Face of Nation : A “little blue wash cloth” was Nick Yarris’ most valued possession for more than two decades.
It got him out of bed in the morning. Gave him purpose. And kept him busy as an inmate on Death Row.
For 23 years, Mr Yarris would wake up at 6am and reach for the cloth before meticulously wiping down his cell, as the clock ticked closer to his execution in Pennsylvania, US.
The original plan was to strap Mr Yarris in the electric chair “and fry (him)”, he says, until the state’s execution method was changed to lethal injection and they would instead “stick needles in (his) veins”.
As he awaited his fate, he focused on the seemingly insignificant details in front of him to avoid the daunting ones ahead.
“I’d clean up all of the dead skin cells from the 244 men in (prison) with no ventilation to circulate all of this micro fine dust,” Mr Yarris told news.com.au.
“My ritual every day was to get up with that cloth and clean, and clean.”
His 6-foot x 10-foot concrete cell included a security mattress, pillow, two towels, state-issued underwear, an orange jumpsuit without pockets, and not much else.
But battling boredom and the depths of his own mind were the least of his worries.
Mr Yarris was just 21 years old in 1982 when he was convicted of an abduction, rape and murder he didn’t commit and sentenced to death.
A jury found him guilty of murdering Linda Mae Craig — a woman he’d never met — after he told a lie to get out of another, less serious crime.
He’d read an article about Ms Craig’s murder and decided to pin the crime on an associate he thought had died, hoping that being an informant would help his own cause.
“I created my own lie to get off on those charges and put myself in the eye of the storm of all storms,” he said.
“I made things worse by lying about a homicide I knew nothing about and it was used by police to manufacture a case against me.”
His plan backfired spectacularly when police tracked down the associate, who was alive and well with a sound alibi — and all eyes turned on Mr Yarris. Before he knew it, he was the prime suspect, and soon found himself on trial for murder. He vividly recalls the moment the verdict was delivered.
“I felt so much hatred in the courtroom it was like a loud radio blasted in my face,” he said. “The jeers, the smiling faces. People from my own community, people who babysat me as a child, in a scornful manner made a point of making a sizzling sound of my flesh frying in the electric chair.
“I was so befuddled by the attacks because I didn’t carry the weight of the sin — I hadn’t killed anyone.”
Mr Yarris spent the next half of his life on Death Row until DNA evidence proved his innocence and he was exonerated in 2004.
He served the majority of his sentence in Pennsylvania’s notorious Huntington state prison.
“It was one of the first Supermax prisons in America,” Mr Yarris said.
“The average survival rate of prisoners there was five years.
“You get stabbed over a cigarette — it’s that quick.”
Mr Yarris said his first week in the facility — which he described as a “punishment unit” — was “horrifying”.
“A curtain flapped and there was a kid sitting behind it with a screw driver sticking out of his head …. then he died,” he said.
“That f***ed my head up.”
According to him, things only got worse from there, with regular beatings and torture organised by some of the guards.
“They used to torment us by bringing in brutes from the population and making us fight for the guards’ pleasure,” he said.
During his 8057 days in solitary confinement in various prisons across multiple states, Mr Yarris was held alongside some of the country’s most violent and sadistic murderers and rapists.
“It was a terrible tightrope I walked with inmates,” he said.
“I’ve been stabbed, had my throat slit, shot with a dart, sneak attacked.
“I’ve had a rope dropped around my neck and was almost strangled to death.”
At one stage, he heard whispers of a $1500 bounty on his head.
“I had to hurt people,” he said.
Every moment outside of his cell was an opportunity for another inmate to attack. The showers, exercise yard and prison hospital were the most dangerous common areas.
“There are some very devious people in there and they don’t mind killing,” he said.
“I had a serial killer stalk me for years.
“In death row every rule in society is flipped. You can be as racist, violent as you want, and no one will say anything.”
Mr Yarris came to know many of his fellow death row inmates during his time behind bars. Among them was one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy, who was locked up in the cell next to him for eight months.
“(Bundy was) the most snivelling, a**hole you’ve ever met in your life,” he said.
“Everyone in prison hated him because he was boasting in the media that he had conjugal visits and the state then punished him by restricting visits for all of us.
“Everyone hated Ted.”
Bundy was put to death in 2012. His lawyer claimed he murdered more than 100 people.
But according to Mr Yarris, the worst and most twisted serial killer he met on death row was Gary Heidnik — who was the inspiration for the “Buffalo Bill” character in the film Silence of the Lambs.
Heidnik kidnapped six women, torturing and raping them in a pit under his house. Two of the women were killed, one of which he dismembered and fed to the survivors.
“This is someone so twisted and sick you couldn’t believe it,” Mr Yarris said.
“I ended up next to him telling us why he enjoyed doing that to these women.
“He said he was going to create a master race.
“They executed Gary after they proved he was sane.
“This was somebody who was pretending to be insane while trying to justify doing the most evil, horrific things to human beings.
“But he wasn’t insane. He wanted to be glorified.”
Mr Yarris wasn’t like the other inmates. He didn’t belong there. But, remarkably, he didn’t let that or his impending execution stop him from using his time behind bars for self-development.
“I began writing and doing educational courses,” he said.
“Every day of my life from the day I went in until the day I got out, I used my hours to read and write.
“I realised no one else was going to care about me so I started to be nice to myself.”
In 1986, Mr Yarris started “practising (his) death speech”, after exhausting all avenues of appeal.
“I knew I was going to die there,” he said.
“But I wanted to erase the person they hated me for being so I could get up and speak eloquently about myself for two minutes before they killed me.
“My one defiant act was to love myself despite them.
“When everyone is spitting in your face and you can be nice back to society — that is the ultimate self empowerment and that’s what I was striving for.”
Mr Yarris never did have to make that speech thanks to his long struggle for post-conviction DNA testing of crime-scene evidence finally being granted in 2003.
“I was as close to being executed as 60 days if the DNA testing failed,” he said.
The results were conclusive. Genetic material found on the victim belonged to someone else. Mr Yarris had not committed the crimes. He was soon released from prison.
The author and public speaker, who now lives in Oregon with his wife and two children, is no longer bitter about having paid the price for a crime he didn’t commit.
“I passed that point a long time ago,” he said.
“I carry the burden of telling the lie.
“I spent years in my cell agonising over stupidity … now I set my eyes at peace at night knowing I’ve done so much good and there’s not one person I’ve hurt since I got out.
“It’s the transformation of bitter to better.”
But the transition from life in captivity to freedom hasn’t been an easy one.
“My 15 years of freedom have been harder than all of my death row years combined,” he said.
“I screwed my life up with a lie. I shamed my family. I was letting a murderer walk around and it was breaking my heart.
“Death row made me one of the nicest people I could have been because of the suffering.
“It’s been a real challenge to hold onto the same passionate, innocent, love I walked out of my cell with. But I’m not going to let anyone take my kindness from me.”
Mr Yarris’ case was the subject of a Netflix documentary The Fear of 13 and his autobiography of the same title. Most recently, he recorded an eight part in-depth podcast series on his life, called Surviving the Impossible. The series is available now via the newly launched premium content platform, Global Story Network, an Australian company.
“You might not be on death row, you could be in a plane crash, tsunami … whatever people go through, these are nuggets of hope,” he said of the series.
And sometimes that comes in the form of something as seemingly insignificant as a little blue cloth.
