Page 53 of The Writer

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Excerpt from The Taking of Maggie Marshall by Denise Morrow

LIFE IN PRISON for Ruben Lucero is difficult. It is difficult for anyone, but particularly for Lucero. As a convicted sex offender with a fixation on teenage girls— children in the eyes of most—he is considered the lowest of low. The guards torment him. He was beaten within hours of entering the general population and suffered a gash in his lower abdomen when someone attacked him in the showers with a weapon fashioned from a toothbrush. While in the prison infirmary, he was attacked again. Someone sodomized him in the middle of the night with what is believed to be a mop handle while two other inmates held him down. A month after arriving at Dannemora, he had chalked up three stays in the infirmary and a combined seven days in solitary, isolation being the only place the guards could guarantee his safety.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for Ruben Lucero; I only want you to understand what life in prison is like for him. Something as simple as showering or eating a meal can easily turn deadly. And while most prisoners find safety with one of the groups or gangs, no group or gang is willing to accept Lucero, not even when offered payment. Nobody is willing to protect him.

When Ruben Lucero was sentenced, he wasn’t a strong man. I mean that in both the literal and figurative sense. According to his intake form, he weighed only one hundred and thirty-two pounds. His job as a groundskeeper kept him reasonably fit but did nothing to add bulk to his almost girl-like frame. He was timid, had been picked on his entire life. He had no friends. He lived life in a bubble, and that did nothing to improve his social skills. Had the folks in Vegas taken bets on Lucero’s survival, the odds would not have been good. How he made it through those initial months, I don’t know, and when I asked him, he refused to talk about it.

Although I followed Lucero’s trial closely, the first time I met him, the first time we spoke, Lucero was three years into his sentence and no longer resembled the man I’d seen in the courtroom and the press. He’d put on at least forty pounds, all muscle. His long hair had been shaved away, and several tattoos covered his scalp as well as his arms and hands. His wide, childlike eyes had receded deep into his skull. And he was covered in scars, too many to count. Looking at him was painful and sent a single thought through my head: Prison made this.

Then he proceeded to tell me the truth.

He was guarded at first, rightfully so. But he was also clear, concise. He laid out the evidence against him and dispensed with each item systematically, not as a man who would say anything to gain freedom but almost as an impartial observer. Someone who was familiar with all aspects of the case and whose only goal was to set things right.

I didn’t want to believe him, but I did. Because his truth, the truth, made far more sense than the case laid out by the prosecutor had. When I asked him why he hadn’t testified in his own defense, he told me his court-appointed public defender advised him not to. When I asked why that same public defender hadn’t raised these issues in court, he only shrugged, shook his head, and said, “I met with her twice before the trial and we covered everything I just told you. I told her I had a fondness for young girls, I admitted to that, but I also told her I never touched Maggie Marshall. I described the man I saw following her. I told her to run prints on the evidence found in my apartment because I knew she wouldn’t find mine, but she did none of that. On the final day of my trial, her last day to present my defense, I asked her why not, and she only stared at me. I realized she had already made up her mind about me and decided I needed to be in here, not out there.”

Ruben Lucero’s public defender was a woman named Carolyn Douglas. She was two years out of law school and had a caseload on her desk tall enough to tickle the ceiling. She also had one foot out the door, ready to move into private practice. Lucero firmly believed Carolyn Douglas had been asked to throw his case by her new boss, one of New York’s preeminent criminal defense attorneys.

A man named Geller Hoffman.