IT WAS A MISERABLE MID-MARCH afternoon, chill and sleeting, as John Sampson and I ran to the main gate of the Greensville Correctional Center, a hexagon-shaped high-security prison in the rural, southern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
We ducked inside the security shack, showed our badges and identifications, and surrendered our service weapons. A gate rolled back, and we walked through.
As a homicide detective with the DC Metropolitan Police and as a behavioral specialist with the FBI, I have been to many jails, prisons, and penitentiaries over the years, but I am still unnerved by the sound of steel-barred gates slamming shut behind me. We passed through seven such gates, following Warden Adrian Yates and several reporters who’d arrived before us.
One of them, a journalist named Juanita Flake, said, “Is it true, he chose?”
The warden kept walking.
“Can you—”
Warden Yates spun in his tracks and glared at her, looking barely in control. “I don’t wish to talk any further, Ms. Flake. I’m not in favor of this, but it is my job to see it done. You want it different? Call the governor.”
Yates, who had been criticized by the media, went to the next gate, which slid back. Three gates later, we entered a small amphitheater with perhaps thirty seats.
Twenty of the seats were already taken. Despite the years that had gone by since I’d seen them, I recognized many of the people gathered there. They recognized us as well. Most nodded and smiled weakly.
A fivesome sitting together sneered and, I’m sure, spoke bitterly about us under their breath. Those three men and two women were by far the best-dressed people in the room.
The men—two brothers, both middle-aged, and their father— wore well-tailored, dark three-piece suits. The women—one in her sixties and the other in her twenties—were dressed in charcoal-gray Chanel outfits; their hair was perfect, their jewelry flashy.
Sampson found us seats facing a long rectangular window. Drapes had been drawn closed on the other side.
I started to question my decision to come here almost immediately. I had good reasons, of course, but they didn’t stop the doubts from creeping in.
“You framed him,” a woman said.
I looked up to see the older of the two fashion plates beside me. She was a petite woman with dyed ash-blond hair and the kind of tight facial skin that suggested she had a high-dollar plastic surgeon on retainer.
“Mrs. Edgerton,” I said wearily. “That was your son’s defense in his trial and during his appeals.”
“His appeal, not his appeals,” Margaret Edgerton hissed. “You get only one appeal in this primitive, eager-to-kill state.”
“And the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld his conviction and sentence, ma’am.”
She trembled with rage. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did, sure as I’m standing here. And I hope to God you carry to your grave the knowledge that you put an innocent boy on the other side of that curtain, Dr. Cross.”
“No, ma’am, your son put himself there, a long time ago,” I said.
“He’s innocent.”
Warden Yates said, “We need to begin.”
“My son is innocent!” Mrs. Edgerton shouted. “You can’t do this!”
“The law demands this,” Yates said. “If you’d rather not be here, I understand.”
He left the room.
She glared at me. “Remember this moment. It’s when you doomed your soul. You will burn in hell.”
Then she stormed away to her husband’s side, where she broke down sobbing.
A few states in the country allow the doomed man to choose his method of execution; in Virginia, the choice is lethal injection or electrocution. The drapes rolled back and revealed not a gurney but a heavy oak chair with arm, leg, and chest straps.
Two corrections officers entered the death chamber. Warden Yates followed them and watched his officers open the only other door in the execution facility.
A shaved-headed man in his early forties stepped out. He was tall and lanky and appeared slightly drugged. He looked not at the electric chair but through the window at us.
Michael “Mikey” Edgerton drew himself up to his full height and then walked to the chair of his own volition, as if he welcomed what was about to happen.
“Mom, Dad, Delilah, Pete, and Joe, you know why I chose old Sparky?” Edgerton said over the intercom. He took a seat, laughed, then looked straight at me. “I’m not going out like some kid going night-night. I want Cross and Sampson and everyone else who helped frame me to see me crackle, to see the smoke coming out my head and the skin on my arms and legs