Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [310]
The prison had released a carefully worded statement indicating that James B. McDougal had died that morning of natural causes. But Clark wasn’t buying it. As he reconstructed the facts over the next few days, from his own sources inside the prison, they simply didn’t jibe with the official accounts. He managed to gather up additional information from reporters who had gained access to the prison’s internal report of McDougal’s death, a report that was still being kept under lock and key. The true story, as Clark pieced it together, was deeply troublesome.
On Saturday, March 7, at approximately 4:30 P.M.—just hours before his death—Jim McDougal had been summoned to the correctional office for yet another urine sample. Although he had again requested dry-cell status, that request had been denied without explanation. McDougal was unable to urinate. This time, McDougal began to get testy—he demanded to know “why he was on the UA [list for urinalysis].” He added sarcastically that “the only person involved in [the Whitewater] case who had anything to do with drugs was the president.” After McDougal complained to the guards of dizziness, they grabbed him by the arms and informed the prisoner that he was being taken to the segregated housing unit (SHU), or the “hole.”
In a freak onset of weather for Texas, it had begun snowing that evening. While McDougal was being led across the compound to the SHU at approximately 10:30 P.M., snowflakes left watery splotches on his khaki prison jumpsuit. McDougal appeared to have difficulty breathing: The guard escorting the prisoner stopped long enough to give him an opportunity to catch his breath. As they entered the jail unit, they passed a large, official, smiling portrait of President Bill Clinton hung on the wall alongside portraits of other top government officials, including Attorney General Janet Reno. McDougal glanced at the photo of his former friend and then marched into a holding area, where he was stripped naked and issued a reddish orange jumpsuit. This was the badge of shame for inmates condemned to the hole.
As McDougal was processed in the shower area of the SHU, he vomited. The bald-headed inmate was then placed in solitary confinement in cell B-24, a fourteen-by-eight-foot space in the prison’s most isolated unit.
Clark later pieced together additional facts from off-the-record conversations with guards in the SHU: Somewhere in this time frame, McDougal would have been required to participate in a “stand-up count.” This was a routine followed each night in the hole. One by one, each inmate was required to stand up in his cell to be accounted for, to ensure that dummies could not be stuffed into bunks, which would allow prisoners to escape undetected. Clark surmised that McDougal “raised a ruckus about his having been placed in the hole and also raised the issue about his medication.”
At approximately 1:30 A.M., an internal prison report noted that McDougal shouted out to the guard that he thought he could now provide a urine sample. The guard, who was ten feet away and reportedly playing cards with a fellow officer, replied dismissively, “It’s too late.”
At 10:55 the next morning, Sunday, another guard reported hearing “a loud sighing from within the cell.” Although this relevant fact appeared in none of the official reports, the guard confided to Clark that he heard a “thud” noise, as if something had fallen over. “That’s what they said,” Clark recalled. “It sounded as if [something] had fallen.” Clark added, “In the isolated cell, there’s just the bed there, so I don’t know how you fall down.” Yet the sound of a person collapsing and a loud sigh attracted the attention of the guard, who found McDougal lying on the floor “unresponsive.”
Immediately, the guard shouted, “Man down!” The officers in the hole hurriedly called for assistance from the medical unit that dispatched men carrying a portable defibrillator. However, as Clark calculated