Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [311]
Notwithstanding news reports that McDougal had died of a heart attack at a hospital off prison grounds, Clark’s sources in the SHU confirmed that he was likely “dead before the portable defibrillator ever arrived.”
The autopsy report issued by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of Tarrant County certified that James B. McDougal, a white male “appearing somewhat older than the given age of 57 years,” had arrived in a body bag clad only in red coveralls, a white T-shirt, and white socks. The decedent, according to this report, had died of natural causes. Specifically, the autopsy listed the cause of death as “sudden cardiac death due to hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”
Ironically, McDougal’s death occurred exactly six years to the day after Jeff Gerth’s story first appeared in the New York Times, linking Bill and Hillary Clinton to McDougal’s misdeeds in the Whitewater scandal.
As news of Jim McDougal’s death swept through the cells at Fort Worth prison, numerous “wild rumors” gained traction. One was that a Blackhawk helicopter had landed at the facility shortly before McDougal was taken to the hole, and that he had been “injected with some sort of a substance” by mysterious men in dark suits. Inmates also whispered that McDougal’s cell in the hole was roped off and repainted once the body was removed, to whitewash over clues concerning the true cause of his death.
Claudia Riley was the person listed on prison records as the sole next of kin. She had just returned from Chicago when her daughter delivered the news at the Little Rock airport. Claudia let loose an “animalistic cry.” She later recalled that moment: “Jim was going up for parole, and it was assured pretty much that he was going to get out. His book was being finished and he was going on a book tour. That’s what he was living for. It was one of those things that you find very hard to believe.”
Although the sky was dark and the air was cold with the remnants of winter, Claudia exited her car in the middle of her driveway in Arkadelphia, giving a spontaneous eulogy to the man who had occupied her little trailer-cottage after he had become a destitute, convicted Whitewater felon. The rest of the night, Claudia remembered, “messages were pouring in, and the warden from the prison was calling … so I spent most of the night taking telephone calls from these people.”
As prison officials scrambled to explain the sudden death of its celebrity Whitewater inmate, Claudia Riley undertook the more basic task of figuring out how to get McDougal’s body released for shipment back to Arkansas. Despite her general revulsion with the Office of Independent Counsel, she contacted Hickman Ewing, knowing that he had worked closely with McDougal in recent months. Ewing seemed shaken up; he was heartsick that McDougal had died so ignominiously in the hole. He seemed equally distraught that death had now sealed the lips of the only man who might have been able to prove the criminal complicity of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater/Madison Guaranty misdeeds. Ewing would later say, “I didn’t think that they [the prison guards] did him right. I think they were negligent at the very least in the way that they handled him. I was very [upset]—it was like a relative died.”