The man who doesn’t fit

Melanie Reid

Perhaps the essence of the Kenny Richey saga was best summed up by his mother, one wet, dark night in Edinburgh at the end of December. The news had just broken that her son, the Scot on death row in America, was due to be released the next day; and Eileen Richey was ambushed by a BBC crew as she returned home after a night out. Befuddled and blinking in the camera lights, she was asked how she felt.

“I’m scared,” she said. The BBC reporter tried to prompt something more appropriate. Where was the motherly joy? Instead, her honesty was searing. “I’m just really scared,” she repeated, a careworn woman who looks much older than her 63 years. “I’m frightened. I have seen him twice in 20 years. I don’t know him.”

By the next morning the embarrassing footage had vanished, replaced by the spin of Max Clifford, who had just taken over as Richey’s agent. A statement was hurried out in Eileen Richey’s name saying: “Things happen in such a rush and as yet I haven’t been able to speak to Kenny. Obviously I am happy beyond belief that his long imprisonment is almost over.”

Fear is what this story is all about. And so, from the very start, Richey’s release from jail was an event with two parallel truths: the public relations version, sentimentalised for the media; and the deeper reality, in which a handful of damaged, confused, vulnerable individuals tried to cope with a situation for which they were ill equipped.

Since his return, Richey, a wheyfaced man of 43 walking through Internationals Arrivals on feet unaccustomed to carrying him, has been busy on the surface truths: telling the story of his 21 years in prison, most of it on death row, for the murder of a toddler called Cynthia Collins.

He had always maintained his innocence; having made a plea bargain for a lesser sentence, he returned to Scotland in triumph, fulfilling his own vision of himself as an exonerated man.

Except that celebration, in these circumstances, is a loaded concept. Richey spent the first few days of freedom holed up in a Scottish country hotel where, like a prodigal son, he was reunited with his mother and told his story to the Sunday People, the Mail on Sunday and Sky News for sums reputed to have started at £40,000. The papers persisted with the fairytale, with the Mail on Sunday publishing an awkward picture of Richey holding his mother in his arms. Eileen Richey’s face is frozen with tension. Maybe she was worried about him lifting her – he has had three heart attacks; more probably she could not cope with such enforced intimacy.

Fear. He felt it too. Richey told the People he was more nervous of seeing his mother than he was of having his head and legs shaved for the electric chair.

Yet reporters who witnessed the reunion scenes were struck by how unemotional mother and son were. It was as if their relationship had been freeze-framed at the point a troublesome, damaged 18-year-old Richey left her to join his father in the US. On their first evening at the hideaway hotel, over dinner, Eileen Richey nagged her son to sit up straight and stop talking with an American accent; and soon she got bored in the country and returned to Edinburgh with her other son, leaving Richey with the media.

For sure, the accent was marked. In his compelling interview with Kay Burley of Sky, he displayed a deep, laconic purr which combined Scots and American, and sounded not unlike the man he says is his hero, Sir Sean Connery.

A curious, judgmental TV audience examined his soundbites. Were they schooled, or spontaneous? Either way, they were good theatre. “I’m trying to get back to living. I’ve had my time of dying, 21 years of dying,” he said. Then the mask slipped.

Asked by Burley for his feelings about the toddler’s aunt, Valerie Binklay - who had told Richey in court that he would “burn in Hell” – the soft, conciliatory, self-pitying Richey was replaced with something altogether more vicious. He spat: “She’ll be burning there first long before I will. I’ve got nothing to burn in Hell for and as far as there being a Hell, there is no Hell anyway. This is hell. I’ve had my years in Hell, 21 of them. It can’t get any worse.”

Richey’s first few days were disorientating. His interviews were a shopping list of dislocation: the weirdness of mobile phones; beer costing £3 a pint; sleeping on the floor because hotel beds are too soft; learning to walk a distance again after the confines of a 6ft by 10ft cell.

His newspaper minders were impressed with how he handled the hustle and bustle of the city. But they found him difficult to deal with: lacking in emotion but with strong mood swings. He was far too enthusiastic with alcohol for their liking; and they found his obsession with talking about sex off-putting.

Again and again came evidence of that sense of arrested development: of a messed-up boy who had gone to sleep and woken up two decades later.Richey, childlike, said he welcomed the feel of rain on his face and said he intended to drive a camper van around Scotland, taking pictures of castles for a book that he plans to write.

By the time his media circus moved on to London to do more appearances, this blighted child-man-maybe-monster was starting to show the strain. He gave Fern Britton a devilishly sullen interview on ITV’s This Morning and then, speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, he was like a balloon that had been punctured. In fact, he declared he had experienced more suicidal thoughts since his return than he had in prison. “I don’t fit,” he said, memorably.

“So much has changed. Even the scenery. It’s going to be hard for me to adjust back into society. I was left behind, essentially, and it feels like I’m still stuck in 1986. I just feel like I’m not a part of anything and it breaks my heart.”

John Thompson has heard these words a hundred times before, for they are the universal cri de coeur of the released lifer. In fact, Thompson knows better what’s happening to Richey than Richey knows himself.

Thompson spent nearly 18 years on death row in Louisiana for a murder he did not commit. He was freed in 2003, aged 40, after the stunning disclosure that a lead prosecutor, dying of liver cancer, had revealed that he concealed blood evidence proving Thompson’s innocence.

Thompson now runs an organisation supported by the British legal action charity Reprieve and dedicated to helping people who have been exonerated to rebuild their lives.

And fear, he told me, is the primary emotion. “I feel for Kenny Richey. Most guys who come home stay trapped. They are scared to go anywhere, they are scared to go out, they are scared in case they say the wrong things and get taken the wrong way.

“The family members don’t know how to deal with it. That fear is so broad. Yeah, it’s like walking through a minefield.

“Richey’s mother, she won’t know him. What does she know about psychiatry? She doesn’t know what he’s been through, when he’s feeling low, what he needs.”

And Thompson stressed: “Richey has to get the right help. That will make the difference about whether he survives or not.”

Emily Bolton from Reprieve agrees: “Men like Kenny come out with all the deficits they went in with, plus the results of 20 years of deprivation. It is just so hard for them to rejoin society.”

A recent study by the American organisation Life After Exoneration Programme showed that exonerees have significantly worse health than other people of comparable ages, often suffering from coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes, asthma and chronic lung disease. Serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder are two to four times higher than among the general population.

Family relationships are often shattered by the return of long-term prisoners, because their huge psychological needs are beyond most normal families.

Paddy Hill, who spent 16 years in prison wrongly accused of the Birmingham pub bombings, once said: “It’s only about a year or so after you get out, if you’ve got the intelligence, and, most importantly, if you’ve got the balls to admit to yourself, that you realise, I’m in shit here, I’m in trouble. But a lot of people turn to drink or drugs because they can’t face reality.

“You find your family has all grown up without you. They talk about things they can relate to, and the only thing you can relate to is four walls, a door, and a barred window.”

How much of this does Kenny Richey grasp? Midweek he flew to Dublin for more interviews and then Planet Celebrity stopped spinning. By today, he was scheduled to return to Edinburgh, not to some fancy hotel, but to his mother’s tenement flat in lowly Dalry. Those who have observed mother and son together predict this arrangement will last days rather than weeks.

And it is precisely at this point, when the hubbub has died down, that Richey will have to face his fears: effectively a man alone, washed up in a foreign country, devoid of support systems. Still clinging to the past, he says he hopes his American ex-wife Wendy Amerud, 50, who divorced him before the fatal fire, will rejoin him and start a new life.

Men in pubs will want to fight him; the family weakness for alcohol will endanger him; his precarious health will undermine him; a dearth of strong relationships may isolate him. Who would not take bets that by the end of 2008 he will not be in hospital, or jail, or worse? In Scotland, Richey is regarded with ambivalence, if not open dislike. For many Scots, he is far from the human rights hero the campaigners would portray him as. He is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a manipulative loudmouth.

The Scottish tabloid newspapers agree. “Smug, offensive and pretty damn unwelcome,” said one. Another columnist was even less impressed: “Just seven days into freedom and Kenny Richey has already created a persona that sticks in your memory . . . a bit like a freshly squeezed dog turd that sticks to your shoe.”

No wonder Eileen Richey feels scared.

Why he was on death row

Kenny Richey left Scotland in 1981 to live with his American father in Ohio. In June 1986, fire swept through his neighbour’s apartment and two-year-old Cynthia Collins died. In January 1987, Richey was convicted of arson and sentenced to death. The prosecution claimed he had started the fire in an effort to kill an ex-girlfriend in the apartment below the Collins family’s. Cynthia’s mother said she had asked Richey to babysit, which he denied, maintaining he had been asleep at home. He refused to accept a plea-bargaining deal to serve just 11 years for confessing to killing Cynthia.

He has lived through 13 dates for his execution and in 1994 was an hour away from the electric chair. He accepted a plea bargain in December to attempted involuntary manslaughter, child endangering and breaking and entering, for a failure to babysit Cynthia and breaking into a neighbour’s greenhouse. The charges are not an admission of guilt regarding arson or intent to kill.

Lifers: where are they now?

THE GUILDFORD FOUR

Gerry Conlon, 52, has undergone psychiatric treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder.

Paul Hill, 51, married Courtney Kennedy, daughter of the assassinated American attorney-general, Bobby Kennedy, and niece of John F. Kennedy. In 2000, Tony Blair apologised to the Guildford Four in a private letter to Hill’s wife.

Paddy Armstrong, 56, got caught up in the temptations of drink and gambling. He later married and settled in Dublin.

Carole Richardson, 50, was Paddy Armstrong’s girlfriend when she was arrested. She was 17. She has kept a low profile since she was released and is now married with a daughter.

THE BIRMINGHAM SIX

Richard McIlkenny struggled with alcohol abuse after his release.

Patrick Hill received £1 million of compensation from the Government after years of negotiations but claimed he was “dead inside”, that “time doesn’t heal f*** all” and that he couldn’t feel anything for his children. He and his wife divorced; he now lives in Scotland with his new wife, whom he met at an event for the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, which he set up and runs.

Gerry Hunter’s marriage ended soon after his release, although he remained friends with his ex-wife. “I’ve forgiven the police, the prison officers and even those who actually carried out the bombings. I’ve no bitterness,” he said.

Johnny Walker went home to Derry to his wife and seven children, some of whom did not recognise him. He is now happily remarried and lives in Donegal with his Finnish wife and their seven-year-old son.

Billy Power: “When I went to jail my oldest daughter was eight and my youngest three. You can’t get back those formative years. “I feel more bonded to my grandchildren than my children.”

Hugh Callaghan wrote a book – Cruel Fate: One Man’s Triumph Over Injustice – about his experience.

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