Dec. 8
ARIZONA:
Nation's Oldest Death Row Inmate Will Never Be Executed
A few weeks ago, an elderly gentleman named Viva Leroy Nash wrote to New
Times about the death penalty.
"Now that our stubborn President Bush is about to leave office," Nash
wrote in a shaky hand, "it appears that our overly tenacious state
prosecutors won't be so brazen as to actually push Congress around in
order to demonstrate their egregious power."
He went on, "There are obviously many weird people in our world, with
twisted minds, that have a tendency to not only kill helpless people, but
often do it in a despicable manner. Often, psychos turn into insane serial
killers who should be promptly eliminated, not tortured to suicide, as
I've seen happen.
"Genuine serial killers should be eliminated by execution quickly, but not
by prison guards or their contemporaries. Same for adults or homos who
kill children. Or Mormons who habitually force children into marriage."
Nash wasn't specific on how these murderers (and Mormons) might be
"eliminated," though he said that "no elected person or any of his cohorts
should have that power or authority. Especially if he or she is a
religious nut and refuses to listen to the common sense of the majority,
who aren't really in support of the death penalty from what I've read."
(To the contrary, a Gallup poll last month said 64 % of Americans favor
execution in special circumstances. However, that's down from 2 decades
ago, when about 75 % of those polled said they were pro-death penalty.)
Leroy Nash framed his thoughts about capital punishment from a unique
perspective and location.
At 93 years old, he is the oldest person currently on death row in the
United States.
Nash resides inside the Browning Unit at the Arizona State Prison
Complex-Eyman, a "super-max" facility in Florence.
It is about an hour's drive from the site of the west Phoenix coin store
where, in November 1982, he shot employee Greg West to death and
traumatized Susan McCullough for a lifetime.
Nash's attorneys long have claimed that senility and serious mental
illness have morphed him into a "fossil" legally incompetent to be
executed.
But Nash's many missives to this paper, in which he has answered questions
carefully and usually cogently, suggest otherwise.
For example, he wrote last May in response to a question about any remorse
he might have:
"I have and do regret many negative instances or happenings in my life,
instances when I committed a negative wrongfully, and later really
regretted it at length. But it is far better that one, if he can't turn it
into a positive, do what he can to push it out of his memory, so as to
eliminate as much damage as possible. I do not like to hurt people!"
Maybe he doesn't, but he sure has.
Nash has been convicted of murdering 2 people, 1 in Utah in 1977, the
other at the Moon Valley Coin and Stamp store in 1982. He also tried to
kill a Connecticut police officer in 1947.
Nash gives profound meaning to the phrase "career criminal."
His record reaches back three-quarters of a century to 1932, the year
Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency and the year Babe Ruth
famously called his own home run in the World Series.
But his 1st murder conviction had to wait until 1977 a few years after
he'd been paroled after serving 25 years for the attempted cop-murder. It
was then that the 67-year-old outlaw was convicted of shooting to death a
Salt Lake City mail carrier.
The victim had happened to enter a jewelry store Nash and a partner were
robbing.
5 years after that, Nash walked away from a work detail outside the walls
of the Utah State Prison. How he got trusty status while serving 2 life
sentences, and after three escapes from other prisons, is uncertain.
Nash killed again just 3 weeks after escaping from Utah. How he executed
23-year-old coin store employee West on November 3, 1982, defines that
"despicable manner" he damned (referring to others) in his recent letter
to this paper.
Court documents and the woman whose life miraculously was spared during
the Phoenix robbery-murder describe in chilling detail how Nash shot West
3 times, twice after the younger man begged for mercy.
Store owner Susan McCullough recently spoke to New Times, the 1st time
she'd discussed the murder publicly since testifying before Nash was
sentenced on June 27, 1983.
"The gun was pointed right at me, and I knew I was going to die," the
diminutive Gilbert grandmother said, hands trembling.
"This was after Mr. Nash shot Greg the 1st time. I was looking at the
barrel of the gun and, for some reason, I flashed on my daughter, who was
around 9 at the time.
"He pulled the trigger, but it didn't fire, and I dropped down under the
table. I still don't understand why Nash didn't come around and kill me.
"Greg was on the floor there bleeding. He was saying, 'Please, God.
Please, God, don't shoot me.' I was trying to stay still. Then Nash fired
into Greg twice more. I watched him die. He was like a brother to me and
to my husband."
---------------------------------------------
That Leroy Nash is the subject of a story at this late date is
astonishing.
In 2005, fellow death row inmate Richard Rossi wrote an article for a
criminology journal titled, "Too Old to Kill," about the specter of Nash's
possible execution.
Rossi described how, as a clerk at the prison library, he had read some of
Nash's numerous self-composed legal pleadings.
"I always wondered how his case seemed to linger in the courts and lacked
any progress," Rossi wrote, "when numerous other men who arrived here
years later were already executed as their appeals were exhausted."
Sent to death row in 1984 after his conviction for murdering a Phoenix man
over the price of a typewriter, Rossi said he'd come to realize that
"behind the scenes, a concentrated effort was secretly under way to delay
the exhaustion of this octogenarian's appeals. Could you imagine what a
spectacle and horror show it would be for the state of Arizona to execute
the oldest person on death row in America?"
>From Rossi's point of view, "sooner or later, the execution of older
prisoners will reveal the cruel and unusual punishment the death penalty
is, along with the fact that it was purely senseless murder."
Of the 23 Arizona inmates put to death since the state again began to
execute killers in 1992 after a hiatus of nearly 3 decades, 8 were
sentenced to the row after Nash.
However, 7 of the 119 men and two women on Arizona's death row have
resided there even longer than Nash, including the longest in tenure, Joe
C. Smith, there since 1977.
Leroy Nash is, by far, the oldest.
Fred L. Robinson, who murdered his ex-girlfriend's stepmother in 1987 in
Yuma, is 2nd-oldest at 67.
By way of comparison, Leroy Nash has spent well more than 67 years of his
life behind bars.
As for killer-turned-writer Richard Rossi, he died of natural causes in
May 2006 at the age of 58.
But Nash and his endless case live on and on and on.
It's not that Nash's attorneys ever have argued for his innocence,
primarily because he was guilty as sin in the coin shop killing.
"I feel like a dirty skunk," Nash told a Phoenix police detective shortly
after he murdered Greg West. "This is worse than terrible. It's horrible.
I deserve to be executed . . . I'm old and useless. They ought to put
people to sleep like dogs. God, I hated to see him die."
Since his conviction and death sentence, Nash and his myriad attorneys
continually have lost appeals in state and federal courtrooms.
Their main point over the years has been how poorly trial attorney Arthur
Hazelton Jr. prepared and performed on Nash's behalf back in 1983.
It doesn't matter to them that even Clarence Darrow probably couldn't have
kept Leroy Nash off death row under the circumstances it was Hazelton's
job to have tried.
Court records do strongly suggest that Hazelton did little to even try to
win a life sentence by presenting mitigating evidence: mental illness,
extreme childhood issues.
More recently, the thrust of Nash's arguments has shifted to his alleged
incompetence to be executed.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said it is improper for states to execute the
mentally retarded and also those inmates who can't appreciate the meaning
or purpose of their impending execution and lack the capacity to make
rational decisions about pursuing post-conviction appeals.
But the high court never has halted an execution strictly because of a
condemned inmate's advanced age. Leroy Nash is asking the federal courts
to consider the constitutionality of executing elderly inmates with
dementia or, like him, with other serious age-related maladies.
Nash's legal team which currently includes Phoenix attorney Tom Phalen
and a lawyer from the federal Public Defender's Capital Habeas Unit
claims he is unfit to be executed.
Oral argument is slated for December 9 at the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in San Francisco.
Officially, the state of Arizona still wants to put Leroy Nash to death.
But the odds of Nash actually ever being executed seem to be less than
slim.
"We are not opposed to moving forward with the execution of someone who is
on death row and happens to be elderly," explains Kent Cattani, chief
counsel of the capital litigation section at the Arizona Attorney
General's Office.
"But by the time the Ninth Circuit decides whether Mr. Nash is competent
to be executed or not, he may actually be incompetent. That's life, isn't
it?"
So to speak.
These days, it seems a given that Leroy Nash is destined to die of old age
(will he make it to 100?) rather than by a fatal injection of
state-administered poison.
That end to a violent, crime-ridden life would suit his attorney just
fine.
"I'm obviously not excusing the murders he committed, as they were
horribly tragic," says Tom Phalen, who continues to toil for Nash at a
price to taxpayers of $170 an hour just one of many expenses that come
with keeping someone on death row.
"But I also do have compassionate concern for this doddering old man, who
can't hear, can't see, can't walk, and is very, very loony. Sometimes, he
goes way off into his delusional world when he's talking to me. He also
has a fixed set of false beliefs about the procedural history of his case,
and he is impervious to persuasion to the contrary. Everyone knows this is
a waste of time."
Nash surely has flung some wacky legal theories at the courts over the
years, including a pleading in the 1980s claiming that Arizona
"discriminates against indigent out-of-state Caucasians" accused of
committing crimes.
For the record, Nash himself is an out-of-state Caucasian.
"He's had a broken hip, a massive heart attack, and many other medical
issues," Phalen continues. "Leroy would be a PR nightmare of the 1st order
for the state of Arizona if they actually strapped him on the gurney and
stuck a needle in him."
To Phalen, Nash now is incapable of inflicting any more violence, even if
authorities were to wheel the old fellow out of prison and send him on his
way.
Suffice it to say, that's not about to happen in Leroy Nash's lifetime.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Viva Leroy Nash was born in Utah in 1915, when the United States was still
2 years from sending soldiers to Europe to fight in World War I.
He writes that his mother gave him the ironic first name of Viva it's a
form of the verb "to live" in Spanish after an ancestor.
Nash's accounts of his life have varied over time.
He has said his father, who owned a car-repair shop, often beat him as a
child, tied him to a tree on occasion, and that his mother was just as
violent.
In 1988, Nash responded to New Times for a story about the death penalty
in Arizona with an hour-long audiotape.
Sounding like a grizzled old coot from a Western movie, Nash claimed to
love "almost everybody. I'm a great-grandfather. I have three
granddaughters who are married, and they're so beautiful they look like
they belong on the cover of Playboy. I don't tell anybody who they are or
where they live. I got into trouble they didn't."
Earlier, he had told a probation officer that none of his three siblings
"had any bad illegal habits. I'm the black sheep, and nobody seems to know
why. I do not seem to be able to function in normal society."
Nash described himself in one letter as a rough-and-tumble country kid who
grew up on Salt Lake City's then-rural south side.
Earliest available records show that he was caught stealing potato chips
at the age of 7, and got busted in his early teens for lifting a cornet
from a high school.
The seventh-grade dropout with bright-blue eyes and prematurely white hair
was a wild child who roamed outside of Utah as soon as he could.
By the time Nash was 17, he already had been sentenced to a year and a day
at an industrial school for juveniles in Ohio after his conviction in
Illinois for transporting stolen cars.
He escaped from the school, was caught, and got sentenced to 30 months at
the adult U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Paroled in 1934, Nash fathered a son with his then-wife Beth. (The son,
who apparently was Nash's only child, died in 1989.)
Nash immediately resumed a life of crime, committing robberies in Utah,
Georgia, Alabama, and parts unknown.
Authorities returned him to prison in 1936 after his arrest in a bungled
Salt Lake City armed robbery with younger brother Lewis.
After finishing that prison stint, Nash again hit the road, committing an
untold number of crimes until Mobile, Alabama police arrested him in late
1946 after a lucrative check-kiting scheme came to light.
He again escaped from jail and claims to have fled to Mexico with a large
sum of money he stole from a Wall Street bond courier.
After returning to the States in 1947, Nash quickly found new trouble in
Connecticut.
Yellowed police reports show that employees at a hat store in Danbury came
upon a black satchel that Nash, a customer, had left behind. They called
police after finding road maps, blank checks, ammunition, and a gun in the
satchel.
A state police captain soon pulled Nash over, and was taking him to the
station for questioning when the 32-year-old pulled a loaded revolver out
of a pants pocket.
He shot the officer twice, but the cop survived.
Nash fled and found his way to Dallas, where he was arrested within days.
Ever cunning, Nash almost succeeded in smuggling a little two-shot
Derringer into jail, as well as two hacksaw blades sewn into a belt.
He confessed to shooting the state cop, and was convicted of attempted
murder.
A judge sentenced Nash to 25 to 30 years in the Connecticut State Prison,
of which he served 25 years.
Intelligent and well read, Nash became a consummate jailhouse lawyer
during that extended prison stay.
He frequently filed legal pleadings, and in the early 1960s, won certain
procedural safeguards for inmates in a ruling that ended 1 step short of
the U.S. Supreme Court (though he lost his own appeal for redress).
Freed in the early 1970s, Nash predictably returned to the only life he'd
really ever known robberies, burglaries, and, if it happened to come up,
murder.
At the age of 63, in May 1977, he and an accomplice targeted a jewelry
store in downtown Salt Lake City.
They'd tied up an employee and were loading merchandise into bags when a
mail carrier unluckily walked in. Nash shot him to death.
Police nabbed the killer after someone jotted down the getaway car's
license plate number.
Nash pleaded guilty, and a Utah judge sentenced him to two life terms for
the robbery-murder.
A prison psychologist said of Nash in March 1978, "While he can at times
be quite convincing and manipulative, he more generally fails to maintain
good interpersonal relations and . . . is not a good candidate for
psychotherapy or counseling."
The psychologist added a cautionary note: "He should be considered a high
escape risk and is also likely to try and manipulate himself out of the
institution."
Someone should have listened.
In October 1982, the 67-year-old escaped from custody while working as a
trusty on a prison forestry crew.
It's uncertain how Nash got to Phoenix within days after fleeing Utah, but
he did and with a plan.
He checked into a motel on East Van Buren Street, scanned the newspaper
classifieds, and phoned a Phoenix man who had a blue-steel .357 Magnum for
sale.
Nash went to the gun seller's apartment after expressing interest in
buying the weapon.
He was carrying a handful of bullets in his pocket.
Nash quickly loaded the gun inside the apartment when the other man went
to find a cleaning kit, held the guy up, and fled.
He bided his time for the next several days, securing a senior citizen's
bus pass in Phoenix, and scoping out potential locations for his next
heist.
The day after Nash murdered Greg West, police found paperwork inside his
motel room with the name of and directions to the Moon Valley Coin and
Stamp shop.
Nash reminded himself in a note left in his motel room not to allow the
coin shop employee to "put hands in vault or on any lock near his desk in
back room."
He may have targeted the mom-and-pop store on West Thunderbird because of
its proximity to busy Interstate 17, half a mile to the west.
On the morning of November 3, 1982, Nash donned a checkered sports coat,
pullover sweater, and Bass shoes and stuck his recently stolen .357 Colt
Trooper into a holster.
An hour or so later, he stole a white Ford van from a Phoenix delivery
service company and headed to 1930 West Thunderbird Avenue.
He parked a few yards from the coin shop, kept the motor running, and
walked with purpose toward the front door.
He was about one minute away from committing another murder and five
minutes away from losing his freedom for the last time.
Leroy Nash had been on the loose for 20 days.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These days, Susan McCullough is a doting grandmother, a deeply spiritual
woman who lives in Gilbert with her husband of 40 years, Garry.
In November 1982, she was a 32-year-old mother of a 9-year-old daughter
who spent her weekdays at the coin shop that she owned with Garry.
She did the books at the store, and employee Greg West provided customer
service.
The McCulloughs had hired West more than a year earlier after, Susan says,
he kept bugging them for a job.
West was a good-natured Phoenix native with a chubby face and a big head
of hair who looked younger than his 23 years.
West's marriage was just 9 months old (they had wed on Valentine's Day)
and going strong.
The couple bought a cute home in north Phoenix they had a dog and a
parrot and he seemed to truly enjoy his job at the coin shop and his
life, in general.
"He and Cindy were so sweet together," Susan McCullough says. "She was so
self-assured, and he was a little shy."
Cindy West worked at the Ambiance Travel Agency, a few doors down from the
coin shop.
Susan McCullough says she and Greg West sometimes discussed spiritual
matters at work, especially after he'd embraced Christianity about six
months before his death.
"Greg loved to joke about things, but he also had this mature and serious
side," McCullough says. "He was very much into reading and thinking about
the meaning of life and what happens after we leave this Earth."
McCullough says she had a migraine headache on that November morning in
1982, but she went to work anyway after dropping off her daughter at
school.
West already was on the job, setting up the display cases for the day
ahead, cheerful as usual.
Minutes after West unlocked the front door at 10 a.m., an elderly man came
in.
West was sitting in a chair on the other side of the counter, and
McCullough took note from her desk a few feet away when the customer
expressed an interest in buying some gold and silver.
"I'll take it all," the man said.
"You can have it all," West replied, to the best of McCullough's
recollection.
This is how Leroy Nash described what happened next, in a legal document
he composed from prison in 1984:
"The conversation ended with Nash requesting the valuables in a display
case and drawing a gun. Next, a gunfight occurred with Nash firing 3 shots
and West firing at least one.
"There is some discrepancy about who discharged the weapon first. Whatever
the matter, West reached for a gun at approximately the same time and
fired the weapon. 2 more shots were then fired by Nash. West subsequently
died. Nash shot West because West drew a gun on him."
(Nash put it more colloquially in a recent letter to New Times: "Poor guy
bushwhacked me and an unfortunate thing happened. Wish it hadn't
happened.")
Then and now, Susan McCullough's account is vastly different from Nash's.
She tells New Times that Nash shot West in the chest without notice right
after saying he'd take it all:
"As Greg was falling off his chair after Nash shot him, he grabbed for the
little gun he had below the counter, and shot it once. For the rest of my
life, I'll feel that he was trying to save me. But the bullet just went up
in the air.
"We always had told him that if someone holds him up, just give them what
they want without a fuss. Greg would have done that if Nash had let him.
But he just had to kill him."
McCullough was just a few feet away when Leroy Nash shot the helpless and
prone West twice more. She had slipped under the counter when that second
bullet (the one apparently meant for her) failed to discharge.
Nash soon stuffed about $600 in cash and merchandise into a bag and made
his getaway.
McCullough waited a bit after she heard the door close, then crawled over
to West, who was unconscious and bleeding profusely.
"He was so pale and so hurt," she says.
Next door to the coin shop, bicycle store owner Jack Owen had heard the
shots and screams.
Though only 43, Owen had a serious heart condition that would end his own
life just 6 years later.
But he had promised Susan McCullough he'd come to her aid if something
happened next door, and he did a true hero.
Owen grabbed his own pistol and ran out of his shop just as Nash was
exiting the coin shop.
"Jack tackled that a-hole," says his widow, Joanne, of the extraordinary
moment.
"They literally came face to face and got entangled. Jack pinned Nash face
down until this Explorer scout [Douglas Lee Clark], came by and helped
hold him down. Jack ran back in and called the police. He didn't realize
he'd been shot until later."
Susan McCullough heard another gunshot outside and figured the killer was
firing at more people. Actually, Jack Owen's weapon had discharged by
accident and he'd shot himself in the hand, but he wasn't seriously
injured.
McCullough summoned the courage to peek outside.
"Greg was fading, and I just had to get [West's wife] Cindy, who was two
doors down," she says. "My legs were like rubber. Everything was moving
slow for me. Nash was still at the scene, lots of commotion going on out
front the cops hadn't arrived yet."
Cindy West ran over to the coin shop with McCullough. She tried to stick
the corner of a paperback into her husband's mouth to keep him from
swallowing his tongue.
The situation was dire.
"I wanted to go in the ambulance with Greg," McCullough says, but she was
told she'd have to wait to be interviewed by a detective.
Greg West died within minutes, as Phoenix police prepared to interrogate
his killer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leroy Nash had already spent a lifetime of dancing around with police
investigators after committing crimes.
In the West killing, he at first gave them a wrong name, saying he was
Paul Henderson and never had been in trouble with the law before. He said
he had no idea who owned the van still running in the parking lot.
But he confessed within a few hours, telling Detective Jim Thomas he felt
sorry "for that poor bastard. He shot at me. I wish he would have killed
me."
Gregg Thurston, then a deputy county attorney, came by the station and
heard Nash say, "I went up to rob the place to get some money to survive.
The guy pulled a gun on me and shot at me. I didn't mean to kill him. I
guess I was shook up. Everything went so fast."
A grand jury indicted Nash on murder, robbery, and other charges.
Greg West was buried in the West Valley after a beautiful and packed
church service. Susan McCullough's husband, Garry, one of the pallbearers,
collapsed with grief at the hearse, though he was able to carry on with
his grim task.
Prosecutor Thurston later announced his intention to seek the death
penalty against Leroy Nash.
"Nash wanted to plead guilty to all charges in return for life," recalls
Thurston, who now is in private practice. "But I wouldn't have felt good
if he'd escaped again and killed someone else. I remember him quite well.
His self-defense argument was ridiculous.
"I personally never cared if he got executed or not, as long as he never
got to hurt another person. If they want to do away with the death
penalty, fine. But my job was to try to get a conviction and a
death-penalty sentence in this case, and I got it."
Thurston got it after Nash's attorney, Hazelton, unusually agreed to
submit the case to Superior Court Judge Rufus Coulter Jr. on the sole
basis of the grand-jury testimony.
On May 25, 1983, the judge convicted Nash of all charges and scheduled
sentencing for a month later.
These days, the "sentencing phase" is what defense attorneys representing
the clearly guilty emphasize, trying to find reasons why their clients
shouldn't be sent to death row.
Defense attorney Hazelton, who now works for the Maricopa County
Attorney's Office, argued in one pleading how Thurston's position that
West had "begged for his life and [Nash] shot him unnecessarily" was an
exaggeration.
"There was very little time for the victim to experience the stress, fear,
and mental pain that preceded the death," Hazelton wrote, an absurd
stretch of the facts.
A clinical psychologist hired by the defense wrote, "Nash has regular
conversations in his own spirit world. He does not function according to
our mode of behavior, but rather lives by natural laws."
The psychologist, Dr. Donald Tatro, concluded that Nash suffered from a
paranoid disorder and was an "antisocial person whose behavior goes
largely unchecked by considerations of conscience . . . a dangerous person
who, in my opinion, is incapable of living successfully outside of
institutional walls."
Nash told Dr. Tatro, "When I am broke and hungry, I am related to a tiger
in a jungle, and when I go hunting, I don't think anyone has the right to
stop me, or I will test them just like a tiger would test another animal."
Greg West apparently had been that other "animal" and had gotten his
comeuppance with three shots to the chest.
At Nash's sentencing hearing, Susan McCullough told Judge Coulter what had
happened at the shop.
By that time, about seven months after the fact, she was having repeated
nightmares.
McCullough also had become claustrophobic she still is and was trying to
cope with the loss of her friend and employee.
She and Garry shuttered their coin shop after the murder, and never
reopened it.
"I would wake up screaming at the top of my lungs, and it would scare my
husband about half to death," she tells New Times. "It was classic.
Someone was trying to murder me in my dreams. I didn't need an expert to
tell me what was going on.
"When I went to court that day, I looked right at Nash, and he stared back
at me. I was shaking through the whole thing. But I told the judge exactly
what had happened."
Surprising no one, Coulter ordered Nash to death row.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leroy Nash and his appellate attorney soon began intense efforts to win a
new trial or a re-sentencing.
None of the angles worked.
But Nash would become storied in penal circles, mainly because he had
reached death row already a senior citizen and got older and older.
In October 2005, the journal The New Criminologist published a piece about
Nash that praised him as "a living legend."
The story quoted infamous British prisoner Charles Bronson as calling Nash
"an example to us all. A total, heroic superstar, I love the guy. Even if
they gas him, inject him, or fry him, they can't kill the man."
The journal spoke fondly of Nash's schoolboy gang back in Utah in the
1920s, claiming its members had robbed and thieved "so their impoverished
mothers and sisters wouldn't have to turn to prostitution . . . He is most
certainly not one of those spineless thugs who gun down people for a
handful of loose change or a mobile phone."
No, Nash is a fellow who gunned people down for a handful of coins or
jewels and maybe a few bucks.
The writer's version of Greg West's cold-blooded murder was more fantastic
even than Nash's own self-serving account:
"The desk clerk bravely opened fire, and in the ensuing gun battle, Nash
shot the man, killing him."
As years passed, Leroy Nash added many pen pals to the long list of people
intrigued by him and his never-ending story.
The list includes an Arizona State University professor who calls Nash his
friend, numerous females, and news reporters.
Meanwhile, life on the outside has gone on for those directly touched by
Nash's malevolence.
Cindy West remarried, had 2 sons now teenagers and moved out of the
Valley, fearing that if Nash escaped yet again, he would track her down
and kill her, too.
Jack Owen, the Good Samaritan with the bum heart who kept Leroy Nash from
fleeing in the van right after murdering Greg West, died in 1988 while
riding his bicycle.
As for Susan McCullough, who so nearly became a murder victim herself,
well, she deserves the last word in this story, not Viva Leroy Nash.
"To be spared like I was, I just knew and know that God has something
special in store for me," she says, "but I still haven't figured out
exactly what that is. You don't ever have closure until you're gone.
There's no getting set free."
McCullough says she honestly hasn't given much thought to whether Nash
should have been executed long ago.
"I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, but if it's the law, it's the
law," she says. "I just never want him to get out of custody, even if he's
100 years old. I know he'd try to find a way to hurt someone he just
would."
McCullough pauses for a moment to consider a final thought, folds her
hands on the kitchen table and goes on, her voice strong now.
"This guy hurt so many people, besides being a murderer of an innocent kid
[West]," she says. "What happened just spread out like a tentacle or a
spider web of hurt. You know, there is good and evil in this world."
(source: Phoenix New Times)
