Author's notes:
WARNING: Racist and offensive language in this chapter.
The case in this chapter is partially based on the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Bang."
As of August 2013, there were only two women on North Carolina's death row – Carlette Parker and Blanche T. Moore.
I apologize for the delay. New jobs tend to take up a lot of time.
Tragic seemed to be an understatement. A BIG understatement. As their tech expert regaled the most important facts, the agents all studied the case file, bit by bit.
Evelyn Barrymore – whom everyone called Eve - seemed to have, by all accounts, been dealt just about the worst hand a person could be dealt in life. Born to an alcoholic shopkeeper and an apparent tyrant of a mother in Dobson, North Carolina in 1980, her opportunities were considered slim and far between. She was fairly unremarkable student in school; teachers described her as a quiet and shy girl who didn't make friends easily and more or less drifted through life. In eighth grade, she received a week long suspension for being caught drinking on school property and afterwards became even more withdrawn, cutting classes frequently and barely moving forward. Her behaviour was subsequently put down to the death of her father earlier in the year.
At age sixteen, Eve became pregnant and dropped out of school. By nineteen, she'd had two children by different men, briefly marrying the second one before divorcing him less than a year later. Her kids were seized when she was twenty-one by the state amid allegations of drug use; she admitted that she had developed a serious cocaine addiction, even though she swore she never did drugs around her children. Over the next three years, Eve was arrested numerous times for drug possession and prostitution, which helped fuel her coke habit. In late 2004, she was charged with assaulting a man with a switchblade during a proposition; Eve claimed she defended herself after he tried to force her into his pickup. The charges were dropped after the man declined to appear in court.
On the surface, it would seem like that was the wake-up call Eve needed. She sought help for her drug addiction, gave up prostitution and seemed genuinely interested in repairing her relationship with her kids. She also became very active in Raleigh's Christian community, working for a church and becoming involved in trying to help women on the street to prevent them from making the same mistakes she did. It was through the church that she met a man who seemed to bring a light from God into her life; Darren Makinson, a thirty-four year old international banker originally from Alabama whom locals described as charming, personable and always immaculately dressed in designer suits and dark-rimmed glasses. Darren, who was African-American, told members of the church that he had recently split up with his wife and he was looking for a "spiritual reawakening" to balance his working life, which required a lot of travel. Eve immediately volunteered to help him, and the two began to meet every day before and after church at first to discuss spirituality, then just to talk. Community members noticed that Eve seemed much more outgoing and relaxed after meeting him, a clear sign to many of a genuine attraction. When Darren asked her to dinner one night, she initially hesitated; her history of bad relationships and the fact she had grown up in a closed community and household stirred up old fears. But his persistence and charm won and soon the two were a solid item. The situation couldn't have seemed better for her.
On the morning of March 18th, 2005, police were called to an apartment complex on the southeast edge of the city. Residents had complained of hearing loud noises the previous night and early in the morning, and security had received no response to repeated knocks at the door. When officers entered the apartment, they discovered a gruesome sight – the body of a black male lying on the floor of the bedroom in a pool of his own blood. He'd suffered multiple stab wounds to his back and neck, including one single slice across his throat that had severed his jugular and caused him to bleed out. But the most disturbing aspect was that fact that the man had been castrated, his testicles later discovered in the garbage bin outside the complex. There was evidence a cleanup attempt had been made, albeit a very poor one.
Officers positively identified the man as Darren Makinson and the apartment as belonging to his girlfriend, Eve Barrymore, who had failed to report in for work that morning. The initial theory suggested Darren had been killed by an intruder who'd then kidnapped Eve and was now on the run with her as a hostage. The evidence, however, just didn't fit that theory; no kidnapper would take the time to try to clean up a crime scene and the level of violence directed at the victim suggested a deep personal rage on the part of the killer. The most damning evidence came when police discovered a bloody knife about ten blocks from the crime scene on the side of the road; forensics positively identified the blood as Darren's and only one set of fingerprints on the weapon – Eve's.
Raleigh police immediately put out an all-points bulletin, as the young woman was now considered the prime suspect in Darren's murder. Her flight from justice didn't last long; she was identified and arrested two days later while driving Darren's car near the South Carolina border. Upon returning to Raleigh and meeting detectives, Eve initially denied having done anything wrong, but after being confronted with the evidence she confessed to the murder.
Her confession was lengthy, graphic and disturbing. According to her, on the evening of March 17th, she and Darren had met at her apartment, something they had done before but just to discuss church business. Late in the evening, they both had a glass of wine and Darren told her he loved her and wanted to be with her. Though they'd been dating for a couple of months, they'd never taken that next step. Eve was reluctant to become intimate with a man again, but eventually decided she trusted him enough and agreed. He promised he'd be gentle and wear a condom, which put her mind at ease.
The detectives' notes for the next part of the interrogation were chilling, not just for the graphic detail Eve gave but also the apparent calm, matter of fact way in which she delivered them - as if she was recounting a church meeting instead of a murder.
According to her, while Darren kept his word and was a complete gentleman during the act, immediately afterwards he became cool and distant and quickly made as if he was getting ready to leave. As Eve got out of the bed to ask him what was up, she noticed something strange with the condom he abruptly took off and tossed in the trash; at the very tip was a tiny hole, barely noticeable unless you were looking carefully. Eve immediately became concerned – she wasn't on birth control and had no plans to have another child with someone she hadn't known for too long. When she told Darren about the broken condom, he seemed completely unconcerned even after she explained she wasn't on the Pill. It was then that she noticed something else; the wrapper on the floor also seemed damaged - as though someone had poked a tiny hole through the centre where the tip of the condom was supposed to be.
Confused and upset, Eve practically threw the damaged goods in her lover's face and demanded an explanation. It was then, as she told it, that his personality completely changed. He burst out laughing right in her face and told her she had just been "niggerized." As a shocked Eve listened, Darren told her that he'd never loved her and just saw her as a "nice piece of meat." She described how he called her a slut and a whore and how she'd been naïve to think she was anything more than one in a million. But the biggest shock came at the end when she told detectives how he smiled as he described how he'd purposely sabotaged the condom so that her "white ass was now another conduit for his legacy."
Eve said she didn't know how the knife got into her hand, but she did remember swinging with it and remembered him falling to the ground with blood splashing everywhere, including on herself. And she also remembered castrating him. According to her, she wanted to remove his weapons – his words indicated that she wasn't the first one to whom he'd done this – even though she was sure he was already dead. She ended the interrogation by claiming her actions were justified as she'd saved more women from being damaged by him.
The case, predictably, caused a media storm throughout the country. Despite the overwhelming evidence and the threat of the death penalty if she lost, Eve went against her lawyer's advice and opted for a trial. She argued she should be given the chance to prove her actions were justified, saying that the jury members, especially those who were female, would understand. She would turn out to be very wrong.
The prosecution's case hinged on two areas: one was the physical evidence which clearly suggested that Eve and only Eve could have murdered Darren Makinson. The other was the character of the accused. The prosecutor let no opportunity slip by to remind the jury of Eve's background and criminal history. He argued she was a pathological liar who frequently twisted the truth in order to put herself in a better light and described the attack on Darren as "brutal, horrific," adding that the castration was the act of a "cold-blooded, man-hating sociopath with zero remorse or empathy." Witnesses from her apartment building were called, including a neighbour who testified he'd heard Eve yell and call someone a "fucking dirty nigger" at around the time of the killing. The prosecutor maintained that the principal motivation for the killing was that Darren was unwilling to commit to a long-term relationship, which caused Eve – whom he described as "needy and paranoid" – to snap and direct her rage at the man she believed betrayed her. The broken condom and damaged wrapper, he claimed, were "incidental and irrelevant."
Unsurprisingly, Eve's defence lawyer was left with little to work with. His case essentially boiled down to her interrogation where he argued that she'd been betrayed and taken advantage of by a "cunning predator." He emphasized to the jury her tragic background, saying how her alcoholic father had died in a car crash when she was young and how she had been raised in a "house of fear" by her tyrannical and religiously fanatic mother. Josephine Barrymore, the court heard, had frequently berated her husband and repeatedly told her young daughter than all men were predators and rapists who sought only to take advantage of pure, godly women. This fear, Eve's lawyer argued, was brought back by Darren's betrayal and she snapped.
The trial itself was marred in controversy. For one thing, it was held fairly close to Raleigh and the scene of the crime. The defence's motion to move the trial to a more neutral part of the state was dismissed offhand. Several local and national newspapers ran editorials that were overwhelmingly in favour of 'swift justice' before the trial had even begun. But the most damning evidence that might have changed the outcome was a background investigation the defence did on the victim.
Darren Makinson, it turned out, was by no means an innocent man. While the prosecution portrayed Eve as racist and sociopathic, it seemed her victim actually was both of those. A childhood friend told investigators how Darren had the same attitude towards white people as Nazis had towards Jews. At age fifteen, he and a cousin were arrested for allegedly overpowering and raping a white female police officer just outside Mobile, but were released for lack of evidence. The same friend said how Darren often bragged he was going to "wipe out the white race – one pale-skinned bitch at a time."
While there was no evidence that Makinson had ever killed anyone, what he had done was almost worse. His M.O. was simple; he would settle in a new town or city, establish himself using a carefully constructed cover story and seek out a potential target – always a Caucasian woman between age twenty and forty and often one who was in some way vulnerable or easy to charm. He would learn about their likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses and play on those, using them, taking as much time as necessary to establish a certain level of trust with his target. Once that target had been reached with a woman he would express his desire to become intimate with her, emphasizing that he preferred to use condoms instead of putting the burden on her to use birth control, so as to keep the power firmly in his court. After the woman consented and after making sure she was not using her own form of birth control, he would secretly sabotage the condom by poking a tiny hole through the package – and the tip. After having sex with the woman, he would leave to establish himself in another town and begin seeking out another victim.
There were plenty of victims, and not just the women he left betrayed. While some of the ones investigators could track down had had abortions once they found out what had happened most didn't for religious or personal reasons. As far as anyone could tell, at last count Makinson had at least thirty-eight children, all by different women, across the country. Most of them were in single parent households, often of the working or lower middle class, reliant on government assistance or minimum wage jobs to get by. In one tragic case, a young college student in South Dakota who'd dated him briefly threw herself off the roof of her dormitory. Investigators theorized that she chose to take her own life rather than admit to her very traditional family that she'd gotten pregnant out of wedlock.
While it was never proven, authorities suspected Makinson's trail of victims stretched beyond American soil. As someone who travelled frequently – the only part of his stories that seemed to be truthful – he'd made frequent trips abroad, including to Canada, England, Western Europe and Australia. Like most sexual predators, Makinson had had no reason to stop until he was stopped - in this case at the cost of his life instead of just his freedom. Investigators were convinced that in many, perhaps all of these countries were women who he'd lied to and taken advantage of, leaving a trail of fatherless children behind him.
It was compelling evidence and might have made the jury a little more sympathetic to Eve, but for whatever reason the judge ruled it inadmissible, saying it was irrelevant. His position, essentially, was that murder couldn't ever be justified and that Makinson, despite being a scumbag and sexual predator, didn't deserve to have his throat slit and his testicles sawed off. The character profile of the victim, a key piece of Eve's defence, was now gone.
With so little to go on, and with her lawyer unwilling to put his client on the stand, the outcome was no surprise to anyone. After a trial that lasted two weeks, it took just forty-five minutes for the jury to pronounce Eve guilty of murder. The prosecutor announced that, in an increasingly rare move in the state, he would seek the death penalty, arguing that her crime was "cold, calculated and without a shred of remorse."
Three weeks after her conviction, Eve was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
One additional blow to the young woman who'd been used and abused most of her life: a few weeks after her arrest Eve discovered she was pregnant – Darren Makinson's final act of power over her. She gave birth to a baby boy named Jason just before the trial started, who was immediately seized and given up for adoption. The amount of time Eve was able to hold her new son in her arms was approximately one minute.
From the time of her conviction and imprisonment at the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women in Raleigh until the time of her death, Eve fought to get her sentence overturned. She filed appeal after appeal, trying in vain to get off death row; forbidden from seeing any of her children and being one of only three women sentenced to death in the state took a toll on her physical and mental health. Each and every time, the answer was the same – her execution would remain intact.
Finally, in September 2011, her final appeal was rejected. It was official; the state of North Carolina would take her life for taking another's.
On September 17th, two days after being informed that her death sentence would be carried out, a guard found Eve unresponsive in her bed. Despite efforts to revive her, she was pronounced dead at 4:17 a.m. The cause of death was later revealed to be an overdose of anti-depressants, which had been prescribed to her after she was hospitalized for cutting her wrists with a crudely-made razor. It would appear that she had been secretly hoarding them for some time until she had a dose that she was sure would prove fatal. Investigators theorized that Eve decided to take her life, and re-establish some control in it, rather than have someone else decide the day and time she would die.
While her death caused some waves in the media for a short time, Evelyn Barrymore was quickly forgotten. Her mother Josephine, who had never visited her before, during or after the trial, refused to have anything to do with her. Josephine herself would die of pneumonia just a few months later.
With no one to claim her, Eve's body was buried at a private location. It was a familiar ending for a woman who'd been on her own most of her life. Her gravestone bore no name but a message she'd left behind just before she died:
Sometimes it's Hell getting to Heaven.
TBC…
