Blood Runs Coal by Mark A. Bradley

Author:Mark A. Bradley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Lucy and Silous

Lucy Gilly was a survivor. When she was only six years old, the flame in the gas heater in the motel room she shared with her mother went out. Deadly carbon monoxide filled the room’s air; unable to get out or raise the window, she lay on the floor, her face pressed to a crack underneath the door, while her mother suffocated.

Lucy was going to find another crack now. She was only thirty-two years old, and she had a teenage son to reclaim from her sisters.

Prison was awful. When the FBI first arrested her on February 5, 1970, its agents transported her to filthy Cuyahoga County jail in Cleveland. She was one of only a handful of female prisoners, something not lost on the leering guards or the sex-deprived inmates.

When that jail became too dangerous, state authorities moved her to the Stark County jail outside Canton, Ohio—which was even worse. The Stark County jail’s conditions were so harsh that state judges routinely gave prisoners four days of credit for each day they actually served. To protect her, Lucy’s jailors placed her in solitary confinement.

Left alone, she became consumed by her fears of dying in the electric chair. Pennsylvania had not electrocuted a male prisoner since 1962, and it had been even longer since it had executed a female prisoner: Corrine Sikes, an African American maid with a borderline IQ, died in Pennsylvania’s electric chair in 1946, after a jury convicted her of stabbing to death the woman she worked for.

But these statistics gave Lucy little comfort. Between 1915 and 1962, Pennsylvania had electrocuted 350 people. Worse, she knew Richard Sprague was a strong supporter of the death penalty. He had sent over twenty men to Pennsylvania’s death row, including her husband.

Lucy was afraid of Sprague. In August 1971, her lawyers contacted Thomas Henderson at the Department of Justice, promising that she would implicate an unnamed UMWA official if the government would set her and her father free. Her husband’s freedom was not part of her deal. Henderson told her she needed to talk with the special prosecutor; the Department of Justice had no jurisdiction over her state murder charges.

Rebuffed, Lucy clung to the hope that her father’s mystical belief in the UMWA would save them. Huddleston had told her that the union’s power was limitless. He also warned that its hit men would kill them both if she talked.

Paul Gilly’s conviction on three counts of first-degree murder and his death sentence erased her hopes. The union had done nothing to save her husband, and Sprague was going to send her to the electric chair if she lost in her trial. The UMWA’s death threats were meaningless now. Sprague was going to kill her first.

Lucy knew she had to strike a deal with him—and Sprague needed her as much as she needed him. From his first day on the case, he never believed the Yablonskis’ three killers had acted alone or for their own reasons. They were puppets. He was not interested in prosecuting only those at the bottom.

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