"I LIED!" CONFESSION OF RUDOLPH HARRIS, JR. ON YOUTUBE
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 47 days since I last blogged. They have been consequential days, though, and much has happened while I continue to spend my life in prison. Much I can't talk about at this moment, but I will, I will.
When my friend, Dan Faulkner, visited in June from Seattle, he obtained a video tape of the infamous rapist/liar/state witness, Rudolph Harris, Jr.'s confession, in which he admitted that he and fellow liar, James Edward Grayes, perjured themselves at my trial. John Middleton, Esquire, made the original video tape at Florida State Prison in 1982, shortly after Harris went to prison for brutally raping eight women in Tampa.
When Harris' partner, Grayes, refused to make a corroborative statement unless the attorney "did something" for him, the confession of Harris languished for years, waiting for an audience. The James Grayes interview is something beyond belief, and one day soon I'll recount for you what revelations he made about committing perjury for the state attorney's office.
Dan had the original tape digitized and converted to a DVD, and put the first five minutes of the seventeen minute confession onto "YouTube." You can see it for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-jfO4_0_4
Dan is quickly mastering tech stuff he has never worked with, to my great benefit and thanks, and as soon as he gets the YouTube logistics figured out, the entire seventeen minutes will be available for viewing. I will talk more about this, too, in the near future.
Since I last blogged, we had the state funeral of the murdered correctional officer, Donna Fitzgerald, which drew close to 2,000 mourners at the local Catholic church. Virtually every guard at Tomoka attended, which resulted in volunteer guards coming in to fill in for the day from prisons across the state. You can't close down a prison, not even for a day.
The local guards prepared us, told us that the entire prison would most likely be locked down that day, we'd be confined to quarters, but that wasn't what happened at all. Instead, the replacement guards came in and ran the place like it hasn't been run in a long time - correctly!
The day went without a hitch, telephones and TV's on, canteens open, rec yard open, tennis and handball courts open, chow hall ran in record time, everyone fed, no hassles, only one person went to lockup, no screaming or threats. It was amazing. Then four PM came, they left and were replaced by the regular crew, and things went back to abnormal.
We just finished dealing with Tropical Storm Fay, who moseyed up the Florida peninsula and parked over Melbourne and Daytona Beach for a few days, causing widespread flooding. We were locked in Tuesday through Friday, work cancelled and weekend visits also cancelled, which was especially disturbing.
The days of steady rain brought thousands of frogs out of their holes and hibernation, and we were rewarded with extremely loud day and night concerts. It was particularly hard on the prisoners from New York, New Jersey, Chicago, and other northern locales who've never been serenaded by thousands of rainfrogs, who were driven to distraction and couldn't sleep for the distraction. One guy from the Bronx asked me, "What are they DOING?" And I told them, "They are breeding!" He added, "Do they have to do it so loud?" Nature's way. Frogs are screamers, male and female.
For the inspired occasion, I wrote a Haiku -
Rain frogs sing all night,
Country music symphony
Drives city boys nuts.
Another prisoner asked, "How can you sleep through all that racket? I was awake all night." I told him when you grow up in the rural South, the sounds of frogs, of rain on a tin roof, of crickets buzzing, becomes the perfect sleep aid.
Meanwhile, check out the confession of Rudolph Harris, Jr., and let me know your thoughts.
Charlie
