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The Execution of Private Barry Winchell
The Real Story Behind the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"
Murder
By Thomas Hackett
Fort Campbell, a United
States Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, is home to the
famed 101st Airborne Division, which spearheaded the D-Day assault and held
the line at the
Pvt. Barry Winchell, a twenty-one-year-old
from Kansas City, Missouri, was one of those earnest young men. He enlisted
in 1997 and within a few months joined Delta Company, 502nd Infantry Regiment,
101st Airborne, trained to fire heavy weapons like the .50-caliber machine gun
and the 40 mm grenade launcher. He was by all accounts a good soldier, with
ambition and skill and the beginnings of a life plan.
In the early hours of July
5th, 1999, Winchell was murdered on the third-floor landing of his barracks,
bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by a fellow soldier. The initial account
of the murder was straightforward. The Army called his death the result of "an
altercation between soldiers:" In fact, it was that, Barry Winchell had
been in a fistfight with his assailant the day before the attack, and on that
Fourth of July night, with staff sergeants nowhere in sight, the soldiers had
all gotten very drunk at the barracks.
But the Army did not report
at first that Winchell was actually sound asleep in his cot when he was attacked.
Nor did the Army reveal that he had been the target of steady harassment by
other soldiers for months, that he had been ostracized and isolated, taunted
even by his superiors, because he was believed to be gay. Finally, the Army
did nothing to suggest the close and complicated relationship that Winchell
had with his roommate, whose own sexual uncertainty contributed to the tormented
atmosphere in the barracks and whose Louisville Slugger ended up in the killer's
hands on the fatal night.
Not all of these complicating
details emerged at two separate court-martial proceedings in December and January.
Trials, especially those conducted by the military, demand a narrative without
ambiguities or cloudy motivations. Yet the forces at work in this particular
incident - - identity and sexuality, affection and attraction, desire and disdain
- cannot be easily simplified. What is clear is that three confused young men
came to the Army with questions about their manhood, hoping they could figure
out what to make of their troubled lives. Instead they found a place where those
questions aren't tolerated.
Barry Winchell never caused
trouble, though his life was not always easy. When he was four, he, his mother
and his two older brothers fled his father and lived for a short time in their
car. Barry struggled academically, not learning the alphabet until third grade
and dropping out of high school. But in other respects he was a typical American
boy, and his childhood became a happier one after his mother's remarriage, to
a likable man with a career in the aerospace industry. Barry was in the Cub
Scouts and Boy Scouts and Rocket Club. There were piano lessons, and then long
hair and a heavy-metal band for which he played bass guitar and wrote songs.
He went to the prom with the girl he said he hoped to marry. He had "his
share of teenage things," says his mother, a psychiatric nurse who works
with troubled kids. "His friends had drug and alcohol problems. That was
the group he was accepted by, and I'm sure he did some of that himself. But
he believed that you have to make a decision to become the man you want to be,
and part of being a man is accepting the consequences of your actions."
That's largely what attracted
Winchell to the Army: the opportunity to prove his mettle. "Before he enlisted,
he told me he'd seen all the movies - - that he knew all about the Army,"
says his stepfather, Wally Kutteles. "I told him it wasn't going to be
like the movies. I told him, 'Somebody is going to chew you out, and you'll
have to be able to take it. You're going to have to stand up and be a man! '
He said, 'I can do that.'"
Winchell's parents began
to see an amazing transformation after he enlisted. During basic training at
Fort Benning, Georgia, he wrote cheerful letters home, peppered with jokes about
the privations of military life. He announced that he wanted to be the best
soldier there ever was. He showed a dazzling aptitude for the workings of machinery.
He pored over weaponry manuals and became the best marksman in his company -
- his Captain even encouraged him to become a helicopter pilot. Just about every
week he'd call his parents, pretending at first to be down in the dumps, only
to surprise them with news of more praise or another award.
The guys in his company
even called him "Top Gun," he told his stepfather.
That was a small but understandable
lie. Although Winchell was doing well and earning encouragement from his superiors,
he was far from being a figure of envy. In fact, during the last three months
of his life, he was ridiculed daily by his fellow soldiers, for Winchell had
fallen in love with a man - - and not just any man, but a veteran of the Gulf
War who worked in a nightclub as a drag queen.
Winchell's main tormentor,
who started the taunting and then turned it into a company-wide blood sport,
was also his roommate. He was the one who first introduced Winchell to gay nightlife
in Nashville.
That roommate, Spc. Justin
Fisher, was the company character - - a charismatic, mouthy rebel who was a
few years older than most of the others. He was a hellion, his fellow soldiers
say, whose idea of a good time usually meant flirting with trouble. He'd get
drunk, fight, pass out, and afterward there'd always be a good story to tell.
Like the time when he loaned clothes to a friend before they went out on the
town in Nashville; in the car on the way home, he forced the friend to undress
and drive home to the base in his underwear. Fisher liked to concoct schemes
of going into the nearby town of Clarksville, Tennessee, equipped with walkie-talkies,
and pulling off some heist. Hanging around Fisher, you might get in trouble
yourself, says Pvt. Bill Marsh, who had briefly roomed with him, but it was
usually worth it: You were going to have a good time.
"Basically, he had
too much fun. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He'd be making fun
of NCOs (non-commissioned officers), basically telling them 'You can't break
me.' They'd make him do push-ups all the time and he'd be laughing. He did it
to everybody, always trying to find out how far he could go."
Fisher's cocksure persona
was in marked contrast to the frightened child he had once been. He grew up
first with an alcoholic father, who berated him for failing at sports, and later
with a physically abusive stepfather whose home he left before finishing high
school. Fisher talked big, but back in Lincoln, Nebraska, he'd made his living
at maintenance jobs - - roofing, painting houses - - or working at a McDonald's.
He had fathered an infant son, and in March 1997 he joined the Army, he told
friends, in order to support his child.
But he also liked the idea
of playing with guns, posing with guns, aiming the barrel at whoever was taking
the picture, looking like a badass. Soldiers said he was obsessed with thugs,
real and fictional, like Al Pacino in Scarface and the sadistic Mr. Blond
in Reservoir Dogs. Home on leave in July 1998, he bought a Louisville
Slugger baseball bat to use on a guy he'd heard was harassing his youngest sister.
And though he didn't have the guns to go with it, he owned a double-harness
holster. "He thought he was his own personal crime boss," a soldier
named Nikita Sanarov testified. "He was always plotting his own crimes.
He liked to plot revenge on someone who had stolen something of his - - handcuffing
the guy, plunging his head in a tub and burning a cigarette into his flesh.
He liked the idea of interrogating someone like that. He wanted to be the Man."
It was mostly talk, but not entirely. Justin Fisher never took the bat to his
sister's tormentor, but he did enter the Army with an arrest on record for having
the makings of a pipe bomb.
"He wasn't a shitbag,"
Bill Marsh says. "But if he didn't like you, he'd make sure you learned
the hard way."
In May, 1998, Fisher and
Winchell were randomly assigned to the same third-floor dorm unit, one of twelve
apartments in their three-story building. They had a rocky friendship from the
start - - what one soldier called "a love-hate relationship." Some
quarrel was always brewing. Winchell smoked, which Fisher hated. And Winchell
was something of a mama's boy, someone who wanted to please authority figures.
He was just the kind of person who would annoy Fisher, who bragged that whenever
he felt stressed out, he went into his room, locked the door and beat the crap
out of his roommate. He took to calling Winchell "my bitch."
Again, it was mostly talk
- - but the bickering did sometimes turn violent. The one fight for which both
were written up, a couple of months after they came to Fort Campbell, started
as a boozy argument about who should clean their room. Fisher wound up sitting
on Winchell's chest and punching him in the face. Finally, he struck Winchell
in the head with a metal dustpan. The gash required several stitches.
The blood that spattered
on the walls and ceiling during that incident would become a point of pride
with Fisher. He showed it off to anyone who came by, refusing to let Winchell
clean it. Yet they remained roommates. Winchell once told his older brother
Sean on the phone that Fisher was a "psychopath," but he said it with
a note of admiration. The next time Sean called, he heard the two of them horsing
around like kids. When their company Captain asked whether they wanted to be
separated after the bloody dustpan incident, they declined.
"'We just had a spat,"'
Cpt. Daniel Rouse recalled one of them saying. "'We like each other.'"
Justin Fisher's role as
the company bad boy wasn't compromised when he returned to the post last March
raving about a gay club he had visited in Nashville and the amazing "girl"
he'd seen lip-syncing to Madonna in a pink negligee, sequined thong bikini and
go-go boots. The next night, he got Winchell to drive him and two other soldiers
back to the Connection, in the city's warehouse district. It is a huge club,
a kind of gay emporium - - 48,000 square feet, with Saturday night crowds of
2,000 people packing its showroom, dance floor, country & western bar, restaurant
and boutique.
Nashville is about an hour's
drive southeast of Fort Campbell, and its resident drag queens say they're accustomed
to catching the wide eyes of soldiers on the town. They say they often end up
playing a transitional role for nervous young men unable to admit that they
might be gay. "It's really killing when that happens," says Calpernia
Addams, who served in the Navy for four years and now performs as a drag queen.
His name has been legally changed, and he won't say what it used to be; he took
Calpernia from Julius Caesar's wife and Addams from The Addams Family.
Both as a man and in drag, as a sailor and a civilian he's seen the pattern:
A boy enlists thinking the military will make him a real man, but on
some debauched and drunken night at a loud dub in a strange city, where it's
dark and men are dancing chest to chest, this bright, glittering thing - - this
man! but a man more womanly than any woman he's ever known - - catches his eye.
The object of Justin Fisher's
fascination that disorienting weekend last March was Calpernia Addams.
"They were all there
on a Sunday night, hooting and hollering every time I came onstage," recalls
Addams, 29, who is tall and delicate, with pale skin, surgically enhanced lips
and a voluptuous figure. "I met Fisher and at first didn't notice Barry,
because he was so quiet. Fisher looked at me kind of like boys look at strippers.
His eyes were darting all around, not looking me in the eye. I think he found
me attractive and was unnerved. The next weekend, they all came again, and afterward
we went to an after-hours club."
By the time the soldiers
and drag queens got there, Addams and Winchell had discovered one another and
started to hit it off. "So Fisher asked me to set him up with another female
impersonator," Addams recalls. "He said, 'What about Kimmie - - hook
me up."'
Kim Wayne Mayfield goes
by the name Kimmie Satin, but unlike Addams, he hasn't legally changed his name.
Even with plucked eyebrows and shaved legs, he is unmistakably a man, with a
stubbly chin and a conspicuous Adam's apple.
"They come on Friday,
Saturday nights, these little jarhead freaks from Fort Campbell who want a blow
job with a drag queen," says Mayfield. "You see a dozen every night
and they will all say they're straight. They seem to think that being with me
doesn't make them gay. They can say in their mind, 'I didn't know it was a man
till we were finished,' or something fucked-up like that. So for me, it's a
kind of a revenge, saying, 'Yeah, you dog homosexuals, but you'll go home with
me in a heartbeat."'
Mayfield, 31, says his relationship
with Fisher never went beyond petting. In all, he saw Fisher only three or four
times, usually with a group of other soldiers. Fisher was memorable, though,
if only because he seemed so happy and horny and full of life. He wasn't especially
handsome (friends mention his big ears and tangled teeth), but he had a presence.
"I remember fooling
around, getting him all worked up, as hard as a rock," Mayfield says. "He
was asking me if it still works. He was very aggressive, his hands were all
over me, grabbing my butt. But there was also this nice little moment when he
put his arm around my hip and I snuggled up to him."
So Fisher and Mayfield had
only a passing, teasing attraction, but Winchell and Addams had found a bond
surprisingly old-fashioned: a man in uniform and a country girl. "It was
a really nice relationship," says Spc. Phillip Ruiz, one of the soldiers
who went along to the Connection. And within a few weeks of meeting, they were
spending their free time together.
"If a straight man
is sort of the Holy Grail for a drag queen, a military boy is even better,"
Addams says, eating lunch at a Taco Bell on post, nondescript in a long denim
skirt and a cardigan sweater over a halter top. "I was lonely, and when
you meet someone who's attractive and has a good job and treats you nice, well,
that's a very hard-to-find package, and I latched right onto it."
Addams has been taking female
hormones for two years, and, as evidence of his transformation, last year took
fifth place at something called the National Entertainer Awards, winning for
the best evening gown. "I don't consider myself a slut," he says in
a voice that's huskier than he would wish. "I know there's a very Jerry
Springer-esque element to my life but I try to present a classy image."
The truth is, despite the showgirl style, Addams says he wants nothing more
than to be a housewife in a suburban home, married to a 1950's version of the
American man.
Winchell felt comfortable
being that man, Addams says. As a preoperative transsexual, Addams has no trouble
passing as a woman, and that's exactly how Barry treated him - - like a girlfriend.
"It's kind of a cliche to say he had a childlike quality, but that's
what he had," Addams says. "He was always treating me like a lady,
bringing me jewelry and things. Barry was the type of man who could undo the
jelly jar if it was stuck. He was one of the only people in his circle that
had his own car. It had leather seats, and it rode real smooth."
Soon, Addams was taking
up all of Winchell's free time. Weekends, instead of hanging out and drinking
with the guys from the barracks, he'd drive down to Nashville and keep Addams
company in his dressing room. They'd go to movies together, holding hands. Then
Addams would ride with Winchell back to the post, saying goodbye outside the
gate so nobody would see them together.
That precaution wasn't enough
to insulate Winchell, however. Beginning with the first Nashville adventure,
the intimidation Fisher dished out took a darker turn. The first night they
all visited the clubs together had been a drunken and disordered one. Fisher
had kept everyone waiting till the wee hours as he disappeared into the back
room of an after-hours club with Kimmie Satin - - bragging, when he finally
emerged, "I just fucking made out with that chick!"
"What chick?"
Ruiz asked.
"You know, that guy
over there."
Riding back to base, Fisher
suddenly started slapping at Winchell, then choking him. Fisher tore off his
shirt and announced that he'd wanted to kick Winchell's ass for a long time.
Ruiz and the others managed to calm him down until he passed out in the back
seat.
The next day - - in what
might well be interpreted as a veiled confession of his own indiscretions -
- Fisher told his sergeant that someone in the unit, he wouldn't say who, had
been intimate with another man. He told different versions of this story to
his fellow soldiers. In one, he said he'd dropped Winchell off at a gay bar,
later returning to find him having oral sex with a man. Another version had
him waking up in the barracks and seeing Winchell going down on a woman who,
upon closer inspection, turned out to be a man. A soldier would later testify
that in front of others, Fisher would ask Winchell "what it was like to
suck cock." Friends noticed the vicious pleasure that Fisher - - emboldened
by the typical knee-jerk hostility to homosexuals one would expect to find in
an all-male Army unit - - now took in jeering at Winchell, "calling him
a dumb fuck, a queer fuck, a fucking faggot," as Spc. Edgar Rosa recalled.
Through last May and June, he'd strut around the barracks saying he wished his
roommate would die. "He tried to get Winchell to hit him, to ruffle his
feathers and then put him in his place, screaming at him, calling him one of
those names," testified Rosa.
When the taunting started,
Ruiz reminded Fisher of his own misadventures in Nashville: "I said, 'Dude,
you kissed a guy!' He said he didn't remember any of that, that he was too drunk."
People who knew both men
have speculated that perhaps Fisher's anger came from jealousy - - that he was
attracted to either Addams or Winchell. Possibly, his own shame led him to punish
someone else for having homosexual desires. Calpernia Addams and Kimmie Mayfield
believe the murder had everything to do with Fisher's conflicted and uncontrollable
feelings.
"Little psychological
dramas that most people could control, Fisher had to act out," Addams says.
"He would go off. Maybe it was not having me, or maybe he wanted Barry."
One particular incident
gave Addams reason to wonder. Sometime in May, he recalls, Winchell told him
that he woke one night to find Fisher groping him. "He told me he jumped
up and said, 'What the hell are you doing?' " Addams says. "And
Fisher said, 'Oh, I'm just drunk.' And Barry said, 'Well, get off.' When he
mentioned it to me he was like, 'This really weird thing happened.' It freaked
him out"
Fisher's friends are flummoxed
by these conjectures. In the three months that he roomed with Fisher, Pvt. Bill
Marsh saw no indication that Fisher was remotely attracted to men. Neither did
Pvt. Phil Frenz in the months that the two were in adjoining cells at Fort Knox.
That Fisher had gone to a gay club and met up with drag queens - - that didn't
surprise them. He was a nervy guy who did the unpredictable.
During his court martial,
however, Fisher would admit from the stand to being "afraid of my manhood."
His and Winchell's escapades at the gay club, he said, were "a secret between
us." In a misguided play for sympathy, Fisher addressed Winchell's parents
directly. "Who do you think took him to the gay bar?" he asked "It
was me."
The statement hung in the
air, raising questions: Why had Fisher been so intent on tormenting Winchell
for something he himself had done? Was there more to it, some intimacy between
them that he would not say?
But no one - - not Army
prosecutor Capt. Gregg Engler, nor Fisher's civilian attorney Michael Love,
nor military judge Col. Kenneth Pangburn - - would touch those questions. A
forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Caruso, would only testify that, whether or
not Fisher was gay, he was certainly sexually confused and curious. Ever since
Fisher was fourteen, Caruso noted, he had been secretly wearing women's underwear.
Whatever Fisher's personal
quirks might have been, they didn't explain his increasing vindictiveness toward
Winchell. "He was jealous over something," says Spc. Clayton Mckinzie,
a friend of Winchell's. "The last few weeks, it was real worse."
What started as a private
conflict between two men quickly began to spread and infect the whole unit like
a virus. Fisher's slurs reached the ears of all ninety men in the five platoons
that constitute Delta Company, from private to section leader to platoon sergeant
to sergeant. "Pretty much everyone called him derogatory names," said
platoon Sgt. Michael Kleifgen, who was friendly with Winchell. "They called
him a faggot, I would say, on a daily basis."
One day, apparently thinking
he was being big-brotherly, Kleifgen raised with Winchell the forbidden subject
of sexual orientation. "I asked if he was gay," Kleifgen testified
at a hearing. "He said no. I left it at that." The sergeant then silenced
the courtroom by saying, straightfaced, "The military has a policy of 'Don't
ask, don't tell."'
Army spokeswoman Maj. Pamela
Hart has said that if Winchell felt threatened, he could have talked to his
superiors or to the post's Equal Opportunity Office. Yet Winchell did complain
to Cpt. Daniel Rouse. Rouse told his men to "Knock that shit off"
but nothing more was done to stop the harassment.
"Everybody was having
fun," said Kleifgen, adding that it was the kind of vulgar, easygoing racing
that came with the territory, especially in all-male infantry units like Delta
Company.
But even Kleifgen was alarmed
by hearing his immediate superior, First Sgt. Roger Seacrest, say of Winchell,
"The faggot has got a fucking drinking problem, and I'm going to do something
about it." In fact, Kleifgen took the unusual (and professionally risky)
step of reporting Seacrest to the post's inspector general. He also brought
the matter to the attention of the company commander.
"It was basically blown
off," he said. "I filed a formal complaint. Nothing was done about
it."
A group called the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, initiating
its own investigation of Winchell's death after receiving anonymous tips from
Fort Campbell soldiers, was the first to bring the military's transgressions
to light. The organization saw the killing as a case of systemic homophobia,
set against the backdrop of ambivalence about gays in the military. If the activists
are right, it would make Winchell's slaying the first gay-bashing death in the
armed services since 1992, when Seaman Allen
Schindler died of massive head injuries from an unprovoked beating at the
hands and feet of fellow military sailors. This happened not long before the
controversial "Don't ask, don't tell" policy was implemented. In a
bathroom of a park in Sasebo, Japan, near a US. Naval installation, Schindler
had his ribs broken, his skull fractured, his nose and jaw broken, his liver
turned to pulp, his aorta torn, his bladder ripped open and his face so badly
beaten he could only be identified by the tattoos on his arms. The Navy tried
to cover up the murder and almost succeeded. Told that her son died accidentally
after falling in a brawl, Schindler's mother was not informed that he was being
discharged because he was gay - - or that a plea agreement allowed one of his
assailants to serve only a four-month sentence.
When President Clinton was
elected, a week after Schindler's death, many hoped for an executive order that
would delegitimize the military's hostility toward gay soldiers as authoritatively
as President Truman had ended its racial segregation in 1948. Instead,
Clinton stumbled into a policy that has satisfied almost nobody, perplexing
gay and antigay soldiers alike while continuing to trip up presidential candidates.
And intolerance has actually intensified: The number of gay and lesbian soldiers
drummed out of the service has nearly doubled in the six years since they were
allowed to serve if they kept their sexual preferences private, according to
the SLDN, which also reports six times as many incidents of harassment.
Although the policy is now
on every soldier's lips, many think that it implies another phrase: Don't ask,
don't tell, but harass all you want. They complain that it's become a soft Army
now and that, with recruitment down, too many "weak" soldiers have
been let into their ranks. They wonder why someone who is gay would join the
military in the first place. If gay men are allowed to enlist, says one soldier
interviewed at Fort Campbell, they "need to be harassed more than they
are."
"For generations;"
Randy Shilts wrote in Conduct Unbecoming, his sweeping 1993 history
of gays in the U.S. armed forces, "the military has been an institution
that has promised to do one thing, if nothing else, and that is to take a boy
and make him a man." Allowing gays and lesbians to serve seems to flout
that belief system. Barry Winchell was sexually curious, yet he was clearly
meeting the Army's tests of manliness. Without combat, young male soldiers wonder
whether it isn't all a myth, this glorified idea of the Army as a proving ground.
Listening to soldiers complain
about the Army, one can see how the occasional display of aggression might momentarily
assuage the disappointments. A soldier griped, one bored night at the post's
bowling alley, "Our job basically consists of ironing our uniforms."
So into this atmosphere
poisoned with prejudice and dangerous notions of manliness stumbled someone
ill-equipped to keep his bearings: an eighteen-year-old private named Calvin
Glover. He had been in the Army eight months, at Fort Campbell only since April,
and had never been involved in the unpleasantness between Winchell and Fisher.
Glover was just another lost soul who, at seventeen and with nothing else working
out in his life, had given himself to the Army, one of the last organizations
that would have him.
To Glover, the Army represented
independence. His divorced parents thought it offered just the opposite: the
supervision he'd always needed. Growing up in Oklahoma, he'd shuttled back and
forth between his mother's place in Sulphur and his father's in Ada, mostly
fending for himself. There were no Boy Scouts and Rocket Clubs in his youth.
Making few friends, he drank, took drugs, dropped out of school in eighth grade,
got expelled from a youth shelter in Tulsa and returned three times to the same
home for troubled teenagers in Ada.
"He was very confused
about life," his father said. "He was out of control," his mother
said. "I thought the Army would be the place where he could get the role
models he needed. I felt it was the place to help him grow up."
It hadn't, though. Glover
found the same difficulty making friends in Delta Company that he'd had at home.
He tried hard enough, says Ruiz, he just didn't know how to fit in, how to shoot
the breeze until a mutual regard developed: "He was just kind of a goober
- - goofy, fidgety, always saying dumb things - - who desperately wanted acceptance."
Around the barracks, Glover became known for acting on dares, for going too
far in his attempts to belong. The guys in his company thought his bragging
about drugs and crimes laughably pathetic. Justin Fisher was just the kind of
charismatic badass Glover was always trying too hard to be. As Fisher told tales
of hits and heists, Glover tried to match him, spinning yarns about taking methamphetamines
for five days straight and robbing banks. When he felt people weren't listening,
he'd start throwing beer bottles and swinging baseball bats to get their attention.
"He wasn't a squared-away
soldier;" said one soldier in his unit. "He always seemed like he
was on something," said another.
"Teenagers all have
problems, but Cal wants to belong to something so bad," his father said
later in court. "He lived in fear of being rejected and humiliated. He
would do anything to feel important and accepted."
Certainly the image of Glover
as a "homophobic tormentor" (as the New York Times described
him) didn't jibe with the frightened, emotionally needy boy he seemed to be
in person, bashfully saying hello to anyone who would look his way. During his
trial, as he sat trying to compose the apology he would read to Winchell's family,
Glover seemed small and meek, like a chastened schoolboy in detention hall.
Just about everyone who met Glover's beseeching eyes - - even Winchell's parents
- - would admit to feeling some pity for him despite themselves. Just as Barry
Winchell had found a sense of acceptance and belonging with Calpernia Addams
and the gay friends he'd made at the Connection, Glover, too, had felt secure
and at ease among flamboyant gay teenagers. Cynthia Brown, director of the Ada
Youth Shelter, saw that side of Glover beneath all the bluster and posturing.
She was called to testify on his behalf.
"Calvin," she
blurted from the witness stand, facing him, "I know you're not going to
want me to say this, but I don't see how anyone can call you homophobic when
you were painting your nails and fixing your hair."
For the long Independence
Day weekend, Barry Winchell decided to stay on base and save his money for the
visit his parents were planning, for his twenty-second birthday, at the end
of August. He had recently been nominated for Delta Company's soldier of the
month award; he had some studying to do if he was going to win the honor and
get accepted to warrant officer school. That's all he talked about the last
time he called his mother on Thursday, July 1st.
He didn't t mention the
steady abuse he had been taking of late. But he did tell a friend that, with
all the hostility in the air, he was afraid someone was going to get hurt, either
Fisher or himself.
On a sweltering Saturday
night, he joined a dozen other soldiers who had nowhere else to go that weekend,
meeting at the concrete picnic table outside his barracks. They passed the evening
drinking from a keg, telling stories, playing whiffle ball on the scruffy lawn,
listening to a blaring stereo. Calvin Glover was there, "trying to impress
us to show us how tough he was," recalled Pfc. Arthur Hoffman. "He
was loud in a bragging type of way. Really pushing it."
Justin Fisher was there,
too, having a good time getting under Glover's skin, prodding him to tell more
of his incredible exploits. From time to time, Glover would realize that Fisher
was mocking him. "No, really," Fisher would say, "I'm sorry,
man .... I was only teasing. Go on, really..."
And Glover did. At some
point, Winchell lost patience with Glover's lies and Fisher's cruel encouragement.
"You're just a cherry
private, Glover!" Winchell said in exasperation. "Why don't you take
your drunk ass to bed?"
Drunk and revved up, Glover
pounced on Winchell. Fisher stopped him, laughing, then said, "If you think
you can do it, go ahead."
Winchell stayed seated,
smoking, unafraid. Over and over, Glover tried to swipe the beer out of
his hand. "Suddenly, Winchell sprung up from the table and hit Glover three
or four times, throwing him down on the ground," Hoffman said. "He
had him down in a couple of seconds. He had no trouble subduing him."
It was beautiful, the soldiers
would say, seeing the company loudmouth bested by the company faggot. Instead
of feeling he'd just won a reprieve from the ridicule, however, Winchell was
upset. In fact, he was crying as he tried to patch it up with Glover.
"It's cool, right?"
he said, trying to shake Glover's hand, offering him another beer and some Southern
Comfort. But with Fisher reminding him how he'd just had his ass kicked, the
gesture only added to Glover's humiliation.
"It's not cool!"
Glover said. "I could fucking kill you. A faggot cannot kick my ass:"
By the next day, though,
July 4th, the incident seemed all but forgotten - - except by Justin Fisher.
"You know how people have that voice in their head that they're going over
the line? Fisher didn't have that," says Ruiz. "With him, it
was relentless."
Repeatedly, Fisher tormented
Glover, telling him he didn't "have a hair on his ass" if he was going
to let "a fucking faggot" like Winchell take him down.
"Glover didn't react,"
Spc. Carlos Rodriguez said. "In fact, Glover and Winchell were playing
whiffle ball together. Winchell apologized, and Glover took it. Later they were
sitting, just talking. Winchell was showing Glover how to juggle."
Around 2 A.M. that second
night- - the keg running dry, the party breaking up - - Winchell left Glover
and Fisher and the others and went to bed. It was his turn to watch the company
mascot, a dog named Nasty, so he set up a cot on the third-floor landing just
outside his room rather than risk Fisher's wrath should the dog make a mess.
He made his bed carefully, folding three blankets lengthwise as a makeshift
mattress. The next morning, life would return to normal. He could go back to
being an ordinary soldier, maybe even soldier of the month.
No one disputes that around
3 A.M. that morning, Calvin Glover beat Barry Winchell to death with Justin
Fisher's baseball bat. Gregg Engler said in court that the attack was prompted
by Glover's shame at losing a fight to a homosexual, plain and simple. Glover's
defense attorney, Maj. David Robertson adding to Glover's own tearful admission
at the beginning of his trial that he was "just really drunk" - -
blamed Fisher's influence, saying that Fisher saw an opportunity to manipulate
an impressionable soldier into fulfilling his own vicious wish to harm Winchell.
Portrayed as a cunning malefactor, as a "manipulative gay-hater" who
"despised" Winchell, Fisher had used Glover "as his weapon of
choice," Robertson argued.
The prosecution and the
defense agreed that the July 4th keg party ended peacefully. After Winchell
had gone to sleep, Fisher brought Glover back to his room, where they kept drinking
while listening to the soundtrack of the movie Psycho. At this point
their stories diverge. Fisher has told investigators that Glover walked around
the room for about ten minutes with a "psychotic" look on his face,
making violent chopping motions in the air with the baseball bat. He says Glover
left the room, while he - - not knowing Glover "had that much rage in him"
- - lay down and listened to his stereo. Twenty minutes later Glover was back
in the room, apologizing for getting blood all over Fisher's bat.
Glover said that in Fisher's
room, just before the murder, Fisher continued giving him a hard time about
losing the fight, saying how much he hated Winchell himself. Glover said he
was goaded into settling the score - - Fisher's exact instruction was to "go
outside and kill that motherfucker," Glover told a prison guard, who later
testified. He also claimed that as he returned the bat, Fisher, enamored of
mob movies, acknowledged his complicity, saying, "We're family now - -
this stays in the family."
Fisher has admitted to making
the solemn mafioso pact and to washing the baseball bat. Yet as Glover ran from
the barracks after the attack, disposing of his bloody clothes in a dumpster,
Fisher remained, pulling the fire alarm, waking other men to get help.
Groggy-eyed soldiers rushed
to the scene and found Winchell with blood streaming from his left ear, his
eye sockets turning black from cerebral hemorrhaging, his brain oozing from
a gaping crack in his skull, his entire head swelling to the size of a basketball.
By the time the paramedics
arrived, at 3:3o A. M. - - the 911 system on base wasn't working, and ambulances
were slow in coming - - Fisher was covered head to foot in blood, still going
berserk. "Oh, God, help me," Staff Sgt. Bradley Hardin recalls Fisher
screaming in a panic, "I think he dying."
Everyone remembers those
words. But they also remember Fisher saying something else as the ambulance
drove Winchell away. For a while, Fisher stood silently on the scruffy lawn
outside the barracks with all of the others. Glover stood there, too, covered
in sweat, with bits of grass on his face and in his hair, having apparently
fallen while frantically trying to hide evidence. The soldiers regarded both
of them warily. Then, quite suddenly, Fisher started screaming again, this time
at the ambulance driver as he pulled away.
"No balls!" he
yelled. "No balls! Let him die! Let him die!" Winchell never regained
consciousness; he died the next day at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
from blows to the left temple, the left forehead, the jaw, the back of the head,
the neck - - to no other part of his body than his head.
"Calvin, tell me real
slow," his father, Rue Glover, said in a cowboy's drawl minutes after his
son was convicted of premeditated murder. "What changed?"
Some would say that essentially
nothing had changed for Calvin Glover - - that he had simply shown the world
who he already was when he entered the Army, that sooner or later he
was bound to make a dreadful mess of his life. But some had the opinion that
joining the Army was the fateful change in Calvin Glover's life. Talking to
soldiers at bars on and off post, you mostly heard that the murder of Pvt. Barry
Winchell had been politicized and sensationalized by reporters and activist
organizations, and by politicians anxious to overturn an unpopular policy. It
wasn't prejudice that caused Winchell's death, they said; it was more a matter
of the stupidity that breaks out when bored young men, already primed
for violence, start drinking. Still, the more soldiers talked, the more resentful
they became of the Army's handling of the murder, believing that its vigorous
but narrow prosecution of the crime ignored the Army's own responsibility for
the corrosive atmosphere it permitted and for the miseducation it gave Calvin
Glover.
Phil Frenz, who spent roughly
equal time with both Fisher and Glover at Fort Knox's prison, doesn't believe
either soldier harbored any deep hatred of homosexuals. "It's just that
being in the infantry, they got this whole macho thing going on when it comes
to gay people," he said by telephone. "And in my personal opinion,
the Army played a big factor in this, because it kind of brainwashes you. The
Army is not going to go all out and say, 'Hate him,' but the NCOs, the way they
react to gay guys, it transfers over to you. People use the term faggot all
the time, but, like, if you use the term nigger, if you didn't get your ass
beat right then and there you'd get brought up on an Article Thirty-two [disciplinary
action] or a court martial. You'd be fucked. But call a guy a faggot - - nothing.
They'd laugh at it. That's just normal. So if you're openly gay, of course you're
going to get a lot of shit for it. That's the Army."
In December, Calvin Glover
was sentenced to life in prison for murder. In January, Justin Fisher pleaded
guilty to charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements and providing
alcohol to a minor, getting a twelve-and-a-half-year sentence and avoiding a
trial on the more serious charge of accessory to murder. Both are incarcerated
at Fort Leavenworth Military Prison, in Kansas. Fort Campbell's commanding general
has announced an investigation into whether officers ignored reports of Pvt.
Winchell's harassment. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen has asked the Pentagon
to conduct spot checks to determine if anti-gay harassment is occurring at other
military bases.
There seems to be plenty
of blame to go around. Winchell's parents, Patricia and Wally Kutteles, say
they are grateful for the opportunities and challenges the infantry offered
their son, and they believe he met a few good men in Delta Company. (They believe,
too, that he met a good man in Calpernia Addams someone who, if nothing else,
proved to be a caring friend during what was surely a difficult time in Barry's
life.) But they are also now convinced that a misguided policy not only failed
to protect their son but killed him. So in the final analysis, Patricia Kutteles
does hold the military to blame for what happened just as much to blame as Glover
and Fisher are - - and plans to pursue a wrongful-death suit in civil court
against the Army.
"I think there was
concern and affection for Barry in the unit;" she said after her son's
killers were sentenced. "But there was a mentality, a mind-set in
the Army, that contributed to his death. His superior officer's silence condoned
the harassment. It sent a message to these soldiers that if you label someone,
it's OK."
READ NEWS ITEMS ON THE MURDER OF PRIVATE WINCHELL
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