Blood Simple

 Steven Parkus, Missouri's capital punishment inmate No. 54, sits across a metal table from Wade Myers, a Florida psychiatrist, in an interview room in the Potosi Correctional Center, the state's death house, about 70 miles south of St. Louis.

Parkus rubs his eyes with shackled hands, rocks back and forth, smiles and jokes with Myers, seemingly unaware that he's conversing with the man who has been hired by the state of Missouri to evaluate whether he is just smart enough and just sane enough to be executed.

Parkus is talking about female aliens. In the videotaped interview, he tells the psychiatrist that he imagines how, if he had sex with a female alien, her vagina would suck him up like a vacuum and he'd never be seen again.

"Just suck you right up in there?" Myers asks, his voice expressionless, his pen scribbling on a legal pad.

"Aliens got some hell of a power," Parkus says, chuckling. "I was tripping about that one night. It say in the Bible they got some kind of fantastic power. Stick your face somewhere between her legs and they'll never find you again. You'll get vacuumed up. It'll suck you right on up. Never find you again."

Parkus is slight, but his voice is a low growl that's Tom Waits deep and doesn't seem to fit him -- in fact, it comes off as a little comical, just like his talk about aliens.

But Parkus is a murderer. And a serial attacker of women. And a habitual liar. He's been on Missouri's death row since 1987 for killing a fellow prison inmate, and the state would like to end his appeals -- and, with a lethal injection, his life.

But in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in Atkins v. Virginia, that to execute the mentally retarded (defined by the court as having an IQ below 70, using the standard set by the American Association of Mental Retardation) is unconstitutional. Sixteen years earlier, the court had ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute the insane.

Steve Parkus' attorneys say he's both. Doctors have diagnosed him as schizophrenic, and his IQ has been tested repeatedly. (He has scored as high as 76 but usually registers below 70.) Parkus, his attorneys claim, is exactly the kind of inmate the Supreme Court had in mind when it decided Atkins and deserves to have his death sentence commuted to life without the possibility of parole.

But the state has other ideas.

As soon as the Atkins decision was announced three years ago, pundits predicted that inmates and their attorneys would rush to file claims of insanity and mental retardation -- and that inmates would feign those conditions to get out of their death sentences. Both sides of the debate predicted that many death-row appeals would come down to expensive debates between experts.

That's how Parkus found himself being interviewed by Wade Myers, the Florida doctor with a reputation for finding even the nuttiest inmates to be perfectly sane.

After listening to Parkus ramble about his space-alien fantasies, Myers decided that the inmate was a malingerer, a con artist who was feigning his mental deficiencies. Parkus wasn't retarded, Myers concluded; if anything, the diminutive convict had showed higher intellectual traits.

In February 2004, Myers sent his conclusions to Associate Circuit Judge Robert Stillwell in the 24th Judicial Circuit Court in Washington County, where Parkus' last appeal is being weighed and may be decided at any time.

Parkus' attorneys, who are based in Kansas City, say they were shocked by Myers' findings and tell the Pitch that it's Myers who needs his head examined. Parkus, they say, is mentally ill and retarded; horrible, repeated victimizations have made him that way. Anyone who met him, they contend, would see that he was no faker.

The Pitch took the suggestion and scheduled a visit.

Because of his history of violence against women, Parkus cannot receive a female visitor without a glass barrier. A prison guard denies the Pitch's request to place a tape recorder on Parkus' side of the window. He's been known to smash such objects in a rage.

But when the orange-clad, handcuffed figure appears in the visiting chamber, he looks neither angry nor dangerous. Just shy.

Parkus has long, graying hair and a scraggly goatee. He has washed-out blue eyes, but they don't look vacant. He makes eye contact and smiles and laughs at appropriate times. It's his words, not his manner, that are alarmingly disconnected from reality.

"I been having these funny dreams where I appear in front of Bill Clinton, and he's playing solitaire or something, and he keeps looking at me and he holds up the ace of spades," Parkus says. "And there's some kind of alien there, some scary-looking beast or something. And ol' Clinton's got on this white shirt and a black tie and a black hat, and his hair is gone, so whoever got him got him good."

Parkus goes on to say that before the guards "slam-dunked" him -- before he was placed in a form of solitary confinement called administrative segregation, or ad-seg -- he had 30 Bibles that he used to line up on his bed and try to match up, page for page, word for word. There, he learned that the King of the North and the King of the South, as described in the Book of Daniel, are really Clinton and President George W. Bush, though sometimes he changes his mind and says that the King of the North is actually a Potosi guard whom he knows. Comparing different versions of the Bible led him toward his favorite conspiracy theories, which have to do with the book of Revelation, the Oklahoma City bombing, atomic weapons and the prison itself. He describes his vivid dream of the ad-seg wing blowing up and the skin melting off his forearms before his eyes.