A flush rises from under David Vasquez's collar and washes his face in pink. He begins to rock and to wring his hands. He is trying to describe his first weeks in prison for a crime he did not commit, but he has trouble forming the words. "I couldn't hold up very good," he finally says. He was assigned to a top bunk. When another inmate suggested that he join him on the lower bunk, "I told him I'm not that kind of a person and all that, but he said, 'Nope . . . . You want to get down here?' " The other inmate's boyfriend, he said, "was on me too a lot and I just couldn't -- two against one -- I couldn't fight them, they were both too strong . . . . He knew I was scared. And I was sometimes even saying, uh, I better get it over with." It was not the first time that Vasquez, described in a court as having "borderline retarded/low normal" intelligence, had suffered from the decisions others made about his life. Both his past and his future -- though he did not know it -- had become intertwined with the history of a man he has never met: four-time convicted murderer Timothy W. Spencer. Seven months ago, Gov. Gerald L. Baliles pardoned Vasquez, now 42, after he had spent five years in jails and prison. Since his release Jan. 4, he has been left virtually on his own. He has received no job training, no psychological counseling, no pay for time lost. Had he been a convicted criminal placed on probation, Vasquez would have been assigned a probation counselor to help him sort through the problems of adjusting to the world beyond the prison gates. Because he was pardoned, he is ineligible for such help. In February 1984, Vasquez was wrongfully accused of murdering lawyer Carolyn Jean Hamm, who was found raped and hanged in her Arlington home. Vasquez was charged with capital murder -- which carries the death penalty -- after "confessing" in interrogations with two Arlington detectives, who told him details of the crime scene that reappeared in his own statements, according to recordings and transcripts obtained by The Washington Post. He pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, the judge recommended that the Department of Corrections place Vasquez "in a facility in which he can receive psychiatric treatment." On Aug. 15, 1985, he entered the Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, Va., 70 miles west of Richmond. Eighty percent of Buckingham's inmates are hard-core criminals requiring maximum security. Because the prison is so crowded, no inmate gets "any intense therapy," said assistant warden David Smith. Vasquez said he met with a psychiatrist infrequently. Because of crowding, Vasquez was assigned to the first available cell, Smith said, without regard to his temperament and experiences. Smith said that, given the limits imposed on him by crowding, he tries to separate white and black inmates when requested and to separate openly homosexual inmates, and not to put smokers and nonsmokers in the same cell. Vasquez's prior adult record -- no arrests and no history of mental illness or substance abuse -- would have qualified him for a minimum-security prison had the murder of Hamm not been so heinous. Vasquez said in interviews after his release that sexual assaults against him began almost immediately after he entered Buckingham. In the months that followed, he became physically ill from the trauma. Prison medical records show that during late October and early November of 1985, he suffered vomiting, nervousness, agitation and insomnia that the medical staff could not explain. Vasquez now attributes his medical problems to the stress he was under, though he did not tell the staff about being raped. Vasquez never filed a formal complaint against any inmate, but, according to 1985 prison records, he told a prison board that two inmates "would like me to have sex with them." "They hit me a couple of time {sic} and told me to do as I was told," Vasquez told the board, the board's report notes. In separate interviews, two other inmates said Vasquez told them that he had been assaulted about the time the attacks occurred. One of his former attorneys, Richard McCue, also said that Vasquez told him about being assaulted. "When he came to the {prison} system, the system failed to properly classify him," said Earl Lawrence Squires, a convicted murderer who has become a jailhouse lawyer at Buckingham. "Security personnel failed to properly protect him, and the man has suffered punishments most of us could never relate to." On Nov. 8, 1985 -- almost three months after entering Buckingham -- Vasquez asked to be put in protective custody on the advice of Lt. J.R. Townsend, a guard. When the request was approved, Townsend moved Vasquez from his cell in the middle of the night. Townsend said Vasquez refused to file a formal complaint against his assailants for fear of retribution. "There was nothing we could do about it," he said. "That's the way the system works."Victim of Harassment Vasquez spent four days in protective custody, then was transferred to another cellblock. But he continued to be harassed by other inmates. At 5 feet 8 inches and 140 pounds, his small size and docile, childlike manner made him an easy target in a prison full of violent men, guards said. Sometimes he would skip meals to avoid having to pass "the boulevard," the yard where fights and stabbings occur and where inmates from across the prison mingled. At other times he stuck close to friendly inmates or guards. "He followed me around for about three weeks, like a little brother," said Sgt. Earl Isaac, a guard. "The other inmates teased me about him." But slowly Vasquez found friends who would protect him, friends who would carry into the prison the sack of snacks his mother brought him so other inmates would not steal it, as they had on several occasions. Because of his Spanish surname, Vasquez acquired the nickname "Taco," which he talks about as if it were a prize. His friends said his humor was infantile; he got much amusement from knocking someone's hat off his head. "He's one of the few people who could get away with that; you don't do that kind of stuff around here," said Charles Young, an inmate who tutored Vasquez in reading and became a close friend. "I guess he's just not something you see much of in a place like this." Guards describe him as the ideal inmate. He attended church regularly and got a job cleaning the cellblock. Vasquez's mother, Imelda "Mel" Shapiro, 60, was a regular visitor to Buckingham, where she would show up in her best evening attire. Vasquez's inability to help her financially while he was imprisoned, to ease the pain she suffered from degenerating back discs, distressed him greatly, according to inmates who helped him write letters to her. "I was more than glad to see you mom," Vasquez wrote Shapiro in November 1985. "I wish I would see you every day, I Love and miss you so much, so times I think of you so much until I cry . . . . LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, Son." On Sept. 7, 1987, nearly two years after he entered Buckingham, Vasquez was awarded the most coveted prison commodity, a single cell, based on good behavior and time served. Three days earlier, Timothy W. Spencer got an even bigger prize. After spending nearly four years in another prison on burglary charges, Spencer was released to a Richmond halfway house. Spencer, now 27, had grown up in Arlington as a streetwise youth known to police for the destructive fires he set as a child. Like Vasquez, he had learning problems in school. Just two weeks after his release from prison, Spencer -- who had no known history of violent crime -- raped and strangled Debbie Dudley Davis, an advertising account executive living within walking distance of the halfway house. Thirteen days later, he tortured and strangled Susan Elizabeth Hellams, a neurosurgery resident in Richmond. Six weeks later, he killed 15-year-old Diane Cho in her home in Chesterfield County, a Richmond suburb. And five days after Spencer killed Cho, while on a Thanksgiving weekend pass to visit his family in Arlington, he raped and strangled Susan M. Tucker, a Department of Agriculture employee living four blocks from Carolyn Hamm's former Arlington home. Spencer has been convicted of all four of those murders and has received four death sentences. The two Arlington detectives who arrived at Tucker's home on Dec. 1, 1987, were startled by the crime scene. "It's Carolyn Hamm all over again," said Detective Joseph Horgas, who headed the Tucker investigation and was familiar with the facts of Hamm's death. Both Hamm and Tucker were found nude and lying face down with their hands tied behind their backs; both had been raped and strangled with a ligature. Their purses had been emptied. Was Hamm's killer still loose? Following the Evidence During the next year, Horgas, working backward from the Tucker murder, linked Spencer, whom he remembered arresting as a juvenile in Arlington many years earlier, to the Richmond homicides. He then pieced together a circumstantial puzzle that convinced Arlington Commonwealth's Attorney Helen F. Fahey that Spencer had also murdered Hamm four years earlier. Fahey had replaced Henry E. Hudson, who prosecuted the Vasquez case and is now the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Police had always believed Vasquez did not act alone, but they were unable to link Spencer with Vasquez. Vasquez was interviewed again in prison, but was of no help. The strength of the circumstantial case against Spencer convinced Fahey, and eventually Gov. Baliles, that Vasquez was the wrong man. According to Arlington detectives, Fahey and FBI documents, these are among the elements that implicated Spencer in Hamm's murder on Jan. 23, 1984:Police found a pattern in 14 rapes, attempted rapes and burglaries in Arlington and Alexandria between June 1983 and Jan. 29, 1984, when Spencer was arrested on burglary charges five days after Hamm's death. The last two crimes in that series occurred within a block of Hamm's home the week before she was killed. In several of the cases, the assailant had used venetian blind cords to tie up the victims. Hamm's hands were tied with venetian blind cords. Spencer was linked through DNA tests of blood and semen at the crime scenes to the Tucker, Davis, Hellams and Cho murders and to one of the Arlington rapes in 1983. No DNA testing could be retroactively performed on evidence that remained in the Hamm case. DNA testing was not in use in 1984 when she was murdered. The FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime reviewed the Hamm and Tucker cases and agreed that the same man likely had committed the two murders. For example, the way the women's hands were tied was the same and both murders "were perpetrated by an organized type personality of prior criminal sophistication who acted alone when he committed the killings," according to a copy of an FBI report obtained by The Washington Post. Fahey said Spencer will never be charged with Hamm's murder because it would be pointless with four death sentences against him already. She said that Spencer would not cooperate with investigators when they tried to question him about the Hamm murder. Spencer has declined to comment. For a year, Vasquez waited impatiently in prison for police to reexamine the Hamm case and for Baliles to decide on Fahey's request for a pardon. Then on Jan. 4, as he was eating a cheeseburger in the mess hall at Buckingham, a guard tapped him on the shoulder and told him to pack and call his attorney. He didn't move. While other inmates at the table cheered, Vasquez sat calmly and finished his dinner. Then he walked outside, across "the boulevard" and into his cellblock, where he found his friend Charles Young. Young suggested he call his attorney before he did anything else. "He was just stiff, kind of stunned, because he hadn't really heard it yet," Young said. "He got on the phone and called his lawyer, then he kind of looked at the phone and said, 'A full pardon?' and the next words were, 'Tonight?' And he hung up the phone and he walked halfway to the stairs and then he leaped about four feet into the air. He didn't say anything, but he screamed." Vasquez's mother, Mel Shapiro, had kept her Christmas decorations up for her son. In her front yard were big red bows, plastic Christmas holly and little yellow ribbons. Shapiro was on the phone with a reporter when her son walked up the yard carrying a television set and a fan. She gasped and dropped the receiver. They embraced. Arlington police have quietly congratulated themselves on Vasquez's release. "We busted our hump and I take a lot of pride in what these gentlemen have done," said Deputy Chief Arthur Christiansen, referring to detectives Horgas, William Shelton and Robert Carrig. Shelton and Carrig had arrested Vasquez, but joined Horgas in the investigation that led to Vasquez's pardon.Freedom and Frustration Vasquez and his mother, with whom he lives in Manassas, have a different view. "The police haven't even come over to say hello, how are you," Shapiro said. "They don't even have the decency to say they're sorry." When Vasquez was released, he told reporters he wanted the state to give him back pay, or "a million dollars." He does not understand why no one has offered him a cent. He has not made any formal requests. "I'm just so doggone frustrated," he said recently. "I wish the state would just go ahead and give me what I want and get it over with." Emotionally, he seems on edge. He will drift off in a conversation and talk about friends he made in prison during the last two years, about how well he got to know the prison priest, how disappointed in himself he is that he hasn't yet been to Sunday Mass in Manassas. "They used to take care of me and all, take care of me . . . , " he said recently about his friends in his cellblock. Nor does he understand why all the television reporters, the guys he once called friends, the ones who called him "buddy," have suddenly disappeared. "All the TV people, they're following North and Barry now," he said with disappointment one day. Vasquez is reluctant to spend much time away from home. Manassas is not what it was five years ago. Gigantic shopping strips create a steady stream of traffic, but, a perplexed Vasquez notes, there are no sidewalks for him to use. His favorite bowling alley is gone. His Georgetown South neighborhood has changed as well. Drug dealers have moved in and so have the Manassas police, whose daily presence makes Vasquez even more apprehensive about going outside, because he associates police with his arrest. "I already don't go walking around this area," he said, "not with the things going on around here, up the street, I says, 'nope.' " He has started to make new friends among his neighbors, but they work during the day, which leaves him alone with his mother and her dog Kodi, he said. His mother is separated from her third husband. Vasquez "is starved for affection and love. I mean love-love, not physical love," said Marion Dehe, a neighbor and longtime friend. "He has to sit and hold hands, he has to kiss you." Financially, Vasquez and his mother are nearly broke, they said. This month he began a part-time night job cleaning office buildings, at $5.20 an hour, with no benefits. His mother does not work because of her chronic back pain, she said, but the Social Security Administration has denied her disability benefits. The Buckingham Jaycees, a group of inmates, sent Vasquez $50 shortly after his release, and a Hispanic community group gave him food and $100. Friends occasionally treat them to a night out. "I have never been broke in my life," Shapiro said. "It's scary." What would be a normal life for David Vasquez? "Going out. Having a good time. A place to go dancing and all that. Take her out to dinner," he said, gesturing toward Shapiro. "Take my baby here to dinner, to din-din. And a good job that has benefits. I'd like to work at Giant, they've got good benefits and all, maintenance or stocking." On one recent Sunday night, Vasquez, his mother and a friend ventured out to a Fairfax dinner club. It was his second night out in public since his release and he fidgeted in the back seat, keeping his eye on the passengers in the next cars. At the club, he took over the dance floor as though it were a long-lost friend. Sometimes he danced so hard, swung his arms so much, that he would accidentally hit other dancers. He was oblivious to everything but the music, to which he lip-synched. As the group was leaving, a gray-haired man approached Vasquez's mother, "Mel" Shapiro. Vasquez, at her arm, tensed up. What would he say? "Are you Mel?" he said, his hand extended. "I'm Len. I just wanted to say I'm happy for you and wish you the best."
Dana Priest Dana Priest, a reporter at The Washington Post for 30 years, covers national security issues. Recently, she has investigated Russian disinformation operations, censorship around the world, the massive national security state, CIA operations and veterans issues. She is the Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland. Follow