TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052989/05298900.040

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 112 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 30

"I Won't Kill, I'll Just Maim"


By Richard Behar


    Once he has been locked up, a homicidal maniac has limited
opportunities. He can spend the rest of his life in prison, or
he can be put to death by the state. But Willie Bosket Jr. is
not your everyday homicidal maniac. A self-described "monster,"
he is intelligent, well read and sophisticated. At least three
books are being planned to memorialize his life story. He has
at his disposal a "spokeswoman" to handle inquires from the
media and Hollywood. He is only 26 years old, and in the view
of many people he is the best possible argument for instituting
capital punishment in New York State, which currently lacks the
death penalty.

    He is also the most burdensome inmate of the state's prison
system. For him alone authorities have built a special dungeon
at the upstate Woodbourne Correctional Facility, where Bosket
is scheduled to spend the next 31 years in solitary confinement.
(For the remainder of his life, if he behaves himself and stops
assaulting his guards and quits hurling feces and food at them,
he may be moved into more conventional quarters.) His room is
lined with Plexiglas, and three video cameras track him
constantly. He is so prone to commit mayhem that when a visitor
calls, Bosket is chained backward to the inside of his cell
door. When the door is swung open, there is Bosket, pinned to
the bars like a specimen in a bug collection.

    What did Bosket do to deserve such barbarous treatment?
Plenty. He was 15 when he shot to death two New York City subway
riders (BABY-FACED BUTCHER! cried the headlines). In the eleven
years since then, he tried, while briefly out of prison, to rob
and knife a 72-year-old half-blind man. He has also stabbed a
prison guard, smashed a lead pipe into another guard's skull,
set his cell on fire seven times, choked a secretary, battered
a reformatory teacher with a nail-studded club, tried to blow
up a truck, sodomized inmates, beat up a psychiatrist and mailed
a death threat to Ronald Reagan. Bosket claims to have committed
2,000 crimes by the time he was 15.

    To a visitor, Bosket plays the cunning Mr. Charm. He is
handsome, slightly built at 5 ft. 9 in. and 150 lbs.,
articulate and witty. He has 200 books in his cell and converses
easily about the works of Dostoyevsky and B.F. Skinner. "I'm
really a loving and caring person," he protests. "I hunger for
knowledge. My pain and suffering have stroked my ability to be
intellectual. If the system wasn't so quick to incarcerate me
as a child, I could have become a well-known attorney. I could
have been a Senator."

    Instead, he says, he is a "political prisoner" embarked on
a "revolutionary struggle" aimed at killing anyone who
represents oppression. In New York, one of the few states that
still prohibit capital punishment, legislators are yet again
debating the death penalty. The monster is unimpressed. "Willie
Bosket is gonna keep striking," he says. "If they bring back the
death penalty, I won't kill. I'll just maim. I want to live
every day I can just to make them regret what they've done to
me."

    What "they" did to him began, he says, when he was a boy,
the product of a broken home in New York City's Harlem. By nine,
he was a chronic and violent troublemaker. When he was given
mental tests, he threatened to set fire to the hospital ward and
kill a doctor. The tests showed that Bosket was suffering from
a severe antisocial personality disorder. His helpless mother
had him sent to a reform school, where he began to emulate his
father.

    Bosket never met his father, but the parallels between the
two men are dramatic. Each had only a third-grade education,
was sentenced to the same reform school at nine, went on to
commit double murders, and displayed a superior intelligence.
The father's goals, however, were different: he studied hard and
became the first convict in history to be inducted into the Phi
Beta Kappa honor society. After his release from prison in 1983,
Bosket Sr. found work as a university teaching assistant.

    His rehabilitation was short-lived. In 1985 he was arrested
for molesting a six-year-old child. Later, after a shoot-out
with police during an escape attempt, Bosket Sr. shot and killed
his girlfriend and then blew his brains to pieces. This has
given Bosket Jr. food for reflection. "I can say with all
conviction that genetics has played a role in what I am. But
what I learned from my father's life was never to conform to the
system, never to forgive, as he did." The "system," he adds,
became his "surrogate mother."

    Bosket has now filed a suit against his surrogate mother,
charging cruel and unusual punishment at Woodbourne. He is also
angry because the authorities have ignored an eight-page
handwritten letter in which Bosket volunteered himself for
study as a way to help prevent future Boskets. "It's all just
theater to Willie, and we try not to give him a stage," says
Thomas Coughlin III, New York's commissioner of correctional
services.

    But Bosket still finds ways to attract attention. While en
route to court last month, he kicked a guard who was removing
a leg manacle and then shouted to photographers, "Did you get
that picture? Did you get that on film?" That act was
reminiscent of the time last year when Bosket plunged a
makeshift 11-in. knife into the chest of a guard, in full view
of a newspaper reporter Bosket had enlisted to write his life
story. The guard was critically injured but recovered.
"Sensationalism sells newspapers," the baby-faced butcher
blithely explains, "and the system responds to violence."