TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052989/05298900.040

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 102 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."