Sat, Nov 21, 2009 page9

• Prison decks give new meaning to ‘face cards’

  Since prisoners have a lot of time on their hands for card games, the hope is that they may recognize a face from the ‘unsolved’ murders card decks and provide the missing piece of information that could solve a crime

  • By Dan Barry / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In the down time before another head count, two prisoners play cards. One inmate shuffles and the other flicks his hand, a mystical cutting of the deck. The dealt cards land on the lid of a garbage can used as a table, falling on top of one another, face down.

  A form of gin rummy breaks out in the courtyard of the Campbell Pre-Release Center as the inmates, Mark and Mario, toss their unwanted cards into the discard pile. But from deuce to ace, nearly every card is a face card, looking up in silent appeal.

  The cards ask: Do you know who killed me? And they ask: Do you know where I am? And they ask: Do you know something? Anything?

  

  The South Carolina Department of Corrections started selling these decks in its prison canteens for US$1.72 about a year ago; since then, inmates have bought more than 10,000 packs. Each card asks that you please call 888-CRIME-SC if you have any information about a case; each card also whispers, “Call (AST)49,” an anonymous prison hot line.

  The seven of hearts spins to a stop, and gazing up is Victoria Duncan, last seen driving off with two men in 1998, later found beaten to death in York County. She disappears under the king of spades, Christi Hanks, a prostitute from the Anderson area, found dead in a field in 2006.

  Here comes the 10 of spades, Tracy Ann Johnson, beaten to death in her home in Greer in 2000, only to be covered by the four of hearts, Richard Martin. He left Nancy’s Lounge in Anderson one night in 1995 and was found an hour later, dying from blunt trauma to the head in the middle of Welcome Road.

  Hands are won and lost as the inmates shuffle and toss the cards on top of one another. Their discards form kaleidoscopic arrangements in which the dead and the missing peer up together, as though from a deep, shared hole.

  “You going down, mister,” crows Mario to Mark, looking at the cards looking at him.

  The inmates sit about 2m from a bank of public telephones.

  Another discard spins into view: Brian Lucas, 29, forever smiling on the ace of spades. He was one of four people shot to death in an isolated motorsports shop outside Spartanburg on Nov. 6, 2003. My case is unsolved, his card says. Please call.

  Brian Lucas’ father, Tom Lucas, is the one who decided that his son would be the ace of spades, and that the three killed with him would also be aces. While he grieves for the other 48 murdered or missing people in the deck, he wanted to emphasize that this was our son, the son of Tom and Lorraine Lucas.

  Aces, he says: “I had blood in it.”

  Their son, their motorbike-loving, fix-anything, father-of-two Brian, was killed at the Superbike Motorsports store where he worked as service manager. Also murdered were Scott Ponder, the owner and now the ace of diamonds; Beverly Guy, Ponder’s mother and the ace of hearts; and Chris Sherbert, the shop mechanic and the ace of clubs.

  After receiving the call, the Lucases drove six hours to South Carolina from their home in Kentucky, through fog and tears.

  “He cried all the way down,” Lorraine Lucas says.

  While closure is a fiction, their wait for justice continues. The why of what happened that afternoon, amid the motorcycles and helmets and Suzuki paraphernalia, is still an open question: a quadruple homicide that, six years later, remains in a swirl of maybes — maybe drug-related, maybe business-related, maybe family-related.

  The Lucases moved back to Spartanburg and began working to keep the spotlight on their son’s case. They joined the Crime Stoppers Council, persisted with investigators and even talked to psychics.

  “We would have talked to Santa Claus if we could,” Tom Lucas says.

  In the midst of their frustration, Lucas learned of a company called Effective Playing Cards and Publications, which had produced “unsolved” playing cards that were being circulated in the state prisons of Florida, as well as in county jails in several other states. And he thought: Why not cards for unsolved South Carolina cases like my son’s?

  Backed by the Crime Stoppers, Lucas met with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, collaborated with law enforcement officials, designed the cards and raised the money. He also worked closely with corrections officials to have the cards sold in the state’s 28 prisons, as well as in many county jails.

  “There’s a lot of information inside a prison,” Lucas says.

  He pressed police officials to choose the cases they wanted to include, and accommodated families whenever possible.

  For example, the family of Donnie Bell, killed in a hit-and-run in 2003, asked for the three of hearts because “that was his card,” Lucas recalls. “I said, ‘Certainly.’”

  But he always made clear that the four aces were taken.

  The thought of a family member’s image fluttering through prison card games is both jarring and reassuring, Lucas says. Many of the cases are cold, and families find hope in knowing that their loved ones have not slipped from memory — that they are, in a way, working their own cases.

  Ann Hollingsworth, 54, of Anderson, agrees. Her sister is in the deck: Tina Milford, 23, kidnapped from a Li’l Cricket convenience store and shot to death in 1983. Hollingsworth says she endorses the program because a prisoner’s memory, or conscience, or self-interest, might be jogged by a young woman’s high school portrait on the 10 of hearts.

  Twenty-six years have passed, Hollingsworth says. Her younger sister would be 50 in January — “if she’d lived.”

  Lucas acknowledges that the cards have yet to solve a murder in South Carolina, but he emphasizes that they have prompted dozens of tips, including one promising lead in a case more than a dozen years old.

  “It gives you something to look forward to,” he says, studying the 52 cards arranged face-up on his kitchen table, including the ace of spades, his son.

  Brian Lucas now appears and disappears in prisons throughout South Carolina. Here at the Campbell Pre-Release Center, he smiles from atop that garbage-can lid of a table, then vanishes until the next rat-a-tat-tat shuffle.

  The cards are stored between the air fresheners and decks of Uno cards in the prison’s canteen. When they first appeared a year ago to replace another brand of playing cards, they prompted several altercations. Inmates kept interrupting games by picking up a card in play to take a closer look.

  The dead and the missing are known here.

  “I remember she was quiet,” one inmate says of the three of diamonds.

  Says another of the five of diamonds: “People say he got what he had coming.”

  The “unsolved” decks, long since stripped of any reverence, are now part of the everyday prison culture here. Inmates say that the cards are too expensive, that the cards are not as sturdy as those they replaced, that sometimes a card is just a card.

  “I’m tired of seeing James,” says a man hunched around a hand he’s just been dealt.

  James is James Oneal Boulware, shot to death in Rock Hill a couple of years ago. The two of spades.

  James and 51 others are soon shuffled and spun across tables to form new combinations of faint possibility. Read ‘em and weep.
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