April 1999 Cover
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Don't read all about it
Matthew Shepard has become a household name. He is joined now by
Billy Jack Gaither of Sylacauga, Alabama, beaten to death last month
allegedly by two young men whom he met at a local bar. It's no help to Shepard
and Gaither, but both murders garnered front-page news and
presidential condemnation. By contrast, almost no ink anywhere will be spilt about
the killing of Jeffrey R. Ford, a 36-year-old burglar described
as "effeminate," who was found strangled in his cell last June 29th in
the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, which, despite its name, is
not a hospital but a prison.
James A. Diesso, a 25-year-old inmate held on charges of
armed robbery, strangled Ford to death and lacerated his body, smearing
his blood all over the cell that they shared in the prison's
administrative detention unit. A few weeks earlier, another of Diesso's
cellmates petitioned to be removed, fearing for his life. A year earlier,
Diesso attacked another cellie, also described as "effeminate," stabbing the
man 17 times, but not killing him. On April 12 Diesso is set to go on
trial for Ford's murder.
As far as the media goes, prisons are a world apart. Though
America's penal institutions, at 1.8 million inmates last year, hold enough
people to rank among the ten largest US cities (and one enjoying
population growth of 4.4 percent last year), what happens inside them rarely
touches public consciousness.
Diesso's defenders his mother and a prisoner's rights group
called UNION say that he is not diabolically evil so much as mentally ill.
He has been diagnosed with an organic brain disorder, and they maintain
that when not given his medication which they say he has not
regularly received in Vacaville he suffers violent episodes in which he
completely blacks out. For 11 days in the month before Ford's murder,
prison officials held Diesso in "protective custody" where he was kept naked
and given only the cement floor to sleep on conditions imposed supposedly
to prevent suicide, which he attempted shortly after Ford's murder
by swallowing a razor.
California double-bunked Ford and Diesso in a cell designed to
be punishingly small for one person, because even with California's
prison construction boom, the state's prisons remain overcrowded. Terri
McDonald, spokesperson for the prison, tells The
Guide that Diesso and Ford consented to share a cell, though she admits their choices in
living arrangement were not wide.
Was Ford killed because he was, or seemed, queer? The
question matters less than the state's complicity in Ford's death, which locked
him up with his killer for most of the hours of the day.
In the Shephard and Gaither murders, gay and lesbian
spokespeople argued angrily that the killing wasn't so much the evil deed
of individuals as the fault of the government for failing to
legislate against "hate crimes." But in a not-so-untypical murder that the
state virtually set up, silence reigns. **
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