CHATHAM — The life story of Teresa Lewis — one of “greed, lust, lies, all woven into murder-for-hire,” as told by the presiding judge — is nearing its predetermined end.
At 9 p.m. Sept. 23, Lewis is scheduled to be executed for the shotgun slayings of her husband and stepson eight years ago as they lay ambushed in the beds of their mobile home in rural Pittsylvania County.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Bob McDonnell stops the lethal injection, it will be the first time Virginia has executed a woman since 1912.
Prosecutors say Lewis, a 41-year-old grandmother, wanted the two men in her home dead so she could collect their life insurance. To accomplish that, Lewis turned to two other men, strangers she met one day at Walmart and later recruited with sex and promises of a cut of the money.
Although the two hit men did the shooting — and later received life sentences — Circuit Court Judge Charles Strauss found Lewis to be the most culpable in the murders of her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis, 51, and his 25-year-old son, Charles “C.J.” Lewis.
“There is no question in the court’s eyes that she is clearly the head of this serpent, ” said Strauss, who decided in 2003 that Lewis must die.
As the execution date approaches, the condemned woman’s lawyers are advancing a second story — one they say was not told to Strauss when the judge could have chosen a life sentence for Lewis.
They say that a woman who was borderline mentally disabled, numbed by drug addiction and impaired by a personality disorder that made her particularly dependent on men, could never have contrived such a crime.
“She was easy prey for someone, particularly a man, to take advantage of her and to use her, ” said Jim Rocap, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents Lewis.
Rocap and others working on Lewis’ behalf have uncovered new evidence that shows, he said, “she was not the head of the serpent. She was not the mastermind, but she was in fact the dupe.”
The origin of a murder
Teresa Lewis grew up poor in Danville, a textile city near the North Carolina line. She was raised in what a psychiatrist would later call a “repressive home environment, ” made more difficult by her own mental shortcomings.
At 16, Lewis dropped out of school and left home to marry a man she met in church. When that marriage ended in divorce, she began to drink heavily and pop pills she was prescribed for abdominal pain.
Described by her mother-in-law as “not right, ” Lewis was incapable of such simple tasks as balancing a checkbook. She skipped from job to job, and had held nearly 50 low-wage positions by the time she arrived at the Dan River Inc. textile factory in 2000.
There, she fell for her supervisor, Julian Clifton Lewis. And he fell for her. They were married the following year.
When Julian Lewis’ son died in an automobile accident, he used some of the $250,000 in life insurance benefits to buy 5 acres of land and a mobile home in Pittsylvania County, where he and his new wife settled.
About that time, Teresa Lewis began to scheme about a way to get the rest of her husband’s money, according to David Grimes, the county prosecutor who would later try her on capital murder charges.
In the fall of 2002, Lewis met two men while waiting in the Walmart checkout line. Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller were roommates in a nearby mobile home, Lewis learned before they exchanged telephone numbers.
Within two weeks — “an incredibly short period of time from meeting these two men, ” Strauss would later remark — Lewis was suggesting that Shallenberger and Fuller kill her husband in exchange for some of the estate.
The planning began in earnest after Lewis learned that her stepson, a member of the Army Reserves, had just taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy. Unsure of what awaited him in Iraq, Charles Lewis named his father as a primary beneficiary. If something happened to Julian Lewis, the money would go to his wife.
The policy became their death warrant.
The night of the crime
In late October 2002, Charles Lewis was due for a visit home from training with his unit in Maryland. Upon hearing the news, his stepmother withdrew $1,200 from the bank to buy shotguns and ammunition. A plan was set for Oct. 30, the eve of Halloween.
Teresa Lewis left the back door unlocked and waited for Shallenberger and Fuller to barge in. She was in bed with her husband when they did, sometime after midnight.
“Teresa, get up, ” Shallenberger told her, according to a summary of the prosecution’s case contained in court records. As Lewis waited in the kitchen, Shallenberger shot Julian Lewis as many as five times while Fuller went to Charles Lewis’ bedroom and killed him with three shotgun blasts.
Then, as Julian Lewis lay dying, his wife returned to the bedroom to retrieve his pants and wallet. Before Shallenberger and Fuller left, they split with Lewis the $300 taken from the wallet.
More than an hour later, after calling her former mother-in-law and a friend, Lewis dialed 911. When rescue workers arrived, Julian Lewis was still alive, moaning.
“My wife knows who done this to me, ” Julian Lewis said when a sheriff’s deputy asked who shot him. He died a short time later from loss of blood.
After first insisting that her husband and stepson were the victims of unknown intruders, Teresa Lewis admitted to police that she did, in fact, know who killed them. She also confessed her own involvement.
As Grimes began to review the case, even more disturbing details emerged. He said Lewis encouraged her 16-year-old daughter to have sex with Fuller as part of the plot. He also described her efforts, before her husband and stepson had even been buried, to collect their assets.
“There were any number of factors” that influenced his decision to seek a death sentence, Grimes said. “But every time I turned around, there was another factor that made it worse.”
Tom Blaylock, a Roanoke lawyer who represented Lewis, also weighed those factors — which he feared would lead a Pittsylvania County jury to impose a death sentence in short order.
He and co-counsel David Furrow felt their client would be better off if she pleaded guilty and was sentenced by a judge. This was a woman whose only prior record was forging a prescription, they reasoned. And by then, one of the co-defendants, Fuller, had already been promised a life sentence for his cooperation.
“The bottom line is we didn’t feel like the judge would give her the death sentence, ” Blaylock said. “Unfortunately, we were wrong.”
Death verdict appealed
Unlike some pleas of the condemned, Teresa Lewis’ story does not include a claim of innocence.
“The night of my crime I had Jesus telling me not to let this happen and the Devil telling me to do it! Well, stupid me chose Satan’s way, ” Lewis wrote in a statement to her fellow inmates that was read last month at a religious service at Fluvanna Correctional Center. Through her attorneys, Lewis declined a request for an interview.
In asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case — or, if that fails, for McDonnell to grant clemency — Lewis’ attorneys are emphasizing factors they say the sentencing judge never heard.
During the appeals process, two psychiatric experts who examined Lewis said she lacked the mental capacity to plan a murder-for-hire.
As someone diagnosed with dependant personality disorder, Lewis was an eager-to-please follower, said Elinore McCance-Katz, a psychiatry professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“This is exemplified in a series of relationships with men with whom she rapidly became infatuated with and with whom she would take a submissive role, in what appears to be a desperate attempt to obtain affection, attention and security consistent with her passive-dependent personality structure, ” McCance-Katz wrote in her evaluation.
As for the coldness that prosecutors said Lewis showed, McCance-Katz opined that the defendant’s addiction to pain medication “would have a profound, almost numbing effect on her personal reactions to otherwise horrible events.”
So far, appeals courts have rejected arguments that Lewis’ lawyers failed her by not presenting evidence of her diminished mental state, and, with it, the possibility that she was led astray by Shallenberger or Fuller — as opposed to the other way around.
But in a clemency petition submitted to McDonnell, Lewis’ current lawyers are taking that argument one step further with new evidence they say has never been heard in a courtroom.
‘A hierarchy of evil’
In November 2004, Matthew Shallenberger was entering the third year of a life sentence at Wallens Ridge State Prison. Contacted by a private investigator for the Washington law firm that had taken Lewis’ case, the inmate agreed to talk.
Shallenberger said the murders were his idea and that he decided to manipulate Lewis in order to get the insurance money, according to an affidavit from the investigator, Alfred Brown.
“Teresa was in love with me. She was very eager to please me. She was also not very smart, ” Shallenberger said in a written statement that the startled investigator transcribed on the spot.
After signing the first two pages of the statement, Shallenberger balked when he came to the third. He then tore off the signed parts of the document and ate them.
Although he refused to sign the statement, Shallenberger accepted full responsibility for the murders, Brown wrote in the affidavit. Shallenberger also said: “What will happen will happen.”
Three years later, Shallenberger killed himself in his prison cell.
Since then, defense lawyers have obtained signed affidavits from three other people with knowledge of the case — including co-defendant Rodney Fuller — who now support the account told by Shallenberger.
While attempting to shift some blame to Shallenberger, Lewis is not denying her involvement. The most she can hope for with a clemency request is a commuted sentence of life in prison.
In general, courts are reluctant to consider after-the-fact changes in testimony, especially when they come from co-defendants or other questionable sources.
Grimes is dismissive of any account that diminishes the role played by Lewis.
“I would describe it as a hierarchy of evil, and she was at the top of that hierarchy, followed closely by Matthew Shallenberger, ” he said. “She was in control.”
Death row’s gender gap
It has been nearly a century since the state of Virginia executed a woman.
On Aug. 16, 1912, 17-year-old Virginia Christian “went unflinching and sullen to her death” in the electric chair for the murder of her employer, according to newspaper accounts at the time.
Such cases were rare then and remain so now. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977, just 11 of the 1,224 people executed nationwide have been women.
One reason is that women rarely commit the types of crimes that qualify for the death penalty, usually murder in the commission of a robbery or rape, said Mary Atwell, head of criminal justice department at Radford University and the author of the book “Wretched Sisters: Examining Gender and Capital Punishment.”
When women such as Lewis are on death row, it’s often because they have violated societal “gender expectations, ” Atwell said.
“Being an unfaithful wife and a bad mother, although they are not legal aggravating factors, in my mind, they are often emotional aggravating factors, ” she said.
But conversely, might gender alone spare a woman?
Rocap, Lewis’ lawyer, said her plea for mercy is not based on the fact that she’s a woman. Her previous lawyers had argued, unsuccessfully, that her death sentence was excessive because Virginia has never executed a woman under these exact circumstances.
“All criminal statutes in this Commonwealth must be applied without regard to gender, ” the Virginia Supreme Court said in denying the appeal. “Therefore, we decline the defendant’s invitation to apply Virginia’s murder statutes in a discriminatory fashion based upon gender.”
‘I’m trusting Jesus’
Locked in a cell of the segregation wing of Fluvanna Correctional Center, Teresa Lewis can communicate with other inmates only by speaking into air vents or yelling over the din created by the state’s most troubled women.
That hasn’t stopped her from ministering to them, said the Rev. Lynn Litchfield, the former chaplain at Fluvanna.
“It would be hard to count the number of women who, either in church or in writing, have expressed their gratitude for Teresa’s impact on their lives, ” said Litchfield, who for six years communicated with Lewis by talking through the food slot in her cell door.
The Christian message preached by Lewis resonates with the other inmates because she has walked in their shackles, Litchfield said. By sparing the life of one woman, she believes, the state could salvage the lives of many more.
In the written statement read during a church service at Fluvanna in late August, Lewis wrote: “Within the next five weeks Man wants me to die, but I’m not worrying over this, I’m trusting Jesus.”
“I will never claim this death sentence or this horrible execution date, ” she wrote. “I will fight to the end and in the end no matter what I’m gonna win either way.”
Lewis signed the statement: “Fierce Love, Peace Always.”