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1 This is where I live.

This is where I exist.

There is nothing matters to me.

There's nothing means anything to me.

I am who I am.

Just a killer.

These guards will tell you

I live in an administrative segregation unit.

Until just six months ago, I was in isolation,

in a one-man cell for almost two years.

What danger am I now?

What danger to society is a 71-year-old man in a wheelchair?

They don't know what to do with me here.

That's right. They don't know what to do with me here.

And I don't care.

They say if there's no rage involved,

if you have one split second to think about what you're doing,

it's first-degree murder in this state.

- Alright? How's sound? - Sounds good.

Yeah?

If this was a second-degree murder like it was supposed to be,

I'd probably be in a halfway house somewhere like now,

on my way to a nursing home.

I was born in McDonald County, Missouri.

I grew up two and a half miles south in Noel on a small farm.

Mostly what I remember about those days are just

warm kitchens, the smell of biscuits cooking.

Sometimes, uh, just a dog.

I was five and a half years old when my mother, father, and grandmother

were killed in an automobile accident.

I was the only survivor.

I have no idea how that affected me, losing my parents like that.

It was a very caring family at first,

but within five or six years,

my mother had begun to drink.

And the more she drank,

the less involvement with the family she had.

My mother's alcoholism had reached a point that, um...

I remember her throwing a vodka bottle at me one day,

and I walked out of the house when I was about...

Well, it was before my 17th birthday.

And I began to live at the Redings Mill Inn at that point.

The Redings Mill Inn,

downstairs was a legitimate tavern operation,

and the other side of it, um...

there were up to eight women there at a time.

They were prostitutes.

They used to kid me, joke with me,

but we'd usually always end every night,

whichever one of them didn't have a trick was taking me back to her room.

I began to feel that I had to protect them.

I had to take care of them.

This was part of my job.

They were my family.

They were my family.

By the time of my 17th birthday,

I was an actual pimp

for about six of the girls that worked there.

What it takes to really be a pimp

is understanding that your first responsibility is to care for that woman.

I took some of these gals off of a truck stop parking lot.

You know, I cared for them more than had been previously known in their lives.

I believe that, as well as I cared for them,

they began to care for me more.

You know, uh, some people might not call that love.

Some people might call it, um...

infatuation,

but they were there for me, just as I was there for them.

Tammy was a prospective prostitute.

Around 7:30 p.m. that evening,

she offered to show me what she could do on a good Saturday night.

We had gotten in the car.

At that point, Tammy realized, "Oops. I don't have any cigarettes."

"Just stop down here at this convenience store

and I'll run in there and get them."

That's where it all started on that night.

She came back very quickly.

I could tell when she came around the corner into my sight

that she was upset about something. She was very upset about something.

I'd started to roll my window down,

and even before I got it all the way down, she goes,

"Gary, this ******, he pushed himself up against me."

"He pushed his groin right up against my butt."

When I turned around to tell him to get away from me,

he grabbed me by the hand and pushed me back against the counter."

Because of what Tammy said to me,

I felt that he knew she was a prostitute

and he was trying to take her for his own.

That is totally unacceptable in my world.

It made me very angry.

When I saw him at the front of the store, I said, "Boy, I want to talk to you."

He turned and ran.

And got into a brand-new Ranger truck.

I looked back at, uh, Tammy and said, "Get in the car. Get in the car."

It didn't take five seconds to catch up to him.

When we came to a stop at Fifth and Joplin,

I was parked alongside his truck.

I remember Tammy saying, "Oh my God, don't do this."

I said, "Don't worry about it, honey. I'm going to kick his Black ass."

The Black guy saw me getting out of my car,

and at that point, he stepped out of the truck and had a...

what was obviously, um, a bottle

wrapped in a brown paper bag.

And he said, "Do you want some of me, old man?"

And I said, "Nothing but your bucking ass, boy."

He swung the beer bottle.

It knocked me to my right knee.

When I rose, I rose drawing that blade.

I swung right up over his shoulder into the side of his neck with that blade.

The arterial spray of blood that shot out was probably four to six feet.

It was just like a garden hose of water squirting.

And he went, "Oh my God... Oh my God."

And I stepped back away from him

and watched him stagger back towards the truck.

I returned to my car.

As I got in, I threw the blade on the dash,

I pulled the door closed.

Tammy said, "Oh my God, what happened?"

And I said, "Nothing, honey. It's just another ****** down."

We returned to the house, packed some clothes.

I got a key to a trailer, a mobile home, about 45 miles away.

And we drove down there to spend the weekend

and just wait and see what would happen.

This is my favorite of all-time. Right here.

- That's a good one. - Yeah.

Man, he looks happy.

Right in the middle of his two big brothers.

My name is Charley Kibby Johnson,

and I am the mother of Jason Oscar Johnson.

I'm Oscar B., the father of Jason Oscar.

- Right there. - Who's that?

Everybody knew him, even growing up.

As he was growing up, they knew him by that smile that he had

because he was a happy individual.

In sports, he was always at the top notch.

University of Cincinnati Wildcats.

Yeah.

Go, Jason, go.

They would pretty much, uh, compare him to some of the professional athletes.

- He was good. He was good. - He was great. He was better than good.

This is Jason's girlfriend.

That was the love of his life.

And I'm sure that had things not changed,

they would have been husband and wife today.

We drove to Joplin.

And we got there approximately 5:00 in the morning.

And they explained to us that he had lost a lot of blood,

which had caused multiple strokes.

We had to go in a conference.

Had to decide what to do.

Oscar and I decided that,

"What good is anybody that's a vegetable?"

If you don't know who you are, you don't know where you are.

Uh, that was not our son.

Our son was a vibrant, intelligent, loving, and caring individual.

We made the decision to take him off of the life support.

I remember saying,

"Jesus is waiting on you."

"He's waiting on you, and it's going to be okay."

And he took his last breath.

I was there when my baby... took his first breath,

and unfortunately, I was there when my baby took his last breath.

One could say pretty easily that this is a good versus evil case.

Nothing suggested anything other than good on Jason Johnson.

Nothing suggested anything other than evil for Gary Black.

My name is Darren Gallup,

and in 1998, I was the lead detective in this case.

A lot of people refer to this as the Gary Black case,

but really, this is all about Jason Johnson.

And he was the victim,

and so, it's really about him.

And this is the Joplin Police Department here.

Gary has to justify this as saying it's a street fight.

So it would lend, obviously, to the self-defense theory.

There was no intent or premeditation.

But that's just not what the evidence shows.

There's just no way that this can be conceived as a street fight,

which then caused Gary to pull a knife in self-defense.

There was no evidence that suggested any of that.

The evidence that we had said that Gary Black

pulled up next to Jason Johnson

while he was seated in his vehicle,

gets out, pulls a knife, and stabs Jason Johnson in the throat.

You can look in here and it's obvious that he was sitting in the truck

when he was stabbed in the throat.

Blood would not have gotten into this truck

if the altercation happened outside the truck.

This is the knife used as the murder weapon.

When somebody takes a knife out, especially a knife like this,

and lunges it into the throat of a person sitting in a vehicle,

the only result that they can expect is for that to be a killing.

That is a first-degree murder.

That's premeditated murder.

I do not regret the death of Jason Oscar Johnson.

He was a fake player.

He stepped into a game that he knew nothing about.

Jason Oscar Johnson knew she's... she was a prostitute,

knew she was an open prostitute, a free prostitute,

and he was trying to take her for his own.

I saw the video.

The video from that convenience store.

I saw him grinding his groin up against her from behind

at the counter.

I saw her turn to face him,

and I saw him grab her by the hand, push her backwards against that counter,

and say something to her.

He wanted to play "I can take care of you better than anybody else."

He wanted to play "I am a pimp."

What he played was dead.

Well, it's just straight lies is what it is.

It just goes to show you what type of a person Gary is.

He...

will make stuff up just to make himself look better,

and he continues to victimize Jason.

Jason Johnson was not a pimp.

There's no evidence to support it,

and you can just look into your heart and know that that's just wrong.

So it just shoots, like, one frame at a time.

Well, Jason is standing at the counter buying what he's buying,

and then this is Tammy right here.

And this is where the alleged bump, or whatever, occurred.

This is Tammy, and this is Jason right there.

And that was it.

I mean, it was literally a second and a half

of a... of an interaction there.

So any claims of Jason was trying to sexually assault

or do something inappropriate to Tammy,

it's obvious in the video that that's not what occurred.

Even if Jason would have said something,

you know, why would anybody think that that's okay

to stab somebody in the throat

just for bumping into your girlfriend, or your wife,

or as Gary might put it, his prostitute.

These are all the tattoos on Gary Black,

uh, the day that I talked to him,

and this is a German Nazi SS tattoo.

I... I really believe that...

that Gary stabbed Jason in the throat and killed him

because, uh, he was trying to save face.

And the fact that Jason was Black

and, you know, Tammy testified that whenever, uh...

Gary got out of the car and stabbed Jason,

and then he got back into the car,

he turned to Tammy and said, "One 'n-word' down."

That certainly lent credence to it being a racially-motivated crime.

Through our investigation,

we felt like that this, one, was a first-degree murder

and that it warranted the death penalty.

The only question was if the jury agreed with us or not.

You have to have certain aggravators in the state of Missouri

for the death penalty.

Uh, one of those aggravators

is, uh, the... the past history.

This was not the first violent crime that Gary had committed.

You ever had a dream about the Bogeyman?

Gary Black's my Bogeyman.

This is where I was supposed to die.

But I haven't been up here, oh, probably 35 years.

I'm sure that I'll have nightmares tonight about it.

Back in March 1976, uh, it was a Friday night,

and I'd, uh...

picked up, uh, my girlfriend

and, um, taking her out to a date.

And I brought her up here.

We saw a car

pull up the hill.

They pulled in behind me and stopped. They blocked me in.

Gary Black popped up in this window here,

driver-side and with a sawed-off shotgun.

And said they's police.

Told me to get out of my car, so I got out my car.

He spread me eagle up against the car.

They picked up my billfold and keys,

and then they shot me.

I remember I could feel the blood running out my side,

and I could feel the coldness creeping up my arms.

Just cold, just like I was going numb, but it's cold. I was bleeding to death.

I got over 40 pellets still in me.

I got two in my heart.

They had to remove half my lung,

had to remove my spleen.

If Gary Black hadn't been released as early as he did

and put back out on the streets,

then he wouldn't have had a chance

to do what he did on murdering another guy.

It... It just floored me.

He should have stayed in jail.

I feel for the family on the other person.

And it's just so sad, so preventable.

What good does it do to kill someone for having killed someone else?

If all you do is kill the other person,

then the death of the one person becomes meaningless.

Does Gary deserve compassion?

Every human being deserves compassion.

If your attitude is, is that there's some people that are just so horrible...

I mean, maybe you can't find compassion for them,

and that's within you, but they're human beings.

And no matter what they've done,

they deserve, uh, a criminal justice system

that treats them fairly.

If you look back at Gary's 1976 sentence,

with respect to whether or not Gary deserved a second chance

when he got paroled,

I think he did.

You know, we don't have any magic compass to tell us

whether or not this person is going to commit another offense or not.

It was right to see if he'd changed.

There's no other way to find out.

You know, you can go "what if, what if, what if."

If he'd have been kept in prison, maybe he wouldn't have been out

and maybe wouldn't have killed Mr. Johnson."

You know, it's all "what ifs."

I think that a lot of the anger that Gary had

that made him a dangerous person when he was younger, it's gone out.

I don't think society is gaining anything by having Gary incarcerated at this point.

The point of prison has come to be

keeping them away from the rest of society,

where they might hurt people

or take people's property or something like that.

It doesn't really accomplish much.

I... I just don't think that there's that much...

much justification for keeping him in... in prison.

Gary's pretty harmless now.

I think Gary Black will always be a threat to society

or to any institution that he's kept in.

We've had some very manipulative inmates, but none as truly evil as Gary.

My name is Becky Stevens.

My role at the Jasper County Sheriff's Office, I am the current captain.

I learned about Gary Black before I started working here.

I learned about him in the police academy at the local university.

Um, they...

They would teach courses,

and he would be the example for their courses.

He had a, a pretty good reputation for...

I don't know how to describe it, but just

for being dangerous, I guess that's the best way to put it.

You know, we have some behavior modification techniques,

which is basically loss of privileges

or not letting them out of their cell for so many hours.

Gary didn't care. There was nothing that mattered to him.

He didn't have anybody that came to visit. There was nothing for him to behave for.

He would be aggressive towards the officers.

He could get to you even, you know, if he was locked in his cell.

You can still yell,

and then he would get the other inmates to go and do his biddings for him.

That's just the way it was.

He lives on the torment of others.

I don't know if I could have words to describe how racist Gary Black is.

If we placed an inmate of color

into that housing unit where Gary was located,

he'd make their life a living hell.

Daily, all day long, the mental attacks,

the psychological warfare.

I believe Gary Black still poses a threat to society, even in prison.

And an individual like Gary who has no...

no care for human life

is very dangerous no matter where he's at.

What do you do with somebody like Gary Black?

He is the most dangerous person that I have ever prosecuted.

My name is Norman Rouse, and I was the lead prosecutor

in the Gary Black trial.

The fact that he got life without parole,

um, sometimes that's just the way it is and the process,

but it was very hard to take.

Life without parole makes me very angry.

If I did not have a sentence of life without parole,

uh, I would have 22 years done on this conviction,

and I would be very close to be making parole

on a regular life sentence,

which, here in Missouri, is considered to be 30 years

for the purposes of parole.

There are no incentives to behave yourself.

There is nothing you gain.

There is no incentive

for a man with life without parole to live in any other way.

Gary Black's allegation that, "But for life without parole..."

um, "I wouldn't be violent,"

we can go back and look at the prison records

long before he got life without parole.

In 1993, there's a report here where, uh, he stabbed another inmate.

Uh, and in 1999, he actually assaulted a jail officer

and, uh, caused damage to his left eye.

So these are just clear incidents of, uh, his continued violence,

when life without parole was not an issue.

Keep in mind, we just have his violence while he's in prison.

There's a lot of criminal records out there, uh, that we haven't looked at.

So, this is just the, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg,

simply out of the prison system.

Keeping him in prison with life without parole,

which a lot of people believe is, is appropriate

as opposed to the death penalty,

as you can see from his records, all these records,

it doesn't keep him from being violent.

I think he's very lucky to be alive.

In fact, all these records vindicate and substantiate

that he deserves the death penalty.

♪ He is my friend ♪

♪ He is, oh yeah ♪

♪ Through thick and thin ♪

♪ Oh, Lord ♪

♪ And I can depend ♪

♪ Oh, yes I can ♪

♪ Oh, yeah ♪

♪ When no one is there ♪

Good morning, everyone.

♪ He answers my prayers... ♪

We just thank God for this is another day

that God chose to wake us up.

I do the prayer line every morning, Monday through Friday.

Currently, we have about 67 people that come on.

I believe my duty after the death of my son

is to help others

who have experienced similar circumstances and situations.

To help others realize that life still goes on.

But God is always our refuge.

He's always our strength.

The anger that I had has changed.

Yes, he is. We thank God...

As a Christian, I have to forgive.

It took a while, it took a long time,

but I can tell you sincerely that I have forgiven him.

I have forgiven him.

I'm not in favor of the death penalty.

There's no real purpose and there's no real gaining of anything.

If he was executed, he would not have had time to feel remorseful.

I want him to think about it.

I want Gary Black to spend the rest of his life

seeing the face of Jason Johnson.

Had a little heart attack, went to Jeff City for a stroke,

and just getting by, just getting by.

I've been given a type of medication that thins my blood

to keep me from having another stroke,

and it results in easily bruising around my eyes.

They say they're monitoring it and getting it under control.

I don't know.

It should have been a second-degree murder.

Jason Johnson got out of that truck completely.

He hit me with a bottle, and I stabbed him in the side of the neck,

that fast, that quick.

Just as he hit me, I stabbed him. It was over.

There's just no way that this can be conceived as a street fight.

The eyewitness testimony and everything that we put together

suggested Gary Black

pulled up next to Jason Johnson

while he was seated in his vehicle,

gets out, pulls a knife, and stabs Jason Johnson in the throat.

That is a first-degree murder. That's premeditated murder.

I could care less what he says.

I believe that I did what was right.

I feel that the CCTV shows that a Black man

made sexual contact with his groin against a white woman's butt,

and anything that happened after that was legitimate.

I wanted to kill him the moment that truck come to a stop at Fifth and Joplin.

I knew he couldn't get away. It was cross-traffic.

I knew he couldn't go any farther.

"Now, it's me and you, ******."

"You want to see how tough you are, how big you are? Let's find out."

"Let's find out if you really want to play in this real game."

Right at that moment, I knew he was dead,

and he died.

Are you a racist?

Definitely.

I am definitely a racist.

I grew up in the Klan. I grew up around it.

Gary Black is unique in his disregard for humans and,

and treatment of humans.

Keeping him in prison with life without parole,

which a lot of people believe is, is appropriate

as opposed to the death penalty,

it doesn't keep him from being violent.

I've often thought, "What do you..."

"What do you do with a person like Gary Black?"

Sit here and cost the state of Missouri money.

That's what I do with myself.

I sit right here and cost the whole state of Missouri

every penny I can get for the rest of my life.

Dying, even dying, you people are going to pay for me.