Clifford Boggess smiled, greeted witnesses with a cheerful "Hi!" and apologized for the murders before he was given a lethal dose of drugs.

"I'm sorry for the pain I've caused you," were his last words to 2 relatives of a victim. Then the born-again Christian began praying, "for the conversion of sinners on death row."

"It doesn't make it feel any better, his apology," said Lisa Jones, whose grandfather, Joe Hazelwood, was killed.

Boggess was sentenced to death for the July 23, 1986, beating and stabbing death of 86-year-old Moses Frank Collier during a grocery store robbery in Saint Jo that netted him $700. A customer found Collier's body later that day in a back room of his store. His throat had been cut and there were numerous wounds on his face, including the imprint of a tennis shoe.

Police said 1 of Collier's pants pockets was turned inside out and covered with blood. Investigators found $950 in cash in Collier's back pocket that Boggess had overlooked.

A month later, he used a shotgun to kill Hazelwood, of Whitesboro, in a $400 robbery. He received a life prison term after pleading guilty to that slaying.

Boggess had said he went "hog wild" after completing high school and lasted a year in the Army before he was booted out. He turned to drugs and alcohol and by age 21 had become a self-described "blackout alcoholic."

He said his discovery of Catholicism helped him go ahead with the execution. He asked that no additional appeals be filed on his behalf and that he receive lethal injection on his 33rd birthday.

Sources: Associated Press, UPI, Rick Halperin

Clifford Boggess was delighted to be facing the executioner's needle. "Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy," said Boggess, condemned for fatally stabbing and beating the 86-year-old owner of a grocery store in Montague County during a robbery. "But my relationship with God has become more real."

It's 1 of 2 murder convictions against the former carpenter's helper who asked that no additional appeals be filed to stop the lethal injection. "A certain part of me now thinks its better that I die," he said. "Not that I think the death penalty is good. But if I can die for earthly sins, maybe it's better for eternal judgment."

Boggess, who turned 33 on the day of his execution and recently became a Roman Catholic, asked that his execution date be set on his birthday. The court in Montague County agreed. "I like the idea of leaving this world on the day I came in," he said. "There's a nice symmetry to that. It's also the date of my birth into a new life in heaven."

Boggess was sentenced to death for the July 23, 1986 murder of Moses Frank Collier, 86, who owned Collier Grocery and Produce Store in Saint Jo, about 50 miles east of Wichita Falls.

A month after the Collier killing, he used a shotgun to kill another man, Ray Hazelwood of Whitesboro. He received a life prison term after pleading guilty to that slaying.

Boggess said he went hog wild after completing high school and lasted a year in the Army before he was booted out. He turned to drugs and alcohol and crowds "that gave me easy access to them" and by age 21 had become self-described blackout alcoholic, working odd jobs long enough to earn money to get high. "I made a conscious decision to cease to care," he said. "I was fully conscious of the killings. I'm not going to use drugs or alcohol as an excuse. I was not out of my mind. I knew what I was doing." He got about $700 in the Collier slaying.

Boggess said his religious beliefs and an acknowledgment that he would get no relief in the courts convinced him to go ahead with the execution. "I know how the courts work, I know how the system works," he said. "It would be foolish to kid myself and hang on to false hope right up to the last moment when I could be using this valuable time to better prepare myself to leave this earth and meet my God. And that's what I've been doing. Essentially, I went out and committed these horrible crimes in a country that has a death penalty, in a state that zealously pursues the death penalty, and I am now receiving the legal consequences of my own actions. Nobody made me do it. I voluntarily did the things I did. So no one is responsible but me. No one twisted my arm. No one held a gun to my head."

The Story

Alan Austin's notebook on "The Execution"

In 1995, we set out to do a story about Capital Punishment -- a macro-examination of an execution's effect on all who take part in it or have a stake in it. What happens to the warden and the guards who feed and tend the man only to send him off to die? What happens to the chaplain whose job is to minister to terrified people that the chaplain's own institution is killing?

To the relatives of the man's victims -- do they gain some comfort or "closure" by the death of the murderer? To the relatives of the murderer -- is their grief or agony a fair price to pay for it all? Above all, we would get to know the condemned man, learn everything we could about him and his crimes, and record what happens to him as he sees his death approaching. Most Americans have made it clear that they favor the Death Penalty. But support or opposition to it seems based largely on abstract arguments and slogans about crime and punishment. What if the whole process were to be given human faces at close range? Might it have an affect on our opinions about Capital Punishment?

All along the way, during the three-and-a-half-year making of this film, we ran across nuggets of the very things we had in mind. An assistant warden who presided in the execution chamber, muttering, as much to himself as to us, "Who knows, maybe someday this will make us all crazy." A guard on Death Row telling us, with no humor intended, "I used to work as a forester -- these guys are different than trees."

A prison chaplain who'd ministered to ninety-nine men in the last hours before their execution, saying that after the first one, he was unable to sleep for four days and it hadn't gotten any easier in all the time since. But his successor, Chaplain Brazzil, calling it "a wonderful job" and saying he thinks of the condemned inmates as people dying from long-term illnesses.

The center of the story was bound to be the man being executed. We were looking for a typical murderer (if there is such a thing). And it had to be someone willing to admit he'd committed murder, as well as someone articulate enough to describe that experience and the ordeal he was going through on Death Row.

Clifford Boggess of Saint Jo, Texas, seemed perfect. He admitted committing two murders in 1986, both premeditated, both for money, both helpless old men, both brutal. And he was possessed of a fantastic memory, which allowed him to describe both murders in precise detail -- not just what he did and how the victims reacted, but what he was thinking as they happened. He spoke, and wrote, in paragraph form, every word just right for what he wanted to say. He remembered important events, and names, from his past. And he was willing to dig into that past. In fact, he seemed as curious as we about his own creation. As a bonus, he had become an accomplished artist whose work amounted to an abstract autobiography.

Perfect. Except that our "typical" murderer turned out to be extraordinary instead, and, inexorably, our story about the details of a typical execution began to shift into a story about Clifford Boggess. He commandeered us. Not that we liked him. Several members of our production team were repelled by him, and all of us wish he'd never been born. But the more we were drawn into his story, the richer it became. It borrowed from one classic after another: Crime and Punishment, for one, except that unlike Raskolnikov, whose conscience betrayed him to the police and then finally helped him find redemption, Boggess, with no conscience to betray him, lacked any means of redemption, however he tried (and I became convinced that he did try very hard); Frankenstein, the monster made without a soul, doomed from the beginning; Pinocchio, the wooden boy trying to become human. Boggess himself liked The Wizard of Oz and was always longing for some place that didn't exist. And he liked the works of Jane Austen, for reasons that escape me. And then he came to embrace the works and life story of Vincent Van Gogh and The Bible, identifying with the thief on the cross.

Since completing the writing of this documentary, just last week, I read Robert Hare's book about psychopaths, Without Conscience, and was interested to find that Clifford Boggess fit the profile -- the checklist of characteristics -- of a psychopath very neatly: the notion that the world revolved around him, the manipulativeness, the inability to care about anyone else. But there was one exception. Instead of the inveterate liar that helps identify a psychopath, I found Clifford Boggess to be rigorously, almost obsessively, honest, at least when it came to facts -- and we checked them. That honesty, combined with his amazing recall of details, is part of what made his recitation of his murders so chilling. I never believed his protestations of remorse. But I do believe he thought he was telling the truth even about that; he knew he wanted to feel remorse and tried so hard to do it he thought he'd succeeded. All of which makes me think he may have invented a new tool for the psychopath to use to manipulate people -- honesty. The only other explanation I can think of is the one he gave: he wouldn't be able to lie to God, so why bother to lie to anyone else.

But he did indulge in one sham. He tried to smuggle out a drawing of the prison fence near Death Row, knowing that was a breach of prison security. He hid it inside another, innocuous, drawing of a cowboy. The warden caught it, took away Boggess's art supplies and put him in a "lockdown" cell for six months. Alas, the person he tried to smuggle the drawing-within-a-drawing out to was me, causing the warden to wonder if we weren't part of an escape plot and losing me access to Boggess for more than a year. This suspicion seemed ridiculous to us then, but, even though I only caught a glimpse of the fence drawing, in the fuming warden's office, I think it was the very fence that several Death Row inmates tried to break through in an escape attempt this winter.

I don't believe Boggess had escape in mind with that drawing. It was part of his "Death Row Series" of artwork that he wanted to have exhibited and sold on the outside. I think he had a much grander, posthumous, escape plan: to get his soul into heaven and his ashes into France, to be scattered where Van Gogh once was incarcerated.

Boggess had shown a horrifying lack of feeling for the two old men he murdered. He murdered them brutally, for paltry amounts of money -- a few hundred dollars. He overlooked more money in the pockets of his first victim than he got from his second. But he seemed to have similar unconcern for his own life -- a highly intelligent man bragging to casual acquaintances about committing the first murder. He simply squandered all three lives.

The killer with a deprived background is a cliche, but Boggess's infancy is a tale of horror beyond ordinary limits. His biological mother, by all accounts, was drug addicted, alcoholic and brutal to the children. Three of those children died violent deaths. Clifford was left to the care of his nine-year-old sister and to a brother later imprisoned for child abuse. Then he was abandoned. "There was something missing in him," his adoptive uncle would notice later. "There was something in his eyes that I seen in some those crazy sons-of-bitches up in Folsom." That uncle, Carl, had served time in California's Folsom Prison for bank robbery and shooting a policeman, but he saw something beyond the pale in Clifford Boggess -- from the beginning.

One of the two Texas Rangers who worked on Boggess's case, Phil Ryan, a man who had spent nearly his whole career investigating murders and interviewing murderers, said he considered Boggess the most cold-blooded of them all.

Cold-blooded, conscienceless, or not, Boggess kept dreaming up new methods of winning some measure of forgiveness or redemption. Maybe he was only trying to sweeten the pot in bargaining with God. For several years on Death Row, he used the income from the sale of his paintings to sponsor a foreign orphan. And he offered to drop his court appeals and volunteer for immediate execution if his organs could be used as transplants, pointing out to me that that might actually save more lives than he took (Are you listening, God?) Evidently, the chemicals used in lethal injection executions render the organs unuseable, so, unwittingly or not, the offer was an empty one.

Probably his most ambitious effort at atonement involved Lisa Hazelwood, the granddaughter of his second murder victim. During my first visit with Boggess, he told me that what bothered him most about the murders was seeing the sixteen-year-old girl come into her grandfather's store at the point when he was about to rob and murder the old man. She left without knowing what was happening -- but sensing that something was wrong -- and he went ahead with the murder. Boggess said he'd tried to get in touch with her, but failed. I mentioned it to her during visits to relatives of both victims, and some time later she decided to write to Boggess to relieve the guilt she'd been carrying around for ten years for not having somehow saved her grandfather. She said later that just writing the letter was a great relief for her. Boggess spent six weeks composing a letter of "reconciliation" to answer her. It was full of apologies and expressions of remorse, but the words were so typically cock-sure that it read more like a sermon or a lecture than an apology. Try as he might, nothing Boggess said or did rang true.

He did seem fully human to Conny Krispin, his "pen-pal" from Germany. She corresponded with him for eight years and visited him several times. They referred to each other as "best friends." And, unlike our team, she evidently believed his remorse to have been genuine and said he had helped her become a better Christian.

Women visiting men (strangers) on Death Row is a frequent phenomenon. Some people consider them groupies. Conny said she thinks many are. Why? What's the allure? I asked. Conny suggested two reasons: the relationship is safe, protected, as it is, by bulletproof glass and steel mesh; and a man on Death Row is willing to give a person their full attention.

After more than eleven years on Death Row, Boggess was executed June 11th, 1998. His 33rd birthday, by his own request (after his last appeal was denied by the Supreme Court.) "The same age as Christ when He died," Boggess said. He seemed to witnesses at the execution to be in good spirits, and the Chaplain said they sang and joked together in the hours leading up to it. His last words were brief. He'd planned something elaborate, including some remarks against the Death Penalty. And he planned to sing a song, lying on the execution gurney: "Because Christ Lived." But the Chaplain persuaded him to keep it simple. To prevent his body being buried anonymously in the prison cemetery, Boggess arranged by mail to have a small-town Texas mortuary pick it up and cremate it. Then the ashes were mailed to England and a pen pal there would take them on to St. Remy France to scatter them at the monastery where Vincent Van Gogh had been committed for several years. Boggess paid for all this in advance with proceeds from the sale of his paintings.

What had begun as a search for answers about the Death Penalty became, on the editing bench, mostly a story of Clifford Boggess -- his transformation from talented little boy to cold-blooded killer and then his attempt to transform himself again on Death Row. Though he had lured us in a different direction, the original questions remained: Did executing him make sense? Did it do more good than harm? Did it amount to Justice?

Jack Collier, the only surviving close relative of Boggess's first victim, Frank Collier, seemed to get a little satisfaction, though he thought lethal injection "too easy." Lisa Hazelwood says she's relieved that Boggess is dead, but is frustrated at what seemed to be Boggess going merrily to his death. Boggess's adoptive mother suffered great agony, I believe, throughout Boggess's eleven years awaiting execution, the agony relieved some by his phone call to her an hour before it happened. The same is true of his adoptive grandmother, in Saint Jo, who told me afterwards that she thought he was "better off now than the living death he had on Death Row."

When we began on this story the members of our crew were about equally divided, pro and con (I was con), on the Death Penalty, and remained so at the end. Although I got to know Clifford Boggess pretty well in those three-plus years and respected his struggle to become human, I can't say that I felt grief about his death, and that worried me: had his emotionlessness been contagious? As I reported at the end of the film, I felt lousy the day of his execution. I think one reason was the waste he represented. His uncle Carl -- and I believe this ex-con had the most accurate fix of anyone on Boggess -- said, "I feel sorry for the deal he got." He was referring to the damaged goods that Clifford represented even as a tiny child -- the abuse, neglect, probable drug-and-alcohol addiction, and abandonment he received at the hands of his natural parents. Clifford Boggess said he would welcome scientific study -- before and after his death -- into the effects this horrific maltreatment had had on his mind. Instead, he was simply warehoused and then disposed of. And I'm sure he won't be the last.