My Death Row Valentine
Spree killer Gary Sampson wants one. Disturbing weirdness alert. Boston Herald:
He can’t promise a future, let alone the moon, but lonely-heart rampage killer Gary Lee Sampson is hoping a kindred sucker for romance will be his death-row date this Valentine’s Day.
The 49-year-old monster, who during one week in July 2001 carjacked and slaughtered two Massachusetts men who picked him up hitchhiking, then strangled the caretaker of the New Hampshire cottage he hid out in, has been looking for love online, pitching himself as “an easygoing kinda guy” with “a good sense of humor.”
“Real funny,” said Scott McCloskey, 45, of Plymouth, whose father, Philip McCloskey, 69, a Boston Gas retiree from Taunton, was repaid for his kindness to Sampson by being dragged into woods off Route 3A in Marshfield at knifepoint and slaughtered.
“It’s just sickening. Good luck to those women,” McCloskey said of Sampson’s prospective courters. “I would ask them, ‘Have you ever had anyone you loved taken from you in such a grotesque manner?’ Twenty-four stab wounds and a slit throat is not a good way to go.”
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Sampson’s death sentence was upheld on appeal in 2007, but while the Granite State has capital punishment on its books, including hanging, it has no facility to carry it out and has not executed anyone since 1939.
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“He’ll never see death,” Whitney’s widow, Susan, 64, said resignedly. “He needs to die, I think, but not many do, not less they kill a police officer.
“It’s been seven years,” she tearfully said of her husband’s death, “and we’ve got three beautiful grandchildren he’s never seen.”
Sampson probably will find himself a hoosegow honey. No shortage of pathetic women looking for lockup love. He isn’t exactly picky, anyway.
Gary Lee Sampson once called himself a “try-sexual” . . . he’d try anything once. The list of his known lovers suggests he wasn’t lying. Anyone looking for love in his jail cell may want to consider his track record:
Ricky Dale Carter
This North Carolina transvestite played house with Sampson for two years and claimed to have endured Sampson’s beatings until Carter finally showed him the door for cheating on him with women . . . as well as with another tranny known as “Savannah.” He told the Herald in 2001 his frequent batterer called himself a “trysexual. He’d try anything once.”
Karen Anderson
The Bonnie to his Clyde, Anderson was accused of helping Sampson pull off multiple bank robberies in North Carolina. He called her “Kitten” and she once thought of him as her “knight in shining armor,” but in a Dear Jane letter, Sampson dumped her with, “I love you, but not that much.”
That’s Gary with Ricky in happier days top right, Karen in her stripes and pink Lexington NC jail cell lower after Gary ditched her to take the rap back in August 2001. Amanda’s top left, Molly bottom right.
Amanda Sampson
Sampson abandoned his New Hampshire bride of three weeks in 1998 when she told him she was pregnant. “Get rid of it,” he demanded.
Molly Johnson
This mysterious Boston-area woman was a fixture at Sampson’s death penalty trial at U.S. District Court in 2003. Johnson insisted they were just penpals, but proudly showed off artwork he gave her, painted with jailhouse coffee, Kool-Aid and jelly beans as pigments. Their freakish friendship angered the families of Sampson’s murder victims.
The place in the woods where Sampson walked McCloskey to his execution is about a mile and a half from my house. I drive by it when I go to pick up my kids, down Old Main Street, a creepy little overgrown cut-through off Route 3A, and never drive down there without thinking about it. The casual randomness and utter brutality of his murders is chilling.
The Sampson story also produced a leading contender for the five weirdest hours of my career.
When they arrested Sampson on July 31, 2001, the New Hampshire prosecutor gave out his DOB at the press conference. That proved helpful as we did various background checks, and with a little triangulation, we figured out he was wanted for bank robbery in Lexington, NC, a fact law enforcement had not mentioned. I got Lexington Sheriff Gerald Hege on the phone at home around 10 p.m. I didn’t know at the time Hege was an internationally famous Court TV host and publicity hound, and was a little surprised when he rousted a deputy over the Nextel to go pull the files, staying on the phone for over an hour to dish tales of Sampson’s straight and tranny loves, and his life on the lam as a two-bit bank robber. A Herald photog and I caught a plane to North Carolina in the morning, happy in the knowledge we were at least six hours ahead of our competition.
Waiting in Hege’s outer office at the Lexington jail, I couldn’t help but notice that everyone was in black fatigues, like they were about to go on a SWAT raid. Including the approximately 400-pound clerk who opened the door to Hege’s inner office to announce we were there. It was dark in there, and in the brief glimpse I got as the door was opened, I could have sworn the walls were painted in a woodland camouflage pattern. When we were shown in, we saw that not only were the walls camouflaged, there was camo netting draped from the ceiling, a mockup sandbag bunker with machine gun in one corner, more sandbags around his desk, and exotic weaponry on every wall, plus various personal items of Vietnamabilia on the wall behind his desk.
We made some small talk about Hege’s internationally noted Court TV show and recent visits by German and Australian film crews, and reviewed details of the Sampson case. Hege noted that Sampson’s robbery accomplices were upstairs in the cells. I asked if I could interview them. He said he ought to call their lawyers, but when I suggested that no good ever comes of involving lawyers in the free choices of men and women, he agreed and directed a deputy to ask the inmates if they cared to speak with the press. We were ushered up to the cells. All pink, with Looney Tunes and Disney characters on the walls, part of Hege’s experiment in inmate attitude adjustment that also included dressing them in stripes (see Anderson photo above).
After that, a couple of detectives were assigned to give us a tour of Sampson’s haunts. They didn’t seem too happy about having to chauffeur reporters around, but got over it as we shared with them news of Sampson’s criminal career up north. They took us around to see Ricky, a very nice guy, who was shocked by the news of his erstwhile boyfriend and very obliging. Ensuing story follows:
LEXINGTON, N.C. - Accused killer Gary Sampson may have AIDS and may have expected to die soon when he started his 2 1/2-month crime spree of bank robberies, carjackings and murders, according to friends and lovers.
They described Sampson as a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: a sensitive, caring man who became abusive and manipulative, who told grandiose lies about his criminal past, hid his homosexual tendencies from straight lovers and cheated on his transvestite lover with women.
Those close to Sampson say they believe he had little to live for, that the prospect of death by AIDS pushed him over the edge.
“He told me he was sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Ricky Dale Carter, a transvestite who lived with Sampson for two years and endured his beatings.
Carter said he believes Sampson infected him with HIV. When Carter tested postive and confronted Sampson, Carter said, “He broke down and started crying. He finally came to terms and said, `I know I was wrong.’ ”
Carter said Sampson refused to see a doctor.
Sampson’s heterosexual friends and alleged bank-heist accomplices said they were “stunned” to learn about his gay past, but said they knew he was sick and that he told them he may not have long to live.
“He told me he had cancer. He throwed up a lot,” Bennie Lee “Lucky” Mills, 29, said in a jailhouse interview.
Mills said he had trouble believing the guy he had beers with and agreed to rob banks with had a transvestite lover.
“It surprised the hell out of me when they (police) told me about it and showed me the pictures (of Sampson with Carter),” Mills said.
In the women’s section of the jail, Karen Denise Anderson, 27, Sampson’s lover of four months, said, “That made me sick. That’s the one thing that doesn’t make any sense . . . He always talked about what it said in the Bible, about how they (gays) should be stoned to death.”
But Carter said, “He always said he was `trysexual.’ He’d try anything once.”
Sampson’s lovers, male and female, said he appeared to be tortured by demons from this past, which they believe prompted him to act out violently. But except for his claims to have been raised in an orphanage until his adoption at age 11, they had no clue what the demons might be.
“He had this anger in him like he was mad at the whole world, like he could beat up the whole world,” Carter said. “I don’t know if he was molested as a child. I tried to get into his head. There was a black hole. I tried to look inside, but there was a wall.”
Carter met Sampson in September 1998, when Sampson had recently moved to Lexington from Carolina Beach and was dating a gay Lexington man. Sampson moved in with Carter and they had a good year, while Sampson worked landscaping jobs. But when Sampson caught Carter looking at books Sampson had ordered about creating a new identity and “how to cheat the government,” he administered his first beating.
“I felt there was something evil about him. I was afraid of him,” Carter said.
A year later, when Carter found Sampson was bringing women to his house while Carter was at work, Carter finally decided to confront him.
“I had never stood up to him because I was afraid. At that point in time, I had had enough. `There’s your stuff. Go.’ ” Carter said.
Carter had dumped Sampson’s belongings in the yard. Sampson backed down and agreed to move out.
Sampson took up with one or more women and ended up living in Lexington’s discount Royal Lake Motel. Anderson met him there when mutual friends introduced them on April Fool’s Day of this year. The romance was consummated that night, and she moved into his cheap motel room with him days later.
“He was a knight in shining armor. He swept me off my feet,” Anderson said. She said he spoke sweetly to her. “He didn’t believe in hurting people. Up until May 17, I didn’t see the other side of him.”
That day, she said, he proposed a bank robbery. When she balked, she said, he held a knife to her throat. The beatings began.
“It was boom, like night and day,” she said. “He never so much as raised his voice until that morning.”
Police and Mills say Anderson may be exaggerating the threats to cover complicity in the robberies. But police say her accounts of cruelty are consistent with Carter’s.
“He was just looking for someone he could manipulate,” Anderson said. She said she agreed to drive his getaway car on four of five bank robberies.
After the first, she said, “He dropped the money on the bed and told me he had done it.”
Between the robberies, they vacationed at the Cherokee Casino near Maggie Valley in North Carolina’s Piedmont region and at Carolina Beach on the coast.
Police say as much as $60,000 was stolen in the five robberies.
Anderson insists Sampson never let her out of his sight.
When security bank photos of the gunman were shown on TV in mid- July, Anderson said Sampson told her he had to leave.
He left her with elaborate instructions on how to mislead the police. And he left a farewell note, citing conflicts with her ex- husband.
“I love you, but not that much,” Sampson wrote.
Anderson shuddered in the jailhouse hall when she heard about Sampson’s alleged murders and learned that he may never breathe free air again.
“Thank God . . . I never did want to be in trouble. I have four kids,” said Anderson, who has no prior record.
“When they try him for these murders, I hope they fry him. Not only did he take those lives, he took mine. Mine will never be the same,” she said.
It’s too bad they can’t get on with executing him. He has scarred this world far beyond his worth.
Topics: crime, punishment
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:30 am on Friday, February 13, 2009
One Response to “My Death Row Valentine”
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February 13th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
People (and I use that term advisedly) like Gary Sampson are the reason the death penalty exists. If I had to guess, having first-hand experience with a conscienceless sociopath in the family, I’d say he was born that way, and anything that happened to him in his early life merely exaggerated an already existing condition. Not that that excuses anything, as even sociopaths know right from wrong. They just don’t care.