Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
Stan Greer’s firstborn, Vince, was a good, sweet kid. He made straight A’s and hit home runs, and he made sure the kids who didn’t were never teased or excluded. But sometime between eighth grade and his freshman year in high school, the sunshine went out of him. His grades skidded out of control, he started skipping school and smoking pot, he spent hours alone in his room and, in general, withdrew from the world in which he’d shone. The change was dramatic enough for his principal to urge the Greers to take him to a psychiatrist, ambiguous enough for Stan to resist her advice. How could a kid in the gifted class—a kid who’d won two academic gold presidential medals—have mental problems? Surely this was just normal teenage rebelliousness ...
On November 26, 1997, when Stan came downstairs to rouse him, Vince fired the 22-calibre rifle he’d been holding. The bullet landed near Stan’s spine. Vince then went outside and around the house, crashed through the glass door into the kitchen and fired a single, fatal shot at his mother.
He’d turned 15 the week before. Certified to stand trial as an adult, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole—plus a second life sentence—and his father and two younger sisters were left trying to fathom what was either an uncontrollable symptom of illness or an inexplicable, terrifying impulse.
Stan knew he’d never understand, but he forgave Vince immediately. “After he shot me, I heard him go out the door and thought he’d run off, so I relaxed for a second wondering, ‘Am I going to die?’” he remembers. Then glass had crashed, and he’d managed to get himself upstairs to the kitchen. Donna Greer was lying on the floor. Stan grabbed Vince and says the boy crumpled instantly, so that they both collapsed to the ground. “I asked him twice, ‘How could you do this to me? How could you do this to your family?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know,’ in the most pitiful and honest voice I can imagine.”
At the hospital, Vince’s sister Lindsay, then 13, thought for a time that both her parents were dead. She had a harder time with instant forgiveness. “Then, when my dad was off the heavy morphine and not acting all silly, he said, ‘You know that’s not your brother,’” she says. “It didn’t take me long after that to realize—it didn’t even look like Vince. His jaw was set; his eyes were black and glazed over. He looked like he was dead.”
The violence in Vince dissolved as quickly as it had erupted. Housed with the Death Row inmates at Level Five maximum security prisons, first in Potosi, then in Bonne Terre, Mo., Stan’s firstborn grew into a good and generous young man. He followed an old-timer’s advice to “stay out of the shadows”: avoid the gangs, avoid dark solitary places, learn to hold your own without turning mean. Protected by a net of rules and routine, his childhood sweetness came back.
“You search for a friend like that your whole life,” says his longtime cellmate Kurtis McClendon, who’s serving time for robbery. “Everybody loved him. I had to tell him at times, ‘Hey, man, you can’t help everybody out, people are trying to use you,’ and he would say, ‘I don’t care.’”
“He was one of the best people I’ve ever met,” says inmate Brian Collar.
Vince rarely talked about his past, but there were times when his eyes lost light, like windows covered in cardboard, and his voice turned flat and distant. “You could see the weight on him,” says inmate Charlie Roland. “He’d go through spells, weeks he wouldn’t be himself.”
On the evening of September 5, though, Vince was talking about the next flag football game and running a “ticket” (sports bets the prison officials gladly ignored). At lights-out, he gave Collar his trademark hang-10 sign, thumb and pinkie extended. “Dude,” he said, “I’ll see you when I see you.”
The next morning his new cellmate couldn’t rouse Vince and raised the alert. Vince was unconscious, and Stan says he was told that a syringe was still sticking in his son’s flesh. Inmates say the thin nylon rope from his laundry bag was rigged so that, as he fell backward on his bunk, it would hold his head inches above the pillow, strangling him. At press time, the Missouri Department of Corrections could not confirm any of this information, because the death remained under investigation.
Stan heard that an inmate on the floor above watched a medic work for a sweat-drenched 37 minutes to get Vince’s heart started again. But his brain had gone too long without oxygen, and he was officially pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. on September 7.
His death would have read instantly as suicide except for one troubling detail: fresh pinkish-red marks, unscabbed, slanted across his forearms. To Stan, they looked like rope burns.
The Department of Corrections launched a formal investigation, and Vince’s friends inside launched one of their own. Stan arranged a hopeful Christian funeral and wondered if he should hire a private detective.
Once again, he had to try to understand.
In the casket, Vince’s eyes are puffy and squeezed almost shut, his skin is grayish white and his lips are pressed together. But on the easels in the packed funeral parlor, he’s age 5, 8, 11, 12, playing ball, looping his arm around his mom or dad or one of his sisters, always with pink cheeks, clear eyes and that ever-present, borderline-goofy grin.
Stan hugs well-wishers, promises them he’s not agonizing over how his son died. “God knows,” he says with quiet confidence.
A week later, his voice is shakier. He’s going through the personal effects the prison sent, refolding underwear Vince had stitched again and again to mend. “We told him to let us know if he needed anything!” Stan bursts. Then he takes a deep breath, steadies his voice and describes the phone call from the prison, the race to Missouri Baptist Medical Center. “There were three guards around him, and he was shackled to the bed. That really hurt. He looked good, though, his color was good. His friend Charlie from prison called and said, ‘I’m sorry about Vince.’ I said, ‘He’s not dead, he’s just unconscious.’”
His brain never came back to life, though, and soon Stan found himself talking to people from the Midwest Transplant Network about donating his son’s organs. “They said it was heroin,” Stan says dully. “And they took forensic samples from the rope burns, and under his fingernails.”
Staggered by the new mystery, his mind reverts to the old one: “Mid-America Transplant Services had documents from the prison saying Vince had schizophrenia”—the diagnosis the prosecutor had mocked in court. “I wonder if the autopsy will show anything? I know they looked at his brain, he had a scar. Would St. Louis County do that? We always thought he should have an MRI—he had all these head injuries as a kid. At 13, he ran into a Dumpster playing at night, massive head injury. He fell off the bleachers in choir, and at one point he collided with a first baseman and it knocked him out, and right before the incident, he hit his head in gym class. I remember Donna saying that night, ‘When I took him to the doctor, he was acting weird.’”
Seven weeks after Vince’s death, the Greers still didn’t have a death certificate, because the autopsy report was not complete—the medical examiner was waiting for information from the Department of Corrections—and Stan was worn out from weeks of shuttling between Vince’s death and the violence that sent him to prison in the first place.
He’d never forgiven himself for having a loaded gun in the closet or for ignoring his wife’s pleas to take Vince to a psychiatrist. “When I was a kid, I had a friend who was diagnosed schizophrenic, and then he killed himself,” he explains.
Was Vince schizophrenic? The illness, Stan now knew, left people unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was being hallucinated; it could cause odd behavior, withdrawal, suicidal depression, suspicion and intense anxiety; it could be a single episode or recur sporadically or consume a lifetime.
Vince’s friend Scott Telle had talked about Vince hiding behind a couch and asking, with a strange expression, if Scott had heard something. Lindsay had remembered him leaving school once, saying a woman told him he could. A teacher had remembered him coming to class late and saying a white-haired woman had told him to stay in the cafeteria. Family, friends and teachers had all described a “glossed-over,” “dull,” “glazed” look in Vince’s eyes. Vince’s girlfriend had said she’d seen him hold a knife to his own throat.
Before Vincent’s trial in 2000, Dr. John Rabun, a forensic psychiatrist who was trusted by both sides, did diagnose Vince with schizophrenia—the episodic type, with residual symptoms. Rabun said Vince had symptoms that were hard to feign: flat emotions, decreased psychomotor activity, little spontaneity in the speech pattern. Another psychiatrist, Dr. James Edwards, concurred. But Dr. Patricia Carter, a psychologist, diagnosed conduct disorder, depression and cannabis abuse.
The jury went with the psychologist. As one juror told me afterward, when I reported the story for The Riverfront Times, “Somehow, [Rabun’s] appearance and the way he knitted his eyebrows, we thought, like they say about a lot of psychiatrists, they’re not too far off [from their patients].” The juror said they didn’t trust Vince: “The fact that his grades went down and he stopped being a goody-goody boy and was having all kinds of sex with this young girl ... We just felt that he wasn’t really as sick.”
Stan fumed for years over those jurors. But even Vince saw himself as a typical teenager, and he reported his emotions in those terms. According to police transcripts, when St. Ann detectives questioned him after the shooting, he said his problems were “just constantly fighting with my parents and stuff.” Asked why he shot, he said, “I don’t even really know. It’s like whenever I try to think back on it, I don’t really remember it.” Then he hit on a reason: “Yesterday in school, one of my teachers was telling us about how he used to be a DJO [deputy juvenile officer], he used to track juveniles that killed their parents and stuff. I just got a weird thought in my head, and I couldn’t get it out. I didn’t hardly sleep at all.” He remembered “getting madder and stuff.” After the shootings, he said, the anger went away and he was “thinking that I wanted to die.” By the time he wrote his girlfriend from jail, he’d mustered a bit of adolescent swagger: “I don’t think I’ll get convicted. I think I’ll do a little time in a hospital.”
The letter was read in court. Then the girlfriend was brought in at the end of the trial, as a surprise witness intended to prove Vince had a motive to kill his parents. She said Vince had suspected his dad of having an affair because he’d seen him with a blond woman on the deck and had found a leather skirt in their shed.
Reminded of this, Stan straightens with a jolt and leaves the room. He comes back waving a faded “pleather” miniskirt about 12 inches long. It’s a child’s size 7. “Lindsay and her friends used to play dress-up in my shed,” Stan says quietly. “This was just a way to plant a seed in the jury’s mind: ‘Maybe this family isn’t quite right.’”
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch tried Vince’s case himself, with a harshness that stunned some of the onlookers. By the third day, whispers flew that McCulloch’s own son had sown a few wild oats of late; maybe McCulloch was just mad at teenagers. He had refused to allow Stan to hire his son a lawyer, communicate with his son’s lawyer or testify in court, because he was a victim. To the jury, McCulloch had argued that Vince had shot his parents for “a completely stupid adolescent reason: I’m grounded, I ran away, I’ve been skipping school, it’s all over.”
Years later, in December 2004, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial criticizing McCulloch’s treatment of another case and adding that he’d been wrong in the Greer case, too. McCulloch fired back: “Drug abuse and teenage rebellion brought on in great part by a domineering father hardly equate with true mental disease. Greer was simply trying to avoid responsibility for his criminal conduct.”
“Domineering father?” Stan repeats now, his voice incredulous. “The only thing he could’ve been going on was the fact that I coached some of the kids’ sports.” I asked three times for McCulloch’s explanation of that characterization, his reasons for certifying Vince as an adult and his opinion about the legal role of the not guilty by reason of insanity plea, which hasn’t convinced a St. Louis County jury in 47 years. He was unavailable for comment.
After Vince’s death, McCulloch had again been quoted in the Post, this time saying he had gone to the family to try to work something out before the trial, but the family was bent on proceeding. “If he would’ve done that once, we would have thrown a party,” Stan says, his voice acrid. “I hand-delivered an affidavit of non-prosecution to his office.”
After Vince’s death, Stan heard from dozens of inmates. Tyson Bock wrote that Vince “would have gave me the shirt off his back” and said Vince teased him for weeks before his birthday “that he had something for my ass.” That night, Bock was dreading a hazing, but Vince was holding two cheesecakes behind his back; he’d baked them in a crockpot. “He touched me deep,” Bock wrote, “and we all devoured the cakes.”
Among themselves, Vince’s friends had grimmer conversations. It had to be suicide, they told each other; nobody wanted Vince dead, and even if they did, nobody would take that kind of risk—or waste good heroin.
But they’d all seen pictures of marks that, to them, looked like rope burns.
“The investigator popped in a little CD and brought up the pictures,” says McClendon, who was one of Vince’s best friends. “[The marks] were about twice the size of a pencil wide and about 1 inch long on a diagonal, and the slants met in the same spot, starting from the outside of his forearm and slanting down toward his wrist. The only person who might have the answers is his new cellie. When they called a Code 16 and saw that Vince wasn’t breathing, they locked the cellie up in the hole.”
Roland tells me he may have figured out the red marks: “They had to strap him to the gurney.”
“Nope,” McClendon says. “I talked to medical, and they showed me the straps they use. They’re like 2½- or 3-inch straps.
“There’s no telling with Vinnie,” he adds. “He was so smart. ... He read about carbon dating, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, history—hundreds and hundreds of years of history. He could have been plotting this in his mind. He would have had 20 seconds or so to pull that syringe out of his arm, but he left it in; the combination of that with a nylon rope—I think he wanted people to know it was suicide.
“He’d tried before,” McClendon says suddenly. “The first time it happened, about six years ago, he was at Potosi. He was so sick about his trial and the way it was playing out in the media, he figured it would be easier for everybody. He tried to O.D., just swallowing some opiates and Xanax, and the guard happened to come by and see he was not responsive.” Was Vince sorry to be rescued? “No, he was almost kind of happy, because he wanted to live. But he would go through spells of bad depression because of the money his dad was spending to try to get him out of prison and the strain on his sisters.
“It always just killed him, because he loved his mom, and he couldn’t explain why he did what he did,” McClendon says. The account Vince gave him was that he and his dad wrestled with the gun. “He said his mom came screaming down the steps and it was just like a surreal, unreal moment. The way he explained it to me was like when you watch a movie, it will show part of the movie and then go away, and it might cut back to another scene, but it’s leaving these gaps in the story.”
Vince talked to Roland about his crimes only once: “It was that he tried to kill himself and the gun goes off and hits his mom. And that his dad tried to grab the gun and it went off and hit him. See, the thing is, Vince has to wake up every day here, and every day is a reminder of what he’d done to be here. The reality was like a baseball bat hitting him in the face every morning.”
Roland isn’t surprised that, if Vince did kill himself, he confided in no one first. “There’s people who want to tell people so they can get attention for it. He didn’t really want to show any problems to his friends. But the weekend before, we had holiday events for Labor Day—wheelbarrow, piggyback-ride races, soccer dribble—and he didn’t participate in any of them. He just sat on the side and watched, said, ‘Man, I don’t feel like doing it,’ even though he could’ve won. He and I won all the time, got ourselves sodas as prizes. Why wouldn’t he win himself sodas? Because he wasn’t gonna drink them.”
So how did Vince get the heroin, if indeed that’s what was used?
“Oh man, it’s everywhere,” McClendon says. “You have choices of heroin here. Tar-based black, synthetic white … It’s easier to get here than it is on the street.”
Still, Vince’s friends can’t rest easy—not with those marks on Vince’s arm.
“His cellie was serving a 47-year sentence for forcible rape of an under-12-year-old,” McClendon says. “The investigator told me they were getting ready to let him out of the hole, was anything going to happen to him? I said, ‘No, because he wasn’t responsible for it; the worst is, he’s going to answer some questions.’”
In the first trial, when the first jury—several members sobbing—returned a verdict of life in prison with no possibility of parole, Vince’s attorney, Brad Kessler, began a formal statement to the press: “Vince Greer would have been better served—” Kessler broke off. “You want my opinion?” he blurted angrily. “Vince Greer would have been better served if he’d killed himself that day, because he got no justice here.”
After Vince went to prison, Stan continued paying his son’s health insurance for two years, hoping to win on appeal. This time forensic psychologist Richard Scott evaluated Vince and said he’d been too young and too depressed to premeditate killing his mother. He’d acted in broad daylight, made no attempt to escape, was not even fully dressed and could not give a motive.
The prosecutor, Doug Seidel, countered by telling the jury, “This was a premeditated, deliberate and intentional murder. He deserves the maximum punishment.”
Vince already had two life sentences running concurrently. This jury voted to make them consecutive.
In prison, Vince told his family there were periods of time when he didn’t know what was happening to him. He talked about hearing voices in the walls. Stan says the prison doctors prescribed Haldol, an antipsychotic that left Vince rigid with muscle spasms. Vince started turning down meds. When he was sent to the psychiatric unit in Fulton, he begged to go back to general population because he didn’t want to be surrounded by, as he told his dad, “a bunch of old guys all zombied out.”
Stan remarried while Vince was in prison, and his second wife, Kelly Spradley Greer, drew close to Vince. After she had surgery for a brain tumor, they compared notes about depression and memory problems. “He once said, ‘I wish I would have told them more,’” she says. She warned him about taking the Elavil she says the prison doctor prescribed for him, because she’d found warnings about using it with schizophrenia. “Every once in a while, there would be something really strange in his letters,” she says. “Once he called here and asked to talk to [his childhood friend] Scott Telle and said, ‘I thought he was living with you guys.’
“In the last few years, though, he’s been much better,” she adds. “I asked him once, ‘Do you ever hear voices anymore?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but I pray about it.’”
This summer, Vince told Kelly he was feeling suicidal. Then he sounded better again. She says the last time she talked to him, earlier in the week of his death, his biggest worry was that “he was down to about $10 in his account.”
When Vince’s effects were returned, Kelly found a card she’d sent; it ended, “Never give up.” Suicide would have saddened but not surprised her, she says—but this doesn’t feel right. “Those burns—his hands had to have been tied,” she says. “How would he have let someone do that to him?”
“Vince would’ve twisted the guy into a knot,” Collar says, sure at least of that. He and McClendon finally got to grill Vince’s cellie in mid-October. “We pressed him a little bit,” Collar says. “I said, ‘Man, you don’t really matter to me. I’m not going to play with you.’ He’s got kind of a weird case, so his leash is real short with me anyway. But what he said reassured me that it was suicide. He said the night before, Vince pulled out his photo album and showed him some photos, and he talked about his case. He was kind of surprised by it, because Vince didn’t talk to him a lot. I know Vince didn’t share his photo album with a lot of people.
“Some of the stuff the cellie said didn’t correspond with what the investigator said, but this guy takes psychotropics. He said Vince was on his side; the investigator told me he was on his back. I asked if his head was off the pillow and he said he couldn’t tell. Kurt believes the guy knows more, and he probably does. But I’m sure he didn’t kill Vince. He looked me straight in the eye.”
Did the cellie have any ideas about the marks on Vince’s arms? “No, and that’s the thing that’s still got Kurt bothered. Unfortunately, neither Kurt nor I are forensic experts.”
Vincent’s cellmate did not respond to messages asking for comment.
Dr. Michael Graham, the city’s chief medical examiner, did the autopsy for the county. At press time, he had not yet signed off on it, but he did say the cause of death would be an overdose of heroin. Reminded of the red marks, he said he didn’t think they were rope burns but would say no more.
Vince’s friends and family aren’t expecting the official autopsy report to bring much closure anyway. What they’re sure of is that he needed more medical help than he was receiving. “I guess he told his dad he was seeing counselors and stuff, but none of that was actually happening,” Collar says. McClendon says that instead of taking prescribed meds with side effects he hated, Vince bought or bartered for Xanax to help him cope.
Does the fact that Vince became relatively stable in prison—able to turn down anti-psychotic drugs, exhibit only symptoms of depression and show no signs of violence—mean those early schizophrenia diagnoses were wrong? And if so, does that mean McCulloch was right, and Vince was just a bad kid who wanted to break the rules?
In seven years at a maximum-security prison, pinioned by two life sentences and no possibility of parole, Vince Greer was written up for a total of six violations. One was “possession of intoxicating substance”: cigarettes. (Vince had been certified to stand trial as an adult, but he was too young to smoke.) Three violations were “interfering with a count” (sleeping through roll call, most likely). One was “disobeying an order”—“That means ‘failing to comply with a written or verbal order or instruction of any employee,’” explains Brian Hauswirth, chief public information officer of the Department of Corrections. Then there was a cryptic “violation of institutional rule” in 2005. Hauswirth looks into it then calls back to say solemnly, “I can’t get into much detail, but this involved cigarettes as well.”
Dr. Anne Glowinski, director of education and training in child psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, never examined Greer and cannot comment on his case. “What I can tell you is that there are many different possibilities,” she says. “Do you need to have schizophrenia to hear voices? Absolutely not. There’s actually a diagnostic criterion for ‘depression with psychosis.’ And is it possible that that person would never hear voices again? Yes, it is.”
Schizophrenia itself is a highly variable illness. And Glowinski points out that diagnosing can be far more complicated than the stark choices forced by the legal system. She says she’d be especially concerned if a teenager had depression and past head injuries and used drugs of any sort. “Head trauma can be associated with changes in impulse control and with depression,” she says, adding that even if head injury wasn’t the start of the problems, the various symptoms and effects could exacerbate each other. In her words, “You’re playing with fire.”
But who wants to admit that the fire smoldering inside a smart, beloved teenager could be that destructive?
“I spent a lot of time raising Vince,” Stan says. “I had seasonal jobs. I’d bundle him up and put him on my shoulder, and we’d walk through the park to my mom and dad’s house. I wanted him to hear the sounds, get him involved with nature. When he was 6 months old, I took him on a float trip. He wanted to go, man.” He pauses. “His inmate friends say he could name all the birds and insects; they’d say, ‘There’s a vulture,’ and he’d say, ‘No, it’s a red-tailed hawk.’
“I think the love of his family and friends kept him going, and as long as he could muster it, hope. But I think he was losing hope. I was trying to get through to the governor—I wrote [former Sen.] Jim Talent July 20th to see if he’d help—but no one ever got back to me.
“I spent years fantasizing about how he would escape and how I would protect him,” Stan admits suddenly. “We have a house in the country that we thought Vince would live in someday. I kept thinking of that; it kept me working.”
Stan never expected this kind of escape.
He never expected any of it.
