The harassing phone calls and threatening letters stopped only a few months ago.
But Anneliese MacPhail fears they will start again with the first anniversary — on Friday — of the execution of Troy Anthony Davis.
There is a vigil in Savannah for Davis scheduled for Friday night. A pair of Washington, D.C., commemorations are planned to call attention to a case that put Georgia in the center of an international debate over capital punishment. And Thursday the NAACP and Amnesty International stood with Davis’ sister to call on the state of Georgia and the U.S. government to revisit Davis’ court case.
A year ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters worldwide rallied behind Davis because of questions about his guilt in the 1989 murder of her son, Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail.
“I heard from them for a long time,” MacPhail said of the phone calls and letters.
Only one letter had a return address on the envelope. All the other letters and calls came from those hiding behind their anonymity. They stopped coming just before the summer started.
Davis’ name, because of the publicity, became universally known. There were references to his case in television shows and movies. His family received support and sympathy from strangers.
But all the while, anger and blame were directed at the MacPhail family.
Anneliese MacPhail felt no one understood or sympathized with her family's nightmare, the murder of her second youngest of her four sons and two daughters. For years until Davis was executed and for many of the months since, all the attention was on the man convicted of killing her son. Meanwhile, the 27-year-old officer's two young children grew up without him; their mother eventually moved them to Texas, and she still lives just outside Dallas.
“It’s quiet now, thank God,” MacPhail said of the calls and letters.
After the execution and until late spring, strangers blamed the 78-year-old woman who was born in Germany, came to the United States as the wife of an American soldier, but was widowed when her 43-year-old husband had a heart attack. They condemned her to “rest in hell” for Davis’ execution on Sept. 21, 2011. She was called a “murderer” with “blood on your hands.”
One even asked her “when was the last time [you] buried a son,” overlooking the fact that she had buried two: One was a baby and the other was her son whose death was at the center of the turmoil.
“I did not convict him. I did not put him on death row,” she said while sitting at her kitchen table in Columbus. “It was unreal.”
Savannah policeman Mark MacPhail was working an extra job at a Burger King restaurant the night of Aug. 19, 1989, when he ran to help a homeless man calling for help. Davis and his friends were beating the transient, trying to get the man’s beer.
Moments later, MacPhail was shot dead.
Two years later, Davis was convicted and sentenced to die. And over the next two decades, Davis’ appeal moved routinely through the courts until just a few years before his execution. By then, witnesses started backing off their testimony, saying they were uncertain of what they saw that night.
The central message of the all-consuming campaign was that someone else — not Davis — killed officer MacPhail.
Kim Davis, Troy Davis’ sister, made that point again Thursday, alleging prosecutorial misconduct and a willingness by the Georgia courts to ignore evidence she thinks established reasonable doubt.
“The state of Georgia didn’t want to hear any of the innocent news,” Kim Davis said in a news conference. “… the state of Georgia wanted to make an example of Troy.”
MacPhail chafes at the efforts to keep the case alive, but she says she’s not angry.
“That’s gone,” she said. “For a long time, I was angry. Now I’m disgusted. There will never be closure. I have learned to live with it.”
Unlike any other execution in Georgia, Davis’ became something of a spectacle. Reporters and photographers from around the world came to the prison just outside Jackson to cover the execution. The pope, former President Jimmy Carter, the European Union and a onetime FBI director joined thousands demanding that Davis’ execution be called off.
And Davis’ family, especially a sister dying of cancer, seemed to be everywhere, talking to the media, pleading with the state Board of Pardons and Paroles and begging the courts to stop the execution. (Martina Davis Correia died of cancer at age 44 on Dec. 1, 2011.)
MacPhail and her family could not believe what they were hearing, even after the legal odyssey had already stretched over two decades.
Mark MacPhail Jr., now a hotel security officer with plans for a career in law enforcement, was just 7 weeks old when he father was killed. The younger MacPhail, who lives in Savannah, says he is blessed — and cursed — because he does not have the memories of his father that his older sister has. He says his sister, Madison, almost 2 when her father was killed, is still raw even years after her police officer daddy was killed and a year after Davis was put to death.
Mark MacPhail Jr. says the family never knows what will trigger her sad memories, but Old Spice after shave always will. They try to shield her.
“The smell of Old Spice, that will take her back to Daddy,” the 23-year-old said. “I don’t have those memories.”
But Mark MacPhail Jr. has his daddy's face and his daddy's personality. Anneliese MacPhail says there have been many times when her grandson is at her door, even for just a few moments, and it will take her back to days when her son would sit on the kitchen counter and talk about his day.
For all of them, there are two dates burned into their memories, the mother and her grandson say: Aug. 19 and Sept. 21.
“I remember the day he got killed, and I remember the day of the execution,” Anneliese MacPhail said.
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