A widow’s journey to justice

Three days before the man who murdered her husband went on trial, Claudia Barnes requested a tour of the Atlanta Municipal Court building. She peeked behind double doors and inspected the wood-paneled halls and courtrooms on the sixth floor. She made mental notes about where the defendant would sit, where the jury box was located, the distance between the break room and the elevators.

She mapped out her escape route.

Claudia didn’t put anything past Brian Nichols. “Evil genius,” she called him.

When Atlanta’s most anticipated murder trial finally got under way Sept. 22, the defendant —- known to everyone as the confessed courthouse killer —- sat just a few feet from Claudia.

SWAT team members wouldn’t say how Nichols was secured. Claudia believed, or rather she hoped, that his shackles were bolted to the floor and that he was wearing stun gun belts around his chest.

This would be the hardest thing she’d done —- to relive the tragedy that sucked all the happiness from her life. It was that much more disconcerting because a failure in security had allowed Nichols to kill inside a courtroom.

Time had stalled since the blustery March morning in 2005 when Nichols escaped from custody during his rape trial in the Fulton County Courthouse and launched a killing spree. He fatally shot Claudia’s husband, Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes; his court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau; and sheriff’s deputy Hoyt Teasley. Later that night, Nichols killed U.S. Customs agent David Wilhelm at a house he was building near Lenox Square.

After three years of legal delays and nine weeks to select a jury of eight women and four men, Claudia thirsted for justice.

She knew the word “closure” was phony. But she did not want to miss a single day of the trial and hoped the evidence and testimony would allow her to stitch together the details surrounding her husband’s murder. That knowledge, she believed, would begin to free her from devastation.

Preparing for trial

Just as the legal teams had done their homework, so had Claudia.

She’d already decided to retire from the judicial assistant’s job she’d held for almost half her life. She made her last day Sept. 2, so she’d be free to attend the trial. She paid her bills in advance and took care of chores.

After her retirement, though, anxiety set in —- the kind you feel when you’re waiting to get on a scary ride at an amusement park.

She broke down when she heard “Margaritaville” on the car radio. Rowland loved the Jimmy Buffett tune. “They’re playing our song,” she said out loud.

A romantic to the core, Rowland fell hard for Claudia when they started dating in 1993. They did everything together and especially liked spending time in Panama City, Fla., where they’d ride bikes and hunt for change around fast-food drive-in windows and in beachfront parking lots. Rowland had done that for years, and he challenged her to rack up more than he did. He liked to put his found money in old Coke cans; she preferred pretty Victorian tins.

Most often they’d find pennies, but he promised her he’d propose the day she found a dime. They were married in 1996.

On the trial’s opening day, Claudia took MARTA downtown. Getting off at the Garnett station, her eyes caught the glint of a dime by the ticket vending machine. She just knew: Rowland was telling her he was with her.

That first week of the trial, she would find a dime on the ground every day.

Claudia glided her favorite MAC shade, Eden Rocks, over her lips and applied stoicism on her face before arriving at Courtroom 6B, where she took a seat on the second row behind the prosecution table. That’s where she would sit for 12 weeks, through 144 witnesses’ testimony and more than 1,200 pieces of evidence. She would miss only three days, to attend her son’s wedding in Kansas.

On her left wrist, she wore a Mickey Mouse watch that Rowland gave her on their second Christmas together. A blue rubber band adorned her right arm. “Brandau Teasley Barnes,” it said, for the three courthouse victims.

She gazed at Nichols, still strong and handsome dressed in jacket and tie. She felt repulsed. She thought he had no right to look like an ordinary citizen, that he ought to face his jury in an orange prison jumpsuit.

He was confident —-arrogant, she thought —- the way he scanned the courtroom and whispered to his lawyers. It would be their job to convince the jury that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.

What rubbish, Claudia thought. She saw him as a man with a brilliant mind and a photographic memory who knew exactly what he was doing on that day in downtown Atlanta.

The prosecution team worried that some testimony and evidence would be too traumatic for Claudia. She was undeterred.

“I want to know everything,” she said.

The first punch came just seven minutes into the prosecution’s opening statement. Two chilling gunshots followed by screams pierced the quiet of the courtroom as an audiotape made in Rowland’s courtroom took Claudia back to just before 9 a.m. on March 11, 2005.

Nichols had overpowered Deputy Cynthia Hall, beating her almost to death. Then he entered Courtroom 8H, where Rowland was hearing a civil case before Nichols’ rape trial resumed, and shot both Rowland and Brandau in the head.

Awful news unfolds

Claudia was in the Fulton County Courthouse that wretched morning, as usual, working in State Court Judge John Mather’s office. She heard the blare of sirens, saw police cars blocking the intersections.

It took her almost 45 minutes and a maze of questioning to discover that Rowland had been shot. She could not accept that he was never coming back to her. That he wouldn’t send her flowers as he had done every week of their nine years of marriage.

Claudia struggled to maintain a steely veneer. A victim’s advocate slipped her a business card. Claudia was adamant. “I don’t need counseling,” she said. “I just need answers.”

At the trial, she felt she was in the final days of that quest.

The fact that she hungered for most was to know that her husband had not suffered.

Before Rowland’s memorial service, Claudia had gone to the funeral home to be alone with him one last time. She wanted to touch his hands because he had been so fond of holding hers, as though they were high school sweethearts.

He looked like he was asleep, not dead. He had a smile on his face. Surely, the embalmer was not that good, Claudia thought. She felt comforted by her husband’s smile and later, when she learned he was shot just moments after telling a joke, she convinced herself that he died instantly, before suffering could wipe the smile from his face.

Now, looking at the disquieting forensics pictures and listening to medical testimony, she knew he never had a chance of survival.

She opened a black leather-bound journal that Rowland’s secretary had given her, an impromptu gift at the courthouse. The first page still contained the woman’s grocery list.

She felt like a college student taking copious notes on a professor’s lecture. She looked up at the video screen and saw the details of her husband’s condition.

“There was a tremendous amount of blood,” paramedic Charles Kinney testified. “It was on the floor. It was on the walls. It was on us —- it was all over everything.”

Sadness clouded Claudia’s face. She looked down, crossed her legs this way and that. She clinched her left hand over her mouth when Kinney described seeing brain matter.

As disturbing as the details were, Claudia realized this was the last time anyone would talk about the circumstances of Rowland’s death.

She sat on foam pads she’d brought to cushion her body on the wooden bench. But nothing could soften what she saw and heard.

She stared at a photograph of Rowland’s head that showed the bullet had entered just above his left ear. She made a sketch in her notebook.

Funny, she thought, how Rowland’s left ear always got red. He frequently complained about it burning. Maybe that had been a premonition.

Claudia found it curious that both Rowland and Brandau had been shot in the same manner, the gun just 1 inch from their heads, the bullets entering and exiting in the same places. She noted that Teasley and Wilhelm were both shot in the stomach and bled out internally.

It was more proof to her that Nichols was not delusional but a murderous mastermind. He knew something about human anatomy, about how to kill. Maybe he had learned about target points from all the war videos he played.

“It’s all too calculated to be crazy,” she wrote.

Turning to God

On Day 16, prosecutors played a three-hour videotape of Nichols confessing his crimes to an Atlanta homicide detective.

It was the first time Claudia had seen the video.

Nichols said he killed the four because he saw them as enemy combatants and himself as a soldier in a “noble” slave uprising against the U.S. government. The defense argued that Nichols’ beliefs were part of his delusional disorder.

Claudia cringed and wrote in her journal: “I want to ask him whether he has a delusional disorder today or was it just a once-in-a-lifetime flareup?” If he’s still delusional, that’s all the more reason to sentence him to death, she thought. He’s never going to get better.

New answers

All her years, Claudia had believed capital punishment was wrong —- that no man had the right to take another’s life. But after Rowland’s murder, when she turned to God for guidance, she found new answers.

You can kill the flesh but not the soul, she decided. We’re responsible for his flesh; he’s accountable for his soul. She told herself: God doesn’t care about the flesh anyway.

When the defense suggested that Nichols’ delusion was reinforced by things in Rowland’s office —-including a portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee —- Claudia could hardly sit still.

She wanted to stand and shout as a lawyer would: “Objection, your honor.” She wanted to tell the jury that Rowland was a history buff.

“I’m the one who lived with him,” she wanted to say. “I know he’s not a racist.”

Relief finally came Nov. 7 when the jury found Nichols guilty on all 54 counts, including murder, kidnapping, carjacking and robbery. They didn’t buy Nichols’ plea of insanity. Now Claudia wanted him to hear the judge say: You get death.

The sentencing phase of the trial cut into December, and Claudia and the man who killed her husband spent their birthdays together, in court.

On the 4th, she marked her 61st with cake her friends brought. One week later, Nichols turned 37. Claudia hoped the jury would return a sentence that day. But deadlocked, they kept deliberating. Why was it taking them so long to decide Nichols’ fate?

Claudia could feel her heart sinking when the jury returned late Friday and announced they still were split: nine favored the death penalty, three did not. Under Georgia law, Judge James G. Bodiford could not impose death without a unanimous decision.

It was chilling for Claudia to think Nichols would be in a cell somewhere, still alive, perhaps still plotting an escape. But she took solace in picturing this self-centered man locked behind bars perhaps in a maximum-security prison, unable to ever come in contact with another human being.

He’ll be his own best company, she thought. And one day, he will die alone.

She was accepting the next morning when Bodiford announced Nichols’ punishment. Eleven life sentences, including four without parole, for the murders. And 485 years for other charges. All to be served consecutively.

“You can’t ever trust anyone like Mr. Nichols,” Bodiford said. “There’s ample evidence that trusting Mr. Nichols will get you killed.”

It was as though the judge had looked inside Claudia’s heart. That’s exactly what she wanted to shout to the world.

Claudia donned her coat knowing she would no longer have to put her own life on hold, waiting for the next court date. Or listen to lawyers defend her husband’s murderer. Or see his devilish face on television, in newspapers, in a courtroom. Or anywhere.

She began meandering toward her car with thoughts of fried rice and chicken wings at the Jade Garden, a Chinese restaurant in East Point —- one that Rowland loved.

HOW WE GOT THE STORY

Before the Brian Nichols trial started in September, reporter Moni Basu asked Claudia Barnes if she would share her experience of watching the man who killed her husband finally face justice.

Barnes’ perspective, Basu knew, would be unique. The scene of Nichols’ escape and murderous rampage, the Fulton County Courthouse complex, had been Claudia’s workplace as well as that of her husband, Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes. She knew two of the other three people who were slain, as well as many of the lawyers, deputies, secretaries and others whose lives were touched by the events that day. During the 3 1/2 years it took to bring Nichols to trial, the judge’s widow had attended virtually every legal proceeding in the case.

Claudia Barnes agreed to talk with Basu intermittently during the trial and to share her journal entries, on the condition that the story not appear until the case ended. The story reflects Barnes’ thoughts and feelings as she described them to Basu.