In prison at 16, she’s free at 46
The four-page letter, on pink-lined paper with schoolgirl penmanship, arrived in the newsroom eight years ago.
“Hi!” it began, as cheery as a postcard from summer camp.
Lorrie Sue McClary, inmate W-13181 at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, went on to tell a tale that raised questions about the purpose of prison, the concept of justice and the imbalance of a legal system that sent a 16-year-old girl to prison for decades while letting her adult co-defendant go free after four years.
On Monday, after 30 years behind bars, McClary finally went free. She walked through the prison’s front gates, wearing civilian clothes — a black skirt and blue top — and climbed into a car without shackles for the first time since she was a round-faced teenager.
She is 46 now, but her cravings on Monday were still a teenager’s: She wanted pizza, Pepsi, peanut-butter-fudge ice cream and something she had only heard about — cable television.
“I feel like I’m starting my life from scratch,’ she said. “I returned to planet Earth finally, and I want to know what this planet is all about.”
When I first met McClary, she was sitting across a Formica table in the cafeteria-like visitor’s room of Valley State Prison for Women. She was 37 at the time, hard-looking, pasty and overweight from a thyroid condition and two decades of prison food. She had been locked up 21 years, convicted at age 16 in the strangling death of a 79-year-old widow in San Bernardino County. She was the youngest female in California ever to go directly into an adult prison.
She said she had confessed to the crime at the urging of her troubled 23-year-old boyfriend and co-defendant — who McClary said was the actual killer — because he told her she would be tried as a juvenile and receive a light sentence.
“I thought I was in love with him,” she said with the flat, matter-of-fact tone that came from repeating the details so many times over the years. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, testified against her and served just four years.
McClary, on the other hand, was still sleeping in a prison cell two decades later, rising at 5:45 every morning, reporting to her job making eyeglasses, writing letters to media and politicians to plead her case, moving from one empty day to the next.
The State Board of Prison Terms granted her release this summer and set the date for last Friday, her 46th birthday. But bureaucratic red tape delayed her release until Monday. But when her parole officer showed up at 8 a.m. to drive her to her parents’ house, officials said the paperwork still hadn’t arrived. They told her she wasn’t going anywhere, triggering memories of that awful day in 1998.
The parole board had granted her release that spring, citing her exemplary behavior, a rare letter of recommendation from the prison warden and even a letter of support from the slain widow’s son.
McClary took nothing for granted as she waited Monday morning for her official release. At midday, the paperwork finally arrived, and her parole officer drove her to her parents’ house in Coulterville, east of Modesto, a house McClary had never seen. They had moved there 17 years ago to be closer to the prison. On the trees lining their street, her family had tied yellow ribbons. They hung a “Welcome Home’ banner over the front door and invited friends and neighbors for a party.
McClary said she plans to learn medical transcription and work from home. She wants to garden and paint.
McClary has heart problems, osteoporosis, asthma, back pain and arthritis. She is significantly overweight from her thyroid condition and three decades of prison food. She isn’t likely to be a threat to anyone. She is where she should be, at home, with her aging parents, figuring out who she is now, a full-grown woman marveling at the joy of opening a window.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].