Cathy Lamb had given up when I met her.
She was 72 and imprisoned in Oklahoma for more than three decades. She wasn’t trying to get out anymore, though once she had hope. The district attorney who prosecuted her regretted his choices; in 2000 he wrote a letter to the parole board saying she deserved to be free. It was the kind of writing that makes a difference. Lamb became the first person in the state ever sentenced to life without parole to be granted a commutation hearing.
The parole board agreed with the district attorney. Lamb was recommended for an historic sentence reduction, but the family of Lamb’s murder victim, Darrell Lovell, objected, and the governor at the time declined to free her.
23 years later, I was sitting at my desk at Tulsa’s public radio station when word came in that the Department of Corrections, newly staffed by a relatively progressive director, was allowing women from Eddie Warrior Correctional Center to visit downtown Tulsa. They were touring an art show at 101 Archer featuring work made by fellow prisoners.
I used my phone to take pictures of the women as they browsed the art in their orange jumpsuits. There was an energy in the room of people having a curious experience together. I’ve always liked art for that reason and wanted to make sure I looked at every piece, too.
On one wall were paintings clearly created by someone with experience. A seascape done in gentle gray and blue watercolors had a card attached that read, “Now I am old, somewhat battered, worn, sometimes abandoned and mostly forgotten, but still I stand.” I thought of a woman in a cell writing those words, painting a landscape from memory.
I pulled out my phone and looked up her name, Cathy Lamb. Articles from the Tulsa World and other outlets said Lamb killed 23-year-old Darrell Lovell in 1991 during a fight started by her boyfriend. After Lovell apparently shoved Lamb against a truck in a bar parking lot in Bokoshe, Oklahoma, she shot him with a gun she sometimes carried in her purse. Later, as I read the trial transcripts at the Le Flore County Courthouse, I learned Lovell was 5’10” to Lamb’s five feet. At his home in Poteau, the former district attorney told me the difference in their sizes was what made him come to feel the murder was self-defense.
I visited Lamb’s sister, Nancy Lawson, in Sallisaw and she told me about their father, a violent alcoholic. As a young woman Lamb tended to seek out similarly fraught relationships. At 14, she got pregnant and married a much older man who one night, drunk, was run over by a semi while lying in the road. His leg had to be amputated.
Still, Lamb tried to improve her own life. Though she dropped out of school in the eighth grade, she earned an associate’s degree in art and wanted to be a teacher. When I eventually met Lamb at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, she told me, from the confines of the wheelchair she was bound to due to medical issues, that art had always been her refuge.
I worked on the story for a while, and after it published, new attorneys took up Lamb’s case in front of the parole board. Her second commutation hearing took place last year in Oklahoma City. I sat in the audience and listened. It seemed likely that Lamb would be released, judging on comments from parole board members, who pointed out how rare it was for a district attorney to show public remorse.
Last week, sitting at my kitchen table, I got a phone call from an attorney who said Lamb would be getting out on parole. I logged on to the prison messaging system and paid $5 to write her a message, at the same time she was writing me one, it turned out. Mine asked if I could be there when she left the prison, hers was telling me of her release. We agreed we would meet outside Mabel Bassett Correctional Center.
I hesitated to tell people the news, but when I saw the former editor of the Tulsa World at an event hosted by the same nonprofit, Poetic Justice, that displayed Lamb’s art, I couldn’t keep it to myself. He asked me how I initially learned about Lamb’s case and I mentioned something about parole board records. The next morning, though, as I was walking to the radio station, I remembered all the work I read by other reporters: a long line of witnesses who took the time to put down what they saw and heard.
On the morning of Lamb’s release, I met a group of her supporters waiting at the prison gates in McCloud. It was an unseasonably warm February day. The group was in high spirits, with their phones pointed at the gate in case it opened. And eventually, it did. Lamb came rolling out in a bright pink blouse and jeans. We rushed forward, filming, taking pictures, so we could capture what might happen.
