Eternity's gate slowly closing at Peckerwood Hill

HUNTSVILLE - Seven new graves - products of a single morning's burial - scar the hard, rust-colored earth of Peckerwood Hill, the state prison cemetery near downtown Huntsville.

Earlier, a few mourners gathered to pray and seek solace from a chaplain's Scriptures. Now, under a blistering sun and the vigilant eyes of their crew boss, white-clad convicts work to place the inmate-made concrete tombstones that will seal these prison doors for eternity.

Jack Washman, 50, a Corpus Christi man serving 38 years for heroin possession, scans the sky as a cawing crow lazily circles. "I can't judge them. Only God can do that," he says of the cemetery's newest residents. He looks across the parched sod at rows of lichen-covered crosses, then adds, "You can't work out here and not recognize your own mortality."

Thousands of stones

Joe Byrd Cemetery, as Peckerwood Hill is more politely known, sometimes seems one of the world's loneliest places. Thousands of tombstones, many bearing only prison identification numbers, some with no markings at all, dot the 22 acres bordering Sam Houston State University.

For roughly 160 years, the cemetery has been a home for deceased prisoners who had nowhere else to go. With their families unable or uninterested in claiming their remains, 117 inmates were buried here last year. All told, about 3,000 lie at rest on the hill.

Funerals for the dead, drawn from the state's 111 far-flung prisons, are held on Thursday mornings. Soon, though, that may change. Peckerwood Hill is running out of room.

With much of the cemetery's remaining land subject to flooding, Walls Unit Warden James Jones, who oversees the graveyard, says a new burial ground must be found within two years.

Jones is optimistic that a new site can be chosen from land the Texas Department of Criminal Justice owns in Huntsville. Still, the hill's closing to new burials arguably will mark a milestone in prison history.

Cleaned up in early '60s

Texas' only prison cemetery was star-crossed from the start. The site was donated to the state in the 1850s only because prison officials already had - by mistake - used it for burials. By the early 1960s, the site had become a weedy jungle.

Capt. Joe Byrd, for whom the site is named, is credited with rescuing the cemetery with a massive cleanup and maintenance program. Under his direction, unmarked graves were identified and crosses erected.

Frank Wilson, a former Sam Houston State doctoral student writing a book about the site, says the cemetery lives in Texas myth.

"With the death chamber being at the Walls Unit, people believe the cemetery is where all the executed prisoners are buried," says Wilson, now a professor at Indiana State University. Wilson's research reveals only about 2 percent of those buried were executed.

Among them are three of the first five men Texas electrocuted. Also at the site are serial killer Kenneth McDuff, executed in 1998, and Henry Lee Lucas, a convicted killer who embarrassed law enforcement agencies across the country by fraudulently confessing to 600 murders.

Lucas, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison, died of natural causes in 2001. He lies in an unmarked grave after vandals repeatedly damaged or stole his tombstone.

Not all unremembered

The cemetery's colloquial name, derived from a disparaging African-American term for poor whites, hints at the way many may view the graveyard's occupants. Wilson, however, says he found himself captivated, in some cases, by the dead inmates' humanity.

"Certainly bad people are buried there, but you can say that about any place," he says.

That many of the deceased are fondly remembered is evidenced by the vases of flowers and miniature flags left at gravesites. Some families even provide money for personalized tombstones, Jones says. Still, many prisoners go to their graves attended only by prison officials and inmate workers.

"We stand in for the family," Washman says. "We pray for the family. ... There are so many emotions going on."

Thomas Navarro II, 41, serving 14 years for assault, says cemetery workers sometimes tear up at funerals.

"I wonder what's running through their minds," he says. "For myself, I sometimes feel like I'm a gatekeeper to eternity. ... It's not easy to lower someone into the ground."

allan.turner@chron.com