Beatrice Taylor smiled as her eyes, reflections of hope and optimism, scanned the modest midcity Baton Rouge apartment.
A sofa was placed against one wall, staring directly at a television, and an inviting chair opened its generously padded arms to visitors.
The kitchen pantry lacked little.
More important than the trappings of furniture and a full fridge, however, was what the apartment represented: freedom. A freedom that was snatched from Taylor 24 years ago when a Jefferson civil Parish jury convicted her of second degree murder and sentenced her to life without parole, the first Caucasian female to receive a penalty so severe that only capital punishment is more harsh.
Taylor to this day says she acted in self-defense and although much of the evidence would seem to support her claim, the jury disagreed. Coupled with a woefully inexperienced defense attorney that was clashing legal swords with a savvy district attorney, Taylor’s odds of acquittal were scant, a fact she reconciled herself to as the weeklong trial progressed.
“You can’t prove self-defense, not when someone is not there to witness,” said the 74-year-old Taylor, who thanks to the efforts of the Tulane Law School Domestic Abuse Clinic was granted her freedom this past October.
Although stripped of her freedom in a Gretna courtroom, what even the jury could not shackle was her faith. A cradle Catholic and New Orleans native who spent much of her early years in Oklahoma, Taylor said her faith was her beacon of hope, the light of freedom that never left her horizon.
“It’s not just the faith, it’s the people, it’s the Catholic people. It’s so glorious,” she said.
Father John Carville, who knew Taylor from celebrating Mass at LCIW, wrote a letter in her support to the parole board. Father Carville said Taylor was well liked by her fellow inmates and never missed a Mass.
“I felt that I could always count on her to help me understand what the women prisoners needed,” Father Carville said. “She was quite knowledgeable about her faith and I think she really was a conduit of God’s grace to many of her fellow inmates.”
Taylor’s life dramatically changed in 1997 when a former boyfriend with an extensive history of domestic abuse ambushed her at the front door of her Gretna apartment. The diminutive Taylor, who stands less than five feet tall, was easily overpowered by the burly bricklayer.
At one point, she was able to free herself and ran into the kitchen, where she grabbed a knife for protection. According to Taylor, her attacker then lunged at her, breaking her foot in the process, while promising to kill her.
It was during that sequence when the attacker was stabbed, she said.
“He could have easily thrown me over the balcony; he was so full of drugs and hate,” Taylor said, adding that an autopsy revealed he had excessive amounts of cocaine and alcohol in his system. “I was just in survival mode.
“There was no one there but me and God and God knows what happened.”
On the day of the verdict, Taylor was transported to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, still wearing her pinstripe business suit and fashionable heels, drawing more than a few curious stares from inmates.
After a relatively quiet first year with no reports against her, Taylor was assigned to the chapel, the first of several life-changing events. She started out as a housekeeper, cleaning the pews and doing whatever else was needed.
She also enrolled in discipleship courses and assisted at various Christmas events.
While working in the chapel, she began to counsel women whose sons or daughters had been murdered. She said she knew that when the chaplain’s phone rang and she heard the scream from the other end, tragedy had just struck an inmate’s family.
“There is no wail like that of a mother who’s lost her child,” Taylor said. “You stop in your tracks and you know what is going on.”
The chaplain would often introduce herself to the grieving mother and together they would pray in the chapel. Taylor said she was not going to allow the grieving mother to break down alone in her living quarters.
“That is what started changing me, when I felt their grief,” she said. “I imagined the grief my victim’s parents had, regardless of his background and regardless he had a record for all of that stuff.
“That was their child and I had killed a child of God.”
The lens by which she viewed life also shifted.
“I watched other people and knew how they felt,” she said “I began to relate to the women, I began to love the women. And they knew it.”
During this time she also began to build a prison library, including numerous Catholic and Christian books. She feasted on every word written about lives of the saints, which also nourished her now flourishing spiritual life.
At one point she was invited to enroll in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary but declined.
“God said to me, ‘I need someone in the trenches. You have studied from the tree of knowledge and will continue to study from the tree of life. And when someone comes to you with a problem you will be there in the library,’ ” Taylor said. “And that is exactly what happened. People came to me.”
After reading Gov. John Bel Edwards inauguration speech in 2016, Taylor said she was inspired to apply for clemency. After all, she knew she was innocent.
So she began documenting everything about her case, and in August of that year the documents were ready to be filed, only to be lost in the historic 2016 flood.
Undeterred, she went back to writing at Jetson Center for Youth in Baker where many LCIW inmates were transferred following the 2016 flood, focused on her future while chronicling her past.
In 2019, the Tulane Law School’s Domestic Violence Clinic picked up her case and in August, it was presented to the parole board.
Taylor’s sisters from California and Malaysia flew in to support her, and many people offered written statements on her behalf, including Father Carville and Deacon Randy Clement, a deacon assistant at St. John the Evangelist Church in Prairieville.
She was granted parole and in the summer of 2020 Edwards granted Taylor clemency, but because of the coronavirus pandemic she was not released until October.
Her first stop when clinic members picked her up at Jetson?
Starbucks, of course.
Today, she has her driver’s license, a laptop computer on the way and is learning to use a cell phone, what she calls “this beast. I had a cordless phone and that was top of the line.”
Her optimism is infectious, her positive attitude refreshing, even after spending nearly a third of her life incarcerated.
She said it’s only the beginning.
“I would like to interface with Catholics, be involved with something where I can be of use,” she said in heartfelt words. “I want to pay back and give back.”