 | | | Photo of Mary Reilly
by Frank H. Methe III | |
A prayer for prisoners
Offer your freedom, Lord,
to all those who are
imprisoned,
whet her in body or mind,
whet her by their sin
or another’s.
Grant courage to
the innocent,
forgiveness for
the hurting,
and strength for
the families
whose lives have been
wounded by crime.
Light, O Lord, a path
for the lost.
Help them break
the chains of sin
and despair
and find new freedom
in faith.
Amen.
- Julie L. Rattey |
Mary Riley, 64, sits at a table in a day room at Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel, 60 miles west of New Orleans. It is a depressingly hot day in south Louisiana, the kind measured in three digits on the outside thermometer. But from all appearances, the cool Riley is a doyenne of the tea-in-the-afternoon crowd. Her white hair is coiffed in understated elegance. Her words and mannerisms are measured and proper ... and restrained.
Mary Riley is the product of what is refined from within, from letting the spirit take risks and break bonds and bloom to what might have been; she is a living, breathing paradox. For this is Mary Riley, a two-time murderer who spent three years at St. Gabriel in the mid-1970s for killing her husband, then returned with a true life sentence for killing her landlady in 1984. But that Mary Riley, she says, “no longer exists.”
“What I am, where I am, I feel is my calling,” Riley says. “That calling comes from God. I know that I was sent here to fulfill my life. I’m here to mentor the young girls here; to teach them. To advocate for them. In fact, they all call me ‘Momma.’ I like that. That kind of feeling between people is hard to find in today’s world. Strange that I came to prison to find it.”
From the beginning, Riley’s life had all the elements that portend a ship about to break up on the rocks.
“I was born in Iowa,” she says. “I had scarlet fever when I was 3 and my real parents never came to get me from the hospital. There were five of us siblings and all you had to do was look at us to know we all had different fathers. The woman I wound up with and called ‘mother’ was an alcoholic. The man I believed to be my father was never there. I can honestly say that as a child I never knew what love was. I had no idea. It was just a case of daily survival.”
Riley blew into New Orleans two days ahead of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and hunkered down for what she hoped would be a new beginning in a new place. Five husbands and 40 years later, she finds herself respected and loved by people and in a place not known for that commodity.
“My first husband used to beat the living daylights out of me,” she says. “We both knew and kinda agreed that one of us was going to kill the other. One day he beat me so bad I woke up and found myself on the kitchen floor bleeding and feeling like everything was broken. I got up to wash off the blood and he told me that if I opened my mouth, I’d get more of it. I told him, ‘No more!’ I walked around the bed and got a gun and shot him. I knew I’d have to go to jail for what I’d done, but because of the circumstances of how it happened, I got out after serving just three years, which was two-thirds of the original sentence.”
Having located only one of her siblings, Mary Riley was hungry for family, any kind of family, as she bounced around from job to job and between run-down apartment houses in New Orleans and Tangipahoa Parish, north of the city. It was in one of those houses in Tickfaw, Louisiana, that a knife was pulled, and Mary Riley’s fate was sealed.
“My landlady knew that her husband was fooling around on her,” she says. “And she thought that I was the one he was fooling around with. But she was wrong. Well, one day, we had a disagreement over one of her grandchildren and she said she was going to evict me. Well, I waited until things cooled down then I went over to talk to her. While I was talking, she pulled a knife on me. I managed to get it away from her and I killed her. I got life without parole.”
