Billy George McCune was born in Waco, Texas on May 8, 1928. In 1944, at the age of sixteen, McCune was incarcerated in the Austin State School, Austin, Texas, having been adjudicated as ”feebleminded” in McClennan County Court, Waco. In 1946 he was diagnosed as a ‘normal boy and quot; with an IQ of 87 and transferred to the Mexia State School, Mexia, Texas. Later he enlisted in the Navy, served two brig terms for minor infractions and was discharged.Friendless and without employment, McCune arrived in Fort Worth, Texas on February 2, 1950 where he was arrested and convicted for the first and only time in his life. The offense was the alleged rape of a socially prominent Fort Worth matron in her late thirties. According to the charges, McCune was said to have sexually assaulted the woman in the back seat of her car which was parked in a public lot. McCune carried no weapons and the woman outweighed him by twenty pounds. There was a witness.McCune was sentenced to death in the electric chair. Guilt-ridden and plagued by newspaper accounts of himself as a “sex criminal, and quot; he amputated his penis with a double-edged razor blade and passed it to a trusty in a tin cup through the bars. During this period he also experienced a religious conversion and was baptized in his death cell. For two years McCune lived on Death Row in Huntsville while the men around him were systematically exterminated. After his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1952 he spent seven years in total isolation. Since then he has been in the Wynne Treatment Center of the Texas Department of Corrections where he has been denied most prison privileges, classified as ”psychotic” and locked alone in a row reserved for lunatics, homosexuals and otherinmates considered “unfit for the general population.’ Every year for the past thirteen he has come up automatically for parole and each time parole has been categorically denied.This is his autobiography. and quot;If George Jackson was the tiger, then McCune is the lamb. If the mighty state of Texas struck at Billy, then McCune has struck back. His weapon is a five-cent ballpoint pen refill held in a trembling hand, and his tale will be heard until the great walls of Texas prisons are lowered to the ground. His is the voice of the voiceless and the dead. His is the sadness of ten thousand nights of darkness shared by two hundred thousand men. He is you and he is I, stripped naked and locked into a cell from which the only light we see tells us there’s no way out but by suffering and death.” and quot;–from the Introduction by Danny Lyon

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