His full legal name was Joseph Paul Jernigan, and he was born in Geneva, Illinois, on January 31, 1954, the youngest of Earl Jernigan’s six children. The boy suffered from asthma and almost died of it. He and his brothers and sisters typically owned just one pair of jeans each. Their mother eked it out in a chicken-processing plant, as a clerk at Montgomery Wards, and at other low-paying jobs, and they lived in public housing. She married a truck driver who, like Earl, was a strict disciplinarian toward the children. Later she suffered a stroke. Afflicted with a learning disorder, Paul flunked a grade at school and dropped out two years before graduating. He was a drunk and eventually was doing a pharmacy’s worth of drugs, from Quaaludes to horse tranquilizers. The Army trained Paul Jernigan as a mechanic, sent him to Germany, then tossed him out as unsalvageable. Perhaps recognizing the cruel matrix that shaped Jernigan, it gave him a general discharge (a “no comment” in effect) rather than a dishonorable one. A shrink later found Jernigan to be a passive-aggressive man who was sometimes TNT-volatile. In the years after the military Jernigan kept a cooler of ice and beer in his automobile; a typical paycheck went for pot, cheeseburgers, and enough octane for himself and the car. Paradoxically, though, friends trusted Paul Jernigan with their children. Jernigan was the perfect baby-sitter who enjoyed romping around with his charges. He married for a stretch and loved his stepchildren. But he failed at marriage just as he had failed in school and in the Army. Jernigan bungled at burglary, too. He was already a two-time loser in 1981 when he and a pal named Roy Lamb were driving down the road in Corsicana, Texas, a small, howdy-neighbor kind of town south of Dallas on Interstate 45. Emboldened by a night of booze and pot, the two decided to rob Edward Hale’s house. They began stuffing their loot into a pillow case when Hale surprised them. Lamb ran out. Jernigan beat Hale over the head with an ashtray, hoping to kill off the witness. Hale stubbornly survived. Then Jernigan stabbed him with a rusty, dull-bladed meat knife, which just bent on Hale’s chest. And so he took a shotgun and fired until the watchman was dead. Edward Hale did not die painlessly. After the murder, Jernigan went to Houston to try to straighten out his life. He was in a halfway house when arrested. Some would say Jernigan needn’t have wound up on the gurney; the law prevented the courts from accepting an accomplice’s testimony. Mark Ticer, his last attorney, believes that Jernigan may have felt so contrite that he wanted to die. Ticer grew truly fond of his client. In character, Jernigan would constantly inquire about the lawyer’s two-year-old and remember birthdays.