Death Row Inmate Preaches to Prisoners Daily. Now the State Plans to Kill Him.

image by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images

The photo shows four men in clean white clothes standing before a row of prison bars. They cluster around a large blue tub, something like an oversized kiddie pool. One points a microphone to a fifth man sitting inside – Will Speer, known as Big Will.

Big Will's clothes are wet. He has just sat up from the water. He is smiling and the three men behind him, bending toward him, are smiling, too. They are doing something Speer, as a death row prisoner, has not been allowed to do in two decades: touching another human being. They are, in the parlance of evangelical Christianity, laying hands on Big Will.

The picture captures Speer's baptism on Father's Day, June 19, 2021, in the rec yard of the Allan B. Polunsky prison, home to Texas' death row. Speer had just completed six months of a new program that the state prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, calls the Faith-Based Program. TDCJ promotes it this way: "The Faith-Based Program is based on the belief that individuals, no matter their past, can change if given the right tools and opportunity to do so."

But that's not supposed to be true for death row inmates. To impose a death sentence in Texas, juries must, by law, find that the guilty person will forever be a "future danger." This belief, that some human beings are irredeemable, is one of the principal justifications for the death penalty.

And it is this belief, of course, that put Speer on death row. By the time he was 23, he had killed two men, Jerry Collins and Gary Dickerson. After the second murder, a jury decided that Speer would forever be dangerous. Still, he was allowed to participate in the Faith-Based Program. He said he made a commitment to God sitting alone in a cell, but the program gave him the tools he needed to fulfill that commitment.

"I've quit things all my life. Because I've been taught to be a quitter. Because I wasn't ever good enough," Speer said. "It was the programs that got me to a point that I was looking past the negative, not being the victim any more, but taking responsibility for my actions. ... In Anger Management I learned to take something off of the table as a way to solve a problem. Things I've taken off the table are disrespecting people, physical fighting, and quitting. When we remove something from the table, we have to figure out another way. A proper way. When we can't quit, we have to find a way to get it done."

Speer graduated from the Faith-Based Program this June with honors, a distinction reserved for those who demonstrate "a commitment to change that is readily observable to ... peers, the unit chaplain, and Field Ministers." The program involves 20 to 30 hours weekly of study and community discussion, all geared toward helping inmates "reach a point in their lives where they are truly repentant for their actions, seek forgiveness, and find inner peace with God," wrote TDCJ Chaplain Joaquin Gay in an email to the Chronicle. After graduation, Speer was selected to become the first inmate faith-based coordinator for the program. His fellow prisoners have written that Speer's ministry and counsel are greatly improving death row. TDCJ officials are giving him unprecedented freedom to share his story, allowing him to deliver inspirational messages every day at 6am over Polunsky's radio station, the Tank. "These chaplains I see, you can tell they care," Speer said. "These men care about us, and it shows by their actions and what they do."

The Chronicle had hoped to interview officials from TDCJ about the Faith-Based Program, especially its highly respected Region I Director Daniel Dickerson. Chaplain Gay sent answers to questions via email, but no one at TDCJ agreed to an interview. If they had, it would have been complicated. The agency that worked to save Big Will's soul, and rejoiced at his salvation, is required to execute him on Oct. 26.

Childhood and Murder

Speer's story is familiar to anyone who understands death row. He was born in Houston to a family suffused in physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. He loved his mother, but both parents were drug addicts. His father beat and humiliated Speer. He punished him for his bed-wetting, which persisted into his teenage years, by wrapping Speer's urine-soaked underwear around his head and making him stand in a corner until it dried. And he was vicious with Speer's mother.

"I remember my dad beating my mom," Speer said. "I remember him throwing her down stairs. I really feared my father because of how violent he was and how he treated her. And that treatment spilled over into her relationship with [my stepfather]." Speer's stepfather beat him even more brutally than his father. He whipped him, stomped him, burned him with cigarettes. He called Speer fat, worthless, and "retarded" – a biting insult because Speer had learning disabilities and was repeatedly held back at school. The stepfather eventually shot Speer's mother three times in the head and is now serving a life sentence.

As he was being attacked by his stepfather, Speer was also being sexually abused by an older boy in the neighborhood. His mother sent him away at the age of 15 to live with his father in San Angelo, trying to protect him. But his father pressured him to inject meth and cocaine and to watch pornography with him. He accused his son of stealing his drugs and slammed him so hard against the wall of his home that the Sheetrock was crushed and outlined in blood. Speer returned to Houston.

Will Speer gets baptized on the row (photo via Will Speer’s Clemency Petition)

There, at age 16, he fell in with a group of young men, one of whom asked that Speer kill another friend's father, Jerry Collins. Desperate to be part of the group, Speer did. Two years later he was tried as an adult and given a life sentence.

In prison at the age of 18, Speer was singled out as someone who could be bullied. The abuse began anew. He was beaten until bruises and cuts covered his body. Inmates wrapped toilet paper around his feet as he slept and lit it on fire, causing second-degree burns. He had part of an ear bitten off and spent three weeks in the hospital, receiving multiple surgeries.

In constant danger, Speer asked to join a gang. Its leader ordered him to kill a fellow inmate and, again, Speer agreed. He was convicted of capital murder in 1997 and entered death row at the age of 23.

Mitigation and the God Pod

Donna Coltharp, an assistant federal public defender, began researching Speer's case in 2016 and was struck by the similarities of the two murders. In both, she said, Speer sought inclusion and protection. Working alongside other attorneys, she learned that the jury in Speer's second murder trial had never learned about his childhood or his experiences in prison. She appealed Speer's case to a series of courts, arguing that if the jury had heard his story at least one of its members would have voted for life without parole. No judge has ever agreed.

As Coltharp sought help in the courts, Speer was rededicating his life to Jesus Christ. He was selected in 2021 for the Faith-Based Program – called the "God Pod" on the row – joining 27 other inmates. They studied classes from a pair of programs, Bridges to Life and Overcomers, on processing trauma, redefining the concept of manhood, and accepting responsibility for one's actions.

Coltharp says the men aren't allowed to have physical contact but they pray and sing together and deliver sermons to one another. They're supported by TDCJ chaplains and field ministers – prisoners who travel from cellblock to cellblock ministering to inmates – and are visited by the warden. It is an unprecedented level of support for the prisoners, who are usually housed in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and never given access to any of the programs available to other inmates.

As inmate coordinator, Speer is currently teaching classes and mentoring the next wave of students, even as he awaits his execution date. He has, in Coltharp's words, "found something valuable about himself."

"I think that's what was always lacking for Will," Coltharp said. "Other people were valuable. Other people were attractive. Other people were strong and powerful and could protect him. But Will never figured out what he had. And it turns out that what he has is this enormous love."

Speer says his faith never stuck before because it was always for someone else. "I remember being 16 and I committed to God for the chaplain that was there [in the prison]. After that, because I was still getting into problems because of my poor decisions, I abandoned God. Then, later, I came back to religion again, but I did it for my dad, so it didn't stick."

Later, sitting in solitary confinement, he felt no hope. "I was looking around my cell and really coming to the realization of my poor choices and poor decisions and that I don't have the answer. And, because of that, I cried out to God. There wasn't a voice – it wasn't something like that. It was me making the decision to say that I don't have the answers, but I know that God does."

Coltharp says Speer is more joyful than she's ever seen him but also wracked with guilt over the pain he has caused the families of his victims. "I think about them a lot," Speer said. "There's always something that comes up on a regular basis that makes me reflect about the things that I've stolen from them."

With the execution fast approaching, Speer's attorneys submitted a clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Oct. 6, asking the board to recommend to Gov. Greg Abbott that he commute Speer's sentence to life without parole. They are aware, however, that BPP almost never recommends the commutation of a sentence – they have done so only five times in 30 years.

Speer said if he is executed he will have no bitterness.

"I don't judge these officers for having a job to do and following through with that job," Speer said. "I may not like what they do, but here's the thing for me: Because I understand what people think about us men here on Death Row, because I understand that, I can accept – I don't have to agree with it – but even if their thinking is flawed, I can accept what their thoughts are. I believe they are wrong, but because I can accept it, I can have peace. And because I have peace, I'm good. I'm free. I am so much freer in this cell than so many people in their cell. I'm good. I will humbly accept it."

Editor's note: This story was updated Oct. 12, 10:53 a.m., to include responses from TDCJ and to correct a factual error. The story misstated that a new friend of Speer's asked Speer to kill his father; he asked Speer to kill another friend's father.