Here’s an excerpt from one of the books I’m working on:
I met Eisenberg in the chapel so we could talk.
The chapel was a good place to meet, we could sit in the foyer and talk in private without anyone bothering us. A small hallway off the foyer led to a few offices for the chaplain and chapel administrators, when they were working back there the front door to the chapel would be open and we could get in. There were two small benches ninety degrees to each other, Eisenberg took one, I took the other.
We talked about girls, he related how after he had done his first bit, five years at Menard for aggravated battery on a chick, he went back to college. He was in great shape then after five years of working out, not like now, and had no problem meeting girls. He said he met one particular girl at school, they went out for a while, then it ended. I asked him what happened. He said, “I slapped her.”
He told me about how he got his present murder case. He was in a hotel with a girl, they were doing drugs. He fell asleep. When he woke up, he saw that she had done all the drugs, and he got pissed off. “I hit her five times,” he said. That killed her.
“She had a preexisting medical condition,” he said without further elaboration. He got fifty years.
When he talked to the presentencing counselor assigned by the court to sum up his life, he cried while talking about the girl dying. With annoyance, Eisenberg said that in the report, the counselor wrote that Eisenberg had cried “crocodile tears”.
Eisenberg told me that he talked to the prison doctor about quitting smoking, and the doctor told him not to bother, it was too late, his heart was done for. Under the law that he had been sentenced under, Eisenberg would have to do twenty-five years. He was fifty years old then, five years into his sentence, with a bad heart. He knew he wouldn’t make it. He had a wistful, resigned look on his face.
We got up, it was time to go back to the grind.
