The old song

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

It was already midday when my mom and I left home for our college road trip, taking the old roads through eastern Washington. Washington State Route 261 leads to Lyons Ferry Road, which leads to Harvey Shaw Road in an endless stream of pavement that takes you somewhere through nowhere, the long way ’round.

Harvey Shaw’s two lanes weave through brown fields with no houses, broken only by a fallen barn or a water pump — small reminders of civilization. The moon was high and bright by the time we neared Walla Walla, and it glinted off waves of frosted grass.

In the midst of all that nothingness, I saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat strumming his guitar on a desolate hilltop. I mistook him for another statue — rural Washington is littered with rusting monuments to a white man’s idea of the lost frontier.

He wasn’t a statue. He wasn’t a man anymore, either. 

He was a ghost, and he disappeared almost as soon as I’d noticed him.

I stared at the spot where I’d seen him until the moonlight that had glinted off his guitar faded into the blinding spotlights of Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla, WA 99362.

When you drive Harvey Shaw Road at night, you’re blinded by the prison’s searchlights. The white watchtowers sprout out of flat land, producing enough light for a city of skyscrapers and casting it down onto single-level houses with peeling paint.

Washington State Penitentiary was home to the state’s death row from the first execution in 1906 to its abolition of capital punishment in 2023, and in all that time it was both neighbor and specimen to Whitman College. They don’t mention that in the promotional pamphlets. 

The boy who led my mom and me around campus wore a beaming smile as he told us that Whitman classes are allowed to interview the inmates — “not the famous ones, though.”

The famous ones are men like the Green River Killer, the Werewolf Butcher, the Hillside Strangler and the South Hill Rapist — men who make “violence against women” its own category. 

I wanted to ask if he knew of any inmates who had played guitar before they felt that lethal needle prick. Maybe the phantom in the wide-brimmed hat had a nickname, too, before he took up his haunt on the hill.

I picked a different college. There, I sat in a circle of tiny swivel desks and debated capital punishment with boys who told me they “watch true crime.”

“It’s always so obvious when you see these men. They don’t look human,” one of them said. “How could you not want people like that dead?”

He looked through me as he said this, because I’m the symbol that states use to justify their killing — the pretty white woman, the perfect victim. They couldn’t answer when I asked them why states are so willing to kill for women yet try, at every turn, to strip us of our bodily autonomy. Governments have always found the ideal of  femininity more appealing than its reality.

I’ve never seen hatred warm anyone but the living.

Just as it’s easier for governments to idealize women as victims, it’s much easier to kill a perpetrator of a heinous crime  as an anomaly than to admit they’re just one note in a much longer song. 

As we sat on the campus of one of Ted Bundy’s alma maters, I wondered who the threat of capital punishment supposedly deterred — not Gary Ridgway or Kenneth Bianchi or the spectral guitarist. Sometimes I can hear his song in the staccato slam of my neighbor’s door when he’s angry, in the voice of the man next to me who yells into his phone or in the footsteps that follow me one block too many.

They’re all elements of society’s background music, going unnoticed yet constantly influencing and informing our lives.

I wish I could say that guitarist only haunts Walla Walla, but Harvey Shaw Road leads to Lyons Ferry leads to Washington State Route 261, and from there the highway can take him anywhere. I will never know who he was, or what he did to earn his purgatory of a guitar, a field and the frost.

I know his death didn’t save anyone. Gone and buried, his song continued, amplified by a society that normalizes violence and views women as prized possessions with no autonomy. We’re all bound to the same, vicious song until we learn to acknowledge that the problem is bigger than the individual.