The Associated Press
 Steven Bixby talks to the media during a break in his arraignment Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2003.(AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain) |
ABBEVILLE, South Carolina (AP) -- Steven Bixby considers himself a patriot and a prophet with no regrets about gunning down two law officers at his parents’ home, according to hundreds of pages of letters written after his arrest.
The letters, each signed “chaotic patriot Steve,” also reveal his personal demons and ironclad beliefs, and in one he questions his own sanity.
The 39-year-old man was convicted Sunday, after a five-day trial, of murdering the two officers. On Tuesday, the penalty phase of his trial begins; the same jury that convicted him has a choice of sentencing him to death or to life without chance of parole.
His family was upset because the state wanted to take about 20 feet of land near their home to widen a highway. Witnesses said Bixby and his father, who is awaiting trial on murder charges, had threatened to gun down any officer who set foot on their land.
During deliberations that lasted less than 2-1/2 hours, jurors asked to rehear some of the letters to a former girlfriend in which Bixby described how he took one wounded officer’s gun, handcuffed the dying man, dragged him inside the house and read him Miranda rights.
“I started to cry but I got refocused on the job,” he wrote to former girlfriend Alane Taylor. “If we had wanted to, that whole day would have been an entire bloodbath.”
The officer, Abbeville County sheriff’s Sgt. Danny Wilson, was dragged into the house after he was gunned down while standing on the front porch, authorities said.
State Constable Donnie Ouzts was sent to check on Wilson and was shot when he stepped out of his patrol car. Ouzts died on the way to a hospital.
Police surrounded the house for the rest of the day in a standoff with Bixby and his father that didn’t end until after hundreds of rounds were fired.
Steven Bixby and his father, Arthur, who was wounded, were charged with murder.
Public defender Charles Grose said Bixby composed more than 1,500 pages worth of letters to Taylor in the first year after his arrest that day in 2003. In them, Bixby is steadfast in his belief that the shootings were justified, calling them “right and correct in God’s eyes.”
“We the people are a majority,” Bixby wrote. “The laws were made to protect us from the police.”
On the stand for the defense Saturday, Bixby’s mother agreed. “He has the right to protect his property by any means necessary,” testified Rita Bixby, 74.
Although she wasn’t home during the gun battle, she was charged as an accessory because authorities say she knew her husband and son planned to harm police officers.
The 20 feet of land the family refused to give up has since been used to expand a highway that runs near the now-vacant home.
The letters include ramblings about the significance of some numbers, including mathematical equations involving his birth date, age and length of jail time.
He says God “wants all the evil to be exposed” and mentions a premonition of the shootout: “I saw this in a dream about a month before it happened.”
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.