THIS IS PART OF “OPERATING CAPITAL,” AN ONGOING LENS DISCUSSION ABOUT LOUISIANA’S RESUMPTION OF EXECUTIONS.
“Wait, what?” people said at the time, in 1996.
They’d heard that police had arrested 18-year-old Jessie Hoffman, the quiet kid who’d been quarterback at John F. Kennedy High School.
And the crime he had been charged with was unspeakably bad.
Hoffman did it. Even now, at age 46, as he faces execution by nitrogen gas Tuesday evening, his lawyers aren’t arguing about his guilt.
Yet some people who knew Hoffman still can’t believe the kid they knew committed this act. They swear he’s innocent.
He’s not.
John Purcell Bryson, 68, a former New Orleans Police Department assistant superintendent, remembers thinking that officers must have charged the wrong kid.
Then he looked at the record. “It’s all documented,” Bryson said. “There’s no doubt about it. Oh my god. He was convicted and rightfully so.”
But he remains shocked, more than 28 years after it happened.
“I can’t wrap my brain around this being Jessie. I still can’t believe it. It doesn’t feel like reality. That’s not the Jessie I knew,” said Bryson, who drove to Baton Rouge on Sunday morning, to speak at a rally in front of the governor’s mansion. He hoped that the governor would spare Hoffman’s life, he told the crowd.
There, at Sunday’s rally, Bryson heard others speak about how Hoffman was seen as a mentor and a peacemaker among other guys on Death Row.
That description of Hoffman seemed consistent to Bryson. “He’s always been like that, since a kid,” he said, recalling the young Jessie Hoffman he’d met in the late 1980s when commanding the Police Public Housing Liaison Officers, a community policing program in the city’s housing developments that included sports and after-school programs for kids.
He remembers a talented athlete with a strong work ethic and unmistakable kindness, he said. “He would steal your heart and I would think in the back of my mind, ‘I wish more kids were like this.’”
But then there’s the crime. “Monstrous,” Bryson said. “He had to have snapped. I mean, literally lost it.”
Police said that he kidnapped 28-year-old Mary “Molly” Elliott, took her to an ATM in New Orleans East, forced her at gunpoint to withdraw $200, then drove in her car to a remote area of St. Tammany Parish near the East Pearl River where he raped her in the car, demanded that she walk naked to the dock and kneel down, then shot her execution style.
As Elliott’s family has given interviews recently, they have described a beautiful woman known for her generous spirit, who was funny and full of life. They’re haunted by the idea that she spent the last hours of her life terrorized at the hands of Hoffman.
Recently, her husband Andy Elliott gave a statement to the Times-Picayune saying that he’s never heard an explanation for what happened. “From my standpoint, hearing why he did this crime is the only hole that could be filled by Jessie himself, yet he’s never offered any explanation or remorse, not even to his own family,” Elliott wrote.
Her sister-in-law Kate Murphy asked in a Monday letter that Hoffman be granted a pardon hearing, the Times-Picayune reported. “I wanted to meet with him as part of my own healing process and am outraged that the prison and the board of pardons refused to allow for this important work,” she wrote.
Murphy requested a Zoom call with Elliott earlier this week and it was denied on Monday by Department of Corrections officials. “I would like to have the opportunity still to meet with Jessie.”
His attorneys say that Hoffman has long wanted to speak directly to Elliott’s family. He penned an apology to the family that was included in a clemency petition filed by his lawyers in August 2023. “I want to say that I am extremely and genuinely sorry for all the pain that my very selfish, horrible and heartless acts have caused you all,” he wrote. “I know that I am the cause of unimaginable pain and suffering. I am truly sorry.”
It seems that the 2023 clemency application with a supplement filed in February hadn’t been considered by the pardon board.
In psychiatric interviews, his emotions about the crime seems less canned.
“He was very directly admitting to what he did, and describing his decades-long struggle to understand how he could have done these acts,” wrote Kate Porterfield, a child psychologist, who interviewed him in 2018 in a document shared by Hoffman’s legal team. “He was extremely remorseful, and his emotional state when describing the events of that night is best described as ‘stricken.’ He fought back tears, paused for lengthy periods, held his head down and expressed deep anguish at what he had done.”
His struggles to grasp his crime is not an explanation.
But it suggests that the only available rationale for what happened are found within psychiatry reports introduced into the court record and within childhood records collected by his legal team.
People who work on death-penalty cases usually see evidence of hard childhoods.
But with Hoffman’s case, social worker Odalys Acosta saw more evidence of abuse and neglect than she’d ever seen before. “In Jessie’s case, there were 10 times the records.”
The records filled a small U-Haul truck, she said. She also interviewed dozens of relatives and acquaintances.
Acosta’s job on death-penalty cases is to help explain why something happened and why a person became the person they became. The problem in his case was that there was so much that it was hard to settle on one explanation.
Records show that neglect started at birth, when his mother left him behind in the hospital. He was picked up by his paternal grandmother. Soon, his mother demanded him back, but would sometimes tire of him and return him by placing him on his grandmother’s doorstep late at night.
One psychiatrist compared Hoffman’s mindset to that of a child soldier. He saw high levels of gun violence in the courtyards of the public housing apartments where his family lived. But the worst violence he experienced was at the hands of his mentally ill mom.
When her kids did something wrong, she would put their hand over the fire of a stove burner. As she took the hand off the fire, she’d check it. If it hadn’t blistered, she’d put it back over the fire. His hands still bear scars from that.
When Jessie was three, his grandmother brought him to the hospital for a badly burned hand that had become infected. He ended up spending three weeks in the hospital.
The beatings of he and his brothers were constant, with an extension cord or with a heavy belt cut into strips to become a whip, often inflicted when they got out of the bath, when their skin would run with blood and raise up into welts. Sometimes she would line them up and whip one after the other, making them watch each other’s beatings while they waited for theirs. She kept several guns, threatened to shoot them, kill them.
And here is where the larger explanation starts.
Some kids, when faced with abuse, act out. They misbehave. They get attention any way that they can.
Other kids, like Jessie Hoffman, react by going inward, becoming quiet.
“Imagine a room where everyone’s screaming and if you just back away two tiny steps, you’re out of the scream line,” Acosta said. “That’s what Jessie did. He took a tiny step out of the line of fire and sat there as quietly as he could.”
To survive, Hoffman stepped away mentally, to the point where he experienced the torments of his household differently. Psychiatrists call it dissociation. He described a bad beating to a childhood psychologist this way. “When something like this would happen, I’d go into myself – isolate – not engage. Putting things inside, that was my way.”
The overwhelming abuse still came at him. But instead of something that was happening to him, it was as though the abuse became something that happened when he was in the room.
His aunt and siblings remember Jessie as a protector. When his mom wanted to beat his little brother Gerry, Jessie would volunteer to take his place. “I’ll take Gerry’s whippings; give them to me.”
He also adopted a certain discipline for himself. When two cousins drowned in the Industrial Canal, he became a lifeguard as a teenager and taught his siblings to swim. While other kids in the household began acting out or got into the streets, Jessie stayed away from drugs and alcohol. He did barely enough academically to scrape by. But he latched onto sports, especially football. He’d go to school, go to practice, then come home.
Within the house, his mother locked the refrigerator with a padlock, often withholding food.
His mother raised her children the way she had been raised, family members told the legal team. At times, her kids found it difficult to criticize their mother for how she raised them. “She did the best she could,” his brother Marvin said in a videotaped interview.
The result was what one psychiatrist describes as “ongoing severe and sadistic abuse,” nonstop chaos that triggered about a dozen recorded police calls each year to the family home, initiated by neighbors’ calls about disturbances, batteries, and domestic violence, sometimes with guns and knives. Though there were steady police calls about cruelty to juveniles, the children were never taken away.
Though his parents were mostly separated, Jessie’s dad, too, could be abusive. He’d hogtie them if they didn’t know their ABCs, with their feet and hands tied behind them, one brother remembers. Or he’d lock them in a cupboard for prolonged periods of time. Make them hold encyclopedias with their arms out as they knelt on rice.
Many nights, as their mother got drunker, she would call her sons, one by one, into her room to give her a massage or comb her hair. Then she’d demand that they have sex with her. It was common, said Jessie’s brothers. They saw it happen to Jessie many times. But in interviews with social workers and psychiatrists, Jessie barely speaks of it, scarcely remembers it.
In the weeks leading up to his attack on Molly Elliott, several things happened to Hoffman that his psychiatric analyses deem important.
It was November; he had graduated from high school that spring. His football-academics profile wasn’t quite good enough to play ball in college. (Though he was a talented player, landing 55-yard and even 70-yard touchdowns in newspaper accounts from the season, he did not do well in the classroom, earning an ACT score of 12.)
For the first time in years, he didn’t have football and coaches to stabilize his days.
His dad wanted him to join the military, but he had failed an exam. He ended up staying at his mother’s chaotic house again, this time in the Fischer housing development. His girlfriend told him she was pregnant.
Plus, he had been robbed twice at gunpoint, prompting him to start carrying a gun. One of the robberies was particularly traumatic. His girlfriend recalled in detail how they were robbed at gun point in August 1996 as he was walking her to the bus stop. She thought they would be killed. Instead, the three young men had Jessie strip down, then told the two of them to run. So he ran home naked. Three months later, he was ordering Molly Elliott to strip down and walk to the dock naked.
Basically, severe trauma, when unresolved, can return in unexpected ways, psychiatrists warn. Or, as Hoffman’s lawyers describe in his 53-page clemency petition, “When trauma remains unresolved, the mind and body continue to seek mastery over the experience, often leading survivors to unconsciously repeat aspects of the trauma.”
When neuropsychiatrist George Woods interviewed Hoffman in 2018, he explained it this way. That day, Hoffman said, when he left for work from his job as a parking valet, he was going to get something to eat and come back to work. “He does not know what prompted him to approach Ms. Elliott. Throughout the crime he had no plan of what to do. He reports it was like he was observing the whole thing from far away, but could not stop it. He wanted to stop but could not. He kept hearing in his head, ‘stop, stop,’ but felt powerless to do so.”
Over the past 28 years, Jessie Hoffman, became a mentor to others within the prison, in a way that was recognized by many visiting faith leaders and even by a guard at Angola, who wrote if the circumstances were different and Jessie had been his neighbor, he would invite him to family functions, “because I trust him and his attitude and demeanor.”
In a way, as John Bryson said at Sunday’s rally, Hoffman is the same person he has always been. A protector. A quiet confidante.
For people who know him, that horrible day is the piece that does not fit. But it is with him every moment of every day, they say, as the wrong he can never undo.
His biggest champion is his son, Jessie Smith, who can explain in detail how his dad raised him from Death Row, corresponding with his teachers and his counselor, and encouraging him to do right within the world.
Most of what he got from his father – love, encouragement, chastisement – is positive.
But because of their closeness, Smith carries a certain burden, also handed down from his father, he says. He has not researched the crime. Just knew the basic details. But it weighs on him, he said.
He wondered, he says, “How is it fair for me to be alive and experience all of these things and she’s not here?” He really would like children, he said. “But I can’t see myself having kids and knowing that the woman would never have them or her kids would never be able to see her. I live with that.”
But he also now lives with the idea that his dad could be gone soon. And that will leave a hole that he cannot imagine, he said.
They read books together and discuss them. They check in often. “Birthdays, holidays, I talk to him; I get advice. If I’m doing bad, he gets on me. If I’m doing good. He lets me know I’m doing a good job. My dad is really the only person I tell everything to.”
Essentially, he said, his dad has spent his entire life breaking generational curses, making sure that his son’s life was better than his. “Just to have all those lessons disappear would be tragic,” he said.