The Death Penalty: The Crime of Wyatt Matthews

Grafenwöhr lies in a remote corner of northeastern Bavaria, twenty miles or so from Czechoslovakia, just beyond the minefields. It is a training area for U.S. Army armored units in Germany; the units with their officers and enlisted personnel rotate in and out regularly, getting a taste of living in the field and firing their impressive weaponry for practice with live ammunition. It is cold there in February, as my family and I well know, for we lived in the tiny village of Vilseck, about 12 miles south of Grafenwohr, for a year in the midSeventies. The events I am about to describe took place on February 27, 1979, three years after we left. The aftermath dragged on for five years.

Phyllis was 29 and beautiful, the wife of an Army career warrant officer helicopter pilot. She had been, for about a month, substituting as a camp librarian, filling in for a woman on maternity leave. Private First Class Wyatt L. Matthews, 22 and, some evidence indicates, mildly retarded as well as alcoholic, had been in the Army for 18 months, in Germany for one.

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Joseph A. Rehyansky

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Grafenwöhr lies in a remote corner of northeastern Bavaria, twenty miles or so from Czechoslovakia, just beyond the minefields. It is a training area for U.S. Army armored units in Germany; the units with their officers and enlisted personnel rotate in and out regularly, getting a taste of living in the field and firing their impressive weaponry for practice with live ammunition. It is cold there in February, as my family and I well know, for we lived in the tiny village of Vilseck, about 12 miles south of Grafenwohr, for a year in the midSeventies. The events I am about to describe took place on February 27, 1979, three years after we left. The aftermath dragged on for five years.

Phyllis was 29 and beautiful, the wife of an Army career warrant officer helicopter pilot. She had been, for about a month, substituting as a camp librarian, filling in for a woman on maternity leave. Private First Class Wyatt L. Matthews, 22 and, some evidence indicates, mildly retarded as well as alcoholic, had been in the Army for 18 months, in Germany for one.