And yet the father is there, in the background, as context that cannot be un-noted. The son learned that his father killed people. He chose to maintain a relationship with the father anyway. He spent two million dollars trying to undo the conviction. He stood at the father’s proxy wedding. He visited once a year, for as long as the father was alive.
## March 15, 2007: The End of the Prison Years
Charles Voyde Harrelson died of a heart attack on March 15, 2007, in his cell at the ADX Florence federal penitentiary in Fremont County, Colorado. He was sixty-eight years old. He had been at ADX Florence — the federal government’s most secure prison, designed for prisoners who have demonstrated the capacity and willingness to undermine security at other facilities — since 1995, when he and two other inmates attempted to escape from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and were stopped by a warning shot. The escape attempt resulted in his transfer to Florence, which is as far as the federal prison system goes.
He had been in some form of federal custody since his arrest in September 1980 — twenty-seven years. He had lived more than a quarter century in a world organized entirely by the rules and restrictions of the federal penitentiary system. He died there, without the new trial his son had spent years trying to secure.
The Supreme Court had rejected his final appeal in 2004. Three years later, he was dead. The question of whether Charles Harrelson was guilty of murdering Judge Wood — a question that Woody had spent enormous energy and resources raising — was definitively closed by the legal system in 2004 and by death in 2007. The conviction stood. The sentence stood. The man died in the facility designed for the most dangerous prisoners in the federal system, having spent the last twelve years of his life there.