Preface

I have heard a great many confessions.

That is what a priest does. People tell you things. They tell you in hospital rooms, in kitchens, in the parking lots of churches. They tell you on the phone at two in the morning. They tell you because the thing they are carrying has grown too heavy to carry alone.

On death row, the confessions are different. There is less to protect. A man who has been told the date of his death has lost most of what a lie could save. I have accompanied thirteen people to their executions. I have sat with them in the last hours, after the lawyers have gone home. Nothing is left in the room but the two of us and whatever they have not yet said. That is where the truth comes out. Often enough that I have learned what it sounds like.

Guilt has a sound. So does innocence. After enough years, you can tell them apart.

I have known Clarance Goode, Jr. for years now. I know him the way you come to know someone when the only things you have are time and words: hours on the phone, letters, the visiting room at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. I know his voice when he is tired. I know it when he is hopeful, and I know how rare that is. I know what he sounds like when he is talking about La Kendra, about his children, about his grandchildren. I know him well enough to know when he is holding something back.

He has never hidden from me the things he did when he was young. He names them. He has never once asked me to make any of it smaller than it was.

That is not a man who hides.

He has never confessed to these murders. Not once. Not in a low moment. Not in a letter written at three in the morning. Not when people ask him, as they do, whether he would take a life sentence if the state offered one and the only price was the word guilty. He says no. He has said no to me, in the places where a person says the truest things he knows.

My whole life is built on taking people at their word when they tell me what they have done. A man who will own everything else and refuses to own this is not protecting himself. There is nothing left to protect. He is telling the truth. The same truth he has told his attorneys, his family, the courts and anyone else who would listen for twenty years. I have heard him say it in every register a voice can hold. It has never changed.

I know that a spiritual advisor is expected to say this. I know how it sounds. I say it anyway, because it did not come easy. It came the way everything comes in this work: by showing up, again and again, until the person in front of me stopped being a case, became a man.

La Kendra knows it too. She has stood with him for more than thirty years, through prison, release, then prison again. She is not a woman who would stand with a man who killed a ten-year-old girl. The people who know Clarance best are the people the state has never bothered to ask.

This book is called The Weight of Someone Else’s Sin because that is what he is carrying. The sins in this story are real. Three people were murdered in the summer of 2005. One of them was a child. Somebody did that. Somebody lied about it. Somebody planted the evidence that made the lie stick. Somebody decided that a man with a record from north Tulsa was close enough to the truth to do. Every one of those people has gone on with their lives. Clarance has spent nearly two decades in a cell paying for what they did.

John Grisham wrote in The Confession: “Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it’s a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.” Clarance has survived it for nearly twenty years. I do not know how. I have watched him do it.

The state of Oklahoma would like him to confess. Not to a priest. To a court. It would like him to sign his name to a lie so the lie can become the official record. He will not do it. He has told me that if he takes that plea, he cannot keep telling the truth. He is right. Confession is only confession when it is true. What the state wants from him is not confession. It is surrender.

So here is what I know, and I am putting my name to it. Clarance Goode, Jr. did not kill Mitch Thompson, Tara Burchett-Thompson or Tara’s ten-year-old daughter Kayla Burchett. I have listened for that confession in the places where a lie cannot hide. It has never come.

What follows is his life. All of it. The reader can decide what kind of man sits in that cell. I decided long ago.

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood
September 7, 2026