AHEAD of Scotland’s appearance in the World Cup in 1986, US Ranger Tom Richey went into town to buy a TV to watch his home country play. The 17-year-old ate two tabs of acid and took his pistol, with which he would shoot two men in the head, killing one.
The events of that day earnt him a 65-year prison sentence. Now, 40 years later, with Scotland once again in the World Cup, the Edinburgh-born man is pleading to “come home”.
Richey spoke to the Sunday National from a phone in his cell at the Airway Heights Corrections Centre in Washington state.
He said: “I’m not looking for a break by looking for a transfer, I still take accountability for my actions. I’m just looking to come home, finish the rest of my sentence back in Scotland.”
At the time of his crime, Richey was incredibly naive, according to his version of events.
When he first got in touch with the Sunday National, he described how he had his heart set on joining the army but did not want to serve in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Speaking over the phone, he said: “When I was 16, the movie Rambo came out. I was so immature at that age, as we all are, that I thought, ‘Man, that’s what I want to do. I’d love to be that guy.’ So that kind of planted the seed.”
With his parents having separated when he was 14 and his dad living in Ohio, Richey said he decided to try and live out his Rambo fantasy in America, leaving behind his mother and his home.
At the point of his enlistment, Richey believes he was the youngest Ranger in the US and claims he was immediately identified as a point man to lead advances after scoring 40 out of 40 in a shooting test.
“We used to always do the kill shot,” he said. “It became automatic, we’d do it all the time. Because I was the point man, I was always doing the kill shot [in training] and so that was ingrained in me, you didn’t hesitate.”
It was that training that Richey brought with him when he went to buy the television to watch the World Cup.
He and his fellow soldiers would regularly take LSD, he said, but the day of the murder was the first time he ever suffered a “bad trip”.
“We used to do it before jumping off planes and stuff like that,” he said. “This time I had a bad trip, I was gripped by paranoia.”
Hearing voices after being told in the first shop he went to that they didn’t have the TV he was looking for, he said he was “mission oriented” and drove on to another in Tacoma.
“We start quibbling over the price, they were trying to jack up the price, which they did to soldiers,” he said.
“So we got into an argument over the price of this telly and I just lost it, man I just took out my gun and I took the store employee into the backroom and just as I walked into the room, the manager spun around and startled me, looked like he was trying to make a move and I went back to my training automatically and I just shot them in both their heads.”
After sobering up the next day, Richey said he turned himself into the military police, admitting his crimes.
“I’m not making excuses for what I did, what I did was wrong and horrible and to this day I’m still remorseful about it and there’s nothing I can do to make things right,” he said.
But his quest to return to Scotland goes on. Of particular frustration to Richey are the new rules in the state of Washington which allow people who were convicted of aggravated murder under the age of 21 to appeal their sentences on the grounds of immaturity at the time the offence was committed.
He said: “The initially charged me with aggravated murder and then came back with a deal and the funny thing is – they gave me the deal for 65 years saying that’ll give you the chance to get out one day and I accepted it – but had I stuck to my guns and got convicted of aggravated murder, I’d be free today on resentencing.”
Asked if he was haunted by that choice, Richey replied: “Yeah, but a lot of things haunt me more than that, man, like the fact that I shot two people and killed a person, that haunts me a lot more than this stuff.”
His campaign for a transfer has been a long one after having applied for one immediately after arriving in the American prison system.
Things moved slowly but encouragingly, he said, and he was preparing to be repatriated and discussing with the prison bosses what he would be able to take back to Scotland.
But his efforts were thwarted with the US authorities eventually losing faith that their Scottish counterparts would enforce his enormous sentence.
He has written to MSPs but had no success and his efforts with the US authorities have proved similarly fruitless, with Richey told that there has been no change to the facts of his case since his previous attempts.
The campaign did however lead him to study the law, Richey said, and he told how he had campaigned on behalf of other prisoners, especially people of colour, to have their sentences reduced.
That work brought him into conflict with some of his fellow inmates, he says, and he accuses the neo-Nazi Aryan Brotherhood prison gang of an attack so brutal it left him needing reconstructive surgery on his face.
“I got just pummelled from behind,” he said. “I was always proud of the fact that they never knocked me off my feet.”
A spokesperson for the Washington Department for Corrections said that Richey has the “right to continue to appeal to transfer to Scotland”.
