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If, in one sense, Adams was saved by the media, he is now at risk of becoming their prisoner. Released on $50,000 bond three weeks after the appellate-court ruling, Adams was soon out of his orange prison uniform and into a borrowed shirt and tie, then whisked off to a Houston studio to appear on Nightline, the first of a slam-bang round of television appearances. Awkward at first, Adams quickly seemed as comfortable as Tom Hanks discussing his latest movie on Johnny Carson's couch. For the moment, prying reporters have become as ever present as guards. On the plane to Ohio, flight attendants passed food trays bucket-brigade style over the backs of cameramen crouched in the aisles.
Waiting in the Columbus airport were about 100 people, including Adams' mother Mildred, a retired supervisor at a home for retarded children, and friends from her Baptist church with yellow ribbons around their necks. Adams plowed through the crowd to hug his mother and then the teary-eyed Morris. At the press conference, Adams' sister whispered in his ear that Texas had decided not to retry him. He squeezed his mother's hand so tightly his knuckles turned white.
The next day Adams' sister threw a party. The family brought deviled eggs and a cake; someone had left seven bags of groceries on the doorstep during the night. Recalling his first postprison meal of chicken chalupas, Adams said, "It felt strange to have the man across from me eating something different than I."
Adams, now 40, seems to have made his peace with his jailers, knowing that to pursue revenge could poison his future happiness. He has learned, he says, to "think the worst and hope for the least." Doug Mulder, the former Dallas prosecutor who wronged him, is shielded by law from suits by convicts. But cases like Adams' leave a residue of uneasiness: if the Supreme Court had not reversed the death sentence, and if a filmmaker had not stumbled onto suppressed evidence in locked and forgotten files, Adams would have been dead long ago.