Today I thought I would talk about people who, through trying to understand ,were able to forgive….. Last night I was watching a program about Victim Mediation. There were three cases, three killers. The first case started with a girl driving her station wagon to the police department. She told how a man had kidnapped and abducted her and her 45 year old friend. She told of how her friend had been raped first and how the killer had made her help him dispose of the body after he had choked the life from her beloved friend. They had driven up the road a bit and thrown her off a bridge…. Then he decided to let the girl live after she begged for her life…. He had jumped from her car as she pulled up to a stop sign….The second victim was a man that worked at a motel… He complied with all the robbers demands… after the motel was robbed he was told to lay on the ground as they ran away… he had been scared… thinking they had left he got up to run away… one of the robbers came back and shot him. He didn’t die… I call the robber a killer because he had killed every thing that man HAD been… He had taken his life and left him breathing…. No longer did he have dreams… or hopes….. And then there was Brenda…. She had wanted to be a teacher. She worked late nights at the mini mart…. It was there that she would spend her last days on earth collecting money for gas and soda. Police were called to the mini mart after a customer couldn’t find Brenda and noticed things didn’t look quite right. Her bruised and battered body was discovered on an old dirt road just outside of town….Her mother would not be able to have an open casket funeral.

Killer one had been a young white truck driver….He had been apprehended by the police and identified by the woman he had let live. Killer two also had been identified…He was a young black man that had spent most of his young life incarcerated…. Killer three? Brenda’s killer? The police hadn’t had to look for him. He had shown up at the station with his priest in tow with a confession of rape and murder. He, a Mexican man, clamed he had suffered from black out’s his whole life…. He had turned his self in because of the fear that he would kill again…. As Brenda’s mother sat there looking at the man that had killed her daughter I saw her tears begin to flow…. She asked simple questions and then she ask how long it took her daughter to die. He did the right thing by not telling her…. She then recounted how he had left her child on that final night…How her neck had been choked so hard that it had swollen to be larger than her head… How he had left his finger marks on her cheeks… And as she cried and relived her horrific memories he sat there racking his brain trying to remember what he had done…He knew he was guilty. He had found her body him self crammed in his trunk like a bag of laundry. I saw remorse in his face… and she had wanted to see that too. She had told him that she will probably never get the chance to ask these questions again… I saw that he was sad by this comment. He had told her that he was sorry…and that she could come back any time and ask him any thing she wanted…. This is what I heard from killer two… He sat there in front of his victim… His gaze meeting him head on… The man asked why…. Why after he had complied with all there demands had they shot him any way? Not only did the killer admit he was the shooter but he took full responsibility for his actions. He told of how he had shot because he thought the man was going to an alarm box… The man had been a body builder and a runner but now he sat there only a shell of the man he had been… His words were soft to the killer….He told of how he couldn’t sleep at night from reliving the whole thing every time he closed his eyes…. I was shocked at the humility of this man…. And when he finished… the killer of his soul spoke…. I wish I could recall exactly what he had said…word for word but all I can do is sum it up…. He expressed his heart felt apologies…. He said not only did he know what he had done but he lived with it every day of his life. I saw these two men shake hands…. They even tried a brief hug…. This on the other hand is not what I witnessed from Killer one….. The young truck driver had grown old as I watched him sit down across the table from his victim’s son…. He had been young in his mug shot picture and the years there had not been kind to him… He sat there with out of date feathered hair and a smug look on his face…. The son explained that he could not come to terms with what had happened to his mother…He told of the coroner asking him to identify her body…. He then asked if he could show a picture… he slid it across the table. A lovely woman with sparkling eyes looked up at her killer as he gazed down at it… then the son slid a picture of his family over…. A large group with brothers and sisters, children and grand children…. I saw the killer become annoyed…. Even his eyes rolled a few times showing how he thought none of this were relevant… Then the son slid a picture over and the killer got to see how he had left his mother…. He got to see her bruised, battered and bloody body as it lay on the slab waiting for the autopsy. He held fast to the story he didn’t remember…. All he remembered was going home and going to bed…. Yes he remembered drinking with his mother that night but nothing else…. He WOULD NOT say he was sorry for something he SAID he could not remember… I hope he stays a long time where he is…. His kind should be dropped like a rabid dog!

Since we are talking about killers, I was shocked to know that Woody Harrelson’s dad is doing a life sentence in a maximum federal prison for killing a federal Judge. “ Maximum John Wood Jr.” to be exact….. You might remember Woody in Cheer’s… and his movies. He spends a lot of money trying to get his dad out…All in vain……………..