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T A B L E++T A L K

When does "tough love" cross the line and become abuse? Join the debate in Table Talk

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The mother of all years
By the editors of Mothers Who Think
A mom's almanac of the sad, silly, serious and sublime stories that made news in '97
(12/23/97)

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R E C E N T L Y

The Forgiven (Part 1)
By Michelle Goldberg
Who would befriend such savage murderers? The victims' parents did
(01/07/98)

Time for One Thing
By Elizabeth Rapoport
Stop apologizing
(01/06/98)

Cyberspace: The final dating frontier
By Eve Glicksman
A cyber romantic discovers that the Web can bring doctors, bankers, engineers and old college boyfriends to your door
(01/05/98)

Family myths, family realities
By Stephanie Coontz
A string of lurid cases this year drew attention away from the real challenges that confront American families
(12/23/97)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | When people talk about forgiving killers, they tend to distinguish between the psychopaths and the drug addicts or armed robbers or other offenders who seem somehow less evil, more capable of rehabilitation. But one founding member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation made her peace with a killer whose crimes were as grisly as those of the most notorious serial murderers.

Marietta Jeager was on a camping trip with her husband and children in Montana when David (she doesn't use his last name because she doesn't want to hurt his family) cut through one of their tents with a knife and kidnapped her 7-year-old daughter, Susie. He kept her locked in a cabin for a week, where he tortured and raped her. Then he killed and cannibalized her. A year after the murder, he still had not been caught. On the first anniversary of Susie's death, he called Jeager at her home in Michigan to taunt her. Jeager quietly asked him, "What can I do to help you?" He was so undone, she says, that he eventually gave her enough information for the FBI to catch him.

When Jeager told me this story, I assumed that she had simply tried to keep him on the phone long enough to find out where he was. She insists, however, that her forgiveness was genuine. "It really was, to my own amazement," she says. "I had been working on it and praying for it for a whole year. And it turned the whole thing around, because his intention was to call and get his kicks and hang up. What undid him was that I asked what I could do to help him. He started crying, and that's when I really realized what a miracle had happened to me. He said, 'I wish this burden could be lifted from me,' and then he couldn't stop crying. He kept asking me to hang up and I wouldn't because it was my only link to my little girl." They talked for more than an hour.

The murderer hanged himself in his cell, so Jeager never spoke with him again. Had he lived, she says, she would have written him and maybe visited. "We're all capable of evil," she says. "Some saint said, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' Murderers themselves have first been victims of violence -- verbal, physical, sexual. For many of them, that's all they've ever known. The man who took my little girl was a very, very sick young man. His ideas about sexuality and atonement for sin and making sacrifice came from his very Fundamentalist background. And he was schizophrenic. There were all kinds of people in him telling each other what to do."

Her daughter's murder was so brutal, so extreme, that Jeager's forgiveness awes even other members of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. Aba Gayle, whose daughter was also killed, calls her a saint. Jeager insists she's far from it. "I keep saying I want to fart and belch in front of people who say that to show them it's not true. The reason I object is that it lets people say, 'Marietta can do it, she's different.' I want to say that I'm just like everybody else. I don't want people to look for reasons not to deal with forgiveness because I know what a gift it is, the healthiness and wholesomeness that it brings to my life."

She believes that forgiveness is the only way to preserve one's health after a trauma like a child's murder. "More and more of the medical profession is telling us that the root causes of our illnesses and addictions are old hatreds and resentments," she says. "We forgive first of all for our own sake. Spirituality prompted my decision to forgive, but also the knowledge that hatred is not healthy."

Waltrute Boudewyn, a member of the traditional support group Parents of Murdered Children, agrees that murder can destroy the health of a victim's family members. "Some people are affected to the point where they have heart attacks. In my observation, it can be likened to a crashing of the immune system so that you become more susceptible to diseases."

That's exactly what happened to Jeager's husband, who had a heart attack shortly after the murder. "I saw the deleterious effects that it had on him," Jeager says. "He died an early death because his body couldn't take the stress of holding on to that hate. Those who maintain a vindictive mind-set give the killer another victim. When an execution is done with, they realize that they don't feel healed. They feel guilty that they bought into the lie that another death would make up to them what they lost. The truth is that there is no amount of retaliatory deaths that will compensate for the loss of our loved ones or restore them to our arms. To say that an execution would be just retribution is really to insult the immeasurable value of any one person to us."

Like Jeager, Aba Gayle's best friend, Sue Norton, is admired by other members of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation because of how quickly she forgave the man who murdered her relatives -- in this case, her father and stepmother. In fact, an hour before an Oklahoma jury gave Robert Knighton the death penalty, Norton was sitting outside his cell holding his hand.

Norton, like Gayle, believes she was given a direct message from God to forgive Knighton, whom she calls BK. "I had never thought of forgiving him, ever. This man was a mean, bad man. He'd been an Aryan Brotherhood leader in prison. But I came to realize that killing him was not going to take away my hurt."

When the jury went into deliberation, Norton looked so upset that Knighton's attorney asked if she was all right. She told him that she needed to see Knighton. "When I was sitting in front of his jail cell, I said, 'I don't know what to say to you, but I don't hate you.'"

He replied, "You should. You'd be better off."

She told him, "I've never hated anyone in my whole life and I'm not going to start. If you're guilty, I forgive you." Then she reached inside the jail cell and held his hand. "He didn't barely touch my fingers and I just grabbed on," she recalls. "This big old mean man had one tear rolling down his face, and that was the first of many tears that BK and I have shared."

N E X T+P A G E: Friends and family call her a "fanatic and weirdo"

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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER