[Times art: Rossie Newson]

By BILL DURYEA, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 20, 2001

The people scheduled to watch Timothy McVeigh die hope to find peace. Some who have witnessed Florida executions say it isn't that easy.

They come to the gate of the Florida State Prison in Starke wanting many things: vengeance, an apology, an end to the waiting or simply for the pain to go away.

Often they arrive in the darkness, weary from the road and a bad night on a motel mattress.

They are ushered politely through barbed wire fences and clanging gates, through the ominous corridors of the prison itself. Through the walls they can hear a rumble of protest from those left behind on death row.

They sit in chairs with heart-shaped backs in the front row of a small room with a large clock. They look through a pane of glass, and they watch the last living moments of the person who often was the last to see their loved ones alive.

This is the compensation the state of Florida offers to the families of the victims of the state's worst criminals. It invites them to witness another death.

The U.S. government made the same offer to the more than 1,100 family members and victims of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Able to accommodate only 10 in the witness room of the execution chamber in Terre Haute, Ind., federal officials have set up closed circuit television in Oklahoma City so an additional 300 people can watch Timothy McVeigh die by lethal injection.

The victims and relatives of victims who have signed up to watch (and nearly three times as many have declined) hope that seeing his death -- not just hearing about it or reading about it -- will provide the relief they so desperately seek.

The only people who know if this works are those who have passed through that witness room before.

We spoke to five witnesses in the days before McVeigh's original execution date of May 16. Among the many subjects they addressed, all five spoke ruefully of the delays they experienced and their relief that the Oklahoma City victims would not endure the same lingering tension.

Then the FBI revealed its paperwork bungle, and McVeigh's execution was pushed back a month.

When and if McVeigh is executed, his witnesses will complete their passage through his final moments. Then they will understand why those who went before them say they left the witness room changed.

Why most say for the better.

Why some are not so sure.

'A beautiful day'

John Weiler quit his job as an executive at Westinghouse after his pregnant wife and their two young daughters were bludgeoned and shot to death by a burglar who didn't want witnesses.

He quit, he says, for the sake of his co-workers.

"It was very difficult for people to come in every day and see me, knowing this had happened," he says. "It wasn't noble. It was practical."

That was in Jacksonville in 1982. On July 8, 1999, 17 years later, long after Allen Lee Davis had been convicted of the murders, Weiler entered the witness room with the same stoic practicality.

"It's fairly straightforward. You're expecting to get satisfaction," Weiler says from his home on Merritt Island. His voice is polite but clipped.

"You're expecting to identify the individual responsible, look that person in the eye and see if there's any response, whether there's any remorse.

"There never was any remorse."

Weiler embraced the death penalty long before he ever knew Davis' name; he believed in its power as a deterrent. But after he became a victim, he realized that the death penalty could serve the victim, too. To be present would help him heal.

"Closed circuit TV would not be good enough for me," Weiler says. "You don't have the opportunity to make eye contact with the individual."

Sitting no more than 5 feet from Davis, flanked by his second wife, one of his late wife's sisters and a family friend, Weiler had 20 minutes to stare at Davis.

"He didn't want to look at us. He tried hard to avoid it," Weiler says. "But whatever way he looked, there was someone."

Weiler had this thought: "Your time has come, and I'm going to watch it happen."

Weiler believes Davis experienced the most pain at that moment. Not the instant the electric current surged through his sedated body, not when the blood dripped from his nose. But the moment when he had to confront the gaze of his victims.

"It wasn't nice. I didn't expect it to be nice. I would have liked it to be a lot more painful. It was nowhere near the pain he inflicted on the victims."

It was light out when he walked out the door of the witness room.

"It was a beautiful day. For us, it was a very beautiful day."

'I wanted to bang on the glass'

The death penalty hasn't fixed Pamela Bates' life, but it has helped.

"It's not as bad as it was," she says, her voice a rasp of cigarettes. "There's one less person in the world to destroy another family."

Her life was fine before New Year's Day 1995, when a drifter named Dan Patrick Hauser strangled her 21-year-old daughter in a Fort Walton Beach motel room just to see what it would feel like to kill someone. Melanie Rodrigues was Bates' only child.

"I didn't care about anything," she says. "I cried a whole lot. And I read. Sci-fi, westerns, a lot of murder mysteries, believe it or not. They get caught in the end, just like Dan Patrick Hauser."

But catching Hauser was not enough for Bates. The justice system determined that he should die, and Bates agreed.

For five years -- a blink of time compared to most death penalty cases -- Bates suffered the mounting tension of the unfulfilled sentence. She grew to dread the sudden intrusion of the ringing phone.

It would be someone from the state attorney's office updating her on the appeals or someone from the governor's office telling her a warrant had been signed, or a reporter seeking her reaction to the latest development.

"The longer they breathe," she says, "the worse it hurts the family."

She and her fiance, Joseph Bates, now her husband, drove seven hours from Fort Walton Beach to Starke on a Tuesday last August. They arrived to discover that the execution had been stayed by an appeal from the Capital Collateral Counsel, a state agency that intervened on Hauser's behalf even though he had fired his attorneys.

"They're a bunch of pansy-ass people that want to stick their nose where it don't belong," says Pamela Bates, 47.

"He wanted to die. I wanted him to die, too."

Three days later, the execution went forward. Quickly.

Hauser, wearing a gray Buddhist robe, closed his eyes and declined to speak any last words.

"I just wish he would have looked at me. I just wanted to bang on the glass and scream: "You're going to die!' "

Almost as soon as she had sat down, Bates was standing again and walking outside to speak to reporters in the rain.

"After it got all over with, we went to a bar and had a few drinks. Bourbon and water," Bates says. "Joe saw the relief in me. It was immediate."

When the phone rings now, she doesn't flinch.

"I know he's dead."

A wound that doesn't heal

"Nothing's changed," says Mark Parker. "And I knew it wouldn't."

"I still wake up every morning paralyzed. I go to bed that way. That's not going to change."

In 1984, Parker, then 19, was working as a corrections officer in the Orange County Courthouse when Thomas Provenzano, an electrician who thought he was Jesus, started firing at men in uniform.

Provenzano, carrying four weapons inside his Army jacket, shot Deputy Harry Dalton in the face, gravely wounding him. He shot William "Arnie" Wilkerson in the chest, killing him. Provenzano shot Parker in the back as he ran down the hall for help.

Parker, paralyzed below the neck, was in the hospital "four months, 15 days, 10 hours and 32 minutes," he says. "I left from there, came back home, and I've been here ever since."

After he was convicted, little changed for Provenzano either. He marked the end of the millennium from his cell on death row. Four times a governor signed a death warrant, and four times it was stayed.

On June 20, 2000, Parker sat in the second row of the witness room waiting for the curtain to be pulled back. Provenzano, 51, had been strapped to the table already.

Nothing happened.

With 11 minutes to spare, the execution was called off.

"It's starting all over again," Parker said to Carl Head, the friend who had accompanied him. "It's going to be another 14 years before they execute this guy."

Parker went home to bed to recuperate from a bad pressure sore in the middle of his back.

The victims' advocate from the governor's office called the next morning. Can you come back?

I need time to heal, he said.

The governor really wants to do it today, she said.

The execution, once it happened, was about what Parker expected but less than he had hoped for. During the many delays, the method had changed from electrocution to lethal injection.

"I felt deprived that he wasn't electrocuted," Parker says. "I wanted to see him suffer a little bit, and he didn't suffer.

"Since the shooting, I've had 11 operations. Each of the operations they've put me to sleep. That's what they did with him. The only difference is he didn't wake up."

Parker spent the next seven months in bed recuperating from the pressure sore.

The curtain opens -- and closes

Gary Dalton sat in the front row, breathing hard.

"You almost hyperventilate in the anticipation of the whole thing," he says. "You're sitting there thinking of all the things that went on."

His father, Harry Dalton, lived seven years after Provenzano shot him in the face, but he was never the same.

"There's a curtain you can almost see through," Dalton says. "You can see people moving around behind it."

Staring at the drawn curtain, Dalton thought about the guilt that dominated his life for so long after the shooting.

"I was supposed to meet my dad that day for lunch," he says. "I always wondered what if I had been there. I could have stopped him."

Dalton, 41, became an Orange County deputy like his father. He was too angry, though, to attend the whole of Provenzano's trial. He went one day, but Provenzano "freaked out" when he saw Dalton. Father and son looked nearly identical.

Dalton's rage subsided over time. But he never forgave Provenzano, whom he came to refer to as Tommy, as if they'd known each other for years.

"How can you forgive someone who doesn't ask for it?"

When the curtain opened, it startled Dalton a little. Would Provenzano say anything now?

"We thought maybe at the last moment he'd say sorry. "This is what I did.'

"When they opened the curtains, he looked around and talked to his attorney. There wasn't a crazy bone in his body. He was articulate. He was soft-spoken, but he was scared."

He saw Provenzano's legs shaking. Then they stopped.

"What a dumb ass," Dalton thought. "Twenty-five years ago, it could have been so different."

Provenzano was breathing. Then he stopped. He turned blue.

Dalton stood up and looked at his brother, Bruce, next to him. Bruce said, "Man, that's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen."

"It's over," Dalton said back.

"It was a very good feeling," he says. "Tommy needed this. He needed to go."

Giving, and seeking, forgiveness

Celeste Fausel did everything she could to avoid seeing Gerald Stano die.

For months before his final death warrant was signed in 1998, Fausel had asked to meet with the man who had confessed to murdering 41 women in three states. One of them was Fausel's older sister, Mary Carol Maher, whom Stano stabbed to death in 1980 after she rejected his sexual advances.

"I didn't want to yell at him," says Fausel, 39. "I actually wanted to tell him I forgave him. Unless you forgive someone, you can't continue with your life."

If she could see Stano before, then she wouldn't have to be part of the execution. She wouldn't need to betray her Catholic belief that any killing is wrong.

"But he wouldn't see me.

"If he wouldn't see me, I would have to go to the execution."

Fausel arrived at the prison very early on the morning of March 23, 1998, with her brother John Patrick Maher. Officials escorted them to a cafeteria, where inmates served them breakfast.

"I didn't have any appetite."

Several legislators came up and introduced themselves.

"When we walked into the chamber, it was dark outside. They brought Stano right in.

"I didn't know the woman sitting to my right. Apparently it was one of Stano's lawyers. I was going to ask her to move. But I thought she might be a family member.

"As soon as (Stano's) eyes would pan across the front row, she would hold her hands straight up and point at her eyes: "Just look here.'

"You could tell he was upset and she was trying to help him through it."

At the moment the switch was pulled, a brother of another victim shouted, "Yes, yes!" and Fausel looked directly at Stano and spoke the words, "I forgive you." He didn't see it. He didn't hear it.

And then she began to cry, as if she were reliving her sister's death.

Three years later, Fausel is still tormented by her decision to witness the execution.

"It didn't make me feel better. If someone thinks it's going to make them feel better, it doesn't. The pain doesn't stop because his life is gone."

In some ways, she feels worse.

"It probably was very wrong for me to be there."

In her private prayers, she asks God to forgive her.

The long wait for justice

There is no shortage of experts ready to tell witnesses how they should feel after an execution.

They ought to feel terrible, psychologically traumatized, say researchers who study what happens to people who witness violent deaths. As a defense against the shock, the person's mind cuts off the connections between emotions and thoughts. It's called dissociation. People who suffer from it say they feel numb, they have nightmares, they do poorly at work, their relationships suffer.

And yet most of the relatives and victims say they felt like that before the execution. For some, the relief of seeing the execution was so profound that they shouted their thanks to God as they walked away.

Those who have witnessed many executions, who have watched many families walk in and out of that small room, know that killing the killer does not always provide the anticipated relief.

Victims' advocates tell the families that all they can guarantee is that their involvement with the justice system is over. They tell them they'll never again have to plan a family holiday around a court hearing.

It's an odd notion -- that the punishment can be pointless, perhaps even detrimental to the survivors, but that they will feel better once it's over.

Perhaps they feel better because by being there they have obtained clear proof that this malignant relationship, as unwanted as cancer, has ended. The relative walks out, and the killer doesn't.

The victims who choose not to attend find other ways to sever their ties to the murderer. They forgive. From then on, they say, they no longer need to wait for him to die for their lives to resume.

But those who choose to witness must depend on the government and the courts to bring them satisfaction. That process, as the McVeigh case points out, is unreliable.

Though McVeigh had publicly admitted his guilt and halted his appeals, the last-minute revelation that several thousand FBI documents were never released to his lawyers delayed what looked like an inevitability. Once again, it showed how little control the victims have over anything except whether they will watch or turn away.

The victims of killers less notorious than McVeigh spend years in this limbo, growing angrier all the while. But how much of what is taken for bloodthirstiness is simply frustration born of years of delay? These are not killers by choice, but circumstance. They just want something to work the way it's supposed to.

Still, one wonders how they would cope in a world in which the death penalty was not an option.

"I'd have been angry," Pamela Bates says. "I'd probably have stayed angry the rest of my life."

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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