When infamous “pick-ax murderer” Karla Faye Tucker was executed on
February 3, 1998, in Huntsville, Texas, small clusters of death penalty protesters
held a candle-light vigil. But many more of the hundreds gathered outside
the prison were there to cheer her death. A cardboard sign waved by one man
said it all: “May heaven help you. It’s sure as hell we won’t!”
Inside the prison, however, a man named Ron Carlson was praying for
Karla – not in the witness room for her victims’ families, where he could have
been, but in the one set aside for the family of the murderer.
It has been two years since I met Ron and heard his remarkable journey
from hatred to reconciliation, but what he told me sticks in my mind as if it
were yesterday:
Shortly after I came home one day at five after a hard day’s work – it was
the 13th of July, 1983 – the phone rang. It was my father. He said, “Ronnie,
you need to come over to the shop right away. We have reason to believe
your sister has been murdered.” I was floored. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t
even believe it when I saw her body being carried out of an apartment on
television.
Deborah was my sister, and she raised me. My mother and father divorced
when I was very young, and my mother died when I was six. I had no
brothers – just one sister – so Deborah was very special. Very special.
Deborah made sure I had clothes to wear, and that there was food on the
table. She helped me do my homework, and slapped me on the hand when
I did something wrong. She became my mother.
Now she was dead, with dozens of puncture wounds all over her body,
and the pick-ax that made them had been left in her heart. Deborah was not
one to have enemies. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong
time. The murderers had come over to steal motor--cycle parts from the
house where she was staying, and when they discovered Jerry Dean – the
guy she was with – they hacked him to death. They were high on drugs.
Then they discovered Deborah, so they had to kill her too…
Houston was in an uproar. Headlines screamed the gory details of the crime,
and the entire city lived in fear. A few weeks later the murderers – two drug
addicts named Karla Faye Tucker and Daniel Ryan Garret – were turned in by
relatives. Subsequently tried and convicted, they were both sentenced to death
by lethal injection. (Daniel later died in prison.) Still, Ron felt no relief:
I was glad they were caught, of course, but I wanted to kill them myself.
I was filled with sheer hatred, and I wanted to get even. I wanted to bury
that pick-ax in Karla’s heart, just like she had buried it in my sister’s.
Ron says that he was a problem drinker and drug abuser before his sister’s
death, but that after he buried her, he became more heavily involved than
ever. Then, about a year later, his father was shot to death.
I was often drunk, and I’d get high on LSD, marijuana, whatever I could get
my hands on, as often as I could. I also got into a lot of fights with my wife.
I was very angry. I even wanted to kill myself…
Then one night, I just couldn’t take it any more. I guess I had come to the
point where I knew I had to do something about the hatred and rage that was
building in me. It was getting so bad that all I wanted to do was destroy things
and kill people. I was heading down the same path as the people who had
killed my sister and my dad. Anyway, I opened a Bible, and began to read.
It was really weird. I was high – I was smoking doobies and reading the
word of God! But when I got to where they crucified Jesus, I slammed the
book shut. For some reason it struck me like it never had before: My God,
they even killed Jesus!
Then I got down on my knees – I’d never done this before – and asked
God to come into my life and make me into the type of person he wanted
me to be, and to be the Lord of my life. That’s basically what happened that
night.
Later I read more, and a line from the Lord’s Prayer – this line that says
“forgive us as we forgive” – jumped out at me. The meaning seemed clear:
“You won’t be forgiven until you forgive. I remember arguing to myself, “I
can’t do that, I could never do that,” and God seemed to answer right back,
“Well, Ron, you can’t. But through me you can.”
Not long after that I was talking on the phone with a friend, and he
asked me if I knew that Karla was in town, at the Harris County Jail. “You
ought to go down there and give her a piece of your mind,” he said. Now
this friend didn’t know where I’d been going spiritually, and I didn’t tell him.
But I did decide to go see Karla.
When I got there, I walked up to her and told her that I was Deborah’s
brother. I didn’t say anything else at first. She looked at me and said,
are who?” I repeated myself, and she still stared, like she just couldn’t believe
what she was hearing. Then she started to cry.
I said, “Karla, whatever comes out of all this, I want you to know that
I forgive you, and that I don’t hold anything against you.” At that point all
my hatred and anger was taken away. It was like some great weight had been
lifted off my shoulders.
Ron says he talked with Karla at length, and that during their discussion he
discovered that she, too, had recently come to believe in God, and that her
faith had changed her whole outlook on life. It was then that he decided he
would have to return and find out more about her:
At first I had just wanted to go in, forgive her, and move on, but after that
first visit I needed to go back. I wanted to find out if she was really sincere
about this Christian walk she claimed to be on. I also wanted to find out
why people kill, why they murder each other. I never found that out, but I
did find out that Karla was real. I also found out, through her, that people
can change and that God is real.
Karla’s mother had been a prostitute and a drug addict, and she’d introduced
her daughter to all that when she was very young. Karla started
shooting drugs when she was ten. It was only in prison that she turned her
life around – through a ministry at the Harris County Jail that reached out
to the women, gave them free Bibles, and helped them find something to
live for.
Ron visited Karla on death row every second month or so for the next two
years, and he also wrote letters to her. They were soon close friends. He
remembers:
People just couldn’t understand it. They said something was obviously
wrong with me – that I should hate the person who killed Deborah, not
reach out to her. One relative told me I was disgracing my sister’s memory,
the way I was acting, and that she was probably rolling in her grave. Another
made a public statement the day Karla was to be executed about how
happy he and his family were to know that she would soon be dead. He
said, “We have a saying in Texas – ‘What goes around, comes around.’”
Karla herself was mystified by Ron’s attitude toward her. Talking with a Dutch
television crew who interviewed her shortly before her execution, she said:
“It’s unbelievable. Amazing. Forgiveness is one thing. But to go beyond that
and reach out to me – to actively love me…?” If anything, she found it easier
to understand the thousands of Texans who wanted her dead:
I can understand their rage. Who wouldn’t? It’s an expression of their hurt
and pain. And I know people don’t think I deserve forgiveness. But who
does deserve it? I’ve been given a new life, and the hope – the promise – that
this is not the final reality.
Karla went to her death bravely, smiling as she made her last statement – “I
am so sorry…I hope God gives you all peace through this” – and humming as
she was strapped to the gurney and pumped with lethal chemicals.
As for Ron, he insists that it was useless to execute her: “It does no good
whatsoever to kill anyone. It does not make our streets safer. It just makes
more victims. Sure, I miss my sister. But I miss Karla too.”