Christ taught us to forgive, and we hopefully all try to teach our children to forgive. However, many times when a crisis comes into our lives, we forget. Society often encourages hate and vengeance, and too quickly forgets "the forgiveness" message . At least, this is what I found when I was greeted with one of the most horrid crisis of my life.

They first talked in the Perry, Oklahoma jail in 1990. Sue Norton was so frightened she could barely stand. “I want you to know I don’t hate you,” she said to the man who had just been convicted of murdering her father and stepmother. “You should,” Robert Knighton responded. “And if you are guilty, I forgive you,” Sue Norton said.

Knighton couldn’t believe what he heard. He looked at Norton as if she was crazy. “Lady,” he cried out, putting his hands on his head. “Nobody’s ever been nice to me ever before. I’d be better off dead.” The commotion brought the jailer, who told Sue she would have to leave. “I want to pray first,” she said, and reached through the bars to grasp the same hand that a jury believed had pulled the trigger of the handgun that killed Sue Norton’s “daddy” and his wife. Knighton tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him go.

Norton writes “friend” in the blank on the form at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, where Knighton is on death row. Norton, who comes to McAlester from her home in Arkansas City, visits the prison about four times a year. She is here today, because it is Knighton’s 56th birthday.

The day before she mailed him his birthday package. Three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, three T-shirts and an Elvis card. Sue visits with the guards, chatting as they make her slip off her shoes and frisk her. “I’m used to this by now,” she says. “After five or six years, I’m used to it.” A prison staff member tells Sue that an Oklahoma state senator is lobbying to take away inmates’ televisions. Sue keeps smiling, but her eyes narrow. “What is his name?” she asks.

For several minutes she waits until a guard unlocks the barred door, and then she walks down a long, colorless hallway toward the visiting area. She doesn’t even glance at the door to the execution chamber, where a gurney with arms straps awaits its next occupant. Robert Knighton will probably die there some day. For two hours, Sue talks to Knighton. She calls him “B.K.” Through a thick glass that sometimes fogs over, they talk and laugh on prison telephones. Norton tells him about her husband, her kids and her grandchildren. She tells him about her ongoing crusade against the death penalty.

Knighton can see the laugh lines that paint her pretty face when she smiles or lets loose with her carefree giggle. Sue Norton is as colorful as the prison is not. They never talk about the crimes Knighton is accused of committing. Never. Sue won’t say if Knighton has ever apologized for what happened at her daddy’s house. The inmate tells her about his life in the penitentiary and the other death row inmates she has come to know through him. Nothing much changes here, and there isn’t a lot of new information to share. Knighton complains about prison, and Norton responds like she always does: “Just wait. Tomorrow the rules will be different.” Somehow the two hours fly by. They pray together. She says: “Love ya” and makes her way back down the hallway. The time has gone by too fast for Knighton. Norton is the only person who ever visits him. She is his only friend.

The telephone call came at about 9 p.m. on January 9, 1990. Sue Norton was visiting her younger brother in Wichita. “Your daddy is dead,” the voice said at the other end of the line. She was shocked, sickened and saddened. Richard and Virginia Denney were old and poor. They lived in a tiny, rented farmhouse outside of Tonkawa, Oklahoma. They had no telephone. They raised chickens and goats. They sold the eggs and milk in town.

According to testimony in Knighton’s trial, Knighton, a woman in her early 20’s and a teenage boy went to the Denney farmhouse and demanded money. Despite begging for their lives, the Denneys were shot as they sat at their dining room table. The trio stole $61 and an old pick-up truck. They were arrested the next day in Texas. They also were charged with killing two people in Missouri. The teenage boy received a life sentence with parole for his part in the Denney crime. He is incarcerated in the Oklahoma prison system. The woman received a 15-year sentence, and has been released from prison.

The Denney deaths were a gruesome crime of heartless, cold-blooded murder. Sue and her husband, Gene, had to scrub the blood off the floor. Sue recalls the first time she saw Knighton. It was his arraignment in Noble County District Court. He looked crazed. He looked mean. She saw no emotion in his eyes. During a 2-week preliminary hearing, she started learning more about Knighton. During the trial a few months later, she found herself struggling with the hate society dictated she should feel for him.

She doesn’t condone what he has done, but she understands his background may have led to this tragedy. Knighton wouldn’t talk much about his childhood. He said most of it he couldn’t remember. Sue said over the years she has pulled the stories of Knighton’s horrific past out of him. Springfield, Missouri, was home to hi. He was born to a mother who had eight husbands and many boyfriends. He can’t remember wanting to grow up to be anything. There was a toy guitar, he recalls.

For a while, he dreamed of being a famous singer, like his beloved Elvis. Knighton was emotionally and physically abused, Norton says. When he was 5 or 6 years old, he went to Thanksgiving dinner at his grandparent’s house. He was forced to sit outside on the porch as the rest of the family celebrated inside. His only crime was that he looked too much like his father. He cried and banged on the door until neighbors called the police. Even they didn’t help Knighton, who was then called “Bobby.”

One of Knighton’s mother’s boyfriends hit Bobby hard enough that the child ended up in the hospital. Another boyfriend destroyed Bobby’s favorite toy, a stuffed monkey, because his mother had no where to send him for the night. Bobby, who only stayed in school through the fourth grade, ended up in a boy’s reformatory when he was 12. He told Norton that boys who misbehaved were beaten or placed in a cellar for days at a time.

He spent time in other juvenile facilities and landed in prison in Oklahoma as a young man. In 1974, he was in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sentenced to 40 years for manslaughter and kidnapping charges. In November of 1989, the prison door was unlocked and he was set free. “They told me to go home,” Knighton said during an interview in the Oklahoma prison. “They just didn’t tell me where home was. Everybody was gone. I had no one to talk to.” Knightly talks slowly and deliberately. He has difficulty looking visitors in the eye. His voice is soft, and the gestures of his tattooed arms are slight. “Love” is tattooed on the four fingers of his right hand.

When he was released from the Missouri prison, he was placed in a halfway house in Kansas City, Missouri. There was no one there to tell him how to do things. Nearly two decades had passed since he had lived in the world. Knighton didn’t even know how to get a can of soda out of the new machines. He didn’t know how to ride a bus, because the cords to pull and make it stop were gone. He had to adjust to people brushing against him, which in prison is interpreted as an act of aggression. “I stood on a corner in downtown Kansas City with thousands of people rushing past me,” Knighton said. “They all had places to go. I had nowhere to go.” He was a drug addict. Within a few weeks of his release from prison, Knighton left Kansas City halfway house and took to the road with his two young companions.

Norton says she had to forgive in order to heal. This morning, she leans back in her chair in the restaurant at the McAlester Holiday Inn. “Sometimes I wish I could just quit doing this,” she says, her smile gone. “Sometimes I wish I could just get a real job, and stop all this. But God gave me this job. I don’t have a choice.” Since the Denney’s deaths and her friendship with Knighton, Norton has become active in the organization “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation” and the “Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty.”

“If I don’t fight this with all I’ve got I’m just as guilty as the person who pulls the lever,” she says. She corresponds with half a dozen prisoners and visits three regularly, including Knighton. Norton will talk to anyone, anywhere about the death penalty. She tells her story with a smile, sweet voice and without judgment. Sue Norton, 48, is gregarious. She calls people “honey” and always, always departs a conversation with a hug or a squeeze of the hand.

Knighton v. Mullin U.S. Court of Appeals (10th Circuit 2002)