On the first anniversary of her daughter’s abduction, Marietta Jaeger picked up the telephone and heard the voice of the man who had taken the child. She did not shout at him. She asked whether Susie was alive and safe, and she told him she was worried about him as well. The call lasted more than an hour. The FBI was recording it. Near the end, the caller broke down and sobbed. Jaeger went on to forgive him, and she spent the following decades speaking publicly against the death penalty. She is a useful place to begin, because her forgiveness was not a simple thing, and neither was anyone else’s in the cases below.
Families of murder victims are asked, by reporters and courtrooms and parole boards, to say how they feel. Some of them have forgiven in public, in letters, at sentencing hearings and in front of television cameras. Others have refused, and said so just as plainly. These cases show something that neither the forgiving nor the refusing side always expects: the two groups are not divided on punishment. Several of the relatives who said they had forgiven also said they wanted the offender to stay in prison or, in one case, to be executed. Several who refused to forgive had no wish to see the offender’s sentence made lighter than it already was. What separates them is what they think forgiveness is for.
David Meirhofer confessed in 1974 to four killings in Gallatin County, Montana, spread over seven years. The best known was the death of Susie Jaeger, a seven-year-old girl from Michigan who was taken during a family camping trip in June 1973. Meirhofer, a 24-year-old contractor from the nearby town of Manhattan, was never tried. He died by suicide in his cell on September 29, 1974, a few hours after he confessed, so none of the killings was ever proved in court. He was charged, according to a 2023 newspaper column, with the death of Susie and the death of a young woman; the charges were never tried.
Marietta Jaeger spent a year not knowing what had happened to her daughter. In June 1974, a year to the day after the abduction, the kidnapper telephoned her. She stayed calm. "I wish there was something we could do to help you," she said, as she later recalled her words. When she asked what she could do for him, he broke down. She later said she had felt a strange calm during the conversation. "I was grateful to know some part of his spirit abhorred the act he had committed," she said, as quoted in a 2023 column. The FBI said the recording helped identify the caller for certain as Meirhofer. In a later call, also recorded, he gave details that investigators said only the person who took Susie could have known. Then he turned angry. "You’ll never see your child again," he told her. He was arrested in 1974.
Jaeger’s forgiveness grew out of her Catholic faith and a year of prayer, she told reporters. She described the change as a wrestling match that God won, and said that on her own she would never have wanted to forgive the man who took her daughter. "God’s idea of justice is not punishment but restoration," she said, as quoted in 2023. She told prosecutors she did not want Meirhofer executed.
She was careful about what forgiveness meant. "Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting," she said in 2015. She did not argue that crime should go unpunished, and she said that people who kill should be punished, with life imprisonment where necessary. What she rejected was execution. "The death penalty certainly wouldn’t change what happened to Susie," she said at one talk in Montana. At another she said that "it demeans our own dignity and worth when we take on the same mindset of someone who kills."
Years after the case, she met Meirhofer’s mother. The accounts differ on what passed between them. By one, the two women hugged but did not talk about the crime; by another, Jaeger told his mother she had forgiven her son, and the two wept on each other’s shoulders.
Jaeger became a campaigner against capital punishment. She was an early member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a group launched in 1976 by Marie Deans, and in the early 1990s she helped start Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing with Bill Pelke, whose grandmother had been killed in Indiana in 1985. By 2015 the group had toured 40 states and 16 countries, bringing relatives of murder victims to speak against the death penalty. She wrote about her daughter and her own path in a book, The Lost Child, and in a later one, When a Child Is Taken, according to newspaper columns about her, and she led retreats and worked in prison ministry.
Coral Eugene Watts confessed in 1982 to killing 13 women, 12 of them in Texas and one in Michigan. He was 28 when he was arrested in Houston on May 23, 1982. Prosecutors said they had "not a stitch of evidence" tying him to any killing, and they gave him immunity from prosecution for the deaths he described, in return for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a 60-year sentence. Judge Doug Shaver accepted the deal because there was no evidence to convict Watts of murder and the police needed his help. "Sad to say," Shaver said, 60 years was the most the evidence allowed. He said he would recommend that Watts never be paroled. Ira Jones acknowledged that the arrangement was hard to accept, because people wanted the man to "burn in hell," but said the answers meant a great deal to the families.
Michigan would not join in. Watts offered to confess to 22 killings in that state if he were given the same immunity. William Delhey, the Washtenaw County prosecutor, said he saw no purpose in granting immunity for the Ann Arbor deaths, given a Texas sentence that could be shortened by good-time credit. In 1982, Watts told Tom Ladd: "if I ever get out, I’m going to do it again."
The families of the Texas victims had backed the plea bargain because they wanted to know what had happened to their daughters, sisters and wives. Over the next two decades they came to see its cost. Watts had been sentenced under a Texas mandatory supervision law passed in 1977 and rescinded in 1987, and 60 Minutes calculated that he would be released after about 24 years. A court ruling had removed a finding that would have limited his credit, and by the early 2000s his release was scheduled for 2006. Lawrence Fossi had fought Watts’s release since 1988. "If this guy’s criminal history isn’t enough to keep him from getting the highest rate of good time, the rules are meaningless," he said.
The families organized, petitioning and lobbying Governor Rick Perry for two years. They did not speak with one voice. Laura Allen, Anna Ledet’s mother, had long before written to Watts to tell him she forgave him. "I just want him to stay in prison," she said. At a memorial gathering, Joe Tilley, Linda Tilley’s father, said: "Forgiveness cannot be bestowed when forgiveness is not sought." Linda’s mother, Carol Tilley, said the murder had destroyed her faith in God. Paul Bunten, who had interviewed Watts in prison in 1982 and later became police chief in Saline, Michigan, said: "I don’t understand how you can forgive somebody for taking somebody’s life." Watts’s sister, Sharon Watts, said her brother was on medication and lacked "the energy to get out and do something." The psychologist Harley Stock said his chance of rehabilitation "approaches zero."
Michigan acted. In November 2004 an Oakland County jury convicted Watts of first-degree murder in the 1979 death of Helen Dutcher, and on December 7, 2004, he was sentenced to life without parole. In 2007 he was convicted in Kalamazoo of the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele and received a second life sentence. He died of prostate cancer in September 2007, a little over a week later. Those two Michigan verdicts are the only murder convictions in his record. Allen, who had forgiven him, and Joe Tilley, who said forgiveness could not be given to a man who had not asked for it, were on opposite sides of that question and on the same side of the one that mattered to the legislature and the governor: neither wanted him released.
Chester Dewayne Turner has been convicted of murdering 14 women in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1998. A jury convicted him of ten murders in April 2007 and sentenced him to death, and a second jury convicted him of four more on June 19, 2014. On August 1, 2014, Judge Robert Perry denied a defense motion for a new trial and sentenced him to death on each of the four counts. He called the evidence "compelling" and the DNA "irrefutable," and said Turner had "hunted women in the inner city." "It is the order of this court that you should suffer the death penalty," the judge said. As Turner was led out, he said, "I’ll be back."
Two relatives of the women in the 2014 case spoke that day, and between them they stand for the two poles of this subject. Gwendolyn Cameron, whose sister Cynthia Johnson was killed in 1997, said it was judgment day. "What he took from our family can never be replaced," she said, and: "The sooner they execute him, the better we’ll all be." Verna Belvin, whose niece Debra Williams was killed in 1992, said she had to forgive him. The Associated Press reported both statements in its account of the hearing.
The California Supreme Court upheld the 2007 judgment on November 30, 2020, reversing only a separate conviction for the death of an unborn child, according to Associated Press reports. The automatic appeal from the 2014 judgment was reported pending in June 2024. In June 2024 prosecutors in Salt Lake County, Utah, charged Turner with aggravated murder in a 1998 case. That charge has not been tried. California has had a moratorium on executions since 2019, so the sentence Cameron wanted carried out quickly has not been carried out.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer was a registered nurse in Ontario from 1995 to 2016. On June 1, 2017, she pleaded guilty in Woodstock to eight counts of first-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault, all involving people in her care, most of them elderly residents of long-term care facilities. On June 26 she was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. None of the deaths had been treated as suspicious. The offenses came to light only because, in September 2016, she checked herself into a Toronto psychiatric hospital and told her psychiatrist what she had done. A public inquiry found that families, co-workers, managers, inspectors, coroners and the nurses' regulator had all missed it.
The families learned this in public. At the plea, Susan Horvath, whose father, Arpad Horvath, 75, was one of the eight, said she could not forgive Wettlaufer, and she called for better oversight of long-term care. She became one of the most public voices among the relatives. At the sentencing hearing her brother said their father had been his teacher, his hero and his best friend. The court heard many kinds of pain from the other families: grief, anger and guilt about having placed a parent in care or having missed signs. In the Silcox family, relatives said the case had turned siblings against one another, and the judge told the families they could not blame themselves. A relative of one of the two men Wettlaufer tried to kill in 2008 and 2009 told the hearing he was still working through his anger. The woman she tried to kill in 2016, the only one of the fourteen people in the case still alive at the time of sentencing according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, told the court she was still afraid to sleep and had worried that Wettlaufer would get out and finish what she had started.
Wettlaufer apologized briefly. She said she was truly sorry for the people she had injured and killed, and that "sorry" was far too small a word. Civil suits followed in July 2017, and in September 2018 one family launched a lawsuit seeking $12.5 million.
The questions about where she was held continued. In March 2018 she was transferred from Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener to the Institut Philippe-Pinel in Montreal, which has a psychiatric unit for women serving federal sentences. In October 2018 Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the transfer was for mental health reasons and that public safety was the overriding consideration, and the Conservative deputy leader, Lisa Raitt, said victims' families deserved better. In March 2019 Correctional Service Canada wrote to Susan Horvath to tell her that Wettlaufer had been returned to Grand Valley. The inquiry’s report of July 31, 2019, concluded that the system would never have caught her without the confession.
Andrew Urdiales, a former Marine, was convicted of murdering eight women: two in Cook County, Illinois, in 2002, one in Livingston County, Illinois, in 2004, and five in Orange County, California, by a jury on May 23, 2018. He was sentenced to death in each place. Governor George Ryan’s mass commutation in January 2003 and the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in March 2011 removed the two Illinois sentences. In California Judge Gregg Prickett imposed death on all five counts on October 5, 2018.
The people who spoke at the end included a woman who was not a relative of any of the dead. In September 1992, when she was 19, she was abducted in Southern California and escaped, and the episode was presented as aggravation in the California penalty phase. No one had been arrested at the time. She testified about it at the Illinois sentencing hearing in 2004 and again at the California trial in 2018. At his sentencing in October 2018, CBS Los Angeles reported, she told Urdiales she forgave him, while saying this did not mean he did not deserve the death penalty. He died in a cell at San Quentin on November 3, 2018, and the prison system investigated the death as a suicide.
Her statement is the shortest of the group. She forgave him and, in the same breath, did not suggest that forgiveness changed what he deserved.
Genene Jones was a licensed vocational nurse in San Antonio and then Kerrville, Texas, whose patients included infants. On September 17, 1982, Chelsea McClellan, 15 months old, died at a clinic in Kerrville where Jones worked. In February 1984 a jury in Georgetown convicted Jones of her murder and sentenced her to 99 years. In October 1984 a San Antonio judge, Pat Priest, found her guilty of injury to a child and sentenced her to 60 years, to run concurrently. At the 1984 trial, Petti McClellan’s testimony was one of the most powerful moments, recalled Scott Monroe, who helped try the case. "The judge was crying. The jury was crying. The lawyers were crying," he told KSAT. "Except for Genene Jones. She did not shed a tear."
In 2011, after a news story about her possible release, the Texas Board of Nursing began proceedings to revoke her license. Jones wrote to the board from prison, apologizing "for the damage I did to all because of my crime." "My only defense is that I was not of sound mind then or any time before 1994," she wrote. "That is not an excuse just a fact." The board revoked the license on June 10, 2011. Told of the letter in 2017, Petti McClellan said: "I don’t think there was anything sincere about it."
A 1977 Texas law set Jones’s mandatory release for March 1, 2018, after 34 years and eight months in prison. Bexar County prosecutors indicted her for murder in five children’s deaths in 2017, and in January 2020 she pleaded guilty to the 1981 murder of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer and was sentenced to life, with the other four charges dismissed. She stands convicted of two murders and one count of injury to a child.
Arthur Gary Bishop confessed in July 1983 to abducting and killing five boys aged 4 to 13 in Salt Lake County, Utah, between 1979 and 1983. A jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, and he was sentenced to death in 1984. After the Utah Supreme Court upheld the verdicts in February 1988, he asked to end his appeals. He gave the psychiatrists who examined him several reasons, the Deseret News reported in April 1988. He believed his death would have a cleansing effect on the community and on the families. Some of his victims' families had not forgiven him, he said, and he believed his execution would spare them what he called the sin of unforgiveness. He was executed in June 1988. His last words, as recorded in a 2019 KUTV list of those executed in Utah, were: "Give my apologies to the families of my victims."
Bishop’s reasoning reverses the pattern of the other cases: here it was the offender, not the relatives, who spoke about what forgiveness required of the families.
The statements in these cases were made at different moments, and the moment shaped them. Jaeger spoke to the man who had taken her daughter, on a telephone line the FBI was recording, before there was any arrest. Allen wrote to Watts in prison to say she forgave him, and said she wanted him to stay there. Belvin and Cameron spoke at one Los Angeles sentencing hearing, one of them saying she had to forgive and the other that the sooner Turner was executed the better. Susan Horvath, offered Wettlaufer’s apology in the Woodstock courtroom, said she could not forgive her. The survivor in the Urdiales case forgave him in October 2018 and said it did not mean he did not deserve to die.
Forgiveness and punishment did not line up the way a listener might expect. Jaeger forgave and opposed execution. Allen and the 1992 survivor forgave and wanted the sentence to hold. Joe Tilley said forgiveness could not be given where it was not sought, and Carol Tilley said the murder had destroyed her faith in God. Petti McClellan did not believe Jones’s apology. Where relatives made requests of the state, those requests concerned release, notice and the length of a sentence, and in Watts’s case that effort ran for years and ended with Michigan convictions and a death from cancer.
• 1973, June: Susie Jaeger is taken during a family camping trip in Montana.
• 1974, June: the kidnapper telephones Marietta Jaeger on the first anniversary of the abduction.
• September 29, 1974: Meirhofer dies in custody, hours after confessing.
• May 23, 1982: Watts arrested in Houston; his plea and immunity agreement follow, and Judge Shaver sentences him on September 3, 1982.
• September 17, 1982: Chelsea McClellan dies in Kerrville, Texas.
• July 1983: Bishop confesses to the killing of five boys.
• February 1984: Jones convicted of murder; October 1984, of injury to a child.
• 1984: Bishop sentenced to death.
• June 1988: Bishop executed.
• November 17, 2004: Watts convicted in Oakland County, Michigan; sentenced December 7, 2004.
• April 30, 2007: Turner convicted of ten murders.
• September 2007: Watts dies, shortly after his Kalamazoo conviction.
• June 10, 2011: Texas Board of Nursing revokes Jones’s license.
• June 19, 2014: Turner convicted of four more murders; August 1, 2014, sentenced to death; Cameron and Belvin speak.
• June 1, 2017: Wettlaufer pleads guilty; sentenced June 26, 2017.
• May 23, 2018: Urdiales convicted in Orange County; October 5, 2018, sentenced to death; the 1992 survivor tells him she forgives him. He dies November 3, 2018.
• March 2019: Correctional Service Canada tells Susan Horvath that Wettlaufer has returned to Grand Valley.
• January 16, 2020: Jones pleads guilty to the 1981 murder of Joshua Sawyer.
• November 30, 2020: California Supreme Court affirms Turner’s 2007 judgment, except for one count.