"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.
Photograph by www.freefoto.com.