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 him. He was born to a mother who had 8 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.
Photograph by www.freefoto.com.