"I believe forgiving B.K. was the most healing thing that ever happened to me," she says. "I'm not a bleeding heart liberal. I just don't want him to be murdered. Two wrongs don?t make a right."
Her position on the death penalty wasn't well defined until the trial in Perry. She recalled picking up pecans in the yard of the courthouse during breaks in the trial. "I wondered if he had ever picked pecans," she says. "I wondered if he had ever done anything fun when he was a child. I certainly wasn't condoning what happened. I was sick. But from all bad things that happen in our life, something good has to come from it."
The night after the verdict she cried and prayed. She didn't want to hate Knighton, as everyone expected her to do. "God," she prayed in the room at the Cherokee Strip Motel she was sharing with her mother and sister, "tell me how I'm supposed to feel."
In the middle of the night she awoke and said to herself: "Sue, instead of hating, you could forgive him."
The next day, she and Knighton shared that first conversation. At the beginning of their friendship, Norton and Knighton corresponded and talked on the phone. She was told "no" when she asked to visit him on death row. Finally, after months of being turned down, Norton went to the Oklahoma media with her story. That, she says, opened the prison door.
Knighton has not been the only one to think Norton is crazy. Many people, including some members of her family, disagree with her friendship with Knighton. They disagree with her anti-death penalty stance.
In her hometown of Ark City, people who were once her friends cross the street instead of talking to her. Friends who once stopped by the house to visit no longer do. Some of their disapproval comes from a non-profit foundation Norton has started in the community. Called the "Fifth Avenue Foundation," its purpose is to run a program to aid the transition for parolees from prison to the outside world. She wants to provide the help no one gave Knighton, which she believes might have saved her daddy's life. Opened for three years, Norton's foundation has had only one client, who stayed only five weeks. The program would provide around-the-clock structure while introducing the parolee to employment, socialization and fending for himself without public assistance, Norton says. Ark City residents were concerned about bringing newly released convicts to their town.
"They think I'm about the biggest lunatic they've ever met," she says, adding that unbeknownst to most people, ex-convicts are already among them. "You go to the grocery store; they're beside you. You walk around the street; they're beside you. They get out of prison and we give them $100, the clothes on their back and say, 'We've had you locked up like an animal for all these years, here's your $100 and this is our day.'"
Norton would like to see a state-mandated program like hers to attack the problem of recidivism. "Prison is a business that feeds on itself," she says. "If they don't have the revolving door, they don't have a business."
Norton's foundation is on the third floor of a mostly vacant, century-old building in downtown Ark City. As Norton talks on the phone, her voice echoes through the cavernous hallways and empty rooms. A painting that hangs here shows a hooded man holding up another weakened man. "This is how I think about me and my guys," she says about the prisoners she visits. A sign on the wall reads: "The cure of crime is not in the electric chair, but in the high chair."
"I'm not a way out of prison," she says about her foundation she calls her dream. "I want every hour accounted for. I want to keep that person so busy that they don't have time to get in trouble. they would have to be pretty desperate to come here. They will be expected to learn three marketable skills and be totally, totally violence free."
An hour after leaving the office, Sue Norton cooks dinner in her home outside of Ark City. She talks on the phone to one of her sons and her husband, telling Gene Norton to pick up some rolls at the grocery store before coming home. The home is middle class, comfortable, but not ornate.
And Sue Norton is far from being a coddled housewife who has found a hobby in befriending inmates. She too had a rough childhood. Denney was not her birth father. She was adopted when she was 3 years old. Denny and Norton's mother stayed married until she was 16.
Photograph by www.freefoto.com.