Alex Mar - Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy

Witches of America

On a spring afternoon in 1985, in Gary, Indiana, four teenage girls enter the home of an elderly woman under false pretenses, and when they leave she is dead. One of them, a fifteen-year-old, will soon be sentenced to death for murder. There is no question of her guilt; this is not a story of wrongful conviction.

The crime was violent enough to shock the consciencea legal phrase the prosecutor invokesand so no voices of protest will rise up in that city, or in broader Lake County or farther south in the capital, at the impending execution of a tenth grader. Not until a man very close to the victim, her grandson, publicly forgives the girlagainst the wishes of his familyand campaigns to spare her life. Not until the crime is featured on the front pages of newspapers and television programs five thousand miles away, across the ocean, where petitions are signed by millions, does the American media begin to question the outcome of this case. A tragedy in a midwestern steel town will continue to play out, have its second act, as far away as the Vatican. From criminal court in northern Indiana, the reverberations of the case will eventually be felt in the highest court of the United States.

Over the past five years, I have read thousands of pages of documents, personal letters, and newspaper features, and scanned through thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of footage. I have conducted interviews with some eighty individuals, culminating in hundreds of hours of conversation. Throughout, I was asking myself about the nature of belief, of conviction, the source of our guiding principles. I have asked myself what our common definition of justice might be, if there is even a shared understanding of the word.

Unlike some of the people whose lives and choices I will describe here, I am not a practicing Christian. But I have returned again and again to a moment from the Gospel of Matthew that has special meaning for someone at the center of this story: the moment when the disciple Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive those who harm him. The answer is seventy times sevenan enormous number, as if Jesus were suggesting his followers be prepared to forgive an infinite number of times. It is hard to imagine someone who could carry this out; it is hard to know if such a request is even fair. Anger is a very human, instinctual response. The act of forgiveness, I think, is more alien, and requires something tougher: a belief that none of us is solely defined by the worst thing we have ever done. That each of us remains human, sometimes in spite of our actions. And that sometimes, our actions are a response to forces larger than ourselves.

This is a story that asks what any community is willing to accept as just consequencesas justicefor harm done. It is a difficult question, one that each person in this book has been forced to confront. Because whatever the answer, its impact will be more sprawling than predicted, hard to contain. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, in ways very great or very small, the fates of neighbors are linked.