By Ron Carlson

When infamous "pick-ax murderer" Karla Faye Tucker was executed on February 3, 1998, in Huntsville, Texas, small clusters of death penalty protesters held a candle-light vigil. But many more of the hundreds gathered outside the prison were there to cheer her death. A cardboard sign waved by one man said it all: "May heaven help you. It’s sure as hell we won’t!"

Inside the prison, however, a man names Ron Carlson was praying for Karla—not in the witness room for her victims’ families where he could have been, but in the one set aside for the family of the murderer. What Ron told me sticks in my mind as if it were yesterday:

Shortly after I came home one day at five after a hard day’s work—it was the 13th of July, 1983—the phone rang. It was my father. He said, "Ronnie, you need to come over to the shop right away. We have reason to believe your sister has been murdered." I was floored. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even believe it when I saw her body being carried out of an apartment on television.

Deborah was my sister, and she raised me. My mother and father divorced when I was very young, and my mother died when I was six. I had no brothers—just one sister—so Deborah was very special. Very special.

Deborah made sure I had clothes to wear, and that there was food on the table. She helped me do my homework, and slapped me on the hand when I did something wrong. She became my mother.

Now she was dead, with dozens of puncture wounds all over her body, and the pick-ax that made them had been left in her heart. Deborah was not one to have enemies. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murderers had come over to steal motorcycle parts from the house where she was staying, and when they discovered Jerry Dean—the guy she was with—they hacked him to death. They were high on drugs. Then they discovered Deborah, so they had to kill her too…

Houston was in an uproar. Headlines screamed the gory details of the crime, and the entire city lived in fear. A few weeks later the murderers—two drug addicts named Karla Faye Tucker and Daniel Ryan Garret—were turned in by relatives. …

I was glad they were caught, of course, but I wanted to kill them myself. I was filled with sheer hatred, and I wanted to get even. I wanted to bury that pick-ax in Karla’s heart, just like she had buried it in my sister’s…

I was often drunk, and I’d get high on LSD, marijuana, whatever I could get my hands on, as often as I could. I also got into a lot of fights with my wife. I was very angry. I even wanted to kill myself…

Then one night, I just couldn’t take it any more. I guess I had come to the point where I knew I had to do something about the hatred and rage that was building in me. It was getting so bad that all I wanted to do was destroy things and kill people. I was heading down the same path as the people who had killed my sister.

It was really weird. I was high—I was smoking doobies and reading the word of God! But when I got to where they crucified Jesus, I slammed the book shut. For some reason it struck me like it never had before: My God, they even killed Jesus!

Then I got down on my knees—I’d never done this before—and asked God to come into my life and make me into the type of person he wanted me to be, and to be the Lord of my life. That’s basically what happened that night.

Later I read more, and a line from the Lord’s Prayer—this line that says "forgive us as we forgive"—jumped out at me. The meaning seemed clear: "You won’t be forgiven until you forgive. I remember arguing to myself, "I can’t do that, I could never do that," and God seemed to answer right back, "Well, Ron, you can’t. But through me you can."

Not long after that I heard that Karla was in town at the Harris County Jail. I decided to go see her. When I got there, I walked up to her and told her that I was Deborah’s brother. I didn’t say anything else at first. She looked at me and said, "You are who?" I repeated myself, and she still stared, like she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Then she started to cry.

I said, "Karla, whatever comes out of all this, I want you to know that I forgive you, and that I don’t hold anything against you." At that point all my hatred and anger was taken away. It was like some great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Story reprinted with permission from Why Forgive? by Johann Christoph Arnold available from Plough. Please visit their Website at: http://www.plough.com/usa