LETTERS FROM HOME: A WEEK WITH PLENTY OF TRAGEDY TO GO AROUND

Aug. 31, 2000

Dear Leslie,

In Cape Girardeau, many people can tell you something about Rush Limbaugh's days growing up here. Now we have the obscene flip side of celebrity. We knew a man who was put to death for murder.

Most of the memories are of Gary Roll as a teen-ager or young adult. In adulthood he seems to have disappeared in a haze of drugs.

As a teen-ager I hung around for a while with a few older guys who played serious games of sandlot baseball, basketball and football. One of them was Gary Roll's older brother, Lee.

He was powerfully built and so fast his friends called him Scooter. You hoped you didn't have to try to tackle him by yourself in a Saturday game of football at Capaha Park. Forget it.

Lee served in the Special Forces in Vietnam and later became an FBI agent. In the early 1990s, he was in charge of the FBI SWAT team that responded when a man strapped with dynamite caused mayhem and death at the Topeka, Kan., federal building.

Lee is Superman, but there was no saving his brother.

Mainly what I remember from those days is that Gary Roll seldom played sports with us. That would be a meaningless fact if he still were a middle-aged man working in the family heating and air conditioning business. Now he's an executed killer, a person who forfeited his membership in the human family.

It is easier to portray an unknown killer as a monster. This Mr. Hyde grew up with us.

We long to understand why he could have done what he has done. I'm left wondering if it means something that Gary Roll didn't play with us.

Gary Roll was put to death one minute after midnight Wednesday morning while most of us who lived in the same town and breathed the same air slept. Now his life is ended and perhaps his death will soothe in some way those he has hurt.

Tammy Farmer, whose two brothers and mother were killed by Gary Roll, wrote to me, disturbed by a story in which people recalled the Gary Roll who was once a nice person. She wonders why the focus is always on the criminal, not on the victims and their families.

She worries for the surviving brother who walked into the house the morning of the murders to see his mother lying on the floor.

She chose not to attend the execution. "I have worked hard to learn how to survive every day," she wrote. "I don't want to be a part of the media frenzy. I'm sure it will be the same as it has been for the last eight years. 'Poor Gary.'"

Few of us can understand the depth of the pain Gary Roll has caused Tammy Farmer and the members of her family. Try to imagine the hatred they have felt, multiplied by numbers beyond counting.

Neither can we know how Gary Roll's mother and brother and sister and son suffered as the seconds ticked down to his execution.

There is plenty of tragedy here to go around.

A killer tests our ability to feel compassion. He had none for the people he killed. To be that unfeeling is to be alienated from the part of yourself that makes you human -- your soul.

I do not comprehend the mechanism by which this breakdown can happen. I only know that all of us -- even Gary Roll -- are pilgrims on the long road to find God.

To kill any human being is a leap in the wrong direction.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.