OSV STORY FOR JULY 21

Mercy for the guilty

How one woman forgave her mother's killer, and came to see capital punishment as another pro-life issue

By Mary DeTurris

The verdict was murder; the punishment, death. It was a sentence that Celeste Dixon had waited months to hear and one that she thought would avenge the brutal shooting of her mother.

Then, standing in the court hallway only moments after the verdict was read, something happened that would change Dixon forever: She saw the convicted killer's mother weeping for her son, a scene that started her on a journey of healing and teaching.

"We were all pretty happy. We had gotten what we wanted," Dixon said of the death sentence. "I remember looking up and seeing his mother standing in the hallway, and she was just crying, a small fragile-looking woman, all alone."

Dixon walked up to the woman, hugged her and told her how sorry she was.

"It occurred to me at that point that when they do finally carry that sentence out there is not going to be any difference between his death and my mother's. It's still murder; someone deliberately taking someone else's life," she told Our Sunday Visitor.

Dixon didn't always feel so compassionately toward the man who killed her mother during a robbery at her childhood home in Hockley, Texas, just outside of Houston. She had wanted revenge. She had wanted to make him pay the ultimate price.

But that is probably not surprising, considering the circumstances surrounding her mother's death.

Murder and mercy

Dixon, who served in the U.S. Navy and the Reserves, was stationed in Puerto Rico when she got the emergency message on Aug. 18, 1986. She knew it had to be a death or life-threatening illness for such a message to come through, and her only thought was that the one person she just couldn't live without was her mother.

Her chief took her into his office and told her only that her mother had died; the message did not say how it happened. It was a roommate who first said the word she couldn't believe: murder.

"I thought, these things don't happen to people like me. They happen to someone else," recalled Dixon, who immediately returned home to learn that her mother's murderer was a man on parole for a previous robbery who lived just down the road, on the proverbial "wrong side of the tracks."

According to Dixon, the man -- Michael Richards -- was out of prison for just a few weeks the night he decided to cross the tracks and take a walk.

Her mother's house is on five acres, set back from the road by a long driveway. A van was parked in front, and Richards walked around to the back door to ask if the van was for sale. Her mother -- who was with Dixon's two sisters and a brother -- told the man it was not and gave him a glass of water when he requested it. He left, and a short time later her siblings did, too.

"He must have seen the car pass him. He turned back around and came in, and according to his confession, took two TVs and the van," Dixon said, adding that when he came back for more, her mother surprised him. He shot her in the side of the head.

Richards claimed the gun went off by accident, but Dixon said that from the wound and the position in which her mother was found, it's unlikely that was the case.

Dixon had to return to Puerto Rico for seven more months, but the one thing that kept her going was the knowledge that she would be out in time to attend the trial.

"The prosecutors said they were going for the death penalty, and I concentrated on that," she said. "The trial was in August almost one year later, and I went every day. I wanted him to see me and to know that he had left others behind. . . . I was just waiting to hear the judge

say, 'Death by lethal injection.' "

Even before the post-court scene that changed her mind and her life, Dixon began to question what was happening. She said that during the trial she could not help but reflect on the fact that the killer had a low IQ, had been abused by his father, that his father abused drugs and let his friends sexually abuse the children.

"It seemed to me that things were not quite as they seemed," she said. "I began to think that he was a victim as much as my mother was, but in a different way. I started to feel sorry for him, but I pushed it out of my mind because I was still pretty angry."

Richards is still on death row in Texas.

Over the next year, Dixon's attitude toward capital punishment began to change, but it was not until she went on a retreat that things solidified.

She was in the retreat center's library when she found a book on saints and opened it up to the story of St. Maria Goretti.

"I started to read her story, and right out of the blue I began to cry. . . . I was thinking of my mother. It was like I went right back to the time it happened," she said. "I reached the conclusion that God was asking me to forgive Michael Richards for what he had done. When I did, this weight just lifted off my shoulders. I feel like God gave me a glimpse of what His love is like."

Second chances

Dixon is the only one in her family to have a change of heart. In fact, her siblings are hurt by her decision, and she hasn't told them that she has begun to speak at respect-life meetings and to others about her feelings.

Speaking out on life issues, however, is nothing new for Dixon. The former head of the Texas chapter of Feminists for Life and a former leader of the campus pro-life group at the University of Texas at Austin, Dixon said she sees her position on the death penalty as completing the pro-life circle she began years ago.

Dixon is now a member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, an organization made up of people who have had relatives murdered and are opposed to the death penalty. She said that the pro-life message she brings to people is important, but it's not new.

" 'Forgive us our trespasses. . . .' All of us to a certain degree owe a debt to God. None of us is without sin. God forgives us every day. A lot of us are never going to commit the crimes the people on death row did. Still, we get second chances all the time. No one ever wants to give these people a second chance," she said.

Dixon explained that the more she learned about the death penalty, the more she was against it, noting that statistics show most capital cases involve white victims killed by minorities, despite the fact that 50 percent of murder victims are black.

"I didn't like what capital punishment did to me because when I started to think about it, I realized that I was actively wishing for another person to die. I didn't feel much better than the person who pulls the trigger," she said. "I think it does that to us as a society as a whole. Capital punishment feeds the anger and the hurt of the victims."

DeTurris is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor 1996; from the 7-21-96 edition

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