© Copyright 2001 The Courier & Press
Paul Stevens of Dawson Springs, Ky., makes his way slowly but steadily up the steep steps at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, Ky. Although he had to stop for a breather about halfway to the top, Stevens still makes the climb once a week to visit with the facility's inmates.
The early morning hours of July 11, 1969, are burned into the memory of Paul Stevens forever. That was the morning he found his daughter's dead body, lying in a pool of blood.
The man who killed her - the father of the 3 children for whom she'd been baby-sitting - was drunk and passed out in an adjacent room.
Next to him was the bloody kitchen knife used to stab 20-year-old Cindy Stevens in the heart.
It's an image that haunted Paul Stevens for more than a decade, wiping out every other memory of his oldest daughter, and dragging him into a hell of burning rage and resentment.
32 years after her death, Stevens carries a different image of his daughter. It's a picture of her pretty young face, at age 19, not long after she graduated from Memorial High School, second oldest of his 7 children.
It's a picture he shows to the men on death row every week.
Every Thursday morning, Stevens leaves his home in Dawson Springs, Ky., and drives 30 minutes to the Kentucky State Penitentiary outside of Eddyville, Ky.
At age 79, the steep climb up 3 flights of steps to the prison's main door takes longer than it did the 1st time he made the trip in 1986, with his parish priest.
Housed in the maximum-security prison is Kentucky's death row, where 41 men await their execution.
It is where Stevens has chosen to do a ministry in his daughters name, as a volunteer prison chaplain.
"I can't explain it, but I feel very close to the men on death row," said Stevens. "I need them. When I first came here, I knew I needed them for my own healing."
Stevens is a fervent opponent of the death penalty. In March, he shared a stage with Bud Welch, whose daughter was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing.
The men offered the same message, said Stevens: Don't kill the killers of our children in our name.
In 1969, Stevens had a different message.
He wanted the man who killed his daughter - 30-year-old Jack Gatewood - dead.
The trial was moved out of Evansville, where the Stevens family lived, to Vincennes, Ind., because of the flurry of publicity about the case.
For 3 weeks, Stevens and his wife, Ruth, made the hourlong drive to the Knox County Courthouse.
During those drives, he was haunted by the last conversation he had with his daughter, hours before her murder.
He was worried about Gatewood's heavy drinking and his bouts with violence with his ex-wife, who had custody of their children.
"I told her I didn't want her baby-sitting there anymore," said Stevens. "I told her it was too dangerous."
Cindy made her father a promise. That night would be the last time she would baby-sit for the Gatewood children.
It took 11 hours for an all-male jury to reach a verdict. They found Gatewood guilty of 1st-degree murder, but denied the prosecutor's request for the death sentence.
The decision angered Stevens, a fury that would soon turn to bitterness. Because of clerical errors in the court record, the murder conviction was reduced to a lesser charge. Gatewood would serve only 7 years in prison.
"It just intensified the hatred in me," said Stevens.
He moved his family out of Evansville, no longer able to live in the same house where Cindy grew up. He started drinking and grew increasingly morose with thoughts of his daughter's last hours of life.
"I was so filled with hatred, I couldn't think of Cindy without going back to the night of the crime," said Stevens. "I had lost her and all of the good things I remembered about her."
In 1978 - 7 years after Cindy's death - friends from church asked Stevens to make a Cursillo, a 3-day spiritual retreat.
It's a deeply private and intense experience, and Stevens found himself confessing not just his lethal rage but his deep guilt for not being able to let it go.
During the retreat he was given a short prayer and encouraged to recite it, as a kind of mantra when he had flashbacks of his daughter's murder scene.
"It was a very simple prayer," said Stevens. "'Jesus, I love you.'"
It was an experience of conversion. He no longer felt called to avenge his daughter's death.
"He touched me and made me whole," said Stevens.
After the retreat, Stevens began to ask himself why he hadn't killed Gatewood with the same knife that ended his daughter's life when he found her killer unconscious.
He realized he made a choice that night, and that realization led to a change in his heart about the death penalty.
"I couldn't kill him. How could I ask someone else to do it in my name?"
When Stevens retired in 1986, he began to look for something he could do in Cindy's name.
Stevens approached his parish priest and asked to go along with him on one of his weekly visits to say Mass at the state prison.
"From the very 1st time I came to the prison, I had Cindy with me," said Stevens.
Stevens begins his day in the prison visiting with inmates in protective custody. Most have been convicted of sex crimes against children and are isolated from other inmates for their own safety.
Stevens greets them with a hug and friendly banter, and conversation about the weather, the prison food or their families.
He's doesn't ask an inmate what his crime is, he doesn't preach about religion, or try to convert them to his Roman Catholicism.
It is his presence that is his Christian witness, said Byron Jasis, an administrator at the prison and a fellow Catholic.
"The man's main ambition is to come here and offer them unconditional love," said Jasis.
2 years ago, inmate Lance Hiemstra became a Catholic, inspired by what he saw in Stevens.
"He is a brother, a father, a confidante to us," said Hiemstra. "He can identify with our struggle and we can identify with his."
Hiemstra, in prison for sexual assault, was suicidal before he met Stevens.
"God spared my life," said Hiemstra. "God has another purpose for me. Paul convinced me of that."
Stevens spends at least half his day on the U-shaped Death Row, which occupies the bottom floor of Cell Block Six and is separated from the other prisoners in the cell block with a razor-wire-topped fence.
He visits with inmates gathered in an exercise area before he heads down "The Row." He stops at every cell, checks on every man.
It is here where Paul Stevens met Harold McQueen, and agreed to walk with him to his death.
McQueen had killed 22-year-old Becky O'Hearn, a clerk working alone on the night shift in a convenience store.
McQueen arrived on death row in 1980. By the time Stevens met him 6 years later, McQueen was waking every morning at 3:30 a.m. to say the rosary.
"He was a different man by the time I met him," said Stevens. "The Harold who was executed wasn't the same Harold who had killed."
It's why he agreed to walk "the last mile" with McQueen before his execution.
He prayed with McQueen as the convicted murderer was strapped into the electric chair.
"May you be in heaven with Jesus, Mary and Joseph and Cindy," Stevens told McQueen, "and all the saints in whose name we pray."
Before Stevens left the death chamber, McQueen handed him back the rosary Stevens had lent him months before. It was Cindy's rosary.
Stevens' ministry has earned him attention from the media in recent weeks, prompted by the scheduled and now postponed execution of McVeigh. He's pleased when the attention focuses on his anti-death penalty message. But he deflects any praise for himself.
Stevens considers his ministry an act of penance, for what he calls "the grievous sin" of his near-decade of vengeful anger.
"I pray," said Stevens, "that my service to the prison will make up for that."