There is no way, we understand from the moving strains of Heggie’s music. The brilliance of Dead Man Walking is that it grants us all that, and then challenges us to find any way the most brutal killer on this earth isn’t also a child of God. To Sister Helen’s credit, and especially to the credit of McNally’s no-holds-barred libretto, we are spared nothing: not the horrific nature of the rape and double murder itself, and certainly not (as is often alleged in pro-death penalty circles) the suffering of the victims or of the loved ones they leave behind. You will feel utterly drained when the final notes are sung a cappella and the character of Joseph De Rocher (a composite of Willie and a couple other Louisiana killers) lies dead on that cruciform gurney, killed by lethal injection rather than by the chair known as “Gruesome Gertie” that had been his actual fate. Watching Houston Grand Opera’s production of the Jake Heggie/Terrence McNally collaboration is a harrowing experience. I certainly never for one moment suspected that with Dead Man Walking – Sister Helen’s book that became an Oscar-winning movie and even an opera now on display at the Wortham Center – the woman I called for that rather predictable quote would argue for the humanity of the only man I ever wished to see dead. And sometime before each of those many deaths, I put in the mandatory call to Sister Helen Prejean, the voice for all those who believed the state was doing wrong. Of all the murderers I covered as a young UPI reporter on their way to Louisiana’s electric chair, and even for the one whose execution I witnessed as a representative of the state, there was only one I thought deserved to be killed: a smirking, hateful, unrepentant monster named Robert Lee Willie.
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