Executions don’t heal

On April 19, 1995, Julie Marie Welch, a petite 23-year-old just a smidgen over five feet tall, left her office in the Murrah Federal Building at 9 a.m. to meet with a Spanish-speaking individual in need of her translation services. Welch was a language whiz. She’d moved back home to Oklahoma City after spending a couple of years in Spain and going to college in Milwaukee.

Julie and her fiancé, Eric, planned to announce their engagement soon. A devout Catholic, she had gone to mass that morning before work.

When Julie’s body was found, days later, officials working the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing said that she was walking with the visitor back to her office—just seconds away from safety. A co-worker in Julie’s office had received only minor scratches. Now Julie’s dad, Bud Welch, points out his daughter’s chair, sixth from the end, in a picture of the Oklahoma City Memorial.

For a while after her death, Welch tormented himself. If only she hadn’t come back to Oklahoma City. If only she hadn’t left her desk that morning. If only she had walked a little faster back to her office.

“I was angry at her, angry at God, angry at myself because I always encouraged her to pursue foreign languages,” Welch says.

And, for a while, he was filled with hate toward the perpetrators.

“I was so full of rage and vengeance that I didn’t want trials,” he says. “I simply wanted them fried. I wanted retribution any way I could get it.”

But these feelings did not bring Welch healing or closure. Similarly, he says, others with loved ones who’ve been senselessly killed, whether in Oklahoma City or at the World Trade Center or in a violent crime in the Truckee Meadows, may never find a way to cope with their grief and rage, Welch says. And that’s because some survivors have their heart set on getting revenge via the death penalty, mistakenly thinking that this will help assuage the grief.

“We all have to go through the process,” he says. “And some will never do it. They will remain full of anger and retribution all their lives. They may die early because of it.”

Welch, who spoke to a Nevada state legislative subcommittee last week during hearings on the death penalty and related DNA testing, calls the killing of Timothy McVeigh “a huge staged political event.”

“It did nothing for family members,” he says. As happens after many executions, those interviewed by the media said things like “It was too easy,” or “He didn’t suffer enough,” or “It’s about time.” Others said: “Now I can get on with my life.”

But years after such an execution, the cameras are gone, along with the public focus. “No one’s going to do a story four or five years later, when people are saying, ‘It didn’t do what I thought it was going to do.’ “

And that’s what Welch hears in his travels around the world. Last year, Welch was on the road for 248 days speaking against the death penalty. He recounts one such conversation after speaking in San Antonio. A couple came forward after Welch’s talk. Their son had been murdered 15 years earlier. The couple attended the execution of their son’s killer six years ago.

Welch asked the couple, “How did that help you, witnessing his death?”

“The man was shaking his head to say it didn’t help. And the woman said that, almost a year after the execution, she’d been having problems sleeping and bad dreams. They had watched him take his last breath. He had twisted a bit, and that was haunting her.”

Welch asked them whether, if they had it to do over again, they would support the execution.

“We’d want him in prison,” the woman told Welch. “Still alive. I can’t vent toward him now that he’s dead.”

Similarly, Welch has watched many of the survivors in Oklahoma City become increasingly frustrated after McVeigh’s execution.

“We didn’t experience closure on the day we took Tim McVeigh from his cage and killed him,” Welch says. “God simply didn’t make us so that we’re going to get a feel-good or any kind of closure from watching a human take his last breath.”deidrep@newsreview.com