Witness to an Execution Finds Retribution but Little Relief

POTOSI, Mo. — Janet Allen trembles with tension and stares straight ahead. Nearby, behind tightly closed blinds, is Andrew Six. In three minutes, she will face him for the last time.

More than 10 years ago, when she last saw Six, she thought she would die. In fact, she believes she did die, on the operating table. “I got a glimpse of heaven,” she says. “I saw the purest streets of gold. But God must have known I had family who needed me.”

A family that Six had already ravaged: The robbery of her husband, Don. The rape of their older daughter, Christine. The kidnapping of their younger daughter, Kathy.

Earlier today, Janet Allen drove eight hours from her Iowa home to reach the state prison here to watch Six die.

Now her trembling melts to sobs. It’s all too much.

“Dirty, lousy creep,” she mutters.

Memories of April 1987 torment Janet Allen. Six and an uncle visited the Allens’ trailer to test-drive an old truck that the family had to sell. Janet rode along because her husband, a heart patient, was too sick. Six pressed a knife against her throat and bound her wrists with duct tape.

It’s all too much. With Janet seized, the men marched the family into the trailer at knifepoint. Told that 19-year-old Christine was pregnant, Six replied: “That’s the one I want.” He raped her in the next room while his uncle robbed the Allens. Escorted outside, Don Allen broke away and ran for help. Christine headed into the woods.

In a rage, Six dragged his knife across Janet’s throat. She fell to her knees in the gravel driveway, gasping, her windpipe nearly severed. Then the men grabbed Kathy and sped away. A bumper sticker on their Mercury boasted: “I’m the person your mother warned you about.”

By the time the ambulance arrived, neighbors had wrapped Janet’s neck in bath towels. But she struggled to her feet. “I just wanted to know, where was Kathy? Where was Kathy?”

The ambulance carried Janet to the Ottumwa, Iowa, hospital, where surgeon William McMillan was on call. A onetime ambulance driver in the toughest neighborhoods of Detroit, McMillan had treated many victims of knife wounds.

“But I had seen absolutely nothing like this,” he said. “I had to hold my finger on her jugular to keep her from bleeding to death. It was amazing she was alive.”

It took more than 60 stitches and a week in the hospital for healing to begin. “She had a lot of pain, and not just her neck,” McMillan says. “It was pain in the heart.”

Janet was clinging to life in the hospital when her pastor broke the news: Twelve-year-old Kathy was dead--her throat slashed, her body dumped in a ditch in Missouri.

It’s all too much.

Kathy was Janet’s “special birthday present,” born in 1974, just 15 days before her mother’s birthday.

Like her older sister, Kathy was mentally slower than playmates. By sixth grade, she had already received special education in reading. A cheerful student, she always smiled. She loved to ride her bicycle after class, a puppy yipping from a basket on the handlebars.

“She was happy, so happy,” Janet recalls. “So full of life.”

Kathy used to accompany her mother to bingo games and services at Word of Life Fellowship. On Sundays, Kathy sat without fidgeting too much while the Rev. Jerry Lanferman preached a fundamentalist gospel. But the girl’s favorite part was greeting fellow worshipers, often with a handshake.

“She was a sweet little girl,” Lanferman says. “And because she was a little slower in understanding, I believe this child is in heaven. God watches over children.”

Lanferman had to summon courage with a prayer when he first went to Janet’s bedside.

“He told me Kathy had been found dead. We prayed and I hurt,” Janet recalled, her eyes glistening.

“All I could offer was prayer and the love of God for something we could never understand,” Lanferman said.

Still in the hospital, Janet missed Kathy’s funeral. Lanferman remembers tears and an overflow crowd, the small casket inside, at the front of the church, the TV cameras outside.

“I used John 10:10, which says the thief has come to steal and to destroy,” Lanferman said. “We really do have an enemy, and he is the devil. Well, Kathy was taken away by the enemy. But I knew then and I know now that she is with God.”

Ottumwa rallied behind the Allens, setting up a fund that paid for Kathy’s cemetery marker. Six was tried for first-degree murder in Missouri. The jury found him guilty, but the forewoman dissented about the death penalty. The judge ordered it anyway. Then the appeals began.

Thoughts of Kathy never left Janet. But she lost touch with particulars of the case--until this summer, when she learned Six was scheduled to die. When the Missouri Department of Corrections contacted her about witnessing his execution, she didn’t flinch.

“I want to look him in the eye and let him know he did this to us, but I am still alive,” she said before the Aug. 20 execution. “I am a victim. Kathy was a victim. Our whole entire family was a victim of this.”

But the trip was doubtful because the Allens did not have extra money. Janet pressed for publicity, offering to repay anyone who might make a loan. A Missouri crime victims organization contributed $300, and private citizens offered small donations.

On the morning of the execution, the Allens headed down U.S. 63 toward Potosi in their old Buick.

In their motel room, six hours before the execution, they spoke of revenge and religion.

“I’m like the Bible says--’an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ ” Janet said. “They shouldn’t have did what they did.”

Then her tone softened. “I just wonder if Andy Six ever asked God to forgive him.”

Christine Allen spoke: “I just wonder if he will go to heaven or hell.”

Over a fast-food dinner of fried chicken, Don Allen was quiet. Finally, he rejected the idea of witnessing the execution.

“Bad, bad memories. No, not me.” He lapsed into silence again.

Later, at the restaurant’s playground, Christine climbed with her children into a pit full of small rubber balls, frolicking as if they were three children, not two.

Janet watched and sighed. “Those two small ones, I have raised them because Christine can’t. I’d die for them. I lost a little girl, and they are my little girls.” Crystal, 10, and Ashley, 8, call her “Mama Janet.”

*

It’s 11:40 p.m., and the execution is 21 minutes away. Janet has changed from her sweatshirt and slacks into a blue-and-pink dress. She waits in a prison office that, tonight, is her sanctuary. Kay Crockett, with the Missouri Department of Corrections, is nearby.

At 11:50 p.m., they start down a maze of prison corridors separated by heavy steel doors. Crockett, a coordinator of victims services, loops her arm through Janet’s. Down a flight of steep stairs, Janet seems unsteady. Crockett offers gentle reassurance, and they enter the witness room, with its two tiers of plastic chairs, maroon and gray.

At first, Janet sits in the last chair on the higher tier. Then she wonders about the view. She shifts to the lower tier, where the window into the death chamber--where Six will die by injection--is just four feet from her face.

Now 11:58 p.m., the seconds seem like individual eternities.

Janet looks at Crockett. “OK?” Crockett asks, and rubs Janet’s shoulder. She coughs nervously and accepts a pink tissue to wipe her eyes.

A message crackles through the headset of a prison official: “The operation has begun.” The blinds go up, and Janet Allen once again confronts Andrew Six.

But he never looks her way, staring to his right, toward witnesses he invited. Janet looks there, too, suddenly wondering whether Six’s relatives from Iowa can see her. Crockett assures her that they can’t.

Janet trembles again. “Be strong,” Crockett urges.

At 12:05 a.m., Andrew Six is pronounced dead. The miniblinds are snapped shut. Led down the prison corridor, Janet sighs deeply.

“He didn’t move a lot,” she says to no one in particular.

Upstairs in the prison media room, those reporters barred as witnesses want to know how Janet Allen reacted. To their surprise, she walks in to tell them herself. The questions begin.

How were you feeling when it occurred?

“I believe in the capital punishment, but it’s something that you don’t like to see happen. But there again, it was a sad situation when our daughter was murdered.”

Wasn’t it a peaceful process?

“It was like he just went to sleep, you know?”

Should he have suffered?

“I believe if they would have done like in the Old Testament, you know--when you murdered somebody, they would do you the same way--I don’t believe you would have as many crimes if they would do that.”

Could you watch that?

“I think I could.”

Were you weeping?

“I have a heart, I have feelings. I feel sorry for that family. . . . I hope and pray that he had given his heart to the Lord. It would be an awful thing to have to spend the rest of his life, you know, in hell, and burn forever and ever and ever. You don’t realize what hell is. It’s something that you’re not going to cool down. But just think, if you go to heaven, you can rejoice with Jesus.”

Do you think it helped you?

“I don’t know whether I was helped or if I feel better. I feel saddened because it had to happen. . . . He tried to take my life. He tried to kill me. But you know what? He didn’t get the job done. I’m still alive.”

It’s still too much.

*

Weeks later, back home in Iowa, Janet wonders what went through Six’s mind as life slipped away.

“He didn’t look at us,” she says. “He was probably ashamed to look me in the eye. It wouldn’t bother me to stare him right in the eye.”

Her thoughts turn to Kathy, who would have been 23 this fall. No dates, no dances, no graduations, no grandchildren.

“Six could have been alive today, too, if he hadn’t done it. He cheated Kathy out of her life. He cheated my family. And you know what? He cheated himself.”