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Marietta Jaeger's daughter Susie was abducted
at the age of seven during a family camping trip in Montana. For over a year
afterwards, the family knew nothing of Susie's whereabouts. Shortly before the
one-year anniversary of Susie's disappearance, Marietta stated to the press
that she wanted to speak with the person who had taken her child. On the
anniversary date, she received a call from a young man who taunted her by
asking, "So what do you want to talk to me about?"
During the year following Susie's
disappearance, Marietta had struggled to balance her rage against her belief
in the need for forgiveness. Her immediate response to the young man was to
ask how he was feeling, since his actions must have placed a heavy burden on
his soul. Her caring words disarmed him, and he broke down in tears on the
phone. He subsequently spoke with Marietta for over an hour, revealing details
about himself and the crime that ultimately allowed the FBI to solve the case.
Marietta was to learn that Susie had been
killed on a remote Montana ranch a week after she disappeared. Despite her
family's tragedy, she remains committed to forgiveness and has been an ardent
opponent of the death penalty for the over 25 years since Susie's death.
Reprinted with permission from Not
in our Name: Murder Victims Families Speak Out Against the Death Penalty,
a publication of Murder Victims Families For Reconciliation (Barbara Hood
& Rachel King, Editors; MVFR
Several years ago Marietta married Bob Lane and left the intercity of Detroit and moved to his sprawling ranch in Three Forks, Montana.
Marietta continues to travel around the world with her Christian message of forgiveness
Marietta Jaeger-Lane Quotes:
"Loved
ones, wrenched from our lives by violent crime, deserve more beautiful, noble
and honorable memorials than pre-meditated, state-sanctioned killings. The
death penalty only creates more victims and more grieving families. By
becoming that which we deplore -- people who kill people -- we insult the
sacred memory of all our precious victims."
Concerning the claim of justice for the victim's family, I say there is no amount of retaliatory deaths that would compensate to me the inestimable value of my daughter's life, nor would they restore her to my arms.
To say that the death of any other person would be just retribution is to insult the immeasurable worth of our loved ones who are victims.
We cannot put a price on their lives.
That kind of justice would only dehumanize and degrade us because it legitimates an animal instinct for gut-level bloodthirsty revenge.
In my case, my own daughter was such a gift of joy and sweetness and beauty, that to kill someone in her name would have been to violate and profane the goodness of her life; the idea is offensive and repulsive to me.
Capital punishment degrades, dehumanizes and debilitates us as a human society.
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