Free Oregon Hill by Howard Owen Page A

destroyed a whole family, and Leonard was a hard man to have empathy for. He tended to smile at unfortunate times, and he just irked me at some gut level. I didn’t like Leonard Pikarski.
    He got kind of fixated on me, I guess, because I’d written so much about the case. He wrote me from prison, in his sad, third-grade hand, with about every third word misspelled, always telling me he didn’t really do it, that he had proof, to please help him. I shared some of those letters with other reporters, for the entertainment value. They always got a laugh.
    “Hey,” I’d announce. “Got another Leonard-gram.”
    They let me write a column once, a real privilege for a young reporter, a couple of months before he was executed. I wrote about what a pathetic loser he was, how even the most craven, sadistic killer was always claiming he didn’t do it. I even shared some of the more embarrassing parts of his letters with our salivating readers. The last five words of the column: Burn in hell, Leonard Pikarski. He never wrote me again.
    I had one of the reporters’ seats at the execution itself. I told myself this was necessary, part of being a hard-nosed reporter who had to see it all.
    The room was a dingy off-white, and most of it was filled with the glass booth where we all sat. There was another booth, with a one-way mirror, and I assumed that either one or both of Leonard Pikarski’s parents were in there.
    The gurney was shaped like a cross. One idiot, a couple of years earlier, insisted on the electric chair instead because he said he “didn’t want to die like Jesus did.” I’m thinking he had a moment of regret about that decision, just after they threw the switch.
    There was a bright red phone on the wall, in case the governor called at the last second, which he never had.
    Leonard was led in by six big guys, who strapped him to the table. I knew they drugged them beforehand, and he didn’t look like he really knew what was going on.
    Still, it seemed like he was looking right at me. As much as anything, it reminded me of the one time I’d had to take a dog to the vet’s to be put down—the same look of confusion and mild disappointment.
    They asked him if he had any last words. You couldn’t hear him, and the flack later told us he just said he wanted to sleep. It seemed like he said more than that, but who knows? Then they put in the IV lines, and pretty soon Leonard Pikarski drifted away, I presumed to that hell I’d wished for him earlier.
    It was summer, and the room was not well ventilated. It didn’t smell like death, whatever that’s supposed to smell like, just fear and sweat and maybe some undefined odor that you only get when you’re watching the life ebb out of a helpless human being a few feet away.
    Nobody said anything to each other as we left. As rude and crude as some reporters can get, I’ve never known anybody who was at an execution to joke about it later.
    Afterward, I was always cool and reserved about it, telling others—especially young female reporters—what a necessary evil capital punishment was.
    About six months after his execution, they caught the killer. He’d tried to abduct a girl on her way home from school in Louisa County, but she escaped and got a neighbor to call the police. Through sheer luck, a deputy was nearby, and they surrounded him in a barn. Before they could capture him, he killed himself.
    He had a motel room key, and when they searched the room, they found an assortment of used underwear. They also found a diary. He apparently was quite proud of his achievements. He’d raped and killed another girl in Ohio a few months before he murdered the sisters. He hinted that there might have been others.
    The same people who had been so entertained by Leonard Pikarski’s letters seemed to avoid me in the newsroom now.
    A few days after all this came to light, I got a call. There was a gentleman to see me in the lobby. He had information about Leonard