Okla. Siblings Could Be First To Witness Execution -- Victims'- Rights-Law Author Is Crime Survivor

OKLAHOMA CITY - Brooks Douglass remembers the cold steel of the shotgun barrel the intruder jabbed into his 16-year-old head as he lay trussed beside his weeping mother on their living-room floor.

Douglass' sister, Leslie Frizzell, remembers, as a 12-year-old, wiping away the blood after the man raped her - then, nearly 17 years later, her incredulous rage when he implied she had imagined it.

They both remember listening to their parents die after the man's partner methodically shot each member of the family - one, two, three, four - in the back.

Those memories are why both Douglass and Frizzell say they probably will choose on Friday to be the first survivors of murder victims in Oklahoma to witness an execution in person.

They have that choice because of a law the state legislature passed this spring. Douglass, now a state senator, was the author of the bill.

When he wrote it, the execution of their tormentor, Steven Keith Hatch, looked to be years away. But the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Hatch's appeal in June, thrusting brother and sister up against a macabre decision reserved for those whose lives already have been placed irrevocably outside the norm.

Debate and dread over viewing

Of the two, Frizzell is more certain she will be in the private viewing booth that prison officials are constructing for family members. At first, she said, she "debated and debated" whether to go, particularly because the idea upset her two children.

What decided her was Hatch's assertion at a July clemency hearing that he had not raped her, despite what she might believe.

"That infuriated me," she said. "I wanted him to look at me so I could say, `Let me tell you what you said to me.' "

Douglass said he will probably be present as well when the lethal injection is administered, in part to support his sister. But the prospect evokes more dread than relish.

"None of my choices are good," said the Republican legislator. "I know there will be emotional scars from watching the execution. But if he's executed and I'm not there, that will have repercussions, too."

What it boils down to as much as anything, he said, is that "I've ridden this horse for 17 years; why not see it through to the end?"

The hellish ride - eerily similar to the murders chronicled by Truman Capote in the book, "In Cold Blood" - began the evening of Oct. 15, 1979.

Hatch and his partner, Glen Burton Ake, chose the Douglass home, set amid fields in rural Okarche, Okla., at random. They were roughnecks and one-time brothers-in-law, on the run because they imagined police were seeking them for violating their probation on earlier crimes. They were messed up on booze and drugs.

One knocked at the Douglass front door on the pretense of asking for directions. Sixteen-year-old Brooks invited them in. They entered brandishing a double-barreled shotgun and a .357-caliber Magnum. In the living room they hogtied the boy, his mother, Marilyn, and his father, Richard, a prominent Southern Baptist minister.

Ake forced Leslie from room to room, looking for valuables. Hatch guarded the others. When Brooks tried to comfort his mother, Hatch threatened to blow his head off.

While the family listened to Leslie's pleas and sobs, both men raped her. Then they tied her alongside the rest.

The men paused to eat the family's supper, which was ready on the stove. Then Ake told Hatch to go outside, start the car, and "listen for the sound."

"Hatch knew he was going to shoot us," Douglass said. "I knew he was going to shoot us."

Ake emptied the revolver, pumping one bullet apiece into Brooks and his mother, two apiece into Leslie and her father. The slugs ripped through Brooks' esophagus, liver and the lining of his heart; Leslie suffered damage to her kidneys, liver, lungs and intestines.

Once the intruders were gone, the children managed to free themselves and their parents. By then, both parents were dead. Brooks drove Leslie to a doctor's home nearby.

Hatch and Ake killed two people in Texas before they were captured. At separate trials, both were convicted of murdering the Douglasses and sentenced to die.

Hatch's sentence has stood through a half-dozen appeals and resentencing hearings. However, Ake's conviction was overturned because the state did not provide a psychiatrist to aid in his defense. At his second trial, he was sentenced to life in prison.

What about victims' rights?

After the judge pronounced the sentence, he read the killer his rights: another appeal, a free transcript of the trial. Then the judge said, "You know, Mr. Ake, just once I'd like to be able to look at a victim of crime and read him just one right."

Douglass said he never forgot those words, which echoed his own disillusionment with the justice system.

What he and his sister had learned with brutal swiftness, he said, was that police and prosecutors saw them not as hurting, wronged human beings but as pieces of evidence. Investigators summoned them back from their first holidays with relatives after the murders to pluck hair samples from their heads, arms and groins.

Although Douglass played down his tragic history during the Senate campaign and had no thought of championing victims' rights, he soon realized that he was uniquely placed to see that others were treated with more compassion than he had been.

Legislation he sponsored since 1992 has bolstered compensation for victims, given them more privacy and allowed them to testify not only about the facts of a case but about their pain.

His latest bill, which lets family members witness executions, already has been used once. In that instance, the victim's relatives watched on closed-circuit TV because the booth that will separate family members from the media and other witnesses had not yet been built.

Douglass said he never imagined that he and his sister would be the first to watch a killer die face to face.

His aim, he said, was merely to balance the scales of justice. "The defendant can choose five witnesses," he said. Now victims have a comparable privilege.

Hatch did not respond to an interview request transmitted through his lawyer. The attorney, Tom Lahiff, minimized the significance to his client of Douglass' and Frizzell's likely presence at the execution.

"That's probably not one of the first things on his mind," he said. Of more concern, Lahiff said, is that Ake, who did the shooting, will live while, unless a last-minute petition succeeds, Hatch will die.

Neither Douglass nor his sister, who is a schoolteacher, can gauge how watching yet another death may change their lives.

But Douglass has already experienced one catharsis that rocked him to the core. About 18 months ago he happened to be touring the prison where Ake is held. He asked whether the prisoner would see him, and, to his surprise, Ake agreed.

Their 75-minute conversation "was the second most dramatic thing that ever happened to me in my life," Douglass said. Ake was "very, very remorseful," and invited him to say or do anything to help ease his pain.

"From there," Douglass said, "it was kind of an out-of-body experience. I bawled through most of it. He did, too.

"I told him, `For 16 years, I've wanted nothing more than to see you dead. Now, I just want it to be over. I'm sick and tired of carrying this around with me."'

Time for forgiveness

When he had said all he had to say, Douglass found, much to his astonishment, that he was granting Ake his forgiveness. "I told him, `Whether I like it or not, for the rest of my life, you'll be a part of me. I'd rather that you be something positive, not something negative.' "

At that, he said, "I felt the anger, like water all around me, suddenly flooding out of my feet - like poison. I could breathe again after not being able to breathe for years."

For him, Hatch's execution seems like one more necessary step along the same road. "To the degree that I'm ever going to get away from it (the murders), this is something I've got to face.

"What's strange is that I've realized over the past month that, on that day (in 1979), my childhood ended. I put my dreams on the back burner. The order of the day became survival.

"Now, I can start to think about that time in my life and who I would have been if it had never happened. It feels wonderful. I realize that there's a lot of baggage that can be shed, because I don't need it any more. "