Keith Morrison

Well, he isn't exactly sure about that, he said.

It was that kind of conversation, friendly, with some kind of limit, we sensed, coming soon.

Is there anything that you would like to say now to the families of those people, to the survivors of those people, that would be... I'm sorry.

Mind you, he said, it was his mother who did it, who made him a killer.

So, her fault?

Well, yes.

I find that very interesting, actually, Kenny, that you can say you love your mother, that you... I love my mom and dad forever.

And have those positive feelings toward them, even though your mother was the one who instructed you to kill people.

I mean, it's something for people to wrap their heads around.

I'd like to wrap my head around it.

Still friendly, but his mood seemed to have changed.

When your mother died, was that very difficult for you?

He was baptized a Catholic in prison, he told us.

Then I probed a little more about his mother, rather gently, and the conversation grew strained.

Well, I was just curious to know if your mother, like you, came to regret her crimes and try to achieve her own kind of redemption or whether she was just, you know, Sante all the way along to the end.

There was no way they cut off.

And that was that.

But as we tried to understand why that would be a trigger for a hang-up, Kenny called back to tell me he didn't want to talk about his mother anymore.

by which he meant his pitch to raise a million dollars for education is tangible contrition.

But there is one more bit of family laundry, and it is still unwashed.