It was the perfect campsite, a place where the five kids in the Jaeger family could skip stones in a drifting river and wake up to views of the Montana Rockies.
It was June 1973. The park was the first stop in a long-planned dream vacation, their first family camping trip. And everything was falling into place. They'd even snagged a prime site by the riverbank, complete with a picnic table under shade trees.
When it was time for bed, the younger kids scrambled into a tent and cocooned themselves in sleeping bags. Heidi, 13, snugged in next to 7-year-old Susie, the coltish, brown-haired baby of the family and they talked before settling to sleep.
Heidi woke before dawn, startled by cold air drifting in through the tent hole.
"She sat up and looked around," Jaeger tells me on a recent day. "And Susie wasn't there."
It would be 15 months before the Jaegers knew what happened to their youngest daughter.
"I kept thinking that it couldn't possibly be happening. None of it seemed real" says Jaeger, now 77.
We've met at a busy coffee shop on a recent day near her home in Missoula, Montana, about 180 miles north of where Susie was taken. She has curly white hair and the startlingly blue eyes that stared into so many television cameras after her daughter's disappearance.
"That night I had an argument with God," she says.
"I told him, 'Susie is an innocent, defenseless little girl, and I'm her mother, and it's only natural that I should want to hurt the man who took her.’"
How was she supposed to make it through this?
Her answer changed her life.
"I realized that if I gave into rage and fury and that desire for revenge it would consume me, and I'd never be any good for anyone. When we live with rage and bitterness, we destroy ourselves — we give the killer another victim."
Day by day she trained herself to feel concern for the man who, finally, would be revealed as David Meirhofer, a 24-year-old contractor from a nearby town. He confessed to the unspeakable. And Jaeger did the unimaginable. She forgave him.
She's told this story in towns across the country; at state legislatures and universities; at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, in Geneva; and in Rome, Japan, and South Korea. She's described it to media outlets from the Bozeman Chronicle to "Good Morning America."
She's done so as one of the forerunners in one of the most unlikely and increasingly visible anti-death penalty campaigns — led by survivors of violent crimes.
Adherents tell their stories, over and over again, to try to convince the world that reconciliation promotes healing. Taking revenge prolongs and multiplies anguish for the victim's family and the murderer's, they say. Retaliation multiplies the violence in the world, a Gordian knot of evildoing-to-evildoers that has been strangling us since the dawn of man.
Mercy, in this view, is the best way to unravel the threads.
On June 19, only two days after a racist white gunman shot and killed nine people during Bible study in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., heartbroken relatives of the victims offered him forgiveness.
"We will not let hate win," the family members told Dylann Roof at his bond hearing.
In April, Bill and Denise Richard, whose 8-year-old son died and 7-year-old daughter lost her leg in the Boston Marathon bombing, asked the Justice Department to stop seeking the death penalty for the bomber, for wrenchingly practical reasons.
It would "prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives," the Richards said.
In May, before Tsarnaev was nevertheless condemned to die, members of the abolition group Murder Victims' Families For Human Rights spoke to a small gathering at a Boston church near the site of the marathon bomb blasts. Bud Welch, a founding board member, told the crowd about losing his 23-year-old daughter, Julie, who died along with 167 others in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Hatred and revenge killed Julie; he did not want to live by it, he says, a decision he's since described at speaking events around the world. After McVeigh was executed in 2001, Welch found solace by befriending McVeigh's bereaved father.
Abolitionists tell similar stories via social media and the web. The organization Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing — co-founded in the early 1990s by Jaeger and fellow activist Bill Pelke — has toured 40 states nationwide and 16 countries overseas. Speakers include a woman whose father was stabbed to death in front of her and a man whose brother was executed by a Utah firing squad.
Pelke, a retired steelworker who runs Journey of Hope from his home in Alaska, lost his grandmother, a 78-year-old Bible teacher, in a brutal murder at her residence in Gary, Ind. Four teenage girls were charged in the slaying. When one of the teens, 15-year-old Paula Cooper, was sentenced to die in the electric chair, Pelke devoted himself to a campaign to save her life.
The overarching goal of the U.S. movement is to end the death penalty. For some advocates, the mission ends there.
"They don't want to have the murderer over for Sunday dinner," as one advocate puts it. Not every story involves forgiveness.
But many do. In Tulsa, Okla., Edith Shoals, 67, is a victims' advocate for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and, on the side, organizes support groups for women whose children were murdered. In 1992, Shoals' daughter Lordette, an 18-year-old college student, called Shoals from a pay phone and was murdered in mid-conversation, shot in the back by a carjacker.
"Grieving's not a big enough word for what happens," says Shoals.
"But if you don't forgive, it eats you up from the inside out."
Jaeger, for her part, had none of this to turn to in 1974, when she learned that Susie had died. Mercy groups didn't seem to exist. That changed in 1976, when Marie Deans, a tireless advocate for death row inmates, launched Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, today the longest-running victim-led abolitionist group in the country. Jaeger was one of the founding members.
Since then, Jaeger, Pelke and hundreds of have spent decades joining abolitionist marches, rallies and speaking tours, alongside activists such as Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who wrote the book Dead Man Walking, later to become a hit movie starring Susan Sarandon.
Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting, Jaeger reminds audiences.
"The criminal needs to be punished, with life in prison if necessary," she tells me.
Forgiving is not a spiritual mulligan; it doesn't give criminals a free pass, she coaches me. We're talking for the second time, sitting in another Missoula coffee shop, and she is answering countless questions with unerring generosity.
Executions do not honor the victim, she continues.
"Susie was a sweet beautiful girl who deserved a more beautiful and noble memorial than a state-sanctioned cold-blooded killing."
To share coffee with Jaeger is to enter a surreal world where, at the next table, people are joking about how they want to kill the waiter for bringing a latte instead of a cappuccino while right in front of you a mother is describing how she didn't wish death on the man who murdered her 7-year-old.
What is the right response to evil? I have to ask again. People who have been taught about forgiveness from an early age — perhaps because of a spiritual background — might have easier access to the concept, I'm thinking. But for me, it's a dark thicket without a bread crumb.
Revenge is sweet and mankind has a big sweet tooth, myself included. Some people in my family are victims of violent crime, I tell Jaeger. I haven't forgiven one perpetrator in particular, in large part because the man never apologized.
Before arriving at the coffee shop today I found a 1983 TIME magazine cover story about how Pope John Paul II forgave the would-be assassin who shot him four times.
"Why Forgive?" the headline asked. That's where I'm still stuck.
Jaeger’s journey led her to meet Meirhofer's mother years ago. They hugged each other, two bereaved women taking comfort. They refused to talk about the crime.
"I needed to stop thinking about how Susie died," Jaeger says.
She tells me about visiting Susie's grave, and then has to stop for a moment to regain her composure.
"I'm sorry," she apologizes.
"This is what I live with," she says, simply. And then she's ready to tell her story again.
This originally appeared at Juvenile Justice Information Exchange and has been edited and reposted with permission.
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