John Byrd, the man who murdered Sharon Tewksbury's husband during a convenience store robbery 19 years ago in Ohio, was put to death last year on Feb. 19. Tewksbury wanted him killed and she's glad he's dead. Over the years he was in prison he'd threatened her family from death row, writing her letters about his friends on the outside who would "take care of us," she says. "If the man who murdered my husband had at any time shown extreme remorse and asked to talk to me, I might have done it, but in 19 years all he did was threaten to hurt us. There are people in this world who are just plain evil. It has nothing to do with faith and religion and believing or not believing."

Yet Byrd's end has done little for her and her family. Certainly, she feels safer: "The death penalty for my children and I gave us the freedom to know that this man was never going to hurt us again or anyone else again," she says. Still, there was no release, and now Tewksbury speaks of the execution with surprising ambivalence. "None of us felt elation. None of us felt overjoyed. I don't have strong feelings about the death penalty one way or the other now. My goal is to get all of the media to understand that 'closure' is a bad word, a word survivors don't understand. 'Transition' is the word we use. That doesn't mean everything is OK. Never will it be OK, and no execution, no jail sentence, nothing, will help in that process."

Such a reaction isn't uncommon. Austin Sarat, a political science professor at Amherst College and the author of the 2001 book "When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition," says that although there haven't been large-scale studies of the effects of the death penalty on victims' families, anecdotal evidence suggests it often fails to ease anyone's pain. "If you study victims' groups, you find that reaction to the process is very divided," he says. "Many people who witness an execution as relatives of someone who's been murdered come away disappointed, especially where lethal injection is the method, because there's literally nothing to see. For other victims, seeing someone die at least provides the assurance that this person will never do it again."

Today, Tewksbury works as national volunteer coordinator for Parents of Murdered Children. She agrees that victims are frequently disappointed after a long-awaited execution. "Sometimes it doesn't come to them right away, because they're all caught up in the moment," she says. "But further down the road you wake up thinking, 'I'm still missing the person that I loved, nothing's changed, and I don't feel any better.' It's a long hard struggle to work through grief. Some survivors have the ability and the energy and hope to do that, and others don't and their lives are just destroyed."

Welch has seen the same thing. "I'm on the board of directors at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and I know a lot of victims' family members. For five years prior to [McVeigh's] death, I was saying, 'You're really looking for closure, you're looking for something to help you feel better when you kill Tim McVeigh, and I'm afraid you're not going to find it."

More than most other death-penalty opponents, Welch viscerally understood how the families felt. Right after Julie was killed, he was desperate to see McVeigh die. In 1999, he told a Harvard audience, "After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged -- I mean, fry the bastards. We didn't need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. You no doubt probably saw at some point McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them ... Because had I thought that there was any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so."

As the months dragged on, though, Welch had to contend with the memory of his daughter, who was passionately opposed to the death penalty. At 16, she had founded a chapter of Amnesty International at her high school. He remembers that while driving her home from college during her junior year, she'd been enraged by a radio news report of an execution in Texas. "Dad, all they're doing is teaching hate to their children in Texas," she told him. For months, the conflict between her politics and his pain tormented him, and he eventually came out against McVeigh's execution and traveled to western New York to visit McVeigh's father, Bill.

McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. Since then, Welch says, "Not a single person has told me they benefited from it. I've had about five people tell me that it really didn't help them any," he says. Some came to that realization while McVeigh was still alive. Welch says that at one survivors' meeting several years after the bombing, a widower who'd wanted the death penalty suddenly said, "You know what? Hell, it ain't going to help me when they kill that guy."

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