In Montana, where the vigilantes of gold rush days became legend dispensing swift, deadly justice, 52 years have passed since a murderer swung from a hangman's noose.
That chunk of history may end Wednesday when Duncan Mc-Ken-zie Jr., on death row 20 years for the torture-murder of a rural schoolteacher, is scheduled to die at the state prison in Deer Lodge.McKenzie, 43, passed on the gallows and chose to die by injection.
He has more appeals pending and has asked Gov. Marc Racicot for clemency. The Board of Pardons recommended against it late Saturday, but Racicot has not announced his decision.
The victim's mother, a state senator, wants McKenzie dead.
"I've tried to be patient," Ethel Harding said. "I believe he should pay for his crime, and he has to do it personally."
Most people in Conrad, a town of 2,900 in Montana's wheat country where McKenzie killed his victim in 1974, also want the execution carried out.
"Conrad's never forgotten," said farmer Jerry Hepp. He said his Bible-study group at St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church once voiced unanimous support for Mc-Ken-zie's execution, despite the church's stand against capital punishment.
Paying for one's crimes has been a theme in Montana justice since gold drew miners and crooks to the Rocky Mountains.
Among the outlaws was a band of thieving desperados known as "the Innocents," blamed for the murders of more than 100 people in the gold camps from 1862 through 1864. Their leader, Henry Plummer, was the sheriff of Virginia City.
In reaction, local businessmen formed a vigilance committee.
The vigilantes broke the back of the Innocents by forcing a captured outlaw to provide his cohorts' names and hanging every member they could find - anywhere from 24 to 30 of them according to various accounts.