Shortly before his execution, John Albert Taylor told me he had come to think of me as a friend because I sent him Christmas cards.
As a reporter, I was doing my job, trying to learn all I could about a man sentenced to die for raping and strangling an 11-year-old girl.Over the years it became clear Taylor was very lonely. And in the end, I did feel empathy and compassion for him as he faced a firing squad for a murder he wouldn't admit to, but which I have no doubt he committed.
First and last, though, I feel for the young victim and her mother. Sharron King found her daughter, Charla, dead on a bed in their Washington Terrace apartment in June 1989.
Charla had been raped and garroted with a telephone cord. Taylor was visiting a sister in the same apartment complex, and his fingerprints were quickly matched to some found on the telephone in the King bedroom.
During Taylor's trial, I learned that he had been living across the back fence from our house when the murder occurred. I have a small child, and I'm always frightened when I remember this.
After the trial, we began a correspondence, and Taylor would call me on the telephone, usually at night and always collect. As a journalist, I would take his calls, talk to him and take notes.
Our understanding was that everything he told me was off the record until after his death unless he said otherwise. Naturally, I hoped that Taylor would confess to the murder, but he never did.
When he invited me to attend his execution, I accepted immediately. But as the weeks dwindled to days and then hours, I became more apprehensive. I didn't want to see a man - any man - shot to death, but especially one I knew.
The first harsh words Taylor ever spoke to me came two days before he died. I had asked him, yet again, if he planned to file a last-minute appeal that would have kept him alive several more years.
"I'm tired of you asking me that question," he snapped over the telephone. "I'm not going to appeal."
Like most death-row inmates, Taylor had a lousy childhood. He described himself when young as a "whipping boy" for his mother and stepfather.
Leslie Beale, a half-sister who flew in from Florida for his trial, testified that their childhood had been strict and that his stepfather had been harsh with John.
Taylor spent three years as a teen in a sex-offenders program at a Florida mental hospital and later spent 10 years in a Florida prison for a burglary charge. Another sister, Laurie Galli, said her brother raped her three times when she was a child.
I now think Taylor was preparing for death for some time. He studied religion for about a year and was baptized into the Catholic Church last week.
Perhaps he saw it as a way to be released from his sins, but I don't think Taylor ever revealed his innermost thoughts to me, so it's impossible to know.
He had never hinted he was preparing to die. Then one night in December, he called and said he had just fired his attorney and dropped all appeals.
As a journalist, I immediately broke the story, without hesitation.
Taylor's letters and phone calls continued. He was having health problems - an enlarged heart, bleeding ulcers and swollen legs and feet.
While in prison those six years he gained 40 pounds and, with his deteriorating health, was scared he would die alone in his cell. The only alternative he saw for himself was execution, and I think he just decided that he preferred that to a lingering, lonely exit.
Taylor was always soft-spoken and, near the end of his life, seemed to grow more relaxed. He laughed and joked more. But he never forgot he was talking to a journalist. He hated to be asked questions.
When I forgot, he would say, "That sounds like an interview question to me."
The last time I saw him in person, on Human Rights Day, he had been reading an Ann Rice novel.
But Taylor was alone when the four bullets tore through his chest. Many strangers were in the room, but his mother wasn't there, or his seven sisters and half sisters. He couldn't even fill his five witness chairs.
Only two people he considered friends were there, myself and prison Chaplain Reyes Rodriguez. His family was represented by an uncle whom he barely knew, who very kindly came in from Oregon at Taylor's request.
Taylor's natural father, Albert, probably would have attended, but he died shortly after his son's trial. Taylor respected and loved his natural father, whom he got to know only in the last six months of Albert's life.
Taylor didn't want to exploit the sensational aspects of his execution. He wanted it to be a low-profile affair. As for choosing the firing squad over lethal injection, he said that for him, it was simply more frightening to picture himself strapped helpless to a gurney than to face a firing squad.
"I just hope they aim straight," he joked.
He wanted no funeral or memorial service and asked that his body be cremated and his ashes taken to Oregon by his uncle and scattered without ceremony.
I found Taylor a shy, private man who seemed to prefer the solitude of his prison cell to life on the outside. He had even lost contact with a former wife and their son, now 16.
While Taylor trusted me and considered me a friend, my own feelings were more complicated. I was fond of him but didn't count him a friend or forget he was a murderer.
Still, now that Taylor's life is over, I feel emptier. No more letters from a lonely human being trying to reach out, chats with a man who sounded for all the world like a courtly Southern gentleman.
My heart aches for Charla, her mother and I guess for John Taylor, too.
Perhaps his own words best serve for an epitaph:
"What's done is done."