Sunday, April 6, 2008

PECKERWOOD HILL: "Many times, I have struggled with my feelings about this place."

Rev. Pickett has buried hundreds of men here. Not just a handful of executed killers, but small-time hoods with bad hearts, gangsters with AIDS, bed-sheet and razor-blade suicides, victims of shanks, cancer and old age.

Rev. Pickett looks down at the ground, or perhaps the flawed souls concealed there. The heavy air is colder now.

"Yes, I suppose they were bad,” he says, “or at least did bad things. But I knew a man who stuffed a sausage down his son’s throat and killed him. Later, he was active in the church and very generous. He changed. Some of them … well, sometimes I’ve thought we might have been friends in a different situation at another time.”

Click here to read the rest of this story about one of the world's saddest places, and the man of God who tends it.

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