Backfire

Pleading guilty would spare everyone more pain, Emily told her sister.

Janet's mind reeled. Her choice was still unmade when the district attorney sent another message.

Beth Harris's father wanted to meet her.

It had been barely three months since his only daughter's funeral. An insurance executive, Harris is a religious man with a mind he describes as analytical. He needed to know exactly what happened, and why.

"Something wouldn't rest in me until I heard from Janet herself."

She was shackled to an eye bolt on the floor when Harris walked into the district attorney's conference room. Janet looked up and held out her arms.

"These hands are the ones responsible for your daughter's death," she began.

Again and again, Janet apologized, through heaving sobs, with her body trembling so violently that Harris couldn't help but hold and comfort her, a father's instinct.

Janet told him what she had refused to tell police, how she had seen the flames from her back porch that night, but couldn't find her cell phone to call for help. How she heard sirens, and people screaming, but thought everything was under control.

She told Harris she learned of the deaths on the evening news, then spent the night praying and sobbing and sleeping. The next morning, she drove three hours to her parents' house.

Bob Harris listened. He consoled his daughter's killer. Janet asked for his forgiveness, and he granted it. Faith demanded that of him.

"What is forgiveness?" he wonders even now in an interview. "There's an understanding in my mind that she really didn't intend for anyone to be hurt or even be put out of their apartments."

Still, Harris felt Janet had a debt to pay.

Before leaving that day, he told her that he was a firm believer in capital punishment. Was Janet ready to accept death for what she had done?

"Yes," he remembers her saying. "I'd rather die right now than live the rest of my life with this."

Shortly after, Danahey decided to take the plea bargain, live out her life behind bars. There was a chance, she felt, for redemption, "of giving back in a positive way to the world what you took away."

At her formal sentencing, the courtroom was filled with survivors, police officers, firefighters and the families and friends of Campus Walk victims. Danahey's side took up a single bench.

Danahey rose. She says she no longer recalls the rambling apology that left some spectators disgusted, others confused, still others moved. Newspaper accounts quote her vowing to spend the rest of her days trying to fulfill the promise of those lives she took.

"I can make their dreams go on," she promised the grieving parents.

"I am your family now."

A Father's Crusade

Watching the drama unfold on the evening news, a 60-year-old graphic designer named George Brown felt his heart ache at the sight of Danahey's tear-stained face. Stunned when she was locked away for life, Brown found himself calling the district attorney and Danahey's lawyer to demand answers about what had happened to this stranger who so moved him. No one called back.

Brown knew well what damage impulse could wreak. One summer afternoon when he was around 11, he discovered a pack of matches in his pocket. Walking home across a field of broom sage, he lit a clump.

"It was like it had been sprayed with gasoline," he recalls. There was a loud whooof and the whole field was ablaze. The only thing that saved his family's home was a road that formed a natural firebreak. George never did confess.

Like Danahey, he sought meaning from tragedy. Changing the felony murder rule would prove that "I did something at least once that would be meaningful to this generation and generations to come."

Danahey reminded Brown of his only child. He could easily imagine his free-spirited son trapped in a similar situation, another victim of impulse.

And so Brown launched a grass-roots campaign to change the state's felony murder rule. But first, he wrote a letter to Inmate 0774159 at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh. He sent Danahey a picture of his old marmalade cat named Harry, and told her his own synopsized life story. Divorced, recently unemployed in a dot-com downsizing, he was feeling bleak about the prospects for a man his age. He never asked Danahey about the fire, nor did she volunteer. She wrote instead about a spiritual awakening. Brown found Danahey inspiring.

Brown designed a Web site and rallied volunteers to write legislators and speak out against the felony murder rule -- at churches or community centers, to legal organizations and volunteer groups. After an impassioned talk to an influential civic group Brown finally got a call back from the district attorney.

Months had passed since Stuart Albright had put Janet Danahey away for life, and public criticism that he had done so to enhance a tough-on-crime image for his reelection campaign was rankling. He invited his nemesis over for a chat.

Brown remembers a tense but polite discussion, and the moment when Albright pulled a stack of 8-by-10 photographs from a manila envelope and tossed them down on his polished conference table. Look what Janet Danahey did. The grisly photos showed the charred remains of Beth Harris, Ryan Bek and the two Llewellyn sisters. After the prosecutor was done trying to shock him, after he declared that Brown could not know what those parents must have gone through, George Brown remembers softly saying yes, he did know.

Brown's only son was just two months shy of 25 when he died on June 3, 1998. He had just quarreled with his fiancee, and George can only assume that this is what sent his bipolar child into a depressive tailspin. The railroad he was walking along that night marked a shortcut to his father's place. George wonders still if he had been on his way over to talk, deciding, instead, to lie down on the tracks .

Finding Meaning

Danahey's only brush with trouble before had been in high school, when she was caught vandalizing a boy's car with syrup and kitty litter. Now she was a lifer.

Behind prison walls, Danahey began to find what she never quite had outside: a sense of purpose, an identity. Letters filled the dull hours yawning across the prison yard. She wrote to her family, to a woman in a retirement home who corresponded out of loneliness or compassion or maybe both. She exchanged letters with George Brown. A Llewellyn cousin, and the sister of Rachel's best friend. And with Bob Harris.

She yearned to know more about Beth. About all of her victims. She read any newspaper clip she could find and studied the poem Ryan Bek's parents inserted in his published obituary.

"To know people you killed, their families, their favorites . . ." she says excitedly during a prison interview. "What their favorite song is, everything. I don't know, get to know them better in this world so you can fully get to know who you are mourning. I think it'll actually help the pain lift."

She stops, as if dismayed by her own insight.

"Gosh, if you've never killed anybody, you never go through that."

She learned that Ryan Bek had volunteered on behalf of battered women. That Beth Harris had the voice of an angel and planned to become a music teacher. She was outraged when prison authorities denied her request to start a battered-women's support group among inmates to honor Ryan. When she was told there were already too many prison choirs to launch one in Beth's memory. Bob Harris found Janet's urgent interest sincere.

"There is something there I haven't really been able to define," he says. "I do feel sorry for her both in being faced with dying in prison and admitting something that caused four deaths. She's beating herself to death."

And now this strange current keeps carrying him back to his daughter's killer. It is a connection he puzzles over, one that has cost him the comfort of the other Campus Walk families, causing them to shun him at their candlelight vigils and memorial tree-plantings. He says he is not offended, but the hurt is plain in his eyes.

"Beth can never be replaced, but part of the sensitivity of Beth, I see in Janet," he explains. "The warmth Beth had -- I see that in Janet. I don't think it's disrespecting Beth in any way."

In some ways, he goes on, "it's almost like she replaced Beth as my daughter. In a lot of ways, I have protective feelings for her. I want to help her, see whatever she does in life is good and successful.

"It's almost a warped relationship."

Collateral Damage

Mary Belle Danahey tells new acquaintances that her youngest daughter lives in Raleigh and works for the state. She dwells on what has happened to her family over a boxful of newspaper clippings and notes of support spread across the kitchen table. She gets up now and then to refill her tumbler with bourbon and water.

"Janet was ensnared by the law," she says. "Other people have done worse and got away with it. If the wind hadn't been strong that night . . ."

Her denial collides now and then with her husband's disgust, or with her older daughter's reproach. The small family hasn't yet memorized the steps of this complicated choreography. Over dinner one evening at a sports bar, they go round again.

"I feel anger at those four people," Mary Belle blurts out. "Why couldn't you get out?"

"I cannot believe that," Emily says. "You looked at those families." At the sentencing, Mary Belle had glared. "I gave them a look," Mary Belle acknowledges ruefully. "I know that. It's awful."

Emily believes Janet never learned responsibility because "Mama and Daddy always made things right."

"This time we can't, right?" Dave replies sharply.

The Danaheys held a yard sale and got rid of most of Janet's belongings to pay for her legal costs. There wasn't much. A microwave, her clothes, the brand-new set of dishes Mary Belle had bought Janet that Christmas, which she never got a chance to use.

They try to visit her once a month, write letters, talk occasionally on the phone, but the collect calls are prohibitively expensive. Janet's grandfather died. Emily gave birth to her first child, and she and her husband are expecting their second any day.

George Brown persuaded a legislator to sponsor his bill to repeal the felony murder rule, only to ask that it be withdrawn. There weren't enough votes. Maybe this year, or next, the time will be right to move forward.

Campus Walk was razed, and the lot fenced off. Construction crews showed up this spring and new apartments are starting to go up, but for the longest time all that remained in that scarred and empty space was a foundation.