CINCINNATI March 31 Judge Charles J. Kubicki, Jr. pronounced sentence this morning on Anthony W. Kirkland in the capital offense case involving the murder of Esme Louise Kenney and three other women. As recommended March 17th by the jury who convicted him on all counts March 12th, Kirkland received from the court at 9:33 a.m. two death sentences, one for aggravated circumstances involving the death of thirteen year old Esme and the other for same involving the death of fourteen year old Casonya Crawford. He also received two 70 years to life sentences for counts that included the murders of the two other women, along with Tier III Sex Offender status. The trial started on the 1st, so the month of March, 2010 resolves this horrific story, at least in the legal sense. Since the news of Esme’s death a year ago, I have sensed tremendous power in the story’s unfolding.
It began with a conviction about the power of Esme to astonish people when she was alive, based on the many reports and pictures taken of her that testify to her kind, gentle, and all-loving embrace of everyone near her. Esme’s beloved nieces and nephew “delighted” in her. Her older siblings “adored” her. Teachers, friends, and strangers gravitated to her. She gave everyone a hug. No longer is it any wonder to me that she is being remembered in event after event, so many, in fact, that members of her family are hoping for a break.
“I think sometimes we hear of another tribute being put together, and we just think, 'I can't take another memorial service,’" says a family member. "’I just need to let it be, or even ignore it all for a little while.’”
Something else has struck me lately, however, something about Esme that is no less astonishing and which keeps me from being able to "ignore it all for a little while"…until it is said. And that is the transcendent power of Esme’s spirit during the passion of her excruciating ordeal at the hands of her assailant, a power that continued to influence events with far reaching consequences after her death.
Even as Anthony Kirkland was attempting to rape her, she did not resist. "That's what was surprising about it,” Kirkland told detectives. “She was calm. I don’t know. She didn't fight me.” In one of the most dramatic displays of the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek that I have ever heard, she instead quietly asked him, “Do you have any children?” She thus appealed to his conscience, his sense of fatherhood. And it made an indelible impression on her killer. "What did you tell her?" asked the detective. He replied, "I looked at her, and I told her, 'yeah.' Then I stopped." As it turns out, Anthony Kirkland had a three year old son, Anthony Kirkland, Jr.
Kirkland left the scene of Esme's murder, but returned right afterward, because he felt an unusual compulsion to do so. "I was actually called there to go back," he said. "Don't misunderstand me, it was like ... a thought that came into my mind that said...that said 'go back to her, go back to where she is.’ When I got there, I sat up under a tree, and something told me to, just to relax, sleep.”
Kirkland was apprehended because they found him asleep under that tree just a short distance from Esme's body, her possessions on his person, presented as if on a platter to the authorities for indictment.
I agree with those who say Esme's spirit was responsible for the instruction that Kirkland return to her, which he obeyed. He obeyed despite the lack of lighter fluid he had intended to procure that was necessary to render the evidence untraceable. Not only did he come back without it, he came back bearing on his body all the DNA evidence required to tie him to the crime. During past investigations, police had asked him about shaving his body hair and bathing in bleach in order to obliterate evidence. During this investigation, however, even his usual denials, lies, and crafty games to elude the detectives failed him. He broke, giving a full, detailed confession.
Kind, gentle, even in the face of death, Esme’s power proved greater than Kirkland’s, so much greater that it apparently began to trouble him and take from him the desire to live. In the realization of what he had done to her, he tried to induce his captors to pull their guns on him. “I need to keep my word to her,” he told the detectives. “What was your word to her?” a detective asked. “That, uh, well, hell, my word was that I’d be joining her. That was what my word was.”
The result of all these things is that Kirkland, with this sentence, will never kill again. Esme's sacrifice, and the strength of her spirit during her ordeal and afterward, save future lives, and bring justice to three other women who Kirkland is convicted of killing.
Where does such a powerful spirit like Esme’s come from? I believe it comes from God. Perhaps there is a higher purpose for her to which we ought to give our assent. Perhaps Esme is an example of the paradoxical power of God’s love, best exemplified, not in lordly pomp and circumstance that elevates the beloved to some lofty station and status befitting God; rather, in lamb-like weakness, such as the gentle love of a young girl, even in the lonely and terrifying face of her death.
I can’t help but see a message in Esme's life and death, the message with which she herself was “smitten,” so her mother says, and that is the message of Christianity, that God reveals himself through suffering love. I believe that this is her life and legacy, God’s love extending way beyond her immediate world, reaching out to many, many people. My desire is that Esme’s example of hope and love spreads ever farther afield to those who needn’t have known her when she was alive.
A friend of hers remarked at a memorial, “It can’t be her. Esme was going to save the world.” To all who have eyes to see, it is her; it’s Esme, a saint in my eyes, who is indeed going to save the world.
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