Reported by Donna Wilson, STATEWIDE Correspondent

[Jana McGuire, Statewide Host] The Nebraska State Supreme Court has set a December 7th execution date for Michael Ryan. Ryan has been on death row for 11 years. Should the execution be carried out on that date, Ryan will be the third execution in two years. Until Harold Lamont Otey's execution two years ago, Nebraskans had not seen the State execute anyone in almost two generations. Some believe punishing capital crime brings peace of mind to victims and their families, but as Statewide Correspondent Donna Wilson reports, an execution to some extent envelops those reporting on and viewing the official business of the State. Donna?

[Donna Wilson, Statewide Correspondent] Well, first Jana, we should note that the purpose of this piece is not to make martyrs of those executed, nor is it to make heroes of those who saw it happen. It is to examine how human beings react in the most serious of affairs. Each of these people had an official function during the last two executions. Whether or not their duties were as reporters, observers, or attorneys, each seemed not to lose sight of the fact that they remained human beings no matter what the business.

[Leader of anti-execution faction] Folks, do you want them to be the focus of attention? Is that what we're out here for? We're out here for Willie Otey. He's over there. He's not over there. Look over there. Go over there. Just ignore these barbarians. Look over there.

The clock ticks while reporters inside and demonstrators outside the Nebraska State Penitentiary await word on Harold Lamont Otey's execution.

[Official announcement of death] The execution sequence began at 12:23 a.m. The execution sequence ended at 12:25 a.m. And the coroner pronounced death at 12:33 a.m.

[Leslie Boellstorff, Omaha World-Herald reporter] My name is Leslie Boellstorff. I'm a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald. The electric chair isn't a very dignified way to die but Harold Lamont Otey died with dignity.

Those words spoken the night of the execution sometimes still haunt Leslie today. As a government beat reporter for Nebraska's largest newspaper, covering controversial stories is old hat to her. Almost two years to the day after Leslie acted as a media witness to the Otey execution, she believes she's still being misunderstood.

[Boellstorff] That wasn't coming from sentimentalizing Harold Otey because I really had a very ambivalent feeling about him as a person obviously. I believe he committed the crime. I felt that he -- there was a lot of character traits I didn't find very admirable in Willie Otey. It wasn't like oh, he's my hero. I just felt my job there was to talk about how he died. That's what I tried to do.

As a media witness during John Joubert's execution, Eugene Curtin felt an overwhelming sense of justice when admitted child killer Joubert felt the fourth and final jolt of electricity which would kill him.

[Eugene Curtin, media witness] I remembered the two children that he had murdered. Let's remember he didn't just kill these children. He killed them in appalling ways. Torture was involved here. The one child he took out in the middle of December, sub-zero temperatures and made him strip down to his underwear and lay in the snow and he murdered him there. Appalling crimes. Yeah, I felt descend over me completely a sense of rightness, that this was ok.

Silence. The removal of possessions from a cell. Delicate hands of the condemned. Those are the images State Auditor John Breslow walks with.

[John Breslow, Nebraska State Auditor] Something that really amazed me about Willie Otey was his hands. He had the best looking hands I've ever seen. Very manicured. Really big. Really great looking hands. And then after, you know, he had been executed, electrocuted and was dead, his hands -- it was almost like a 130-year-old person who had arthritis. I'll never forget that as long as I live walking in the chamber and seeing the change of his hand. It was just so deformed.

[Paula Hutchinson, sometimes-attorney for Harold Otey] He wasn't sure that he wanted his attorney or his friends to be with him for support when he died because he wasn't sure he wanted to subject them to that ordeal. And we reassured him that it would be a difficult ordeal for us no matter where we were. And at least one of his attorneys wanted to be there for the reason that I mentioned earlier. When someone is trying to kill you, the most important thing in your life is your legal case and so, of course, his attorneys were some of the most important people in his life.

Paula Hutchinson acted as Harold Otey's attorney at different stages. She also was contributing counsel to John Joubert. On the night of Otey's death, she was one of his chosen witnesses. Four individuals. There are those undecided about capital punishment, those who think it just in some cases, those who have not waived on their support for state sanctioned executions and those who vow to fight it until the very end. As an observer Breslow did not see the execution. Hutchinson saw it as a supporter to the accused. Curtin and Boellstorff acted as official media witnesses. The first in 35 years, the Otey execution proved a media frenzy. A generation of reporters had not covered one.

[Hutchinson] With the concepts of redemption and forgiveness and punishment. I think it's very compelling. It's a story as old as society when you commit a crime and what do you do with that person, how do you address the needs of the victims and the victim's family? And that is always a good story.

[Curtin] Well for Bellevue this was an enormous story. We had a serial child killer in the city of Bellevue. We are a small community in the midwest. We're not as small as we were then. We're about 40,000 people now but when this happened in 1983 population of Bellevue must have been around 23, 25,000. This was a small town, Nebraska. It was a huge story for Bellevue and it is still. The fact that Joubert had died in the electric chair was already a week old by the time our newspaper came out so we're not breaking anything here. This was just our effort to put finality to this story that had plagued Bellevue for 12 or 13 years.

The chapter closed on the crime, but the witnesses would be thrust, for a time at least, into the media spotlight. Acquaintances even thanked Curtin for witnessing the execution.

[Curtin] I was simply doing my job as a reporter. Went out there, I saw what happened and I wrote about it. But the people out there seem to have a sense that this was a very traumatic thing to go through, and they're grateful to me for having been willing to do that on their behalf as they see us. People say to me oh, I would never have wanted to see that. Thank you for doing it for me. I've had some of that. I tell them well, thank you very much but it was not that traumatic, it was not that difficult.

[Anti-execution woman in crowd] You're all laughing. This is no laughing matter. Why don't all of you grow up?

Otey's execution may have been a bit more charged for Boellstorff.

[Boellstorff] You get really tired. The emotional levels on both sides are very high and very strong feelings. It's a very combative, confrontational atmosphere. Every interview you make you're trying to step around land mines because of people's feelings and they're looking for you to indicate how you think about it. And when it happened, it was unmistakable. This is now happening. At that point when I was wondering is this it, you know? I'm thinking, maybe I could leave now. I don't think that door is locked behind me. Maybe I could just walk out.

Why didn't you?

[Boellstorff] Well, I guess I felt like I was -- you know, I'm in for it now. I've signed up for this. I'll have to see it through.

[Breslow] The whole week has been extremely traumatic. I don't know -- I don't think anybody here if they were honest with you would say that they're going to walk out here with a bounce in their step and be the same person. I think we're all going to have to deal with what we witnessed and observed tonight and see if it changes us. If anybody went through what I went through, I don't think they would be in favor of the death penalty as much. I mean, just --

Are there any degrees to being in favor?

[Breslow] No, once someone is dead, they're dead. I understand that. I hear people make the expressions about frying somebody and barbecuing them and I have friends who say, you know, I'll pull the switch. If they'd let me, I would do it for free. And I understand that. But you probably won't get me to make any statement like that anymore.

As an observer Breslow spent Willie Otey's final days with him. His job, seeing to it that Otey be treated fairly. Breslow took the death march with Otey.

[Breslow] Before we went down to the chamber, I said to him, I'm glad I got to meet you. And that's all I said.

And no reply from him?

[Breslow] He replied but I can't remember exactly what he replied. It was something similar like that.

And so after the execution had been carried out, let me just ask you the next time you saw Willie Otey was?

[Breslow] He was in the electric chair dead.

For Hutchinson among other things watching Harold Otey die in the electric chair was a culmination of a professional relationship she had for him. In the end the words "I love you" were mouthed to her, too.

[Hutchinson] He was very, very grateful for the commitment that we had to the work we did for him and that's what he was saying. He was saying perhaps something different to his other friends that were there. But it was very important to him that we know and that was his way of saying that. He also didn't acknowledge the official witnesses there to watch him being killed. He wasn't there for a performance.

Hutchinson believes some members of the media were frustrated that Otey didn't make a final statement. Hutchinson says he did, just not to them.

[Hutchinson] Any aggrandizement of his position was more a function of the media and so to him it was a private personal event. The curtains open and the first time the person to be killed sits alone, strapped into the chair but without a face mask or electrodes so that the official witnesses can verify that it's he being killed, and the curtain closes again, and then when the curtain reopens the person is in full gear, the leather mask across the face and electrodes on the head and leg and so forth. And I think in the midst of all that, the fact that he kept a quiet personal moment speaks to who he was. I don't think he forgot for a moment the families of the victim and I know that he sincerely hoped that his death would bring them some relief.

For the victims' families the lives and deaths of the condemned will linger. If they're fortunate the book will be closed, but for the people who one night, one week, or even one month have crossed the paths of someone convicted of a capital crime, the end sometimes seems just a beginning. Reporting for Statewide, I'm Donna Wilson.