..  ..Duncan Peder McKenzie, Jr. ...No A013790 ...Montana State Prison ...Deer Lodge, Montana ...Year of Birth 1953 ...Marital Status widowed ...Children three ...Date of offense January 21, 1974 ...Sentenced to death March 3, 1975 ...Status Executed may 10, 1995, by lethal injection . Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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The murder of 23 year old Lana Harding, a teacher in a rural area near Conrad, Montana, was the crime that brought Duncan McKenzie, Jr., to death row. McKenzie had kidnapped Harding from her home at the Pioneer School, raped & then strangled her near to death, & finally beaten her until she died. McKenzie had served a previous prison sentence for assault & had only recently moved into the area. He was arrested after police learned that his truck had been seen at the school on the evening of the crime. McKenzie spent over 20 years appealing his sentence before he was executed in 1995. Among those to witness his death was Harding's mother, Ethel, who had by then been elected to the state senate. The weather that week turned ugly. We drove from Helena through pea-soup fog & horizontal snow. We were put through the compulsory ceremony of logging our equipment through security, then we were taken out to the prison courtyard. As we carried our photographic & recording equipment across the yard, we unexpectedly bumped into McKenzie, who was being escorted to maximum security. After all the negotiations over whether we could be in the same room witf him, there we were, side by side in the open air. No one even acknowledged anyone else. Though I knew it was almost certainly against the rules, I grabbed Duncan's right hand, which was cuffed tohis waist. When we reached the inner sanctum, they separated us. At the time we met, McKenzie had beaten the devil, maneuvering through 8 execution dates & myriad postconviction appeals-the 2nd longest time under the death sentence of anyone in the United States. "Well, I'll either be executed Wednesday morning sometime or I will have my sentence commuted to life without parole which, being alive, has a lot of benefits to it but but being alive in a place like this has a lot of drawbacks to it so... I've got kids out there that I haven't seen in years & some that don't want to see me...." One of my assistants, Courtney Bent, nervously tried to coax a bit of background out of McKenzie. He told us that in his youth, he had driven his father to rodeos long before he earned a driver's license. He had nursed his father's frequent hangovers. In exchange, his father had taught him to be an auto mechanic. Then McKenzie broached the subject of death. "Someone who I had a great deal of trust in at the time, & who's died since, told me that death should not be feared. That each night when we go to sleep we dream for a certain period of time. Sometimes our subconscious & our conscience will remember the dream or a portion of it. When we're not dreaming, there's a void. It's just emptiness. We don't know it's there. It's just part of the nights as it goes by. It's a little slice of death & yet...we don't fear going to sleep.... We fear only what we don't know or fear itself."

Courtney kept probing & Duncan went on. "The way I look at it-death-it's something we have to accept whether we want to or not because from the day we're born to the day of our death, we're dying. All of us..." He went on as if time meant nothing. He talked at his feet. Ne excess motion, no flamboyant gestures, except to wince at the pain in his back. He had rehearsed the things he said, at least in his mind; I had read some of the same comments in the newspapers. His words were dispassionate. Maybe as someone in his last hours his mind was on automatic pilot. Maybe he was tired & had given up. It was the 5th of May & he had 5 days left to live. Finally he touched on his victim, Lana Harding. "I've heard nothing but wonderful things about Lana Harding as long as I've been here. So, I can't say anything bad about her or her mother for that matter. I can understand her grief & her anger because she sustained a terrible loss. Our first daughter died a crib death at 6 months & what made it even more bizarre was that the day that she died, we had taken her for her 6 month checkup & the doctor...if all the kids were as healthy as she was, he'd be out of business." As we listened to McKenzie, the guards made derisive remarks about his veracity. This had been a fairly common occurrence during our sessions at various institutions. The next day we were invited to the clemency hearing. Deer Lodge is a small town where the modern & the old-fashioned clash. TV cameras & anchor persons faced an audience of weathered faces topped by baseball caps & cowboy hats. A mounted moose head on the back wall, & children ran loose. On the left side of the courtroom sat those who were against the death penalty; on the right, friends of the victim's mother. Walking through the prison that evening, I caught sight of McKenzie talking through a partition to his family & his lawyers. They were bringing him the news that the hearing had gone badly. I waved through the glass. Four days to go. Lethal injection is now the method of execution in Montana. The state's death chamber is actually an RV. Witnesses to the execution sit at the feet of the condemned. For a brief period Duncan was the most famous man in the state-front page. He was the first man to be executed since FDR was in office.