It. is forgiving part of moving on like that? part of getting past it? i think it is. i mean, i feel like i ve forgiven. you can forgive, but it just doesn t change the circumstances sometimes. but there is a difference between forgiveness and forgetting. the state of oklahoma along with brooks and leslie douglass had some unfinished business with stephen hatch. not the triggerman, no. but a murderer, yes. coming up i was afraid to sleep at night. i was afraid somebody was coming to get me. another legal confrontation. and another staggering surprise. a new part of the story.
Victims of crimes had very few rights in oklahoma. he was very, very passionate and focused on victims rights. and who could argue with him? there was nobody in the senate or in the house for that matter who had been through that kind of a traumatic experience. the law s passage was a huge victory for brooks and his allies in the legislature. and personally for him, well, it happened during his second term in the senate. revelation. and not a happy one. for all he had accomplished, all he had overcome, the grief, the fury, the drift, the confusion, it wasn t enough. perhaps it was his long dead father still whispering in his ear, something he needed to do. he found himself on a legislative tour of oklahoma s infamous maximum security prison at mccallister.
Outfits leslie wore to compete in miss teen oklahoma. i was the one that spent time with my mom, whether it be singing or her making me a new dress for a pageant. so autumn, 79, 16-year-old brooks was an advanced football-playing senior in high school, making money breeding doberman dogs. leslie, a precociously pretty 12 ye 12-year-old girl, and dad was busy. a chaplain at the state house. a visitor of prisoners at mccallister penitentiary, even preaching a bit on early morning television. simply saying that death is not meaningless, that it s a part of the overall experience of life. and packing them in at putnam baptist. i may not match god s plan with my living, but he knows just exactly how long i m going to live. i don t. praise the lord for that. for the pastor and his wife, charity began at home. their door was always open.
And family, scraped together a couple of million dollars. for three years into his labor of love cast hollywood actors, as well as some of his friends. and then called it heaven s rain, for reasons his father would have understood. heaven s rain opened late last year, and leslie, who had survived the whole long ordeal in her own private way, had to watch someone else very publicly be her. brooks, do you realize that every time we go through this i have to relive everything again? and that i don t know who s going to show up in my dreams. the thing that kept coming into my head was, i wonder how she feels about this. i wonder what she thinks about this. it kind of just made me look back at at where my head was and what i was thinking. and she actually did a great job
as they raced up route 81, brother and sister had a surreal, surprisingly composed conversation. it was very strange because there was, you know, moments of silence and, you know, then leslie asked me, are mom and dad dead, and i said, yeah, they are. and she goes, so, you know, what are we going to do? i guess we ll go live with our aunts and uncles. and i said, i guess so. i just said, we don t need to worry about it right now. we just need to, you know, need to get better. brooks was doing better than 100 miles an hour in his dad s 1970 plymouth duster. they drove to the lawn of a family friend, a doctor, and blurted out what happened. they actually didn t believe us. we said, we re shot, mom and dad are at the house dead, help us. then i collapsed as soon as i got in the living room.