George Allen decreed that loved ones of murder victims could watch the killers' executions. Roughly half the time, they go. Smith and his sister were the first. Turner, a paroled murderer, shot W. Jack Smith Jr. in the head, then stood over the gasping jeweler, firing into his chest. Now Billy Smith is a little more comfortable with Turner's death by injection.
Time heals a lot of wounds.
Most of the family members of Philip Council, the brain-damaged cashier shot to death during a 1991 robbery in a Portsmouth convenience store, are also at peace. 11 of them, the largest group yet, watched last summer's execution of Johnile Dubois. He got what was coming to him. He just wishes his wife, Elizabeth, could have been there. Their son's accident 20 years before his slaying had fired the afterburners in that special portion of a mother's heart that protects and loves.