Strange but true - My brother's killer now my friend Episode 3

Over the years Denise had forgotten Fields’s name. But in a strange twist, she had ended up working with men just like him. As a young doctor, she had to work places senior staff didn’t want to go.

One of those places was the county jail. Denise didn’t mind. Her new patients were often some of the same people she had treated at the county hospital. In 1997 she took a job at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo County, a medium-security men’s prison located halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Unlike the men at the jail, those she now treated were there for the long haul. She began to get to know them. Once she knew them a bit, she asked what they were in for. Many of them said murder.

They would tell her their stories. She realised they had been in prison for about the same length of time Fields had. Fields, she thought, might, in fact, be like these guys, probably was like them, and she liked these guys. They were “nice people who made mistakes”. She didn’t believe they were evil, at least not the select group of men she worked with at the prison hospice she helped found.

She wanted to know if really, Fields was like them. She had forgiven him, but she wanted to hear him say he was sorry. She didn’t want to make him feel bad, but she wanted her pain acknowledged.

She wanted him to understand what he had taken from her and her family. She asked the men she worked with at the hospice, lifers, what they thought of her plan to contact Fields.

The lifers told her they would give anything to be able to say sorry to their victims’ families. They told her how hard it was to attend parole hearings, see the families suffering and know they were the cause of that suffering. In 2005 Denise wrote to Fields and asked if she could visit him.
Denise reads Ronnie's letter:

Fields’s reply came back immediately in neat handwriting on lined yellow paper.
“Miss Taylor, believe me when I tell you this: no matter what you or your family think of me, I live every day of my life with the fact that I took a life. I regret that it happened and I’m deeply sorry for bringing so much pain and discomfort into your lives.

''Miss Taylor, you made a request to visit me and I am ashamed to see you though I owe your family as much so therefore I will honor your request to visit.”

Denise was familiar with prisons, but this was different. At the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, California, instead of showing her prison identification and breezing through, she had to queue and then wait in a cafeteria-like space with walls painted a ghastly institutional yellow-grey.