Grant murderer’s wish – if he comes clean

I’m not the guy to waste any crocodile tears on the plight of a dying killer.

So don’t worry. I’m not going to start now.

But hearing about Gregory A. Rowley’s last request got me thinking.

Maybe something positive can come of this.

Rowley, 47, lives in Walla Walla’s Washington State Penitentiary. The former Spokane man has served about a decade of a 46-year stretch for murdering a gentle husband, father and Spokesman-Review carrier named David Ritchey.

Rowley has apparently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Sounds more like karma to me, but what do I know?

I’m a columnist, not a doctor.

The upshot is that Rowley is asking for permission to leave the pen so he can draw his final breaths surrounded by those who still love him.

Isn’t that nice?

The man whose life Rowley stole never got that luxury.

David Ritchey died in terror, cut off from any comfort or compassion.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Merryman addressed that subject moments before sentencing Rowley far above the standard range.

Rowley showed “deliberate cruelty” in beating and kicking Ritchey to death, said the judge.

The victim, he later added, absorbed “an unrelenting and sustained attack and severe and prolonged beatings.”

The horror took place in the wee hours of Feb. 24, 1987.

Ritchey, 32, had just finished his two newspaper routes. According to a news account, Ritchey “had been raped and left to die, half-naked and wedged along the side of a parked car so he wouldn’t be easily noticed.”

Ritchey’s death rocked the city. The crime took place in a parking lot next to Rogers High School. For days students attended classes in a state of shock.

Nowhere, however, was grief a more tangible presence than in the modest Ritchey home on Rockwell Street.

I’ll never forget being invited inside the day after a detective knocked on the front door to give the family the worst news imaginable.

“How could somebody do this to him, to degrade him and torment him and violate him and our family?” Marsha, Ritchey’s widow, asked.

“What would provoke somebody to do this to a person who was doing nothing but delivering his papers and doing his job?”

I kept in touch with Marsha for several years after the murder. She struck me then as a gracious and good-hearted person, and I see that nothing has changed.

Rowley “should die with his family,” she said in a Wednesday newspaper story. “He never gave that to us, but I don’t want to be like him.”

The Ritcheys’ three children, as the story also indicated, want the man who deprived them of a dad to stay behind bars.

You can’t blame them for that. But if I were making the decision I would give Rowley this option:

You want to die at home?

Come clean.

The questions Marsha asked me 11 years ago need to be answered. Yet Rowley has never told the truth about what he did that night.

He had to admit being at the crime scene. Investigators found Rowley’s fingerprint, after all. So there was no getting around that. But Rowley has always claimed he was too scared to call the cops about what happened because he was drunk and stoned on pot.

In the encyclopedia of lame excuses, that one is close to the bottom.

Poor Greg Rowley is just another innocent man who got caught in the spider web of someone else’s dirty deeds.

The prisons are full of them.

But with his expiration date about to come due, you’d think a man would want to clear his conscience.

So talk, Rowley. Tell the world what you did to David Ritchey.

Until that day comes, as far as I’m concerned, you should stay locked up.

And rot.