On Palm Sunday, April 8, 1990, Jeanne Bishop was standing in the aisle of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, holding a palm and a choir folder when the call came in that her sister Nancy, brother-in-law Richard and their unborn child had been slain by an armed intruder.
Weeping in the church office, she started to question God.
“I know Nancy would have been praying from the moment she walked into her home and saw his gun,” she said. “I wasn’t so angry at the killer. I get that people have free choice and choose to do evil. I was more mad at God for not hearing her prayer and answering it and saving her life.”
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But when details from the Winnetka crime scene emerged a week later, Bishop’s anger subsided. As her sister lay dying, she had scrawled a heart and the letter “U” in her own blood.
“I knew they were safe in God’s arms at that moment,” said Bishop, 51. “In her dying moments, she is thinking of love, giving a message of love. She’s not thinking bitterness and revenge. God had to be so present with her at that moment. She was going to the love that created her, sustained her and gave his son for her. That was such a big help for me.”
Bishop, a Cook County public defender, had always opposed the death penalty. The death of her sister energized that opposition. She couldn’t support putting more families through the same grief. After all, the killer, 16 at the time, was somebody’s son, Bishop thought.
Until this year, she had never once allowed the name of her sister’s killer to cross her lips. But when she visits her sister’s grave on Easter Sunday, she will pray for David Biro, who is now 37 and serving three life sentences.
“Easter is always such a reminder that violence and death are not the last word,” she said. “They don’t have power over us. Love and the love of God is the most powerful force on Earth and are eternal. This year as never before, I’m seeing that I not only need to love Nancy and Richard and the baby, I need to love the person who took their lives, love them the way God loves them. That’s so brand new to me and makes me see so many things differently. … I feel a stone has been rolled away from my heart.”
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