By Susan Gallagher

When Marietta Jaeger Lane received the Jeannette Rankin Peace Award for her tireless advocacy of forgiveness since the 1973 kidnapping and murder of her daughter, kudos came from a lot of people, one a college instructor who uses Lane’s message to help students turn their lives around.

Over the years, Lane’s efforts to strengthen forgiveness and defeat capital punishment have been lauded widely and even took her to Switzerland, where she appeared before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1999. Her story has been told on TV programs such as ABC’s “20/20” and in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s book “No Future Without Forgiveness.” High-profile, for sure, but consider, too, Lane’s quieter impact – at places like South Puget Sound Community College.

Instructor Yvette Wixson at the campus in Olympia, Wash., cheered the announcement that Rocky Mountain College’s Institute for Peace Studies in Billings was presenting its Rankin award to Lane, a member of Holy Family Parish in Three Forks, on Nov. 20.

Over the last 10 years or so, Wixson has shared Lane’s message of forgiveness in life skills classes at the college. Wixson helps to prepare students – often impoverished adults – for jobs. Many have led difficult lives and carry grudges that stand between them and successful employment, she said in a phone interview. Sharing Lane’s story is one way that she tries to help students resolve their resentment and move forward.

“We are trying to train people to hold a job,” Wixson said. “Sometimes, we have to work on life skills before they can get there. I tell them about the impact that forgiveness has had on Marietta.”

Wixson, who first heard about Lane through a TV program years ago, has not met the woman whose journey has been described as one from fury to forgiveness. Lane advocated life in prison, not execution, as punishment for her daughter’s slayer. Arrested the year after 7-year-old Susie Jaeger disappeared, the accused man died by suicide after confessing to her death and three others.

Susie was snatched from a tent near Three Forks in 1973 while her family, Michigan residents at the time, camped during a vacation. She was one of five Jaeger children.

In the ensuing years, her mother worked with the poor in inner-city Detroit, directed the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, served on the board of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, co-founded the organization Journey of Hope…from Violence to Healing and spoke on Vatican Radio.

As a contributor to “Exploring Forgiveness,” which was published in 1998 by the University of Wisconsin Press and opens with a preface by Archbishop Tutu, Lane said that in thinking about Susie’s killer, she focused on “a God who seeks not to punish, destroy or put us to death, but a God who works unceasingly to help and heal us, rehabilitate and reconcile us, restore us to the richness and fullness of life for which we have been created.” Execution would have violated Susie’s life, wrote Lane, who believed her daughter “was better honored by saying that all life is sacred and worthy of preservation.”

The Jeannette Rankin award, named for the Montanan who was a peace activist and the first woman elected to Congress, is given annually to a peacemaker who lives in Montana or has significant ties to the state. Past recipients include the late U.S. Sen. Mike Mansfield; Greg Mortenson, who established schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, who guided the Archdiocese of Seattle from 1975-91.

Lane said she was honored to receive the award, but does not see herself “fitting in that category” of people. “I’m not sure she knows the impact she has had,” Wixson said. “This thing we call peace starts with each individual, and it starts with inner peace.”

Lane ultimately responded to her daughter’s murder by turning tragedy “into one of the most powerful statements on forgiveness that I have ever heard,” said Moe Wosepka, executive director of the Montana Catholic Conference. He and Lane have together worked against the death penalty in Montana, and are in a group that visits inmates in prisons at Deer Lodge and Shelby.

Lane’s presence in Montana grew after she drove to the state, alone, nearly 11 years ago for the 25th anniversary of Susie’s disappearance. Husband Bill was deceased. Attending Mass at Holy Family Parish in Three Forks, she met Deacon Bob Lane, and the two eventually wed.

Deacon Jim Butts of Pope John Paul II Parish in Bigfork nominated Lane for the Rankin award. She was chosen unanimously.


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 25, No. 12, December 18, 2009.