Katie Kitchen had always felt some sadness about the fate of the man convicted of murdering her father. On a summer night in 1991, Robert Hans Kaim, a seventy-seven-year-old white real-estate developer, had just pulled into his garage in Houston’s upscale Tanglewood neighborhood when an assailant robbed him at gunpoint, shot him in the chest, and then drove off with his wallet. Nine days later, police arrested a twenty-year-old Black man named Joseff Deon White in connection with the crime. White told investigators that he’d had an accomplice, a Jamaican friend who went by the street name Blocker, but the police never found or even identified him. At White’s trial, Kitchen noticed his small stature, and the mothers of his children sitting on his side of the courtroom, crying. The jury reached a guilty verdict in forty-five minutes. On April 20, 1992, White was sentenced to life in prison. “All I could think about was how senseless it was for a person to throw away their life for a wallet,” Kitchen, who was forty at the time, wrote later, in her journal.

The Tanglewood home, where Kitchen grew up, is a mid-century-modern structure made of brick and glass. I met Kitchen there, in August, when she was visiting one of her two older sisters, Ellen Benninghoven, who moved back into the home a few years after their mother’s death, in 2011. As Kitchen unlatched a tall security gate, which the family had installed in the wake of the murder, she gestured toward the front entrance. “That’s where the police found him,” she said. When officers reached the scene, after a neighbor heard a commotion and called 911, Kaim was still alive. According to the Houston Chronicle, he had crawled to the entryway and was banging his head against the door in an attempt to wake his wife.An émigré from Berlin who’d fought for the U.S. in the Second World War, Kaim had an imposing build and a “huge German voice,” Kitchen said. Before he was rushed to the hospital, he told the police that during the robbery he’d refused to hand over his wallet. Kitchen, who was out of town that night and didn’t reach the house until the next morning, sometimes imagines that her father “scared the hell” out of White, perhaps leaving him no choice but to fire in self-defense.

Now seventy, Kitchen is white-haired and voluble, with a slight Texas accent and an understated personal style.Versed in the anti-racist precepts of such writers as Ibram X. Kendi, she calls herself a “white woman of privilege” from a “very segregated world.” During her childhood, a Black housekeeper, Willie Lee, cooked the family’s meals and lived in servants’ quarters Monday through Friday. Kitchen’s first husband, whom she married when she was nineteen and divorced shortly before her father was killed, was the heir to an oil fortune. Today, Kitchen splits her time between homes in Austin, New York City, and Snowmass, Colorado. With the exception of a stint as a waitress at a Holiday Inn, she has never had a paying job.

As we sat in the back yard of her sister’s house, which is still decorated with their parents’ antique furniture and numbered-edition fine-art prints, Kitchen became emotional discussing her father’s death. She recalled his fondness for sailing trips and jelly doughnuts. But at other times she spoke of his murder with an unnerving sense of perspective, as if her personal tragedy were an inevitable result of a broader societal reckoning. “I’m just so privileged that I can’t imagine complaining about anything,” she said. “We all lose our dads, right? Mine was to a violent crime, but, then again, it just shows that I am part of this world. If rich old white people keep putting themselves on taller and taller pedestals, sooner or later people are going to break down the walls.”

After Kaim died, Kitchen said, she finally “started showing up for life.” She travelled the globe, got a bachelor’s degree, and, at at a hatha-yoga class in Houston, met a financial executive named Paul Kovach, who became her second husband. Kitchen was a liberal, but, as she wrote in her journal, she worried that “there was nothing I could really do to make a difference.” In August of 2014, she attended a two-day symposium, “Making the Change They Want to See,” at an arts center near Snowmass. One of the speakers, the artist and policy advocate Laurie Jo Reynolds, described organizing a successful campaign to shut down the Tamms Correctional Center, a notorious supermax prison in Illinois. “We are all bystanders to torture, but we don’t have to be,” Reynolds told the mostly white and wealthy crowd. Another speaker, Darrell Cannon, had spent twenty-four years in prison, including nearly a decade at Tamms, for a murder that he did not commit. Kitchen asked to sit beside him at a dinner after the event; she wrote in her journal that it was one of the first times she’d shared a meal with a Black man. Listening to Cannon discuss his incarceration, Kitchen felt a “deep-seated shame,” and she began to think of Joseff White. “What if he had become a good person?” she wrote. “Shouldn’t he have the right to be free after serving some 20+ years?”

That fall, Kitchen and Kovach enrolled in a pair of personal-development seminars offered by the company Landmark Worldwide. A corporate reincarnation of Werner Erhard’s controversial self-improvement trainings, which were in vogue in the seventies, Landmark is popular today among H.R. departments and M.B.A. types. Kitchen’s course leader, Josselyne Herman-Saccio, told me that Landmark helps people “clear out everything in their past” and then create “something to fill that empty space.” Kitchen signed up on the advice of her stepson, an administrator at an élite private school in Manhattan, who told me he’d hoped that Landmark might help her sort out “her stuff around wealth and privilege and her father’s murder.” During the last session of the second seminar, Kitchen and some of her peers presented their work to an audience of loved ones. Kitchen invited her sisters, explaining that she’d had a “transformation.” When it was her turn to approach the microphone, she felt her heart racing. “That’s where I told them my story, and then my plan,” Kitchen recalled. “I was going to do everything in my power to get the man who killed my father out of prison.”

In Texas, state law requires parole panels ruling on a murderer’s release to solicit feedback from the victim’s family members. When White first came up for parole, in 2006, after fifteen years in prison, Kitchen’s relatives began receiving notices from Texas’s Department of Criminal Justice. (Kitchen herself had opted out of the department’s mailings.) Bruce Roberson, a family friend, wrote back on behalf of Kitchen’s mother, Elsa, to request that White remain in prison. Roberson told me, “Elsa was fervent about not letting him out while she was alive, because she feared for her life.” But by the time Kitchen had completed her Landmark course Elsa had died, and no one in the family formally opposed White’s release or Kitchen’s plans to free him.

In October of 2014, Kitchen called Mark Vinson, the prosecutor on her father’s case and one of only a few Black lawyers in the Harris County district attorney’s office at the time. During the trial, Vinson had described White as “a man who’d do anything to get paid.” Kitchen said that when she reached Vinson, who had retired, and has since died, he told her, “For the life of me, I don’t know why you would want to free that kind of a no-good man.” Kitchen then phoned the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and learned that White was incarcerated at the Darrington Unit, a penitentiary thirty....
She learned that while in prison White had converted to Islam, taking the name Yusuff, and had earned his G.E.D. With Kitchen’s permission, Tauss planned to recommend to the parole board that White be transferred to the Carol Vance Unit, a highly selective prison in Fort Bend County, Texas, with an eighteen-month rehabilitative program. If he completed the program, he would be freed.
Kitchen met White on May 20, 2015, in a windowless conference room at Carol Vance, a few days after his transfer. As they approached each other, Kitchen’s “whole being was filled with compassion,” she later wrote. “I reached out my hand and said ‘Hi, I’m Katie Kitchen.’ ” They talked for four and a half hours. White described life in prison before his transfer, when touching other inmates was forbidden and guards routinely checked his rectum for drugs.He spoke of his four children—he later discovered that he’d fathered a fifth—one of whom had a child of his own. Kitchen said she hoped that they could one day visit schools together to share their story. White told me, “I expected for the white lady to be angry, to go off on me, but it was nothing like that. It was all love.” At the end of the meeting, he asked the mediator’s permission to give Kitchen a hug.

Originally Posted By brappbrah⏩

Originally Posted By MonsieurWhite⏩

Originally Posted By brappbrah⏩

Originally Posted By Polaris⏩

Originally Posted By AlfBundy⏩

Originally Posted By volleys⏩

Originally Posted By SaltyDog920⏩

Originally Posted By inkie77⏩

Originally Posted By volleys⏩