| Diocesan News

Tried and found guilty of the brutal rape and murder of a 9-year-old Rosedale, Md., girl, the barrel-chested crabber from the Eastern Shore was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for his horrific crimes.

But Mr. Bloodsworth didn’t have anything to do with what he was accused of. A former Marine with no criminal record, he had been wrongly convicted and would later become the first American on death row to be exonerated by DNA testing.

But as he was led onto the grounds of the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore, Md., in 1985 on his first day on death row, no one believed his story - least of all the other prisoners.

Handcuffed and shackled as he slowly made his way across the yard of the penitentiary, Mr. Bloodsworth noticed other prisoners racing to the fences to glimpse the monster they had heard so much about.

This was the man a Baltimore County jury convicted of beating Dawn Hamilton with a rock, sexually mutilating her, raping her and strangling her to death by stepping on her neck.

As the new prisoner shuffled onto the old prison campus, he was dwarfed by the gothic structure’s tall granite walls, silver spires and imposing turrets that loomed ominously over Forrest Street like a medieval castle.

Jeering at him, the inmates shouted repeated threats of violence.

“We’re going to do to you what you did to that little girl,” they screamed. “We’re going to get you, Kirk!”

Seated on the couch in the living room of his small home in Cambridge more than 20 years later, pain was still visible on Mr. Bloodsworth’s face as he recalled those long-ago events that forever changed his life. With his brow deeply furrowed, the plainspoken 46-year-old man said he believed hell is a place of torment and that his experiences must be similar to those in that place of misery.

“I remember that first night in my cell and the smell coming from this place,” he said, recounting how roaches frequently scurried along the walls of his small living quarters.

“Not only did it stink of every kind of excrement you could think of,” he said, “but you also could smell hatred - and it was all pointing at me.”

The threats that greeted him when he first entered the state penitentiary continued through the night and beyond, with inmates shouting through the air vents how they planned to torture him.

Despite the strong temptation to despair, Mr. Bloodsworth said he decided he would fight to prove his innocence. He believes God sustained him through nearly nine years of taxing prison life, sending him otherworldly consolations and leading him into the Catholic Church.

With the same steely determination that got him through his prison ordeal, Mr. Bloodsworth is now devoting the rest of his life to abolishing the death penalty and seeking reforms of what he calls a “broken” criminal justice system.

It’s a battle he is convinced he has been called to win.

A journey of faith

On the day he was found guilty, Mr. Bloodsworth said he remembers being housed in a Baltimore County holding cell with another man who sat in the shadows. For two hours, the stranger didn’t say a word as he ate a sandwich and sipped an orange drink. Then he turned to his fellow prisoner and told Mr. Bloodsworth not to worry. The Eastern Shore native couldn’t tell if the man was black or white because there wasn’t much lighting, which he said was “odd.”

“Everything is going to be alright,” Mr. Bloodsworth recalled the man saying. “You’ll be OK.”

After Mr. Bloodsworth heard the guilty verdict and returned to the holding cell, the man was gone and only half the sandwich remained. When he asked the sheriff’s deputy where the “other guy” was, the deputy responded that Mr. Bloodsworth had been the only person in the cell.

Looking back, Mr. Bloodsworth thinks he was visited by an angel.

“Maybe I wanted to see something - I don’t know,” said Mr. Bloodsworth, pausing to light up a cigarette - the white smoke of which swirled in soft vaporous pirouettes near his now-graying hair.

“But I tell you what, he was as real as you are,” he said emphatically.

The encounter with the “angel” wasn’t Mr. Bloodsworth’s only dealing in the spiritual realm. Another time, he remembers being touched on the shoulder with two fingers while he was alone in his cell. He thinks it was a sign from God that he wasn’t really alone.

Growing up in the Baptist and Methodist traditions, Mr. Bloodsworth had attended a small Christian high school and had counted himself a believer. His mother was a deeply devoted Christian who encouraged him to read the Bible - an assignment he took up in earnest in prison, reading through the Scriptures twice.

As a young man, Mr. Bloodsworth ...