KILLER'S COMPLEXITIES

I find I must respond to Hank Mattimore's Close to Home column in the Nov.

6 Sunday Forum, ''A juror's story: Seeing the face of evil at our doorstep.''

Mattimore served with another 11 ''ordinary people'' as jurors on the Jack

Adams murder case. Before saying anything else, I want to thank Mattimore and

his peers for a difficult job well done. They reached the appropriate verdict

for a heinous crime, and because of that we are all a little safer.

After their actions, David Jenne and Eric Ash could never again be trusted

to move among us -- and they never will.

Mattimore says that the members of the jury ''... have seen the face of

evil, close up and personal, in our own hometown. We will never be quite the

same.''

Undoubtedly the images they saw -- a bloodied and battered elderly man, a

bloodstained potholder, the impassive faces of the accused -- will haunt them

always, creeping up unbidden and unwanted. Those jurors will be long haunted.

I, too, am haunted.

During the year since the crime I have struggled with discordant visions

-images and memories that refuse to coalesce.

You see, for the four months prior to the murder, I taught David Jenne in

English at Santa Rosa Junior College.

I worked with him daily and, in fact, had a long chat with him on Dec. 7,

the morning before the murder.

Nothing during those four months suggested that this was a young man

capable of unbelievable savagery.

He was troubled, yes, largely about the death of his father a few years

ago.

These are the images that continue tohaunt me:

After a class discussion about a reading that contained some lines from

William Henley's ''Invictus'' (''I am the master of my fate; I am the captain

of my soul''), David approached my desk.

''I know that poem by heart,'' he says. ''It was my dad's favorite poem.''

He pulls a folded, worn and smudged piece of paper from his wallet.

Carefully straightening it, he explains that the poem had been printed as part

of the memorial for his father's funeral. As he speaks, he gently runs his

fingertips across the poem.

David sits at my desk in reading lab, ostensibly to discuss an assigned

essay. Instead he tells me about his father's easy chair, his father's

pickup.

''You miss your dad a lot,'' I observe. He cannot look at me. ''Yes,'' he

murmurs. The pain and yearning on his face are palpable.

As the semester wears on, I bring in a large box of doughnuts for the class

for no particular reason. When I pass the box to the first student, David's

voice carries over the general flurry of voices.

''Don't you just love it when teachers do stuff like that?'' His words are

filled with a childlike glee.

I make no excuses for David or his friend. How could I? Nor do I make

arguments for or against capital punishment. I am simply left to reconcile the

irreconcilable.

If there is any message here, perhaps it is that life is infinitely messy

and complex, and we generally don't like moral complexities. We file down the

edges that won't quite fit the molds we create.

In that we are much like the Procrustes of myth, an innkeeper who painfully

stretched or shortened his patrons to make them fit into his big and little

beds.

It is easier to see a David Jenne or Susan Smith as pure evil than as a

bewildering mix of good and evil.

Shakespeare got it right: ''There is some soul of goodness in things evil.

Would men observingly distill it out.''