Redemption Song

The financial hardship is still evident, even six and a half years after Ken returned home. Ken and Karen live in a four-room guesthouse on Karen's parents' property. Until their daughters moved out to go to college, the three girls shared one bedroom. Ken and Karen share a car, an old Datsun. Most days, he drives her to the office.

They do get along. Ken works hard to make Karen happy.

"I'm still angry a lot," she says. "People talk about me like I'm some kind of saint. I just want you to know — I'm obstinate, stubborn. Angry."

These days, Karen Lamberton is a strong-minded career woman. Twenty years ago, she was a quiet Mesa homemaker with strong Baptist roots.

Ken and Karen met at the YMCA's Triangle Y camp in Oracle, a small town west of Tucson, in the summer of 1979. They were both counselors at the outdoor exploration camp. Karen was a shy, waifish blonde. Ken was a curly-haired biology student at the University of Arizona.

Within two weeks of meeting, they were already serious.

"Camp was an environment really conducive to falling in love. You spend a lot of time together. You see each other at your best and your worst, and you're young," Ken says, looking back. "You're experiencing things for the first time together. It's just kind of magical."

Ken and Karen's summer romance continued, and the two were married a year and a half later. Ken finished school and got a job at Fremont Junior High School in Mesa.

"We moved to Mesa, bought a little tract home, and started our lives there. She got pregnant, so we started raising a family," Ken says. "We could have been career teachers or career camp professionals if I hadn't taken this other track in our lives."

At first, life was good. Ken started a science club and taught taxidermy after school, using roadkill he picked up along Highway 87, which runs from far east Mesa through Florence and down into Tucson.

The family grew. Karen had their first daughter, Jessica, in 1983, and Kasondra was born two years later. They spent every summer at the Triangle Y camp, where he and Karen were now program directors.

In 1985, Lamberton was named Mesa's Teacher of the Year.

That fall, Kelly Gregan walked into his classroom.

Gregan was vivacious and outgoing. She wore makeup and dressed like a "grown-up," according to classmates quoted in court records, which recap much of the story from both sides.

Gregan joined the science club, but nothing happened until March 1986.

That month, Lamberton took a trip to San Francisco for a national science teacher's convention.

"Kelly told me beforehand that if I didn't send her a postcard, that I was 'dead' or something like that, she used that phrase a lot," he said in a testimony transcript from his appeal. "And so I wrote her a postcard and sent it to her from somewhere in California."

Lamberton was a man under pressure, and Gregan's attention was a welcome distraction, he later admitted in court. His wife was pregnant with their third child, Melissa, and financial problems were growing. The pregnancy was complicated. Karen was constantly sick and at a high risk for miscarriage.

Lamberton retreated, working five or six extra hours every night, with weekends devoted to the science club.

At the end of April, Kelly Gregan gave her teacher a letter.

"You might be surprised by all I have to say . . ." she wrote. "Ever since I met you, I thought you were a real cool guy. When I joined the science club I did it because I thought I could have a good time with you." The letter continues for three pages, concluding, "I was really confused. I still am. I've tried to ignore it, it just gets worse. Inside I know I couldn't live without you . . . You're the most special man I've ever met. And will ever meet."

Another teacher might have dismissed the letter as the ramblings of an emotional adolescent girl. Not Lamberton. He felt the same way.

They began writing to each other often, with Lamberton using his left hand to disguise his writing.

"Juliet," Lamberton wrote, "When I am with you nothing else matters . . . when are [sic] lips meet the heavens open and fire from the sky comes forth."

Other letters were even less sophisticated. In one he worries about another boy: "Kelly, I'm sorry I'm being so weird but I'm very confused. I can't figure out what David means to you . . . It's going to take a long time to get over you."

Her letters were covered in smiley faces, hearts, and fireworks. "Ken," she wrote, "No matter how much trouble I get in because of you, you will always be worth it to me . . . There's times when I dream of us running away to another place, far away from here leaving all of our troubles behind."

Other times she was more direct: "Hi! I could do last night every night! But I don't think you could handle it!!"

She was pretending to be a mature woman, but several letters tell Lamberton he's "ruining my life," following up with a "ha ha not really."