Gerald Gase's family this year exchanged Christmas and Easter cards with a man who met one of their relatives only briefly more than 18 years earlier.

The man is Roger Proctor, who until this year lived on Pennsylvania's death row for killing Gase inside his Meadville home in October 1985.

Proctor for years had been a bad but distant memory for the family of his victim.

Then, shortly before Easter 2000, the family received a letter from the state announcing that then-Gov. Tom Ridge had signed Proctor's death warrant. He was to be executed June 1 of that year at the state prison in Bellefonte, stated the letter, which went on to include instructions on what to wear to an execution and what to bring.

"It was so impersonal, sterile and cold," said Merre Phillips, the murdered man's niece.

Statements from the family and evidence found in the basement files of the Crawford County prosecutors' office led Judge Gordon Miller to reduce Proctor's sentence to life in prison in May.

Phillips and her cousin, Margaret Weber, took turns sitting in court beside the man who repeatedly stabbed their uncle with scissors, speaking with him as the somewhat astonished judge told Proctor he would not be executed.

The family sat down to Easter dinner nine days after receiving the execution notice and decided together that Proctor's death by lethal injection was not the answer. The Roman Catholic family said they believe in the church's stance that the death penalty is wrong.

"No more eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth," Mary Catherine Phillips, Merre Phillips' mother, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a story in Sunday editions.

Weber went home to Detroit after spending Easter with the rest of the family in Tiffin, Ohio, and penned a letter to Proctor, who was still on death row.

"I write to express that I hold no grudge or revenge against you. Your execution would bring no benefit to society or to your family and thus I oppose it. I am willing to express the same to your attorney," Weber wrote.

At the same time, investigators for the Federal Defender's office in Philadelphia had found evidence never turned over to the public defender in Proctor's trial, as required by law, that raised questions about Gase's death.

Proctor was sentenced to death largely because the jury felt Gase, who was stabbed 57 times, had been tortured. Proctor testified that he stabbed Gase a couple of times before leaving the room.

Among reports never passed to the defense was the testimony of Angela Tate.

Proctor and his co-defendant, Diedre Owens, who planned to rob Gase in his home that night, stayed with Tate after the murder.

According to Tate's statement to detectives, Owens told her that she had killed a man but Proctor didn't know it. A coroner's report also suggested that a second weapon may have been used in the murder.

Owens told detectives that Proctor acted alone. She is serving a life sentence.

Despite the question of whether a second person might have actually killed Gase, Proctor would not allow his attorneys to try to have his murder conviction overturned.

"I am guilty," Proctor said. "Sure I would enjoy freedom. But I would not be satisfied with the verdict."

Besides a Christmas card this year, Proctor writes to Gase's family weekly, he said, and they write back.