It would be more than 21 years before he could say he was sorry.

August was the only one murdered that day, but at least four lives would never be the same. For August's wife Clara, his two children and his neighbor Sherrill Nutter, that day changed every one of the days that have followed for 21 years. And like his victims', Rossi's life has never been the same.

"I'm terribly sorry. I wish I wasn't the person I was then," Rossi says, his voice echoing in a death row interview room. He has been at the Florence Prison for the past 21 years waiting to die.

It was a warm August afternoon in 1983 when Rossi, a Phoenix cocaine addict in need of drug money, entered Harold August's Scottsdale home near Hayden and Indian School roads. August, a 65-year-old World War II vet, father of two and husband of 39 years, put his glasses on and opened his tool set. The two had found one another through August's newspaper want ad. August planned to buy a typewriter from Rossi and spend the rest of the day repairing it.

Rossi-the murderer

Today inmate # 50337, Richard M. Rossi, sits in cellblock six of Special Management Unit II on death row in Florence.

Undertones of a Brooklyn upbringing resonate in his accent as he discusses his existence in a 7 by 11 foot cement cell.

Rossi never sold Harold August the typewriter. By the time he left the August home, Rossi had taken August's money and fired five exploding bullets. Two of them found their target in August's next door neighbor. The other three shots hit August, the final bullet entering his mouth and killing him.

"By the way, um, Clara August," Rossi says in the cinderblock chamber where he has been given 15 minutes to speak. "I've never had a chance to reconcile with her. I've never had the opportunity to tell her how sorry I was and that I'm not the monster that she really thinks I am."

Rossi, now 57, has never seen a Web page, talked on a cell phone or listened to a compact disc. He spends his time writing articles about death row and prisoners' rights. Some of his more than 50 pen pals post his articles and poetry on a Web site he hopes to view one day.

Recently one of those pen pals helped Rossi publish a book, Waiting to Die, a moving thesis decrying the death penalty with vivid depictions of life on death row.

"[My book] isn't like the other books where the prisoner says, 'I'm innocent,'" Rossi says rapidly, with punctuated pauses. "Everybody in prison is innocent, you know." For Rossi, conversation is a rare treat.

Clara-the widow

In a bedroom at the brick ranch house where her husband was shot, Clara August uncovers a blue Selectric typewriter. It is nearly identical to the one her husband was attempting to buy when he was murdered. "This is one he had fixed for me," she says.

In the living room Clara explains how Harold had given up an assistant psychology position at Scottsdale Community College to "follow me" to Maricopa Tech, where he enrolled in a small machinery class. The class whetted his appetite for fixing typewriters.

Clara mentions details, names and dates as she tells stories. In conversation she doesn't mention her PhD, but she's quick to speak of her father, a Bohemian aristocrat and uncle to the famous author Franz Kafka.

"I've only seen pictures of the cover on the Internet," she says of Rossi's book about life on death row, holding it for the first time.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves signify Clara's appreciation for writing. She speaks German, Spanish and English and expresses an acute appreciation for humanity's delicate dependence on language.

As soon as she opens Rossi's book about life on death row, she reads the dedication aloud.

"To my mother," Clara pauses. "I feel sorry for her." She continues, reading Rossi's poem in the introduction.

Clara reads the words of her husband's murderer. She's sitting in the house where her husband died. The living room walls wear pastel and oil paintings she and her colleagues have composed since the tragedy. She is perhaps the most mentally acute 85-year-old her friends and family will ever encounter.

"I think he's a very good writer," Clara says softly, looking up from the book. "I'd love to have a copy of this." She asks if she might be able to get a copy.

Cruel and Unusual Justice

The first time Clara saw her husband Harold she painted him. He was a U.S. Navy sailor during World War II. She was an artist, painting sailors and soldiers and sending the portraits to their families.

The last time she saw him was that August morning in 1983, just before leaving to teach a new Advertising in the Arts class. Hours later, in the hall outside the classroom, a pair of detectives told Clara there had been an accident in her neighborhood.

"I just remember how sweaty and hot it was in the backseat of that unmarked car. It was a warm August day," Clara says. She then spent hours in a windowless, colorless interrogation room before detectives finally told her Harold had been murdered.

The next few days were complete numbness for Clara. "I became emotionally ambivalent," she says of the confusion.

Clara's neighbor Sherrill Nutter was in the hospital with gunshot wounds. Nutter would later testify that she overheard August telling his murderer, "You've got my money, and you've shot me. What else do you want?" Then, she says, Rossi fired the final and fatal shot.

Sherrill-the neighbor

It was nearly 22 years ago that Nutter was pulling herself across this same living room floor on her elbows, sliding on her own blood, struggling to get to the back door.

Nutter had entered the home when she heard commotion in the normally-quiet August home. Rossi, jittery from cocaine, shot her twice in the chest before fleeing.

Nutter had crawled to the back porch where a neighbor heard her whimpering for help. Amazingly, Nutter, still a Valley resident, survived the incident.

Sitting in that same living room, Clara corrects a family member after he asserts that Rossi is an animal.

"He's not an animal. He's a human being who regrets what he did under difficult circumstance," she says. "He was a drug addict. That distorted his whole moral concept and his whole outlook on life."

The courts considered Rossi's crime "especially heinous, cruel and depraved." But Rossi says his actions were not especially heinous. Instead, he says he was an upstanding citizen with a business degree battling a drug addiction. "It could happen to anybody," Rossi says. "Once you get involved with drugs, it takes hold of you. You become a different person."

Rossi and many of his readers consider him an intelligent man. "I could still be a very productive person to society," he says. "But they don't want to give you a chance to do it, and I think that's a big problem with society today."

Clara has also heard that Rossi is intelligent. "I understand that he's a very bright man, that he's not just an ordinary criminal," Clara had said before looking at Rossi's book. "But an ordinary criminal is what he turned out to be."

Life without Harold

Conversation and curiosity are the two things Clara misses most about her husband. "Harold was always interested and curious. He always wanted to see what was on the other side of every mountain we encountered," she says. After that first World War II painting, Harold and Clara shared 40 years of life, adventure and conversation.

"My husband had always wanted to live where he could ride a horse in any direction without seeing a fence," Clara says of their move to Scottsdale in 1959.

Clara is well-spoken. Her metaphors are poetic between allusions to literature and history.

"Harold loved the mountains," she says. "He was a Phoenician in the truest, historical sense of the word, as in an explorer, as in Hanno of Carthage."

But since his death, "intellectualism has died," Clara says. "I don't want to be the one who pushes the button," she adds of Rossi and his date with death. "But the judge and jury appointed him that for good reasons."

Thirsty for the conversation and curiosity of her deceased husband, Clara now spends much of her days browsing television channels and skimming publications.

An Eye for an Eye

Rossi says he has died a little every day on death row. While he has spent the last 21 years of his life fighting his death sentence, he says death would be better than life without parole.

"Life without parole is worse than death," Rossi says. "Because the pain here is so bad," he says, pausing longer than normal, breathing the pain, "that you don't want to endure it forever. And if I had to live the rest of my life knowing I'm going to die an old man, no family, no money, no friends, no compassion, being in pain with no medication to treat the pain. What do you look forward to every day? There is no hope."

Rossi does hope for a new trial. He says that hope and his pen pals are his only lifeblood on death row.

"A lot of people in prison change. A lot don't," Rossi says. "A lot of us would never commit a second crime if we had a second chance. But society right now doesn't recognize a second chance."

"Tell Mrs. August I'm very, very sorry," Rossi says. "I wish I wasn't the person I was then. But I have changed. I've deprived her of her companionship and her husband for the rest of her life and for old age."

As she hears Rossi's apology Clara is visibly moved. She is sure of many things. She is sure he is a good writer. And she is sure she misses her husband. She is also certain her life has been changed, taken.

"I'm not a vindictive person," Cara says of Rossi's death sentence.

After 21 years she has finally heard an apology from her husband's murderer. As understanding and intelligent as she is, Clara still doesn't know exactly what justice should look like for someone like Rossi.