Those facing the death penalty have a last line of protection: the specialists who find explanations for unthinkable crimes and attempt to convince juries that sometimes guilty people deserve mercy. By Elizabeth Bruenig For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

DeLong, 34, was facing capital punishment for five counts of murder. In January 1999, he had killed his ex-girlfriend Erin Vanderhoef—who was shortly due to deliver their child, a daughter they had named Hannah—as well as the three school-age children she’d had with two other men. DeLong had entered their decaying clapboard house in Springfield, Missouri, on the morning of January 19 and strangled each member of the family using scarves and cords, hog-tying Erin and gagging two of the children.

When he was arrested several days later, he promptly confessed to each of the murders and immediately became the most hated man in Springfield. Short wished she didn’t have to take the case, but it was her duty as a public defender.

When, after several weeks, she finally forced herself to look at the crime-scene photos, she saw that the bodies of the children were partly hidden by debris—clothes, a plastic lawn chair, an overturned lamp. One of the boys, 10-year-old Chris, was still in bed; the other boy, 11-year-old Jimmy, had been left on the floor. Vanderhoef herself lay on her side on a rug in the living room, her blue top riding up over her pregnant belly. The youngest of the children, 8-year-old Darlene, was found in her sky-blue pajamas, tossed upside down onto a heap of garbage in the corner of her room, a jacket thrown over her face.

Short was then raising two young children of her own, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to hide her revulsion from a jury. “As a public defender, I’d seen all sorts of things, but it was the first time where I thought, ,” she told me when we first spoke by phone, in January. She also doubted that she could do much to help DeLong. He had committed a horrific crime and then admitted to it in a hateful taped confession.

In capital trials in the United States, proceedings are typically split into two phases: The first phase establishes a defendant’s guilt or innocence; if a jury returns a guilty verdict, it then determines in the second phase whether the defendant is sentenced to death or to life in prison. Prosecutors sometimes agree not to pursue capital punishment in exchange for a guilty plea, and on Short’s advice, DeLong did offer to plead guilty and waive all appeals in exchange for life without parole. But the prosecutors had no interest in a deal.

Because DeLong’s guilt was not in question, Short would focus on the sentencing phase. In capital cases, juries are instructed to consider statutorily defined aggravating factors cited by the prosecution—including, for instance, the death of multiple victims or of children, or the use of particularly sadistic methods of killing, all of which applied in DeLong’s case. Juries are told to weigh these aggravating factors against a much broader category of mitigating factors presented by the defense.

These may include mental illness, intellectual disability, and a history of significant trauma or abuse. If the jury finds that the aggravators outweigh the mitigators, then it will likely hand down a penalty of death; if the mitigators prevail, then the jury will likely elect a lesser sentence, usually life in prison without parole.

DeLong’s fate depended on Short’s ability to investigate his background and determine whether any possible mitigating evidence could be found that might persuade a jury to spare his life. Despite deep misgivings, Short threw herself into the case. She had inherited her work ethic from her father, who helped manage the Apollo program as NASA’s vice president of space operations. His job took the family all around the country, from New Jersey to California, Virginia to Texas. Both she and her husband were attorneys; she’d earned her degree at Saint Louis University School of Law.

Short worked grueling hours, spending six days a week at the office and traveling so often that her children became accustomed to her absence. Once, Short startled her 5-year-old son when she arrived home early from a long work trip. Assuming that she had lost her case, he asked, “Is the man dead?”Short wasn’t opposed to the death penalty when she first started practicing law, but as she gained experience in capital cases, she came to doubt that the criminal legal system was capable of consistently producing fair and equal outcomes. Capital punishment is inherently arbitrary.

Some defendants have money and seasoned legal teams at trial; others do not. Some prosecutors favor the death penalty and others don’t, meaning defendants might be executed not strictly because of the nature of their offense but because of the side of a state or county line on which they happened to commit it. As she came to understand the capriciousness of criminal justice, Short changed her mind about capital punishment.

The experience of representing several defendants whom she believed had been wrongly accused strengthened her opposition. To defend Rick DeLong, Short knew, she didn’t need to make the jury believe that he was a good man or that he shouldn’t receive a terrible punishment.

In capital trials in Missouri, as in most states, juries must return a unanimous verdict for a death sentence to be handed down, so Short needed only to introduce a shred of doubt in a single juror’s mind that her client had forfeited his right to live. But even that seemed daunting, given the repugnance that she, DeLong’s own lawyer, could not suppress.

Short may have wished that she didn’t have to take this case, but it would ultimately change her perspective on criminal behavior and set her career on a new path, taking her from the public defender’s office to a field known as mitigation, then still developing but now a central feature of every legal defense in capital cases. Mitigators are investigators whose mission, now mandated by law and precedent, is the granular search for circumstances that might convince a jury that their clients deserve a lesser sentence; in their most crucial cases, these specialists are the final advocates for a defendant’s life. Short would help pioneer the field and become one of its foremost practitioners.

But in January 1999, all she had was a guilty client and bad odds. Doubt is central to mitigation: creating doubt that a person is wholly given over to evil, or doubt that there is no universe—no set of terrible circumstances—in which you yourself might commit a horrific crime. I do believe that there are people who commit acts of perfect evil; a frank appraisal of human nature suggests as much. But those who oppose capital punishment, as I do, oppose the death penalty even for the worst criminals in the worst cases.

The reason to stay the executioner’s hand has less to do with the nature of the defendant than it does with the nature of society: Showing mercy is morally beneficial to everyone.

The legal system, of course, does not think this way; it needs a solid rationale to hang decisions on, and it must establish that what appears to be abject wickedness, and nothing else, may in fact be more complicated and tragic. The work of mitigation—searching for reasons a defendant’s life should be spared—is, unsurprisingly, not always well received in the legal community or by the public. As a society, we like to believe that our choices and actions are entirely within our control. Mitigators introduce an element of uncertainty. Their investigations routinely produce information that calls into question whether defendants would have, in better circumstances, committed their crimes at all.

To some, this seems like making excuses for criminals. For Short, now 65, mitigation isn’t about rationalizing crimes. “It is about telling the truth,” she told me. “The crime is real. The harm is real. Nothing I do changes that.”

She does not wish to downplay suffering or to pretend that something awful did not happen. The goal of a mitigator, she said, is to understand how a person becomes a criminal. “Every life leaves a trail. Abuse, neglect, poverty, brain injury, trauma, addiction, resilience, acts of kindness, moments of courage—all become a part of that person’s story,” Short told me over email.

“Mitigation is not the art of making people less guilty. It is the discipline of making sure we judge them as a whole human being.”When Short was preparing for the DeLong case, mitigation had only just begun to emerge as a routine component of a legal defense in capital cases. It became formalized not long afterward, with the case of Kevin Wiggins. In September 1988, Wiggins, a Maryland construction worker, was charged with the murder of 77-year-old Florence Lacs. He had been arrested while driving her car and had already used her credit cards and pawned her jewelry. A jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death.

But Wiggins, who was intellectually disabled and had been sexually abused as a child, appealed the sentence on the grounds that his attorneys had not presented sufficient evidence of extenuating circumstances in his defense. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in in 2003. The decision held that capital defendants have a right to an effective defense, including an investigation into circumstances that might explain their crimes—a ruling that fueled the rise of mitigation work.

In 2008, the American Bar Association revised its guidelines to direct defense teams in capital cases to include both an investigator, who conducts an independent inquiry into the crime itself, and a mitigation specialist, who is responsible for producing information that might convince a jury that there is something more to a client than their crime suggests. Mitigators sift through the past and familiarize themselves with all elements of a defendant’s personal history. Fragments of clients’ lives may be strewn across the country or around the world, hidden among scattered documents and scattered memories. Mitigation specialists conduct scores of in-person interviews for each case—with extended family, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, co-workers—to put the pieces together. estimates that there may be fewer than 1,000 mitigation specialists nationwide; the majority of them deal with capital cases. About twice that number of people are currently on death row.

Because mitigation specialists often have little time to prepare their cases for trial, they frequently continue their investigations during the long death-penalty appeals process. Legal teams involved in capital cases are typically reluctant to discuss their findings if judicial processes remain ongoing, but at the Mwalimu Center for Justice, a law office in New Orleans that handles capital appeals, mitigation specialists on staff agreed to share information they had uncovered about some of their clients. Benjamin Cole, an Oklahoma man who murdered his infant daughter a few days before Christmas 2002, was found by specialists on his defense team to be schizophrenic; a brain scan revealed a severe lesion.

Cole spoke in riddles and frequently broke into song while interacting with his defense team, until his disease became so advanced that he chose to sit in his dark prison cell hoarding religious pamphlets and rotting food while his hair grew matted and his mind decomposed. The mitigators argued that he was too sick to be subject to execution under the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in , but state authorities were undeterred. Oklahoma executed Cole in 2022.

Sometimes mitigation, no matter how legitimate, cannot overcome people’s inherent disgust with horrific crimes. Cynthia Short was facing that very possibility.

Short still hadn’t looked at the crime-scene photographs when she first met Rick DeLong, a few days after he was taken into custody in January 1999. But she had watched his maniacal taped confession, which would later be played at trial and shared with the . “Now laugh,” he had reportedly said to 8-year-old Darlene Vanderhoef’s lifeless body as she lay thrown over a piece of bedroom furniture with an electrical cord around her neck. Even so, Short insisted on speaking with DeLong in person, with no partition between them and no shackles to hold him in place.

He was much smaller than she had expected, thin and balding, and had a scraggly mullet and a dirty-blond beard.

In Short’s experience, clients facing capital charges sometimes open a first conversation by declaring suicidal intent: The path ahead otherwise leads to either death in a prison cell or death in an execution chamber. But DeLong clearly wanted to live. And surprisingly, he was obsessed with the well-being of another person: Stacie Leffingwell, his long-term partner and the mother of his youngest child. Leffingwell had helped him kill Erin Vanderhoef and her children.

And she was dying from AIDS. “Everything in that first conversation was what could I do for Stacie?”Short recalled.

“How could I help Stacie?”In a photograph Short has seen, Leffingwell kneels next to DeLong and their infant son on a sunlit lawn, a mischievous smile flashing across her face. They had met in the early 1990s when DeLong was barbecuing in a friend’s backyard in Springfield and Leffingwell, a neighbor, dropped by and struck up a conversation. Leffingwell was dark-haired, petite, and funny. Born in California in 1967 to a teenage heroin addict, she had dropped out of high school and never learned to read. DeLong and Leffingwell both used drugs, especially methamphetamines. When they met, Leffingwell was HIV-positive, but she didn’t tell DeLong. He himself was the child of a teenage mother. Born in Springfield in 1964, he grew up in poverty and was subjected to vicious assaults by his stepfather.

He began using drugs at the age of 15 and was eventually snorting or smoking meth several times a week. He got by on intermittent jobs as a mechanic and manual laborer. These details and more were revealed as Short worked with a mitigation specialist and former welfare caseworker named Kathy Schneider. The pair traveled six hours from Kansas City to Springfield and back each week to interview everyone they could find who knew DeLong.

They interviewed people in parks and churches, and once went into a drug house in the middle of a snowstorm. Every month, Schneider went to see DeLong in jail, where she also interviewed his mother and sisters.

Schneider created a history of DeLong’s family going back three generations, documenting the life of his biological father, a man known as Howard Littles, and his stepfather, Buzz, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill and institutionalized. DeLong was a twice-divorced father of four when, in 1996, he was introduced to Erin Vanderhoef, who worked at a McDonald’s in Springfield. Vanderhoef had also suffered a life marked by poverty and loss, and she took a liking to DeLong right away, confiding in others that she was interested in him romantically, even though he was already involved with Leffingwell. They formed a close friendship.

DeLong had a child with Leffingwell, a son born in 1997 whom they named Lyle. Leffingwell had tried to stay clean during her pregnancy, but she resumed using drugs after the baby was born. She disappeared for a time, leaving DeLong alone to care for their newborn. Vanderhoef stepped in to help. When Leffingwell came home, she was in treatment for depression. DeLong and Vanderhoef by then were sleeping together. DeLong’s place was often in a state of chaos and frequented by drug users. Despite the infidelity and the strangeness of the arrangement, Leffingwell and Lyle moved in with Vanderhoef and her three children. A volatile love triangle developed.

In February 1998, DeLong and Leffingwell abruptly moved into a motel in Joplin, roughly 70 miles west of Springfield, near the Kansas border. But DeLong still saw Vanderhoef, and by summer she knew she was pregnant. The news sent Leffingwell into a bout of jealousy and deeper into addiction. That July, she was admitted to a hospital for pancreatitis and stayed for three weeks. She weighed less than 90 pounds. Leffingwell and DeLong told family and friends that she had stomach cancer.

In fact, she was dying of AIDS. In September, DeLong himself was diagnosed with HIV. He began using meth every day. In the days leading up to the murders, DeLong and Leffingwell went on a meth binge. On the night of January 18, 1999, Leffingwell was high and distraught, racked with fear that Vanderhoef was going to replace her.

DeLong, for his part, was furious with Vanderhoef for messing up his relationship with Leffingwell. The couple came to the shared belief that Vanderhoef presented a problem, and Leffingwell demanded that DeLong fix it—permanently.

Early the following morning, DeLong drove from Joplin to Springfield to kill Vanderhoef. Leffingwell rode with him, as did Harold “Bobby” Lingle, a friend and neighbor who had agreed to help carry out DeLong’s plan in exchange for an eight ball of meth. At around eight that morning, they pulled up to Vanderhoef’s three-bedroom house. Lingle, who had met Vanderhoef before, lured her out of the house on the pretext of a grocery errand so that DeLong and Leffingwell could wait and catch her by surprise when she returned. Then DeLong slipped inside, where he found Vanderhoef’s three children getting ready for school. Wired on meth, DeLong killed them one by one. When Vanderhoef came back, Lingle told her that the children had been sent to their rooms.

Then he and Leffingwell helped DeLong subdue and murder Vanderhoef. It was a cold mercy that she died thinking her children were still alive. DeLong, Leffingwell, and Lingle were quickly apprehended. Leffingwell died of AIDS before the year was out.

The lead Greene County prosecutor, Darrell Moore, decided not to seek the death penalty against Lingle, who was said to have an IQ of 72; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Moore was adamant about bringing capital charges against DeLong. A series of delays pushed DeLong’s trial to June 2001. Public furor in Springfield ran hot, and press coverage was intense. When Short stood before the jurors, the first thing she said was that DeLong was unquestionably guilty.

She acknowledged the horror and disgust that they were surely feeling. “There are things that we need to do in this courtroom,” she recalled telling the jury.

“And one of those things that you’re going to need to do is, you’re going to need to really look closely at his mental state. That will be your job.”But it would have to be a job mainly for phase two—the sentencing phase—rather than phase one, the guilt-or-innocence phase.

No one was surprised when, on June 28, after a week and a half of testimony and less than four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Rick DeLong on all five counts of murder. Short knew that the sentencing phase would be difficult. She knew this in part because she had used her own extended family and friends—some of whom were highly conservative and generally skeptical of the defendants she represented—as test subjects, a kind of informal focus group.

When Short and her team had finished their mitigation work, well before DeLong’s trial was scheduled to begin, they collated the findings into spiral-bound books, each more than 100 pages long. Inside were detailed descriptions of DeLong’s crimes, a DVD of his confession, photographs of the crime scene, and a photograph of Vanderhoef and her three children, young and bright and beautiful, posed on a bench in front of their mother, who is holding Lyle in her arms. The books also contained a detailed account of the mitigating factors in DeLong’s case, including his abusive stepfather, his drug addiction, and his HIV status. Scattered throughout were questionnaires asking readers for their reactions at various stages.

The prompts had a clinical feel, as though Short were asking for opinions on a company’s new logo or a politician’s campaign slogan, not the killing of three children and a pregnant woman. . But it was the best simulation of a jury’s deliberation that Short could create. The responses from her family and friends were not encouraging. At the beginning of the book, readers were asked to gauge their support for capital punishment in general. One reader put her support at a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, but after reading through the mitigation evidence, this same woman put her support for executing DeLong specifically at a 6.

Her views were aligned with those of the prosecutor, Darrell Moore, who told reporters in advance of the sentencing phase that he and the judge had received numerous phone calls from angry citizens who wanted DeLong to die for his crimes. In front of the jury, Moore read a letter written by Vanderhoef’s brother in which he told DeLong, “You do not deserve the right to live, in a prison or any other place. You are not a man, you are a coward and an animal.”On DeLong’s behalf, Short introduced the array of mitigating information that she and Kathy Schneider had compiled.

Some of the material had been presented in phase one—a tactic known as front-loading. The idea was not to try to sway jurors on the question of guilt or innocence—in this instance, there was nothing to be done—but to prepare the jury for arguments that would be presented again, and enhanced, later on.

Short was aware that much of the information could be seen as all too familiar: When it comes to defendants facing the death penalty, a life like DeLong’s is normal; very few people guilty of aggravated first-degree murder have peaceful, healthy backgrounds. But two aspects of his story had taken Short by surprise.

First, as she combed through the police files, Short had noticed a coincidence: Mark Deeds, the officer who had coaxed the confession out of DeLong and emerged as the hero of the investigation, had encountered her client before. In 1991, when DeLong was 27, he was arrested for selling cocaine and marijuana to Deeds, who was then working undercover for the Springfield Police Department. DeLong was so deeply enmeshed in the local drug culture that Deeds saw an opportunity. According to the testimony of DeLong’s former defense attorney, who negotiated a plea deal, Deeds threatened DeLong with decades in prison unless he began working as an informant. DeLong agreed. Police and prosecutors paid DeLong for information and granted him leniency on subsequent drug-related charges. At one point, his bond on arrest was reduced from $75,000 to $2,500.

At another point, he received a sentence of five years’ probation for charges that ought to have resulted in prison time. The policies of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole specifically prohibited offenders on probation from serving as police informants, but the department kept working with him anyway. Because of his protected status, DeLong continued to get little to no prison time when he was caught using. His addiction deepened. By the time of the murders, DeLong had helped Deeds and the Springfield Police Department clear a number of high-profile narcotics cases, even as he himself disintegrated from years of dependence. His career as a police informant came at the expense of any attempt at rehab—the one had simply precluded the other.

Given all of this, Short asked, did the police bear any responsibility for DeLong’s condition? The second discovery that Short and her team made came while going through DeLong’s medical records. A week before the murders, he had begun taking Sustiva, an experimental drug that can help slow the progression of HIV but whose side effects include dizziness, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, amnesia, agitation, and hallucinations. Patients abusing drugs or who have preexisting mental illness are at increased risk of developing neurological symptoms.

And the drug’s side effects tend to be most severe when a patient is just starting to use the drug, as DeLong had been.

The witnesses for the defense included an addiction specialist who testified that DeLong’s meth use easily could have contributed to a shattered mental state; a medical specialist who confirmed that Sustiva is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis, and that the drug combined with meth could have disastrous results; and a psychiatrist who testified that DeLong had likely been in the grip of a psychotic episode when he carried out the murders. Short did not know what to expect when the jury began to deliberate. The new information had raised provocative questions about a case whose conclusion had once seemed preordained. In the end, the jury declined to impose the death penalty.

It instead sentenced DeLong to life without parole. In 2003, Short left her job with the Public Defender’s Office due to a round of funding cuts, and decided to become a full-time mitigation specialist. In the 23 years since then, she says that she has worked with approximately 200 clients, none of whom has received the death penalty.

Her attitude toward the field, as a practical matter, can be simply put: If mitigators are able to present a full picture of a defendant’s life, then no reasonable jury will return a verdict of death, not even for the most brutal killer. Her job is to persuade jurors to bestow something that she feels everyone deserves. “Mercy is not something that is earned,” she said to the jury during DeLong’s trial. “Mercy is something that is given.”

Her words were printed in large display type in the ’s front-page story about DeLong’s sentencing. Short is well aware that much of the public—including thoughtful citizens and community leaders—finds mitigation not only unjustifiable but incomprehensible. Still, she cannot set aside her principles or her obligations: Every defendant deserves a full measure of effort, even if onlookers deem it a waste of time and money for people who deserve nothing. She is sustained by some of those she encounters along the way.

Several weeks after DeLong’s sentencing, Short received a note from James Spindler, the Greene County medical examiner. She had cross-examined him on the stand, and had probed him about his own struggles with drugs. Addiction, she suggested, was not something that happens strictly to evil and hopeless people. That resonated with Spindler, who wrote that although he had come across a number of dangerously antisocial defendants in his career whose executions he would by no means oppose, Short had convinced him that DeLong was not a “sociopath beyond redemption.”

The past few years have been among the busiest in Short’s career as a mitigator. After a federal moratorium on new death sentences during the Biden administration—and the mass commutation of most federal death sentences already handed down—the Trump administration has reinstated the federal death penalty. Trump’s former attorney general Pam Bondi encouraged states to aggressively pursue capital punishment and take advantage of foreshortened appeals processes that would fast-track executions.

Mitigation specialists have seen their workload increase in volume and urgency. Short’s determination to try to see beyond the worst of what her clients have done struck me as rare and admirable, and I kept it in mind when I picked up the phone to call the Missouri prison where Rick DeLong is incarcerated. I have spoken with many people who have committed murder, and many people on death row. Capital punishment, and the victims and perpetrators of capital crimes, have long been a focus of my reporting. But I had never spoken with a child killer before.

A prison receptionist answered, and after a pause put DeLong on the phone. His voice was both hoarse and soft; his disease is advanced now, and he has had several heart attacks. He told me what his life had been like before he committed the murders, how he loved working as a mechanic—“There was nothing I couldn’t do to a car,” he said. He recalled his stepfather, and how abusive he was, and how the meth had made the bad moments more bearable.

Meeting Leffingwell had made things better, too, because she came from the same world, and for once he felt understood. They had loved going to rodeos and carnivals together, a kind of fantastic escape.

DeLong talked about his five children, only three of whom will speak with him. He also talked about his grandchildren, though he has seen them only in photos. His son Lyle is in prison, convicted of murder in 2022 and now serving a 32-year sentence. DeLong told me he had loved being a father to Lyle—“That’s my joy,” he said. “I took him everywhere.”He recalled bringing him on fishing trips, and once, in a misguided display of devotion, buying a heavy-duty backpack, cutting holes in it for arms and legs—a makeshift infant carrier—and taking him for rides on his motorcycle. Now the boy was a man, and had followed his father behind bars.

As for his own crimes, DeLong told me that he was glad he’d been caught, and that he knows he deserves the sentence he received. I could not forget that the thin voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man who had taken five lives. It was also the voice of a frail 61-year-old slowly dying in prison. DeLong remembered Cynthia Short fondly, though he told me that he had initially doubted that a woman would be able to see past what he had done to a mother and her children.

But Short, he admitted, had understood everything: the crime, his life, how he might appear in the eyes of a jury. And she knew what it would take to save him. He didn’t have much of a life anymore, but thanks to this woman, he was alive. “You couldn’t ask for better,” he told me. “There’s no way.”