EX-INMATE TELLS HOW HE RESCUED HIS LIFE

Francis "Frank" Sherry's reputation 26 years ago was that of a drug-crazed
murderer.

Saturday morning, however, Sherry ministered to inmates at the Sangamon
County Jail, urging them to turn their lives over to God as he did
following a heinous crime.

Sherry spent a weekend in early April 1975 taking PCP (the animal
tranquilizer phencyclidine). In his drugged state, he came to believe that
aliens had invaded Springfield and taken over all forms of life, he told
the inmates.

He retaliated against the aliens on Monday, April 4, 1975, by going on a
rampage, uprooting all the plants in his apartment and killing his cat. He
then turned on people.

Wielding a hammer, he bludgeoned everyone in his path, stopping in what was
then a Thrifty drugstore at Sixth Street and South Grand Avenue, where he
smashed a jar and slit his wrists with a dull piece of glass.

He had assaulted a total of eight people. Two of his victims died, and one
suffered permanent brain damage. "Like a boil coming to a head, I believe I
was the one possessed," Sherry said.

Sherry told groups of inmates Saturday that his life changed when the widow
of one of his victims came to visit him in jail. She gave him her dead
husband's Bible, and lines of scripture recited by jail ministers began to
stick.

Then came his time in the Menard Correctional Center, where Sherry
continued some of his old ways, smoking marijuana and making bootleg
alcohol. But in the end, Sherry said, scripture won out.

He ended up serving almost 13 years of his 30-year sentence.

Seven months before his release, a prison chaplain married Sherry and Ruth,
a prison minister whom Sherry heard singing in the Menard prison years earlier.

Frank and Ruth Sherry have since ministered to more than 150 prisons
throughout the country, but Saturday was the first time Sherry has returned
to the Sangamon County Jail.

As he talked about his story and conversion to a life of God, Sherry's
remarks were met with scattered declarations of "amen" from Bible-toting
inmates. Sherry referred to all the men he talked to as "brothers," and all
the women as "sisters."

When he invited the inmates from each group to bow their heads and join him
in prayer, all but a few tightly clasped their hands together and closed
their eyes.

One man cried as he stood and proclaimed that he and Sherry used to "shoot
dope together," and he had wondered if they would ever meet again. Sherry
didn't remember the man.

As roughly 20 men filed out of Sherry's first session Saturday morning,
each paused to thank him or ask him to keep them in his prayers.

When the 10 women were leaving, one woman thanked Frank for his testimony,
and both agreed "the hardest part is forgiving ourselves."

"When you come to talk to us, it's not like a drug counselor who has never
done it is telling us to stop getting high," she said. "You know, you've
been there."