Different Kind of Cell

A Different Kind of Cell: The Story of a Murderer Who Became a Monk by W Paul Jones, 122 pages

Clayton Anthony Fountain was the worst of the worst.  At the age of 19, while serving in the Marines, he murdered a Staff Sergeant with a point-blank shotgun blast.  In prison he associated with the Aryan Brotherhood and over the course of nine years murdered three inmates and a guard.  The last murder also involved a disabling injury to a second guard and serious injuries to a third, despite the fact that Fountain was, at that time, being kept in the control unit at the US Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which had replaced Alcatraz as the highest security penal institution in America.  As there was no federal death penalty at the time, a special cell was constructed for Fountain at a mental institution in Springfield, Missouri, and the prisoner allowed no human contact.  Later, he was moved into another cell in the same complex, which had been built to hold Timothy McVeigh in the event he wasn't executed.

Beginning in the late '80s, Fountain experienced - or claimed to experience - a remarkable conversion.  Over the course of fifteen years, he gradually transformed his solitary cell into a hermitage, associated with the Trappists at Assumption Abbey.  The author of this book, Fr Jones, was his spiritual director for much of this time, and the story centers on how Fountain struggled with his past sins and future vocation.  Thankfully, the author neither denies his subject's crimes nor uncritically accepts his change of heart.

Fr Jones is not a professional biographer, and this is not a conventional biography - there is no detailed account of his childhood, or his crimes - but it is not meant to be, either.  Like Fountain himself, the book asks the question, "Is anyone beyond forgiveness?" and answers, "No."