She nevertheless got a job cooking hamburgers at Five Guys and soon became a manager. She got engaged and moved into an apartment with her fiancé. She won her dream job as a legal assistant in the Indiana federal community defender’s office, led by her longtime friend and defense attorney, Monica Foster, the chief federal defender.

“You’ve got to have hope,” Ms. Cooper told me. “If you give it up, you’re never going to make it.”

On May 26, some two years after her release, Ms. Cooper committed suicide. She would have turned 46 this month.

I was one of the few journalists to talk to Ms. Cooper post-prison and was the last to speak with her, in a call a month before her death.

I’d been planning a trip to Indianapolis to finally meet her for a story about teenagers on death row who transformed themselves. If anyone was proof that redemption was possible, it was Ms. Cooper.

She asked me to wait a little. “My life is quiet right now, and that’s how I like it. Once people find out who I am, they all have an opinion about me because of what I did. They start seeing me as a monster.”

Ms. Cooper had been severely depressed since childhood, her older sister, Rhonda LaBroi, told me. Ms. LaBroi begged her to get counseling, but after all the time in prison, Ms. Cooper couldn’t trust anyone. Ms. LaBroi said that in a suicide note, her sister said that “she wanted to tell people suffering from mental illness not to go down that road, not to commit suicide, to reach out any way they could.”

Ms. Cooper’s history was daunting. Her mother tried to commit suicide and kill Ms. Cooper and Ms. LaBroi when they were young. She put the girls in the car with her and ran the engine in a closed garage. Ms. Cooper’s father, Herman, now deceased, issued daily beatings, often with an extension cord, Ms. LaBroi said.