Article content continued

As a young man, Collins said, he knew he was on a disastrous path, but he had no clue how to turn from it. “I was too young, too prideful, too ill-equipped. I didn’t have any positive influences. And too full of myself, too fucking full of myself, to be completely honest there.”

Had he to do it all over again, Collins said, he’d like to work as a youth counselor and try to reach out to the hard cases, to the kids like him. What would he tell a young Peter Collins?

“I would help him find the footholds and the opportunities and just be there. Not condemning or punishing. Just trying to help.”

*******

Collins first noticed blood in his urine last year, yet it took six months for him to get in to see a urologist. Bladder cancer has excellent survival rates if detected early, but Collins’s cancer was advanced by the time he began treatment. In January, doctors told him he had months to live.

He has asked for a special parole hearing but is still waiting for a date to be set. Being allowed to die at home, he said, “would mean a lot to my family.”

In prison, Collins managed to rebuild ties to his parents and siblings. He even planned to write a book about the prison system with his mother, Joan, before she died of cancer in October 1995. “The forgiveness was there on both sides,” he said.

Collins’s mother wrote to prison officials as part of an unsuccessful attempt to get her son out of prison for a supervised visit during the final stages of her disease. In that essay, she described the horror of seeing her son arrested on television, of coming to terms with his violent, mindless act.