But the executions of three men in less than three hours concentrated all the pain and other feelings that emanate from such powerful events.

Outside the Governor's mansion, in Little Rock, Ark., 100 miles away, a few dozen people stood in the freezing rain, to plead for compassion. Like those on the other side of this issue, they quoted a Bible to make their arguments. ''Forgive them, Father; they don't know what they are doing,'' said Sister Joan Pytlik, a Roman Catholic nun in Little Rock.

And, in a room near, but out of sight of, the execution chamber, a small group of people whose lives were unalterably changed by the killers huddled together. Arkansas does not allow the relatives of victims, or of the condemned, to witness the execution. But some of the victims' relatives just wanted to be as close as possible, as the thing was being done.

''They took the shirt off my dad's back before they killed him,'' said Virginia Hamilton, whose father, a small-town marshal who made $100 a week for breaking up fights and giving drunk teen-agers a strong talking to, was murdered by Mr. Denton and Mr. Ruiz when he went to help them with a flat tire.

It took her father away from her when she was 14, and ruined her mother's life, she said.

''Yeah,'' Mrs. Hamilton said, ''I hate them.''

Others, like Mrs. Jester, waited for word by phone. Angela Smith Cunningham, who was just 11 on July 19, 1988, the day Kirt Wainwright shot her mother behind the counter of a convenience store in Hope, Ark., wanted to know one thing, as the execution neared: would he beg for his life, ''like my mother did.''

As the hours ground down to 7 P.M., the start of the first execution, as the inmates sat alone or with their counselors in their ''quiet cells,'' the rain and cold combined to cover the barren trees around the prison in a sheen of glittering ice. Back in Little Rock, as the first man, Mr. Denton, began the short walk to the chamber, protesters lit a single candle.