Dateline NBC - The Trouble on the Hill

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

In this Dateline classic, a feud between neighbors turns a quiet canyon road into a deadly battleground. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on June 8, 2009.

It's at the heart of everything holy, the core of the message, a single phrase, love thy neighbor, to which we might add, woe to him or her who learns to hate instead, as you're about to discover. Once upon a time in a paradise by the golden Pacific, up a quiet private road among the canyons of Carmel, lived three fine people, and they were bright and loved and likable and accomplished. The idealistic engineer, the crusading defense attorney, the caring nurse. Who could imagine what these three

neighbors were capable of? Love thy neighbor, there would be blood. Get off my property! Don't tell me to get off your property! You're on my property every time you back up! Get off your property! Please send us here, hurry! The private driveway was leafy, secluded, quiet. Over a bridge it went, then wound past and under the old oak and sycamore up the side of the canyon. And second from the top were two, call them grown-up hippies, two soulmates, Mel and Elizabeth, the Grimes. It was kismet that they found one another after two failed marriages each. And Mel, who brought Elizabeth up to his uniquely funky utopia, love among the rustling leaves to the tune of wild birds and wind chimes.

And they were just really happy. It was crazy. It was seeing them together constantly, always holding hands. Tom Ellington Wills is Elizabeth's son. He instantly liked his mother's new suitor when she introduced them. He was just a really cool, mellow guy, you know, and had a real good head on his shoulders. Mel grew up on a surfboard in the Monterey Bay,

became a defense attorney, ran marathons, surfboard in the Monterey Bay, became a defense attorney, ran marathons, got involved with the Monterey Blues Festival. My mom was a paralegal at a law firm that was directly next door to his law firm. He would constantly ask my mom out on a date. He said, hey, I've got two tickets to a Santana concert, and you want to go? And my mom loved Santana, so she really couldn't say no at that point. So they went and they were together since that date. Within a year, they got married. They truly lived each day.

We're always gone, we're always on vacation doing things like that. I was definitely jealous going to school, always finding out that they were going somewhere like Costa Rica or somewhere in the Caribbean or going to Hawaii. Elizabeth and Mel. And up on their private hillside, they dressed their overgrown love nest in bits of whimsy. Our house was the funkiest house I think I'd ever seen.

They planted discarded surfboards, upended to grow like flowers, among the odd mismatched sculptures, the signs, the birdhouses, those wind chimes, the carcass of a small ancient rowboat. An unbuttoned labor of love, in a way, and influence, though not always tastefully, by those whose need for Mel's legal services

was as urgent as their wallets were empty. Okay, I can't afford to pay your legal fee, but can I build a deck or can I build a, you know, whatever? Can I do, you know... And that would be okay with him. And he'd be like, sure, no problem. I could use a deck off this end of the house or, you know, a freestanding unit over here, a one-bedroom over here. I mean, the house, the way it's laid out was really funky. So this is not a straight-laced or strictly ordered guy.

Yeah, no, not at all. He was a cruiser. Al had been cruising freestyle 10 years when his new neighbor moved in. Seemed friendly enough, and certainly he was an impressive man, the neighbor. His name was John Kenny, a 65-year-old oil exploration scientist with a PhD from MIT, a Korean War vet, a former college professor, a world traveling consultant. Kenny soon fit right in, joined a local church, befriended downhill neighbors, got involved in local conservation efforts.

He just loves Carmel Valley, and when you see wild spaces like that, you want to preserve them. Cegueline Kenny is John Kenny's daughter, though you can probably tell from her accent that she is not a California girl. Fascinating, isn't it, how fate can dictate the shape of a life? And that is part of our story, too. It was serendipity, as much as anything, that produced the conditions, the distance, the isolation, without which none of this would have happened.

John Kenny happened to be at a conference in New York years ago. He met a woman there, a doctor, a European doctor. And since John Kenny could do his work anywhere, that's how he became John Kenny of Nancy, France. And in that ancient city, Kenny and his wife Marie-Hélène, the gynecologist, raised their two adopted daughters, who, in their way, adored him. Well, my father is a wonderful man. He has risen us the best way he could. He is tender, he is calm, he is funny. As the girls grew through their teenage years in France with their mother, Kenny divided his time between Nancy and his little piece of American paradise,

his house in Carmel Valley, with its wonderful view, its essential serenity. He's a peaceful man. And right down to the sorted sizes of the logs for the fireplace is perfect order. Yes, that. Order. At the end of the road,

at the top of the hill, order and chaos were about to meet. Up on the canyon side in California's Carmel Valley, pristine order moved in beside cluttered whimsy. It was 1999, and for a moment, all was quiet. Every story has a beginning, of course, and every war an original cause. And in the case of this story, this war,

that would be the bridge, which in the year 2000 was in desperate need of repair. The neighbors decided if they didn't do something pretty soon, a car would fall through the boards of the creek bed below, and so they set about deciding what to do. And perhaps somebody should have warned them then about the law of unintended consequences. But, as we say, the bridge is where it began. According to Sigalane Kenney, her father wanted to hire a company to fix the bridge. But Mel Grimes offered to repair it himself. So Kenney agreed to wait.

And so, several weeks later, still the bridge was not fixed. Frustrated, John Kenny took matters into his own hands. He hired a company to make the repairs. He assumed the fee would be equally split. And Mel didn't pay his fee. He said, well, no, I didn't agree. And no, I don't care. And so they had to go to court for this.

But my dad won. But now the irritant was planted and began to grow. Jack was one of those people that really was sensitive to the surroundings around him. Christine and Kim Williams attended the same church as John Kenny. They called him Jack. I think one of the things that kind of was difficult for him was every time he would come out of his house to go to his car, which was at the other end of his house and facing the Grimes property, he would look at their house, which was pretty funky, and a lot of things that weren't real neat and tidy and aesthetically beautiful at all.

The summit was garbage, but to them it was just unique and neat and funky. They were up on the hill on their own, doing their own thing. No one could see. No one, that is, except the man who so loved order, John Kenny. I just don't think he liked looking out the window and seeing all the cars and all the funky yard stuff. Well, it wasn't just that, as Kenny told his daughter. Mel was dumping garbage and branches and all kinds of stuff on his property,

but also in the garden of others. And this was causing a fire hazard, and this was dangerous for the valley. I only got to hear from my mom, like, oh, you know, now this neighbor is becoming a nightmare. In 2003, a new neighbor moved in a little farther down the hill, Joyce Scampa. Mr. Kinney wanted us to take sides. He would call me to run profiles and get maps for him to distinguish exactly where the property lines were. Joyce is a real estate broker, so she had access to property records, and she and her husband were friends of the Grimes.

But... We did not want to get involved in any kind of a feud between neighbors, and we really, really asked not to hear any of the problems. Kenny and the Grimes both went to local authorities, tackling on each other's violations of local building ordinances. Even though they couldn't even see from their own properties some of the illegal add-ons of the other, such as a detached studio tucked in behind the Grimes' house.

It was a meditation room for my mom, surrounded by all oak trees that were over 100 years old. My mom just really found peace in that corner of the property and really wanted something to just kind of get away, listen to her music, read a book, you know, that kind of stuff. And such as the lovely sunroom, invisible to the Grimes, which Kenny added to give him a better view

of the pristine valley. But Mel, as a vengeance, contacted the sheriff and said that my father didn't have the permit to build the veranda. It was just a vengeance, you know, because they had troubles. Mel Grimes hired an attorney, Andy Swartz. Over the year, from April of 2004 to about April 2005, it began escalating as different issues arose. They wrote letters to each other, which were also escalating in tone. And ultimately, Kenny asking the Grimeses to lock his dogs up and not let them run loose. And when something awful happened to the animals,

the Grimes, though there was no evidence, suspected Kenny. Mr. and Mrs. Grimes' home was burglarized. Three of his cats disappeared. The Grimes' dog was poisoned. Elizabeth confided in a new friend, Elise Beatty. When I first met Elizabeth, she told me that she had this real crazy hostile neighbor. Whenever Elise went to visit, she said, Elizabeth warned her, never cross John Kenny's driveway. She was frightened of him because he would make claims, I guess would say things to her in the driveway she would pull up that would upset her, and that would frighten her, that, you know, what would happen next?

Would it only be a verbal confrontation? Could it sometimes be something else? Tom remembered the advice his parents received from one of their attorneys. You know, I've dealt with cases like this. The best advice I can give you, if you guys can do it, is just pack up and leave. Just move. You never know what this could escalate into. Eventually, the growing conflict found a focus. The property line that separated Kenny from the Grimes. It ran right along a road between the properties.

The road, of course, was an easement. Legally, it had to be shared. But then there's a tiny spit of land, four feet wide, maybe ten long. Technically, it's Kenny's property, but it's on Grimes' side of the road. Grimes had to cross that land to get to his carport, that 10-by-4-foot piece. In June 2005, Kenny planted a garden to keep the Grimes' off the strip of ground, which, of course, meant they wouldn't be able to use their carport. A few hours later, he would claim, he was backing out of his own driveway

and saw Grimes driving back and forth over the new garden he'd just planted, destroying it. And then he claimed Elizabeth charged to his car up his own driveway and blocked him in. Kenny pulled out his camera, snapped a picture of Elizabeth. Then, again his story, she assaulted him and yanked his camera strap so hard, he said his head slammed against the doorframe of the car. After that episode, things really, really accelerated with the hatred, the spewing of words and the fear. And I would say that the fear was something that we thought was overly emphasized, but in fact it was real. And the Cold War was now hot. The feud between John Kenny and his neighbors, Mel and Elizabeth Grimes, had reached a boiling point.

Now there had been a physical altercation. Kenny went to the hospital after the camera strap tussle. Hospital records indicate he suffered a cervical strain, a concussion, and a contusion to his forehead. He was given a soft cervical collar for comfort. He went to church the next day. Parishioners said they noticed a visible difference. He showed up with a neck brace and a cane, and his gait was definitely different about how he was able to walk.

He was more hesitant in his speech even, and I think quite traumatized by the whole incident. We were concerned and asked what happened. He said, well, Elizabeth reached into my car and grabbed my camera, which had a strap on it, and pulled it against my neck and pulled me into the car and grabbed my camera, which had a strap on it, and pulled it against my neck and hit, you know, pulled me into the car and, you know, assaulted me. Church friends urged him to go back to the hospital where, in addition to the concussion, he was now also diagnosed with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Grimes had their own story of what happened. Elizabeth said

it was Kenny who lunged at her from inside his car, causing her to trip and become entangled with his camera strap. Each side took out a restraining order on the other. Two days later, much to Kenny's surprise and humiliation, Elizabeth showed up at his weekly men's Bible class at the church and aired for everyone to hear their dirty laundry. Asked Kenny's fellow churchmen to pray for them, Kenny was mortified. And Elizabeth's son saw his mother change.

I remember growing up, my mom was always like, have faith in people, trust people, love people. People are good. You know, the world is great. And now what did she say? Don't trust people, son people, people are good, you know, the world is great. And now what did she say? Don't trust people, son. People are mean, people are out to get you, you know, just, it was a whole different outlook on life. John Kenny was also a changed man. Soon after the church incident, his daughters went to spend the summer with him. He asked them not to talk to the Grimes, but he wouldn't say why.

They asked about his neck brace. He said he fell in the garden. So what was he like then? He was not talkative. He was... Not his usual funny, happy self. No, no, no. He was tired, even, I would say, exhausted.

He was anxious. Yeah, he was scared. Meanwhile, her father's nemesis, Mel Grimes, had his own reasons to be afraid, quite apart from the dispute with John Kenny. Suddenly, the marathon runner encountered serious heart trouble. It kind of just hit him like a freight train. One day, he would walk up the staircase in the house and just like his heartbeat just became real irregular.

Operations followed. He stopped running. His doctors told him, avoid stress. Instead, the neighbors escalated their feud. They went public at a meeting of the Monterey County Planning Commission. Dueling statements. Mel Grimes went first. The one thing that I do regret more than anything else is the trauma that it has caused my wife over the last two years to go through this. She has had periods of time where she simply vomited, cried, and couldn't sleep. Then, John Kenny. None of us, and none of you either, would tolerate a neighbor building something or trashing something or doing anything which damaged the value of your own property and the enjoyment of your own property. Wars between countries or neighbors have their own escalating grammar, and such was the case here through one issue after another as it got worse and worse and worse. And the old engineer, Mr. Kenny, would look out of

his window across the hillside and see what he considered to be the dog patch development of his neighbor, the lawyer, Mr. Grimes. And the Grimes, for their part, looked back at Kenny's house and saw an inflexible and angry old man. But conflicts like this eventually have to settle on something concrete, something tangible. And so the war between the neighbors focused on one little piece of ground just at the edge of the pavement, a piece of land no bigger than a surfboard, really.

And that was the stage for the battle to come. John Kenny, remember, tried to grow a garden on that patch of dirt as a way to block use of it to get to their carport, and that didn't work. So now he turned to lawyers. The best and cheapest option, Kenny's attorneys advised, was to place a rock, a very large rock, on that little strip in front of the carport. Kenny prepared.

He hired a security consultant. The Monterey County Sheriff agreed to stand by when the rock was put in place. Then a pause. In October 2006, a family emergency sent Kenny back to France. He spent the holidays there with his wife and daughters. What was he like at that time? The same he was in Cornell. He was nervous, anxious, not very happy? Not nervous. Scared of something. Scared? Yeah. He didn't want to go back.

The Grimes were away too that season. They were out of town, exactly. They were in Hawaii. So, for once, peace on that troubled hillside. And then, January 2007. Kenny, back from France. The Grimes, back from Hawaii. The climax. John Kenny came back from Europe in January 2007. It was time to launch his plan to end the war with his neighbors.

Once home, Kenny bought a barrier rock, a one-ton boulder. He emailed his attorneys with orders to call the sheriff for a civil standby. His rock was delivered at 3 p.m., January 29, 2007. His security consultant and attorney were waiting for it when it arrived, in case things became volatile. The promised sheriff's deputy didn't show. But nothing happened. Mel and Elizabeth Grimes were not

home yet. He was coming from work from Salinas, out where the courthouse is, and she was on the peninsula. Up on the hill, the lawyer and the consultant gave Kenny strict orders. Stay in the house. Call 911 at any sign of trouble. And then they left.

Kenny's family said he felt abandoned, dismayed. He was 72, frightened, alone. And the Grimes were on their way. They met for a light dinner, and then they drove home. Texting each other along the way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love you, and can't wait to see, you know, can't wait to get home. At 5.30, the Grimes in their separate cars arrived at the top of the hill, Mel first.

He saw the boulder, ran to his tool shed, got a shovel and sledgehammer. Elizabeth arrived, saw Mel with his heart condition swinging the sledgehammer. She grabbed the cordless house phone. 7-1? Yeah, we have an emergency at Hitchcock Canyon Road in Carmel Valley. What's the cover? this house phone. Blocked in Carmel Valley. He's blocked the driveway with what? With a big, huge boulder so that we can't get our cars out. We share a mutual driveway. Where's the neighbor at? He's in his house. Please, please, really.

How old is your husband? My husband's 58. He can't do this. He was just at the hospital today. This gun is crazy. I have to hang up to help him. Then, striking sounds are heard on the 911 call. Grimes is hitting the boulder.

His wife tells him, stop. No, don't touch it. Let the police come. Don't do that, Mel. Stop, Mel. What is he doing? Then they argue about whether Elizabeth should go up to Kenny's house. All right, Mel, stop it or I'll go there. I'm going to his house. I don't know.

Hello? Leave it alone. Leave it alone. Then I'll go to his house. Can I speak to your husband? No, my husband's like so pissed off. Where is he at right now? He's got a sweat jam and he's trying to break this bowl. But not for long. Kenny emerges, walks down his driveway toward the Grimes and the boulder. Elizabeth confronts him. Here he is now. Get out of my life!

Don't tell me to get off your property! You're on my property every time you back up! Get off his property. Please send a sheriff, hurry! Okay, there's another dispatcher starting up. Thank you. The sheriff's coming. Don't talk about my job.

Oh, shut up, you fat a**hole! Now a police is coming. Get off the saddle, will you? Please send someone. And then, the horror and a warning. What you're about to hear is disturbing. I love you. I love you. Hello? Hello? Hello?

Down the hill, Kim Williams heard the gunshots, remembered Kenny's feud, and headed up the canyon road. It was like, this can't be happening. But, you know, the reality was Mel was dead, and he was lying on the ground there, and Elizabeth was near death. Elizabeth's friend, Elise Beatty, was on her way home, heard the sirens, saw the helicopter arrive. I had no idea that the person we watched from this location being unloaded from the ambulance and put it into the helicopter

was in fact my best friend. And I watched and witnessed this event. Whoever it was to me at that point, it was horribly horrific. And it really shattered the safety that we felt in Carmel Valley. Elizabeth Grimes died en route to a trauma center. Her son, Tom, answered a knock at the door and tried to listen to what the policeman said. I really have some bad news for you.

And I'm like, what's going on? He said, oh, your dad's dead. And then he said, and your mom's dead too. And I just fell to the ground. I'm thinking car accident. I'm thinking, how could they both go? They just got back from Hawaii. It must be a car accident.

And as soon as, I'll never forget it, as soon as the sheriff told my wife or told us that my mom was dead too, that she looked at me and said, oh my God, the neighbor. Nine time zones away in Nancy, France, John Kenney's wife, the gynecologist, was in the midst of a consultation when she got a telephone call. Her, John Kenney, involved in a murder? Incomprehensible. She told her daughters the news when she got home. And I just said, it can't be. This is terrible.

It can't be. How do you process a thing like that? I immediately said to myself that my dad, as an honest man, has felt in danger and that he had to do it for him to stay alive. He was arrested, of course, right outside his house. I saw Jack being escorted from his driveway. His head was hung. He was slumped over. He just looked like the world had come to an end.

John Kenny, the brilliant petroleum engineer, the law and order man, was charged with first-degree murder. There would be a trial, and he would take the witness stand to explain why he killed his neighbors. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. We are on the record in the case of People v. Kenny. John Kenny went on trial in August 2008 for the murder of the neighbors he had learned to so thoroughly despise. That he pulled the trigger and took their lives was not in question. But was it first-degree premeditated murder?

Or was it self-defense by a frightened elderly man? The only surviving witness, of course, was Kenny himself, and he was about to tell the jury his version of the story. The judge would not allow Kenny's face to appear on camera while he testified, but he was recorded on audio tape. I was in a high state of fear. I was alone and vulnerable. He was upstairs making dinner, he said, when he heard a rapping sound. Though he wasn't wearing his hearing aid,

the sound seemed to come from the sliding glass door facing his driveway. Panicked, he went to his bedroom, grabbed his pistol. He opened his door and saw Elizabeth Grimes on his deck. He said she swore at him he told her to get off his property. Then he tried to shoo her away. He took a step forward and she took a step back, back and forth, all the way down his driveway.

Then he saw Mel Grimes. He was standing next to the barrier rock in his business clothes with a sledgehammer in his business clothes, with a sledgehammer in his hand, in a frenzy, striking my barrier rock. And now, from the witness stand, Kenny made a stunning claim. He was attacked. I said, stop that, get off my property. I think I only got halfway through it

when Elizabeth Grimes came up behind me and slammed me in the back of the head. I seem to recall that just after she did it, she started screaming as if she were being attacked. And then the heart of Kenny's case. He accused Mel Grimes of charging at him with that deadly sledgehammer raised like a battering ram. It was at that moment I realized they have entrapped me. When I drew my pistol, I did not intend to kill anybody. That was my lifeline to get out of there.

He slammed right into me. The sledgehammer hit a grazing blow on my left upper arm. I was grappling with him for a minute to get him away from me. At the same time, at the same moment he pulled the sledge hammer back for a second strike i cracked him across the front of the face with a with a pistol then he pulled the trigger well knocked him off his pins to my left i mean that fired once at him once at her paused for a moment and once at him, once at her. Paused for a moment, and once at him, and then there was a scary situation, and there was a longer pause between the third and the fourth shot, and

then at her again, apparently. Oh, my God. I mean, it happened so fast. This was a pandemonium. I was acting half on instinct and self-preservation. I wasn't thinking much of anything. I wasn't thinking of anything, except to save my life. Kenny admitted he fired at the Grimes four times. A fifth shot, he claimed, was a simple accident, and the bullet went into the ground. I think he said, my hands were shaking so badly that my thumb slipped off the hammer, and the gun fired, and the receiver came back and ripped a big gash in my thumb.

Why did he fire that gun? Military training, he said. First I was being attacked by more than one person. My training in the Army had been being be attacked by multiple assailants. Take them all down. One, two, three, four. And that, he said, was self-defense. After Kenny finished his story, the prosecutor asked him a question. Does he feel any remorse?

Since remorse, I hate to sound like a schoolteacher, but as you know, remorse is sadness attributable to a sense of guilt. I feel terrible about everything that happened, but I do not feel remorse because I do not feel guilt. Nor did Kenny feel any guilt or remorse right after the incident, claimed the prosecutor. At least he certainly didn't seem to when he placed his own 911 call. Here, minutes after shooting his neighbors, said the prosecutor, can he express his concern only for himself? 911, what's your emergency? Yes, I'm at South Bank Road. Yes, sir. I have an emergency. What type of emergency? I've been assaulted again by two people. You've been assaulted?

Yes, I have. Are you injured? Yes. Do you need an ambulance? No. Okay, who assaulted you? Mel Grimes, Jr. And how do you know these people, sir?

They're my next-door neighbors. Okay, and what did they do to you? Well, they rushed at me and tried to assault me. For what? What's going on? Um, that's as much as I think I should say right now. No, you need to give me as much information as possible so I can let the officers know that are responding, sir. Uh.

Why did your neighbors do this? Oh, my God. I really can't tell. I hope you'll come out here, please. Sir, I need some information. Hello? And at his trial, he was consistent. It wasn't he who started it, said Kenny. It wasn't his fault.

And if that's the only story the jury heard, but it wasn't. After all, when Elizabeth Grimes called 911 from her driveway that fateful afternoon, the whole incident, the climax of that long war, was recorded through her telephone. And now, the entire tape was played in open court every disturbing moment.

Both were shot twice. A bullet hit Elizabeth in the back. So the jury heard the shots, heard them die, heard their last words to each other, I love you. And they heard this last, fifth shot, almost 15 seconds after the fourth. I love you.

Hello? Hello? Hello? What was that? Candy said the gun slipped. Prosecutor Berkeley Brannan countered it was, in fact, proof that this was not a question of self-defense. The defendant shot Elizabeth Grimes while she was down on the ground, helpless. It was a coup de grace shot.

Or was it, as defense attorney Daniel Olmos told the jury, something else entirely? To not let the prosecution convince you that this case is about a patch of dirt. This case is about a 72-year-old man who feared for his life. He thinks that it's a struggle between good and evil. He wanted to be in control. If Kenny's attitude were on trial, it seemed, he would surely lose. But the law doesn't measure attitude. It measures justice. The jury in the trial of John Kenny,

accused of murdering his next-door neighbors, had a disturbing duty. To consider evidence, yes, but as part of that job, to listen to an audio tape of two people dying. Over and over they heard it. The sounds teased into something like clarity, enhanced to allow the jury to comprehend what happened. The jury foreman told us what he thought. Mrs. Grimes is on the phone with the phone to her ear and saying, Mel, the sheriff's coming.

And you can hear Mr. Grimes say, good. Two seconds later, she's attacked. Or there's an altercation. It seems incredulous that she's going to say, the sheriff's coming, knows she's got 911 on the phone, and then all of a sudden she's going to launch into an attack of him. I think he attacked her, knocked the phone out of her hand, and Mr. Grimes died trying to defend his wife. For the jurors, the case boiled down to two things. The 911 tape and... He shot a woman in the back.

He shot a defenseless woman in the back. He hides this gun under his belt. He goes down there and he knows the reaction he's going to get from him. He's too smart not to know this. And then, of course, he shoots Mrs. Grimes in the back. That was about as irrefutable as it gets. You didn't have to shoot that woman. And so they were unanimous. We, the jury, find the defendant, John Franklin Kenney, guilty. Kenney was convicted of second-degree murder for killing Mel Grimes and first degree for killing Elizabeth because the jury decided he shot her when she was down. At his sentencing, John Kenney said he had not broken God's sixth commandment,

thou shalt not kill. And many of his friends stood by him. We don't know what actually happened up there. We know what Jack says happened, and we have no reason to disbelieve him. There's another side to Jack than just what was shown in court and what was shown in the newspapers. That he's a real person. He's a brilliant person. He's a good friend and good father and husband. Prosecutor Berkeley Brannan says he doesn't doubt the statements made by Kenny's friends and family.

He's led a fruitful life, and he threw it away. So he did. But still, said the prosecutor, the man doesn't seem to get it. I think he honestly does not feel remorse. And I think that this perspective comes from a certitude that whatever he did, it was right and fine and justified. John Kenny was sentenced to life, no chance ever of parole. An imprisoned, sole living survivor of a petty feud that turned into an unnecessary war.

To know that the rest of your life you'll spend in a cell and you won't be able to experience the beauty of life anymore, that's what I hope for. I just want him to, you know, regret the rest of his life. Living the rest of his life in prison, to me, is justice. Kenny's daughter and wife were in court to hear the verdict. And then they went back to their town in France. And all they had to take with them was their memory. I can't understand the emotional distress and the pain of the Grimes' family. But we are also very much suffering.

If you have a message for him now, what would that be? I'm okay. And it takes some doing to be okay, doesn't it? Around Carmel Valley, more than a few once testy neighbors became a little friendlier. I can't tell you how many people have, you know have commented that they've mended fences. Up at the top of that winding, leafy road, up among the oak and the sycamore, the earthly possessions of those two doomed lives remained as they were left, abandoned, moldering, among the whimsical keepsakes of a house no one lived in anymore. Yet across the once disputed easement, outside that other stark and empty place, buckets of firewood the old engineer had so carefully sorted according to size

stayed in their place, still lined up just so, as passing years covered all in a layer of decay. Until time finally banished the ghosts from that place. Both houses have been sold now, and life has returned.