Skillicorn's days are numbered, but Missouri's death penalty might not outlive him by much: Two bills in Missouri's Legislature have proposed a moratorium on the death penalty and a review board to examine issues such as cost, fairness and the risk of wrongful execution.

Skillicorn could be the last criminal put to death in Missouri, which is ranked fifth in the country for most executions per capita. His execution could also be the state's most regrettable.

Skillicorn, then 35, met 22-year-old Nicklasson at the Salvation Army rehabilitation center in downtown Kansas City. The older man was staying at the shelter as a condition of his parole; he had already spent 13 years in prison for the 1979 murder of an 81-year-old Missouri farmer, killed while Skillicorn and two others robbed the farmer's home in Levasy.

Skillicorn was a 19-year-old junkie at the time of the farmer's slaying. In prison, his addiction worsened. Desperate for drugs, which were plentiful in prison, but already deep in debt to other inmates, he used a table saw to slice off the top of his right middle finger, hoping to get a morphine drip in the infirmary.

At the Salvation Army rehab center, Skillicorn stayed clean until he met Nicklasson, who had done time for beating his stepfather with a baseball bat when he was 19. Nicklasson hooked Skillicorn on a whole new high: methamphetamine. On August 24, 1994, the two men, plus Tim DeGraffenreid, a 17-year-old friend of Nicklasson's, set off in DeGraffenreid's parents' Chevrolet Caprice and steered south to score a brick of meth.

The Caprice broke down near Kingdom City. Drummond pulled over to help. The men pulled guns on Drummond, and forced him to drive. On a road in Lafayette County, Nicklasson ordered Drummond out of the car and walked him a quarter of a mile into a wooded area. Skillicorn, still in the car, thought the plan was to tie the man up and leave him there, far from the nearest phone. But Nicklasson, angry that his hostage didn't try to fight back or escape, shot Drummond twice in the head.

"If a guy wants to come in here and be a hardhead, if he wants to have bad behavior, they got a place for him," Skillicorn explains. "It's not a pleasant place. They got a place that's literally spending your days in a cage, no comforts whatsoever. It might be a consolation to some people on the street to picture that. But people who do want to be well-behaved, there are things available to them, too."

Skillicorn's certainty in his heavenly reward is based on his good works at Potosi. In order to sit in this open area, Skillicorn had to take a break from his job with Set Free Ministries, a Christian ministry outreach program with an office at Potosi. He's on-call for the prison's hospice, where inmates comfort and care for terminally ill inmates. Hospice at Potosi was in its infancy when Skillicorn arrived in 1996; under his watch, it has blossomed into a nationally recognized program. He is the editor of Compassion, a bimonthly magazine sent to death-row inmates and 4,500 readers around the country. The money collected from subscriptions funds scholarships for college-bound kids who have lost family members to violent crime. The magazine has awarded $36,000 in scholarships since 2001.