Hey, where is this?

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Other People podcast.

I'm Brad Listy.

I am here in Los Angeles.

It's good to be with you.

I appreciate you tuning in wherever you happen to be.

Today on the program, my guest is Alex Marr, author of a new book called 70 times 7,

a true story of murder and mercy. But it is a tall order to expect someone to go and forgive

the person who murdered their loved one.

And I really didn't know how I felt about that.

So I looked him up.

You know, I looked Bill up and I said, you know, do you have a second?

I really want to talk about this decision you made years ago.

And I realized that I really wanted to grapple with that because not only did he forgive her, he wrote a letter to the editor of this big local paper.

He announced his decision to his family members and his friends and his coworkers.

They all thought he was insane.

But he also wrote a letter and looked up the address of, you know, death row for Paula in Indianapolis, just sat down one day at the steel mill where he worked, grabbed some printer paper from his foreman's office, got a pen,

sat down on his break, and just thought, okay, what am I going to say to this girl on death row

who murdered my grandmother? All right, that was Alex Marr.

Her new book, 70 times seven, publishes this week on Penguin Press.

It is a work of literary nonfiction about a 15-year-old girl named Paula Cooper from Gary, Indiana, who in 1985 committed a shocking crime,

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