‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’ How two murderers found grace performing Shakespeare.
Former inmate actors (from left) Howard Ralston, Sammie Byron, Charles Smith, and Jerry Guenthner pose onstage after a wedding ceremony in Louisville, July 30, 2025
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Louisville, Ky.
“Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
with them forgive yourself.” – “The Winter’s Tale,” Act 5, Scene 1
Jerry Guenthner was walking through the prison yard at the break of dawn when he heard the voice.
Haven’t you put your mother through enough?
Why We Wrote This
The organization Shakespeare Behind Bars has helped violent offenders rediscover their humanity. In this story, two murderers come to “be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.”
He spun around. Who’d just spoken to him? It was 6:15 a.m., June 6, 1990. There was no one else in the yard at the Kentucky State Reformatory, where he was four years into a 65-year sentence.
It wasn’t an apparition, like Banquo’s ghost or that of Hamlet’s father. He was just having a rare moment, alone in the yard, heading to chow, admiring the traffic of clouds across an open freeway of sky. Then the voice interrupted, unbidden. It was like somebody talking into his mind. Asking a question that lanced through his core.
Haven’t you put your mother through enough?
“He said it again, and then there was no doubt,” Jerry recalls. But he didn’t feel fear. He didn’t feel judged. It felt like a conscious message filled with pure love and truth. A divine call.
Four years incarcerated, he’d become the leader of a crew. A former high school football player, he stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall. The other prisoners had nicknamed him Big G. They feared his reputation. Practically all of Louisville knew what he’d done, given the news coverage: He had killed a cop.
Now, the 24-year-old oversaw the flow of drugs into the penitentiary. He ran a loan-shark operation and controlled his own gambling ring. He was a fearsome fighter, and even the gangs inside showed him respect.
Jerry’s family was middle-class. His mother, Dorothy Guenthner, was an accountant, but her husband, also named Jerry, was a bookie and gambler who wore chunky, diamond-studded rings and looked like “a cross between Pavarotti and Popeye.” Father and son hung out together at a bar that was like a second home to them.
Not even a year out of high school, the younger Jerry was already dealing drugs such as methamphetamine, which people called “crank.” He had styled himself in an Al Capone-style fedora. On the night of Feb. 12, 1986, a friend hooked him up with a man looking to purchase an amount worth $5,600 – a big haul for a night.
The man, John Robert Weiss, drove a sports car with flip-up headlights, and picked him up that night. But Jerry was unable to contact his supplier. The night ended in a parking lot with the men arguing, Jerry’s potential customer saying he had wasted his time. Mr. Weiss, it turned out, was an armed undercover police officer, wearing a wire. The argument escalated.
Two guns were drawn beneath a sickle moon. The first of the policeman’s six bullets blew the fedora off Jerry’s head. The last seared into Jerry’s arm. Three of Jerry’s five shots were on target. The wounded policeman staggered through the snow, calling for backup into his wire. It was a sting operation, so the police team arrived quickly, but the undercover officer would die from his wounds.
At Mr. Weiss’s funeral, his mother, Nimet, was presented with the Stars and Stripes. She cradled it against her heart with both hands. He had been her only child. Months later, she would weep every day in the courtroom during the trial.
After Jerry was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison, his father was stoic: “Head up, chest out. One day at a time, and never let ’em see you sweat,” he told his son.
Jerry began serving his time at the Kentucky State Reformatory, and he became something of an inmate boss. His mother, he knew, struggled to maintain her bearings during family visits. Jerry knew his activities in prison put him at risk of being sent to solitary confinement. He would then be handcuffed and behind glass for all future visits. That would deeply wound her.
These worries were just part of the backdrop of that June morning when he heard the voice – a “road to Damascus” experience, he now calls it. But the fact is, the experience made him change dramatically.
He immediately gave up control of the drug trade and disentangled himself from his gambling operations. Jerry began going to the prison chapel regularly, attending the services of multiple denominations. He felt a kinship with the prodigal son.
The inmate had never thought about abstractions such as redemption, or forgiveness, or finding healing – for both himself and those he’d harmed in numerous ways. Jerry wrestled with guilt and confronted major existential questions: Who am I? How do I want to spend my remaining years before I die? What is my gift to humankind?
In 1996, Jerry was up for parole. He had been a model prisoner for six years. The parole board, however, denied the request. Police officials were adamantly opposed to his release. It would be another 12 years before he could apply again.
When Jerry returned from the hearing, he fell back into some of his old ways and got high.
Finding light in prison performing Shakespeare
In the late 1980s, when Jerry was working out in the Kentucky State Reformatory gym, he noticed an inmate who was “like the strongest person on the entire planet.”
The person was a competitive weightlifter named Sammie Byron. Sammie exemplified the proverbial scrawny kid who bulks up after repeatedly getting bullied at school, which for him included boys sexually assaulting him. At the same time, he was beaten by alcoholic parents at home. Having no one to turn to, Sammie kept a silence that was shrouded in shame.
Sammie, who was finding solace in weightlifting, had also been volatile and violent as he grew older. His first felony as an adult was shooting Wiley, one of the bullies who had sexually assaulted him as a child. Wiley survived.
Then, in 1983, Sammie strangled and killed his lover, Carol Fox. She had been threatening to expose Sammie’s serial cheating to his wife, Barb, with whom he had a son. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. “The first thing I did was ask [Barb] to divorce me, because I didn’t want to imprison my wife and son with me,” Sammie says.
Jerry got to know Sammie better after they both were transferred to Luther Luckett Correctional Complex near La Grange, Kentucky, in the 1990s. Sammie had an easy smile, which creased into his freckled cheeks, conveying his mental fortitude and calm. In a movie, he’d be played by Morgan Freeman. And Sammie never once got into a fight in prison, a rarity – and probably because of his size and extraordinary strength.
They lifted weights together and participated in other athletic events, but weren’t particularly close. But Sammie was a founding member of a program called Shakespeare Behind Bars, and Jerry soon found himself drawn to Sammie’s crew of inmate actors.
They staged the Bard’s plays with the help of Curt Tofteland, then-director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. The actors sometimes wore makeup and, when cast in female roles, used balloons as breasts. Jerry noticed that, like Sammie, the participants were different from most of the other inmates.
“Their light was on,” Jerry says. “They weren’t dark anymore.”
It wasn’t easy to keep your light on in prison. Jerry maintained his faith and avoided trouble. But it could be hard to imagine going on with a life inside walls for decades to come.
At the first production, Jerry became a “Shakespeare groupie,” rapt as he attended all three performances of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” he recalls. But the play was not just the thing. It was the players.
“I was like, ‘I’ve seen these guys do this and have the fun – and goodness in their heart,’” he says. “And so I knew it was opening something in them. And I was like, ‘I got to get me some of that.’”
Sammie sponsored Jerry’s application to join. It was an exclusive group. Unreliable inmates could jeopardize the productions. “Curt’s first question to me was, ‘You don’t get in trouble, do you?’” Jerry chuckles. “I said, ‘Well, not no more.’”
The group opened a new world for Jerry. The men, by design, devise their core values and hold one another accountable in abiding by them. One of these is respect for emotional intimacy.
The director of the program, Mr. Tofteland, does not choose the roles the inmates play. The men themselves make those decisions. And when Jerry joined the group, Sammie was playing the lead role in “Othello.”
In one of his first rehearsals as a member of the group, Jerry witnessed Sammie repeatedly break down in sobs as he tried to perform his lines.
“The death scene of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, paralleled the real-life murder I committed,” Sammie says. “Seeing the look of terror on Desdemona’s face, I came to see the humanity in my victim, Carol. When I saw the disbelief, the fear, the betrayal in Desdemona’s eyes, my rage transformed to life.”
Sammie chose life, even as he performed Othello’s final words:
I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky
deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am.
Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.
Jerry and Sammie became close friends as they continued on as members of Shakespeare Behind Bars. Eventually, the group decided to take on “Hamlet.”
As they were deciding on who to play the titular role, Sammie gave Jerry a nudge.
The question, “To be, or not to be?” in the silence of a prison cell
Jerry’s voice was squeaky for a big guy.
So, Mr. Tofteland gave him a tip: lie on the floor in the visiting room and yell your lines at the ceiling until you learn to use your diaphragm. “I’ve been bellowing ever since!” Jerry says.
At the time, Jerry had a job in the prison laundry. While folding clothes from the industrial-sized dryer, he’d memorize Hamlet’s dialogue. Jerry’s goal was to learn 30 lines per day. Cumulatively, Hamlet speaks more than 1,400 lines of dialogue – the most of any role in Shakespeare’s catalog.
Jerry learned a lot from Mr. Tofteland, in fact. To prepare for each play, the director would ask the group to answer fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? What do I love? How will I live my life knowing I will die?
Prisons are repositories for shame and guilt, Mr. Tofteland would say. But shame and guilt doesn’t change behavior.
“The only way that you change behavior is to change thinking,” Mr. Tofteland says. “So, what you begin to introduce is a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world, a different way of seeing each of themselves in the world.
“You can’t say, ‘Tell us about the time you were raped,’ or ‘Tell us the time that you saw your father murdered,’” he says. “You don’t have language for that. But Shakespeare has language for it. ... So, I can find any event that’s happened in your life. I can find parallel events that happen in Shakespeare’s characters.”
That’s how Jerry came to portray Hamlet not so much as a melancholy mope but as someone consumed by anger. In the play, Claudius murders Hamlet’s father. Jerry could relate to betrayal. An old friend had set up the drug sting by introducing Jerry to the undercover officer.
Shakespeare also pushed Jerry to confront his own existential burdens. “‘To be or not to be,’ that wasn’t just a line, you know? It was a question that I had to ask myself in the silence of the cell. The easy way out is to kill yourself,” he says. “I had a whole lot of time to do, and it’s like, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easy not to be?’”
If Hamlet offered Jerry an outlet for venting frustration at outward forces, a later role challenged him to look inward at his own culpability. In “Richard III,” the physically deformed protagonist murders his brothers and nephews to become king. Hadn’t Jerry also destroyed his relationships with his sister, his mother, and his father in a bid to become a drug kingpin? He was ready to take responsibility for being so selfish, so greedy.
During an ugly cry, tears slaloming down his cheeks and snot bubbling through his nose, he got down on his knees. Jerry felt God’s forgiveness.
He came to view himself in a different way. Jerry says the person who had
been a gangster and drug dealer was a guy with a mask on. He didn’t have to change who he fundamentally was to be a good man. But he did have to quit wearing the mask.
“That light goes back on, and you realize you don’t have to stay that person,” says Jerry. “You can turn your back on that person and go back to always being the person God intended you to be.”
“I still grieve for the life that I have taken.”
In 2011, Jerry sat before a parole board again. The hearing was packed with supporters. The prison’s warden, Larry Chandler, had submitted a letter about the positive impact Jerry had had on other incarcerated men. It was the only time he had ever testified on an inmate’s behalf. The board, however, ruled Jerry would have to wait another decade for his next opportunity.
By then, Shakespeare Behind Bars was having an effect far beyond Luther Luckett’s barbed-wire fences. In 2001, the Monitor had been the first newspaper to report on the program. Then, it became the subject of Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller’s 2005 award-winning documentary.
“One of the things that ‘Shakespeare Behind Bars’ the documentary did was bring to light that people can change,” says Mr. Chandler. “Hopefully, people can understand that they can change and find some forgiveness in their heart for the heinous crime that they did, and understand that they’re trying to do good now.”
Sammie, whose story was front and center in the documentary, was paroled from his life sentence in 2014. Prior to his release, Sammie had embarked on his own personal tour of reconciliation. First, with his mother. Then, with his father through a series of letters.
One day at Luther Luckett, Sammie spotted Wiley, the bully who had molested him and whom he’d shot. Wiley was undergoing rehab at the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center and was visiting Luther Luckett to access its library of law books. Sammie went over to him.
“The first thing I did was I apologized for shooting him,” says Sammie. “He says, ‘Uh, you know, Sammie, I kind of deserved that. ... It’s a good thing you were not a very good shot.’ So, we laughed together.”
Following Sammie’s release, he worked up the courage to reach out to his ex-wife. Barb, initially skeptical, agreed to meet. They remarried in 2016. “I didn’t marry the same man twice,” she says. “He was a totally different person.” Yes, he was bald, she jokes, but he could now recite chunks of Shakespeare and was willing to be emotionally vulnerable.
“I think the hardest thing was for me to forgive myself,” says Sammie. “I still grieve for the life that I have taken – and I used to hide from that feeling. I never know when it’s going to overwhelm me.”
He remained in regular contact with Jerry, still serving his time in prison. In addition to acting in Shakespeare plays, Jerry fostered dogs as part of the Paws Behind Bars program and acted as a mentor for other inmates. He also earned several associate degrees.
One thing that still nagged him was wishing he could reach out to Nimet Weiss to express remorse for killing her son.
“It always was on my conscience, even after I changed my fact of being the real me, that I had hurt her,” Jerry says. “How can I fix that? How can I even have the audacity to ask her for forgiveness? And what would that even look like?”
Jerry was surprised to find out that a prison psychologist knew Ms. Weiss. Recounting what the psychologist shared with him, Jerry’s voice breaks and his eyes thicken with tears. She had died, but she had let people know that she had forgiven the man who killed her only son.
In 2021, the parole board once again denied Jerry’s request for supervised release. He wondered whether he’d get another chance to live outside prison walls. His father and sister had both died. Would his mother even still be alive?
I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.
On a midweek August morning earlier this year, a small audience has gathered in an amphitheater in Louisville’s Central Park, site of the city’s annual Shakespeare festival.
A Shakespearean actor takes the stage, surrounded by a minimalist set for “Twelfth Night,” the final play of the festival’s 2025 season.
The actor is about to deliver the most important soliloquy of his life – but this time, he’s not acting.
Like a number of Shakespearean comedies, Jerry’s story at this moment is culminating in a wedding, and he’s about to say his vows to a woman named Georgie Cain.
Jerry takes a breath and addresses his audience. “Before all the people we love and with all the love I have in me, I stand before you today in awe and wonder,” he bellows. “Five and a half years ago, I never imagined this moment could be realized.”
Jerry Jerome Guenthner was released from prison in January 2024. Consistent good behavior and credits for becoming the first person in the Kentucky Department of Corrections to get a bachelor’s degree helped earn his release. He had been behind bars 37 years, 11 months, and 16 days.
Jerry and Georgie “met” early during the pandemic. Georgie, thousands of miles away in Australia, was browsing profiles in a “write a prisoner” program.
She was taken with Jerry’s photo with two huskies he was fostering. They began talking every day; Jerry was smitten by Georgie’s accent. He describes her as kind, loyal, and generous.
“We had the most stable love for each other,” says Georgie, who has just moved into their new home. Jerry now works with Sammie at an organization called The Spot, a center that helps at-risk youth learn life skills and find employment.
It is Sammie who gives Georgie away. (“Do I have to call you ‘Dad’ now?” Jerry later jokes to his dear friend.) Mr. Tofteland, the Shakespeare Behind Bars director, is the officiant. Mr. Rogerson and Ms. Spitzmiller, the documentary filmmakers, are here, too, filming a follow-up documentary titled “Shakespeare Beyond Bars.”
Sitting near Barb, Sammie’s reconciled wife, is Jerry’s grinning mother, Dorothy.
“You saw me, past my time, past the headlines, past the shadows of my past, and something worth loving, something worth waiting for,” Jerry says to Georgie.
The setting of the wedding, a Shakespeare stage, is meaningful to the couple for a number of reasons. Jerry had fallen in love with the words of the Bard after watching his fellow inmates perform “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” nearly 30 years earlier.
At a later moment, Jerry would recount how performing the role of Caliban in “The Tempest” continues to impact his own self-understanding. In the play, Prospero says of the creature he helped create, “This thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine.”
“I acknowledge that I was this person, you know – I was capable of doing that,” Jerry says of his crime. He still identifies with Caliban, and especially one of his final lines. “At the end, he comes to, at the end of his journey, I promise to ‘be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.’”
“I once identified as a monster – you identified me as a monster – but now, I learned from that character, as I grew, [who] hurt other people,” he says. “Now, I can come out at the other end and be smart enough to know that I need to ‘be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.’ And, so, I think that’s what we’re all doing. And that’s what we learn from our characters.”
It is a moment of grace for the man who killed a police officer.
The newly married couple gaze at each other, wishing they’d thought to bring tissues to the stage, as Jerry continues his wedding vows.
“You are God’s gift and promise to me,” he says. “A rainbow that shines in the sky of my heart.”