TALLAHASSEE, Florida – Monsignor William A Kerr, a leading human rights figure whom serial killer Ted Bundy sought out to be his spiritual counsellor on death row, died on Wednesday. He was 68.
Kerr was hospitalised on May 3 after suffering a stroke.
‘Monsignor Kerr travelled all over the globe, touching lives everywhere as he worked to build a more peaceful world,’ Florida State University President TK Wetherell said in announcing his death. ‘The world has lost a true visionary.’
Kerr in 1978 administered last rites to a woman bludgeoned to death in her sorority house near the Florida State campus by Bundy, who later turned to the priest for spiritual counselling.
Kerr last spoke with Bundy two days before the condemned man died in Florida’s electric chair in January 1989.
Whether he was visiting refugees in Rwanda or Bosnia or sharing Thanksgiving dinner each year with his long-time friend Roger Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys and Navy star quarterback, Kerr touched lives, his friends say.
‘He was as good a person as you would ever want to meet,’ Staubach told The Associated Press on Wednesday night. ‘He was always dedicated to others.’
Staubach once said if anyone could resolve the differences between the Israelis and Palestinians, he’d bet on his long-time friend.
Kerr’s career took him from a parish priest in his St Louis hometown to the presidency of La Roche College near Pittsburgh, vice president of Catholic University and executive director of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Centre in Washington, DC.
Kerr spent many years in Tallahassee after being assigned to the Catholic Student Centre at Florida State University in 1971. He returned in 2006 as executive director of the Claude Pepper Centre for Intercultural Dialogue. – Nampa-AP
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