A small cluster of high-schoolers from St. Louis stood in the snow and the cold outside the state prison in Bonne Terre Tuesday night and listened to a young priest.

"We live in a throw-away society," he said, "but we do not believe in throwing anybody away."

Martin Link was scheduled to die by lethal injection shortly after midnight Wednesday morning.

The kids prayed for Link, and they prayed for the family of his victim, and they prayed for the people inside the prison who would soon carry out the execution.

As the kids conducted their "Vigil for Life," a car cruised past on Highway K. It stopped near the driveway leading to the prison just long enough for Carl Kabat to hop out. He is a 77-year-old priest with a long history of civil disobedience. He once did almost 10 years in prison for attacking a missile silo with a jackhammer.

Kabat wore a sandwich sign made of cardboard. "Thou Shalt Not Kill," was the message hanging down his chest. "Stop the Murder," was the message on his back.

He approached the guards. They pointed toward the official protest area, which is where the kids were conducting their vigil. "I'm not going there," Kabat said. The guards detained him and called the state police. Within a few minutes, Kabat was on his way to the St. Francois County jail in Farmington.

By 9 p.m., Kabat was gone, the kids had left and the area around the prison was quiet. The witnesses for the execution arrived at 10:30. There are three groups of witnesses. They are kept segregated. There are witnesses for the state, the victim and the condemned.

I was one of the state's witnesses.

On a January morning in 1991, 11-year-old Elissa Self-Braun left her home in south St. Louis and headed toward her school bus stop. Her umbrella was found in an alley she used as a shortcut. Four days after her disappearance, her body was found on the banks of the St. Francis River in Wayne County.

Bill Roach and Mike Flaherty were the detectives from the juvenile division who had been handed the missing-child case. They drove to Wayne County. Elissa's body had been removed from the river and taken to a funeral home. She was lying on a table, still caked with mud. Roach ran his hand through her hair. "We never stopped looking for you, honey, and we'll never stop looking for the guy who did this."

Because there was a question of jurisdiction — where was she killed? — the homicide division did not take the case, and Roach and Flaherty received permission to continue their investigation. Eventually, they arrested Link.

Joe Warzycki was the lead prosecutor when the case went to trial in 1995. He was assisted by Jeff Hilliard.

Roach, Flaherty and Warzycki also served as state's witnesses at Link's execution. Hilliard died from ALS in January 2004.

The state's witnesses were taken to the office in the prison that is used for parole hearings.

At 11:50 p.m., we were led toward the execution chamber. We walked past the "strip room," where inmates change clothes and are searched after visits. We walked past the empty visiting area.

We were led into a small room. There were two rows of chairs facing a blue curtain. I sat next to Roach. He mused about the fact that had Elissa left the house two minutes earlier or two minutes later on that long-ago morning, none of us would be here. He said that once, when he was a young cop, he was at Fairground Park at 3 a.m. He saw headlights coming down Grand Avenue. Then headlights coming down Natural Bridge Avenue. They were the only two cars on the street and they were racing at each other like meteors. They collided. Sometimes that happens.

Two corrections officials opened the curtains. Link was lying on a gurney. He was wearing glasses, but his eyes were closed. He looked serene. He was covered with a white sheet. His breathing was shallow. I could see two leather straps, one for his wrists and the other for his legs. Tubing for an IV came from a wall and snaked up under the sheet.

Directly across from us was his family's viewing area. The curtains were closed. To our right, but out of our sight, was the viewing room for Elissa's witnesses.

Three drugs are used in the execution. The first renders the condemned unconscious. When it was administered, Link coughed. He did not appear to be in distress.

The second drug stops the respiratory process. The final drug stops the heart. I could see no discernible change in Link when the last two drugs were administered.

A corrections official announced that Link's heart had stopped, and he had been pronounced dead.

"The execution of Martin Link is complete," the official said. The curtains closed.

Afterward, Flaherty, Roach, Warzycki and I went out for coffee with Elissa's family. I sat next to her mom. She did not talk about the execution or Link. Instead, she talked about family. Which still includes, of course, the 11-year-old who left for school one morning and never came home.