Published Thursday, 12 November 2009
In Remembrance week UTV's Jane Loughrey returned to the Carrolls' Banbridge home, where she heard Kate Carroll beg her husband's killers to spend just one day in her shoes.
"I pray for them in the hope that one day they will come to the realisation that what they are doing is not right, and that they're just wrecking lives," she said.
'Agony'
"Put yourself in my shoes, see how you would feel, if it was someone you truly, truly loved. I doubt they ever truly loved, otherwise they couldn't do this."
Constable Carroll was murdered by the Continuity IRA in Craigavon in March.
The police officer was gunned down just 48 hours after two soldiers were shot dead by the Real IRA at an army base in Antrim.
Kate Carroll told UTV she was still in agony over the loss.
"Groundhog day is Monday," she said.
"Every Monday I re-live what happened.
"As the day goes on I get worse and worse and worse, because I'm watching the clock until the hour came that Steve was killed - at 9.50pm.
"I just re-live that day over and over again."
But she said she was neither bitter nor angry at the men who murdered her husband.
"I have no bitterness in me. Never had, never will and nobody on this earth is ever going to make me that way. Nobody.
"I pray for them. They're not with me 24/7.
"If they were walking in my shoes for one day, just one day ... that would let them see what they have done."
'Inspirational'
Kate Carroll received a Woman of the Year award earlier this month in recognition of her inspirational bravery in the face of her husband's murder.
She received the award on what would have been Stephen's 49th birthday, a birthday he predicted he would never see.
An emotional Kate explained: "His dad died when he was 49 and Steve thought that he wouldn't make it ... He wasn't to know he was going to be shot."
Kate and Stephen would have celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary in August. Instead, it was a bleak day.
"That morning I just woke up completely empty - there was no Steve," Kate said.
"It should have been a really, really happy day and it was one of the worst days of my life."
Too distraught to visit her husband's grave, Kate has instead planted a tree in her garden in his memory.
But next summer she will go to Ashford Castle, where she and Stephen had planned to renew their wedding vows on their silver anniversary.
She insists it is what her husband would have wanted.