Achille Compagnoni, 94, an Italian climber and a member of the first team to reach the summit of the world's second highest peak, died Wednesday in Aosta, Italy. On July 31, 1954, Compagnoni and fellow Italian Lino Lacedelli became the first to reach the summit of Pakistan's K-2, which at 28,251 feet is the world's second highest peak after Mount Everest. The deed filled Italy with pride just as it was starting to emerge from the destruction of World War II. Since then, only about 280 people have reached K-2's summit. Dozens of deaths have been recorded since 1939, most of them occurring during the descent. K-2 is steeper and more dangerous than Everest and often has more intense weather.

Monsignor William Kerr, 68, a leading human rights figure whom serial killer Ted Bundy sought out to be his spiritual counselor on death row, died Wednesday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was hospitalized May 3 after suffering a stroke as he concluded celebrating a mass. Kerr in 1978 administered last rites to a woman bludgeoned to death in her sorority house near the Florida State University campus by Bundy, who later turned to the priest for spiritual counseling. Kerr last spoke with Bundy two days before Bundy's execution in Florida's electric chair in January 1989. 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 Center in Washington, D.C. He spent many years in Tallahassee after being assigned to the Catholic Student Center at Florida State in 1971. Kerr returned in 2006 as executive director of the Claude Pepper Center for Intercultural Dialogue. Whether he was visiting refugees in Rwanda or Bosnia or sharing Thanksgiving dinner each year with his longtime friend Roger Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys and Navy star quarterback, Kerr touched lives, his friends said.

Max Wall, 93, a popular Vermont rabbi who worked the front lines of European battlefields as a Jewish chaplain, died Tuesday in Burlington, Vt. Wall was born in Poland in 1915. His family came to the United States nearly six years later on Independence Day. During World War II, he spent time near German battlefields in a jeep bearing the Star of David.

ASSOCIATED PRESS