When Shanae Watkins was 12, she killed a girl. Stabbed her three times with a kitchen knife one afternoon on a busy corner in downtown Baltimore. It was a dumb squabble over a 19-year-old guy.

It's been more than a decade since Watkins cut short Chineye Mills' life at age 13, seven years since she left a juvenile detention center with a chance to start hers over again.

Far from burying the murder in a corner of her psyche, Watkins, now 23, relives it all the time. Willingly. In public. On the radio, in a lecture hall and at a small gathering, she has eloquently offered herself as a cautionary tale for girls stalked by temptation and exploitation - and as proof of the possibilities of redemption.

While many praise Watkins for her willingness to expose her ugly past, some girls' advocates say showcasing her moving testimony does not come without major qualms and reservations. For starters, they don't want girls to glorify her crime. Besides, with society full of highly successful women, do they really need her as a role model?

Watkins shrugs off the concerns with a world-weary smile. "To some people my story is inspirational, but some people feel I'm not worthy," she said in an interview. "I can't please everyone. But as long as I can touch one person in the crowd, that's enough for me. I'll take that backlash."

She sees it as her duty, her calling even, to speak out. It's hard not to conclude that being a reformed juvenile murderer may be the best thing going for her. Out of the spotlight, she's an unemployed, undereducated, single mother with three kids barely getting by on food stamps. But in this public role, she is often showered with attention, applause and, not incidentally, modest speaking fees.

If a Baltimore-based nonprofit group gets its way, she soon will touch a far wider audience. The Urban Leadership Institute, which promotes youth development, has become Watkins' champion, not only lining up paid appearances but also finding a writer to help her pen a memoir. Now it envisions taking her on a sort of nationwide roadshow.

"Her story is going to have her all over the country," predicted LaMarr Shields, the institute's president, "and people will pay to sit at her feet to hear what she says about girls' issues."

The institute plans to publish her memoir next year, but before then it intends to reach out widely to youth services providers, public agencies, schools and nonprofit groups to promote Watkins. Meanwhile, Shields says, Watkins will receive training in the kinds of programs that are most effective at preventing girls from taking her destructive path.

Shields even hopes to create a video diary to record key moments, including a possible meeting with Watkins and her victim's mother, Kysha Gray. (Watkins has never reached out to Gray, saying she was not ready until now; Gray, who could not be reached for this article, complained two years ago that the public attention given Watkins "really tears me up.")

Not only would national exposure spread Watkins' message, Shields said, but it would be therapeutic for her - and for her bank account, since the institute would make sure she received fair compensation.

Shields came across her story when he saw Girlhood, a gripping 2003 documentary that followed Watkins and a girl named Megan as they served juvenile jail time at the Thomas J.S. Waxter Center in Laurel.

When viewers meet her, Shanae is a chubby, bright-eyed girl with pigtails that boing from her head. Unlike the manic Megan, she acts the model prisoner, clearly hoping charm will speed her return to freedom. In the end, she spent four years locked up.

As a 14-year-old, Shanae hardly seemed destined for role-model status. At one point in the film, she muses about the stabbing:. "Am I supposed to be upset, am I supposed to beat myself up over it or something like that? I don't know."

The film also lays bare the demons in Watkins' past that might have set her on the path to murder. At age 10, an older cousin gave her Hennessy cognac; the next day, she lost her virginity. Soon she was binge-drinking, smoking marijuana and skipping school. At 11, she says she was gang-raped by five men. Ashamed, she initially told no one.

(The trauma goes back even earlier: She says she was molested at age 4 or 5.)

On camera, her mother, Antoinette Owens, laments her inability to save her daughter. She moved out of public housing but had to work two jobs, which often meant leaving Shanae alone. Owens says she begged various government agencies for help, only to be told nothing could be done because her daughter had committed no crime.

Shanae got wilder and wilder. On April 29, 1997, she and Chineye fought over the 19-year-old both had dated. The girls were at the corner of Howard and Saratoga streets. Shanae had a knife in her purse. Instead of a forgettable fistfight, the quarrel turned into a murder.

By film's end, Shanae seems to have accepted responsibility. Freed, she is shown thriving at Frederick Douglass High School, despite the unexpected death of her mother from pulmonary hypertension. In the final scene, she steps from her grandmother's house in a ball gown and waves regally from a white stretch limo on her way to her junior prom.

Last month, Watkins entered an auditorium at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to loud applause and whoops from about 100 girls - middle- and high-schoolers - and their female mentors, seconds after a screening of Girlhood ended.

Watkins still has those bright eyes and that girlish smile. The pigtails are long gone. Then as now, her voice is clear and strong; so is her knack for expressing herself in wrenching ways.

"Whatever you do will follow you," she told the girls. "It will. Just think about your decisions wisely before you make them. ... You never know what's going to happen."

A question-and-answer session gave the girls a lot to ponder. Never carry a weapon. Sex can wait, and by the way, sex between a girl of 12 and a 19-year-old guy is statutory rape. Find a trustworthy adult in whom you can confide. Choose friends carefully. Sexual assault is never the victim's fault. And so on.

One clear thread emerged as well: high praise for Watkins. While the girls asked practical questions - "Why did you carry a knife?" - a parade of adult mentors commended her for making something of herself and sharing her story. "You are truly living your purpose," gushed one.

After a while, one of the coordinators felt compelled to prick the bubble. Seante Hatcher of Bloomberg's Center for Adolescent Health took the microphone. Yes, the conversation was great, but she had a point to make.

"I don't want any young person to walk away from this and think, 'Oh, I can do my dirt as a child and ... it's not going to follow me when I become an adult. I could be like Shanae and go and talk about how I grew from it and get praise from it.'"

Underscoring her point, Hatcher said, "This is not glorifying anything she went through."

At the behest of another emcee, Watkins ended by stressing that the Waxter Center is not the fun and games it can appear to be in the film. No, she said, "You are actually locked in there."

Afterward, 14-year-old Delia Myers came away seeing nothing in Watkins' past to emulate. But she did admire her. "She didn't grow up to be a junkie or a homeless person or something like that," said the Dunbar Middle School eighth-grader. "She grew up to be an actual nice person and very successful."

Success is a relative concept. By some measures, Watkins has done very well. She isn't in prison and hasn't had any run-ins with police since leaving juvenile jail. In other ways, as she readily admitted that day at her apartment, she is hardly a model of stellar achievement.

"I'm not where I want to be, not where I'm gonna be. And I'm not where I could be, given where I've been," she said, meaning she could be into "drugs, running the streets, locked up." Megan, for example, has been arrested several times and has a prostitution conviction.

Watkins lives in a garden apartment off Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore with her three children - two girls, 3 and 5, and a boy, 2. The carpet is stained in places, the walls scuffed. Other than a television and computer, the living room contains just an old sofa covered with a sheet. All her furniture is donated, she says, partly because kids exert serious wear and tear.

The only wall decorations are a photo of Watkins and her mother, and a big framed poster for Girlhood.

The documentary garnered plenty of publicity, and Watkins appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, among others. She is used to telling her story. At Hopkins, Watkins urged the girls not to give up even if they make big mistakes. "I've worked at banks, I've worked at jewelry stores, I've ran companies, even though I've been through what I've been through and been where I've been."

At her apartment, Watkins offered some details on that job history: She spent a couple months as a bank teller in downtown but was fired for keeping too much money in her till. She sold jewelry at Towson Town Center for two months but quit when the store cut her hours. She managed the office of a bus company but left because her $8.75 hourly wage did not seem fair given her duties.

At the moment, she has no job. She has applied to be a correctional officer. During the job interview, she was asked if she had ever been arrested. Yes, she said. After demurring on the details, she told her interviewer about the murder charge. She's unsure about her chances.

Nor is she furthering her education. She has taken classes at Baltimore City Community College with an aim of studying business. But she quit after she and her husband, William Smith, split up last fall. She can't spare the time.

So she gets by as best she can. Her oldest daughter was born prematurely and qualifies for Social Security payments. Watkins gets food stamps and day care vouchers from the state. She makes $200 or $300 for appearances, such as the Hopkins session, which she said come her way roughly once a month.

Earlier this year, a mentoring program called My Sister's Circle paid Watkins $150 to address a group of 70 girls, all from Baltimore and from low-income backgrounds, and their adult mentors.

The Urban Leadership Institute's Shields had done a workshop for the group and talked up Watkins. But My Sister's Circle's executive director Heather Harvison was nervous. Usually she holds career and college panels, takes the girls to Center Stage and generally focuses on what they can be and do - as opposed to what not to be or do, since they see those reminders every day.

"To put it bluntly," Harvison said, "we kind of thought, do we want our guest speaker to be a murderer?"

With trepidation, she went ahead with plans for Watkins to participate in a program My Sister's Circle holds periodically called Girl Talk, during which the girls discuss issues such as teen pregnancy, drugs and violence.

The session turned out better than she had imagined. "Shanae was phenomenal," she said. Proof came afterward when some girls opened up to their mentors about being asked to carry weapons or seeing weapons at parties. One girl wrote that she now knew she could tell someone about a secret she was holding inside.

"We took a risk, and luckily it was worth it - the girls loved it," Harvison said. Even so, "I don't think I'd have her back to dig deeper."

scott.calvert@baltsun.com

ONLINE

See scenes from the documentary Girlhood, featuring Shanae Watkins, at baltimoresun.com/watkins