Ken Lay's death provides shocking moral lesson

In a chilling twist to the Enron saga -- an epic tail of fraud, greed and all too little heroism -- founder Ken Lay died of a heart attack in Colorado at age 64.

Message boards are burning up over the news. Lay's critics (I admit, a tepid word to describe their pure hatred), are howling at the idea. They think that he somehow got off through his death. Many of them apparently don't believe it was a simple case of a heart attack. Some speculate there was foul play involved in his death. Some even believe that he faked his death through a stunt of some kind and has escaped authorities.

The truth is that Lay's death by heart attack shouldn't be too great a surprise. I'm no doctor and I know a massive coronary can strike the healthiest and certainly the most honorable people without warning. But could many people have been under more stress than Lay? Given his May 25 conviction, he seemed destined to live out the rest of his life behind bars. Sentencing was set for October 23. If he had been deluding himself that he would be found innocent during his trial, his conviction erased any hope.

Maybe Lay would have died of a massive coronary at age 64 even if Enron had stayed on the straight and narrow. And, if Ken Lay knew his fate was to die at that relatively young age, would he have risked his company and his legacy on fraudulent dealings?

To me, that is the most interesting question: If Ken Lay  had remembered how short life can be, would he really have wasted his time on earth causing so much pain and destruction?

For any other corporate leaders who about to slide down a slippery slope of fraud and corruption, his early demise provides a chilling lesson: Life's too short to be a crook.