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This One Is Personal

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Kyle Nicholas Bruner

Kyle Nicholas Bruner

Yesterday I received the horrifying news that the son of my good high school friend Rick Bruner had been murdered. This was Rick’s message to his friends:

It is a very sad morning as I bid farewell to my son, Kyle Nicholas Bruner, 1st mate of the Yankee Clipper, age 33, sailor, poet, teacher, musician and rascal, who was shot and killed this day on a street in Nassau, Bahamas. He did the things he loved. He loved and was loved by many. He was at times exasperating and inspiring… charming and maddening. He loved the sea and it always called him back from where ever he might have seemed settled. We will miss him, but we won’t be alone in that.

Later in the day, we found out that Kyle had been shot while trying to protect two women who were being mugged.

As Rick put it, “It doesn’t make it any easier to handle, but it fits with the way he lived his life.”

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Amanda Knox: Still Being Victimized

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Amanda Knox on CNN

Amanda Knox on CNN

Earlier this week, Chris Cuomo interviewed Amanda Knox for a CNN hour-long special. It is indicative of the feeding frenzy in today’s mass media that this highly promoted interview was run a half-hour late so that Anderson Cooper could report the latest lack of news about the salacious case du jour, the forced confinement for a decade of three women in a Cleveland house, allegedly by a 52-year-old monster named Ariel Castro. The fact that there were no breaking developments seemed to matter little.

When the scheduled interview finally got underway, it became clear early on that Ms. Knox and Mr. Cuomo each had wildly different agendas. Certainly, Knox wanted to promote her just released book, Waiting to be Heard. But she also wanted to talk about the truth of her situation and what happened to her in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007. Mr. Cuomo, on the other hand, just wanted drama, and truth seemed to be of little consideration one way or the other.

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Arias: Considering the Death Penalty

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Travis Alexander

Travis Alexander

As we write this, the jury in the Jodi Arias trial is about to reconvene to consider a punishment appropriate for its finding of murder in the first degree in the death of Travis Alexander. Basically, the jury has three options: life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years, life in prison without the possibility of parole, and death by lethal injection.

Now, you can be for capital punishment or against it for a variety of moral, practical and/or procedural reasons. But if we are going to have a death penalty on the books at all and you don’t use it here, why even bother?

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Can Capital Punishment “Help”?

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Death Penalty

Death Penalty

Commenting on a recent post, “On the Death Penalty,” our thoughtful reader M in Australia poses the following question: “Does it really help the family and friends who’ve lost loved ones to have the perpetrator put to death rather than live out their sentence (sometimes their life) behind bars?”

First, we want to commend M for taking the feelings of murder victim survivors into consideration in framing the argument over capital punishment. It is something we have been advocating a long time.

The answer to the question, from our rather extensive experience, is: Sometimes.

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Robert K. Ressler, 1937 – 2013

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Robert Ressler

Robert Ressler

It is with profound sadness that we note the passing of retired FBI Special Agent Robert K. Ressler after a long and valiant struggle with an increasingly debilitating disease. Back in the 1970′s, when Bob and I were instructors assigned to the FBI Academy in Quantico, we decided we’d have a lot more impact in our discussions of violent and repeat offenders if we could verify what we were teaching through actually interviewing the “experts” – the violent offenders themselves. We became partners, and for a long time you didn’t hear my name around the Bureau without hearing Bob’s, and vice versa.

The story has been told many times now, including by Bob in his own books and by Mark and me in Mindhunter, about how Ressler and I took every opportunity we could during our traveling “road schools” to go into penitentiaries and conduct exhaustive interviews with violent serial offenders. Out of that effort came the first organized study of such individuals, the landmark Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives we co-authored with Dr. Ann Burgess, and ultimately the Crime Classification Manual, which the three of us produced along with Ann’s husband, Dr. Allen Burgess. It is now in its third edition. And out of that effort emerged the FBI’s criminal profiling program, of which I was the first operational agent, and VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, of which Bob became the first manager. By the time he retired from the Bureau, his story was already the stuff of legend.

Bob’s contributions to the fields of behavioral profiling and criminal investigative analysis will be long remembered. He left the field in a far better and more advanced state than he found it. He was one of the pioneers. May his family find peace and grace in his many accomplishments and his lasting legacy.

http://news.fredericksburg.com/justiceforum/2013/05/07/former-fbi-profiler-robert-k-ressler-has-died/

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