Crime and punishment
In connection with the arrest of suspect Bryan Christopher Kohberger yesterday in the Idaho student murders, there was a discussion in the comments of other cases brought to mind, such as that of Leopold and Loeb.
That case, which occurred close to 100 years ago, has remained unusually famous, probably because of the cold-bloodedness of the crime as well as the intellectual brilliance of its two youthful perpetrators, in addition to the fact that they were defended by the famously eloquent Clarence Darrow. If you’re interested, here’s a good site for information, including excerpts from Darrow’s famous summation speech. I had read most of that speech when I was quite young, and it was one of the reasons I went to law school, although as it turned out I was no Darrow.
In our discussion yesterday, a comparison with Raskolnikov, the killer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, also came up. Commenter “Chuck” wrote this:
Crime and Punishment was also the first thing I thought of. Then I thought, no, I don’t expect the perpetrator to have a spiritual rebirth.
Well, I wouldn’t bet on it either. But I thought I’d offer the following passage in evidence. It’s by Nathan Leopold. Now, you might consider it a self-serving lie, but I think it’s the truth because the latter part of Leopold’s life bore it out. He devoted himself to humanitarian endeavors both while in prison and after he was released on parole at the age of about 53. Here’s the statement:
Looking back from the vantage point of today, I cannot understand how my mind worked then. For I can recall no feeling then of remorse. Remorse did not come until later, much later. It did not begin to develop until I had been in prison for several years; it did not reach its full flood for perhaps ten years. Since then, for the past quarter century, remorse has been my constant companion. It is never out of my mind. Sometimes it overwhelms me completely, to the extent that I cannot think of anything else.
So that’s one example. His confederate, Richard Loeb, was murdered in prison at 31 by another inmate, so there’s no way to know what his trajectory would have been had he lived longer.
Really good book about the Leopold and Loeb case that came out in 2009.
https://www.amazon.com/Thrill-Leopold-Murder-Shocked-Chicago/dp/0060781025
Does empathy tend to increase with age? I know I feel like I’m a more empathetic person than I was when I was younger.
Does empathy tend to increase with age?
Increased empathy could well have something to do with the maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain. These play a role in judgment, memory, attentiveness, and moral as well as cognitive analysis of a situation. The frontal lobes are the last portions of the human brain to mature– the mid-twenties in most adults, while some males’ frontal lobes are not fully mature until age 30. Leopold and Loeb murdered Bobby Franks when they were 19 and 18 respectively, which implies that they lacked a full capacity to understand the moral dimension of their crime even though they were obviously intellectually precocious. According to Neo’s quote, Leopold’s remorse for the murder did not emerge until he had been in prison for several years, “perhaps ten years,” by which time he would have been 29 or almost 30 years old.
Another factor in L and L’s planning their “perfect crime” was the intellectual influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose concept of the “superman” induced the two students to consider themselves exempt from the moral rules that govern us deplorables. Darrow referred to the German philosopher in his summation: “Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.” It takes a certain amount of lived experience to outgrow the inflated self-regard that Nietzsche fosters in susceptible adolescents.
To return to Kohberger, he’s 28, possibly a case of arrested brain development as well as moral vacuity– and not the brightest crayon in the box, judging from his academic history, so probably not a neo-Nietzschean.
Darrow referred to the German philosopher in his summation: “Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.” It takes a certain amount of lived experience to outgrow the inflated self-regard that Nietzsche fosters in susceptible adolescents.
Huh? Most of us seem to get through our 19th and 20th year without undertaking a premeditated murder of our 2d cousin just to amuse ourselves.
Does empathy tend to increase with age?
I think as you fail at things, you’re more retrospectively patient with the people you knew when they were failing at them and you now contemplate how vulnerable they actually were.
Art Deco:
If you read Darrow’s whole speech, which was very long, he was not excusing them. They had pleaded guilty. He was trying to get them life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. He said they should be locked up for life.
Sigh.
If I were writing this as a murder mystery – setting up the whole plot and all – I would cast Kohberger as a freakily intelligent incel increasingly consumed with rage against the undergraduate ‘Beautiful People’ – the popular, pretty female upper-caste in the scheme of college life. And like Leopold and Loeb, playing around with the notion of superior intellect being able to plot the perfect murder.
The stabbing rampage argues a lot of suppressed rage, finally getting out to romp.
YMMV.
(Is this comment going to go to spam hell?)
Every time there’s a murder/murders where there is no clear motive I hear “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats. This song is about a school spree killing in 1979. And for me it answers the question of motive every time.
Sgt. Mom–
Neo rarely consigns any comment to spam hell. She and her software are pretty tolerant of the regulars who post on her blog. Anyway, good to see you here.
Leopold and Loeb murdered Bobby Franks when they were 19 and 18 respectively, which implies that they lacked a full capacity to understand the moral dimension of their crime
What’s the point of this–did they understand well enough to be held accountable? Of course they did–to dispute that because they’re not as mature at 19 as at 30 would be like saying there’s no difference between being blind and being near-sighted. You don’t have to have had diff-eq in college to understand how to not bounce checks.
Whatever “full physical development of the brain may mean”, you can understand “murder is bad” long before you get to it. Maybe people understand it better at 30 than at 19, but at 19 they understand more than well enough to be able to be held accountable. 19 is far more like 30 than 9 is. 9 year olds, maybe I can see having the discussion, but the younger kids get the rarer murderers are, which suggest that kids might understand murder even better than adults, at least in the part that counts, which is not doing it in the first place (as opposed to being sorry for it later).
@ Frederick > “the younger kids get the rarer murderers are, which suggest that kids might …”
.. lack means, motive, and opportunity to kill someone. And physical capability.
There have, however, occasionally been very young murderers, so they are not all lacking in those departments.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
“Whatever “full physical development of the brain may mean”, you can understand “murder is bad” long before you get to it”
“You don’t have to have had diff-eq in college”
Differential equations are not much help in balancing the ledger, but these days they apparently aren’t even getting basic addition and subtraction.
Out-of-control steroid use…
…can do some incredibly damaging things to people’s thought processes, such as they are.
(They’re my “go-to”, “one-size-fits-all” “excuse” for pretty much everything.)
Disclaimer: I’ve no idea whether this guy took them or not, but his “transformation” from pudgy nebbish to unrecognizable pushy, chiseled, anti-social jerk indicate something chemical was going on there…
(Not that this “excuse” should save him for any consequences for this pre-meditated savagery…but it should put those companies and orgs who push steroids on notice….)
What is a bit curious is the question he reportedly asked those who arrested him—i.e., whether they had already arrested anyone else…
Speculations and book plots are all very interesting, but we need to remember what Aggie said yesterday: “And listening to the flow of this river of verbal diarrhea, never once did I hear the word ‘alleged’ nor did I hear any reference to ‘innocent until proven guilty’. He’s been found guilty, as it stands right now.”
We’ve seen this rush to judgment before, and it’s not always correct.
What looks suspicious and maybe even conclusive on the surface could be different after longer examination.
Or maybe the Idaho police and the Feds did their job right for a change.
There is a reason we have trials with evidence, adversarial counsel, and judges.
Barry Meislin–
According to the alleged perp’s high school classmates, he was using heroin when he lost weight fairly suddenly, so you’re right that “something chemical was going on there”:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/idaho-murder-suspect-bryan-kohberger-was-a-creep-around-hs-classmates/
“Shocked former classmates remembered the accused killer as being an intelligent student in high school, but was bullied often and could, in turn, be a bully to others himself. They said he struggled with heroin addiction and weight loss.” Heroin isn’t steroids, of course, but it can cause weight loss because it leads to nausea and loss of appetite in many users.
In addition, Kohberger harassed women employees and customers at a brewery he patronized near his home until the owner asked him to stop: “Kohberger would ask women — staff or customers — who they were at the brewery with, and where they lived, [the owner] said. If the women weren’t interested, ‘he would get upset with them a little bit.’ In one instance, Seruneck recalled he called an employee a ‘bitch’ when she declined to answer his questions. Serulneck said he was forced to confront Kohberger during his final visit to the brewery.”
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/bryan-kohberger-harassed-women-at-pennsylvania-brewery-report/
Barry Meislin, offhand the accused doesn’t looked “ripped” as a steroid abuser would. Besides, “roid rage” is typically a sudden outburst of manic violence. This killing appears to have been coldly calculated.
Now that people in Moscow, Idaho, have seen his face, if he’s indeed the stalker one of the girls feared, people will begin to tell police where and when they saw him. They’ll need to be careful to use only credible sightings. Besides, it seems to be a party town, and it would not be unusual for students from Pullman to be over there in the downtown area.
I’m hardly an expert on Leopold and Loeb, but from what I’ve read they had an unusual and highly toxic relationship. Loeb seems to have been domineering, vicious and completely amoral; Leopold was apparently a born follower who was easily dominated. Neither was even approximately “normal”, as witness their apparent belief that the murder of a defenseless boy would be a proof of their superiority (or indeed of anything at all).
Whatever Kohberger’s motives may have been, this factor seems to be totally lacking in his case.
The movie Compulsion (1959) is about the L&L case. I happened across it about a decade ago and it is quite good. Orson Wells and Dean Stockwell.
Most individuals have some sense of morality by time they reach the age of 20. So it makes sense that anyone who commits a brutal act should be “quarantined” until such time as they develop a moral sense. Sknce there are a significant number of people who never develop or have a moral sense, those who commit brutal crimes should be “quarantined” for life or terminated by execution for the protection of normals in the population. The murderer who attacks targets of opportunity in the night is a useless drag on society who just deprives the productive ones of a sound sleep. They might develop a moral sense in 10 years, or 20 years, or never. I see no reason to test their progress by letting out of prison. They already proved what they are. I am not willing to offer up family or friends as a test of that creature’s “rehabilitation”. They look so harmless until they once again go savage.
I prefer an untroubled sleep. Once the perp has shown what he is, I am not willing to offer up me or mine to test his moral growth. If this one has gotten through college without finding something or someone to attract his enthusiasms, he is unlikely to ever change. Execution is probably the most merciful option in this case. He will leave a trail of bodies.
Face it! There are a significant number of people who “ain’t right” and who can’t be fixed.
There are reasons we don’t try children in our regular criminal judicial system. They are presumed not to have developed the proper moral sense to be culpable in the same way. But once a person has reached a certain age – which varies by statute in different states – that person is deemed to be criminally responsible as an adult unless there are certain other mitigating factors that would diminish responsibility even in an adult. The ages chosen by states differ, but as far as I know all of them are significantly under 18 o 19. An 18 or 19 year old, unless severely developmentally impaired in some obvious way, is more than old enough to know how wrong murder is.
Kate, supposedly they have his cell phone pings that point to stalking.
There are reasons we don’t try children in our regular criminal judicial system.
The reasons are bad ones. If the municipal and superior penal courts suffice to ratify fact finding for adult defendants, they suffice for juvenile defendants. You can incorporate dispensations into sentencing rules and have appended proceedings in the family court to determine custodial arrangements while the sentence is being served and after completing the sentence should the youth in question still be a minor when his punishment is complete. You can also have vigorously age-graded penal institutions. We do not need separate juvenile courts and we do not need family courts (with their distinct moral imagination) assessing guilt, innocence, or terms of punishment.
Chases Eagles, I read that, too, about cell phone pings. His defense might point out that it’s a party town, and people coming over from nearby places to hang out downtown are not unusual. If they find cell phone pings repeatedly outside the murder location, that would be another thing. Surely someone will have seen him if he’s the stalker.
Chases Eagles, I read that, too, about cell phone pings.
It’s anonymously sourced. Caveat lector.
Art Deco:
The point I was making, however, had nothing to do with whether they are tried by a separate court system or tried by the same court system using different rules of criminal responsibility and different penalties. It’s the different rules I’m talking about.
It’s the different rules I’m talking about.
No need for different procedures.
Art Deco:
I did not mention procedures in my comment at 4:14, so why you are talking about procedures I don’t know. I am talking about rules of criminal responsibility and rules governing penalties. That is, legal standards and definitions of crimes and of criminal responsbility, as well as penalties for each crime or action, depending on age. Those govern how legal decisions are made concerning guilt, responsibility, and degree of punishment and type of punishment.
Out-of-control steroid use…
…can do some incredibly damaging things to people’s thought processes, such as they are.
A colleague made the same observation about Anthony Weiner, who despite his skinny frame had disproportionate muscles
Kate, cell phone ping data is very accurate. They would be able to detect him following her (if true).
Sure whatever
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11589659/Bryan-Kohberger-went-teaching-University-Idaho-murders.html
It seems that the relationship between abstract knowledge of right and wrong and the deeper emotional connection to those concepts is still mysterious and unexplored. It sounds like Leopold knew, but somehow didn’t understand on a deeper level. Was that just because of the philosophy he adopted? Or was something more fundamental wrong with him?
The UChicago milieu of the time is also interesting. Leopold and Loeb knew Nietzsche. Surely they would also have heard of Dostoevsky. Had Leopold and Loeb heard of his objections to the Nietzschean idea (which came when Nietzsche was still young, unknown and unpublished)? What did they make of Crime and Punishment and Raskolnikov?
I suspect, though, that the Idaho killings were a crime of passion. If Kohberger had wanted to commit the perfect crime, there were better ways to do it. Raskolnikov used an ax. Much less chance of leaving DNA behind than in a close-combat knife attack.
Hitchcock’s film Rope was also suggested by the Leopold and Loeb case. Strangers on a Train also makes use of the “perfect crime” idea. Most criminology students are probably looking for jobs with the police or the courts. Some are trying to overturn the entire legal system, but there may be a few who dream of getting away with the perfect murder.
Abraxas Sometimes you have to wonder. For example, Paddock of the Las Vegas shooting. Took his own sweet time getting that arranged. Scoped out another venue in, iirc, Chicago.
I wonder if he was enjoying the long, slow, mounting anticipation as much as he anticipated enjoying–which is to say relieving whatever devil had him–the actual shooting.
The reason I bring this up is that pursuing a PhD in criminology is a long, slow–was it “sweet”?–way to line up the perfect crime. Was ot fun?
Then he went and, if current understanding is correct, did it amateur-style.
@ miguel > “Sure whatever”
The information in the Daily Mail was interesting, but there was nary an “alleged” to be seen, and the people interviewed seem to be of the common opinion that being arrested means you must be guilty.
I’m afraid Kohberger’s attorneys will have a challenging time, even — or especially — if he is actually innocent.
@ TJ here:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/30/suspect-arrested-in-idaho-student-murders/#comment-2659769
“She believes that she, and some of her child-relatives, relatives who are maybe 10 and younger, might be discovered, and then murdered, by The Third Reich’s police.
To prevent this horror from happening, she then decides to murder these relatives, and then she decides to murder herself.”
Reading the Daily Mail post on the Idaho suspect suckered me into checking out some other articles, including this one:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11590759/Millionaire-pharma-exec-Gigi-Jordan-killed-8-year-old-son-dead-inside-NYC-home.html
“During the trial, Jordan’s defense team argued that she killed the boy while in a state of extreme emotional disturbance, fearing that he would be murdered by her ex-husband.”
Apparently the act of pre-emptive murder isn’t as rare as I would have thought.
Loony, maybe*, but not rare. I’m more used to seeing stories of one member of an estranged couple shooting the other and any children on the theory of “if I can’t have them neither can you” which is not quite the same thing.
*There isn’t a lot of information about what the murderous mom feared, although she said (later in the post) that she was afraid her ex would abuse the boy (unspecified) if he got custody.
About the German WWII case, TJ asks later, “Did this woman know that she and these children would [not] survive the war?” but I think a more relevant question would be, “Did she know what the Nazis were doing to the Jews?”
IIRC there were a number of instances of Jewish suicides who preferred that option to the death camps, and the more ancient incident at Masada also seems to be a case of preventing “a fate worse than death” for the Jews besieged by Roman troops, who knew very well the fate in store for any survivors.
And then there is the Jim Jones murder-suicide-massacre, sometimes too facetiously referenced by the idiom about “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Despite the doom-saying of Jones, the likely consequences of his “Temple” being shut down and the cultists returned to the US bears no resemblance to the almost-certain consequences for the Jews in both the ancient and modern situations.
“Sure whatever…”
I guess the next time you see someone wearing gloves in a supermarket…
…And as all this name dropping (Nietzche, Dostoevsky, Capote, Jong) continues apace, it makes one wonder whether ALL literature—movies, too? Comics? How ’bout video games?— should be banned for reasons of being POTENTIALLY triggering (as in, “I just read Nietzche and WOW, I just can’t wait to OFF someone in the most gruesome way imaginable…”).
Maybe, while they’re at it, they should ban such dangerous concepts as Free Choice and Free Speech.
Oh wait! Maybe we REALLY DO NEED the new—Democratic/Woke—Totalitarianism to help us save us from ourselves…to immunize us from our impulses…to protect us from our predilections…. (That is, unless we feel, truly, deeply, madly, that we have to beat up Deplorables…)
We have met infantility…and it is us?…
Meanwhile, lest the critical issue of prison clothing and accessories be overlooked, we are, thankfully, being kept abreast of the latest prison fashions…
“Idaho murder suspect Kohberger wearing suicide-prevention vest…”—
https://www.foxnews.com/us/idaho-murder-suspect-kohberger-wearing-suicide-prevention-vest-police-crime-scene-dna-sources
Key phrase:
“…’ensure warmth and comfort’…”
Which does seem to be about the size of it these days: soma for the 21st C.
So far, we don’t know what kind of DNA was left at the scene of the crime. Blood, it’s being presumed.
But. Back at least to WW II commando training, there are books and diagrams for knife fighting and killing.
With very few exceptions, death is not instantaneous. It’s a matter of bleeding out, fast or slowly. Perhaps so fast that blood pressure drops in the brain almost instantly.
Perhaps the wound is instantly almost disabling, but still a few seconds or longer of life remain.
There is one exception, a stab directly into the brain through the eye. This is extremely difficult unless the victim is completely without alerting. Or dead asleep.
It’s possible there may be a jerk. But death and immobility are close to instantaneous.
It’s the closest you can get to making it silent. Which you would want to do if you had other sleepers to deal with.
He must have known this, given his major and presumed interests.
But it didn’t work. Somebody fought back enough to suffer defensive wounds. But the question would be of how this guy bled. You can slip your hand onto the blade using a paring knife. A combat knife…unlikely. The guard–against an opponent’s blade sliding up your blade– is also a barrier to the hand moving forward.
For there to have been enough of a fight that he got cut himself presupposes a lot of noise. And the other residents?
What if the DNA is something else? On a coffee cup? Is it known for sure nobody in the house knew the guy so as to let him in to schmooze or something?
If the DNA isn’t blood, even square one isn’t in sight.
I lived in a fraternity house for a number of years. Plenty of times I saw guys I didn’t know who were friends of our folks. Coffee? Sure. Coke? Maybe a snack or lunch. Use the bathroom.
How long since they took out the trash? Couple of foam coffee cups in there?
The presumption is that the four dead were pretty tight, which seems to be the case from the pictures. But since you don’t need film any longer, taking pictures is cheap and you aren’t necessarily recording any kind of a deep reality.
But I haven’t seen much, not much at all, about the other two. Did they have different friends, maybe a friend of a friend who’d let this dude in for a chat?
From the pictures, two of the girls are really attractive. Maybe Kohberger finessed an opportunity to be close to them–visit a friend in the same house to see and be seen. Like the jogger who makes sure his route takes him down sorority row.
Spitballing here about a couple of lacunae; guy gets cut stabbing the dead asleep, the victims fight hard enough that the blade doesn’t go as planned. no noise to wake the others, and, possibly, DNA isn’t blood.
If it isn’t blood, then there are lots of possibilities; the pizza delivery guy, the guy who worked at the food truck and gave them their food to take home, the landlord or some maintenance worker for a problem, textbook borrowed from a lab partner….
Was telling the FBI to watch the 1959 film of “Compulsion” in late November, when the mob was screaming for “Hoodie Guy”. Told them: incel. Premediated from afar. Young male college student, intellectual, influenced by infamous criminal cases, most specifically Leopold and Loeb. Identified with them passionately, “The perfect crime”. “The Ubermench. The Superior Intellect, FBI profilers were saying “the guy is most likely of low education”.” Told then to watch film of Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” from 1974 with it’s sexually tormented Catholic intellectual and it’s dream sequence of a brutal murder of a beautiful young woman asleep in her bed with a large butcher knife. Speculated he had a connection to a mentor figure/religious professor of some kind in which he discussed these novels/films/infamous criminal cases/murderers and their tormented male protagonists/real-life killers. Was obsessed with these works of classic literature: “Crime And Punishment”, “Beyond Good And Evil”, “The Glass Bead Game” “The Antichrist”, “The Stranger”, Marquis De Sade, numerology books concerned with the evil cultural iconography surrounding number “13”. November 13, 2022 was “International Kindness Day”: “show random people acts of kindness to create a better world”.
Called tip line and wrote them letters describing in detail my speculations between late November and early December, in the thick of news media reports that stated “it’s fated to go cold….they haven’t got a clue.”
anonymous
Likely read on motivation. OTOH, maybe it’s so likely by accident and…he didn’t do it.
My question is kind of practical: How do you kill people one at a time without alarming the others? Okay. They’re all asleep. Except some woke up enough to at least get defensive wounds…might have been after the first stabbing before the following ones.
And some were awake enough to inflict sufficient injury on the perp as to leave blood in the house. Or have we presumed it was blood when the word was “DNA”?
That leaves two others who heard nothing and, apparently, took their own sweet time about calling the cops upon discovering the scene.
Strange.
And if his DNA is not blood from injuries sustained in the attack, a great many possibilities open up.
Thinking back more than half a century. I knew guys in college who were ‘way out of any in-group. Socially awkward, weird views they couldn’t stop talking about, poor hygiene, particularly unattractive. Yeah, they had a hard time but I don’t recall any murderous, raging anger.
This is an image from a Lettermen album. This is the in-group of the time–note the real lacrosse stick, not the sissy sticks they use today–perfect clothing and lighting. Likely, sorority girls. This is what the out-group saw and, presumably, resented. Because for various reasons, they knew they had no chance at that enchanted world.
https://www.amazon.com/College-Standards-Lettermen/dp/B0011UDA5A
Couldn’t get the picture to show, but the link works, I think.
Richard Aubrey:
When I hear of DNA at a crime scene I don’t automatically think it’s blood, unless that’s stated. There are plenty of other ways to leave traces of DNA and modern science is good at detecting them. Just for an example, if a victim fights back there is sometimes DNA of the perp under the victim’s fingernails. Another thing, though, in a knife attack, sometimes the perp inadvertently cuts himself and leaves blood.
As far as others hearing the struggle, it depends how far away the rooms are from each other and also I believe a number of the victims had been drinking, which can make them less likely to have awakened. I believe I read somewhere that the other two roommates who were not attacked lived on a different floor of the house.
Neo. Point wrt DNA which is not blood is that it can be explained in a number of ways which have nothing to do with the attack.
Spitballing here: He wants to check the place out. So he befriends one of the two he isn’t planning on killing. Goes to the house for a beer and asks to use the bathroom. Proves what? Defense asks the friend to testify to that. How about all the other outsider DNA which comes in for completely legitimate reasons? How many other guys’ DNA could haul them in if that’s all you have?
It had better be his blood, and fresh. Otherwise, maybe it’s not going to be much use.
Richard Aubrey:
Skin under the fingernails cannot be explained that way. Nor can other types if the remaining roomates say that person was never seen in the house – at least, the road become harder to explain it away that way.
Neo. Skin under fingernails cannot be explained that way. But we don’t know for sure that’s what it was.
But, as I say, spitballing: The food containers they brought home from the food truck–which I believe they did–has the food truck guy’s DNA on them. Are they in the trash? If so, no big deal because who’d go looking for them. But, still, in this hypo, the food truck guy’s DNA is there.
Anybody else? Plumber?
But, going back to some training…hard to figure any skin under fingernails unless he was dealing with one of them and another jumped him and that was who had the skin, from the struggle.
Richard Aubrey:
I don’t know what you mean by that last sentence about DNA under the fingernails. Why couldn’t it be under the fingernails of any of the victims, alone? We’re not talking about huge gobs of skin here. We’re talking about this sort of thing:
Doesn’t have to be some deep scratch – can just be skin cells. Or saliva somewhere.
The media floodgates have begun to open:
“Was this a “thrill-killing” patterned after the infamous Leopold and Loeb case of 1924?”
Newsweek: “Like Leopold and Loeb, was his intention to commit ‘the perfect crime’?”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052700/
“COMPULSION” (1959): Starring Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell, and Bradford Dillman. Adapted from Meyer Levin’s novel. All three won the Best Actor Award at The Cannes Film Festival in 1960. Orson Welles concluding monologue remains to this day one of the longest uncut speeches by an actor in cinema history. At the time the film was made, the Production code did not allow any factual disclosure of their homosexual relationship, nor was any mention made of the fact that they were both from wealthy Jewish families. It received no Oscar recognition of any kind in America.
Neo. Not likely to be skin cells under the fingernails in various scenarios of knifing people who are dead asleep.
It presumes a struggle in some fashion, if only one hand raised to fend off a blow.
And then contact with the assailant’s skin, when the assailant was likely dressed for the weather which, according to the various videos, includes lots of snow.
The weapon has been described as a large-bladed knife. This could mean the biggest knife in your kitchen, or a combat knife, or a knife for hunting/camping. Some reports have referred to a combat knife, however they figured that out from a succession of wounds.
Given the preparation involved, or at least speculated, this guy would have used one of the latter two categories. Kitchen knives allow for a firm grip in cutting up onions or something but do allow for cutting the hand holding it if you get carried away. The other two categories do not.
The ‘net is full of “tactical” knives for retail and pictures thereof.
My much-belabored point is that the DNA does not necessarily result from the fatal struggle. If there were such a struggle, the other two residents would have heard it, failing being blacked-out drunk. I’ve lived in barracks, dorms, and fraternity houses. Off-campus housing, unless purpose-built and this certainly doesn’t look like it, does not include audio insulation.
And if it doesn’t come from a struggle–skin cells under fingernails, blood on the floor or something, there will be difficulty tying it to the crime.
Richard Aubrey–
About the DNA linking Kohberger to the murders: the Idaho affidavit indicates (as of 1/5/23) that the suspect’s DNA was found on the clasp of a knife sheath left behind in one of the students’ bedrooms: I later noticed what appeared to be a tan leather knife sheath laying on the bed next to Mogen’s right side,” officer Brett Payne wrote in the affidavit released Thursday, adding the sheath had “Ka-Bar,” “USMC” and “the United States Marine Corps eagle globe and anchor insignia.”
“The affidavit details how investigators used surveillance camera footage, cellphone data, and FBI analyses to link Kohberger to the crime scene at the time of the killings.”
Details of the cellphone data etc. at the link: https://nypost.com/2023/01/05/bryan-kohberger-left-dna-on-knife-sheath-court-docs/
So much for the perfect crime, if he left the knife sheath at the scene.
If they had DNA on the knife sheath, and cell phone pings to indicate Kohberger had been in the area of the house several times previous to the murder, I don’t quite understand why they didn’t try to get some DNA earlier, by going through his trash, etc., rather than waiting for the genealogical study and then getting a sample covertly.
The affidavit says they associated the suspect to the car and phone first.
https://coi.isc.idaho.gov/docs/case/CR29-22-2805/122922%20Affidavit%20-%20Exhibit%20A%20-%20Statement%20of%20Brett%20Payne.pdf
Left the knife sheath…. Good lord. Can’t claim that was a pizza delivery box.
And if two, at least, had defensive wounds, there was at least some struggle, which means he wasn’t particularly efficient about his goal.
So much for the coldly-calculating master criminal.
That leaves, it would seem, an immediate impulse poorly thought through, including NOT LEAVING THE STUPID KNIFE SHEATH. Did he miss that block of instruction?
Strikes me that grad school requires a certain amount of self-discipline. If he was getting paid as a TA, or something, he was getting the papers back on time, grades recorded, standards pretty consistent. Passing his classes. But in this case, speculating here, he just blew up.
These gals were pretty cute, and, going by the pictures we have seen, knew it and didn’t care who else knew it. OTOH, I knew some really attractive women in college whose standing-on-the-bus stop affect was “Don’t need any help with my social life thank you very much now go away”. One was even off-putting in her yearbook picture. There’s a difference.
Maybe this guy had just been blown off. After what might seem like eons of wishing.
Richard Aubrey:
Coldly calculating criminals sometimes make mistakes. It’s very hard to think of everything and control everything. All it takes is one mistake.
But nothing about this guy reads “coldly calculating criminal” to me – in particular, the rage often involved in fatal knife attacks.
These gals were pretty cute, and, going by the pictures we have seen, knew it and didn’t care who else knew it.
Have a gander at pictures of the young men they were seeing (the fellow who was killed and the fellow who had a multi-year relationship with one of the others). These young women were not following the mechanistic norms of manosphere writers. They were spending time with normal-range young men. If Kohberger was nursing a wound over a rebuff, it may have been because you did not need to be a dark triad hunk to interest these women.
If they had DNA on the knife sheath, and cell phone pings to indicate Kohberger had been in the area of the house several times previous to the murder, I don’t quite understand why they didn’t try to get some DNA earlier, by going through his trash, etc., rather than waiting for the genealogical study and then getting a sample covertly.
They had a DNA sample which did not match the residents or their known associates and collected from an interesting object. They generate a suspect list from a genealogical database they’re permitted to use. They rummage around and notice that one of the 2d cousins is a young man of a certain age who lives 10 miles away. If they can get a warrant for his cell phone data, they can confirm he was around their home at salient periods (something confirmed with the security camera footage volunteered by the local retail manager). It’s at this point that getting a DNA sample from his discarded coffee cups is of interest. (I’m assuming police services in Pullman were helpful with this aspect of it).
Neo. “one mistake” would not include leaving the knife sheath if I’d thought about it before hand. Among other things, sheaths are designed to be worn on belts, although the larger ones are inconvenient while driving.
I can see, more or less, the rage involved if he wasn’t slick enough to avoid a struggle leaving defensive wounds.
Art. It would be one thing if the men in question were, say, co-captains of the rugby team maintaining a 4.2 GPA in pre-med. With their portraits being in the university’s recruiting literature. Losing out to such as they…. World’s full of disappointments.
But losing out to average guys who, in one’s imagination, may well be sub optimal in something like hygiene, how to converse intelligently, something else.
That would be a blow.
I’ve mentioned before how the in-group looks to some of the out-group. The Letterman album I linked to shows how they were using in-groupiness to sell their college standards album. Buy our album, look at the cover, listen to it and you, too, can [at least imagine] live in the enchanted country.
I suppose it helps to be an incel–if that’s the right verb–to be in rage on the outside. But there’s more. More to envy, more to wish for, more to resent not having, more to resent knowing you’ll never have it.
Without going into detail, I moved between several aspects of campus culture and I heard what the outgroup/campus left said about the in-group. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on it, but as things are going, rage seems to be an issue. And from what? What else was there to be mad about? His educational career seemed, at least, to be on track.
How about don’t carry a cell phone when you case the person, place or thing. Also don’t think turning it off near the crime hides you.
The idiots the sabotaged the substations here were caught much the same way: security cameras and cell phone pings.
Richard Aubrey:
Leaving a knife sheath behind is just one of thousands of mistakes the perp might have made.He happened to have made that particular one, plus some others. My point wasn’t about that particular mistakes but about the likelihood of making at least one important mistake even if a person thinks he’s thought of everything.
But regarding the knife sheath being left behind – we’d have to know the circumstances, wouldn’t we? Perhaps there was some reason he didn’t wear it on a belt. And perhaps he thought someone had detected him being in the house and he had to leave quickly and forgot it in the rush.
Richard Aubrey:
Speaking of mistakes – Leopold and Loeb were by all accounts very smart guys academically, but here are some mistakes they made (the excerpts are from Clarence Darrow’s summation):
One of their mistakes was, of course, the dropping of Leopold’s glasses. But even without that, other things would have led the police to them, I believe, including the rented car with blood (they told the chauffeur it was wine they had spilled when he helped clean it, and it was partly his statement that their own car was in the garage that day that invalidated their alibi).
Neo
Trying to figure out the perfect crime for a novel I’d abandoned. Disposing of a dead body is a job of work. And that’s even if you don’t mind leaving some evidence. You can’t do it where there are a lot of people. And you can’t do it where there are no people because you can’t get there for the same reason nobody else is there. If you do go there, the tracks are your own and nobody else’s. And if you go where there are very few people, somebody’s going to remember.
But in this case, he didn’t have that chore with its possibilities for screwing up. All he had to do was get away clean.
We have here an instance of, apparently, rage. Still….
The AR15 and the KaBar both are very useful for various situations and are popular for that reason.
But, because of their popular PR, you will find the junior commandos want them, too.
It’s possible this clown got one because he was wanting to feel studly. Which does not necessarily include thinking things through.
So a smart guy made a stupid mistake, a guy the rest of whose life seemed organized. Means what? To me, insane rage with an insane need to punish.
You can get a KaBar brand hew without a jarhead’s insignia. So this one came from a surplus store. Cheaper, probably. Might be easier, therefore, to get a date on the purchase. Maybe.
Did I say, “get a date”? Might have been part of the problem.
All he had to do was get away clean.
I wonder whether the perp might have picked up some dog hairs on his clothing (per Locard’s theory of contact) from Murphy, the pet dog who was running around the students’ house at the time– and then carried a few hairs into his car. Pet DNA is increasingly used to solve crimes, as we now know that both cats and dogs have unique individual genomes, not just a species-specific genome. There are at least two murder cases, one in Canada in 1994 and the other in the UK in 2013, that were cracked with the use of cat DNA databases.
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/elementary-my-dear-fluffy-cat-dna-solves-another-homicide-6C10913900
IIRC, one of Joe Kenda’s Homicide Hunter cases in Colorado Springs involved cat DNA (fur found on a duvet that the perp stole from his neighbor’s condo storage unit in order to cover his victim and carry her away from the condo).
Now I don’t know whether Murphy the dog contributed any hairs to Kohberger’s clothing or gear, and he didn’t try to kill the dog, but it’s one more layer of complexity that you could work into your perfect-crime novel, should you choose to finish it. I’d be interested in reading it if you do complete it.
PA=Cat
Thanks for your generosity in regards to my novel. As my wife says, the first long term plot I’ll ever have is the one in the local cemetery. She’s not wrong.
I’ve done some shorts but….
Murphy’s DNA is a possibility but, as I have said before, if Kohberger could make the case he’d been there earlier in normal circumstances, various DNA exchanges would have reduced importance. And that includes picking something up.
I understand it was a lively place and if he could make the case that he was passing by and decided to stop in and see what was happening–including pings and security cameras and so forth–there would go some DNA finds. Now, on the KaBar sheath…different story.
Reviewing my college career, as I may have said, circumstance had me moving between various subcultures. The campus left had some decent folks, and some serious fans of the Viet Cong and some SDS people, and some committed civil rights folks and some…nutcases. If a guy, usually a guy, wanted some kind of group identification and couldn’t see his way into…the lacrosse club, a fraternity, ROTC, student government….he’d frequently go left. It’s been said in a larger sense that left is in some cases a matter of envy and resentment.
One thing I noted was that some of the left thought women who took care for their looks, good-looking women, sorority women, were all shallow and superficial and to be viewed with disdain and contempt. Yet they lusted after sorority row–who wouldn’t–and that made a toxic brew. As a result of just being someplace, one time or another, I was required to intervene or threaten to intervene on behalf of a woman. In each case, it was a left-out type and an attractive woman.
I may be making too much of a connection, but with new info as to the crime scene and the screw-up with the sheath….and the folks who said the guy was “awkward”, which can be a euphemism for a lot of things, I’m seeing what I saw over half a century ago.
He could have pitched a Pepsi two-liter full of gas with a cherry bomb attached to it into the building. But he had to get up close, personal, hands on, watching horrible death he caused.
Richard Aubrey:
More information here. I think the suspect was seen by one of the surviving housemates, plus cameras recorded him driving around the neighborhood before and after the murders occurred. And there were almost no other cars driving in the neighborhood at the time. As far as matching the DNA they found on the knife to the subject’s DNA, they didn’t use a database, they used the old tried and true garbage technique and got something with his father’s DNA on it:
Neo will have to start a new thread soon on the Kohberger case. The latest is that the Idaho jail is going to provide the suspect with a vegan diet, but will draw the line at new cookware: “Latah County Sheriff Richard Skiles told NewsNation that Latah County Jail staff is trying to satisfy the quadruple homicide suspect’s dietary needs, ‘but we are not going to buy new pots and pans or anything like that.'”
https://nypost.com/2023/01/06/idaho-jail-will-try-to-accommodate-bryan-kohbergers-vegan-diet/
Looks like Sam Bankman-Fried started a trend in prison cuisine.
The knife sheath dropped by the bed of 2022. The dropped glasses by the culvert of 1924.
Truly, truly mind-blowing.
“It had been my own personal preference at the outset to make no attempt to avoid the extreme penalty. I had desired to plead not guilty and, by refraining from offering any defense whatsoever, positively to court execution. My reasons for this view were twofold: first, I believed, and evidently Judge Caverly agreed, that speedy execution of the death penalty would be much easier for us defendants than the slow, day-by-day torture of spending the rest of our lives in prison. Second, I felt that the pain to our families and the humiliation and shame they must suffer would, in the long run, be less if we were hanged than if we were sentenced to life imprisonment. The shock and the grief were enormous in either event, but I hoped that with Dick and me removed from the scene the wound might begin slowly to heal and the memory to become gradually less vivid and painful. So long as we were alive and in prison I feared that we should be a festering sore, that we should be subjected to periodic bursts of publicity in the newspapers, and that the anguish we had caused our families would never be allowed to abate. I might say that in the thirty-three years that have elapsed, I have found no reason to change my mind.” ( Nathan Leopold, “Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years”)
Anonymous.
Dropping the sheath is so stupid that I am almost embarrassed for the guy.
Insane rage.
Apropos of Leopold’s comment that “speedy execution of the death penalty would be much easier for us defendants than the slow, day-by-day torture of spending the rest of our lives in prison”: Suppose Kohberger is found guilty and sentenced to death, how long will he get to enjoy his vegan meals in prison as his probable appeals drag on? The contrast with the 1950s is telling. When Jack Graham used a dynamite time bomb to blow up an airplane over Colorado on November 1, 1955, in order to kill his mother and collect on a life insurance policy he had just purchased for her in the airport lounge, he was charged with the crime 2-1/2 weeks after the plane went down; put on trial; found guilty in May 1956; and executed in Colorado’s gas chamber in January 1957. Total elapsed time: a little over 14 months; the justice system didn’t mess around in those days.
Graham, of course, was not a graduate student in criminology and not particularly clever otherwise, so his was far from a perfect crime, but he certainly got the “speedy execution” that Leopold wished for. Interestingly, Graham was no incel; he had gotten married in 1953 and was already the father of two children when he blew up his mother’s plane. After his execution, his widow had her and her children’s last name legally changed to spare them the “humiliation and shame” attached to their father’s crime. She died in 1992.
“The impact of “Compulsion” on my mental state was terrific. It made me physically sick–I mean that literally. More than once I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside. Emotionally, it caused me terrific shame and induced what I guess the doctors would call a mild melancholia. I felt as I suppose a man would feel if he were exposed stark-naked under a strong spotlight before a large audience. I kept to myself as much as possible. Every stranger I eyed with the unspoken question in my mind: Wonder if he’s read it. I hope–I know–that I am in no sense today the same person as that horrible, vicious, conceited, “super-smart”–and pathetically stupid–Judd Steiner in the book. There’s only one trouble. I share a memory with the monster; a memory, that is, covering those things that actually did happen. I have been taken firmly by the arms and forced to live through, step by step, in horrible, graphic detail, the worst three years of my life. It has been a traumatic experience. But then, undergoing major surgery without benefit of an anesthetic might be expected to be painful. I can only hope that, like the surgery, this experience, too, may involve some therapy. ( Nathan Leopold, “Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years”)
Upon the release of the film version in 1959, Leopold sued 20th Century Fox and the producers for bringing “unwanted attention” upon his life after he had been released from prison in 1958.
“After November 13, 2022, Kohberger had returned to grade student papers after the murders, in the most ordinary fashion.”
Well,” I said to myself, “it’s over. There’s no turning back now. How on earth could I ever have got involved in this thing? It was horrible–more horrible even than I figured it was going to be. But that’s behind me now. Somehow I never believed that it would happen–that we’d actually go through with it. “But it’s done. “And now, at least, there aren’t any decisions to make. I’ll be able to put all my thought on not making any slips–on staying one jump ahead of the police. But that’s nonsense! Nobody’s ever going to suspect me. “I wish it weren’t over with–that there were still time to change my mind. But what’s the use of wishing things that are impossible? The thing I’ve got to do now is be careful to do all the ordinary, normal things just as I’ve always done them. I’ll stop at a drugstore and call Connie to confirm our date for tomorrow night.” ( Nathan Leopold, “Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years”)
“Leopold, with a wonderfully brilliant mind; Loeb, with an unusual intelligence; both from their very youth, crowded like hothouse plants, to learn more and more and more. Dr. Krohn says that they are intelligent. But it takes something besides brains to make a human being who can adjust himself to life.
In fact, as Dr. Church and as Dr. Singer regretfully admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human conduct. There is no question about it. The emotions are the urge that make us live; the urge that makes us work or play, or move along the pathways of life. They are the instinctive things. In fact, intellect is a late development of life. Long before it was evolved, the emotional life kept the organism in existence until death. Whatever our action is, it comes from the emotions, and nobody is balanced without them. The intellect does not count so much” (Clarence Darrow)
A little known fact: November 13, 2022 was designated as a “special day” via the official authorities who assign that day it’s individual cause.
That day was defined and to be celebrated as “World Kindness Day”: “Make the world a better place by promoting good deeds and being kind whenever possible. Carry it out as a public act.
Bring a positive power into society, and spread it around like an infectious cold.”
Intelligence, brains…. Wasn’t Ted Bundy some sort of genius mensa type? (Or maybe just in his own mind…such as it was.)
“But nothing about this guy reads…”
I don’t know about that. “This guy” seems totally off the wall—“I’m looking forward to going back to Idaho to stand trial and clear my name” (yeah, right)—perhaps even nutty enough to believe that these murders were some kind of class project.
Extra credit…?
(Speaking of credit, the local police deserve a lot of it, for hanging in there, divulging nothing and responding patiently while taking a whole lot of flak for making it seem that they were the 21st-Century variation of rural, hokey, feckless Keystone Cops.)
“Nausea” is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre’s first novel.
The novel takes place in ‘Bouville’ literally, ‘Mud town’) a town similar to Le Havre. It comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholy and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin’s growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls “the nausea”, in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. During the winter of 1932 a “sweetish sickness,” which he calls “the nausea”, increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys. He attempts to find solace in the presence of others, but exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with them. Because of his aloofness to the world and the people around him, he eventually starts to doubt his own existence.
Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th century secret agent he is writing a book about, he establishes Sartre’s oeuvre as a follow-up to Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in search of a precise description of schizophrenia.
However, Roquentin’s predicament is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents Roquentin’s difficulties as arising from man’s inherent existential condition. His seemingly special situation (reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, is supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone experiences, but may not be sensitive enough to let become consciously noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, which would be deprived of larger significance. Rather he is a victim of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought him to the brink of insanity.
Couple of items regarding new info:
It’s been better than fifty years since I’ve slept well. The wind changes and the house creaks, a bird hits the window…I’m up. But prior to that time, I was usually pretty far gone.
So I’m not sure whether to think the survivors slept through this or heard something going on and did nothing. In the latter case, there needs to be an answer.
Recollecting the resentment of the outgroup-loser guy reminded me of a couple of incidents from long ago. Free-play stuff….two dozen high school seniors at a pool party. Hundred freshmen and sophomores in a gigantic snowball fight when classes were called off for the next day. Other examples. There’d be an outgroup-loser guy, until that point not particularly noticeable as…anything, actually. Ferociously attacking women. Dunking them in the pool, plastering the face with handsful of snow. With an air of frantic aggression. Had to be stopped by other guys.
Could have joined in with other activities.
Chose not to.
Mentioned this to my father decades ago. He said he recalled the same thing from when he was in high school. And he was class of 39.
I’m sure there’s a spectrum here, as with so many other issues.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5589212/
Film: “Extracurricular” (2018)
The pop-cultural bacteria was already in the Trump-era water.