Mindhunters | 2013 October

From the monthly archives: "October 2013"

Knox-Sollecito Briefing on Capitol Hill on October 30

By Mark Olshaker On October 29, 2013 · 1 Comment

Amanda Knox & Raffaele Sollecito

By Sharlene Martin

(Seattle, WA) A panel of experts will address congressional members and staff on the third trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito during “Update and Briefing on the Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito Case,” a congressional briefing hosted by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA9) at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, Room SVC 202, on Thursday, October 31, 2013 from 9:00 to 11:30 a.m. The following day marks six years since this horrible crime was perpetrated and justice has still not been done. The next court date of the trial is scheduled for November 6, 2013, in Florence, Italy.

The briefing will feature both legal and criminal experts. The three main speakers will be Mike Heavey, a retired King County, Washington judge and co-founder of www.JudgesforJustice.org who will give an overview of the case and its legal considerations; Steve Moore, a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and criminal investigator, who will discuss the failures of the Italian police investigation and the evidence in the case; and John Douglas, a former FBI Special Agent, legendary criminal profiler and coauthor with Mark Olshaker of their most recent book, Law & Disorder: The Legendary FBI Profiler’s Relentless Pursuit of Justice, which includes an extensive analysis of the Knox-Sollecito case.

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Resolution and Its Absence

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker On October 28, 2013 · 1 Comment

Meredith Kercher

From our experience, if there is one term survivors of murder victims hate, it is “closure.” Law enforcement officials, commentators and even well-meaning friends speak of closure as if it is the final goal to be sought in any criminal justice preceding, a theoretical threshold that will allow the survivors to “get over it” and “get on with their lives.”

Every individual who has been “touched” by murder, however, knows there is no such thing as closure and that it is not even an ideal to be sought. You may get on with things, but you are not the same person after a friend or loved one has been murdered. You assimilate the act and the loss into your own personality and your own orientation to life.

What survivors seek, instead, is resolution. And in the six years since the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, there has been none.

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Why We’re Not Surprised

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker On October 23, 2013 · 10 Comments

Jaclyn Nugent & Kurt Paschke

At MetLife Stadium after this past Sunday’s NFL football game in which the New York Jets upset the mighty New England Patriots, a male Jets fan punched a female Patriots fan immediately after being pulled away from another fight.

Why are we not surprised?

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Greater Love

By Mark Olshaker On October 22, 2013 · 3 Comments

Michael Landsberry

At this point, we don’t know why a 13-year-old student a classmate called “a nice kid” took it upon himself to appropriate his parents’ gun, kill a teacher and wound two other students at Sparks Middle School in Nevada. According to reports, he had been bullied.

But is this becoming one of the standard responses? Why is it that a certain cohort of this perpetually oppressed class have come to believe that murder-suicide in a self-perceived blaze of glory is a reasonable solution? We just don’t know.

What we do know, however, is that the late Michael Landsberry, a 45-year-old math teacher at the school, died in a manner that was completely predictable under the circumstances.

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Zero Tolerance: What’s the Objective?

By Mark Olshaker On October 18, 2013 · 17 Comments

Erin Cox

An old friend of mine – a very prominent Washington, D.C. corporate attorney – always said that the key to success in any situation was to define and understand your ultimate objective. And if you could get all the lawyers in a conference room to agree on an objective, any legal problem could be solved.

We’ve been hearing a lot about “zero tolerance” policies lately, and you really have to wonder if some of the folks implementing them have considered what their ultimate objectives are and if they are implementing them effectively. We all know of incidents of kids with headaches being sent home from school because their parents gave them aspirin to take with lunch – violation of zero tolerance drug policy – or children who’ve been scolded for pointing their hands, gun-like and going bang – zero tolerance of firearms in school. But some of these interpretations can be outright dangerous.

Here’s one that really bothers me, and many other people as well.

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