/still reading.

This guy sounds like a real prize. He definitely needs to be out of circulation.

That said, this guy sounds like what folks in Texas might call Man Needs Killin'. If he truly did kill your neighbor, and the other people he claims to have offed, as well as this incident, he's not curable IMO.

The varying approaches to the story across the different news sources is fascinating.

It wouldn't be the same without Lennie.

Larry, Olivia d'Abo and Jeffrey Donovan. Unless it's CI, because then Olivia d'Abo would be Nicole Wallace, and she'd have to be the killer.

Some more general information would be welcome, such non-blog references (newspaper or magazine stories are good), bio information (such as DOB, birthplace, education, previous jobs), legal actions, career "highpoints", etc. You can add them to the article yourself, or drop me a line and I'll see what I can do with them.

I can't fathom it, and guns are a tool of my trade.

Which you know, doesn't make a lot of sense ...

Excuse me. I need to go look up something.

If the person watching tv is tipped back in their big comfy chair or a bit sprawled on the couch, top of the head may be the target that presents.

I've decide that 90% of any "technical information" you see on TV crime shows is crap. The other 10% is strictly true but irrelevant to the real world.

"CSI: Nevada" and similar shows appeal to the geek in us and to the part of us that wants to see geeks triumph over bad guys.

The one murder case that I became intimately familiar with was solved by the police beating the streets and following tips and being relentless about it.

Yes, I'm in a foul mood.
No, I haven't had my caffeine yet.
Grrr.

Oh, and one other thing. .22 caliber? just from a copyedit perspective, I wonder if that is accurate. I suppose it's possible, but I can't imagine a guy arming himself with a popgun, walking into an apartment with the intent to kill someone.

Oh, and one other thing I learned. Newspapers get it wrong all the time.

OK, must go find caffeine now.

Serge, yeah, I didn't say that I don't watch CSI: Nevada. It's just that now I watch it to see Brass deliver his great one-liners and Grissom to be his socially-tone-deaf self*, and I have to work to ignore all the objections in my head that say "that isn't right" when they get all techno-mumbo-jumbo.

*And all the scantily clad women that occaisionally show up. Oh, come on, it got the ratings it got for a reason: cops, bad guys, and the sort of gratuitous sex that you can only get in Vegas. If it had been CSI:North Dakota, with all it's cold weather, and heavy clothes that brings, ratings would have been slightly lower.

I'm more of a Criminal Intent person, especially the Chris Noth episodes.

Teresa, "harder to spot as murder"? I guess there'd be only one hole rather than two, but I can't imagine even the most cursory examination of the body not noticing the blood all over the top of the head.

Serge: I tried watching the various incarnations of CSI [..]
[i]t didn't help when I read that most of their forensics is total bullcrap [..]

They seem so far off on things I know anything about,
that I dismiss the rest.

One "gag" they've used on two of the CSI shows:
we have a person in a frame from video surveillance
( or tourist digital snapshot ),
but what we need to see is not in the frame.

They zoom into the eyeball of the person,
and read a license plate number
from the reflection in the eyeball.

I don't work with DNA,
but I doubt you get the results back the same afternoon;
I expect you don't get results the same week.

60 Minutes did an interview
with a lady who worked in the CSI unit of Los Angeles;
who worked as a consultant on CSI: Las Vegas.

It was an appreciative interview,
but they showed a clip from the show,
where one of the lab techs was casting a knife blade
( for tool mark analysis ) by pouring plaster into a wound.

The interviewer: "That really wouldn't work, would it?"

The consultant: "That was an argument I lost."

The discussion of who might play the "hyperintelligent neighbors" was about who would play the host and hostess of this blog, who live next door to the apartment where your uncle was killed. They are understandably quite disturbed by such an event, were on casually friendly terms with your uncle, and certainly would not mock his death or allow it to be mocked here.

All of us take this very seriously. The discussion of the police dramas has been mainly about how little they are applicable to real life. In the other recent thread about this topic, we're discussing the extreme dubiousness of the "monster's" confession; if he falsely takes the fall for your uncle's killing, that gets the police off the hook; they would no longer be looking for the man who really killed your uncle! I think we can agree that that is a disastrous outcome.

Not every post in any of these threads will be entirely without humor. Nonetheless, I say again, no one here is mocking your uncle, or his monstrous murder.

I understand what you are saying about the intentions of people on here were not to mock my uncle or his killer. However, do understand that our family feels repulsed, insulted and disrespected by these comments.

That is what I think is important. While Speech is a Freedom, the pain that it may inflict is far from Freedom.

I'm sorry for your loss. Really.

My comments about newspaper reports and television shows weren't meant to ridicule that. All there is for information right now is what the newspapers say and some of that gets filtered through how we think things work by what we see on TV. As it happens, I was on jury duty for a murder trial some time ago, and the main reason I brought up the comments about the newspapers and TV is that being on jury duty showed me how unreliable or flat out wrong they can be.

All that doesn't change anything for you, I know that. Just know that no one here meant any harm to your or your family.

My sincerest condelences to your and yours.

That's just the nature of online discussions. They drift.

Sometimes, an online discussion can be aggressively moderated, with any "off-topic" posts immediately removed by the moderator. That requires the moderator to have a very clear idea what the topic is, and what the exact boundaries are. This isn't one of those discussions.

Many of the posts that are perfectly appropriate here would be highly inappropriate at, say, a tribute site for your uncle, like this one for my coworkers who died September 11, 2001. Any discussion of forensics at such a site would be wildly inappropriate.

If you had somehow known me and known to ask before coming to look at this thread, I'd have said "No, better not. It gets into topics and questions that you don't need or want to see or consider right now. Wait a year, and read it in archive if you're still interested. Right now it would be salt in your freshly-reopened wound."

But on this site just about anything can and will be discussed. I'm sorry for your loss, and I'm sorry you came to read this, and I'm sorry for the pain that has resulted. That doesn't mean that for us to have the discussion was wrong, however. I don't think it was. In part, we're helping our Hosts cope; and as the hyperintellectual types they (and most of us here) are, discussing details, plausible scenarios, and even possible fictional treatments are part of that process.

After I lost all those coworkers on 9/11? I considered a) getting my social security number tattooed on every part of my body; b) committing suicide (why should I live when they died?); and c) writing a time-travel novel where "I" go back and try to save "them." I didn't do any of those things (though I did cut myself a fair amount for a while there). I found the discussions here of all the details of the planes and locations and the collapse of the Twin Towers very helpful in my coping process. Which is to say, everyone copes differently; this is our way.

I'm sorry that it causes you additional pain, and I hope you find deep and lasting comfort soon.

John Hinkley used a .22LR, and he crippled James Brady and almost killed Reagan (had it been a random person, and the same thing happend, i.e., the victim was knocked down by someone as soon as the shooting started] he probably would have died, because it wasn't until they were on the way to the hospital that they checked him and found the wound. He thought he was bruised from being smashed to the ground.

Lydia Nickerson: Complete deformation will make ballistics pretty much useless, but most .22LR is going to be through a skull so quickly as to leave enough to ID (though not as well as the jury might like).

With .22 Short, Subsonic, it might be more likely, but that slow a bullet runs a greater chance of failing to do the job.

The fact of the matter is, most professionals who use .22 are mob enforcers, and they have the best defense of all; no connection to the victim. If the toss the gun after they use it, the odds of them being caught, based on crime scene evidence, are slightly greater than those my getting a World Series ring, but only just.

I'll have to ask some old home-town buddies of mine if they remember anything about this. Maybe I imagined the whole thing.

I know a helicopter pilot who was in Vietnam and had his left-seater take a 13mm round in the side of the helmet. It punched the helmet, hit him in the zygomatic arch, followed the arc of his skull (trapped by the scalp) until the other zygomatic arch got in the way, at which point it punched a hole in the other side of the helmet.

He has one hell of a scar, and an amazing story to tell.

Knowing a lot of guys who been shot at with intent, I know a few more stories of miraclulously non-fatal impacts of bullets and people.

Nikkie: I don't know what to tell you. I can say that I don't think anyone here is the sort to mock your uncle's death. In some way it affected all of us who read of it, for as John Dunne said, no man is an island, and the death of one diminishes all. That we know, even idirectly, Teresa and Patrick, who were directly affected makes it personal, in a distant way.

And many of us react to that sort of near miss with a grim humor. I know I do, and I am sorry if my reactions (which have been technical about aspects of ballistics and the like) have caused you pain, it wasn't my intent.

I either read that story somewhere or this guy I know who flew chinooks for two tours in Vietnam told me that story. either way, I'm having a freaky deja vu feeling right now.

I've read a number of accounts of similar events, from WW2 and Korea. The, relative frequency of such tales makes me belive some of them are true.

The story, as I've heard and read it was about a Huey pilot (more likely given the ways in which the cockpits are arranged).

I have, however, seen some amazig scars from things which ought to have killed people, but the details are more prosacic.

And I don't actually expect you to be back and read this. It has the ring of something posted in far too many places.