As a crime blogger, I know I should cover the shooting that happened yesterday– Valentine’s Day– at Northern Illinois University. I know it’s news, I know it’s crime, I know it’s worth talking about. I just don’t know how to talk about it.
 
Everyone else already is giving their opinions, so that gets me off the hook. Right? Probably not.
 
I have no explanations for you readers. No ideas. No theories. The Tribune is saying that Stephen P. Kazmierczak– the former NIU grad student responsible for the shooting– went off his medication two weeks ago and became “erratic.”
 
This doesn’t seem like an explanation to me. The man took four guns into a lecture hall and opened fire. What kind of medication was this? Why was this man even around people?
 
I don’t know why occurrences like this still shock us. The same thing happened in Tinley Park, and last year at Virginia Tech. It’s been happening for eons, and yet our stomachs still drop, our throats still constrict and our knees still buckle in the presence of… What? Evil? Is that what it is? Was this man evil?
 
Or is this world just sick?
 
I don’t know. We’d all like to think that we’re safe in our ivory tower of education– and then people like Kazmierczak burst in, guns blazing, and shatter the glass of our Utopia.
 
He took his life on stage, and he hasn’t left since. His story will go down in the dramatic realm of American crime. There will be whispers in the halls and sickos looking for bloodstains.
 
And there will be writers like me, trying to make sense of everything with flimsy words.

Apparently, the man was questioned about the Tinley Park case– so says the Chicago Tribune. While the man is not officially a suspect, he’s not off the hook yet. “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” Mayor Ed Zabrocki told the Trib. “They’re checking it out.”
 
Wake me up if he ever becomes a suspect– officially.

Tinley Park Police Cmdr. Rick Bruno told the Chicago Tribune today that the parole violator has no connection to the killings, despite his resemblance to the sketch.
 
“I don’t know where you’re getting that stuff,” he said, “but there are no suspects, no arrests and that’s the truth.”
 
So, why did the Tribune call him a suspect mere hours ago? The plot thickens.

Thanks to Rev Lee for sending me the link. I was lost in journalistic oblivion.
 
A suspect in the Tinley Park killings was taken in today. The man was wanted for parole violation, but after he was apprehended, investigators noticed that he looked a lot like the Tinley Park police sketch.
 
I’m tempted to rejoice at this point– bust out a couple cans of flat Coke and go crazy (I need to go shopping…). But I’m also wary. This is just one suspect. Who’s to say he’s our guy?
 
What do you think? Do you think that the hunt is finally over? Or should we put up a couple of more billboards?

Today, the search for two mass murderers continues—one at least a century older than the other.
 
The Tribune reports that in Indiana, researchers have exhumed the body of the most nefarious female serial killer of all time—Belle Gunness, the “Lady Bluebeard” who many believe killed at least 25 to 30 people. Several of her victims were Norwegian bachelors, lured to her home with promises of romance.
 
She was believed to have died in 1908, after setting her farmhouse on fire, but now, researchers have started to wonder if Gunness faked her own death. DNA tests on her exhumed body will reveal the truth.
 
Back in Illinois, the search continues for the Tinley Park killer. The Tribune reports that seven electronic billboards showing the sketch of the gunman have gone up near East Hazel Crest, Crestwood, Hodgkins, Maywood, Northlake and Addison. Another will go up in Palatine soon.
 
Somehow we always seem to be at least two steps behind destruction. All that’s left to do, it seems, is pick at bones and flash our messages into the night. Do we ever stop destruction–evil–in its tracks? Or do near misses just not make the news?

 
Reproduced here with permission from the Tinley Park Police Department

The Chicago Sun-Times ran an interesting profile of the Tinley Park killer recently. The paper quotes Greg McCrary, a Florida professor of forensic psychology and former FBI profiler, as saying, “He doesn’t want to go back [to jail], but instead of leading a law-abiding life, he’s decided the way to stay out of jail is to leave no witnesses.”
 
People like this, McCrary says, “don’t think they deserve to be locked up for the things they have done, and they hold it against society when they are - they think only of themselves and are incapable of considering others… They think they’ve been mistreated by society.”
 
A couple of months ago I saw the Oscar-nominated film, No Country For Old Men. I thought that the killer in the film, Anton Chigurh, was the most horrifying movie monster I had ever seen. The moment that terrified me most was when Chigurh was about to kill the main character’s wife, Carla Jean:
 
Carla Jean Moss: You don’t have to do this.
Anton Chigurh: [smiles] Everybody says that.
 
I comforted myself that this was just a movie. But every day, every paper that I read, convinces me that real life is a whole lot more terrifying than celluloid.

Today, Sara Paretsky opened up an interesting discussion on the blog, The Outfit: A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers.
 
Last month, the Chicago Tribune reported on a case of mistaken identity that robbed one man of more than a quarter of a century. Back in 1982, a pair of robbers entered a South Side McDonalds and killed security guard Lloyd Wickliffe.
 
One of the men, Edgar Hope, was arrested and sentenced to death. Alton Logan was also arrested, sentenced to life in prison. Too bad he was innocent.
 
Witnesses identified Logan as Hope’s accessory, but in reality the second man was Andrew Wilson. Hope even told his attorney that it was so.
 
Wilson was no stranger to the dark side at this point; he was already in trouble with the law, arrested for the murder of two Chicago cops. Now it seemed that he had killed Wickliffe too.
 
After Hope’s attorney told Wilson’s lawyers– Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz– of this new development, the lawyers asked Wilson if he was in fact Wickliffe’s killer. He responded, “That was me.”
 
The truth was out, but Coventry and Kunz couldn’t tell it. They were bound to secrecy by attorney-client privilege. Only when Wilson died did the truth come to light.
 
On her blog, Paretsky asks, “What possible steps can Coventry and Kunz take now to make Logan’s life–let’s not say whole–it can never be that–but less pain-filled and diminished than it is now?”
 
I don’t know Sara. Perhaps they could dedicate themselves to the Innocence Project at my alma mater? This is a project that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted. Visit their Web site if you want to get involved.
 
Other than that I have no answers. The legal system basically painted Coventry and Kunz into a corner, and unfortunately they can’t take back the past; they can only think about what they’ve done.

The Tinley Park killer needs a better stylist. Maybe then could have avoided providing police with such a telltale identifying mark: his thick braids, one of which was bedecked with four green beads.
 
The Chicago Tribune reports that investigators are currently reaching out to barbershops and hair salons, on the lookout for anyone who recognizes the killer’s distinctive ‘do. It’s a headhunt—literally.
 
Many people are out for the man’s blood as more and more details emerge about the case—how he made sexual advances on at least one of the victims, and how he may have posed as a deliveryman to gain access to the store. Some even speculate that he picked a women’s store to avoid confrontation with men.
 
Here would be the perfect place to say “Be a man” to this coiffed criminal, but, in truth, the situation at this point has divulged past masculinity into inhumanity.
 
Let’s see what other bloggers are saying:
 
In his blog, Buckhorn Road, Chanman ruminates, “Although I know it to be true, I still sometimes have trouble coming to grips with the fact that there are people in this world who can be that evil.”
 
Scott Janz mentions on his blog that he used to live by the strip mall. “I just hope the catch this guy,” he says.
 
On her blog, Shapely Prose, Kate Harding says, “I know a lot of our readers have been (or are) LB employees and many more are customers; this hits awfully close to home. Our hearts go out to the women’s family and friends.”
 
Her blog even got the attention of Richard Roeper, who, in Monday’s Chicago Sun-Times discussed the possibility that the shooter targeted plus-sized women.
 
Whatever their stance, all bloggers came to the same conclusion: They want this man behind bars.
 
Perhaps a barber will be the one to put him there.

Today, the Chicago Tribune announced that five women were killed yesterday morning in the Tinley Park massacre. Apparently, an armed man led the women into the back room of Lane Bryant, shot them, and left. There’s no news on a motive yet.
 
Police think that the five murders could have resulted from a robbery gone wrong.
 
The identity of one of the victims emerged today– Carrie Hudek Chiuso, 33, of Frankfort. She was a social worker at Homewood-Flossmoor Community High School.
 
She was associated with peer mediation at Homewood-Flossmoor, described on the school’s website as “a process for non-confrontational resolution of disputes and conflicts in which a third party (parties) acts as a moderator for the process. In mediation, the goal is to work out differences constructively.”
 
Perhaps the guilty party could have used someone like Chiuso in his life when he went to school.
 
Stay here for more updates.