Category Archives: God’s Nobodies

E-singles and social media

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ThinReads, an ambitious site tracking the e-singles market (with a witty name), asked me to explain in a guest post how I used this blog to add material to my e-single God’s Nobodies. While writing about that, I tagged what I consider “bonus chapters” to make them easier to find in this large archive of posts on God’s Nobodies generally.

This is inside baseball to most readers, but it’s the stuff writers must do these days to attract an audience. After all, what is the point of writing if no one knows about it?

Welcome, people of the Nook

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Good news for users of the Barnes & Noble Nook tablet: Now you’ll be able to download the free Kindle reading app to read Amazon-exclusive e-books like God’s Nobodies. Until now, Amazon provided its app for every platform, from PCs to phones and iPads — everything except the Nook. That was frustrating to authors like me, when asked about the Nook (similar to the frustration of learning that people, upon hearing the name “Kindle Singles,” assumed you can only read them if you own a Kindle device). So tell your Nook-using friends the Kindle Singles store will now be open for their business.

A victim’s grace under pressure

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Is it possible to sit next to a mother of a murder victim and talk about the need to understand criminals better? Should she fight back when she hears someone say we need smarter policies that don’t just bring the punishment hammer down, but instead deal intelligently with the facts that make each case different? I faced that uncomfortable moment today in a panel discussion. Luckily, the person whom I might have upset or insulted with my comments was instead a model of grace and wisdom as we both wrestled with the event’s central question: what communities need to restore justice after crimes of violence.

I was invited to join the panel to talk about my book God’s Nobodies. The event, hosted by the Rochester-area restorative-justice group, Partners in Restorative Initiatives, also featured another journalist, former Democrat & Chronicle columnist Mark Hare, and Lynette Alvarez, a crime victims advocate and mother of a murder victim. The discussion was moderated by Ed Minardo, director of the county jail in neighboring Genesee County, and former director of one of the pioneering restorative-justice programs in the country, Genesee Justice.

Alvarez tells the heart-wrenching story of feeling ignored and disrespected by police and prosecutors when her son was killed 11 years ago. The family, she says, learned too little from authorities about why her son was shot to death. When the offender got out of prison surprisingly early, after an appeals court voided the more serious charges he faced, Alvarez felt even more betrayed and forgotten. She is an eloquent spokesperson for the added pain endured by survivors of murder victims at the hands of a system that doesn’t provide them with all the forms of justice that they need to heal.

And there I sat, talking about the flip side: the need to understand why a crime was committed before we can fairly judge the criminal and the sentence he deserves. Based on the story I tell in God’s Nobodies, my argument boiled down to this: The harshest possible treatment, and ignoring the backstory, is not smart justice. It’s just retribution. Justice requires airing all the facts, in works of journalism if the courts don’t oblige. Only then will the public understand any leniency a court might have shown.

If Alvarez saw a contradiction, she didn’t let on. I’d like to think it’s because she recognizes that we can pursue multiple goals, all driving toward something called justice. Or maybe she’s just too kind and thoughtful to take offense. Either way, I knew I was in the presence of a good person who has suffered too much and yet finds it in her heart to give back to the community, sharing her experience and advice.

Someone to talk to

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It was pure coincidence that it was last night, on the eve of an historic two-day oral argument at the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage rights, that I returned to Syracuse University to talk about Tim Ginocchetti’s life with a group of students. Tim, whose story I tell in God’s Nobodies, never would have stepped foot in the campus’ LGBT Resource Center when he was a student here. He never would have dared identify himself as gay, or simply an ally of gay students, by attending the regular discussion group that invited me to give a talk about the book. And neither he nor anyone else might have imagined how much our culture would have changed — an “astonishing” shift in attitudes, in the words of John Harwood in today’s Times — since Tim’s catastrophic coming-out as gay less than seven years ago. As rapid as this social change has been, though, I was reminded in my talk that we’re not quite there yet.

My ostensible purpose in meeting with this group of students was to tell them of Tim’s struggles and to wonder, with them, how he might have been able to break free of family and faith without such needless, irreversible violence. But, as we talked, the real value became clear: to give these students a safe place to talk about their own struggles. Most seemed content and secure. Some shared stories about their own unsympathetic families as they try to express their true nature. A couple begged for solutions to soften their relatives’ hearts. Tears flowed freely.

I praised them for making the effort to share their experiences and to help each other. The professional help available to them — the staff at the Resource Center, other campus counselors, and resources such as these that I’ve collected to help teens, young adults, and families — existed, but to a lesser extent, when Tim was a student. Not that he felt safe in seeking such help, until it was too late. Perhaps if he’d only had a friend he felt he could to talk to, who knows how things might have changed. As I wrote in the book and explained more in posts such as this one, Tim was alone in his struggle. He didn’t have to be.

While we talked, I noticed one young woman slouched on a couch, crying quietly. She didn’t speak during the meeting. I worried that the discussion was upsetting her, and I made a point of apologizing for telling such a sad, disturbing story. Afterward, she came up to me, smiling and soft-spoken, to say that the discussion touched her deeply. She thanked me and asked for a hug. In that moment I knew, no matter what has happened before or whatever may come, she will be OK.

On Pi Day, 11 years ago

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One anecdote that didn’t fit in the shortened Kindle Single version of God’s Nobodies occurred one week after John Ginocchetti’s death in March 2002. I write in the book of the massive outpouring of love and concern for the families of the Manlius firefighters who died in the line of duty in that terrible incident. Tensions emerged between the firefighters and the Ginocchettis’ church over the minister’s strict limits on the crowds and firefighter-brotherhood pageantry he would tolerate at John’s funeral. New York’s governor at the time, George Pataki, attended the much larger funeral for T.J. Lynch and missed Ginocchetti’s more private service. So, on March 14, the family and friends of 16-year-old Tim Ginocchetti arranged for him to meet the governor at the State Fairgrounds, where Pataki was making an appearance.

Tim said little of the encounter in his journal at the time, noting only that one of his uncles and his father’s firefighter friend, Bill Nickal, brought him to the meet-up. “What an honor!” Tim summed up succinctly. Nickal and his wife Lisa described the scene to me in more vivid terms.

The 6-foot-5 rail-thin governor loomed over 5-foot-6 Tim, “this meek little scrawny kid,” Nickal recalled. But the politician knew just how to connect with a young man who lost his dad so recently — in a way that a true math nerd could appreciate. “We were over to the side,” Lisa Nickal recalled, “and they had a long conversation about different things.” The governor asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Tim likely mentioned architecture, engineering, and math. Then, Lisa said, “somebody brought up that it was Pi Day.” The conversation grew more animated. The Nickals had never seen Tim so talkative. He and Pataki matched wits on how far they could carry out pi. “They were rattling it off” while everyone else stood back and watched Tim enjoy a rare moment of distraction and pleasure in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy that would end up dragging down him and his mother in the years to come.

The Nickals were touched by Pataki’s humanity. “He took time out of his day to meet with that young man,” Bill marveled. In a prison interview, Tim was more forthcoming than he’d been in his journal. He said he’d always wanted to meet the governor and was disappointed he couldn’t at the funeral. When he discovered he and Pataki shared a love for the mysteries of pi, Tim lost himself in the moment. Years later, sitting in a prison meeting room, Tim remembered everything about his time with Pataki. “He actually knows the number pi to 50 places.”

Writer’s agenda and public good

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The talk I gave last month at Syracuse University’s College of Law, in an event sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media in its annual lecture series on law, politics, and media, is now available in this archive as an online video. The title of my talk on my book God’s Nobodies was “Criminal Justice Journalism and the Politics of Fear: Finding the Balance Between Education and Entertainment in True-Crime Narratives.” In it, I talk about the public good that might come from a work of crime journalism, based on what readers get from it, what writers set out to give readers, and whether any of it succeeds. Here is a direct link on YouTube to the video, and here it is embedded in this blog post.

Seven weeks, and still No. 7

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Here’s a quick update for readers, seven weeks since the publication of God’s Nobodies. The book remains a best-selling Kindle Single, at this writing No. 7 in nonfiction and No. 22 overall, despite many new Kindle Singles’ debuts in the intervening weeks. For only a few hours here and there has the book slipped from the top 10 in nonfiction in those seven weeks. At its peak so far, God’s Nobodies was No. 3 in nonfiction and No. 8 overall (the rankings get updated hourly, so I may have missed some higher blips).

What all those numbers mean is that more and more people will learn what happened in this case and, I hope, take lessons from it about relationships, tolerance, understanding crime and criminals, and loving our children no matter what their sexual orientation turns out to be. I am grateful to readers who have helped spread the word by sharing posts from Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, among many other kindnesses.

Of course, it’s not all been positive attention. As I’ve mentioned on the blog a few times, there’s a raging debate in comments on this blog (mostly on the book’s main page), in Amazon reviews, and elsewhere. I have resisted the impulse to engage in line-by-line combat with certain critics who have made allegations that are, to put it kindly, loose with the facts. As I wrote in an earlier post about a published Q&A in the Post-Standard newspaper, if you want to understand what the book says and why I wrote it, please read it and my statements on this blog (archived here) about why I wrote it, rather than taking someone else’s word for what it says and why it says it. To that I will only add that the book, in its final chapter, documents an overreaction to perceived criticism of a church and a minister. Now we’re seeing overreaction to the story of an overreaction.

At the same time, often in private, I have heard from readers — some familiar with the people in this story, and many who are not — who are glad the story has been told and who agree with me that it’s a story that needed to be told.

Author Q&A: “How could this have happened?”

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The Post-Standard in Syracuse last Sunday published a story about God’s Nobodies with an accompanying Q&A with me. It’s now available online. The story by veteran reporter Hart Seely summarizes the book and provides a forum to Rev. Frank Giuliano and his lawyer to make claims that we’ve heard before in the comments on this page: that I have an “agenda” and either invented or twisted facts to fit it. What agenda would that be? The attorney says I’m out to make the church look bad. An anonymous commenter defending the church agrees, and adds that it’s a “homosexual agenda,” a mission to attack all of Christianity. The minister himself is less specific. In the Q&A, I specify what my agenda truly is (as I’ve done a number of times on this blog). Here it is in a nutshell:

The last thing I want this to sound like is a justification for murder. There is no justification. There is no good reason for Pam Ginocchetti’s life to be cut short. She did not deserve that. No one deserves that. But we can’t ignore — and the court decided this, too — why it happened. Why (Tim) did it, what led up to this. I felt the way the court did its work, the public didn’t get any real sense of what happened and why he was given a reduced sentence, and why his homosexuality would have been so volatile (a topic) between him and his mother. Nobody really understood it. That, to me, was a demand that I try to explain it.

We have a long way to go to understand why people commit crimes of violence, why they hurt each other, and once we understand those things, I think we’re better able to protect ourselves, we’re better able to react to those sorts of people. Knowledge will help us cope with these awful events.

I know there are people who will read this book, or who will hear of it and say, “This is just a sob story to make us feel sorry for a murderer.” I feel sorry for people who think that, because they’re ignoring what life is all about. Which is, that we are really complicated, and we do bad things, all of us — not quite this bad, obviously. We have to understand ourselves better than we do. I think it’s the journalist’s job to look at this story and simply ask, How could this have happened?

If you want to understand what the book says and why I wrote it, please read it and my statements on why I wrote it rather than taking someone else’s word for what it says and why it says it.

Halfway to freedom

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Today marks the mathematical middle of Tim Ginocchetti’s prison term. Assuming state law doesn’t change the formula used to award good-time credits (currently it’s one-seventh of a sentence, or in Tim’s case a reduction of about two years and two months from his 15 years), and assuming Tim continues to maintain a clean record earning full credit for his behavior, and not counting an additional six-month reduction he might receive for educational programs he has taken, then I calculate today to be the halfway point between Tim’s first day in jail, August 24, 2006, after his arrest and his earliest possible release date according to prison officials: June 27, 2019. (After his release he then must serve five more years of post-release supervision.)

Tim turned 21 two days before he killed his mother. On his likely release date, he will be two months shy of age 34, having spent more than a third of his life — 4,691 days — in prison.

I didn’t argue in God’s Nobodies, and I do not believe, that Tim was treated unfairly by the court or prosecutors. In my view, his sentence is neither too lenient nor too harsh based on what the law says and how it works, which I tried to describe in detail in the book. As Tim himself has said over and over again, he is responsible for a terrible crime and must pay the price. That crime was not a deliberate murder, which was his original charge and one that carries a possible term starting at 15 years and going up to life in prison. He was convicted of manslaughter, a distinction long recognized in our culture. It’s the difference between the predator lying in wait for his victim versus the (typically) young man who loses his temper in an instant and does something terrible. We cannot condone either one, but neither do we equate them. One is clearly worse than the other. In New York, first-degree manslaughter may be punished by five to 25 years. Tim got 15, the midpoint. And now he’s at the midpoint in that sentence.

Every expert I’ve consulted says there are no figures available on median or average sentences for people convicted of manslaughter. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most current study of a sample combining murder and manslaughter cases (PDF) estimated the average sentence to be 20 years. That excludes murderers sentenced to life or the death penalty (estimated by BJS at about one-quarter of all cases). Based on all that — with the average skewed up by cases treated more severely under the law, and with an acknowledgement that the U.S. punishes such cases more severely than it once did, and more than other countries do — I conclude that Tim’s punishment falls right about where we’d expect on the spectrum.

Will Tim Ginocchetti pose a threat to anyone once he is released? Almost certainly not. I also believe the circumstances that put Tim where he is today — the subject of my book — were profoundly unfair not as a matter of law but in a larger sense. He’s paying a terrible price for his instantaneous reaction to problems he never provoked, to a situation he couldn’t change or escape. On those bases alone, he should be released. But our laws serve a purpose beyond isolating threats to public safety or weighing big-picture blame. In our legal tradition, we seek retribution for his crime. In fact, contrary to myth, American justice is the harshest, most prolific deliverer of retribution in the world. Whether that’s as it should be is a debate for another day. Tim committed the crime and must pay. That’s how it works.

To those who have said he got off easy, or who believe no one who takes a life under any circumstance should ever be released, I urge you to think about what it means to sit in prison for one week. Six months. A year. Five years. Or, in Tim’s likely case, 12 years, 10 months, and four days: 4,691 days.

Why young men kill their mothers

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The same day God’s Nobodies was published, December 14, Adam Lanza committed the same crime as Tim Ginocchetti when he killed his mother. Then Lanza went far beyond that at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Comparisons are dangerous, especially when we lack details on Lanza’s twisted motives for his infamous massacre of 26 children and their teachers. We also don’t know precisely why he killed his mother. Perhaps it was as simple (and, to repeat, twisted) as wanting to spare her knowing what he was about to do. I already speculated, immediately after the Newtown, Connecticut, tragedy, about whether they had one common precursor: untreated mental illnesses. Now I’ll add to the speculation. I can’t help wonder whether the profile that researchers have developed of the classic mother-killer doesn’t apply at least somewhat to Lanza. I do know one thing: It certainly describes Tim Ginocchetti.

Matricide is rare. In 2011, 123 mothers — fewer than 1 percent of what the FBI classifies as murder victims — died by a child’s hand. So it doesn’t grab a big share of researchers’ attention. The studies that have been conducted sometimes rely on small numbers of cases, or find a disparate list of explanations for what triggers the crime. Still, researchers have spotted some patterns among young men who kill their mothers.

One scenario in particular stands out in the studies: a son with an absent or neglectful father and overly controlling mother. His dependence on her is infused with hostility. Our first common-sense reaction — he must be sick to kill his own mother — isn’t all wrong. Many indeed suffer from mental illness and personality disorders. But the studies have found mental illness isn’t consistently a driving force except among older killers. The younger ones — Lanza was 20; Tim was 21; both acted more like kids — are often very bright, successful students, never in trouble, who privately seethe until the frustrations boil over in cases of extreme overkill. As researchers Kathleen Heide and Autumn Frei termed it, these are “long-term dysfunctional relationships that culminated in violence.”

While older killers fit the common image of dysfunction — think raging drunks or psychotics whose domestic-abuse impulses turn deadly — younger offenders tend toward the Lanza personality type, at least what we know of him so far: troubled misfits. By comparison, Tim — admittedly a painfully shy, awkward kid — looks downright well-adjusted by comparison to the brooding, scary Lanza. Still, Pam Ginocchetti’s micromanagement of his life walked her dutiful son into a trap common for mother-killers. William Holcomb, in “Matricide: Primal Aggression in Search of Self-Affirmation,” theorized from the studies he reviewed that shame at being controlled and belittled transforms into a perceived threat. The son fears his very identity is under attack. He sees no escape other than through suicide, matricide, or both.

Some plan their attack, while others act spontaneously. Lanza reportedly tried to buy a gun before turning his mother’s weapons on her and then leaving the house to stalk his other victims. Although Tim had fantasized before about killing Pam, he didn’t plot his crime. He lost control in an instant and reached for kitchen knives. Some confine their violence to the home and a single victim, while others, tragically, do not.

The anomalies and mysteries of this less-than-precise science inhibit neatly prescribed outcomes in criminal courts. For one thing, the psychological motivations I’ve described most likely fall far short of the legal standard for an insanity defense, as they did in Tim’s case. But by learning the mother-son narrative — insisting on a detailed understanding, rather than resorting to casual labels (“evil,” “nuts”) — we make more sense of the seeming senselessness.

Special thanks to Kate Szrom for her research assistance on matricide and to the Newhouse School for providing me with such a talented graduate researcher. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. James Knoll, the prosecution’s forensic psychiatrist in Tim’s case, for the extensive research of matricide that appears in his evaluation of Tim.