Someone Loves the Neo-Nazi Killer

Ever since Hedda Nussbaum’s battered face appeared on the cover of tabloids in 1987, the wives of insane, violent men have faced a particularly cruel kind of scrutiny. Nussbaum called herself the victim of “intimate terrorism,” but the world judged her culpable for failing to protect her adopted 6-year-old daughter from her murderous husband. The BTK Killer had a wife and children. James von Brunn, the white supremacist who allegedly shot two people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, does too—or at least he did (one son committed suicide, his wife divorced him). They surfaced last night in the Daily News. His 32-year-old son Erik is a student at the University of Maryland, and defends his father: “I love my father,” he said. “Everything you need to know about him is on his Web site.” That such a website (it crashed yesterday, here are its remnants) could coincide with love, even in a son, is hard to stomach. The ex-wife, at least, kept her distance: "[It] ate him alive like a cancer," she said of Von Brunn’s hatred. "It's all he would talk about. When I questioned him, he would get angry and abusive.” She did not, however, alert the authorities.

Tags: holocaust museum murder, james von brunn, wife and son of james von brunn

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Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.

Comments

I fail to see how alerting

By: chibbs2000 | Fri, 06/12/2009 - 13:01

I fail to see how alerting the authorities that her ex-husband hated Jews and blacks would have prevented anything from happening, or is there a special unit of the police that goes around arresting people who hate other groups of people? If so please forward me their email addresses as I have an enormous list of names they might be interested in.

Livng with a Mad Man

By: chuck | Thu, 06/11/2009 - 16:53

There is almost nothing the relatives of a man like Nussbaum can do. The law provides that someone can be involuntarily incarcerated if he/she is a danger to self or others, but people quickly figure out that all they have to do is say "I am feeling better--can't imagine what come over me." And then they get out, or they just deny having said anything bad when the policeman comes by after the 911 call. So unless Nussbaum said: "Here is my loaded gun and I am off the the Holocaust Museum" there was little anyone could do.

And there is the problem that most people like him never do anything but rant and rave. And we are not about to put 1,000 people into mental hospitals because one of them may act out his evil words.

wow, way to fault the two

By: the avant guardian | Thu, 06/11/2009 - 15:59

wow, way to fault the two totally blameless relations of this man for caring for him. perhaps his son meant something akin to "if you look at my dad's site, you'll see that he was clearly disturbed". sure, it could mean, "my dad was an anti-semite murderer and that's what i love about him", but that isn't exactly what he said is it? and the truth is, the kid will probably face so much media abuse from this very elliptical statement that he will avoid them in the future.

clearly people who kill people should not be admired for their murderous activities, but do we really want to say that they shouldn't be loved? okay, then, why don't we just dumb everything down into totally black and white terms and forget that this website is supposed to come from an intellectual point of view?