Dad Penned Apology Before Killing Family

Fatal car crash nearby linked to husband

(NEWSER) - A mother and her four children were found dead in their Iowa City home yesterday by police who received an anonymous tip, reports the Daily Iowan. Minutes later, cops responded to a nearby highway crash involving a car belonging to the father of the family, Stephen Sueppel. The dead driver remains unidentified due to severe burns. More»

Obama prepares to pitch Chitown Olympics as city reels from murder

(NEWSER) - As Barack Obama prepares to make a pitch to hold the Olympics in his hometown, the White House is decrying a "chilling" videotaped beating death of a teenager in the same city. It's one of the most shocking things "you can ever see," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday. Four people have been arrested in the death of honor student Derrion Albert, who was fatally pummeled with wooden planks in the middle of a gang melee outside a city high school last week. More»

Did Raymond Clark kill Annie Le because she was moving on?

(NEWSER) - Ray Clark could have strangled Annie Le because she was moving on to a satisfying career while he had to clean mouse cages in a lab, criminologists tell ABC News. If Clark is guilty, he may have suffered from what experts call "relative deprivation"—a mindset created "when you are measuring your own self worth against others and you come out on the bottom," says criminologist Jack Levin. More»

(NEWSER) - If Ray Clark did, as police apparently suspect, kill Annie Le, investigators have an odd theory about his motivation, the New York Daily News reports. In emails that caught their attention, the Yale lab technician scolded Le about her lax handling of mice in the lab. Le apologized, but investigators wonder if resentment over the issue may have turned Clark into a killer. A co-worker described him to the New York Times as "very officious and very demanding" over minor issues and said he often gave grad students a difficult time. More»

Cites drug dispute; 'my bro has a conscience'

(AP) - The brother of a Georgia man charged with slaying his father and seven others in a mobile home insists that 22-year-old Guy Heinze Jr would never harm his family, and instead speculates that a drug dispute could have prompted the killings. "I know my brother didn't do this. My brother has a conscience," 16-year-old Tyler Heinze said yesterday outside the rural cemetery where seven caskets topped with roses were resting atop freshly dug graves. More»