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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 13
Friday, May 13, 2011
Editorial: Book, not about Widmer, stirs thoughts on that case
I should start by admitting that I haven’t followed the Ryan Widmer case closely. He wasn’t running for anything, after all.
But I did watch “Dateline NBC’s” two-hour recap of the long story Friday, May 6, including excerpts from his first interview.
Widmer is the young man accused of drowning his bride in the bathtub of their Warren County home. Two juries have found him guilty. Another jury was hung.
There’s no point in my proclaiming on his guilt or innocence. Suffice it to say that different reasonable people have come to different views, and some have changed their views over time.
The story grabs a lot of attention because it’s not your typical crime story — about a criminal. It’s about this apparently normal young guy.
The NBC program aired as I happened to be reading the 2010 book “Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential — and Endangered,” by child psychiatrist Bruce Perry and journalist Maia Svalavitz. They also wrote “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog.”
Perry gets called in on high-profile cases involving children, like the Branch Davidian case in Waco. (He also does television.)
The empathy book makes you wonder about the childhood of somebody in Widmer’s spot.
It’s largely about how people develop or fail to develop strong human connections, and about what happens as a result. It has lots of science about the brain. But most readers will be struck mainly by the case histories.
One is comedically tragic. A 5-year-old boy was watching television, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Perry approached him and introduced himself.
The child “seemed chirpy, but weirdly robotic. ‘So pleased to meet you,’ he said, smiling.”
When Perry asked how he was doing, the child said, “’New and improved’ … with the same too-bright tone.”
The adult excused himself for a moment, and the child said, “Supersize me!” then “returned to a dull glazed stare.”
Turns out, the child’s only parent was a depressed and poverty-stricken woman who plopped him in front of a television for hours on end daily. He did not really learn communication, because the television didn’t respond to him. But he learned words, and he learned what followed what on television.
“When (the psychiatrist) said he’d be back soon, Brandon had heard ‘More after this!’ and responded with his version of a commercial break,” that is, “Supersize me!”
Then, in the book, there’s a young man from a privileged background, on his way to an Ivy League college, who organized the sexual abuse — at his high school graduation party — of a developmentally disabled teen girl. He raped her and made her “put on a show.” He had never been in major trouble before.
Asked about this event, his response was, “I don’t know what the problem is.” He said the girl was never going to experience sex otherwise. He did her a favor.
Perry found that, when this boy was a baby, his mother hired a nanny to take care of him. But when the boy bonded with the nanny and was cold to his mother, the nanny was fired.
That happened 18 times. So every attachment the boy had ended. So he became unattached — to anybody. “His capacity for empathy was underdeveloped.” He went through life getting good grades (which got him treated well) and being a little bit of a bully. He got in only minor trouble, until that party.
When Widmer was accused, the response of his friends and relatives was that he was just not the kind of guy to kill his wife. He never even showed anger.
He won a lot of public support.
In wondering about his childhood, I’m not casting aspersions on his parents. It’s not just about them; it’s about what might have happened early in Widmer’s life that they had no control over.
Anyway, chances are that there’s nothing unusual in his past, in which case the argument that he’s just not that kind of guy gains strength.
Nor am I saying the courts need to go back decades into personal history before arriving at a verdict. There’s much to be said for not getting hung up on what kind of guy he is and for focusing only on what happened or didn’t on one night.
Still, when the evidence leads different people in different directions, you can’t help wondering about matters not delved into at the trial.
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