All crimes are hard to understand, especially those that cause the loss of human life. But there are some crimes more difficult to understand than others. The primary reason that nearly three dozen states maintain the death penalty is because some murders are more heinous than others. “The worst of the worst,” they are called.

            One of the violent crimes I have the greatest difficulty with are the “fatal abduction” cases—the kind like the one Nicholas-Michael Edwin Jean committed last year. The abduction and cold blooded murder of Susan Puente De Jesus came on the heels of Jean terrorizing the Pearland community with a series of vicious home invasions. He beat one of his victims with a claw hammer and started shooting at another when he tried to escape.

            Jean, an “Army reject” as the Houston Chronicle described him, was sitting around his mother’s Pearland apartment in January 2009 thinking about a crime spree. When the violent outburst was over, there were eight victims, several stolen guns, and vehicles. De Jesus was the only victim who did not survive. The Chronicle reported that on February 2, 2009, at about 9:15 p.m., De Jesus was leaving her job at a Pearland dress shop when she was accosted by a masked gunman who forced him into her 2008 Cadillac. The next morning De Jesus’ vehicle was found abandoned at an apartment complex and security cameras had captured a masked man using her credit card the night before.

            Jean was arrested on March 9 on an unrelated home invasion. He immediately told the police where they could find De Jesus’ body: in the back of a tractor trailer near Reliant Stadium. She had been shot several times in the head.

            Why kill the woman? She meant Jean no harm. She was just leaving work and going home to her everyday life. Jean could have tied her up and left her in the same tractor trailer a couple hours before calling the police to tell them where to find her.

            The men who commit the kinds of crime always have some lame reason for trying to excuse their cold blooded nature. Jean reportedly claimed in a jailhouse conversation that he had to steal a car to gain entry into a gang, but denied killing De Jesus. But his actions in the other home invasions had made it clear that he was willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to accomplish his criminal objectives.

            Famed prison journalist and murderer Wilbert Rideau had a similar lame excuse. In 1961 he robbed a bank, took three employees hostage, and tried to kill all three. Rideau claims that when one of the victims bolted and ran, he began firing his gun in panic until he emptied it. One of the hostages managed to escape while another feigned death. Rideau ran over to the third victim, slit her throat while she begged for mercy, and stabbed her through the heart. He now says he reacted on a panic impulse.

            People who commit these kinds of crimes know exactly what they are doing. They are psychopaths.  They have absolutely no empathy for their victims. They casually and calmly ignore their victims’ pleas of mercy as they slit their throats or blow out their brains.

            These crimes mirror the infamous “In Cold Blood” killings by Richard Hickok and Perry Smith who brutally murdered Herb Clutter, his wife, and two teenage children in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. The two men were hanged back to back just after midnight in the Kansas State Penitentiary on August 14, 1959.

            Rideau escaped the death penalty but spent 44 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Jean faces either the Hickok/Smith gallows fate or the rest of his natural life in prison. Either way, he will never bring harm to another innocent victim.

            I may not understand his crime but I understand quite clearly the fate that awaits him in the Texas prison system. It is not good but it is deserved.