A source emailed me his life’s work. Then, he ended his life | Hacker News Reader

A source emailed me his life’s work. Then, he ended his life

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A source emailed me his life’s work. Then, he ended his life

A pardon expert emailed me his life's work. Then he killed his two sons and himself.

I'm not from USA. I had no idea about this story. When I started reading the article, I started with a feeling of sadness. It always makes me sad to know that someone was facing a problem so great that only saw end their own life as the only solution

If I had started reading the second title, from USA Today, I would have started with the idea that it was the last moments of a monster. And a feeling of anger instead of sadness. It's unbelievable how titles, and photos, can mess with the way you'll face a story you're just beginning to read.

Whoa. So I knew the name Peter Ruckman sounded familiar... this guy was the son of Peter Sturges Ruckman who founded the Pensacola Bible Baptist Institute and held some very hard line (and controversial) cult-like views about the Bible.

Specifically he held that the King James Version was very special and let’s just say that he had many followers and that they are especially tough cats to deal with.

That might provide some additional context...

I have a really hard time understanding suicidal people who kill their kids -- what are they thinking? In the article the author mentions that Ruckman posted a loving video of one of his sons playing guitar about a year before the murders. wtf indeed.

  I have a really hard time understanding suicidal people

Believe me, you don't want to understand. The only way you can, is if you've been there.

Imagine for a moment that you are in a hostage situation. Someone wants to kill you. They have the gun to your head, and you have no control over it. Maybe it's today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe you'll get out okay? Nobody knows. Inside you're scared as hell. You don't like this one single bit. But you're bound, and you can only struggle so much. They have their foot on your back, standing over you. You're powerless. They're screaming at other people. Yelling at you. Acting irrationally. It only takes the smallest thing to set them off, and there's only so much you can do to stop them pulling the trigger. Sometimes they'll go away for long enough for you to get a rest. Maybe get some sleep. But don't kick your toe or drop something. You'll wake them up and you'll be right in the thick of it again.

But the person holding you hostage, is yourself. It's a part of your mind. And it will sap every bit of your energy to try to fight it. The healthy part of you doesn't want any of it. The healthy you doesn't want to hurt anybody. But sometimes you just can't fight it any longer. It's daily, monthly, yearly, conscious waking nightmare.

Reminds me of how David Foster Wallace described it:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

As someone that's been there, that's an excellent metaphor, and as close to a description of the freezing, sweating, spiraling manic terror that polite society will allow.

I don't pretend to understand the mindset of a suicide-murderer, but I'll make a guess. Perhaps they are in pain due to mental illness and want to end their life. The guilt of their children living without them is preventing them from moving ahead with their plan. By ending their children's life, it allows them to be free of that guilt and commits them to a course of action where they will end their own life.

Shame. Guilt. Desperation.

If I offed myself, life insurance wouldn't pay out. Savings wouldn't replace my earnings for long. I'd be abandoning my family, forcing my wife and kids to fend for themselves, basically forcing her to marry for money, and quickly. My kids would always have to live with the knowledge that I killed myself instead of being there for them.

The answer to this for some might be to just kill them all and spare them such an outlook.

life insurance wouldn't pay out.

New policies wouldn't pay. But established policies (usually over 2 years of age) may pay out in the event of a suicide. So that isn't a good justification.

True.

It's not something I'd want to leave to chance though-- it's someone else's money.

When my ex's mother died of natural causes, her life insurance refused to pay out. She wasn't around to contest the matter. The choice became to write it off or fight a costly legal battle and recover a fraction of it.

Having been there I can say the reason I considered killing them and my wife was to spare them the pain. Things would have been thrown into disarray if I had gone through with it and what a terrible life it'd leave them. It was only out of great love that I'd do that.

I'm better now.

Nevertheless, if you love them, let them live and take their chances.

They feel responsible for the children in the sense that they won't be around to provide for or console them. They feel responsible for the children in the sense that they want to spare the world from having to deal with their inherited traits, for any sense of the word 'inherited' you like. They consider the children extensions of themselves, and so consider the job would be unfinished otherwise. If the family is like a tree, they don't want to excise themselves only, they want to lop off the branch.

I hate to speculate on these things, in large because I'm woefully unqualified.

But I suspect that it may be due to his religious beliefs. He could've believed that he was going to being his children with him to heaven. Of course it's not a rational thought, even in the context of Christianity and their beliefs of afterlife, but suicidal people are rarely rational actors.

Hmm.. possible but that runs counter to most Christian doctrine. It's unlikely that someone would believe they'd end up in heaven after taking their own life let alone another's.

The FBI studies mass murderers, and have a few models to explain people who kill themselves and their families. Typically the killer is a middle aged man, who “snaps” and kills his intended targets and himself. The typologies are generally broken down into roughly the following :

Possessive rage.

-A form of, “if I can’t have them, no one can.” Can also be even colder, “They’re mine to kill.” A family to this kind of person can be seen as something which belongs to them, and has no place existing in their absence.

Disappointment with life in general, and his family in particular.

-This typology bears the most similarity to mass murderers. The pilot who crashes his own plane, passengers and all, or the office shooter are not unlike this.

-The killer almost always attempts suicide.

Revenge against the mother.

-Most often seen shortly after separation or losing custody, less likely to end in suicide.

Paranoid ideation (protecting them by killing them).

-Most often seen in the context of psychotic depression.

-Suicide is inevitable.

I know nothing about the man in this case, and so I’m speaking in general typologies. I’d caution people against assuming that he must have simply been depressed and suicidal however. Most people in that situstion only want to hurt themselves, and rarely have the energy, desire, or will to murder their children.

Murderers come in all shapes and colors.

That why Depression and suicide is classified as a mental illness. These people are sick, their comprehension of themselves and the world around them is broken.

The reason you dont understand why or how someone could do such heinous actions is that YOU'RE NOT broken.

I’m not sure how I feel about this piece. The last paragraph is a quote from [edit: a friend of] the professor’s ex-wife asking us not to glorify him, and instead to honor the children he’s murdered. And yet the first half of the piece is all about the value of the professor’s work; the children’s names aren’t even mentioned until the very end. I understand that the author only knew the professor in the context of his work, but to me the tone of this piece seems to go exactly against the wife’s wishes. Others may disagree of course.

> A close friend of Ruckman’s ex-wife — the boys’ mother — reached out to me with a plea.

Awkwardly worded, but it wasn't the ex-wife that was quoted, but her friend.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes this a bit less distasteful.

I myself can't help but sympathize a bit with the writer. Mainly because just like the writer, I don't really know what exactly happened here. This scholar, from their perspective seemed like a well adjusted individual doing good work, who suddenly decided to do this horrific thing. I can understand it's not really that easy to make up one's mind here.

My thoughts exactly, this article seems to be glorifying a murderer. I had to stop myself halfway through and do a double take of how after he had glorified this man's accomplishments, he brings out the murder bit ("surely he's going to rip into him now") and then goes onto glorify him some more. The closing quote makes it all the worse.

And allegedly the lives of his sons too. That's fucked up.

Oy. Odd that's missing from the headline since it changes the context from "passionate" to "psychopath".

The story seems balanced, but the headline is too generous.

Ahh yes, nothing more respectful or justified than smugly calling a deceased person who had mental health issues a "psychopath" while you barely knew anything about them or their personal issues.

You have any kids? Maybe recognize that killing your own kids is hard to rationalize for people that do?

I do get your point, but my comment wasn't flippant. I mulled on it a bit, and tried to put myself in his shoes. I didn't find much there.

I'm honestly not trying to be smug. I have close relatives with issues like schizophrenia, manic depression, etc. So, I'm not completely uninformed. But there is a line where things aren't fixable.

Fair enough, but reducing the sum of a man's life to a single word describing his final few minutes maybe isn't the best system of taxonomy. He was a father and a husband for far longer than he was a murderer.

Thanks. I'm trying to not be HN typical and reach for hyperbole. I'll think on that.

I don't think rationality is the top priority for suicidal people. And I don't care how much you mulled on it or how many black friends you have so you can't possibly be racist—flippantly calling someone with mental health issues a "psychopath" betrays a huge lack of empathy and only serves to further stigmatize mental health conversation.

"how many black friends you have"

I feel like I'm mostly being reasonable in this discourse. However, on this point, fuck off.

in a few decades we're going to look back on terms like "psychopath" with the same disgust we look back on victorian labels for notions of inherent racial criminality

In a wider view, I agree. But I'm not feeling terrible about using the term for someone that offs their own children. In what context is that not some serious and notable mental disorder? Is "sociopath" somehow kinder?

Psychopathy is a specific kind of mental illness and I don't think it's self-evident that anyone who would kill their children is a psychopath rather than afflicted with some other form of mental illness.

I'm open to that. Just not any rationale that it was justified. Or that it excuses the headline wording.

Who's saying it was "justified"?

Whoever decided the headline should say "ended his life" with no mention he murdered his children.

Depending on how much you twist the logic, there IS a semblance of an ideal of "doing them a favor and sparing them the evils of the world". Not defending, but to the truly hopeless it probably provides some weighting for the decision making.

It depends on whether the connotations of "evil" remain attached to the word, vs. "seriously dangerously malfunctioning".

I disagree completely. Psychopaths are as psychopaths do. If anything I expect we'll get better at diagnosing/detecting them and perhaps discovering sub-classes of them, of which perhaps some are problematic and some are not. We'll most likely continue to call the problematic ones psychopaths since we'll need a label to discuss people lacking in empathy who commit terrible crimes or make people's lives hell for fun and profit. Maybe some of the people we now call psychopaths will be called something else and redeemed in the popular imagination. But as long as the worst people we now call psychopaths continue to exist I think there will be no strong drive to retire or sanitize the word.

>And if nothing else, it should help to debunk the conspiracy theories that would inevitably pop up, he said.

I think this is the exact opposite of how conspiracy theories work.

This seems so odd. There isn't any information suggesting a history of mental health issues and the only personal drama seems to be a not dramatic sounding divorce.

For a certain kind of person, it’s not the drama, but the loss of control or possession, or sense of failure. In the context of divorce, and a particularly sick personality, killing children is a way to maximally harm the mother.

People can be very odd.

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