Wife killer Brian David Hummert never intended to rat himself out. But in the end, his own written words - picked over by a forensic linguist - did just that.
Hummert was convicted of first-degree murder by a Pennsylvania jury in 2006 after Hofstra University linguistics professor Robert Leonard, serving as an expert for the prosecution, provided evidence that undermined a grand ruse that Hummert had created to cover up the crime. Leonard established striking syntactical similarities between Hummert's writing and a series of letters supposedly written by a man stalking his wife and a "serial killer" who wrote letters to police claiming credit for the murder.
"We noticed, after a lot of study, that there was a fairly interesting - and very rare - rhetorical device used in both the serial killer and stalker letters," Leonard told Lawyers USA. …
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