As with most murders, there’s not much mystery here – about who did it, and how. It’s mildly unusual that a smart person – a professor at a med school – would be stupid enough to order the murder weapon via his university issued credit card two days before the murder. I mean, this sounds like someone who wants to be caught.
Or someone caught up in the passion of his rage against his wife, who he allegedly thought was having an affair. Someone who just wants the thing done, now, because he’s really pissed and he wants it to be over. He’ll show her.
University Diaries has covered bloodier, more dramatic wife-killing by professors – George Zinkhan, Rafael Robb – and the motives are all along the same lines … He thinks she’s unfaithful, or he wants their kid to himself, or she’s in the process of divorcing him. Or all three. Here the wife – Autumn Marie Klein, a University of Pittsburgh neurologist – was herself a distinguished professor, and her death at the age of forty-one is a loss for science.