Totally Unshocking Crime Headlines, Vol. 15

"Sister's ex killed Hudson's relatives in jealous rage"

The estranged brother-in-law of singer and actress Jennifer Hudson killed her relatives in a jealous rage because he thought his wife was seeing another man, a prosecutor said Wednesday at a hearing in which bail was denied...

Balfour accused her of having a relationship with another man because he saw a birthday present and concluded it was a gift from a boyfriend.

I don't think anyone is surprised by this announcement. Though Balfour's defense attorney has called the prosecutor's case "a quilt with holes in it" (question: why not just "a case with holes in it"? Why the superfluous metaphor?) and claims that his client has been pre-judged "in the media as a killer" (as perhaps my post demonstrates), it's hard to imagine an alternate scenario that is as plausible as the one prosecutors have outlined. Though Hudson's mother and brother were not blood relatives to Balfour, and though her young nephew was Balfour's stepson rather than his biological son, I think it is still fair to classify these murders as acts of lethal IPV as they appear rooted in the sort of jealousy and rage that characterize male-perpetrated intimate partner homicide. As I said in my previous post about gender and lethal IPV, women tend to kill intimate partners who abuse them while men tend to kill intimate partners who leave or betray them. The difference in this case is that the target of the alleged perpetrator's jealous rage was not his ex-wife but her mother, brother, and son. Either way, it's heart-breaking.