Anne Pressly’s parents, on Today, reject bland police account of murder

The Little Rock police, using the evasive, moraline-free language of liberal society, call it “a burglary gone bad.” Implying that a perfectly respectable burglar, Curtis Lavelle Vance, interrupted in his perfectly respectable, random burglary of Anne Pressly’s house by Anne Pressly, became so indignant at her interrupting him in the legitimate pursuit of his profession that he proceeded to crush her head in, breaking every bone in her face, pulverizing her jaw so badly that the bone came out of it, inflicting multiple fractures in her skull that caused massive stroke, leaving her face unrecognizable and her in a coma from which she slipped into death five days later. Her parents aren’t buying it.

Below is the AP story that was posted online a half hour ago, sent by David B.:

Parents: Slain anchorwoman was sexually assaulted

LITTLE ROCK (AP)—The parents of the television anchorwoman who was beaten to death said Monday there is evidence their daughter also was sexually assaulted, and that she broke her hand fighting her attacker.

Five days after a suspect was arrested in the Oct. 20 beating of KATV anchorwoman Anne Pressly, Guy and Patti Cannady said on NBC’s “Today” that the family still has many questions about the killing.

Guy Cannady said that while the police theory is that Pressly interrupted a random robbery, he isn’t convinced of that.

“Well, it’s just unbelievable that a random robbery like this would involve the brutal slaying of Anne in this way. There just seems to be a lot more to the whole story than just a robbery gone bad,” he said. “I think he could have been a stalker.”

They said there was evidence of sexual assault.

“This monster stole my daughter’s innocence,” Patti Cannady said. “He took her life. He took her identity. He took our lives. Our lives have radically changed as a result of what’s happened to Anne.”

The suspect, Curtis Lavelle Vance, was linked to the slaying via DNA evidence. Vance has been charged with capital murder and is being held without bail. He also is accused of raping an east Arkansas school teacher in April.

Police did not return a call Monday morning seeking comment on the Cannady’s comments.

Patti Cannady said her daughter’s left hand was broken. “She fought for her life, she fought her attacker,” she said.

Patti Cannady went to her daughter’s Little Rock home because she didn’t answer a wake-up call and found the 26-year-old woman had been beaten beyond recognition. Every bone in her face had been broken, Cannady said.

“Her jaw, pulverized so badly that the bone had come out of it,” she said. “I actually thought that her throat, it possibly been cut, but that was possibly the first knockout punch. Her entire skull had numerous fractures from which she suffered a massive stroke.”

Pressly died in a hospital five days later without regaining consciousness.

Guy Cannady said they had mixed feelings about Vance’s arrest.

“Obviously, good news for us, but bittersweet,” he said, adding that the next part of the ordeal will be the trial.

- end of initial entry -

Bill in Maryland writes:

Erratum: moraline-free?

LA replies:

That’s a pun on caffeine-free. It’s in Walter Kaufmann’s translation of one of Nietzsche’s books, I forget which one.

David B. writes:

Ever notice how certain crimes are always called a “burglary gone bad,” by police and press? Sometimes they say “robbery gone bad,” or “drug deal gone bad.” Have you ever heard of a “burglary gone well?” Another example is GWB’s speech after the Virginia Tech massacre when he intoned, “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This is how our liberal society rationalizes evil acts. You are supposed to think it was like someone being struck by lightning, or a traffic accident. We see it especially in this kind of crime.

Leonard D. writes:

The contrast to a “burglary gone bad” is not one “gone well,” as David B. jokingly suggests. Rather is it a “normal burglary,” that is, the routine one in which the perp gets away with it without being noticed by anyone, much less assaulting and battering. Nonviolent property crime is most certainly a crime, both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of progressives, although for different reasons. In the law, which is still largely a conservative relic, burglary is bad because private property is sacrosanct. In progressivism, there is no private property by right. But burglary is still wrong because it is not for the individual to decide how much of the public’s property he should be allocated, and because the process of redistribution should be run in an impersonal manner.

One other interesting aspect of this particular crime, under the assumption that it really was a rape or other sexual crime, is that the police probably knew it, and definitely should have suspected it, when they characterized the crime as a burglary. That classification is, I expect, from the same origin as the resistance to naming the race of the perp. That is, they are fearful of and want to manage public reaction to another black-on-white rape. And so they initially announce it as a lesser crime, an unplanned battery as part of a misguided but understandable private redistribution effort. Then, later, they plan to announce the full truth of it, and hope that by that time it’s old news so that no lynch mobs form. (We all know how eager the knuckledragging white majority is to form lynch mobs.)

John B. writes:

“Moraline-free” appears in the following paragraph, in The Antichrist, section 2:

Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtu, virtue that is moraline-free).

It appears again—in the same phrase, “moraline-free virtue”—in section 1 of “Why I am So Clever” (the second part of the autobiographical Ecce Homo), as well as in section 317 of Kaufmann’s assemblage of The Will to Power. In all three instances, Kaufmann footnotes it as follows:

The coinage of a man who neither smoked nor drank coffee.

I vaguely recall a translator’s characterizing the term as “morality conceived as a poison”—or maybe “toxin”—apparently a la nicotine or caffeine; but I can’t locate that in Kaufmann. [LA replies: While I’m also using the term to mean free of morality, I’m using it in an entirely different sense than Nietzsche is. He’s using it in two senses, to promote the classic notion of virtue as excellence rather than as (Christian) morality, and to promote hard, dominating men, who ignore morality in the act of asserting their strength over others. I’m using it to criticize egalitarian liberals, who ignore morality in order to eliminate in white people any opposition to criminal and savage behavior, particularly that of nonwhites toward whites.]

Regarding the attack on Pressly:

I think I have already expressed to you my view that the black men who destroy white women in these vicious attacks do not care whether they are captured and then imprisoned or even executed for the crimes. They see themselves as involved in a war, in which their goal is destruction of whites. They are warriors—of a degraded type—who are content to sacrifice themselves in the struggle. Each white woman destroyed is one less white woman who can reproduce. If she’s beautiful: so much the better. Hence the enthusiastic obliteration of the faces of Pressly and others.

Bill Carpenter writes:

Leonard D. adverts to the phenomenon that the official response to atrocities any normal person would see as racially motivated is always to find their etiology in a property crime, burglary, robbery, theft, trespassing, etc. He is definitely on to something, and you have noted it also. To the liberal establishment—i.e., all governments in the U.S.—racially unequal distribution of property is a standing provocation to nonwhites, which mitigates their moral culpability. Such a degraded view of non-whites, and a narcissistic regard for itself, the establishment has: non-whites are simply unable to contain themselves before the spectacle of white wealth and beauty! I agree with Leonard that burglary is only seen as wrong because redistribution should proceed in an orderly fashion, but I would change his word “wrong” to “inconvenient” or “prohibited”—as in the expression malum prohibitum, something that is wrong because it is prohibited, as contrasted with a malum in se, something that is inherently wrong.

I disagree with John B. that it is useful to see sadistic racial murderers as seeing themselves as soldiers in a war. In individuals so dominated by hatred, there is no need for such rationalization or conceptualization, though it could occur or be easily planted by others who manifest their hatred in conceptualizations instead of actions. The liberal establishment denies the extent of this hatred, as well as excusing it. If it were admitted in its full extent, utopia would be off the map.

Ben W. writes:

Wouldn’t Ann Pressly have saved herself a broken hand (and her life) by firing a bullet through the guy’s skull?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2008 10:53 AM | Send