Kevin Cooper is a repeat offender who was convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of Chino Hills chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and sleep-over guest Christopher Hughes, age 11? The attack also left son Josh Ryen, whose throat was slit, for dead, but Josh somehow survived.
The case was reviewed by numerous judicial authorities that never concluded they should overturn his conviction or death sentence. Yet thanks to ego and maniacal self-regard, a stable of would-be do-gooders has been working to win his release.
The celebrities who say that Kevin Cooper is not guilty need to think two things.
The criminal justice system is out of control with racism so potent that law enforcement is willing to frame a clearly innocent black man.
Only enlightened people who truly care about justice can see it.
Which brings us to this book review in The New York Times, which addresses the mindless self-regard of apologists for killers.
How a Death-Row Inmate’s Embrace of Conservatism Led to His Release
By Katherine Dykstra
Feb. 22, 2022
SCOUNDREL
How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment and the Courts to Set Him Free
By Sarah Weinman
I’ve downloaded the book. Meanwhile, reading the review, I see a familiar pattern. Except this story is worse, because convicted killer Edgar Smith had confessed to killing 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski.
How did Smith attract William F. Buckley’s attention and later win such concerted support that he won release from prison?
Smith was a fan of the National Review. He wrote to Buckley, who wrote back over the years.
Many of the convicted killers who develop celebrity fandom succeed not because they’re not guilty, but because they can write. Think Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer.
Smart killers appeals to writers’ egos as if the writers are the only people perceptive enough to see their innocence. Sure, multiple judges and a jury said Cooper was guilty, after presenting evidence at a court of law. Only the truly observant can see the real truth. All they have to do is consume a few highly curated (and exculpatory) articles, and they’ll see what police and prosecutors who lived and breathed a case for years missed.
From the review:
Weinman makes Buckley out to be a well-meaning man duped by a cunning manipulator: Buckley, she writes, “thought that Edgar was acting in the best possible faith, with the greatest of intentions, only to realize, too late, that he was doing no such thing at all.” When the two first meet, she writes, “the dungeons would be thrown open for his inspection. But who would be inspecting whom?”
Another aspect of the pro-killer brigade’s lack of regard for the victims, aka from Dykstra, “the misogyny that bought Smith’s freedom.”
Look no further than Nick Kristof for a writer willing to airbrush out at times or dismiss at other times charges that Cooper sexually assaulted two women.
As I wrote last year, in a 2021 column, Kristof makes no mention of the two sexual assaults of which Cooper stands accused.
(Be it noted, Cooper wasn’t tried for the assaults because he was tried and convicted of capital murder.)
“He has been accused of rape without being charged,” Kristof wrote in 2018 — when he at least recognized an assault:
“I’m particularly troubled by one episode. Cooper admits forcing a 17-year-old girl into a vehicle in 1982. She says that he also hit her, threatened to kill her and raped her, and she went afterward to a hospital to seek treatment; he flatly denies hitting or raping her. Hile says that if the evidence had been strong, Cooper would have been charged with rape. For my part, I can’t think why the girl would have lied, and although it’s impossible to know after 36 years what happened, it bothers me.”
Cooper’s attorney, however, did write about the rapes that “troubled” Kristof.
In a letter seeking clemency from then California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Orrick’s Norman Hile writes of the Pennsylvania assault, “As a strategy decision during trial, Mr. Cooper stipulated in the penalty phase to the occurrence of those events, but he did not plead guilty to and has not been convicted of those crimes.”
Cooper also was arrested in Santa Barbara for forced oral copulation, rape by threat, sexual penetration by a foreign object with force and sodomy of a woman on a boat. The attack occurred in 1983, after the Chino Hills killings and after Cooper fled to Mexico, where he befriended a couple who invited him to join them as they sailed up the coast. Within weeks, Cooper was arrested for forced oral copulation, rape by threat, sexual penetration by a foreign object with force and sodomy of a woman on a boat.
According to Hile the charge of rape at knifepoint is not relevant, as Cooper “has continuously maintained that the sexual interaction on the boat was consensual.”
Get it. The women wanted it.
I won’t argue that there are no innocent men on death row. I just wish that those who want to believe death row is teaming with framed individuals would look carefully at the facts that sent these men to prison.
We know what happened with Jack Abbott. He killed after his release. Smith attacked a woman after his release.
The misinformation on Cooper is so prolific that I just stumbled on a web site that declares he was executed in 2004, after he refused his last meal. So be careful out there…
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
Kevin Cooper is Guilty #7
The celebrities who say that Kevin Cooper is not guilty also need to believe in a third thing: that they will suffer zero consequences of their virtue signaling.
Cooper isn't going to come to live in their neighborhoods, and even if he did, their private security at their gated communities is there to keep them safe.
If their faith in their safety ever wanes, they might even change their minds but I suspect they'll just buy more security.
Having said all this, I still marvel that anybody pays any attention to celebs except for the occasional entertainment value. Personally, I think we should return to the times when they had to come in through the back door.