Jacob Wideman, who is serving time for killing Kane, is the son of former University of Massachusetts professor and author John Edgar Wideman.
Louise Kane, right, is comforted by family friend Paulene Thompson Tuesday after a clemency board in Phoenix, Ariz., denied parole for Jacob Wideman, who killed Kane’s son in 1986. Wideman is the son of prominent novelist and college professor John Edgar Wideman, formerly at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. By MICHAEL KIEFER
Arizona Republic
Twenty-five years after the murder, the hurt is still fresh.
The victim’s mother described the killer as “so violently intent on killing someone.”
The killer’s father, a renowned writer, said, “I am stunned still by what happened 25 years ago. ... I find myself unable to speak about it to the (family). I can only prostrate myself before them and say good luck.”
But he also felt his son had raised himself well in prison, and he was proud of the man he had become.
On an August night in 1986, in a hotel room in Flagstaff, Ariz., Jacob Edgar Wideman plunged a knife into Eric Kane while he slept.
Both boys were 16 years old, on a summer-camp-sponsored tour of Western national parks.
Wideman told police he killed Kane because he’d had a “tough year.”
“It was not premeditated,” he told police. “It was the buildup of a lot of emotions. I never thought about what I did.”
He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years – which brings him to this October.
On Tuesday, Wideman spoke at length with the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, asking for a second chance.
The board turned him down.
Weight of murder
Jacob WidemanJacob Wideman speaks with concise diction in a breathy mid-Atlantic accent. On Tuesday, he told the clemency board by telephone hookup that the murder “has weighed on me for 25 years.”
Though he went to prison before he could shave, while he still had braces on his teeth, he has become an articulate, intelligent 41-year-old man. During his imprisonment, he landed an attractive fiancee, a psychologist who told the clemency board she wants him to move into the home she shares with her children.
Wideman wrote in his parole application and said in his hearing that he wants to become involved in mental-health care, that he wants to work with children, that he has managed to overcome his own mental-health issues in recent years with meditation and breathing techniques and a new understanding of who he is.
Said Louise Kane, his victim’s mother, “Anyone who could kill for no reason at all, other than that he had violent thoughts and impulses, shouldn’t be in society.”
Sandy Kane, Eric’s father, told The Arizona Republic that he spent the first years after Eric’s death agonizing over how his son suffered, then the next decades thinking about everything that Eric had missed: weddings, graduations, births.
And now that Wideman can apply for parole again in a year, he worries about Wideman being out of prison.
“It doesn’t go away,” he said. “I would do anything to keep him out of society.”
John Edgar WidemanJacob Wideman’s father is the prominent novelist and college professor John Edgar Wideman, formerly at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who twice won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
“I have nothing to say to John Wideman,” Sandy Kane said. “I have nothing but contempt for the man.”
Among Wideman’s books is a 1985 memoir, Brothers and Keepers, which describes how Wideman pulled himself out of a Pittsburgh ghetto to become an Ivy League basketball star and a Rhodes Scholar, while his brother succumbed to the streets and was beaten down by the establishment until he landed in prison with a life sentence for murder.
His older brother never had a chance, Wideman theorized. That logic folded back on him when his son, who did have a chance, committed murder and was also sentenced to life in prison.
Other children thrived
Wideman’s other children thrived. His older son, Daniel, is a published author and a businessman in North Carolina. His daughter, Jamila, became a lawyer after a career in the WNBA. She was a basketball star at Amherst Regional High.
John Edgar Wideman wrote in a letter of support to the parole board, “Today, at this very moment, I remain appalled, bewildered, diminished by the fact that twenty-five years ago my son was responsible for taking another boy’s life. One boy’s life lost, another boy’s life devastated and those excruciatingly cruel facts will never change. They embody a nearly unspeakable truth from which the victim’s family, Jake’s family, Jake, society, none of us will ever fully recover.”
Eric Kane and Jacob Wideman were children of privilege spending the summer of 1986 at a camp in Maine that was owned by Wideman’s maternal grandfather. The highlight of the summer was a tour of Western national parks. On that Aug. 13, the tour stopped in Flagstaff on the way to the Grand Canyon.
The boys, both lanky six-footers, were bunkmates in the hotel. Eric went to sleep. Jacob stayed awake, and in an instant of impulse, picked up a knife he had bought at Yellowstone National Park and buried it twice in Eric’s chest. He stole the group’s car and $3,000 in traveler’s checks and took off on a cross-country odyssey to the East Coast.
Eric was discovered dead the next morning in the room’s bathroom. The medical examiner determined it had taken him hours to bleed to death.
A week later, Jacob’s parents brought him back to Flagstaff to turn himself in. He was initially released on bond and his parents put him in a succession of psychiatric hospitals on the East Coast. At one of them, he was accused of assaulting another youth.
He confessed to killing Eric to Flagstaff police. A year later, he confessed to a second murder that had taken place in Laramie, Wyo., in 1985, where his father was teaching. A young woman had been stabbed to death, her apartment set on fire. Jacob later recanted the confession. He was never charged with the murder.
At his parole hearing Tuesday, Jacob said he had confessed to the crime as a suicidal act, to speed up getting the death penalty, recalling details he read in the newspaper at the time of the crime.
But the death penalty was taken off the table. Jacob pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with chance of parole after 25 years. The judge in the case stated his hope that Jacob never be granted parole.
On Tuesday, Jacob Wideman spoke about the violent impulses he has suffered since a small child, urges that made him feel awkward and out of place.
He described Eric as equally awkward and said that he associated Eric with the things he hated most about himself. And so he killed him.
That behavior continued during his early years in prison, he said, ending with a 1993 assault on a prison staffer that earned him time in isolation.
Like a screenplay
There, in a scene much like something out of a screenplay, he met an older prisoner who counseled him to start making something of himself.
And then, recounting the story using psychological buzz words, he transformed himself through counseling and introspection. The impulses faded to a point where he could control them, while “taking responsibility for what lives in me,” he said.
He diagnoses himself as having obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Eric’s sister, Laurie, attended the hearing by phone.
“I’m not convinced – and I say this as a psychiatrist – that he’s capable of change that can make us all feel safe,” she said.
The parole board did not buy Jacob’s story, either. Chairman Duane Belcher chased him down with questions about his last impulsive episodes, his most recent psychological evaluations, the Laramie murder.
And ghosts of his Flagstaff trial bore witness.
The victim advocate from the case said, “I don’t think meditation stops someone from murdering.”
The former Flagstaff chief of police said, “His slow deliberation now is the same slow deliberation he used when he pulled out a Bowie knife and plunged it into a boy who was sleeping.”
The board voted unanimously to deny parole. Jacob Wideman can apply again in a year.
“I’m understandably disappointed,” John Edgar Wideman said as he left the hearing.
Sandy Kane fretted about going through another hearing a year from now.
“I’m not sure if I’m ever going to get back to that nicer place where I remember my son,” he said.