On Saturday, April 14, 1990, John Kappler, a sixty year-old retired anesthesiologist, packed his Hyundai Sonata for the drive from Boston, Massachusetts to his home in Van Nuys, California (5-6). His car never left the state of Massachusetts . . . Kappler will probably never see the state of California again. Within minutes of pulling away from the curb in front of his daughter Elsie's home in Medford (just outside Boston), Kappler was careening along a jogging path adjacent to the Alewife Brook Parkway in Cambridge (12). According to Kappler, his act was "A great challenge. That I had no alternative. I got in the car and I started" (103).
On the jogging path that morning was Paul Mendelsohn, a thirty-two year old psychiatric resident at New England Medical Center, out for a training run in preparation for his fourth San Francisco Marathon (10), and Deborah Brunet-Tuttle, a thirty-two year old mother and human services worker, on her way home from the store with groceries and some plastic Easter eggs she intended to use at her church's hunt (12). At about 10:35 am, Mendelsohn was struck by the right side Kappler's Sonata, impacting the windshield and sustaining a fractured skull, then carried several hundred feet down the jogging path before his crumpled body fell to the ground. Brunet-Tuttle, to this day, does not even remember being run down and dragged by Kappler's auto. She suffered a number of fractures, including her pelvis. Mendelsohn died less than sixteen hours later, at 2:05am on April 15. Brunet-Tuttle, although severely injured, survived but is permanently disabled. Kappler is now serving a sentence of life imprisonment at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Cedar Junction. His December, 1993 appeal for a new trial was rejected by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (234).
Before the senseless assaults that morning in April 1990, Kappler had previously attempted to kill at least thre...