Review Of Gary Kinder's Victim: The Other Side Of Murder

Gary Kinder’s book, Victim: The Other Side of Murder, offers a disturbing record of the murder and attempted murder of five individuals in a murder/robbery planned by an individual who should have never been free to commit such a heinous crime to begin with. Kinder’s book allows the reader to essentially get into the heads of the people who must experience the fallout of this devastating event, and offers a unique perspective on how the indirect victims of crime can be impacted just as direct victims are. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of a father, Byron Nasibitt and his son Cortney Naisbitt; one an indirect victim of crime and the other, a direct victim, both of whom were forced to deal with the devastating effects

Once the horrific crime is examined, Carol Naisbitt is laid to rest and the perpetrators apprehended the author is then consumed with detailing the physical and psychological harm that is manifested in Cortney Naisbitt’s struggle to recover and his father’s role in assisting him. The critical damage experienced by being forced to swallow Drano and then being shot in the back of the head left his mother dead however Cortney managed to survive with the same injuries, although barely. While we know that Byron Naisbitt did not experience any physical harm as a victim of this tragedy, there is no question that he experienced psychological harm after losing his wife of thirty-plus years and dealing with the devastating harm experienced by his son. Throughout the book, Byron demonstrates an incredible resolve to stay strong for his family, even as he contemplates numerous times that he cannot understand how anyone could do the things that were perpetrated against is wife and son and the other three victims. In many ways, the crime caused Byron to become so over-protective however that it actually threatened his continued recovery once he was able to leave the hospital for good. With regard to sending his son for the intensive therapy that he needed to overcome the “physical and emotional disabilities” associated with his experience, Byron

This was the case for Cortney whose injuries were so severe that it took months before he was even able to begin processing the physiological harms that he had experienced as well as those that would come even after he had begun to recover and started to learn new information about the crime that upset his entire world. This speaks to another thing that I learned, which was the importance of information to the recovery of victims. For example, as much as Cortney wanted to deny that his mother had died, it was critical to his recovery that he was provided with evidence that she was actually dead so that he could work on processing that reality as part of his recovery. When he was taken to her grave and he finally understood that she was gone, it fostered new emotions that he needed to work out, including his desire to see his mother’s murderers “get killed too” (Kinder, 1982, p.