Joe Kenda says extreme violence lives in everyone’s DNA, waiting for emotion to overrule judgment. My friend is a great detective and a shaky geneticist, and the difference matters. Janna and I have known Lt. Joe Kenda the way friendships form now, across screens and wires, built from years of mutual attention. It began when he found this blog more than a decade ago and, in the phrase that gave an old post its title, stayed followed. He has sent us gifts. He is, in the way that counts, a generous man, courteous to strangers who admire his work and himself in a business that rewards performance. So when he stood at CrimeCon and told a room full of true-crime devotees that every person in it carried a ball of violence encoded in their genes, I listened closely. Then I did the thing you owe a friend whose mind you respect. I checked whether it was true.

Continue reading → The Ball of Violence: Joe Kenda and the Killer Inside All of Us