BY AMY Z. QUINN The dead wife of Penn Professor Rafael Robb has been abused in death by Bruce Castor as badly as she was in life by her husband. He bludgeoned his wife to death with a metal bar in cold blood. By ANY objective analysis he appears to have gotten away with murder
Despite evidence that Robb, a PhD and expert on game theory, had been a controlling, abusive husband who couldn’t stand that the wife he despised was daring to divorce him and was planning to take their daughter away on a trip, the Montgomery County District Attorney offered Robb a plea of voluntary manslaughter. Worst case scenario, Robb is looking at seven years.
Meanwhile, Ellen Robb’s family spent yesterday launching a foundation in her name, meant to help women in similarly abusive situations. And while her family says they welcomed the deal, as it avoids a trial, we wonder how this satisfies anyone except Rafael Robb himself, who seemed to be looking for someone to tell him he was a good person simply driven to a bad deed.
Robb claims he “just snapped,” which may explain his “blitz attack” with a chin-press bar on his wife’s skull while she sat wrapping Christmas presents, but doesn’t address why he then tried to pull a Neulander, claiming his wife was killed during a robbery he staged. Once you “accidentally” murder somebody and then try to COVER IT UP, well, it’s no longer an accident is it? Sadly, the only conceivable explanation for Castor’s uncharacteristic leniency is that perp happened to be Ivy League intelligentsia with the resources and connections to hire the kind of high-priced, in-the-boys-club attorney that can broker a such a deal with prosecutors. As such, the plea deal feels more like a smoky backroom handshake than the service of justice.
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