• Sun-Times Print Collection
  • In 1990, David Biro murdered Nancy and Richard Langert (and their unborn child) in their home in WInnetka.

“Ken” was tried as an adult for a double homicide committed in Pennsylvania when he was 15 years old; he was convicted and sentenced to a mandatory life sentence without parole. Letters to a Lifer is a recent book by Cindy Sanford that tells Ken’s story. The author, coming from a police family, surprised herself by getting to know Ken in prison and questioning the need to punish him forever. Jeanne Bishop of Chicago wrote the forward.

Bishop writes that 21 years went by before she could speak David Biro’s name. Though a public defender, she opposed a campaign to abolish the practice of trying juveniles as adults and sentencing them to mandatory terms of life without parole. Eventually, she says, she relented on that point as she found a way to forgive Biro and to pray for him—still waiting, however, for him to express remorse. He did not. In September of 2012 she wrote him. “The only thing that could possibly pay for the loss of Nancy, her husband and their baby,” she told Biro, “is this nearly-impossibly thing: that you would make your way home to God.” She said she’d come visit if he wanted—and he did. They’ve met at his prison several times since. She tells me, “One of the things he said to me the other day is ‘The more I get to know you, the sorrier I am for what I did.’”

This argument is based on an understanding of crime and punishment that tends to wobble on close contact with repentant criminals, particularly repentant criminals who committed their crimes as children. Cindy Sanford and Jeanne Bishop changed their minds and wrote books about their conversions. “Why does the punishment have to be endless?” Bishop wonders. “You honor the victim by restoring a life to society.”

The other thing is that Biro was sentenced to two mandatory life terms for the murders of the Langerts, but to a discretionary life term for killing their unborn child. A judge could vacate both mandatory terms and let the discretionary life term stand and keep Biro right where he is—in Stateville.

This, at least, is what the FBI told Bishop, but she believed the bureau was lying through its teeth. No friend of the IRA, it was simply pumping her for information that would lead it to activists in the U.S. and Ulster. So Bishop refused to offer any names, and the Chicago media were soon reporting that the murders were being investigated as an “act of international terrorism” and that Bishop was refusing to cooperate.