This week's leading spam-related story may be that of convicted spammer Eddie Davidson, who escaped from a minimum-security federal prison on July 20th, and then killed himself and two members of his family. Davidson was serving a 21-month prison sentence for tax evasion and offenses under the CAN-SPAM Act. Among his other activities, he allegedly sent spam on behalf of the Useltons.

Wired has a short summary of the Davidson case, which has spawned a long comment thread. Some of the comments are, frankly, pretty repellent. One commenter observes:

It's a good thing he offed his family before they grew up to be spammers like him. Spammers are just filthy people, they need to stop them from entering this country.

Stop them from entering this country — what the fuck?

A surprising number of commenters also seem eager to conclude that Davidson was actually murdered, presumably by fellow spammers determined to stop him spilling the beans and telling the Feds where he hid the keys to the botnet. The existence of a living witness would suggest that there isn't much mileage in that version of events, but I guess there's no stopping a conspiracy theory whose time has come.

Whatever you think of spam, whatever you think of spammers in general or 'Fast Eddie' in particular, there's no satisfaction in this. Three people died, and two children have lost their parents. 'Tragedy' seems to be the only possible word for the whole business.