The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  One day Hicklin made an on-air comment about people who start brush fires: “They should be tied to a stake and left there.” After hearing this, Taylor wrote that some teenager might “prod his group into acting out the sick fantasy as broadcast by Personality Pilot-Reporter-Folk-Hero Hicklin. Law enforcement finds enough skeletal remains in the hills. It is bestial to hear one condone murder-by-the-torch.”

  Note the sinister nature of his references. They continued in Taylor’s next complaint to the FAA, which was that Hicklin had buzzed his home in what he called a “strafing mission”: “Is there a more barbaric, mindless, obscene act than a pilot who would aim an aircraft at defenseless humans on the ground for the sole purpose of harassment; by a pilot whose sole sick mission is to establish his dominance over his victims?”

  Needless to say, the FAA did not (and could not) take any action that would have satisfied Taylor. Likewise, the court dismissed his suit. With his alternatives shrinking, Taylor typed a seven-page memo recounting in detail each “incident” involving Hicklin. He stated that Hicklin used his helicopter as a weapon and that “aircraft in the hands of mentally unbalanced men constitute offensive weaponry.”

  Let’s stop and look at the context of the situation. At the start, it was simple: A famous person was sent some overly-praising letters by a member of his audience. Though perhaps not written in a style that appealed to Hicklin, the letters were appropriate for the context. At the start, the situation was not interpersonal, but after the admirer was visited by intimidating men who warned him to stop writing letters, it became interpersonal. Jim Hicklin got the last thing he wanted: a relationship with Edward Taylor. They had become enemies.

  Hicklin—

  I could’ve understood your conduct had you come to my door with a .38 in hand rather than having sent two private detectives—like a Strung-Out Queen.

  Now you’ve psyched up buddies to threaten my life. That’s sad.

  Remember to call me “MR.”

  The day he sent this letter, Edward Taylor did more than just write about a .38. He went out and bought one.

  Meanwhile, Hicklin decided to try his first strategy again. He asked the district attorney’s office to send investigators and get Taylor to stop. They did visit him, but they did not get him to stop.

  Taylor told the district attorney’s investigators that he was the victim of Hicklin’s harassment, not the other way around. He feared that Hicklin may have hovered above his house in order to draw a map. He explained that he was so apprehensive of Hicklin’s bizarre behavior that he always carried with him a note of explanation addressed jointly to the Los Angeles Police Department and the D.A.’s office. Along with the note, he always carried the handgun.

  After he was warned by the D.A.’s investigators, Taylor wrote to them:

  When a complainant perceives that established authority does not care and/or will not empathize with what it is like when one has his life threatened by a mindless, manipulative robopath; to experience the trauma of purchasing a .38 handgun in his 46th year in order to defend himself from a paid or emotionally-involved assassin; to see a handgun on his desk during working hours; to see it again first thing in the morning upon awakening and as the final objet-d’être upon retiring at night. Worst of all, is to consider the nature of complainant’s alleged provocation against respondent (to hear the latter tell it): mail(!).

  All the information needed was in this letter. What Taylor projected onto Hicklin, namely that he was “an emotionally-involved assassin,” was actually at work inside him. As James Baldwin said, “In the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.” Though Taylor never made a threat to harm Hicklin, the clear hazard can be gleaned from that letter nonetheless by applying the JACA elements: Taylor felt he had justification to use violence (defending himself); he had few alternatives left (established authority did not care about him); the consequences of violence had become favorable because violence would stop the “mindless robopath;” and finally, he had the ability to deliver violence—the gun.

  The visit from the DA investigators, like the first visit from the private detectives, clearly had a major and unfavorable impact that Taylor had difficulty recovering from. The ultimate intrusion, the ultimate insult, was still to come, and from that one Taylor would be unable to recover.

  One evening while his elderly mother was visiting him, Taylor answered a knock at his front door. It was the police, who, in front of his mother, arrested Edward Taylor. He was booked into Los Angeles County Jail for misdemeanor libel. Unable to contact anyone to bail him out over the weekend, he spent three days in jail.

  Home from jail, shaken more than even he realized, Edward Taylor could not get relief from his indignation about all that had happened. Now that there was a cost on his writing letters, he stopped writing them. Instead, he stewed, tried to sleep, tried to eat, and stewed some more. He couldn’t find the life he’d had before all this had started, such as it was, so he just sat at home listening to Jim Hicklin’s radio show. In this sense, media figures are unavoidably adding some fuel to the fire just by being in the media. A person obsessed with a movie star, for example, might see her in magazines, on entertainment news programs and talk shows. Ironically, even if he wants to, an obsessed person might find it hard to get away from the object of his pursuit.

  But soon Hicklin would be off the air. He and his wife were going on a vacation cruise. Just as he had planned, and just as he had announced over the radio, Jim Hicklin and his wife boarded the Italia cruise ship on April 2nd, 1973.

  Before leaving port, the Hicklins entertained friends who’d come to see them off. But not everyone on board was a friend. In the presence of his wife, Jim Hicklin was shot to death by a man he’d never met and never spoken to. Edward Taylor had “defended” himself in the way he had obviously been thinking of for some time.

  Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention. When people wanted to stop Edward Taylor’s letters, they were certain a strong warning would do it, then they were certain arrest would do it. But even his being arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated for life did not stop Edward Taylor’s letters. He continued to write to the district attorney and others until the day he died in prison.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  People who refuse to let go are becoming more common, and each case teaches us the same valuable lesson: Don’t engage in a war. Wars rarely end well because by definition someone will have to lose.

  In Predicting Violent Behavior, Dr. John Monahan explains that violence is inter-actional: “The reaction of a potential victim of violence may distinguish a verbal altercation from a murder.” As you have now learned from cases of public figure pursuers and other people who refuse to let go, the minute you get into it with someone, you are into it, and if you get angry, that all by itself is a kind of victory for him.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Remember Tommy? In the course of a follow-up investigation, my office learned that he got a job with a bank, enjoyed a three-month honeymoon there, and was fired for insubordination. He began a harassment campaign against the bank’s personnel director that is still going on as I write this. The bank has threatened him with a lawsuit, and he has threatened them with everything he could think of. Tommy’s former employers, like others concerned about violence from an angry employee, face situations that are highly predictable (second only, in fact, to those between intimates). This ease of predictability makes some employers uncomfortable, because with ability comes responsibility. After you finish the next chapter, you’ll have both.

  ▪ CHAPTER NINE ▪

  OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

  “How much more grievous are the consequences

  of our anger than the acts which arouse it.”

  —Marcus Aurelius

  Dear Laura,

  It’s time to remove the kid gloves. It’s my option to make your life miserable if that is what you really want. I told you if I get fired or lose my clea
rance, I can force you to go out with me. You asked me what I could do, Kill you? The answer to that was + still is No. If I killed you, you would not be able to regret what you did. I have your parents address, so what if you run, I’m ready to follow. I’m selling my houses, I have closed my retirement fund, sold my stock. I can go real quick. Let’s say you don’t back down + pretty soon I crack under the pressure + run amok, destroying everything in my path until the police catch me + kill me.

  Take care,

  Rick

  As you read this letter, your intuition cries out for more details. Who is Rick? Who is Laura? What is their relationship? Did he get fired? Your intuition tells you to be curious because more information means a better prediction. You want to know the context, but knowing just what’s in the letter, you can still use the JACA elements to see things the original readers did not see. It speaks of Rick’s justification for violence (losing his job), his shrinking alternatives (taking off the kid gloves), the favorable consequences to violence (making Laura regret what she did), and his high ability (he has her parent’s address, has sold off his possessions and is ready to go).

  The man who wrote the letter is named Richard Farley, and the woman he wrote to is Laura Black. They met while employed at a high-tech Silicon Valley company called ESL, a subsidiary of TRW. Farley had asked Laura Black to go out with him, and when she declined, he refused to accept her rejections. The company tried several interventions to make him stop bothering her, but with each one his harassment escalated. Eventually it included death threats. He also sent along an enclosure with one letter that chillingly communicated her vulnerability: It was a key to the front door of her home.

  When supervisors at ESL told Farley that he’d be fired if he kept this up, his sinister reaction prompted one of them to ask him incredulously, “Are you saying that if you are fired you will kill me?”

  “Not just you,” Farley answered.

  Around this time, Laura reluctantly sought a restraining order against Farley. Her intuition about him was right on the mark when she told the court, “I am afraid of what this man might do to me if I file this action.”

  Farley was fired from ESL and banned from the premises, but he came back one day with a vengeance. He passed through the access doors—literally through them—after blasting out the glass with one of the shotguns he’d brought along. He was also carrying a rifle and several handguns as he walked around the building furiously shooting at his former co-workers.

  When he finally found Laura Black, he shot her once with a rifle and left her bleeding on the floor. He shot ten other people that day, seven of whom died. Laura, though losing blood and consciousness, was able to crawl out of the building.

  Later she told me, “The restraining order was the catalyst that pushed him over the edge. I hesitated a long time before I went forward to get it, but the company urged me on. Ultimately, I was told that my reluctance might be impacting my advancement at work. That was when I finally said, ‘Okay, it’s worth taking a chance.’ The shooting was the day before we were to appear in court with Farley to make the temporary restraining order permanent.”

  But Laura spent that day and many more in the hospital. Farley spent that day and many more in jail. Newspeople spent that day, and many more, reporting that Farley had “just snapped” and gone on a shooting spree. But that never, ever happens.

  JACA has shown you that people don’t just “snap.” There is a process as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil. Though we call it workplace violence, it is really every type of violence, committed by every type of perpetrator. It is revenge killing, when an employee who feels humiliated or emasculated proves that he cannot be taken lightly. It is domestic violence, when a husband seeks out his wife at her work. It is date stalking, when the man who refuses to let go pursues his victim at her job. It is rage killing, when an employee primed to do something big and bad chooses to do it at work. The fear of violence at work is understandable because work is a place where many of us are forced to interact with people we did not choose to have in our lives.

  Fortunately, violence in the workplace offers many predictive opportunities, and there are almost always several people in a position to observe the warning signs. Still, as the cases show, obvious warnings are frequently ignored. The cases also show that it doesn’t have to be that way.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Though you may not recognize the name Pat Sherill, he is one of the reasons that when you think of shooting sprees at work, you think of the U.S. Postal Service. The forty-four-year old Oklahoma letter carrier was known to co-workers as Crazy Pat. In 1986, soon after his supervisors threatened to fire him, he came to work with something more than just his usual anger at his bosses: He brought along three pistols as well. Sherill shot twenty co-workers, fourteen of whom died, and then he killed himself.

  Contrary to the public perception that Sherill helped cement, the statistics for violence by employees of the postal service are actually better than for most industries in America. It’s just that with hundreds of thousands of full-time employees and nearly a million people affiliated with the service in some way, odds are they’ll have more of everything—more failure, more medical problems, more creativity, more laziness, more kindness, more violence. There are shooting incidents at fast-food restaurants more often than at post offices, but they are not reported as if part of some trend. (This is not to say that postal service management style and strategies are everything they could be, but rather to debunk the myth that they are the worst in the nation.)

  Though Sherill’s attack was a bloodbath, within the year another angry employee would make it look like a minor incident by comparison. A USAir employee named David Burke was the man in the news this time. After the incident, reporters learned plenty of things about Burke that USAir could have benefited from knowing when they decided to hire him: He had a history that included drug trafficking, shoplifting, and auto theft, as well as violence toward his girlfriend. He had cut the wires in her car, beaten her, and threatened her with a gun. It had reached the point that she’d gotten a restraining order against him.

  Burke’s troubling behavior went with him to work, where he left a death threat on the answering machine of his supervisor, Ray Thompson, whom he blamed for many of his problems. Burke insisted he was being singled out for racial reasons and he was indignant when USAir fired him for stealing sixty-nine dollars. Another USAir employee (with very poor judgment) lent Burke a .44 magnum revolver. It would never be returned.

  When USAir fired Burke, they failed to take back his airport ID badge, and he wore it on his last day alive. Because of that badge, the woman operating the metal detector waved Burke around it and said, “Have a nice day.” He replied, “I’ll have a very nice day.” He then walked into Thompson’s office and demanded his job back. Thompson said no, then cut the discussion short because he was flying to San Francisco. Soon after, Burke stood in line and bought a ticket for the same flight. Unlike the other passengers taking their seats on Flight 1771 that afternoon, Burke did not care where the plane was scheduled to go, because he already knew where it would end up.

  After take-off, he wrote a note on an air-sickness bag: “Hi Ray. I think it’s sort of ironical that we end up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family, remember? And I got none. And you’ll get none.”

  At twenty-two thousand feet, the flight crew heard two shots (Burke had just killed Ray Thompson). They immediately radioed air traffic controllers: “There’s gunfire aboard!” Seconds later, the plane’s black box recorded three more shots, then some commotion, then a final shot.

  The tower tried to re-contact the pilots, but the jet was no longer under their control. It was now under the firm control of gravity as it made a seven-hundred-miles-per-hour descent into the ground. Forty-three people died instantly, making Burke the perpetrator of the single worst workplace violence tragedy in American history. The worst, but far from the last.

&n
bsp; We generally think of these shooting sprees as being committed by employees at large corporations or government agencies, but an increasing number are perpetrated by stalkers, patrons, and even college students. Several of our clients now are major universities. In years past, they would not have had these concerns, but violence finds its way into every institution of our culture, and people not expecting it are also not prepared for it.

  Often, the signs are all there, but so is the denial. For example, after some terrible on-campus violence, school officials will describe a perpetrator as having been “a student in good standing.” Such descriptions are meant to say, “Who could have known?” but further inquiry always answers that question.

  The case of college student Wayne Lo is an informative example. On the morning of the day he became famous, Wayne received a package at the college. A receptionist was suspicious about its contents (suspicion is a signal of intuition) because of two words on the return address: “Classic Arms.” She correctly notified resident directors, who took the package to a regularly scheduled meeting with the dean, Bernard Rodgers. Staff members wanted to open the package, which they thought might contain a weapon, but Dean Rodgers said it would be improper for the college to interfere with the delivery of a student’s mail. He did agree that a member of the staff could approach Wayne Lo to discuss it.