The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Mass murderers do strike fear in the public, despite the fact that they often die at the scene-a fifth of these murderers die by their own hand.16 In contrast to a serial killer still at large-an ever-present danger because he is still "out there"-the mass murderer makes people fear for their safety in public places, at work, in school, in the mall, and even in their own homes. The point being: somebody else, whom no one suspects could quite unpredictably do the same thing tomorrow or the next day. This type of fear became greatly magnified after Richard Speck's murder of eight nurses in Chicago and Charles Whitman's murder of fourteen in the University of Texas quadrangle-these acts occurred just two weeks apart in the summer of 1966.17 And those dramatic murders came not so long after the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter and his family-in their own home-as famously told by Truman Capote in his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood.18 When it comes to safety and survival, our sense of statistics goes out the window. Never mind that mass murder is rare, that school shootings are particularly rare. The media blitz that accompanies all such crimes, especially the ones carried out by 44 crazy people" (like Jennifer Sanmarco, who was arrested once for public nudity and who used to argue with "voices" in front of her coworkers) or disgruntled workers (like James Huberty of the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's massacre) magnifies the assailants as evil demons who target anyone and puts yellow highlighter under the message: This could happen to you!

  Although it does appear that mass murder is on the rise since the 1960s, some of the increase is more apparent than real-and this is for at least two reasons. In the United States, for example, the population is more than twice what it was fifty years ago. This means that a number that seems twice as high may be proportionally (per million population) the same as before. Also, the more recent mass murderers are more prone to attack the public indiscriminately; those of the period between the two World Wars were largely mob-related (as in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre). As long as you weren't a mobster who confined his hit list to rival mobsters, you had no worries, and the newspapers (and now the TV) didn't force the public so vehemently to think that you might be next. This may help explain how it is that we tend to regard Al Capone and John Dillinger as "bad guys," but mass killers like Mark Lepine (who killed fourteen women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989) or Patrick Purdy (who killed five Cambodian schoolchildren in California, also in 1989) as "evil." Lepine hated educated women; Purdy hated Asians. Understandably, we sympathize much more with women and children than we do with Bugs Moran's gangsters.

  Among the different motives that lie behind mass murder, the public has come to put the "disgruntled worker" in first place, that is, the worker who has recently been fired or is threatened with losing his job. This idea, although only partially based on fact, has been fixed in the public mind thanks to the influence of the sensational press.19 This sensationalism has given rise to the unfortunate phrase "going postal." The phrase gained popularity in the aftermath of the mass murder in Edmond, Oklahoma, August 20, 1986, when Patrick Sherrill, who was about to be fired from his post office job, brought a number of his many guns to the office and killed fourteen coworkers, before turning the gun on himself. What lifted this murder to national attention was the large number of victims. Sherrill was a friendless loner with no known family; no one even came to claim his body. His only earthly attachments were to the National Guard (of which he was a member) and to his gun col lection. He boasted of having fought in Vietnam but was shown never to have seen active duty.20 He gave the world nothing except a bad reputation to postal workers, and that only because he killed fourteen of his coworkers. Popular press aside, postal workers are actually not any more likely to commit a mass murder than are the employees of other large corporations.

  That said, mass murderers, for the most part, do fall into one of a half dozen categories. The most common are indeed the disgruntled workers (more broadly known as employment disputes but also including selfemployed men who have failed at their own ventures).21 But the disgruntled workers make up only about 20 percent22 of all the mass murderers. Also common: rejected lovers (including stalkers of persons with whom there is no real relationship) who comprise about 8 percent, hate crime killers (11 percent), and men committing some other felony. Less common are individuals who are obviously psychotic, the cornered cult leader, and, rarest of all, the man who commits a mass murder to hide the murder of just one targeted victim. Matters of definition enter into the equation here: about two out of five mass murders take place within the home, often with a father killing wife, children, and sometimes himself.23 But some choose to call these acts "familicide" (my own preference), since they form such a special and important group-as highlighted by the case of John List in chapter 4.

  All six of the female mass murderers known to me have been psychotic-either manic-depressive or schizophrenic.24 This was true of Laurie Wasserman Dann, the mass murderer manque alluded to earlier. She was the Illinois woman who tried to stab her ex-husband to death with an ice pick and later, in May of '88, after setting several fires, forced her way into a schoolroom in Winnetka, armed with three pistols, and proceeded to shoot at a class of second-grade pupils, killing one and wounding five others. When the police were closing in on her that evening, she killed herself with one of the guns.25 A little earlier in her violent career she had seen a prominent psychopharmacologist, Dr. John Greist, presumably to treat her manic-depression. She brought him some Kool-Aid (shades of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana) laced with arsenic, however, rather than with cyanide. Dr. Greist wisely declined and thus lived to tell the story to those of us in attendance at a conference he gave at the hospital where I was working some years ago. It put me in mind of the line in Virgil's Aeneid: Timeo Danaos et donaferentes- I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.26

  Thomas Hamilton

  The case I chose to exemplify disgruntlement is that of Thomas Hamilton of Glasgow. Born Thomas Watt in 1952, his surname was changed to Hamilton when at age four he was adopted by his maternal grandparents. As with many eventual mass murderers, Hamilton was a loner, a social misfit, a pariah, and a markedly paranoid person who would later send off letters to members of Parliament, even to Queen Elizabeth, complaining that the authorities were preventing him from engaging in youth work. Therein lay the rub, for Hamilton was a homosexual pedophile or (as others had said) a sexual psychopath. He became a Scout leader who ran gyms and camps for boys. He insisted the boys do their exercises clad only in bathing suits. He took numerous pictures of them, concentrating on their lower halves. At some point Hamilton embezzled £10,000 to buy camera equipment at a time when he was unemployed. In all fairness, there was no evidence that he actually had sexual contact with the boys. When his conduct came to the attention of the authorities, however, because of parents' objections, he offered the lame excuse that "it was necessary to identify what muscles were being used so that wrong movements could be corrected."27 A failure at everything he undertook, he got heavily into debt, living off credit cards and social supplements.

  An avid gun collector, he ended up owning at least six, boasting to the boys about his membership in a gun club. This is not the place to catalog the innumerable signs of trouble in the offing that were missed, ignored, or underestimated by the social workers, police, and scouting officials who were sent warnings about Hamilton (often enough from the parents of the boys in his camp). As is true with many histories of mass murderers, signs of impending disaster were glaring-in retrospect. We think of the title of a famous book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Furious at the parents who voiced complaints about his treatment of their boys and down to his last three pence, Hamilton entered a schoolroom in Dunblane, Scotland, on March 13, 1966, armed with two Browning 9 mm automatics and two .357 Magnum revolvers, and killed the teacher and sixteen pupils, before finally turning one of the guns on himself.

  Several prestigious mental health experts in Scotland offered their opinions about Hamilton after the tragedy. Those of f
orensic psychologist David Cooke from Glasgow are particularly apt. Cooke stated that "[t]here were major difficulties in Thomas Hamilton's life which threatened his self-esteem. He was in debt.... He was being refused access to premises to hold his boys clubs.... It may have been the case that, like many mass killers, he obtained feelings of power and mastery by fantasizing his revenge on those whom he perceived as persecuting him.... He believed that parents were spreading rumors that he was a pervert."28 Hamilton seems to have figured, quite logically under the circumstances, that the "sweetest" revenge would be to kill not the parents but their children. He knew that would inflict upon his enemies a whole lifetime of suffering, rather than the few seconds of suffering that would be endured by the children. In choosing that alternative, he of course also ensured himself the enduring reputation of consummate evil. Dr. Baird, a forensic psychiatrist, felt that Hamilton's primary motive was suicide. I do not see this as an either-or situation. Hamilton wanted revenge, as Cooke mentioned; he wanted people to sit up and take notice; he wanted to rise from feeling unnoticed and ineffective to a position of power and affirmation.29 To effect this change, while knowing he had run out of any hope to succeed in any other way, suicide beckoned. But it must be suicide with a flourish, with revenge and fame built into the final act, letting the world know without saying the words: Apres moi, le deluge.

  Examples from crime reports in the media are legion. In February 2008, for example, Steven Kazmierczak, a former Northern Illinois University student in his twenties, entered the campus and killed six, before killing himself.30 He had been hospitalized for mental illness and was depressed, but he had refused to take his medications. He failed at various jobs and ventures, and finally-in an act of revenge-suicide-he "got back" at those whose lives appeared to be more successful than his, before then killing himself. In Japan, Tomohiro Katoh, a man of twentyfive, was apparently "tired of life" and ran his car into a crowd, then stabbing people who were nearby, killing ten people altogether, before committing suicide.31 In a case where the motives are clearer, Richard Hawkins, an Oklahoma man of twenty, having been fired from his job and rejected by his girlfriend, killed eight people before turning his gun on himself.3z

  Richard Farley

  The rejected lover is another popular "flavor" of mass murder. The psychology so often seen in mass murder: the socially awkward outcast and loner, grudge holding and paranoid, unable to succeed-yet unable to accept failure and move on-shows up about as often in matters of love as in matters of work. When Richard Farley was thirty-six, he met Laura Black; both had been employees of a California firm called Electromagnetic Systems Labs (ESL) in 1984. Laura did not accept his advances, at which point he began to stalk her. He did such things as attend her gym class, wait outside her house, and send her threatening letters. Two years later, undeterred, he threatened to kill her if she refused to date him. One can only marvel at how this otherwise intelligent man grew up so blind to social niceties as not to realize that this was not the way to a woman's heart. He managed somehow to get a set of her keys and left a duplicate set on the dashboard of her car, letting her understand he had access to her house. This got him fired, but it didn't end the stalking. Laura changed homes three times, got an unlisted phone number-all to no avail. She obtained an Order of Protection against him, which was about as effective as those documents usually are. Farley's rage now ignited to the flashpoint, he brought a few of his many weapons to ESL-two pistols and three rifles-and on February 16, 1988, shot to death seven employees. He tried to kill Laura, but she survived with a bullet wound to the shoulder. Rather than killing himself or committing "suicide by cop," Farley chose to surrender to a SWAT team. He was sentenced to death at his subsequent trial. This was a high-profile crime: both he and Laura were highly educated professionals; the crime came in the wake of several other notorious California stalking murders inadequately dealt with by the laws at the time. A movie was made of the case (I Can Make You Love Me), and California then passed its first anti-stalking law.

  George Hennard

  Mass murder triggered by hatred of one group or another is a common motif. In these cases there is often a mixture of reactions that become explosive only when suddenly combined, as when ammonium iodide crystals are ignited by (of all things!) water. A bigot, for example, may sit tight with his bigotry for years on end-until faced with romantic rejection or job loss or exam failure, which then becomes the catalyst to mass murder of people who belong to the hated group.

  George Hennard had hated his mother (for reasons never made clear) and by extension women in general (whom he called "snakes"). He also hated Hispanics, blacks, and gays. Hennard's Swiss-born father was an army surgeon, and the family moved around a good deal when he was growing up. In school he was known as a withdrawn and sullen loner who never dated and never had friends. He joined the navy but got into trouble for smoking marijuana and for a racial argument, for which he had his seaman's papers suspended. He often made derogatory comments about women, especially after having a squabble with his mother.33 By his mid-thirties he was working in a cement company in Texas; his behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre and menacing. A week before the incident, he quit his job-perhaps with the understanding that his life would soon be ending. On October 15, 1991, he reached his thirty-fifth birthday. That evening he watched a television program during the senate hearings about prospective Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, a black man, who had come under criticism for possible sexual harassment of an assistant, Anita Hill, also black. Hennard was heard to scream at the image of Anita Hill: "You dumb bitch! You bastards opened the door for all the women!" Woman hatred and bigotry now met in an explosive mix.

  That combination seems to have been the trigger-that, plus the awareness that his biblical lifespan of "three-score and ten years" was about to be half over, with nothing to show for it. At all events, the next morning Hennard drove his truck through the glass wall of Luby's Cafeteria in (the ominously named) Killeen, Texas. With a pistol in each hand, he set about shooting to death everyone in sight-with the one exception of a woman and her four-year-old daughter, whom he allowed to leave, just after shooting her parents to death.34 Yet, he yelled "Bitch!" at another woman, before killing her. When it was all over, Hennard had killed twenty-two people, fourteen of them women (one of whom was a black grandmother and widow of a locally prominent official; the others were white), just before the police arrived; then he killed himself. Whether he sought to outdo James Huberty (who had killed twenty-one at the McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, California, seven years before) is unclear, as is most everything else about Hennard. His parents and three younger siblings were understandably reluctant to be questioned by the authorities. As with combative, paranoid, bigoted loners in general, we know little about Hennard other than that bare psychological fact. He did have a few drinking buddies, one of whom mentioned that Hennard "would talk crazy when he was drunk, but he's a nice guy when he's sober."3'

  Even though Hennard had many "risk factors" for mass murder: paranoid grudge holding and hatred of various groups, no friendships or sexual partners, substance abuse, gun ownership, poor work history, troubled relationship with a parent, being a male between the ages of eighteen and forty ... all this made that final outburst "more likely" (than for some other young man in that town)-but not inevitable. People often say, "If only he could have gotten help." But there is a catch-22 here. It is no easy matter to compel a man with Hennard's personality to undergo psychiatric treatment; it is extremely unlikely that he would ever seek it voluntarily. It is also unlikely that such a man would benefit even if he were in treatment, especially if forced against his will. Hennard was not even psychopathic like Thomas Hamilton; he was belligerent, antisocial, and hot-tempered-but he would have more in common with men like Charles Whitman, who, despite the massive destruction they cause, belong on a lower rung of the Gradations of Evil scale: probably number 8, for murders (including mass murder) sparked by smoldering rage in someone withou
t psychopathy. Hamilton, in contrast, having been a psychopath before he turned mass murderer, belongs in Category 16.

  Dale Pierre

  At the extreme other end of the Gradations scale is the story of the Hi-Fi Shop Murders in Ogden, Utah, which took place on April 22, 1974. This was Utah's worst murder to date. But I doubt if anything has rivaled it since, in terms of sheer sadism and in the degree of suffering inflicted upon the victims. The crime comes under the heading of "felonymurder," meaning: murder(s) committed during the course of some other felony-in this case, armed robbery.

  Dale Pierre was born in 1953 in Tobago, West Indies, but then moved with his family to Trinidad. Both parents had respectable lives and jobs: his father was a carpenter, and his mother was a hospital worker. Dale was troublesome early on: disobedient, blaming a teacher for favoring another student, stealing flagrantly and often, and running away from home. He was expelled from school because of his behavior. Dale had grandiose dreams of fabulous wealth and prestige, driving in flashy cars so everyone would notice him. A loner with no friends, these dreams seemed far beyond his reach. In his mid-teens his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where at first he did some menial jobs that offered no hope for realizing his lofty ambitions. At twenty-one, he decided to join the air force, but had no patience to spend the many years it would take to become a pilot; instead, he opted for a ground-crew job. He got stationed in Ogden, Utah, at the air force base north of Salt Lake City. His compulsive stealing continued, becoming even more brazen. Dale stole a car from a sergeant at the base and, when caught, murdered the sergeant, bayoneting him several times in the face. Dale was the prime suspect but the authorities were not at first able to gather enough evidence. When interrogated, Dale was unflinching in his lying and had the "thousand-yard stare" that intimidated everyone.