The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

by Jeffrey Toobin

  He came out with his gun raised: an effeminate-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry-red lips, holding the rifle like a pro—stock to cheek, elbow high. Harry Potter with an AK-47. He crossed the hall to the GIRLS 7–16 section, where, among the rows of dresses and frilly tops, he came across two women and shot and killed them both.

  The high-decibel blasts ricocheted through the store and sent the remaining shoppers into a panicky, screaming dash for cover, and as they ran, crying out in confusion, the teen squeezed off two more rounds hitting the arm of a man lunging into a side door—then aiming at a man fleeing down an escalator, killing him before he reached the last step. The boy leaned over a balcony overlooking a central atrium, squinted down 40 feet to Level 1, where a janitor was scrambling to find a safe zone, and shot and killed him. Swiveling back to Level 3, he saw a woman ducking into an employee locker room, and he shot and killed her.

  In the midst of the carnage, the boy changed magazines, loading in 30 fresh bullets. He walked over to the customer-service counter, behind which four workers were huddled. One of them, Dianne Trent, 53, had hastily called 911 and was describing a “young boy with glasses” coming toward her when the teen shot her at point-blank range, killing her instantly. He then shot the remaining three people behind the counter, wounding a man and two women. They collapsed in a squirming, bloody tangle. Then he turned around and shot and killed a 65-year-old man hiding behind a chair with his wife.

  Barely five minutes had passed since the boy started shooting. Seven were now slain, four more badly wounded, bleeding into the thick-pile carpet. Behind the customer-service counter, one of the boy’s victims was crying out, “I need oxygen, I need oxygen.” She bled to death before help arrived. Police and ambulance sirens could now be heard approaching from the distance.

  The teen shot a stuffed teddy bear. Then he turned the gun on himself: one shot, under the chin.

  At that same moment, in a suburban sheriff’s office miles away from the pandemonium at the mall, a 41-year-old woman named Molly Rodriguez was consulting a deputy about her son, whom she feared might be planning to kill himself. She had discovered a rifle missing from her ex-husband’s house that morning, she told the deputy. She wasn’t sure of the rifle’s make, other than that it was black, and ugly.

  As the deputy compiled his report, news came in over the radio about the shooting at the mall. “Ma’am,” the deputy asked, “might that be your son?” Rodriguez said she doubted it. Ten minutes later, the shooter was positively identified as Robert A. Hawkins, born May 17th, 1988, to Ronald Hawkins and Molly Rodriguez.

  Her child.

  IT WAS A BIG STORY. For about a week. Immediately after the shooting, the media descended on the woodsy suburb of Omaha known as Bellevue (population 50,000), where Hawkins had been living, and began some hit-and-run reporting. But that soon sputtered out. After it was discovered that the shooter had a history of mental illness, the national media left town, and then when it came out that he’d recently been fired from a job at McDonald’s, even the local guys dropped the story and went back to reporting on the weather. That was pretty much the extent of the digging, as if losing the opportunity to flip burgers was what drove the teen to murder.

  Less than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, teen murder was such a horrifying novelty that it occupied the entire national conversation for months. But these days, teenage shooters come and go on TV with such regularity that their sprees hardly seem surprising anymore; on the contrary, it feels almost naive to be shocked. In the end, the Robert Hawkins mall massacre—the bloodiest episode in Nebraska since the Charles Starkweather murders of 1958, and one of the deadliest rampages in American history—amounted to just a few days’ worth of news and infotainment. Within two weeks of the shooting, Von Maur was speed-cleaned and reopened, just in time for the Christmas rush. In the atrium where Hawkins had sprayed bullets and slain eight, there was no lasting marker of what he had done: no plaque for the dead on the freshly polished marble columns, no memorial fountain where the victims had fallen. The aisles were soon humming with contented customers who didn’t seem to mind, or even know, that they were shopping in a former killing field. Only the presence of a new security guard, roaming the racks with a revolver on his belt, suggested that anything untoward had happened here at all.

  From the very beginning of his life, Rob Hawkins was a throwaway kid. In 1982, Molly Rodriguez was working the counter at the Swiss Colony in a mall in San Angelo, Texas: a buxom, petite 16-year-old in white pants and a tube top, looking for a husband to take her away from being the seventh kid in a working-class family of nine kids. In walks Ronald Hawkins, young buck, rising star in the Air Force’s electronic-warfare division, and they hit it off: marriage in a matter of months, and then a child, Cynthia. But things changed after the birth, and they changed for the worse. The infant bawling in the house turned them both off, Molly recalls, and without the bedroom to bond them, the tenderness left their relationship. Soon Ronald acted like Molly wasn’t so hot anymore, calling her a “pussy life-support system.” She got back at him by having affairs with soldiers at the base in Suffolk, England, where Ronald was transferred.

  After that, the sex was more sadistic than loving. It seemed to Molly like Ronald enjoyed when she came home with other men’s semen still inside her—at night, while she slept, he would sometimes ejaculate on her face. She got pregnant again in 1987, hoping the second kid would solve the problems of the first, but by then all they really felt for each other was hostility. Robbie was born the next spring, a normal, healthy baby, but during his fragile first months—the period when the infant nervous system soaks up every stimulus—he got wired to violence as his parents’ marriage devolved into a cage fight. “Mom and Dad were on the floor slugging it out,” Molly recalls. Before long, Rob’s childhood became even more traumatic; several doctors would later conclude that at some point during these first years, Rob was molested. Once, when Molly was changing Rob’s diapers, his older sister, Cynthia, then six, leaned forward and put her mouth on his privates. Molly pulled her off. She stared at her husband, but he said nothing. On another occasion, Rob was left alone with a relative who, Rob would later say, “tickled” him in a way that made him feel odd.

  Infants are imitative: They learn by copying what they see. And by the time he was four years old, Rob had grown into an attack machine. He was a menace on the playground, punching other kids or kicking them in the groin whenever he got upset. When teachers disciplined him, he bit their hands. And he held grudges; he once came up to a teacher he disliked and slammed her head in a door. He did this when he was a preschooler, only three and a half feet tall and 34 pounds.

  In 1992, after Ronald was posted to an Air Force base in Omaha, he brought his four-year-old son to the Methodist Richard Young Hospital and asked the psychiatrists what to do with the violent boy. The doctors asked Robbie why he kept hurting other kids. He lowered his eyes to the floor.

  “Because I’m stupid and bad,” he mumbled.

  Committed to the hospital for observation, Rob behaved erratically. One minute he was playing peacefully with Matchbox cars; the next he was desperately throwing his arms around a nurse, as if asking for protection. He was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder—the condition usually found in battle-weary veterans—caused by his hellish family life. After a month of heavy medication, the doctors sent him home with a warning that his recovery depended on continued therapy, and more important, on having a stable, nurturing family environment.

  But stability was not his fate. Robbie returned instead to a chaotic custody battle between his parents, who were now divorced and waging a Jerry Springer-style campaign against each other that culminated in Molly being dragged away in handcuffs and threatening Ronald’s new wife, Candace. Molly herself had quickly remarried—hooking up with an Air Force friend of Ronald’s named Mark Dotson—and she was anxious to start a new family that did
n’t have the drama and the burdens of her first big relationship. So after Candace had repeatedly called the police on Molly with charges of child endangerment, Molly gave up and surrendered her visitation rights to Rob, hoping to cut ties with the past and start fresh.

  She called her son into her room to explain the situation. By then Rob had been on regular doses of Thioridazine, the antipsychotic drug, and Ritalin, to treat attention-deficit disorder. Molly hugged him and said that she was going away. “He didn’t really understand it,” she recalls. “He was so young.”

  WHEN MOLLY’S ABANDONMENT finally sunk in, Rob turned his formidable anger against his stepmother, Candace, the only maternal figure left in his life, transferring onto her all the rage he must have felt toward his biological mother. It probably didn’t help matters that while Rob was always getting in trouble for smoking and fighting, Candace’s own son, Zachary, four years Rob’s junior, seemed to skate smoothly along. Nor did her response to his tantrums help. Rob’s father preferred to handle his outbursts by pinning him on the floor, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he would calm down. But when it was her turn to control him, Candace, an Air Force vet, used the back of her hand.

  Growing up on a steady diet of psychiatric medication and corporal punishment, Rob became more violent and withdrawn. When he was 13, his ongoing battle with Candace went nuclear. She searched his backpack for cigarettes, and Rob flipped out on her. In response, she slapped him across the face so hard that her ring cut his forehead. He balled up his fist and said quietly, “I’m going to kill you.”

  Candace believed he was capable of making good on the threat: For his 14th birthday, Rob got another hospital admission and another fistful of pills. This time he sat in the doctor’s office and stared blankly, refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The doctor insisted he apologize to Candace. But Rob was in no mood to make amends with his family. “I hope they get into a car accident,” he told the doctor. By now, he no longer regretted his outbursts. The four-year-old kid who thought of himself as stupid and bad for hitting people was now a teenager deep in the throes of mental illness. If the doctors returned him to his stepmother, he said, he “knew where the knives were located, and she would leave the house in a body bag.” On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones, Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.

  Not long after, his father drove to juvenile court and asked the judge to take over: His health insurance had run out, he told the court, and he couldn’t afford to pay Rob’s medical bills. Molly, Rob’s biological mother, wasn’t at the hearing—she wasn’t even informed of the court date, although she lived 12 miles away—but in any case she was out of the picture by then, off raising her new family. After a hearing that lasted just eight minutes by the stenographer’s clock, Judge Robert O’Neal rapped his gavel and the state department of Health and Human Services became Rob’s legal guardian.

  TWO YEARS LATER, the angry young man waiting in his therapist’s office for his father and stepmother to show up for a counseling session looked more like a refugee from a Dickens tale than a kid from Omaha. At 16, Rob was now a veteran of institutions, having spent the last 24 months of his childhood in group homes because he resisted the reconciliation with Candace that would have allowed him to rejoin his family. He looked the part of a miserable ward of the state: painfully thin from years of undereating, nails chewed to gnarled stubs. He wore his hair long, in a thick curtain that hid much of his face and obscured his eyes. He had been molested by another resident, and was prone to suicidal despair. None of it matters, he would tell his therapists: “We’re basically just numbers.”

  In some ways, he was even more traumatized than when he’d entered the system. He had done nine months at the Piney Ridge Center, a residential treatment center in Missouri (where he got into physical fights with other residents), before being transferred at the judge’s behest to Cooper Village, a home for boys in Nebraska (where he lived under strict isolation, rarely allowed to leave the campus or make phone calls). Over the years he kept trying to buck the rules and talk to his biological mother, with whom he held out hope of a reunion, but he was never allowed to call her.

  By now, his psychological profile included the darker, more exotic ailment that would lie behind his future crimes: anti-social personality disorder, a condition that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for sufferers to feel empathy for strangers. It is the underlying pathology of most serial killers. Rob drew swastikas and professed to believe in Satan. When the staff threatened to send him to another institution if he didn’t reconcile with his family, this brooding young man who had spent his teen years being raised by orderlies gave them a dark warning. “If you send me there,” he said, “I’ll burn that motherfucking place down and all of the people in it.”

  But now, sitting in the therapist’s office, Rob was about to surprise the doctors and social workers who had seen little evidence of change in him. After two years of round-the-clock therapy—at least two sessions a day, plus novel approaches like equine therapy, where he worked with horses—Rob was finally ready to apologize to Candace for threatening her. His therapists considered this the breakthrough they’d been working toward, and his caseworker noted in his file that he was mentally well enough to return home.

  But when Rob asked her forgiveness for “saying all those hurtful things to you when I was mad,” Candace refused to accept his apology. Rob, she told a caseworker, had clearly been “coached” by his therapist. What’s more, she added, she would “never feel safe with Robert in the house.” She threatened to divorce Ronald if he ever brought his son home.

  Rob was furious. The state had spent two years coaxing and pressuring and drugging him to get him to apologize—and when he finally did, it got him nowhere. “My stepmother is evil—she has no heart,” Rob told his roommate at Cooper Village, another skinny, lost kid named Dallas. As the days passed in quiet isolation, the two boys clung to each other—from the back, their long hair made them look identical—and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed by wearing purple rubber bracelets. They called themselves the Purple Skulls. Noticing that the boys got into more trouble when they were separated, the staff made it a point to keep them together. “We were closer than brothers,” Dallas recalls. “Never apart.”

  One day, when Dallas turned 17, Rob was given permission to go to a dollar store, where he got heaps of candy and all the soda bottles he could carry. That night, he invited the other patients on his hall over and threw Dallas a surprise birthday party. It touched his friend deeply. “Rob could be great when he loved you,” Dallas says.

  As the months passed and other kids came and went at Cooper Village, Rob and Dallas remained, dutifully obeying the regimen of classes and therapy, scheduled in orderly blocks from wakeup at 6:30 a.m. to lights out at 10:30 p.m. The two worked the system to the point that the staff allowed them to have guitars and video games in their room, just like regular kids, and to stay up late playing chess and drawing and talking. It was during these late-night bull sessions that Rob admitted to Dallas that he missed his mother terribly. “He talked about her a lot,” Dallas recalls. “He wanted to be with her.”

  ROB HAD NO IDEA where his mother was at that point, let alone the kind of life she was leading. By then, her marriage to Dotson had fallen apart and she was soon in full-blast dating mode, seeing three or four guys at once, hopping from bed to bed, taking full advantage of the variety and the freedom.

  In December 2004, Rob finally caught a break and was relocated to a pleasant foster home. Run by a grandmother named Marty Glass who had 10 kids of her own, and who over the years had taken in nearly two dozen more children, it was the first place where Rob felt “appreciated and understood,” he told his caseworker. Glass thought he was a “joy to have around” and a “very intelligent boy with an interesting point of view.” Rob spent much of that winter outdoors, helping a contractor build a new addition to Glass’ front porch, and though
he was still no angel—he was flunking out of Fort Calhoun High School, selling pot to seventh-graders and staging half-assed stickups at gas stations—that period, he would later tell his friends, was the happiest of his life.

  It was around that time that Rob, who now had access to a telephone after years in group homes, finally connected with his mother. One day, after convincing his sister to give him the number, he picked up the phone and called his stepfather.

  “Do you remember someone named Robert Hawkins?” he asked.

  “Of course I do,” his stepfather said. Then he handed the phone to Molly, who was over for a visit. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Mommy, it’s me, Robbie.”

  “Oh, my God, Robert!” she gasped. “How are you? Where are you?”

  Molly threw herself into his life as if the separation and abandonment had just been a big misunderstanding. A few days after he called her, she was sitting on Glass’ front porch, bouncing Rob on her knee as they talked. Glass objected, saying she shouldn’t treat the 17-year-old like a baby. “But he is my baby,” Molly shot back. “He’s my baby boy.”

  Molly convinced Rob to clean up his appearance and cut his long hair, and then she went one better, buying him a used green Jeep in good condition and promising it to him if he finished high school. “I wanted to let him know that I believed in him, that he could do it,” she recalls. “To let him know that he was troubled but he wasn’t sick.”

  The next time Rob went to court, wearing a shirt and tie that Molly had purchased for him, Judge O’Neal was impressed. “I think you’re doing a great job, and you are a sharp-dressed man today,” the judge told him. “I’m very pleased, and I’m proud of you.”