The Violence Project

by Jillian Peterson

  But for all the activism and attention, protests and political momentum, this horrific shooting generated, we eventually turned our attention elsewhere. Bills got caught up in the partisan gridlock that has gripped Washington in recent years, and mass shootings have remained an almost monthly occurrence, a grim fixture of American life.

  This is why we started studying mass shootings four years ago. Frustrated that policy conversations arising out of grief, fear, and “common sense” weren’t getting us any closer to the “never again” America kept promising, we decided to start from the bottom up to find solutions that would really work. And the first step to solving a problem is understanding it. We must learn why mass shootings are occurring more and more frequently and figure out who exactly the mass shooters are and what their pathway to violence looks like.

  —

  This book’s two authors have been working closely together for a long time. We’re both university professors in criminal justice and cofounders of a nonprofit violence research center, but it wasn’t always that way. Jill’s first job out of college was as a special investigator on death penalty cases for the New York Public Defense Office, and in many ways it was this experience that set us on the road to writing this book.

  At the age of twenty-two, Jill spent her days on Rikers Island, New York City’s principal jail complex, talking to men who had committed brutal, bloody murders, trying to reconstruct their journeys into darkness. Her very first client had kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered a woman just a few months younger than Jill. After days of digging through records and reviewing crime scene photos, Jill visited the jail for the first time, terrified she was about to meet Hannibal Lecter. Instead, she met a young, broken man with serious mental illness who had lived the saddest story she had ever heard. This became a familiar pattern, so much so that Jill developed a saying: “The worse the crime, the worse the story.” It was always true. The stories never excused the crimes or meant the perpetrators were not responsible, but they explained how these individuals gotten to the point of committing such unthinkable violence.

  While Jill was frequenting Rikers Island, coauthor James was navigating the prison-like structures of some of New York City’s toughest public schools, working as a special education teacher. The experience gave him a deep appreciation for the storm and stress of adolescence, but only after he had moved back home to the United Kingdom did the purpose of his learning become clear. As a PhD student at the University of Oxford, James began studying gangs and serious youth violence. He spent his days and nights interviewing juvenile gang members and hanging out on street corners with drug dealers, watching them work.9 Through this experience, he discovered, much like Jill, that even the most prolific violent offenders have stories—stories that put their crimes in context.

  After being abolished in 1984 and then reinstated in 1995, the death penalty was again abolished in New York State in 2007, so Jill left the big city for the beaches of Irvine, California, and a PhD in psychology and social behavior. Minnesotans usually find their way back home, however, and Jill took an academic post in Saint Paul, at the same university as James, who had married a Minnesotan he met while she was studying abroad. We quickly learned we had similar research interests in violent crime, but, more important, we understood from experience working in the justice system that you can’t prevent violence from occurring unless you fully understand its roots. And so it was that the two of us decided to join forces and pivot our research agendas to the topic of mass shootings.

  —

  It was June 5, 2017, one week before the first anniversary of the Orlando nightclub shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time, and there was breaking news of yet another mass shooting, once again in Orlando. A forty-five-year-old factory worker had killed five former colleagues and himself. The pundits, politicians, and “experts” were busy lining up the usual suspects: bullying, drugs, video games, psychopathy, mental illness, guns. It was all conjecture and partisan talking points. Jill said, sincerely, surely, we could do better.

  As a psychologist, Jill was driven to understand the pathway that leads a person to the point of mass violence. What separates someone who kills four or forty people from someone who just kills one? What was their childhood and adolescence like? What was going on in their mind and what did they hope to accomplish? Are there fundamental psychological and behavioral differences between offenders who kill family members, partners, or friends first but then go on to kill victims at random, versus perpetrators who target people they have no personal connection to or motive against? What about perpetrators who target their schools or workplaces compared to those who kill at random in other public spaces?

  As a sociologist, James thought it was important that we examine how society was affecting trends in mass violence. Was the rise in the number of mass shootings in recent years related to our current economic and political climate? What role did the internet and social media play? Just how allegiant were mass shooters to the ideologies they tapped into? When we focused our policy conversations solely on guns and mental health, were we missing the larger social factors at play that made mass shootings a problem unique to the United States?

  We launched the Violence Project in August of that year. The goal was to gather as much information as possible about each and every mass shooter so we could look for patterns in the data and see if profiles emerged that might point us to new ideas for prevention. We made a list of every mass shooter in America from 1966 to the present day who had killed four or more people in a public space—172 of them—and started to interrogate their lives.

  Two months into the project, the deadliest mass shooting in history occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada. On October 1, 2017, a gunman perched at the window of a casino hotel opened fire on a crowd of people at an outdoor country music festival, killing sixty and injuring hundreds. The scenes were horrific. They compelled us to immediate action. We worked with a team of undergraduate psychology and criminology students to build a database of mass shooters. Together, we coded each perpetrator based on more than 150 different pieces of life history information, creating the largest and most comprehensive database of mass shooters ever built.

  There are basic demographic variables: age, education, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, military service, immigrant status, and any criminal, gang, or terrorist affiliation. And not so basic: whether they grew up with a single parent; whether any parent had died by suicide; if they’d gone through a recent breakup or employment trouble; whether they had told others about their plans to kill ahead of time (known as “leakage”). A significant proportion of the variables deal with mental health: whether the perpetrator had been hospitalized for mental illness or prescribed antipsychotics; whether there was any evidence of suicidal tendencies or substance abuse. There’s also a component on the firearms used: whether they were purchased legally, illegally, or stolen, and the method of purchase, such as private sale, gun show, or store.

  We gathered this information from first-person accounts such as diaries, suicide notes, social media and blog posts, audio and video recordings, interview transcripts, and personal correspondence with the perpetrators. We also used secondary sources such as media coverage (television, newspapers, magazines); documentary films; biographies; academic books and journal articles; court transcripts; federal, state, and local law enforcement records; medical records; school records; and autopsy reports. Anything that could be found on the internet or in the occasional Freedom of Information Act request was included. We report on our findings throughout this book.

  Public data were valuable in our research, but were far from perfect. After a few months immersed in the darkest corners of the internet researching mass shooters, we started talking about how helpful it would be if we could actually interview some of them directly. “Who do you think you are, Mindhunter?” one of our colleagues retorted, referencing the famed FBI criminal profiler John Douglas. Thinking back to those
early conversations from the comfort of our faculty offices, we saw that the idea did sound preposterous. Still, if we could ask the perpetrators of mass shootings questions about why they had done what they had done and what they had been thinking in the days and weeks before their crimes, it might help us understand how they could have been stopped.

  Knowing that it was a long shot, we decided to write letters to mass casualty offenders who were still alive—individuals who perpetrated, or attempted to perpetrate, shootings with the intention of killing four or more people. Almost all mass shooters die on the scene—either by killing themselves or being shot by police. But we wrote to all of the living mass shooters in prison, explaining that we were researchers, a psychologist and a sociologist, and that we wanted an interview. The focus of the interview was not the shooting itself but the perpetrator’s life story leading up to the shooting. We were clear that they would not be paid or compensated in any way and that we would keep their names anonymous so they would receive no additional media or attention. To our surprise, five perpetrators wrote us back and agreed.

  In addition to the shooters themselves, and in the hope of better understanding what had led them to kill, we ended up interviewing dozens of people who knew them and others like them, from their parents to their former grade school teachers. For nearly seventy years, investigators had used such “psychological autopsies,” involving extensive in-depth interviews with friends, family members, and colleagues, often to determine motives behind suicides. We adopted a similar approach because the practice can also provide clarity in cases of mass murder.

  We also interviewed mass shooting survivors, parents of deceased victims, security experts, first responders, and FBI investigators, because we needed to hear all sides of the story and account for the devastating impact of mass shootings. We reached out to some of these people, while others of them reached out to us. These interviews took place face-to-face, across the country, in offices, coffee shops, restaurants, or in people’s homes, and they lasted hours. (A few, however, took place over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.) People spoke to us because they wanted the shootings to stop. They wanted something good to come from their tragedy. They wanted their stories to save lives.

  —

  We spent one morning in the spotless kitchen of Tom and Caren Teves, loving parents who have experienced unspeakable tragedy. Over a brunch of croissants and fruit, we talked about their twenty-four-year-old son, Alex, whose face looked out at us from a wall of photographs. Caren described Alex as “the light of our family. He had a special gift—whoever he met he made them feel good about themselves. He was fun and funny. He loved to eat and explore. He was the life of the party.”

  Alex was a wrestler through middle and high school and attended the University of Arizona in Tucson for college. He then moved to Denver, Colorado, to earn a master’s degree in psychology. Alex graduated in May 2012 with his whole life ahead of him. Then, in July, during a late-night screening of the new Batman movie, he was murdered in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. When the first shots rang out, Alex threw himself on top of his girlfriend, shielding her from gunfire. He died protecting her.

  In the wake of Alex’s death, the Teveses founded the “No Notoriety” movement. Hurt and angry at the amount of media attention the gunman had received after the shooting—his face was on the front page of every newspaper and plastered across newscasts for weeks—the Teveses challenged the media to deprive the perpetrator of the attention he sought. Name the perpetrator as little as possible. Don’t show his face. Don’t let him inspire others.

  Throughout this book, we tell the stories of mass shooters. We do this not to glorify their actions but to understand how we can intervene earlier to prevent mass shootings before they occur. Our goal is to focus not on any one story or perpetrator but on what we can learn from the patterns in the stories over time that can help us prevent more people from dying. We also amplify the voices of the victims, survivors, heroes, and activists whose lives have been changed by these experiences to provide a full picture of this epidemic of violence, how it affects us on a personal level, and what people in communities all over the country are doing to fight it.

  In support of No Notoriety, we will not be naming the perpetrators we interviewed, nor any mass shooter, throughout this book. We gave some perpetrators labels, and some minor identifying details have been changed. Great care has been taken to protect the confidentiality of any research participants who requested it, and unless an interviewee gave their express permission for us to use their name, we have anonymized the data to shield them from any unwanted attention.

  —

  The first letter we received from Perpetrator A was brief. It was written neatly in impeccable cursive on yellow legal paper.

  Greetings.

  I received your letter today & would like to thank you for offering me the opportunity to participate in this study. It will be an honor to provide you whatever input/assistance I am able to contribute to your research.

  A few weeks later, Jill answered Perpetrator A’s first call from a maximum-security prison. We had no control over when our perpetrator research participants were able to call us, so we had to be ready to answer their collect calls at any moment. If we missed a call, it could be days before they could call again. We set up our research line to run through Jill’s cell phone when we weren’t at work. This time Jill was at home with her three kids, so she stepped out on the back porch to take the call.

  Perpetrator A was polite, formal, nervous—his Southern drawl was a little shaky: “So . . . this is a study about mass shooters?”

  “That’s right. We’re studying the life histories of mass shooters, everything leading up to your crime,” Jill began.

  “What makes people like me do such awful things?” Perpetrator A asked. “Sounds like a pretty important study. It sure seems like it’s happening a lot more often these days, doesn’t it?”

  Perpetrator A has now spent twenty-five years, more than half his life, locked up for killing four people and wounding seven others in a late-night restaurant shooting rampage, and in that time, mass shootings have only grown in number and severity.

  —

  Perpetrator B’s first letter to us was formal, gracious, written in shaky block letters:

  I RECEIVED YOUR LETTER, AND I THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO WRITE ME. I HAVE CONSIDERED YOUR REQUEST AND HAVE DECIDED THAT I AM INTERESTED IN BEING A PART OF THE WORK YOU ARE DOING TO PREVENT VIOLENCE FROM HAPPENING IN THE FUTURE. I WISH YOU THE BEST DURING THIS HOLIDAY SEASON AND THANK YOU AGAIN FOR CONTACTING ME. I WILL LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR RESPONSE. GOD BLESS YOU!

  Throughout this book, we will show our interactions with mass shooters like Perpetrator A and Perpetrator B in their own words, alongside those of many others throughout this book. Their stories help us question and challenge some common misconceptions about mass shootings and the policies that have followed. As we’ve synthesized our work, we have found that there are patterns in the lives of mass shooters that we see again and again. Understanding these patterns is, we feel, the key to unlocking solutions.

  First, many mass shooters experience childhood abuse and exposure to violence at a young age, often at the hands of their parents. Parental suicide is common, as is physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence in the home, and severe bullying by classmates. This early exposure to violence and unaddressed trauma feeds the perpetrator’s rage and despair later in life. Mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety, and paranoia commonly develop during adolescence and are rarely identified or treated.

  Second, nearly all mass shooters reach an identifiable crisis point in the days, weeks, or months before their violence—something that pushes them over the edge. For some, this is a relationship ending or the loss of a job. For others, it is an interpersonal conflict or mental health crisis. For the Parkland shooter, it was the death of his mother. Mass shooters communicate their crises to others in noticeable ways: in chan
ges in their appearance or behavior, or specific threats of violence against themselves or others. Too often, others notice the crises but don’t know how to intervene or to whom to report them.

  For many perpetrators, this is a suicidal crisis. The rise in mass shootings in the United States over the past decade maps onto the dramatic rise among white men of “deaths of despair”—deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related conditions. Despite the level of detailed planning that many perpetrators put into their attacks, they rarely have escape plans, because the shootings are meant to be their final acts. But a mass shooting is a unique form of suicide, an angry one, meant to cause as much harm as possible.

  Third, homicidal and suicidal ideation is fraught with uncertainty. Prospective mass shooters, looking for guidance, turn to past mass shooters for models of behavior, and the more they identify with them, the more they are influenced by them. They also turn on the news and scroll their social media feeds to watch the same unending coverage of mass shootings as the rest of us. A rise in shootings motivated by fame-seeking has coincided with the ubiquity of twenty-four-hour cable news, the internet, and social media. After studying and heroizing previous shooters, the next generation kills for the notoriety it brings, inspiring others down the line to follow suit.

  Mass shooters are angry and lonely, and many of them fixate on specific people or groups they can blame for their own miserable circumstances. School shooters blame their schools. Workplace shooters blame their bosses and coworkers. Others blame racial groups, religious groups, or women. Searching for validation for their hateful beliefs, mass shooters not only research other perpetrators of mass shootings but also spend time in online communities where they become more radicalized toward violence. An increase in ideologically motivated mass shootings has coincided with the emergence of a newly emboldened far right and “involuntary celibates,” who’ve forged national and even international alliances of hate online.