'55 school killer: A life taken, lived

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, April, 2007 | by Steven Rea Inquirer Movie Critic

At Swarthmore College on Jan. 11, 1955, Bob Bechtel shot and killed a fellow student, Francis Holmes Strozier. One bullet, from a .22-caliber rifle, in the head.

Five years later, Bechtel was at Susquehanna University, pursuing a degree in psychology.

Fifty years later, in 2005, filmmaker Macky Alston trained a camera on Bechtel, now a professor of environmental psychology at the University of Arizona. His daughters Carrah Bechtel and Amanda Willis were there. So was Bev Bechtel, his wife.

The Killer Within , the documentary showing tomorrow and Sunday at the Philadelphia Film Festival, is about the night that Bechtel, a proctor in Swarthmore's Wharton Hall dorm, a kid who had grown up taunted and bullied,...