Bloody murderers - mass murderers

National Review, June 3, 1996 by Eugene H. Methvin

Potential mass murderers are everywhere, and there is not very much we can do to stop them.

Over the past two months the world has experienced a mini-epidemic of mass killings by men possessed with strange rages.

On March 13, the 43-year-old Thomas Watt Hamilton walked into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, armed with two Browning 9-mm automatics and two .357 magnum revolvers. He blasted away, killing a teacher and 16 five- and six-year-old children, and wounding 14 more. Then Hamilton killed himself.

Eight days later in the New York City suburb of Eastchester, Richard Sacchi, 26, called police to his home and shot the first two who arrived, killing one. For two hours he blasted away at reinforcing officers. He killed his 88-year-old grandmother, with whom he lived. Finally he killed himself. Laid out in the room were a black shirt and suit with a note that said, ''clothes for me funiral,'' and on a wall Sacchi had scribbled in pencil, ''Jesus, forgive me for my sins. I will see you in eternity,'' and, ''My dad is the best dad in the world.''

On April 6 in Vernon, British Columbia, an estranged husband, with a gun in each hand, invaded the home of his wife's family as they prepared for another daughter's wedding later that day. The gunman killed nine family members, then himself.

On April 28 on the Australian island of Tasmania, at a crowded tourist site, Martin Bryant, 29, killed 35 people. He fled to a guest house which, after a 12-hour standoff, he set afire. His clothes in flames, he ran out, badly burned, and was captured.

While details varied, the killers' profiles were remarkably similar: ''loners,'' troubled social isolates, pariahs, men brimming with grievance and rage. The Scottish killer's neighbors called him ''a weirdo,'' and New York's was called ''an outcast.'' Tasmania's was ''an eccentric loner.'' Richard Sacchi had been in constant trouble with the law since his early teens, sent to ''special education'' classes, institutionalized; at the time of his rampage he was soon to begin a 30-day jail sentence for stalking his ex-wife.

Thomas Hamilton had been expelled as a Boy Scout leader at age 21 and had lived for the subsequent 22 years obviously struggling, with some success, against pedophilic inclinations; police investigated complaints by parents but never found sufficient evidence to prosecute. Martin Bryant had suffered mood swings and mental problems. A neighbor whose property abutted his farm told how she and her husband went to introduce themselves. Bryant threatened to shoot them and ran them off. Another neighbor, Scott Goldsmith, said, ''He was polite and well-spoken. Never aggressive. But he had a strange look. His eyes were sort of blank. It's a look you always remember.''

A striking fact is that mass killers uniformly turn out to be pained, miserable people who often have reached out for psychiatric help before their deadly outbursts. Their rational brain -- that ''wrinkled rind of rationality'' in the cerebral cortex, laid on late in human evolution over the emotional limbic system -- tells them their raging internal demons are abnormal. When their murderous rage finally breaks out, they usually wind up killing themselves or arranging an almost inevitable death at the hands of police.

''A loner, abusive father and husband,'' said acquaintances of R. Gene Simmons, the 47-year-old retired Air Force master sergeant who shot, clubbed, or strangled 16 people, mostly relatives, in Russellville, Ark., in 1988. Oklahoma neighbors considered Patrick Henry Sherrill, a 44-year-old ex-Marine postal worker, ''a very strange person.'' ''I never saw him smile or laugh,'' said one. Sherrill feuded with neighborhood teenagers who taunted him and called him ''Crazy Pat.'' Threatened with dismissal by Post Office supervisors, ''Crazy Pat'' killed 14 co-workers, wounded another 7, then killed himself.

A Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Helen L. Morrison, has studied dozens of serial killers and mass killers. She finds comprehensive and revealing differences. The serial killer [see ''The Face of Evil,'' NR, Jan. 23, 1995] goes off the track of normal psychological development early, and never seems to develop emotionally beyond about six months of age.

''The mass killer's development has proceeded at least through the point of becoming a full psychological human being,'' says Dr. Morrison. ''But he regresses to a paranoid rageful state, usually precipitated six months to a year before by some loss, of a person or a position, and the immediate trigger is some kind of perceived slight.'' Mixed with the paranoid delusions of persecution are hidden grandiosity and narcissism.

Many mass killers are obvious paranoid schizophrenics suffering terrible delusions of persecution and driven by voices urging them to murder. At the State University of New York at Albany in 1994, the 26-year-old Ralph J. Tortorici held 35 students hostage, threatening to kill them if he were not allowed to talk to Governor Cuomo and President Clinton. The reason he needed to talk with them was to get them to force doctors at the local medical center to admit they put a microchip in his brain when he was born. Fortunately one brave young man jumped Tortorici, suffering a thigh wound, and others piled on, flattening the gunman.