Murder in Plain English by Michael Arntfield

Author:Michael Arntfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633882546
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

SCHOOL SHOOTERS

School shooters present a particularly troubling snapshot of the schizoid killer personality in that, dating back to Charles Whitman, there is a dominant trend among them to leave behind narrative rationalizations of their motives and the mind-set behind their massacres. The exception—and it's a notable one among mass murderers generally—is when the school rampage is carried out not by a student at the institution but by an adult outsider. In such cases, a sexual motivation and an accompanying narrative emblematic of the Hero mind-set makes the murderous rampage more consistent with serial murder than with conventional mass-murder typologies. In the fall of 2006, several relevant incidents of this nature occurred in near succession. The most notable was the siege of a one-room Amish schoolhouse in the rural hamlet of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. A low-functioning milk-truck driver and pedophile named Charles Roberts IV stormed into the school and took ten small girls hostage; he was armed with two guns, bindings, and a week's worth of vital supplies, which indicated that he came prepared to keep the victims captive and barricaded for days.15 Roberts later called his wife from the scene and admitted that he had been fantasizing about raping prepubescent girls for some time and was now prepared to act on his impulses. Even though he knew it would end in death, he claimed that he was no longer able to control himself. When police arrived sooner than he expected—before he could rape the girls—Roberts instead shot all ten captives at point-blank range, killing five of them, before taking his own life.

Another key turning point in our understanding of paraphiliac-based school shootings committed by nonstudents was the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the single most deadly mass murder in US history to occur at either an elementary or a secondary school. The murders were perpetrated by twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, a local wastrel who had no affiliation to the school; he killed twenty-seven children and staff members, appearing to have had a latent sexual motivation for his actions. Lanza was suffering from severe anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder in addition to schizoid behaviors when he first murdered his mother and destroyed his computer's hard drive to obliterate any written evidence of the motive and planning behind the attack. Unlike many mass murderers, Lanza apparently did not want his writings to become a matter of public record, in part because they might reveal him to be an inveterate hater of women and, like Charles Roberts, a secret pedophile. Lanza had apparently had sexual fantasies about children, which, once melded with his misplaced narcissism and anger, led him on a sexually motivated rampage to destroy what he was forbidden from having. A review of the documents recovered by police from Lanza's damaged computer paint a chilling portrait of a man consumed with misogynistic and pedophiliac thoughts, stoking his rage and inducing him to plan his massacre of innocents—the darkest of dark odysseys. The specific contents of these documents have not

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