Inside the Mind of a Mass Killer

What makes someone walk into a school and callously shoot dead young girls? Or climb a tower and use a rifle with a telescopic sight to calmly pick off victims at random? Or dress in army fatigues and go out hunting for victims? What drives mass killers as they go out massacring strangers, a phenomenon virtually unknown in western society until 40 years ago but now a regular occurrence, as yesterday’s latest US school shooting shows? One prominent Australian forensic psychiatrist, who has glimpsed inside the minds of five mass murderers, has tried to explain.

Professor Paul Mullen, the director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, published his findings on five Australian mass killers in 2004. But his study takes on new significance in the light of what’s emerging about Charles Carl Roberts, the man responsible for the Amish school massacre.

Roberts, 37, and a father of three, bears many of the traits Prof Mullen outlined in his study in the international journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law. According to him, mass killers are normally:

• Male.
• Under 40 years of age.
• Socially isolated without intimate or close relationships.
• Unemployed, or in casual or marginal work.
• Bullied and/or isolated as a child.
• Fascinated with weapons and usually a collector of guns.
• Have no history antisocial, criminal, and specifically interpersonal violence.
• Have no prior contact with the mental health services or a diagnosis of serious mental disorder.
• Make no threats, or overt or covert statements that they intend to commit a massacre.
• Have no significant history of substance abuse.
• Show rigidity and/or marked obsessional traits.
• Are suspicious and may have think they have been persecuted.
• Have a tendency to resentment with intrusive ruminations about previous experiences of humiliation and injury.
• Prone to daydreaming, particularly about acts of individual, and usually murderous, heroism and of revenge against a rejecting and uncaring world.
• Have narcissistic and grandiose traits, which emerge in a profound sense of entitlement and over-weaning self-righteousness.
• Intend to kill as many people as possible then to die among their victims.
• Adopt an existing script for murder suicide that they have acquired from reading about or seeing it in news and dramas.

Roberts was male truck driver aged under 40; had no prior criminal record; left a suicide note saying he was seeking revenge for some persecution he suffered as a child; was described as a normal loving husband and father but had been recently introverted and intense; showed no indications of what he was planning; had a weapon collection that included a handgun, shotgun, rifle, stun gun and two knives; and had carefully planned his attack and his own suicide.

“It is clear to us that he did a great deal of planning…,” Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said. “He came here prepared. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. It appears he did a lot of time in planning and intended to harm these kids and intended to harm himself.”

Mass killings, such as yesterday’s school shootings and the Port Arthur and Hoddle St massacres in Australia, were virtually unknown in western society prior to the Texas University shootings in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a tower and shot dead 13 people and wounded 34 more. Since then, according to Prof Mullen, what he terms “autogenic” or self-generated massacres have become increasingly frequent and tend to occur in clusters.

“Distressing though it may be to contemplate, there are angry despairing young men who would welcome a death that brings them fame together with an aura of power and evil, and in which they pay back the uncaring world for rejection and humiliation,” he says.

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