Mass murderers are as different as their killing field — be it a nursing home or a suburban home — and as diverse as their reasons for killing — whether it’s spousal betrayal or the loss of a job.
But experts say most people who embark on such wholesale slaughter share certain key characteristics: A catastrophic event that triggers a suicidal rage and an unquenchable thirst to get even.
And there is often no way to see it coming.
“I’m not sure you can even predict it,” says Mark Safarik, who retired in 2007 as a senior profiler in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.
“It’s the constellation or coming together, the perfect storm of someone’s last shot at something. For them, there’s just no other way out. Or if there’s another way out, they don’t choose it, because they’re going to punish somebody.”
Mass murder is nothing new, and the invention of repeating guns only made it easier. But even experts who study the phenomenon have been stunned by the recent rash — seven in the past month, three in the past week alone.
“Boy, this is a lot,” said Safarik, now a partner with Forensic Behavioral Services International.
Criminologist Jack Levin was not surprised to learn that the man who shot up a Binghamton, N.Y., immigrant center on Friday — killing 13 people before killing himself — had recently been laid off from his job at a vacuum cleaner factory. What puzzled him at first was why Jiverly Wong chose his target.
“If it was only the job loss, why didn’t he go back to the work site and kill his manager and his co-workers?” the Northeastern University professor said. “Because that’s what we’re used to seeing when someone is set off by a termination at work. But he didn’t do that.”
Then he learned that the 41-year-old Wong — an ethnic Chinese man raised in Vietnam — had taken English classes at the American Civic Association, and that he blamed his inability to find and keep work, in part, on his poor language skills. That’s when the massacre began to make sense — or as much sense as any such tragedy can.
Wong’s attack came less than a week after a rampage that killed eight in a North Carolina nursing home. And it preceded attacks in Pittsburgh and Washington state that left three police officers and five children dead.
The media factor
Media coverage of such events blankets the airwaves, and that becomes another factor, Safarik said. In this era of saturation coverage, mass murders seem to beget more mass murders, and the stumbling economy only makes matters worse.
“I think that people that are on the edge, that are contemplating such tragic events, sometimes all it takes is that being highlighted in the media for them to go, ‘You know? I could do something like that, I’m THAT angry,”’ said Safarik. “It’s in their face on the television, and now it’s in their thinking pattern.
“It becomes an option that, perhaps earlier on, wasn’t an option for them.”
Inside the mass killer’s mind
Most mass murderers, like most serial killers, are middle-aged, white males, like Robert Stewart — the man who walked into Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C., on March 29 in an apparent search for his estranged wife. But that profile, coupled with the large body count, is where the similarities seem to end.
Serial murderers often kill for sadistic pleasure, said professor James Alan Fox, a colleague of Levin’s at Northeastern and his co-author. Mass killers, on the other hand, tend to externalize their homicidal reasonings.
“They always think someone else is to blame,” Fox said. “‘My boss doesn’t give me the right kinds of assignments. My co-workers don’t do enough to help me succeed. My wife doesn’t understand me at all, doesn’t treat me with respect.”’
Serial killers want the death to go on and on, and they work hard not to get caught, Fox said. But for mass murderers, their own death is a virtual certainty, and they want to take as many with them as possible.
“Before they die, it’s very important for them to get some satisfaction, to get even with the people or the institutions or the world that has treated them so badly or made their life so miserable.”
Categories of mass killers
Fox and Levin say mass killers fall generally into three categories:
- People who are angry at a specific person or group of people and who selectively target those individuals.
- People who are angry at a place — like city hall — or a group — like immigrants — and kill anyone who happens to represent those things.
- And, the rarest type, people who target victims at random, such as he sniper who killed 16 and wounded 31 from the tower of the University of Texas administration building in 1966.
That most of these killers are male should come as no surprise: 93 percent of violent crimes are committed by men, Safarik said.
Fox offers several explanations for this gender gap.
First, women tend to blame themselves for their failures and, so, more often simply commit suicide. Also, men tend to have better access to guns and firearms training.
And while women generally see violence as a means of defending themselves or their loved ones, Fox said many men view force as an “offensive weapon.”
“Men will often use violence to show them who’s boss, to assert control,” Fox said. “So if a guy gets fired, he goes back to work and he says, ‘You think you fired me? I’m firing you — literally.’”
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