Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior

by Robert I. Simon

  As compiled from reports of victims, the following are reasons given by workplace attackers for their violence: irrational behavior, 26%; dissatisfied with service, 19%; interpersonal conflict, 15%; upset at having been disciplined, 12%; criminal behavior, 10%; personal problems, 8%, firings or layoffs, 2%; prejudice, 1%; and unknown causes, 7%. Some of these categories reflect the occasion rather than the reason for underlying rage to explode. Firearms are the weapons of choice used in three-quarters of the deaths. Half the deaths occurred in the southern region of the United States and another quarter in the We s t .

  Types of violence in the workplace have also been studied. In a 1993 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 75% of violent incidents were fistfights, 17% were shootings, 7.5% were stabbings, 6% were rapes or other sexual assaults, and less than 1% were explosions. Those who are killed are 3.5 times as likely to be female as male. Homicide is a leading cause of death for women in the workplace. Even though the leading instrument of death on the job is firearms, females were six times more likely than males to die of strangulation. These statistics reflect the fact that women in the workplace are at special risk. Rejection of ardent suitors, or, worse, of workplace harassers, brings with it the increased risk of severe injury or death to the women at the hands of these men. When romances outside the workplace go awry, the rejected male usually knows where the woman is employed and generally has ready access to her workplace. Although the fact has not received much media attention, women who work in retail settings are at high risk of being injured or murdered at their jobs. More women than men work in the retail industry, for instance in convenience stores. Alone and unprotected in such establishments, they are particularly vulnerable and at risk for becoming victims of violence.

  Murders at the Post Office

  In recent years, certain workplaces have become known as increasingly dangerous locations for workers, patrons, and passers-by because of the killings that have occurred there. The most obvious location, perhaps because of the extensive media coverage, has been the post office. “Going postal” has become a slang phrase for having a psychotic episode and wreaking violence on people in one’s current or former workplace. There are 40,000 postal service locations and more than 825,000 postal workers in this country. Dozens of deadly incidents in the past decade have had postal workers or facilities as their focal points. On the same day, May 6, 1993, in two different locations, postal workers lashed out. In Dearborn, Michigan, Larry Jason had been known as a “walking time bomb” who had graphically threatened his supervisors. In San Juan Capistrano, California, Mark Hilburn was fearful of losing his job. Their rampages left four people dead.

  On August 10, 1989, John Merlin Taylor, a model post office employee with 27 years of award-winning, exceptional service, went on a rampage in Orange Glen, California, that eventually left four dead, including himself and his wife. In May 1989, mailman Alfred Hunter stole an airplane and strafed the Boston city streets with an AK-47. On August 20, 1986, Patrick Henry Sherrill showed up at work in Edmond, Oklahoma, in full postal uniform but with three handguns in his mailbag. He murdered 14 workers and injured even more before killing himself.

  Former workers account for only a small fraction of overall workplace violence, but their rampages can be terrifying. A 35-year-old mail clerk, Joseph Harris, lost his job in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post office because he threatened a supervisor. Eighteen months later he went to her home and killed her and her fiancée. He then went to the Ridgewood facility and shot dead two mailmen who had just arrived for work.

  On November 13, 1991, 37-year-old ex-Marine Thomas McIlvane found a message from his post office union shop steward on his answering machine, telling him he would not be rehired, that his appeal for reinstatement at a suburban Detroit post office had been turned down. He had been fired for insubordination, cursing a supervisor, fighting with patrons, and for making obscene, threatening remarks to coworkers as well as to supervisors. For months, McIlvane had threatened that if he was not rehired, he would come back and kill. He had been heard voicing the threat that his revenge would make the Edmond, Oklahoma, post office massacre look like Disneyland. His supervisors had described McIlvane as a “ticking time bomb.” A former professional kickboxer who also held a black belt in karate, McIlvane had been drummed out of the Marine Corps for deliberately crushing a fellow Marine’s car with a tank.

  At the post office, a supervisor had requested protection from McIlvane, but the request was turned down. Coworkers established an escape route that they could use if McIlvane turned up. And turn up he did, the morning after the answering machine message, arriving at the Royal Oak Regional Mail Center in Michigan at 8:15 a.m. with a sawed-off Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle tucked under his raincoat. He killed four supervisors before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.

  Why has the postal service experienced so much violence? No one knows for sure. For one thing, a continuing automation process has been placing great stress on postal employees, who are hard pressed to keep up with the pace of the new equipment. Another major part of the problem seems to come from inadequately careful selection of employees. Lack of tact and management skills among postal supervisors is another contributing factor. Each year, in the postal service, there are 150,000 grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions in the army of 825,000 employees. This is a very high index of supervisor-employee difficulties—1 out of every 12 employees is disciplined annually, and 2 out of every 11 file grievances against their supervisors. On the other hand, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found post offices have a lower homicide rate than many other industries. Programs aimed at reducing violence in the postal service have led to fewer violent incidents.

  In media interviews, an alarmingly large number of postal workers admitted that they strongly identified with the killers in the violent post office events, stating that they themselves harbored similar revenge impulses but did not act on them. In this instance especially, the bad men did what the good ones dreamed about doing. The difference between the two groups depends on many factors—among the significant ones, the degree of depression and paranoia.

  Work problems have been common complaints among my patients over the years. I have listened for countless hours to some of my patients’ exquisitely detailed fantasies of extreme sadistic torture of their bosses. One of my patients relished her fantasy of beheading the boss’s children in front of him, boiling their heads, and then forcing the boss at gunpoint to drink the concoction. As with my other patients who could examine their fantasies, there was very little likelihood that she would act on any of her violent urges. This patient was a very highfunctioning, competent executive who was scrupulously law abiding. Perhaps the ability to fantasize and verbalize terrible violence against others helps preempt the need to put violent motives into action.

  Not So Ivory Tower

  The image of the college campus as a sleepy, peaceful refuge from the world was shattered on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old architectural engineering student, mounted the 307-foot clock tower atop the University of Texas. Before leaving home for his rampage, Whitman had killed his wife and his mother. Atop the tower, he killed 13 more people by sniper fire and wounded 31 before being killed himself.

  Whitman set the pattern for the next 40 years of campus-related killings that seem to have increased the risk of both teachers and students being harmed, as in the actions of Gang Lu, a brilliant but disgruntled astrophysicist at the University of Iowa. During a studentfaculty meeting, Lu shot 47-year-old physics professor Christopher K. Goertz twice in the head, killing him instantly. He then whirled and killed 27-year-old Linhua Shan, his perceived rival, who had received a prestigious university award that Lu had coveted. Before Lu was finished, he killed 5 faculty members and seriously wounded another. Then, his mission completed, Lu removed his heavy coat, folded it neatly onto a chair, and fired a .38 slug into his own head. />
  The cases go on and on, and they involve high schools and grade schools as well as colleges and universities. Inhabitants of Massachusetts, California, Louisiana, a half-dozen other states, and Montreal, Canada have all seen such murders and murder-suicides. Marc Lepine mounted a well-planned aggressive armed assault at the school of engineering (École Polytechnique) at the University of Montreal. Venting his rage principally against women, he killed or injured 14 people with a rifle. After a wounded victim cried out for help, Lepine pulled out his knife and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest until she was dead. He then put the muzzle of the rifle against his head, said “Oh, shit,” and shot himself. It was the worst mass murder and hate crime against women in Canadian history. Lepine left a suicide note that said:

  Please note that if I kill myself today 12/06/89 it is not for economic reasons (because I waited until I used up all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I decided to send Ad Patres [meaning gathered to the fathers, or, simply, dead] the feminists who have always ruined my life. For seven years my life has brought me no joy, and, being utterly weary of the world, I have decided to stop those shrews dead in their tracks.

  Six months later, Lepine claimed his last victims—Sarto Blais, an engineer who had been at the same school and who could not rid himself of his memories of the killings of his classmates and friends, hanged himself. Then, his parents, themselves seeing no reason to go on living, also committed suicide.

  There have been killings at high schools, junior high schools, grade schools. Incredibly, a loaded revolver was discovered at a church preschool in an affluent Virginia neighborhood.

  One of the worst cases is the April 16, 2007, killings at Virginia Tech in which a 23-year-old loner from South Korea, Seung-Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 students and faculty, and wounded 17 more, before killing himself. This has been classified as the worst peacetime shooting in United States history. Later investigation revealed that Cho had several times earlier been identified as troubled, but had refused treatment.

  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers, had planned to set off bombs as well as execute students and faculty with automatic weapons—to kill hundreds and hundreds of people— and be remembered as the most prolific mass murderers of all time. Fortunately, they did not succeed, but did manage to kill 12 and injure 20 more before placing their guns to their heads.

  In all instances in these school shootings, the precise motivations and mental makeup of the shooters remain elusive. There are some clues, however. The U.S. Secret Service developed a profile of 41 school shooters in 37 incidents; they found that the most frequently expressed motive was revenge, and that about three-quarters of the perpetrators had threatened to commit suicide before their attacks. The report described the perpetrators as feeling extremely depressed, with most of them also feeling persecuted and dealing with a significant change in a relationship or a loss in status. These statistics and motivations are consistent with the conclusions reached in other studies of adolescent mass murderers.

  Patients Who Kill

  Medical facilities such as doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, regular wards, nursing homes, and clinics have become increasingly dangerous places for both practitioners and patients because of people intent on murder in such locations. A deranged white supremacist traveled from Maryland to Chicago to shoot to death a plastic surgeon in the doctor’s own office. Jonathan Preston Haynes, age 35, told arresting officers that he had gone to Chicago and randomly selected his victim from a phonebook listing for plastic surgeons. He made an appointment with Dr. Martin Sullivan, age 68, then sat quietly in the doctor’s waiting room until his name was called. Going into the physician’s office, he calmly executed the surgeon, reportedly because Haynes was angry at people “diluting the Aryan beauty by creating ersatz Aryans.”

  Psychiatrists have long known that the most dangerous time is during the first visit with an unknown patient. According to an American Psychiatric Association Task Force Report, 40% of psychiatrists are assaulted during their careers. Nearly three-fourths of assaults against all physicians occurred during the first meeting of doctor and patient. At that time, the extent of the patient’s illness and possible presence of homicidal impulses is unknown to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has not had time to develop a working therapeutic relationship that could inhibit dangerous acts. It is quite possible for any mental health professional in such a circumstance to become endangered as the instant object of a disturbed patient’s persecutory delusions. While in training, male psychiatrists are often told to wear breakaway, clip-on ties, so that a patient cannot strangle the doctor with his own tie. They are also told to take offices that have separate doors for doctor and patient; otherwise, a doctor who sits with the only door at his or her back may be perceived by the patient as blocking the exit, an avenue the patient might need if he or she fears losing control over violent impulses.

  These stratagems are not misplaced. Many mental health professionals have been the victims of workplace violence. One psychiatrist was very seriously maimed by a letter bomb. Others have been killed. Psychiatrist Brian Buss, age 37, was working at a state hospital near Portland, Oregon, when he found it necessary to admit a paranoid psychiatric employee of the hospital to that same hospital for observation and possible treatment. This patient had previously been in a state hospital and expressed fears about having to stay in another such hospital. However, the only alternative, the local community hospital, did not have a psychiatric unit. Buss went into a makeshift seclusion room, alone, to inform the patient that he would soon be transferred to the state hospital where he had been treated a decade ago. The patient became enraged and ordered Buss to leave. When Buss refused, the patient picked up a rod lying on the floor and clubbed him to death. Some time later, when the patient’s psychosis had cleared, he was interviewed and made several safety suggestions for the hospital—for instance, that the psychiatrist should never have come into the seclusion room alone and that he should have left the room immediately when the patient had ordered him to do so.

  Psychiatrist Michael McCullock, 41, decided to treat a 38-year-old paranoid schizophrenic man with a long history of violence as an outpatient in his private office in Portland, Oregon. He did so despite evidence that the man had made threats to kill a philosophy professor while he had been in college and despite the man’s several previous involuntary hospitalizations. The psychotic patient had developed the delusion that Dr. McCullock was torturing him with a brain-stimulating machine and that the only way to stop the torture and pain was to kill the psychiatrist. Barging into Dr. McCullock’s office one day and pulling a shotgun from under his raincoat, the patient shot McCullock dead at close range. He then waited calmly for the police. Later, when interviewed, the patient was without remorse. Because of his delusions, the patient believed that he had been justified in killing his psychiatrist.

  Similarly, Dr. Wayne Fenton, 53, a prominent psychiatrist, associate director of a division of the National Institute of Mental Health, and an expert on schizophrenia, agreed to do a consultation on a Saturday in his private office with a young man known to be paranoid and psychotic, who was unaccompanied by his parents. Shortly, police were notified by the patient’s father that his son had returned from that appointment acting strangely and with blood on his pants and shirt. The police went to the office, found that Dr. Fenton had been murdered. They were soon able to apprehend 19-year-old Vitali Davydov and charge him with the crime.

  Today most emergency rooms in hospitals, in addition to handling emergency cases, also function as outpatient clinics, which treat a variety of chronically ill people. In recent years, disgruntled patients who have not found relief for their pain, or who think they have been badly treated, have come back to kill emergency room personnel. That is why most emergency rooms now have security personnel and equipment to detect the presence of firearms.

  Doctors may also be the victims of politically mo
tivated attacks, as has been made clear by recent violence against abortion clinics and against doctors who perform abortions. Some antiabortion extremists have become terrorists willing to kill to prevent women from being able to have abortions. Michael F. Griffin, age 32, was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Dr. David Gunn, a physician who performed abortions at Pensacola Women’s Medical Services Clinic. Griffin, an antiabortion zealot, shot Dr. Gunn three times as the physician arrived for work during a protest. Antiabortion activist Paul Hill shot and killed Dr. John Britton and his unarmed escort outside The Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola, Florida. John C. Salvi, age 22, opened fire at two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, killing two women and wounding five other people. Medical personnel in many abortion clinics are working under a state of siege.

  Hospital Killing Grounds

  Finally, hospitals and nursing homes have been used as killing grounds by murderers who have access to them and their vulnerable patientresidents. Ex-Marine Donald Swango managed to graduate from Southern Illinois School of Medicine with a medical degree, but his fascination with dying patients was noted. At Ohio State, nurses on the floors that Swango worked on as a surgical intern noticed more patients dying than usual, and one saw Swango give an injection to a patient who soon sickened. He was cleared by an investigation but resigned and became an EMT in Quincy, Illinois. After paramedics noticed people getting violently ill in the office when he was around, he was arrested in possession of arsenic and other poisons, convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison. After his release, he forged documents to reestablish himself in West Virginia and then, under an alias, in South Dakota. Discovered there, he found his way to Stony Brook in New York State. In every location, patients died for no apparent reason. Only when a former employer in South Dakota called Stony Brook was he exposed and a warning about him sent to all the teaching hospitals in the United States. Swango moved to Zimbabwe, where he killed more people but escaped before being tried. He was on his way to a job in Saudi Arabia when he chose a flight that gave him a layover in Chicago, where he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to three killings of patients, and—nearly 20 years after he began to harm patients and coworkers—received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.