The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer
Page 4
“Continued to evaporate RC fuel outside and mixed 2 bags of ANALFO. After mixing the second bag I began to experience dizziness, blood pressure elevation and nausea, classical symptoms of excessive short-term exposure of [sic; if it isn’t already obvious to the reader, Breivik wrote his manifesto in English, which is not his native language] diesel. Diesel is a vicious substance as it is absorbed even through most glove material. Nitrile gloves are best, neoprene somewhat good, but vinyl gloves provide little or no protection. At this point in time, the clothing I am using to mix ANALFO are more or less soaked in diesel, and I knew it was not healthy. But the problem is that using a hazmat suit for mixing is problematic as it will be very hard to labor while wearing it. I have another chemical suit that are more comfortable than the hazmat suit so I will try using that for the last batch. Diesel poisoning isn’t lethal, but will weaken your body over time. However, excessive exposure over a long period of time can shut down your kidneys, which will obviously be lethal. To somewhat counter all the crap I’ve been exposed to the last two months I’m using anti-toxin tabs (herbal supplements strengthening the liver and kidneys), protein supplements, creatine and a multitude of mineral/vitamin supplements.”
This passage gives us an understanding of the mind of a lone wolf killer, and how self-preservation and taking care of himself were important for him. This wasn’t the writing of a suicidal rampage killer: it was the writing of a man who wanted to survive.
On July 14, Day 74, he wrote: “I’m not feeling so hot today. I’m in a weakened state . . . most likely due to diesel poisoning. It shouldn’t take more than 24 hours before my immune system has defeated the negative effects of this exposure. I hope I haven’t been overexposed as it may lead to acute kidney shutdown. Needless to say, I’m going to use my protective suit to mix the last 4 bags today. Finished the last 4 bags. Using the protective suit (fertilizer sprayer suit, used by farmers) proved to be better than expected, except the fact that I completely soaked my t-shirt and boxer with sweat by the time I was done.”
Now it was time to take care of all the small things that would ensure his project’s success, including a short YouTube movie to promote his manifesto. He had notified a few close friends that he was still in the final phase of his book, which he had hoped to conclude with a coinciding publishing tour, visiting cultural conservative organizations in western Europe.
On Friday, he took an early morning train to Oslo, where he completed a few final errands and picked up the Avis van (carrying capacity, 1340 kg). He then went back to the farm. His preparation had come to an end. He now had a van in which he could load the bomb. He needed only to make final preparations before he drove the van down to Oslo to spend the last night at his mother’s apartment. That was where he would write the final entry in his manifesto.
In that entry, he included a couple of age-old platitudes that he had heard during his upbringing. This is all he offered the reader.
“The old saying, ‘If you want something done, then do it yourself’ is as relevant now as it was then. And more than one chef does not mean that you will do tasks twice as fast. In many cases, you could do it all yourself. It will just take a little more time. AND, without taking unacceptable risks, the conclusion is undeniable.”
He signed off in this manner:
“I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Friday, July 22nd, 12.51.
“Sincere regards,
“Andrew Berwick
“Justiciar Knight Commander Knights Templar
“Europe Knights Templar Norway”
Breivik’s manifesto was an obsession that allowed him to write himself into the mental state he needed if he was to follow through with the massacre without any hesitation. He was without any other source of hope. He was convinced that he would be forever powerless and invisible if he did not go ahead with his plan—what appeared to be the only way forward for him. And go ahead he did. Not even his own unconscious attempts at self-sabotage, like putting off finding a farm to create his bomb or waking up late on the day of the massacre, could prevent what years of oppression and lack of meaningful relationships had put in motion.
CHAPTER TWO
TROUBLED CHILDHOODS
I didn’t really have any negative experiences in my childhood in any way. I had way too much freedom, though, if anything.
—ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO
Breivik’s quote mirrors McVeigh’s childhood. “I have very few memories of my childhood, or the interaction with my parents,” McVeigh said in an interview with the authors Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck. “I can’t blame them for anything that happened to me. I was often by myself or with neighbors. Most of my memories focus on that.”
Like Breivik’s, McVeigh’s upbringing appears unremarkable at first glance. His father was a factory worker, and his parents divorced when he was a teen. Young McVeigh grew up in a middle-class American family, in love with TV, movies, and the outdoors. Like so many other kids, Breivik included, he loved sports and superhero comic books.
Born April 23, 1968, McVeigh was the middle child of three, and the only boy. He grew up in Pendleton, New York—a small town near the Canadian border—a white, blue-collar, mostly Christian town where children could run into a neighbor’s house without knocking. “Timmy” did just that, and he was always welcome. As a child, Timothy McVeigh was likable and full of fun.
Conversely, Theodore Kaczynski grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. He remembered his mother focusing on his dialect, encouraging him not to talk like the kids in the street, and he responded by speaking one way at home and another way when interacting with his young peers.
By the age of eight or nine, according to Dr. Sally C. Johnson, who wrote a psychological report in connection with his trial, Kaczynski no longer felt accepted in the neighborhood or at school. The children “bordered on delinquency,” Kaczynski said, and he was neither willing nor interested in being involved in their debased activities. The family moved several times and eventually landed in Evergreen Park, Illinois—a middle-class suburb of Chicago—when he was ten.
“He was the smartest kid in the class,” Russel Mosny, a classmate in math club, told a New York Times reporter. “He was just quiet and shy until you got to know him. Once he knew you, he could talk and talk.” But when the others began attending dances and dating, Kaczynski stayed home. “I’d try to get him to go to the sock hops,” Mosny said, “but he always said he’d rather play chess or read a book.”
While studious, Kaczynski was remembered by an aunt as affectionate. But the aunt, who asked the New York Times to let her remain anonymous, said she saw a change after his younger brother David was born on October 3, 1949. Kaczynski was seven then, and the aunt said he seemed crestfallen at having to share his parents’ attention.
“Before David was born, Teddy was different,” the aunt said. “When they’d visit, he’d snuggle up to me. Then, when David was born, something must have happened. He changed immediately. Maybe we paid too much attention to the new baby.”
McVeigh was also remembered with affection. In One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing, Richard A. Sorrano quoted a neighbor who described McVeigh as “a clown, always a happy person.” He was clever and always found a way to make a little money. Some Halloweens, he could charge admission to a nearby haunted house. “The kids in the neighborhood thought it was great,” the neighbor said.
His father, Bill McVeigh, worked long hours in a local car-radiator plant to support the family, and his mother Mildred (“Mickey”) liked to socialize and stay out late. Torn between fun and family, McVeigh and his sisters experienced turbulence and were often left on their own.
When McVeigh was nine years old, a major blizzard hit town. Out for drinks at a local hotel, his mother phoned to say they were snowbound and that she wouldn’t make it home that night. The deadly blizzard claimed lives. Victims were buried in their cars. By the time it let up, days had passed, and many had run out of b
asic supplies. Always helpful, McVeigh shoveled neighbors’ driveways and learned about survival. The family began stockpiling food, water, and other necessities to cope with the enemy, which in this case was the weather.
His grandfather, Eddie McVeigh, had a great influence on the boy and taught him about the outdoors and hunting, which included Timmy’s introduction to guns at age thirteen. That was when Grandpa Eddie presented Timmy with a .22-caliber rifle, the first of many guns he would own. He was so passionate about firearms that he answered the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “Gun-shop owner.” McVeigh sometimes took one of his guns to school to impress the other boys. It worked.
Kaczynski, as a teenager, had a passion for explosives, and—according to Patrick Morris, a member of the high school math club, in an interview with the New York Times—Kaczynski once showed a school wrestler how to make a powerful mini-bomb. It went off one day in a chemistry class, blew out two windows, and inflicted temporary hearing damage on a female student. Everyone was reprimanded, the New York Times reported, but Kaczynski was unfazed. He later set off blasts that echoed across the neighborhood and sent garbage cans flying.
When the FBI visited his mother Wanda Kaczynski’s home in Schenectady, New York, to gather enough evidence to arrest him, they discovered a fictional story written by Kaczynski as a teenager titled How I Blew Up Harold Snilly, by Apios Tuberosa, a pseudonym he used back then. Like McVeigh, young Kaczynski developed an interest in survivalism soon after becoming interested in guns or explosives, respectively.
When Timmy was in his teens, Mildred left for good, and in 1986 she and Bill finally divorced. Young McVeigh, who stayed with his father and resented his mother, became captivated by computers and turned his bedroom into a computer lab. Although his parents’ divorce marked him, it didn’t affect his performance in school. Always a good student, he continued his excellent grades and graduated from high school with honors. Tim was “. . . a nice kid,” his Spanish teacher Deborah Carballo said in an interview with Sorrano. “You’ll never find a person at Starpoint who can say a bad thing about him.”
Kaczynski far surpassed his classmates in high school—able to solve advanced mathematical equations before his senior year—and through the years he skipped several grades. Although he was placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he still felt intellectually restricted.
“Ted was technically very bright, but emotionally deficient,” according to Morris. “While the math club would sit around talking about the big issues of the day, Ted would be waiting for someone to fart. He had a fascination with body sounds more akin to a five-year-old than a fifteen-year-old.” Once, Morris said, they were talking seriously about their futures. “Ted seemed more interested in smearing cake frosting on this guy’s nose.”
So how do McVeigh’s and Kaczynski’s childhoods compare to Breivik’s? Breivik was described on Norway’s state television channel shortly after his apprehension as a “normal Norwegian boy,” yet he became the worst killer in the history of a country where such a thing was not supposed to happen. Not ever. How could anyone fathom such cruelty as this? How could a seemingly normal boy turn out to be a monster?
Breivik’s childhood could match that of anyone growing up in Norway in the 1980s. He was born in 1979 to economist Jens Breivik, the Norwegian embassy’s diplomatic attaché to London and Paris, and Wenche Behring, a nurse from southern Norway. Jens Breivik had two sons and one daughter from a previous marriage, while Wenche, his new wife, also had a daughter from a past relationship.
Soon after Anders’s birth, the marriage fell apart, and Wenche decided to return to Norway, taking both her six-year-old daughter and one-year-old son with her. With monetary assistance from Anders’s father to add to her modest nurse’s salary, she settled in Skøyen, an area within Oslo’s affluent West End. Not far from the grand neoclassical villas that the area features, the family of three made their home in an outlying district of glass-fronted warehouses and apartment blocks.
Breivik grew up in a social-democratic society, one where both fathers and mothers were employed. Rarely did any parent stay at home during the day. Childcare was available for the very young, and grade school followed. The kids went to class while the adults worked. In this accepted, orderly equation, children learned early on to function on their own without becoming exceptionally independent.
Norway prides itself in having employed the United School of compulsory education. A model based on equal opportunity for all students, it has remained free of charge for anyone hoping to study in Norway, regardless of their nation of origin or their economic status. Beginning in 1889, seven years of education were available in the cities and in small scattered schools across the country. After World War II, various industries offered employment for a wave of displaced agricultural workers, and a distinctive type of working class began to populate the larger cities. In 1967, nine years of free education were offered to students; then in 1997, that number was raised to ten years.
This uncomplicated model for schooling children, aged six or seven years until they reach the age of sixteen or seventeen years, has enjoyed a 150-year reign. On paper, this type of agenda looks solid, and there are years of history to back its ability to rank among the world’s most successful educational systems.
If one were to follow the system as it was laid out when Breivik was a child, one might pause at the different school reforms. Under the Labor Party’s directive, the system must adhere to the rules of the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, the teachers’ unions, and the Ministry of Education and Research, and it must follow a Strategy for Competence and Development in Primary and Secondary Education.
The overriding principle for Norwegian compulsory education is that all children—regardless of where they live, their gender, social background, ethnic affiliation, or aptitudes and abilities—shall have the same right to education, and shall receive this education in the local school. This means that a child cannot be removed from one school and placed in another (whether this be another school in the ordinary system of education or one of the few special schools), except on the initiative of either the parents or the school. And no child can be removed from the local school against the wishes of the parents.
Primary and lower secondary schools are founded on the principle of a unified educational system with equal and adaptable education for all in a coordinated school system based on a single general curriculum. All children and youth are to share in a common pool of knowledge, culture, and basic values.
“We see it as important to exploit the school as a community of work for the development of social skills,” according to Sissel Anderson, adviser to the Norwegian Board of Education. “It must be structured in such a way that the learners’ activities have consequences for others, and so that they can learn from the impact of their decisions. The school must find the difficult balance between stimulating and exploiting the culture the young themselves create, and forming a counterweight to it.”
The aim of this type of training is to develop empathy and sensitivity toward others, provide practice in assessing social situations, and promote responsibility for others’ well-being. Those who have been insufficiently stimulated at home or in their neighborhood, according to the Norwegian Board of Education, must be given the opportunity for maturing in a learning environment where the students take responsibility for one another’s development. Students are therefore encouraged to enlist in practical work, both as providers and recipients of services, where they get into the habit of taking responsibility in their own current society.
With the reform in 1976, upper secondary education also became one single, nationwide system to ensure that all young people have the same opportunities for education and training at this level. Reform in 1997 changed the school-starting age from seven to six years old and made ten years of schooling compulsory (instead of the previous nine).
“The Knowledge Promotion,” or Kun
nskapsløftet, is the most recent reform and was introduced in all Norwegian primary and secondary schools (Grades 1 through 10) in 2006. By changing the substance, structure, and organization, the overall goal of this reform was to increase the basic level of knowledge among students, including reading, writing, and mathematics. A study made by Norwegian Social Research (NOVA), initiated by the Ministry of Education and Research, concluded that the reform may have failed to attain its goal. According to NOVA, the Knowledge Promotion has led to increased social inequalities between girls and boys, and between students from families of “low” and “high” socioeconomic status. A particularly worrisome trend in the first period of the reform is that more students leave school without a full diploma. Nevertheless, students from major immigrant groups have approached the level of students with non-immigrant backgrounds.
A QUESTION OF HOME LIFE
The first-born child to second-generation Polish-American Wanda and Theodore Richard Kaczynski, Kaczynski experienced intense isolation at nine months of age when, due to an allergic reaction, he was placed in a hospital for eight months.
“Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience,” his mother wrote in his baby book in March 1943.
Johnson’s psychological report that was created in connection with his trial fifty-five years later indicates that Kaczynski’s mother perceived his hospitalization—and especially the separation from her at so young an age—as a significant and traumatic event for her son. “She describes him as having changed after the hospitalization in that he was withdrawn, less responsive, and more fearful of separation from her after that point in time,” Dr. Johnson stated.