• Victim of bullying or some other form of social injustice—He was injured early and won’t forget it.
• Rage—He wants to strike back.
• Inability to connect or have meaningful relationships—Not even in extremist groups.
• Misplaced attachment—Because of his intelligence, he has the capacity to connect to a cause/ideology as a surrogate for connecting with other people. He becomes its true believer and most faithful keeper.
• Narcissistic—He is the most important person in the world.
• Desire to live—He is not suicidal. In his narcissistic view, he is too important and too essential to that cause to be sacrificed.
• Not in a hurry—He is smart enough to avoid detection and takes his time to plan his attack and execute it to perfection.
• Needs release—Killing is the ultimate rerouting to intimate gratification.
• Kills on a societal level—It is not enough for him to just kill a neighbor or former teacher. He needs to be seen, to matter. Thus, the killings must be on a mass scale and in a high-profile place.
Study this description and Kaczynski, McVeigh, and Breivik will emerge.
Breivik toyed with cosmetic surgery until he had the face he felt he deserved, and he believed that only he could save Norway from the Islamization of society, both compelling signs of his narcissism. Like other lone wolves, Breivik has a strong need to matter; and the nature of his attacks reflects that, given their scale and high visibility. Because he believes he is such an important person, however, he didn’t want to die when he committed his acts of violence. He was not a candidate for suicide-by-cop, nor would he commit suicide at the end of his killing spree. Self-preservation ranked high on his list of values. However, first place on that list belonged to the ideology he had embraced. It was what he connected with more than anything—or anyone—else.
Breivik said that he dreaded getting up that morning on July 22, 2011, and that he knew that dying was a possibility, that the police might shoot him. He was ready for it. Yet, willing as he was to perish for his ideology, he was not suicidal.
The same was true for McVeigh. He realized that there was a chance he would be killed if someone discovered the bomb in his truck before he could light the fuse, or that he would run into law-enforcement officers while escaping the explosion. He had even been ready to drive his car into the building to cause an explosion if there were no available parking spaces in front of the entrance. Like Breivik, he was willing to sacrifice his life for his cause. But he had no wish to die.
“Rampage killers” may also want to be known, and they may sometimes leave a manifesto or some other explanation of their motives. Like the lone wolves, they too may have been isolated or bullied as children and have similar feelings of rage, as well as a desire for revenge, that can play a big part in their motivations. But unlike a lone wolf killer, they are often suicidal. An example of a rampage killer is Adam Lanza of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut.
Serial killers tend to have low to average intelligence, and most have a history of criminal misdemeanors or worse. They also may have been isolated and/or bullied as children, and often were abused. Killing provides them with psychological satisfaction. They feel no empathy and no guilt, and they prefer to do their killings in private and have no wish to be caught or recognized. Whereas a lone wolf wants to make a statement, a serial killer often kills for his own personal fulfillment.
According to Dr. Puckett, the lone wolf is not a psychopath. Unlike a true psychopath, he has a conscience, albeit a misguided one. Nor is he necessarily mentally ill. Even the Norwegian expert panel of psychiatrists got this wrong in Breivik’s case. Breivik’s lack of empathy at times does not, according to Dr. Puckett, come from psychopathic tendencies, but narcissism. Breivik’s displays of empathy over his lifetime also show that he is not a psychopath. A true psychopath would have displayed a complete lack of empathy since childhood, often torturing animals or even other children or siblings as an early-warning sign.
Because the lone wolf is not a psychopath, he does not necessarily take pleasure in killing or view it as a game. In fact, Breivik dreaded having to murder for his cause. But since he was so disconnected from anything else, and because of his rage and desire to make the biggest statement possible, he murdered those young people on Utøya in a gruesome and callous manner. In the police interrogations of him, Breivik admitted that he had shot his victims’ sexual organs and executed them with up to five shots in the head. He had also shot some teens in the back and then turned their lifeless bodies over to fire his gun down their throats, then finally shot and destroyed his victims’ eyes. It was “uncomfortable” for him to do this, he claimed to the police and his attorney.
In his manifesto, he castigated his mother and sister, and then later told his attorney he had done that to protect them, so they would not be associated with him. The attorney fell for it. If Breivik had actually cared for them, he would have found a less painful way than character assassination to distance himself. Instead, he pretended to be connected because he didn’t know what true connection feels like.
He acts in a similar manner throughout his entire manifesto. He is such a good leader, he claims, that his friends are going to miss him. He is the glue. In reality, he only pretends to know what it feels like to care about and connect with others. He speaks about relationships but has never experienced them.
His need to matter on a societal level, along with the fact that he had become completely subsumed by his ideology, blinded him to anything else. Although he pretended to understand the pain he inflicted and to regret the suffering he caused, he was merely mouthing platitudes—because he didn’t know how to do anything else. He stopped doing his right-arm salute at the beginning of each court day during the trial after his attorney made him aware of the sorrow the gesture caused the parents of the young people he had killed. Was it because he truly had regrets, or because he wanted to be perceived as a sane human, capable of compassion? His trial was a strategy to promote his own cause; in order to do that, he needed to appear rational, even caring. Breivik did not regret the massacre, however. In his mind, he was fighting a war and his acts were necessary.
Because the lone wolf is sane and generally law-abiding until he acts, and because he is intelligent and has a high sense of self-preservation, he is extremely difficult to identify and, in some cases, like with Kaczynski, to catch.
DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES
Our political leaders now double as military leaders. Or is it the other way around? Countries act out of a mass hysteria brought upon them by a singular leader and his/her tight circle of devotees. All people live in a collective limbo between political policies that, at their most modest levels, subliminally strengthen division. Division, at high levels, turns citizens into soldiers. Soldiers are easily cultivated into killers. History has proven that to be true. What history has not told us is what happens when the technology of killing has changed so drastically that one person can, without an army, kill so many.
According to Ramón Spaaij, in his book Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention, this phenomenon is increasing. Spaaij found that beginning in the 1970s, there has been a gradual yet observable increase in lone wolf terrorist attacks in the United States and a much more rapid increase outside the United States. Between the 1970s and 2000, according to Spaaij, “the total number of lone wolf terrorist attacks per decade rose by 45% (from 22 to 32) in the United States and by a massive 412% (from 8 to 41) in the other 14 countries [that were included in his study] combined.”
One individually motivated massacre could devastate an entire citizenry. No country’s war against terror is completely effective. Many believe that the growing governmental agencies employed against such unspeakable devastation can’t possibly protect a nation.
Collecting data on terrorists is more advanced now than ever before. A demented person wanting to caus
e great havoc cannot hide easily if he has already committed a crime. Authorities alerted to a suspect will sift through his past, examine his life, spot his evil tendencies, and try to stop him before he strikes—or, at least, before he can strike again. For every terrorist, or terrorist group, there are experts whose job it is to stop him, or them.
But what about the ones who manage to escape the radar? Remember, the lone wolf does not generally display criminal behavior before his great act, as was the case with Anders Breivik. He was not previously in the criminal world, nor did he have any mental issues to speak of. He was not a rampage killer, and neither were Kaczynski and McVeigh. Rather, all three were highly meticulous.
THEODORE KACZYNSKI, THE UNABOMBER
Although Kaczynski’s first attempts at mailing bombs failed, he was ultimately responsible for killing three people and injuring twenty-three others. As is the case with many lone wolf killers, Kaczynski came from a troubled home. His mother probably didn’t give him enough attention after his younger brother David was born, and she was not sensitive to the fact that although Kaczynski had the intellectual capacity to skip grades, he didn’t have the mental maturity to fit in with the older students. When his father, upon learning that he had terminal cancer, committed suicide, Kaczynski never acknowledged any sorrow, nor did he attend his father’s funeral. He was convinced that both of his parents had made him a “social cripple” because they had made him enter Harvard when he was an unready sixteen-year-old.
His seven-year-younger brother David told the New York Times that he thought his brother’s issues had started in his childhood. “I think that truth from my point of view is that Ted has been a disturbed person for a long time and he’s gotten more disturbed,” David said. It was he, the person closest to the suspect, who turned Kaczynski in.
“I think he’s a person who wanted to love something and unfortunately, again, it gets so complex,” David said. “He failed to love it in the right way because in some deep way, he felt a lack of love and respect himself.”
Although Kaczynski wasn’t close to his parents, he had a good relationship with his brother, at least to a certain degree. But when David got married, Kaczynski saw it as a betrayal.
“I always had a sense that something was missing,” David said about the relationship between his brother and his parents. “The bond was never completely there, the way it had been with me”—although the fact that Kaczynski felt betrayed by David getting married hints that this relationship was unbalanced and not a healthy brother-to-brother relationship.
Highly intelligent, Kaczynski graduated from Harvard, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, and became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at age twenty-five.
Although he desperately wanted to connect with others, he continued to flounder and left Berkeley after two years, despite his innate intelligence. He could write in fluent, elegant Spanish, which he had learned from textbooks, and he had learned German the same way.
According to Dr. Puckett, such killers frequently reject authority: “They’re going to go out and learn on their own.” Kaczynski was more than capable of doing that, as were McVeigh and Breivik.
To Puckett, it wasn’t the relentless anger Kaczynski expressed that was most striking; it was the searing loneliness, and his tormented longing for a woman to join in his voluntary exile from society. Again and again, he wrote agonizing passages about his inability to understand or engage in normal social relationships with people, especially women. He confessed in his journal that he had never experienced a sexual relationship with a woman, except for one kiss with a woman from his workplace in Chicago in 1978.
In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a cabin in Lincoln, Montana. Lacking electricity or running water, he lived as a recluse. By 1978, he began sending bombs, a total of sixteen, to universities and airlines. He chose his targets from newspaper articles, people who represented everything he hated. In his Unabomber Manifesto, he said that he wanted to attract attention to modern technologies that eroded human freedom.
Kaczynski spent eighteen years killing, maiming, and terrorizing his country in a fanatical battle to stop technology and punish those who did not fit his distorted model of the world. Extremely intelligent and careful, he took extraordinary steps to avoid leaving any trail back to himself and his cabin in Montana. In April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times and said that if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, he would “desist from terrorism.”
Turned in by the brother who had once idolized him, Kaczynski ultimately changed his plea to guilty to thirteen counts for attacks in three states that killed three and injured two. Like Breivik, he could not tolerate being diagnosed as mentally ill and having that as his defense. As of this writing, he is serving his life sentence at the ADX Florence “Supermax” penitentiary in Colorado with no chance of parole.
It is no wonder that Breivik was deeply influenced by Kaczynski. They have much in common, whether it is their loneliness or their devotion to their ideologies and the importance they place on their respective manifestos. And both continue to inspire copycats.
TIMOTHY MCVEIGH, THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER
McVeigh’s parents separated when he was ten years old, and he was raised by his father in Pendleton, New York. McVeigh—who, like Breivik, was bullied in school—took refuge in a fantasy world where he imagined retaliating against those bullies.
Most who knew him described him as withdrawn, but some said he was outgoing and playful. Again, like Kaczynski and Breivik, he was not successful in his relationships with girls. McVeigh had an awkward relationship with women, Dr. Puckett said. “He was bitter about his mother and blamed her for his parents’ divorce. But he expressed interest in girls, one in particular, he seemed to put on a pedestal and toward whom he never really made any overt moves.”
In high school, McVeigh was named Starpoint Central High School’s “most promising computer programmer.” Highly intelligent but bored with the school curriculum, he was interested mainly in guns, gun control, and the Second Amendment.
“He was a super soldier in the Gulf War—from a distance,” Dr. Puckett said. He shot Iraqi soldiers, but there was no hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, the reason he quit the military was self-preservation, she said. “He dropped out of training because he got blisters on his feet. This is the total opposite of the school shooters who go in expecting to be fully engaged and to be killed. This killer is the most important person in the world. He cannot be hurt or even discomforted.” This fixation on minutiae parallels Breivik’s current behavior in prison, where he is massively vocal about the smallest of discomforts or slights, oblivious to the irony of these claims while in prison for murdering seventy-seven people.
When, on April 19, 1995, McVeigh exploded a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was the worst terrorist attack on United States soil until the attacks on September 11, 2001. It killed 168 people and injured over six hundred.
Puckett was struck by the visits McVeigh made to the Michigan Militia a year or two before he and Terry Nichols assembled the bomb in the Ryder truck that McVeigh would drive to the Murrah Federal Building on April 19. McVeigh attempted to inspire the group to violence, saying “massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco” demanded payment in kind to the U.S. government. “They were told to leave more than one meeting,” Militia leader Norman Olsen said, according to All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh, “because of that type of talk of destruction and harm and terrorism.” This parallels Breivik’s failed attempts to engage with, and join, Norway’s Progressive Party and, later, right-wing online groups. Later, McVeigh tried unsuccessfully to recruit members for his own “patriot group.” In the final days before the bombing, he tried several times to reach the National Alliance, a radical militia organization. He also hung up a note at a gun show that read “I’m looking for fighters.”
Like Breivi
k, he never gave up trying to make a human connection.
Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, whom McVeigh had met in the Army and who shared his views, helped him obtain the bomb materials and check out the site. But neither of them wanted to take part in actually executing the attack. In the end, McVeigh was alone in his operation.
ERIC RUDOLPH, THE OLYMPIC PARK BOMBER
Eric Robert Rudolph, another homegrown lone wolf, was responsible for a series of bombings across the United States between 1996 and 1998. He killed two people and injured at least 150 others. His bombings were motivated by his religious beliefs against abortion clinics and gays.
He was given his nickname after he bombed the Centennial Olympic Park on July 27 during the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. A massive explosion ripped through the crowd of people celebrating on that summer night. A bomb concealed in a military backpack and placed under a bench had detonated. Although security was supposedly tight, no backpacks had been searched and there were no metal detectors.
Rudolph had made his bomb from three metal pipes filled with smokeless powder, similar to Kaczynski’s, capped with end plugs and 8d masonry nails for shrapnel, according to FBI Agent Terry Turchie. “A Big Ben alarm clock and 12-volt battery provided the timing and ignition system.”
Atlanta Police had received an anonymous call before the explosion, saying “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have ten minutes.” Rudolph also sent letters to the news media claiming the “Army of God” was responsible.
Over the next eighteen months, three more bombings followed: In January 1997, an abortion clinic in Atlanta was attacked. In February the same year, a gay nightclub in Atlanta exploded, and as emergency personnel and police arrived at the scene, a second bomb detonated, aiming to kill the first responders. The “Army of God” also claimed credit for these.
Then on January 30, 1998, an off-duty police officer, Robert Sanderson, was killed at a Birmingham abortion clinic by a bomb triggered by remote control. This time Rudolph was standing just a few yards away.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 23
