The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer

by Unni Turrettini

  As Rudolph walked away from the scene, a young man thought he looked suspicious and decided to follow him to his pickup truck. He wrote down his license plate number, and Eric Rudolph was identified as the suspect, although he wasn’t apprehended for five more years.

  He later explained that the purpose of the bombing was to “confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”

  As with the other lone wolf killers, Rudolph needed to matter and to attack on a societal level, after merging with his cause. Extremely careful and diligent in his planning, he managed to remain hidden in the Appalachian forest for more than five years and was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list until he was apprehended in 2003.

  Dr. Puckett characterized Breivik as a combination of Kaczynski and Rudolph when it came to his approach to his attacks. Breivik was absent when his bomb exploded but present during the killings on the island. Kaczynski mailed his bombs, effectively detaching himself from the bombs’ destructive results, while Rudolph always remained close enough to witness the damage his explosions caused.

  Rudolph was born in Merritt Island, Florida; but when his father died in 1981, he moved with his mother and siblings to Nantahala, North Carolina. When he was eighteen, his mother took him to a Christian compound in Missouri known as the Church of Israel, in search of an alternative to suburbia and traditional religion. Later, Rudolph enlisted in the U.S. Army, but was discharged two years later because he was caught smoking marijuana. A typical lone wolf, he was unable and unwilling to adapt to any group. He was a loner who relied exclusively on his own abilities to deal with the world. On one of his solitary breaks, he disappeared for more than two weeks in the Nantahala forest. He told no one where he had been, not even his own family. His mother encouraged her children to think and live outside mainstream society, and Rudolph was secure in a large family that tolerated his solitary nature. Unlike Kaczynski, he expressed no frustration over not finding a suitable mate. According to Puckett, Rudolph was by all accounts successful with women sexually, but he didn’t seem to need them to complete his world. Where Kaczynski was puzzled by society, Rudolph was indifferent to it.

  Like Kaczynski and Breivik, Rudolph used the word we when conveying his ideology, referring to the “Army of God” when taking credit for his bombings. After he was caught, Rudolph entered a plea bargain and revealed the location of 250 pounds of dynamite hidden in the forests of North Carolina. He later said that he only agreed to the plea to avoid the death penalty.

  Rudolph is serving his life sentence at the ADX Florence “Supermax” penitentiary on the same row as Kaczynski. In a letter to his mother from prison, he wrote: “Many good people continue to send me money and books. Most of them have, of course, an agenda; mostly born-again Christians looking to save my soul. I suppose the assumption is made that because I’m in here I must be a ‘sinner’ in need of salvation, and they would be glad to sell me a ticket to heaven, hawking this salvation like peanuts at a ballgame. I do appreciate their charity, but I could really do without the condescension. They have been so nice I would hate to break it to them that I really prefer Nietzsche to the Bible.”

  Like other lone wolves, he feels no regret for his acts and continues to hold firmly to his ideology.

  THE ULTIMATE BULLY

  At the end of his life, McVeigh said that the United States government was the ultimate bully. This is an important part of Dr. Puckett’s theory, one that separates these types of killers from others. McVeigh’s stated reason was that he sought revenge against the government for its handling of the 1993 Waco siege, which ended in the death of seventy-six people exactly two years prior to his bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. He also sought revenge for the Ruby Ridge, Idaho incident in 1992.

  Ruby Ridge was the site of the deadly confrontation and siege in Idaho against Randy Weaver that led to the death of Vicki and Sammy Weaver, Randy’s wife and son, along with Deputy U.S. Marshal William Francis Degan. The Waco siege involved many of the same agencies as Ruby Ridge, among them the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).

  McVeigh, much like Breivik, hoped to inspire a revolt against what he considered a tyrannical federal government. The Oklahoma federal building housed many federal agencies, among them the ATF.

  Many parallels exist between Kaczynski, McVeigh, Breivik, and—to a smaller extent—Rudolph, enough to suggest that they all fit the profile of the lone wolf. These individuals were victims of bullying. Isolation was imposed upon them at some point in their lives, and that isolation was also self-imposed due to their own characteristic problems of fitting in with other people. When they killed, “they were righting a wrong,” Dr. Puckett explained, “but they were so grandiose that the government itself had to pay for what they had suffered.”

  Contrary to the lone wolf, the rampage killer is not on any particular mission except to commit suicide and take as many people with him as possible. And contrary to the sociopathic murderer, the lone wolf does not take pleasure in taking lives, nor does he do it in secret. He wants impact above all else. Kaczynski even described in a letter from prison that he thought McVeigh’s bombing was “unnecessarily inhumane.”

  “A more effective protest could have been made with far less harm to innocent people,” according to Kaczynski. “Most of the people who died at Oklahoma City were, I imagine, lower-level government employees—office help and the like—who were not even remotely responsible for objectionable government policies or for the events at Waco. If violence were to be used to express protest, it could have been used far more humanely, and at the same time more effectively, by being directed at the relatively small number of people who were personally responsible for the policies or actions to which the protesters objected. . . . Moreover, the protest would have earned far more sympathy than the Oklahoma City bombing did, because it is safe to assume that many anti-government people who might have accepted violence that was more limited and carefully directed were repelled by the large loss of innocent life at Oklahoma City.”

  Kaczynski seems to forget that had his bomb onboard American Airlines Flight 444 exploded, he could have killed more innocent people than McVeigh did.

  “Kaczynski picked his victims out of Who’s Who in America and the newspaper. Breivik picked children,” Puckett says. The lone wolf thinks No one’s safe from me because I can reach out and touch your society.

  Actually, the lone wolf—who has never been able to connect with anyone or anything but an ideology—cannot even connect with the person or people who caused him such early pain on a deep enough level to just focus on killing these individuals. He can’t take out the school bully of his youth, so he takes out a school. He can’t kill his mother, so he decides to kill “the Mother of Norway.” Narcissism may be part of the equation, but the other part is the inability to connect with other people, even when one is deciding upon whom to take revenge.

  NEW MEANS OF DETECTION

  Kaczynski, McVeigh, Rudolph, Breivik: they all managed to evade early detection. How many times were these odd characters on the radar? And how many times did the authorities drop the proverbial ball? Certainly, it can be argued that this type of neglect had aided Breivik in carrying out his atrocities. Richard Cottrell, ex-Euro Parliamentarian and author of Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe, and others hint of a possible conspiracy between the criminal, the governments, and their intelligence gatherers.

  “We are seeing a massive extension of synthetic terror organized for political purposes,” Cottrell says. He believes (after his study of the Aurora shootings on July 20, 2012) that the endless “no one is safe anywhere” mantra preached by the Department of Homeland Security will eventually invade public events and delve into the privacy of America’s communication.

  These new mass murderers have a ready audience in the digital age, and most take advantage of that. Almost always, they employ a manifesto or a journal to s
hare their frustration and anger with an imagined audience. These documents often begin in a rational way, as Breivik’s did, and then the authors almost always write themselves into murder.

  They want fame, and the digital/blogging/YouTube age gives them a fair amount of that. Perhaps that need to be heard can make them easier to spot as well. Finding them before they strike is the challenge of the future if we are to prevent more from turning into lone wolves or international terrorists, as was the case in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15, 2013.

  “Boston is where the two dovetail,” said Dr. Puckett. “We knew it was a matter of time before the domestic lone wolf merged with the international terrorist. The fact that these guys are acting on their own suggests they still have unmet social needs, so they continually try to re-engage people in extremist groups.”

  Dr. Puckett believes that spotting potential killers can start at the community level, when they attempt to become a part of local groups and cannot handle even those connections.

  Local law enforcement doesn’t have time to spot them, she says. “An organization like the FBI could bring people in, school them in this stuff. Soon the conversation will get around to, ‘Next time you talk to [the] head of local militia, make your usual connection, and eventually, he’ll tell you which whackos show up on their radar.’”

  Such an approach could also lead to witch hunts, yet Dr. Puckett and others in her profession have a point. Killers like Anders Breivik must be detected prior to their crime, because the first crime they commit will almost certainly be the one that destroys a large part of a community or a nation.

  Breivik is an excellent example of that. In the relative freedom of his Norwegian prison, how many others who believe as he does has he already located? Is he planning for later when he’s supposed to have been rehabilitated? Most certainly prison is the safest place for him to live, write, and motivate others. The danger here is that Breivik’s fans can continue his work while he is incarcerated. And when he gets out—if he gets out—how rehabilitated will he really be?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  COPYCATS AND KINDRED SPIRITS

  Choose targets wisely and ensure that the secondary effects will have devastating effects.

  —ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO

  On August 1, 1966, an angry engineering student and former Marine by the name of Charles Joseph Whitman murdered his wife and mother in Austin, Texas, and then shot and killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-two others in a massacre in and around the Tower of the University of Texas in Austin. He spent ninety-six minutes picking off his targets from the tower the way Breivik would, decades later, pick off his from the shores of Utøya.

  Reporters of the time had difficulty explaining how much his incomprehensible actions shocked citizens of the United States. No one knew what to make of such madness. In those pre–September 11 days, they didn’t understand how such a violent act could take place in their country.

  After the killings, a psychiatrist Whitman had visited released all his records. They included information about Whitman’s fantasy of killing people from the tower. Nothing else indicated that he was a danger, the psychiatrist argued in those more innocent times, when something like that might have been a red flag. But would experts have truly been able to spot a Whitman today?

  His father had abused his wife and children, and Whitman confessed, in his journal, to striking his own wife. He also complained of unbearable headaches, and an autopsy confirmed that he may have suffered from physical, as well as mental, disabilities that led to his crime.

  Regardless of the cause, Whitman’s actions stunned the country in a way that few have since. The first in a long line of killers, he wasn’t a lone wolf. His massacre was a form of super-suicide. He had no cause, no motive other than his own misery. Despite his brilliance, he wanted only to end his tortured life and to take as many people as possible out with him. He set the tone for the new mass murderer and mass killings to come.

  Statistics show that in the weeks and months following an event such as the attacks of July 22, 2011, mass murders increase.

  According to Richard Cottrell, “the Aurora, Colorado shootings were in the same line as the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik.”

  Cottrell points out that the parallels between the mass shooting by college student James Eagan Holmes (during a midnight screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, in Aurora’s Century Movie Theater on July 20, 2012), which killed twelve and injured seventy others, are aligned with Breivik’s bombing in Oslo and, especially, his shooting mania on the island of Utøya.

  “We seem to be looking at an American copycat version of Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik,” Cottrell wrote. “The same picture of a deranged lone gunman with a vengeance against society.” Cottrell also makes an important point: “Like Breivik, he survives to tell his tale in court.”

  Cottrell lists a series of shootings and bombings across Europe that erupted soon after Breivik’s massacre.

  • The killing of two Senegalese street vendors in Florence, Italy in December 2011 by a suspected right-wing extremist.

  • The rampage by an alleged solo assassin, who killed two shoppers at a Christmas fair in Liège, Belgium, in 2011.

  • The murders of three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and three off-duty servicemen in Toulouse, France, during a presidential election campaign.

  • Bombings at a school in Brindisi, Italy, in May 2012, in which a teen girl died and five others were horribly injured.

  • The 2012 bus bombing in Bourgas, Bulgaria, which claimed the lives of the driver and five Israeli tourists and injured another twelve.

  Cottrell notes that, in every instance, subliminal motives are aimed to ignite racial and religious tensions. More curious, he suggests, is how close this type of lone terrorist may be to the scrutiny of the police and intelligence services.

  On August 10, 2012, Vojtch Mlýnek, a 29-year-old Breivik sympathizer1, was arrested in the Czech Republic while planning to carry out a series of copycat terrorist attacks. The man, who had been convicted five times in the past of explosives-related charges, had built up a stash of weapons, explosives, a detonator, and an automatic rifle at his home. Because he had used Breivik’s name as a pseudonym in e-mail communication, the police were alerted and able to arrest him before he could press the detonator he was carrying when apprehended.

  Tomas Tuhy, the regional police director who supervised the arrest in the Czech Republic, told reporters: “We are working with the idea that the suspect probably sympathizes with known murderer Anders Breivik from Norway.”

  On November 20, 2012, Polish authorities announced the arrest of a 45-year-old lecturer of the Agricultural University of Cracow, under suspicion of preparation for a terrorist attack. According to the authorities, Brunon K, as he was called, was an admirer of Breivik and was further inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

  The Polish domestic intelligence service ABW first found out about Brunon K after it launched an investigation into Breivik’s Polish contacts, when it became known that Breivik had ordered some of the chemicals for his bomb from Poland via the Internet. According to ABW, Brunon K was preparing an attack against Sejm (the lower house of the Polish parliament). He planned to detonate four tons of explosives in a car bomb parked at the building during deliberation of the following year’s budget. It is at such a time that all the members of Parliament, the prime minister, and the president are present in the building. Breivik had similar plans, only he sabotaged his own efforts by planning his attack for a Friday afternoon in the middle of summer.

  Brunon K intensified his preparations after Breivik’s conviction. He conducted—and filmed—an experimental explosion of a 250-kilogram bomb in the Polish countryside in the municipality of Przeginia. He had also recruited other people for his cause.

  He told investigators, “Breivik and McVeigh made mistakes. I will be better.”

  On July 26, 1764, near present-day Gr
eencastle, Pennsylvania, four Lenape Native Americans entered the schoolhouse and shot and killed the schoolmaster and all but three children. Known as the Pontiac’s Rebellion massacre, it was the first U.S. school shooting.

  In February 1997, over two centuries later, a sixteen-year-old boy in Bethel, Alaska brought a shotgun to school and opened fire, killing the principal and a student. In October of the same year, in Pearl, Mississippi, two students died. In December, in West Paducah, Kentucky and Stamps, Arkansas, seven died and sixteen were wounded. In 1998, ten people were killed, thirty-five wounded, in five separate school shootings.

  Over the years, on the unlikely battlefield of school grounds, crazed professors have killed themselves and each other. Parents have killed because they didn’t like the way their children were treated, and students have killed, as at the University of Central Florida, on March 18, 2013, when James Oliver Seevakumaran, age thirty-one, planned to destroy his world with an assault weapon, a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition, and four homemade bombs inside his backpack.

  After pulling a fire alarm at the Tower 1 dormitory, Seevakumaran, according to his written plans, intended to attract a large number of people inside the building so that he could murder them. He then pointed a handgun at his roommate and threatened to shoot him inside their dormitory room. His roommate ran into a bathroom and called 911. Seevakumaran then shot himself in the head.

  According to the New York Times, the FBI study of 160 shooting sprees in the United States since 2000 showed that 486 people were killed—366 of them in the past seven years—and 557 others were wounded, many of them gravely incapacitated for years afterward. Sixty percent of the sprees ended before police could arrive, and forty percent of the shooters committed suicide. FBI analysts also found that many of the gunmen had studied earlier gun massacres and were attracted to the attention mass killers received.