The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer

by Unni Turrettini

  Jack Hobson, a former high school School Resource Officer (SRO), currently a college instructor in Boston, is the author of Drifters, a book examining the drift theory of juvenile delinquency. “There seem to be common attributes that drive a shooter,” Hobson explained in an interview. “The most prolific of these are revenge fantasies, the need to get even for some wrong, real or imagined. Some school shooters go after their bullies, others their sexual or academic rivals. Many of their mental issues stem from an unfulfilled attachment with parents in pre-adolescence.”

  According to Hobson, paternal disappointment often breeds a convoluted sense of self-esteem and shame. “And that festers into a fantasy that, if I do something horrific, maybe Dad will love me and be proud.”

  Maternal attachment, or lack thereof, breeds either a safe comfort zone or a relationship that smothers the child and stymies strong interpersonal relationships with peers. “And within the confines of school, these kids cannot adapt to the normal nuances of the social jungle, and they are preyed upon in hurtful ways,” Hobson said.

  Breivik’s unstable mother and distant father impaired his interpersonal relationships as a young man. He was the weird kid who just didn’t fit in and became an easy target for bullying. The lone wolf has that in common with many rampage killers. However, most of these school shooters were not lone wolf killers, but depressed and suicidal young men who fed off lone wolves and other rampage killers for a sick sort of inspiration.

  ISLA VISTA, SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA

  Hobson’s description applies well to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old college student who murdered six people in Santa Barbara, California, on May 23, 2014. Although never formally diagnosed with mental illness, Rodger struggled with depression and had seen multiple therapists since he was eight years old. In his YouTube manifesto, Rodger complained that, being of mixed race, he wasn’t accepted and girls weren’t attracted to him.

  “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?” he wrote. “I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

  Rodger once said to his father that he wished he wasn’t Asian. “I had no idea he was so racist,” Peter Rodger said.

  Born in London to British filmmaker Peter Rodger and Malaysian Li-Chin, a research assistant for a film company, Rodger was raised in Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was young. Rodger never adjusted. He also had a hard time trying to live up to his successful father, who had married a beautiful actress a year after he left Rodger’s mother.

  According to his father, Elliot was a quiet and invisible kid growing up. “I lived just down the road from him,” one of the survivors said. “I went to the same school as him, and I never saw him.”

  His killing spree was revenge for the rejections and all the bullying he had been subjected to over the years. It was a super-suicide.

  “On the day before the Day of Retribution,” he wrote, “I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery.”

  The second part of the manifesto was dedicated to his “War on Women.” “I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB,” he wrote.

  According to a May 27, 2014 article in the Washington Post, Rodger was an adherent of the so-called “manosphere” on the Internet. Notably, he was linked to an account on the pickup site PUAhate.com, where he promoted an overthrow of “this oppressive feminist system” and envisioned “a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.” On YouTube, he followed a number of accounts that claimed to teach pickup artistry—a skill that’s equal parts pseudoscience, manipulation, and objectification. In his last YouTube video, in which he announced the start of his killing spree, Rodger stole some classic pickup lingo: “You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one. The true alpha male.”

  His father described in an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 2020 his son’s fear of other people, which led him to isolation. “He was obsessed with finding a girlfriend,” Peter Rodger said, and tormented by the fact that no girls were attracted to him, and jealous of couples around him.

  “If I can’t have it,” Rodger wrote, “I will destroy it.” Too terrified to make connections with women, he decided to hate them.

  “He was unable to engage,” a friend of his father said to Barbara Walters. “He couldn’t communicate.”

  Several incidents prior to May 23 indicated his violent behavior and mental instability. In July 2011, Rodger stalked and threw coffee on a couple outside of Starbucks at the Camino Real Marketplace in Goleta. In a later incident, he threw coffee on two girls sitting at a bus stop in Isla Vista for not paying attention to him.

  In the summer of 2013, he tried to shove some girls off a ledge at a college party. His father told Walters that Rodger had been beaten up by boys at the party after the incident, and that his son never told him what had really happened.

  “He was a very good liar,” Peter Rodger said.

  His mother saw some of his YouTube videos and, terrified over her son’s threats and behavior, contacted the police. Six officers made a visit to Rodger’s apartment, but the well-spoken, intelligent, and polite young man convinced them that it had all been a misunderstanding. The police left without entering his place.

  “Had they demanded to search my room,” Rodger later wrote, “that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds, I thought it was all over.” The police neither watched the YouTube videos, nor ran a background check for purchasing guns.

  Three years of planning led to the “Day of Retribution” in which he stabbed to death his roommate and two friends at his apartment before going off on his shooting spree, killing three more and injuring thirteen others. In his journal, Rodger wrote down every detail of what he would do, and how. He had even planned to kill his younger half-brother, in fear that the young child would one day “surpass him.”

  After driving erratically around Isla Vista, shooting from inside his car, Rodger crashed it and pointed the trigger at his own head. Depressed and suicidal, Rodger was a rampage killer much like the Columbine killers and Adam Lanza.

  SANDY HOOK, CONNECTICUT

  On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old male, killed his mother in their Sandy Hook, Connecticut home. Then, after having shot the locking device off the door of a nearby elementary school, Lanza started firing his weapon at the children and staff. Before taking his own life moments later, he managed to slaughter twenty first-grade children and six adult members of the faculty.

  Almost immediately, it was reported that Lanza, a young man who had always remained on the fringe of society, “wanted to kill more people than Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, and he picked Sandy Hook because it had the most potential targets” (MAIL On Line, July 23, 2013).

  Both Lanza and Breivik shared a love of Call of Duty and other violent computer games. Detectives found thousands of dollars worth of these games in a darkened den in Lanza’s home. Both killers used American-made assault rifles and similar handguns. There were other similarities, but Lanza had smashed his hard drive and left no manifesto or notes. After a more thorough comparison, we are left with how the two killers differed rather than how alike they might have appeared to be at first glance.

  Perhaps there is more reason to study the comparison between Adam Lanza and the Columbine killings committed by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at their own high school on April 19, 1999.

  Before taking their own lives, Harris and Klebold shot and killed twelve of their fellow students and one teacher, in addition to wounding many others. The Columbine massacre was the first one that America witnessed fragments of on live television. Students called media from their cell phones, and were interviewed on live TV from the school during the massacre.

  Harris and Klebold, who had met in the se
venth grade, were best friends. They attended football games, school dances, and a variety of shows, and worked together on a school video production. Dylan worked backstage at the sound board at school plays, and he was good at it. Neither of them was particularly athletic, but they both loved watching sports. “His life was baseball,” a friend said about Dylan.

  “Eric fancied himself a nonconformist,” Dave Cullen wrote in Columbine, “but he craved approval and fumed over the slightest disrespect. His hand was always shooting up in class, and he always had the right answer.”

  Both were heavy drinkers, but Eric was better at hiding it from his parents. Eric always seemed the obedient one. Like Breivik, he was also a control freak.

  “He gauged his moves and determined just how much he could get away with. He could suck up like crazy and make things go his way,” according to Cullen.

  They were both intelligent, but Eric was the leader. He knew when to play and when to get serious. If they got into trouble, Eric would do the talking. He knew how to read people and how to tailor his responses. Apologies, evasions, claims of innocence, whatever the subject was susceptible of. “He was like a robot under pressure. Nothing could faze him, not when he cared about the outcome,” Cullen wrote.

  The boys were gifted analytically, as was Breivik. They loved math and technology and spent hours on new gadgets, computers, and video games. Unlike Breivik, the Columbine killers didn’t intend to make any political demands, nor did they have a mission. They committed suicide in the library, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack.

  Unlike Breivik and other lone wolves, Harris and Klebold left a paper trail of criminal behavior. In their junior year, they’d been caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. Arrested, they entered a twelve-month juvenile diversion program, which included community service and counseling, and had finished the program with excellent reviews ten weeks prior to the massacre.

  The police had also received numerous complaints from the parents of Brooks Brown, a classmate and childhood friend of Harris and Klebold’s. The Browns told the New York Times that Harris had made death threats—ten pages of murderous rants on his web page—toward Brooks. In addition, thirteen months before the massacre, Sheriff’s Investigators John Hicks and Mike Guerra had investigated one of the Browns’ complaints and discovered that Eric was building pipe bombs. Guerra drafted a search warrant to search the Harris home, but for some unknown reason the warrant was never presented before a judge.

  It’s possible that Klebold was clinically depressed and just did whatever Harris directed him to, but it is also plausible that he craved the attention of a super-suicide. Harris had clear sociopathic tendencies. Both wanted to top McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma, and by choosing the same date as the Oklahoma City bombing, perhaps they were commemorating their hero. Had their bombs not failed, they would have succeeded.

  On November 7, 2007, at Jokela High School in Jokela, Tuusula, Finland, eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen came to school with a semiautomatic pistol, shot eight people to death, wounded one other, and then shot himself in the head. Auvinen died later that evening in a Helsinki hospital.

  His was the second school shooting in Finland’s history. Angry and suicidal, Auvinen had been inspired by the Columbine killers, but he had also studied other mass murderers. The typical white male, intelligent, and using his hatred for humanity as justification, he wanted to take as many people to the grave with him as possible.

  VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY, BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA

  The deadliest shooting in the United States by a lone gunman occurred on the Virginia Tech campus on April 16, 2006. The killer, a South Korean student, Seung-Hui Cho, killed twenty-seven fellow students and five faculty members and wounded seventeen others, during a two-hour rampage. Able to avoid being stopped after the first phase in his attacks, he visited his dorm room, cleaned up, destroyed the hard drive of his computer, and then continued his massacre. Also during this pause in his killing spree, he went to the post office and mailed forty-three still photos and twenty-seven video clips, including ten minutes of his own rantings, to NBC TV.

  Using both his Walther .22-caliber pistol and 9-mm Glock, Cho fired 174 rounds, shooting each victim at least three times. When no longer free to roam the campus without facing the police’s firepower, he shot himself in the head with one of his own handguns.

  Occurring about five years before Breivik, the Virginia Tech killer could have been stopped. A special review panel organized by the college detailed numerous incidents of Cho’s aberrant behavior, going back to his high school experiences. His package to NBC included an 1800-word clip, similar to a letter he left in his dorm room. In both, he expressed hatred for the rich. In the video, he proclaimed his admiration for Klebold and Harris, the Columbine killers.

  Like Breivik, he had become isolated and spoke of being ostracized. Unlike Breivik, Cho had a history of mental illness. He was sent to a psychiatrist after writing in a school paper, in the eighth grade, that he wanted to “repeat Columbine.” Doctors had labeled him as a danger to himself and others. In college, various instructors were concerned about him but were told there was nothing that could be done. Professor and poet Nikki Giovanni felt that Cho’s writing was “intimidating” and asked to have him removed from her fall 2005 poetry-writing class approximately six weeks into the course.

  Cho’s rampage prompted Virginia to close loopholes that had previously allowed him, despite his long history of mental illness, to purchase the weapons he used to kill and maim so many innocent victims. Based on his troubled background, he shouldn’t have been able to legally purchase the guns; but because of the laws at the time, his history of mental illness was protected by confidentiality legislation, and he wasn’t about to reveal that history when he went to purchase his weapons.

  BOSTON MARATHON

  The Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013 presented an eerie mirror image to Breivik’s act of terror. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, age twenty-six, and his brother, Dzhokhar, age nineteen, were Muslim immigrants from Chechnya, near the Russian border. The older brother, Tamerlan, had gotten himself listed on a database aimed at ferreting out opponents of the government. In his case, it was his outspoken rants against the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Breivik was flagged by the Norwegian government for buying large amounts of fertilizer and other chemicals suitable for bomb-making.

  The carnage at the finish line of the Boston Marathon was caused by two homemade kettle bombs. The bombs killed three, including an eight-year-old boy, and sent 264 others to three Boston hospitals. Most victims were treated for severe trauma and terrible wounds, while some required amputation.

  The cooperation of the Boston Police and the FBI was commendable. Within four days after the attacks, an unprecedented manhunt had located the brothers, but not before they had killed Officer Sean Collier of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Department. The elder brother, Tamerlan, was killed hours later. That night, after the residents of Watertown, a city near Boston, were ordered by the FBI to stay in their homes, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was apprehended. Covered in his own blood and exhausted, he surrendered after being found hiding in a boat parked in a Watertown resident’s back yard.

  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, at the time of his capture, was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, with a major in marine biology. According to those who knew him, Dzhokhar greatly admired his older brother, Tamerlan, who had, in the three years before his death, become more devout and religious. A YouTube channel in Tamerlan’s name linked to Islamic supporter videos. The FBI was informed by the Russian Federal Security Service in 2011 that he was a “follower of radical Islam.” In response, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan and his family and searched databases, but they found no evidence of terrorist activity, domestic or foreign.

  Here were two brothers living apparently normal lives in a country that had accepted their parents with open arms
. What had happened to them?

  Some experts believe they were motivated by an anti-American, radical version of Islam acquired in the United States. Others believe their turn to radicalism happened in Dagestan, a republic of Russia. Tamerlan had visited Dagestan, known for its violent militant Islamic gangs, not long before he decided to employ his brother in making the bombs they placed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Police found evidence of other bomb construction and uncovered their plans to strike again in New York’s Central Park.

  Dzhokhar, while recovering from gunshot wounds he had suffered during his manhunt and capture, claimed he and his brother were self-motivated and not connected to any terrorist group. Through Facebook and Twitter, he is referred to as “Jahar,” and the very young and very ignorant have already begun the process of projecting him as a martyr.

  In the August 2013 issue of Rolling Stone, the editors of the magazine elected to put a frontal portrait of Dzhokhar, looking like a Jim Morrison–type young rocker, with the bold headline THE BOMBER on its cover. Featuring this killer in the place reserved for music icons and popular legends caused immediate outrage, enough that many newsstands refused to sell the issue. Rolling Stone had won a national magazine award for its exclusive 1970 prison interview with Charles Manson, and that interview caused no national boycott. So, what made this cover so outrageous?

  Fear of copycats, of course, might be one answer, but the magazine wasn’t concerned about that. However, this isn’t the place to debate whether the cover was a wise decision. More important is what it says about our culture.

  “Where’s the definitive line between what’s acceptable and what takes it too far?” asked Marla Moore, who had designed that cover. “In this particular case, the article about ‘Jahar’ is insightful, informative, and a relevant piece of journalism, helping to lend background information on how a young, seemingly sweet and good-natured student could become a monster. Something that all concerned over the Boston bombings should read.”