The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer

by Unni Turrettini

  Pracon and AUF (the Labor Party’s Youth League) were very clear that they didn’t want to let Breivik win. They were never going to stop believing in their politics and in the democratic system in Norway. Yet Breivik won anyway, not in the sense of changing the government and its politics, although the Labor Party and the socialist coalition lost the most recent parliamentary election in 2013. Instead, he attained something close to what he had always longed for: to be heard, to connect to someone at some level, and to matter.

  According to Dr. Puckett, law enforcement can’t follow a paper trail to these killers, which makes it difficult to find them. “We must have local awareness by local law enforcement,” she said. “They come from the same town, the same school, and the same PTA meetings as people of these extremist groups.”

  These killers can be spotted, but they can’t be spotted in traditional ways because they aren’t traditional killers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  OUT OF HIDING

  Cornered prey will often mount a final desperate attack.

  —ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO

  We do not have to sit back and wait for the next Breivik, the next Kaczynski, or the next McVeigh. We need to track these lone wolves in a new way, a way that will reveal them before they are able to assassinate young people on an island or set off a bomb. We cannot do it with a tidy list of how-to bullet points either. According to Dr. Puckett, tracking these lone wolves is not a matter of profiling; it’s a matter of analysis.

  “Paper trails don’t exist,” she said, “but the behavior trail does exist. How do we see it? By citizen involvement. That is critical.”

  No one else but the neighbors and community members who observe this killer can identify him. Unlike the sociopath, the lone wolf is not stripped of empathetic feelings. Psychopaths exhibit few emotions; lone wolves have a lot of them. They over-care about themselves because no one in their lives wants to deal with them. They are all they have.

  “McVeigh was a pretty normal kid in a pretty normal house,” Dr. Puckett said. “When his parents divorced, his social world was crumbling. If someone had recognized that he was moving toward isolation more than connection, he might have been stopped.”

  The same is true of Anders Breivik at a much younger age. Child Protective Services in Norway was already aware that this child was not in a good environment. His mother herself alerted the institution that she couldn’t handle him. CPS did actually step in to analyze the child’s behavior, but the court decided against CPS’s recommendation and let young Breivik stay with his mother. Had the court given custody to the father and his new wife, he might have been a different person. He wasn’t a killer when he was four. He wasn’t invisible. He was, as are all children that age, emotionally oriented to his parents and peers. Could there have been a different outcome? Perhaps.

  CPS established early that Breivik had behavioral problems. He was withdrawn and lacked a sense of security and joy. In the sixth grade, he helped found a boy-only gang he named the Skøyen Killers. Although the group was not violent, Breivik wanted it to appear threatening. He already had an attraction to extremist groups with hateful ideologies. In junior high, young Breivik tried to be a part of the illegal taggers and hip-hop groups. In high school, he attempted to belong to a white-boys-only gang with a racial agenda. Then he dropped out of high school a couple of months before graduation and entered politics. The obvious lack of connection, the repeated attempts at meaningful relationships, combined with isolation, violent computer games, and anabolic steroids, must be looked at as a whole. In Breivik’s case, it turned out to be a lethal cocktail. The signs were there, red flags from childhood. None of the signs alone was enough to trigger an alarm. But if one were to look at all of them as a whole, they point to the development of something much more sinister.

  When Breivik moved back in with his mother and isolated himself completely from his friends and acquaintances, his transformation was probably complete. Was it too late to stop the massacre at this point? Possibly not. Friends and family noticed how he turned to extreme ideologies, and they could have warned local police. Law enforcement could and should have checked out and verified the appropriateness of someone without any experience in farming using his investment company to order chemicals suitable for bomb-making.

  Stopping the development of such a killer before it starts—the earlier, the better—is difficult, and it involves the old balance between individual freedom and national security. To accuse someone of a crime they have not yet committed raises difficult moral questions.

  “In the U.S. we teeter constantly between the two because liberty is so important,” Dr. Puckett said. “In Norway, the norm is conformity, and that can provide a false sense of security, as was the case before the Breivik killings.”

  Norwegian culture, where the individual has no place or worth outside of the group, strongly influenced Breivik’s need to matter. Dr. Puckett believes that a “social cripple”—as Kaczynski described himself, and as all the other lone wolves might also be described—“would be under even greater interpersonal stress” in a culture that values the group over the individual.

  “In many other cultures,” Puckett wrote, “to live outside the group is literally a matter of life and death psychologically as well as physically.” Norway is such a country.

  The Norwegians are so used to being cared for by the state and institutions that they no longer notice one another. The state has removed individual responsibility, and people don’t think it’s up to them to meddle in someone else’s life in any way. The July 22 massacre has not changed their behavior.

  In the United States and most countries, matters must escalate to a breaking point before they are addressed. A withdrawn child can mean a lot of things. But if a rare and particularly withdrawn child is a Breivik in the making, those closest to him may see him trying and failing to be part of a group. They may notice that he doesn’t feel normal in the usual social setting. Ultimately, his alienation will become the engine for his development. He will fail to even navigate and make connections within a fringe group. Yet he will never stop trying to connect with something. He must be stopped before that connection proves deadly.

  Breivik’s killings were an astonishing experience for Norwegians because they had no idea anything like that could happen in their country. That’s not so different from what happened in Connecticut with Adam Lanza, Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara. Many times we hear “I never would have guessed that kid could have done this.” It is the tragic echo of our times. These people are rejected by society because they are odd, but they do not behave in a menacing way or cause those around them to worry or do anything but dismiss them until it is too late.

  At this time, analyzing behavior and activities is proving successful in both identifying the lone wolf and others with a paper trail before they strike. Even though Adam Lanza had not broken the law, there were tremendous indicators of danger because of his total alienation from others. Lanza had a long history of mental issues and was obsessed with guns. He spent considerable time on violent computer games and studying the Columbine killers and Breivik. Obsessive studying of past mass murders should be another red flag. All of the killers have studied and taken inspiration from others before them, whether it was Breivik studying McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho of the Virginia Tech massacre studying the Columbine killers. If anyone had noticed, the outcome might have been different. In Elliot Rodger’s case, his mother actually did notify the police, but the local authorities didn’t follow up. Involved citizens and local law enforcement must work together as a team.

  After the Unabomber was caught, the FBI asked Dr. Puckett to do a study investigating what the lone wolves have in common. The FBI realized they could not track murderers with no tracks. Dr. Puckett traveled extensively and investigated for eight months, and what she learned may change the way lone wolves are being identified today. They were all intelligent. They share
d attachment to a violent ideology and an attraction to weapons. Dr. Puckett also discovered something just as important.

  “If law enforcement does not have contact with the guy, the people he attempts to connect with, the people he expresses himself to, are the only ones who can identify him.”

  Because of her report and the input of others in similar roles, the FBI helped to disrupt or prevent nearly 150 shootings and violent attacks in 2013 alone, in part by steering potential gunmen toward mental-health professionals. As unbelievable as that sounds, potential killers were identified before they struck.

  According to an Associated Press interview with Andre Simmons, chief of the Behavioral Threat Assessment Center, a division of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, the FBI has for years been working with state and local authorities to profile potential offenders with the goal of preventing violent crimes like mass shootings. The prevented shootings and violent attacks from January through November 2013 represent 148 cases that the Behavioral Threat Assessment Center has conferred on during 2013—up thirty-three percent from 2012.

  In that year, the unit received about three new cases a week referred by federal, state, local, and campus law enforcement, schools, businesses, and houses of worship. This center becomes involved only after someone notifies law enforcement about some troubling behavior.

  Dr. Puckett believes this is what must happen. The spotting of these killers comes from the communities themselves—and that does include schools, businesses, houses of worship, PTA meetings, and, in some cases, fringe groups.

  “Awareness needs to be brought to the FBI by law enforcement, and the public needs to be the observers,” she said. “Law enforcement can’t do it, because no crimes have been committed yet.”

  Most people, even the Breiviks of the world, are involved in some sort of social participation in their own communities, or at least are trying to break in. Dr. Puckett is quick to point out that not all mentally ill people are violent, and lone wolves are as rare as they are deadly.

  “If altruism and dedication to a cause were enough,” she wrote, “there would be no end to the supply of selfless and dedicated terrorists who were ready to surrender their lives and even die for their ideological causes.”

  But when they do strike, the damage is massive. The community must play an important part in assessing the threat.

  Adam Lanza killed twenty children and six women with a semiautomatic rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Before driving to the school, he killed his mother. After the shooting, Lanza has been described as “troubled.” Investigators said his fascination with violence was apparent to teachers and other acquaintances.

  In the case of the Boston bombers, the signs were there as red flags, just as they had been in Breivik’s case. Tamerlan’s radicalization to extreme ideology had nothing to do with possible connections to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. He turned to radical Islam just as Breivik turned to his hateful ideology. The change in the two brothers’ behavior as well as their fascination and stockpiling of weapons should have been enough for their friends and family to take notice.

  All these killers, according to Dr. Puckett, had experienced something in their childhood that made them feel isolated and insignificant. Lanza is the one outlier, with his documented history of signs of mental illness. Breivik, as well as McVeigh, had parents who divorced during their childhoods. McVeigh considered that his mother had abandoned him. Kaczynski was convinced that his parents had mistreated him emotionally. Most of these lone wolves had above-average intelligence. All of them had few friends and were quiet and withdrawn as children. In appearance, McVeigh seemed different than the others in that he was a social child; but as he grew past boyhood, McVeigh too was increasingly described as a loner. None of them managed to establish or keep a relationship with a woman. The lack of physical relationship, or even connecting with another person, is important to creating a lone wolf. All the offenders in Puckett’s study were heterosexual and interested in women, and most of them were tortured by the fact that they couldn’t establish a lasting relationship.

  Dr. Puckett also pointed out that the more intelligent a person is, “the more he is able to look to his own ideas as authority for his actions, rather than to the direction of others (such as a government or an extremist group).” This means that although they had trouble affiliating with other people, these killers were not directionless.

  “They were able to form their own ideological variants of the agendas of an extremist group and adapt them to their own uses.” Most important, Breivik, McVeigh, and Kaczynski all used their intellectual capacity to compensate for being unsuccessful in their social lives.

  “They needed to matter in the world,” Puckett said, “and if they couldn’t do it socially, they needed to make their mark in another way, a way that would be noticed.”

  Kaczynski wrote in his journals that he wished to start an anti-technology organization, but he added that he couldn’t because of his social disability. Kaczynski was the only one of these killers who didn’t repeatedly try to connect with an extremist group, perhaps because of his high IQ and capacity to replace human connection with his ideology even more easily than someone of a more average IQ. Blaming his parents for making him “a social cripple,” he spent nearly twenty years seeking revenge on “the technological society” he couldn’t live in by sending increasingly sophisticated bombs to complete strangers he had read about in newspapers or looked up in Who’s Who in America who seemed connected to everything he hated in society.

  “To make an impression on society with words is almost impossible for most individuals and small groups,” Kaczynski wrote to the New York Times. “Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers . . . in order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”

  Kaczynski operated under a group identity. Breivik claimed he was part of the Knights Templar, an organization that probably does not exist. Both Breivik and McVeigh saw themselves as starting a revolution against their governments.

  The Behavioral Threat Assessment Center operates with the knowledge that mass shootings like Newtown are uncommon; and that’s important, affirmed Ronald Schouten, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and expert on threat assessments. “These occur very rarely, and there’s no consistent profile,” Schouten said of those who carry out the shootings.

  Dr. Puckett, who has worked with Schouten, concurs. When investigating a case and a potential killer, she tells her sources: “Throw everything at me. I can’t have too much stuff to look at.”

  She’s looking not just for past behavior but for something still more amorphous. Although past behavior in most people is the best prediction of future behavior, in the lone wolf it is not.

  “We study environment,” Dr. Puckett said. “What they’re thinking. Who they’re with and not with. Who they’ve tried to be with. What successes, what failures. What’s happened in their lives. The development is complex. When they act, it’s after a long period of alienation.”

  The Threat Assessment Center—staffed by agents and analysts of the FBI, the U.S. Capitol Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and a psychiatrist—helps the local officials assess the threat posed by the person of concern.

  A certain university student (not one who has been mentioned in this book), as an example, began to display bizarre behaviors and an increasing interest in firearms. Although he had roommates, he now uses their photos as bull’s-eye targets in the shooting range he created in their basement. None of this was illegal activity, but the roommates looked at the behavior and contacted university authorities, who contacted local police. With the FBI behavioral analysts, the university arranged an interview with the disturbed student,
who agreed to be admitted to a psychiatric facility.

  Although the center was launched in the fall of 2010, the unit’s existence is not yet common knowledge around the country. But awareness is growing, as the FBI has recently been sponsoring two-day conferences about the threat of active shooters, Simmons said.

  “In the same way that these American Lone Wolves were compelled to take up their solitary campaigns,” Dr. Puckett wrote, “it’s logical to assume that extremist ideologies from abroad will be adopted by one or more new Lone Wolves who decide to commit acts of societal-level violence as a result.” They may be homegrown like Breivik, McVeigh, and Kaczynski, or they may be immigrants like the Boston bombers. But their motivation is the same, no matter where they live or come from.

  “A world where domestic and international terrorism collide will be an increasingly dangerous one,” according to Dr. Puckett. “Since 9/11, the primary U.S. response to attacks from international terrorists has been from the military.” Civilian law enforcement, she continued, has been overwhelmed by the challenge of preventing terrorist acts on American soil. The Patriot Act and executive orders from the White House attempt to monitor the vast number of terrorist targets in the country but are inefficient when it comes to a lone wolf.