Castleden - Spree killers

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2013 Canary Press eBooks Limited

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ISBN: 9781907795923

Cover & internal design: Anthony Prudente

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

There is a clear distinction between mass murder (or spree killing) and serial killing. Both serial killers and mass murderers are multiple killers with lots of victims. The difference is that serial killers usually murder their victims one at a time. The murder is followed by a cooling-off period when the killer returns to functioning normally, maybe for weeks or months, before killing again. Then there is another cooling-off period. Mass murderers kill and kill again and again within a short time with no cooling-off period in between. The killing happens in one surge of action, one rage, often lasting just one day. A killing spree. There are some exceptions to this, but generally the distinction is clear: serial killers kill one victim at a time and mass murderers kill all their victims at once or in quick succession over a matter of hours, while the rage lasts.

The second half of this book deals mainly with the dangerous, lone, breaking-point killers. In England in 2010 there were two high-profile cases of men going berserk and shooting several people, Derrick Bird and Raoul Moat. These are people who are pushed over the edge of sanity by a variety of circumstances, perhaps the breakdown of family relationships, perhaps stress or unfair treatment at work, perhaps financial problems, and often a pile-up of several different sorts of problem. The stress generates rage and the rage generates violence. Pushed beyond breaking-point, the killer sometimes lashes out randomly at whoever happens to be to hand, perhaps a group of co-workers. Often the killing starts with a significant choice of target. The target may be family members, especially if the stress has been generated within the family. In these situations, the killer starts by killing selected members of the family in cold blood, and then, psyched up for killing, he goes outside and kills whoever he happens to meet, perhaps someone passing in the street, completely at random. The Derrick Bird killings were of just this type, targeted killings followed by random killings. And just as frequently there is a third stage suicide. The rage burnt out and with the realisation dawning that he has gone too far, the killer shoots himself. This pattern is so common that it implies that it is the suicide that may be the real focus. First, I cant go on like this, so Ill kill myself; then, why dont I take some other people with me? Why dont I punish the people who have made my life so intolerable, and kill them too? So the suicide may in many of these cases be an integral and crucial part of the psychology of the action.

There are other kinds of mass murder, very different in scale and motivation. At the other end of the scale from Derrick Bird, the lone killer, is the Third Reich, where the state machine is geared to exterminating perceived enemy groups within the state. It is not just a particular family member who is perceived as making the killers individual life a misery, it is an entire racial group within the state that is seen as threatening the states communal stability and well-being. In the 1930s and 40s, Germany was gripped by a kind of collective insanity that led to the mass murder of millions of people. The Holocaust is unfortunately not a unique event in human history, but it is perhaps the most extreme of its kind a genocide.

And there are many kinds of spree-killing madness at intermediate scales in between these two extremes.

Some of the lone breaking-point killers are unstable misfits who are going to go off the rails at some point, but many are, again like Derrick Bird, inconspicuous people who keep their problems to themselves for as long as they can. Many are male, generally conventional, accepting of received societal values, conformist, and they come from lower-middle-class backgrounds. It is rare for mass murderers to be rich. They are usually men who are aspiring, trying to make their way in the world, perhaps finding it something of a struggle, and not quite in control of the events around them. They are trying to achieve more than they can. They see their ambitions thwarted and seek to blame the people round them for keeping them down. They feel excluded from the social or economic group that they would like to join and develop an unreasoning hatred for the members of that group. Because they are outwardly so conventional, often rigidly so, it is an enormous shock to those who think they know them well when they go berserk and kill six people at work.

There are many different paths to mass murder. Some people are frustrated by their family circum-stances. Christopher Speight is a particularly sad example of someone stressed beyond endurance by a developing situation over which he has no control, in his own home. He feels in the end that the only thing he can do is to shoot his way out of it. So family annihilation is one all-too-common type of mass murder.

There are also the military enthusiasts, the gun fanatics who cant resist trying their hand at taking a shot at moving targets. Often when they are handling their guns they fantasise, and in their minds they become commandoes, snipers, sharp-shooters or assassins. And this is where a countrys laws about gun ownership play a vital role. In countries where gun ownership is tightly restricted and there are few guns in private hands, this type of crime is rare. In countries where there is a long tradition of private gun ownership, and the gun laws are permissive, there are many more cases of people going crazy with guns and committing mass murder.

A third type of mass murderer is the disgruntled worker, the man (or woman) who thinks he (or she) is being treated unfairly, passed over for promotion. Worst of all is the worker who feels he has been unfairly dismissed. There have been many cases of people who are so furious at being sacked that they go home for their gun and return at once to shoot their supervisor and one or two co-workers at the same time.

A fourth type is the school shooting, where a student gets his own back on a community for excluding or undervaluing him. This is often the flip side of the buddy culture. The Columbine School Massacre is a classic case. School cultures that place too much emphasis on team games, on belonging to groups, on being socially successful, on having lots of friends, run a significant risk of creating angry, bitter and frustrated outsiders. The onus is on teachers to cut across peer-group pressure, which can slide so easily into bullying and oppression; instead they have to encourage individuality to flourish.