Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Mass Murderers Fit Profile, as Do Many Others Who Don’t Kill

A mourner, Michael Garwood, visited a memorial near the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Ore., where Christopher Harper-Mercer killed nine people Thursday.Credit...Scott Olson/Getty Images

They have become one of the most notorious and alarming stripes of evil. People who, when you think back, seemed off. Didn’t dress right. Kept to themselves. Were nursing a bitterness that smoldered inside of them.

And then they picked up guns and went out and killed as many as they could.

In the aftermath, the same questions arise: Why didn’t everyone know? Why weren’t they stopped?

Now those questions are being asked about Christopher Harper-Mercer, who for reasons yet to be deciphered slaughtered nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday. They have been asked about the man who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, S.C., in June. The man who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., last year. The man who killed a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013.

And so forth.

What seems telling about the killers, however, is not how much they have in common but how much they look and seem like so many others who do not inflict harm.

Weaving a profile of the public mass murderer, drawing on threads that have been identified, can reveal the broad contours of a certain type of individual. But those contours are indistinct enough to apply to countless others — the recluse next door with poor hygiene who never speaks — who will never pick up a gun and go out and murder.

“The big problem is that the kind of pattern that describes them describes tens of thousands of Americans — even people who write awful things on Facebook or the Internet,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied and written about mass murderers. “We can’t round up all the people who scare us.”

The mass public killings that have drawn such intense public attention are a phenomenon that largely did not occur until two generations ago.

Image
Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26.Credit...via Associated Press

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections, has studied more than 1,300 mass murders that took place from 1900 to 2013. Of them, he classifies 160 as mass public shootings, ones in which at least four people were shot and killed in a concentrated period, excluding those in family settings or involving other crimes.

There were few before the 1960s. The episode, Dr. Duwe said, that some academics view as having “introduced the nation to the idea of mass murder in a public space” happened in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and killed 16 people.

Using data compiled by Dr. Duwe, the Congressional Research Service released a report this year that charted an increase in these shootings since then, from an average of one per year during the 1970s to four in the 2000s and a slight uptick in the last few years. The figures, however, are subject to intense debate, mainly over how to properly define the shootings.

Those who study these types of mass murderers have found that they are almost always male (all but two of the 160 cases isolated by Dr. Duwe). Most are single, separated or divorced. The majority are white. With the exception of student shooters at high schools or lower schools, they are usually older than the typical murderer, often in their 30s or 40s.

They vary in ideology. They generally have bought their guns legally. Many had evidence of mental illness, particularly those who carried out random mass killings. But others did not, and most people with mental illness are not violent.

“They’re depressed,” Dr. Fox said. “They’re not out of touch with reality. They don’t hear voices. They don’t think the people they’re shooting are gophers.”

‘History of Frustration’

They do not fit in. Their most comfortable companion is themselves. According to Dr. Fox, mass killers tend to be “people in social isolation with a lack of support systems to help them through hard times and give them a reality check.”

“They have a history of frustration,” he went on. “They externalize blame. Nothing is ever their fault. They blame other people even if other people aren’t to blame. They see themselves as good guys mistreated by others.”

Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, said these individuals often feel they do not belong, yet frequently live in “smaller town settings where belonging really matters.”

Mr. Harper-Mercer showed signs of such isolation and despair. Like others, he appeared smitten by past mass killers. “They see them as heroes,” Dr. Fox said. “Someone who wins one for the little guy.”

Elliot O. Rodger, a 22-year-old California college student, had not had any friends since grade school. What little interactions he had seemed to be online, while playing the video game World of Warcraft. Many mass killers gravitate to violent video games, as do many young men in general, though this could be more a symptom of their isolation than a cause of their violence.

A parent of an elementary school classmate said her husband had refused to allow their son to spend the night with Mr. Rodger, who would hide in their home when he would visit. Simon Astaire, who served as the family spokesman, said at the time, “He was as withdrawn as any person I ever met in my life.”

As a teenager, he received a diagnosis of a developmental disorder identified in part by a difficulty interacting with others.

At Santa Barbara City College, Mr. Rodger clashed with his roommates and lived a life online. He stopped attending classes, and he posted videos about being rejected by women.

Image
A man knelt across the street from the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., where Dylann Roof killed nine black worshipers in June.Credit...Wade Spees/The Post and Courier, via Associated Press

Not long before he acted, he posted a video to YouTube. It showed him sitting behind the steering wheel of his BMW, ranting about his isolation, the women who had shown no interest in him and his disappointment at being a virgin. He complained, as well, about all the sexually active men who were enjoying life more than he was.

“It all has to come to this,” Mr. Rodger said in the video. “Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day I will have my retribution against humanity. Against all of you.”

On May 23, 2014, he stabbed three men to death in his apartment, then drove off and shot three others from his car in the crowded streets of Isla Vista. After two shootouts with sheriff’s deputies, he killed himself.

Pedro Alberto Vargas was another solitary man; he lived with his elderly mother in an apartment complex in Hialeah, Fla., and rarely spoke with anyone. One of the few people he talked to — an acquaintance at the gym — told reporters that Mr. Vargas had exercised as a way to release his anger, and that he had had bad experiences with women.

He had a checkered employment history. A graphic designer, Mr. Vargas clashed with a supervisor at Miami Dade College, his alma mater, who had written that Mr. Vargas “lacks social skills” and that “it is hard for him to accept change.”

When the college discovered in 2008 that he had downloaded inappropriate files from the Internet, including some related to violence and sex, he was forced to resign. That pattern continued at his next two jobs, with Mr. Vargas fired after brief stints.

On July 26, 2013, Mr. Vargas, 42, brought a gasoline can into his apartment. He poured the gasoline over a stack of money on the floor and lit a match. The building managers, a married couple, rushed to the apartment, and Mr. Vargas fatally shot them. He left the apartment and continued shooting, killing four more people before being killed by the police.

Killing Certain Strangers

So many of the murderers end up dead. It is not possible to ask them why they killed.

The majority of mass shooters, experts believe, target specific people for specific reasons. Explicit writings or social media postings sometimes reveal their motivation. A grudge against their boss and co-workers. Or whoever happens to be at their place of employment, as was true with the rash of postal shootings. Their wives and children.

But sometimes the reasons may be clear only to them. Who knows why, nearly a year ago, Jaylen Ray Fryberg, a popular 14-year-old football player, texted two cousins and three friends to meet him in the cafeteria and then opened fire on them before killing himself at a high school outside Seattle. Four died.

He had posted cryptic messages on social media: “It breaks me. ... It actually does. ... I know it seems like I’m sweating it off. ... But I’m not. ... And I never will be able to.”

Other mass killers strike against broad categories — a religious group or immigrants or women. “They may kill strangers, but certain types of strangers,” Dr. Fox said.

In July, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, targeted the American military, killing five servicemen in a shooting rampage at two military sites in Chattanooga, Tenn., before a police officer shot and killed him.

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white high school dropout charged in the June massacre of nine black people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, had registered a website where he posted a four-page screed about his quest for white supremacy.

Image
Flowers in a bullet hole at the scene near the University of California, Santa Barbara, in May 2014, where Elliot Rodger, 22, who had expressed rage at women for rejecting him, killed six people.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The least common but most frightening variation is the indiscriminate public killing. When people die because they happened to be where the killer was. They simply got in his way.

There is little question that Kurt Myers’s life was going poorly. At 64, he was barely scraping by in the upstate New York village of Mohawk. Residents in the area characterized him as somewhat antisocial, but he had no known history of treatment for mental illness and few interactions with law enforcement, except for a 1973 arrest for drunken driving.

A local newspaper, The Observer-Dispatch of Utica, reported that investigators had found no calls on his phone records to or from family or friends in the seven months before he acted. He had not had a job since 2006. His home was a tiny, sparsely appointed apartment.

He was clearly in financial trouble. His phone records listed 150 to 200 calls, many of them from credit-card companies trying to collect on more than $21,000 in debt, The Observer-Dispatch reported.

On the morning of March 13, 2013, Mr. Myers is believed to have set his apartment on fire. He picked up a shotgun. He drove to a nearby barbershop, where he shot four people, killing two and critically wounding two others, and then went to a carwash and lube place in neighboring Herkimer and murdered two more.

He holed up in an abandoned bar, where he was killed by a team of state and federal officers the next day.

The Observer-Dispatch also reported that investigators concluded that Mr. Myers had not had any disagreements or much interaction at all with the people or places he went to kill.

Image
Neighbors and friends gathered outside an apartment building in Hialeah, Fla., in July 2013, where Pedro Vargas, 42, killed six people in a rampage.Credit...Gaston De Cardenas/Reuters

So why? No one kills over a bad haircut, a bad oil job. Why?

How Mentally Ill?

Can you kill in this way and be sane?

From his research, Dr. Fox believes that in the universe of mass murderers, including the domestic killers, the robbers and the burglars, mental illness was not a significant factor. “Most involved in the family massacres are not seriously mentally ill, but vengeful,” he said.

But when it comes to seemingly indiscriminate killings like those in Oregon, that is another matter. “For the purely random attackers, that’s where you find psychotic thinking,” “The more indiscriminate, the more likely there is serious mental illness.”

Dr. Duwe, among his 160 cases of mass public killers, concluded that 61 percent had a serious mental health disorder, “or at least had some symptoms indicating that they did have one.” Paranoid schizophrenia was the most common ailment, he said, followed by depression.

There seems little question about the mental state of Aaron Alexis. In September 2013, Mr. Alexis, 34, a former Navy reservist who worked for an information technology company, planted himself above an atrium at the Washington Navy Yard and fired on everyone he saw, killing 12 of them. He was eventually shot and killed by the police.

A month before the shootings, Mr. Alexis was traveling for his job when he got into an argument with a family at an airport in Norfolk, Va. After the shooting, Glynda Boyd recalled how Mr. Alexis had asked her, “Why is she laughing at me?” He was referring to her 78-year-old aunt, who was in a wheelchair.

His paranoid episodes persisted over the next few days. After he arrived at a hotel in Middletown, R.I., he complained that he was hearing voices emanating from a kitchen, though the kitchen was not near his room. One unnerved hotel guest asked to be moved after he began knocking on doors looking for the voices.

Later, after moving to another hotel, Mr. Alexis called the police and told them that vibrations were coming from a “microwave machine.”

Navy officials said Mr. Alexis had shown a “pattern of misbehavior,” and the authorities in Newport, R.I., alerted naval police there of Mr. Alexis’ paranoia. That information never made it to superiors.

Research does show that people with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder, pose a modestly higher risk of violence. But most people who are mentally ill are not violent.

Dr. Swanson of Duke said studies indicated that only 7 percent of people with a diagnosed mental illnesses might do anything violent in a year, “and that is something as minor as pushing or shoving somebody.”

With many of the killers, the signs are of anger and disappointment and solitude.

“Sure, you’ve got these risk factors, but they also describe thousands of people who are never going to commit a mass shooting,” Dr. Swanson said. “You can’t go out and round up all the alienated angry young men.”

A correction was made on 
Oct. 11, 2015

An article last Sunday about the difficulty in determining common characteristics of mass killers misspelled, in some editions, the given name of a 14-year-old boy who killed himself and four other students at a high school outside Seattle. And the article also misspelled, in one instance, the surname of a 64-year-old man who killed four people in upstate New York in 2013. The student was Jaylen Ray Fryberg, not Jaylyn. And as the article correctly noted elsewhere, the New York man, who was killed by the police, was Kurt Myers, not Meyers.

How we handle corrections

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Killers Fit a Profile, but So Do Many Others . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT