Searching for clues to serial killers
Mass murderers are as different as their killing field - be it a nursing home or a suburban home - and as diverse as their reasons for killing - whether it's spousal betrayal or the loss of a job.
Mass murderers are as different as their killing field - be it a nursing home or a suburban home - and as diverse as their reasons for killing - whether it's spousal betrayal or the loss of a job.
But experts say most people who embark on such wholesale slaughter share certain key characteristics: A catastrophic event that triggers a suicidal rage and an unquenchable thirst to get even.
And there is often no way to see it coming.
"I'm not sure you can even predict it," says Mark Safarik, who retired in 2007 as a senior profiler in the FBI's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit.
"It's the constellation or coming together, the perfect storm of someone's last shot at something. For them, there's just no other way out. Or if there's another way out, they don't choose it, because they're going to punish somebody."
Mass murder is nothing new, and the invention of repeating guns only made it easier. But even experts who study the phenomenon have been stunned by the recent rash - seven in the past month, three in the past week alone.
"Boy, this is a lot," said Safarik, now a partner with Forensic Behavioral Services International.
Criminologist Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University, was not surprised to learn that the man who shot up a Binghamton, N.Y., immigrant center on Friday had recently been laid off from his job at a vacuum-cleaner factory. What puzzled him at first was why Jiverly Wong, 41, chose his target.
"If it was only the job loss, why didn't he go back to the work site and kill his manager and his co-workers?" Levin asked himself. "Because that's what we're used to seeing when someone is set off by a termination at work. But he didn't do that."
Then he learned that Wong - an ethnic Chinese raised in Vietnam - had taken English classes at the American Civic Association, and that he blamed his inability to find and keep work, in part, on his poor language skills. That's when the massacre began to make sense - or as much sense as any such tragedy can.
Wong's personal failures meant that he had "lost the respect in the eyes of others of the immigrant community," said Levin, co-author of the book "Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder."
"I'm sure that he was on a suicidal rampage, but first he decided he was going to get even," Levin said of Wong, who killed 13 before ending his own life. "And just like every other mass killing I've studied, his motive - his primary motive - was revenge."
Wong's attack came less than a week after a rampage that killed eight in a North Carolina nursing home. And it preceded attacks in Pittsburgh and Washington state that left three police officers and five children dead.
Serial murderers often kill for sadistic pleasure, said professor James Alan Fox, a colleague of Levin's at Northeastern and his co-author. Mass killers, on the other hand, tend to externalize their homicidal reasonings.
"Before they die, it's very important for them to get some satisfaction, to get even with the people or the institutions or the world that has treated them so badly or made their life so miserable."
Fox and Levin say mass killers fall generally into three categories:
_ People angry at a specific person or group of people and who selectively target those individuals.
_ People angry at a place - like city hall - or a group - like immigrants - and kill anyone who happens to represent those things.
_ And, the rarest type, people who target victims at random, such as Charles J. Whitman, who killed 16 and wounded 31 from the tower at the University of Texas administration building in 1966. *
