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COLLEGE KILLERS

School Shootings in North America and Europe

© 2012 RW Press Ltd

This 2012 edition published by RW Press Ltd

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Contents

Introduction

NORTH AMERICA

Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre

Bath School Disaster

University of Texas Tower Shootings

Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

Jonesboro Massacre

Thurston High School Massacre

Columbine High School Massacre

Red Lake Massacre

Amish School Shooting

The Virginia Tech Massacre

EUROPE

Cologne School Massacre

Dunblane School Shootings

Erfurt Massacre

Winnenden School Shooting

TERRORISM

Ma’a lot Massacre

Beslan School Hostage Crisis

Toulouse Shootings

Introduction

‘This sure beats the hell out of algebra, doesn’t it?’

Perpetrator of a shooting at Frontier Middle School, Moses Lake, Washington

We send our children to school believing it to be a place of safety. Sometimes, however, it is far from that. College Killers describes how easily the classroom can become a killing ground, and school a place where death haunts the corridors and cafeterias.

According to the United States Secret Service, it could be anyone. He – and almost all school atrocities have been perpetrated by young males – is more often than not the progeny of a troubled marriage or single parent upbringing, but there have also been instances where a killer has emerged from the sanctity of the all-American ‘Mom and Pop’ family. He might be a greasy-haired loner, a Death Metal aficionado who rarely leaves his room, but, alternatively, he could well be the life and soul of the party with a wide circle of close and admiring friends. No one suspects anything is wrong until they watch the gruesome CCTV footage of him stalking the corridors of his school or university, armed to the teeth, with murder, mayhem and revenge on his mind.

It is baffling to most of us that someone could walk into a school or college and kill anyone that crosses his path – innocent student and teacher alike. The Columbine Killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of one of the most high-profile school massacres, committed their heinous crimes with staggering callousness. When asked by another student what they were doing, Klebold replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh, just killing people’. At Thurston High School, as he went about his grim business, the face of murderous student, Kipland P. Kinkel, has been described by a fellow student as expressionless, ‘like it was something he did every day’.

But rarely do we find out what drove these, mostly young, college killers to such desperate lengths, because the majority of them remain silent during their horrific attacks. The 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech in 2007, and the older Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane in 1996, for example, went about their murderous business in a silence broken only by the sound of gunfire and screaming. Our lack of understanding is perpetuated by the fact that most of the perpetrators commit suicide when they run out of ammunition or are eventually cornered by the authorities.

Hamilton was an outsider who picked on the innocents of Dunblane Primary School for reasons largely unknown, although he did feel an overwhelming sense of injustice and frustration. Other school killers’ motives have been a little more evident. Andrew Kehoe blew up Bath Consolidated School in Bath, Michigan, while burdened with crippling debts, while the political aims of terrorist organizations that were behind the Ma’alot Massacre in Israel and the shocking Beslan School Siege in Russia were obvious.

The majority of these attacks have occurred in the United States where school killings are almost weekly occurrences, but they are beginning to spread to other countries with European schools beginning to figure in the statistics. Wherever they occur, however, it is evident that, more often than not, the violence derives from psychological imbalances within the minds of the perpetrators. In the cases in this book, it is evident that many of the killers become thus through poor parenting, a lack of respect for the institutions that have an influence over our lives and a casual approach to violence, perhaps fostered by over-indulgence in ultra-violent video and computer games. Several of the killers in this book – Thomas Hamilton, Kip Kinkel and Andrew Golden, for example – had displayed a morbid fascination for guns from an early age, a fascination indulged by parents who thought it was safe for their offspring to be around firearms.

This book looks at the stories of 17 incidents – from the Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre in 1764 to the Toulouse shootings carried out by Mohammed Mehra in 2012, analysing the motives and examining the methods of some of the most heinous of all murderers – the College Killers.

NORTH AMERICA

Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre

Year: 1764

Perpetrators: Delaware Native American warriors

Murdered: 11

Folklore in Antrim Township maintains that on that particular morning, the children did not want to go to school and only 11 answered ‘Present’ when their names were called at registration. The previous day a woman, Susan King Cunningham had been murdered by Delaware warriors not far away from Antrim and the atmosphere in the area was tense. One of the absentees, Mary Ramsey, claimed to have had a premonition that something evil was about to happen. Her premonition came true.

The last 20 years have seen an explosion of school and college atrocities, but it is generally believed that the first ever to take place was as long ago as 1764 in Antrim Township, a small community in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The four perpetrators were members of the Delaware Native American tribe who attacked a small schoolhouse, scalping and killing almost everyone inside.

The backdrop to the incident was the conflict known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, a war that had been initiated by a loose confederation of Native American tribes mainly from the areas of the Great Lakes, the Illinois Country and the Ohio Country. The tribes were unhappy with the way the British were administrating the region following their victory in the French and Indian War that had been fought between 1754 and 1763. Former rulers of these territories, the French had governed by forming alliances with the Native Americans. They had given presents such as guns, knives and tobacco to chiefs that were re-distributed amongst their people, giving the chiefs stature and authority. The British, however, regarding this approach as bribery, brought it to an end, causing insult to the Native Americans who began to feel that the British were treating them as a conquered people.

Colonial Rule

There was more resentment when the British general, Jeffrey Amherst, began to place restrictions on the amount of gunpowder and ammunition that the Native Americans were allowed to have, the French having imposed no such limits.

The number of British settlers further exacerbated the situation. There had been relatively few French colonists but the British flooded in, clearing the territory of trees to occupy and farm it, displacing many Native Americans from their ancestral lands.

Religion also played a part. It spread through the Native settlements in the 1760s, against a background of food shortages and disease. The most influential person in this religious awakening was Neolin, a member of the Lenni Lenape Native American people, also known as the ‘Delaware Prophet’. Merging elements of Christianity with traditional beliefs, he advocated that Native Americans should stop trading for the goods the whites offered. The British, he claimed, were a threat to the very existence of Native Americans. ‘If you suffer the English among you,’ he said, ‘you are dead men. Sickness, smallpox, and their poison [alcohol] will destroy you entirely.’

The war began when Pontiac, chieftain of the Ottawa tribe, travelled from Detroit to Pittsburgh, attacking small colonies of settlers who had occupied lands that the British Crown had promised would remain in the hands of his people. The British fought back, trying to stop the attacks. This, in turn, led to a widespread retaliation by Native Americans across the settlements in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.

Tribal Retaliation

The tribes’ retaliation was also a response to the atrocities committed by the Paxton Boys, a white gang from the Dauphin County area. Governor John Penn of Pennsylvania had announced that bounties would be paid to white men for the scalps of Native Americans over the age of ten and the Paxton Boys obliged, rampaging through the region and eventually wiping out one whole tribe, the Conestoga. The response of the Native Americans was to kill and scalp any white person they encountered, regardless of age or gender.

On the morning of 26 July 1764, at the small schoolhouse that served Antrim Township, Christian schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, and 11 pupils were preparing for another school day. Suddenly, three Native American warriors ran into the room, startling the teacher and his pupils. As two of the Native Americans guarded the door, the schoolmaster, knowing what was about to happen, begged them to kill him and take his scalp but to let the children live. His plea was futile. The Native American clubbed the schoolmaster and ten of the students to death and took their scalps.

The 11th pupil, Archie McCullough, was scalped, but the blow to his head failed to kill him. When the Native Americans left, Archie crawled to the fireplace and, traumatized by the horror of what he had seen and experienced, hid in it until he was certain they had gone. He then staggered outside to a stream where he washed his bleeding head. Shortly afterwards, a neighbour found him. Remarkably, Archie lived to a good age, although he was mentally scarred by the incident.

A Divided Land

A few days after the massacre, the settlers of Antrim Township gathered to bury their dead. They were interred in a common grave in one large wooden box. Meanwhile, the warriors returned to their tribe with the scalps. One young man who was present when they returned was John McCullough. Aged eight, he and his brother James had been kidnapped from their homestead close to Antrim in 1756. James had been handed over to the French authorities, but John was still living amongst the tribe as an adopted son. He recorded in a diary that, when the young Native Americans returned with the scalps they had taken, they were accused of being cowards by their fellow Delaware because they had taken the scalps of children.

The story passed into legend and, in the area, it was uncertain after several decades whether it had really taken place. Eighty years after the attack the people of the nearby town of Greencastle decided to find the grave to prove once and for all the truth, or otherwise, of the story. Their search finally uncovered a large grave containing the bodies of one adult and ten children. The Enoch Brown Memorial Park now marks the spot where the massacre occurred.

In July 1766, Pontiac travelled to New York where he made a formal treaty with the British at Fort Ontario. The British had already realized that it would be sensible to keep their settlers and the Native American tribes separate and officials drew a boundary line between the British colonies along the seaboard and Native American lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, creating a vast ‘Indian Reserve’ that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Quebec. Pontiac’s Rebellion had served as a reminder that indigenous peoples had certain rights to the lands they occupied.

Bath School Disaster

Year: 1927

Perpetrator: Andrew Kehoe

Murdered: 44

The woman was engulfed in flames when the oil stove she had been trying to light, unaccountably, exploded. She screamed in unimaginable pain, but the 14-year-old boy at the kitchen door just stood and watched, doing nothing. Eventually, after several minutes had passed, he picked up a bucket, filled it with water and poured it over her, dousing the flames. It was too late, though, and a few hours later she would die in hospital from the multiple burns she had suffered.

The boy’s name was Andrew Kehoe and it did not pay to get on the wrong side of him. The woman was his stepmother and he had never gotten on with her since the day she had married his father. Neighbours knew what he was like, though, and there were whispers that young Andrew had probably done something to the stove to make it explode. Nothing was ever proven.

Head Injury

Andrew Kehoe was born in 1872 in Tecumseh, Michigan. After attending his local high school, he enrolled at Michigan State College in East Lansing where he met the woman he would eventually marry – Nellie Price.

Before settling down, Kehoe left Michigan and lived in Missouri for several years, learning to be an electrician. Whilst there, he suffered a serious head injury in a fall and was in a coma for two months. He recovered and went back home to Tecumseh, but many questioned whether his subsequent behaviour and actions were caused in some way by that injury.

He married Nellie and they bought a 185-acre farm near Bath Township. A fastidious man, known to change his shirt if there was the smallest speck of dirt on it, he was also moody and argumentative and very careful with his money. This last aspect of his character led to him being appointed to the Bath School board as treasurer in 1926. It was around this time that the board decided to invest in a new school for the town, to be known as the Bath Consolidated School. In order to fund the project, taxes were increased. This was bad news for Andrew Kehoe who, with his wife suffering from tuberculosis, was already heavily in debt. His mortgage lender had begun foreclosure proceedings on his farm. Kehoe was extremely vocal in his opposition to the tax hike, and he blamed one man for it – the school-board president Emory E. Huyck. At his wits’ end, he devised a plan to get back at Huyck.

Pyrotol was an explosive, used by farmers for excavating or blowing up tree stumps. Therefore when Kehoe bought a quantity of it, it did not seem unusual. He was buying it, however, in several different locations and stock-piling it. In November 1926, he added a stock of dynamite to his deadly stash.

Dynamite Stash

Due to Kehoe’s natural flair with tools and machinery, he had been appointed handyman for the school, which gave him access to every part of it day and night. Whenever he visited the building, he took with him a little Pyrotol and began to put his horrific plan into action. He pretended to be re-wiring the school, but he was, in fact, wiring together various explosive charges that he had hidden all over the building, even in the roof. By early May 1927, he had completed his work. Under the classrooms, as the children studied, lay a massive charge of a 1000 lb of dynamite ready to ignite.

The school was not the only place, however, where Kehoe had been busy. Back at his farm, he had set lethal firebombs in the farm buildings and outhouses.

It began on the afternoon of 17 May 1927 when he beat his sick wife Nellie to death and hid her body behind a chicken coop. The following morning, he drove into Bath where, at the post office, he dispatched a package containing the school board’s financial records, including a meticulous analysis of a 22-cent discrepancy in the accounts. He was fastidious to the end.

The Tragedy Begins

That morning the school day was beginning as usual. Children were arriving and teachers were preparing their classrooms. Kehoe had returned to his farm where he hitched his five horses to posts in their stables and beside them piled up rubbish and branches. At his barn, he loaded his pickup with nuts and bolts and threw on old machine parts that were rusting in the yard.

Explosions erupted at the Kehoe farm at exactly 8:45 a.m. and debris was thrown high into the air, some of it landing dangerously on neighbouring properties. People appeared at their doors and then ran to the farm to try to help. But it was already an inferno. Kehoe had connected his bombs to tanks of petrol and these were blazing intensely.

Kehoe, meanwhile, jumped behind the wheel of his truck, but just as it left the farm, the ground shook and the air was filled with the sound of an even larger explosion. The bombs at the school had gone off.

Those running to help the Kehoes turned in their tracks and frantically made for the school, where many had sent their children that morning. They were faced with a horrific sight. The force of the blast had made the entire north wing collapse. Part of the roof had been blown off and under it lay numerous children, those still alive screaming pitifully for help. One man returning home to get a rope to drag the roof away, passed Kehoe in his truck. He was grinning.

Devastation of Innocence

When he arrived at the school 30 minutes after the blast, parents were scratching at the debris with their bare hands, desperately trying to find their children. Catching sight of the target for all his anger – school superintendent, Emory Huyck – Kehoe called to him and Huyck rushed over. As he approached Kehoe picked up a rifle, turned and fired into the space behind his seat. There was a massive explosion as the dynamite he had secreted there blew up. It killed Kehoe and Huyck instantly but also blew the debris he had put in the truck in every direction, lethal pieces of metal slicing through the air like shrapnel. Glenn Smith, the town’s postmaster, was killed in the explosion, as were his father-in-law, Nelson McFarren and eight-year-old G. Cleo Claton.

As searchers dug, they found yet another huge and potentially devastating bomb that the devious Kehoe had set to go off at 9:45 a.m. It had failed to detonate, possibly because the first explosion had short-circuited it.

A total of 45 people – including 38 children aged between seven and 14 – died at Bath Consolidated School that day. It was America’s biggest ever school killing and, of peacetime civilian attacks, only the September 11 atrocity and the Oklahoma City bombing have produced more fatalities.

University of Texas Tower Shootings

Year: 1966

Perpetrator: Charles Whitman

Murdered: 16

Charlie Whitman’s feelings of inadequacy derived from his father. C.A. Whitman was a plumber whose family lived a comfortable and outwardly happy life. Behind closed doors, however, Whitman senior ruled the household with an iron fist. His wife and three sons lived in fear of his violent temper and his unreasonably high expectations of them.

Charlie was a gifted student, an accomplished pianist and an Eagle Scout, but in June 1959, shortly before his 18th birthday, the tensions simmering in the Whitman house finally erupted when he came home drunk. His furious father beat him and threw him in the family swimming pool where he nearly drowned. Shortly afterwards, against the wishes of his parents, Charlie enlisted in the Marine Corps.

Too Little, Too Late

He initially did well and was granted a scholarship to study for an engineering degree at the University of Texas, where he arrived in September 1961. Liberated, however, from his strict upbringing and rigid army discipline, he almost immediately began to get into trouble. He was arrested for poaching deer and began to gamble, accumulating sizable debts. Marriage to his girlfriend, Kathy Leissner, seemed to calm him down a little and his grades began to improve. Nevertheless, it was too late and, to his great disappointment, the Marine Corps withdrew his scholarship. By February 1963, he was back on active duty, leaving his new wife back in Texas to complete her degree.

His problems continued but he managed to persuade his father to pull strings to have his enlistment time reduced. In December 1964, he received an honourable discharge.

Back in Austin, Charlie returned to his studies, determined to make up for his recent failures. He enrolled for a degree in architectural engineering, working as a debt collector and then a bank cashier to pay his college fees. In his spare time, he was a scoutmaster and his journals of the time were filled with self-improvement ideas. Like his father, however, he had a bad temper and he hated the fact that he was overweight. He became depressed, a condition made worse by the divorce of his father and mother. It got so bad that Kathy made him seek counselling. He was prescribed diazepam and sent to see a psychiatrist.

The counsellor very quickly recognized Charlie’s hostility towards his father and his feelings of under-achievement, but she took little notice when he described to her his fantasy of going to the top of the 307ft (93.5m)-tall University of Texas Tower with a deer rifle and shooting people down below. He had been talking about this fantasy for years, but the psychiatrist saw no reason to be worried that he would actually carry it out. Although scheduled for further treatment the following week, Whitman never returned.

To get through his heavy workload in the summer of 1966, Whitman began taking the amphetamine Dexedrine. However, instead of making him alert and focussed, it made him even less efficient and, with his self-esteem at rock bottom, his thoughts began to turn towards making his fantasy a reality.

The Killing Begins

On 31 July, he bought a Bowie knife, binoculars and a supply of canned meat. He took Kathy to a movie and then they joined his mother Margaret for lunch. They stopped at the house of some friends on the way home and in the evening Kathy went back to Southwestern Bell where she was working as a telephone operator. Charlie stayed at home and typed a letter in which he tried to explain what he was about to do, citing unusual and irrational thoughts. He even described how his attempt to get psychiatric help had been unsuccessful. Chillingly, he detailed his plan.

At 9:30 a.m., he picked Kathy up from work and she went to bed while he drove to his mother’s apartment. At some point during his visit, he choked her with a length of rubber hose and then stabbed her in the chest. At around 12:30 p.m., he wrote another letter, explaining his actions before putting his mother’s body in bed and pulling the bedclothes over her. He stuck a note on the door for the apartment block’s caretaker reading ‘Roy, I don’t have to be to work today and I was up late last night. I would like to get some rest. Please do not disturb me. Thank you. Mrs. Whitman.’

Back home, he stabbed Kathy five times in the chest as she lay sleeping, before scrawling on the letter he had already written ‘Both dead’. He wrote more letters to his family before packing a vast array of equipment in his old Marine footlocker – a radio, three gallons of water, petrol, a notebook and pen, a compass, a hatchet and hammer, food, two knives, a flashlight and batteries, a 35-caliber Remington rifle, a 6mm Remington rifle with a scope, a 357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, a 9mm Luger pistol, and a Gales-Brescia pistol. As if that was not enough, he additionally bought a 30-caliber M-1 carbine and a 12-gauge shotgun.

The next morning, he bought a two-wheeled trailer, loaded the footlocker into it and set off in his car for the university campus. Arriving at a security checkpoint, he used the ID that he had had as a research assistant and got a 40-minute permit for unloading equipment. At 11:35 a.m., wearing blue coveralls, he unloaded and entered the tower.

His first victim there was 47-year-old Edna Townsley, receptionist on the 28th floor observation deck. He bludgeoned her with a rifle butt and she would die a few hours later. Shortly afterwards, two people walked through reception, not really noticing anything untoward. Whitman let them get into the elevator and, unbeknownst to them at the time, escape unharmed.

M.J. and Mary Gabour, their sons Mark and Mike, and William and Marguerite Lamport were making their way upstairs from the floor below. When the two Gabour boys appeared at the door, Whitman opened fire with his sawn-off shotgun, killing 16-year-old Mark instantly. Further firing killed Marguerite Lamport and seriously wounded Mike and Mary Gabour. William Lamport and M.J. Gabour ran to get help.

Fantasy Becomes Reality

Whitman methodically unpacked his gear on to the observation deck and immediately started firing at the people in the piazza below. He shot pregnant 18-year-old Claire Wilson, killing the baby she was carrying. A 19-year-old, Thomas Eckman, tried to help her and was shot dead. 33-year-old Dr. Robert Boyer died next. Thomas Ashton, a 22-year-old Peace Corps trainee was shot in the chest and would later die.

University police officers arrived and secured the doors and exits. Meanwhile, Whitman moved to the west side of the tower and shot and wounded a boy on a bicycle on Guadalupe Street which was known as the Drag. A 17-year-old, Karen Griffin, fell to the ground and would die a week later, while 24-year-old Thomas Karr, took a bullet in the back trying to help her. He only lived for another hour.

Two Austin police officers tried to get to the tower but one of them, 22-year-old Billy Speed, received a fatal wound fired through a 6in (15cm) gap in a balustrade. Meanwhile, back on the Drag, 38-year-old Harry Walchuk fell dying from a bullet wound in his chest and 18-year-old Paul Sonntag was shot dead through his open mouth as he peered from behind a construction barricade. As Sonntag’s 18-year-old fiancée, Claudia Rut, tried to help him, she was also shot. She died a few hours later.

A full 500 yards from the south of the tower, a 29-year-old electrician named Roy Schmidt joined a group of onlookers hiding behind cars. When he stood up, thinking he was too far away for there to be any danger, he was hit in the abdomen. A few minutes later, he was dead.

As word of the horror at the tower had spread, many had gone home to get their own guns and by now bullets were ricocheting off the stonework around Whitman as he changed weapons and re-loaded. Overhead, police snipers fired at him from a light aircraft, but they were wide of their target.

A Bloody End to the Terror

Meanwhile, three police officers had succeeded in getting to the base of the tower where they met ex-serviceman, Allen Crum. The four made their way up the tower to the floor on which the observation deck was located.

Splitting into two groups of two, they thought they had Whitman trapped, but as they edged closer, Crum accidentally discharged the gun the officers had given him. It was now or never. Officer Ramiro Martinez leapt from around a corner and opened fire with his .38 pistol at Whitman, who was approximately 50ft (15m) away from him. His partner, Officer Houston McCoy, jumped out from behind Martinez and blasted Whitman in the neck, head and left side with a 12-gauge shotgun. Martinez, having emptied his .38, grabbed McCoy’s shotgun and ran at Whitman firing at him and shouting ‘I got him!’ It was over, but down below 15 people lay dead and 32 had been wounded. For one man, electrical engineering student David Gunby, shot in the lower back by Whitman, it was the beginning of 30 years of dialysis. On 7 November 2001 he announced to hospital staff and his family that he had suffered enough and would be discontinuing his treatment. A week later, he died. He was Charles Whitman’s 16th victim.

Interestingly, when Whitman’s autopsy was carried out, it was discovered that he had been suffering from a brain tumour that, according to the autopsy report, ‘conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions’.

Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

Year: 1989

Perpetrator: Marc Lepine

Murdered: 14

‘I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker,’ he wrote in the suicide letter found afterwards. ‘For seven years life has brought me no joy and being totally blasé, I have decided to put an end to those viragos.’

Marc Lepine

On 6 December 1989, the last day of term before the Christmas holidays, students were relaxing in the Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering faculty associated with the University of Montreal. The college’s management had even provided free wine in the cafeteria that day. For 14 people, however, Christmas would not come that year and many more would undergo an experience that would scar them for the remainder of their lives.

Dangerously Anti-Social

Marc Lepine had been born Gamil Gharbi to an abusive Algerian father and a French-Canadian mother. Eventually, when Gamil was seven, his mother decided that she had endured enough cruelty and divorced her husband. Gamil hated his father enough to change his name at the age of 13 to Marc Lepine, but although he could easily shake off his father’s name, he found it more difficult to renounce the warped views about women espoused by him. Gradually they evolved into an obsession.

He believed that women should not be permitted to go to university and argued that the reason he was a failure was that educated women were taking all the jobs he wanted. He applied for a place at Ecole Polytechnique and when his application was rejected, he claimed that it was because the college was enrolling too many female students. Even at home, Lepine felt undermined by women. His younger sister publically humiliated him about his chronic acne and his failure to find a girlfriend. He fantasized about her death, even digging a mock grave for her.

By that fateful December day in 1989, Lepine, who had never been able to make friends and was interested only in computers, electronics and weapons, had become dangerously anti-social.

He had spent months planning the atrocity. In August, he had applied for a firearms certificate, an application that was accepted in October. Towards the end of November, he purchased a Sturm Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle from a sporting goods store, telling the shop assistant that he was going to use it for hunting small game. Meanwhile, he visited Ecole Polytechnique on a number of occasions, familiarizing himself with the college’s layout. He even took his mother a birthday present, even though it was still weeks until her birthday. He knew he would not be around to help her celebrate.

That afternoon, Lepine sat outside the registrar’s office for a long time. He was wearing a white baseball cap, a grey parka and heavy boots and had a green plastic bag beside him. He seemed nervous and every now and then would check the bag as if to make sure that its contents were still there. When a curious employee finally asked him if she could help him, he suddenly stood up and walked away.

By this time – 5 p.m. – people were beginning to drift away from the college, locking their offices and classrooms. As Lepine walked in the direction of classroom 230, he reached into the bag and pulled out his rifle, armed with a magazine containing 30 rounds.

‘I Am Fighting Feminism’

Arriving at the door at around 5:10 p.m., he turned the handle and walked in. Inside was a mechanical engineering class consisting of 60 students. He stopped the presentation being given by one of the students and ordered the male and female students to go to opposite sides of the room. When no one moved, believing this to be simply an end of term prank, Lepine raised his weapon and fired a round into the ceiling. He then ordered the male students to leave the room and, speaking in French, asked the nine women who remained if they knew why they were there. Someone said ‘No’ and Lepine answered, ‘I am fighting feminism’. One of the students, Nathalie Provost, tried to argue that they were nothing of the kind, but Lepine replied, ‘You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists!’ He then opened fire, sweeping his weapon across the cowering girls from left to right. Six of them were killed and three wounded.

He left the classroom and climbed the stairs to the second floor where he wounded several more women. As he moved towards the financial services department, 24-year-old Maryse Laganière hastily locked the door to the office in which she worked but before she could duck down out of sight, Lepine fired through the door’s window, killing her.

He made his way downstairs again, to the first floor cafeteria where around 100 people were enjoying the free wine provided by the college. He shot and wounded a couple of women, scattering the diners in all directions. He found two women in an unlocked storage area and coldly shot them dead.

He next walked up the escalator to the third floor, finding a room where, oblivious to the horror unfolding below, a class was still in progress. A couple of male students and 23-year-old Maryse Leclair, were delivering a presentation from a low stage at the front of the classroom. Watching were 25 fellow students and two teachers. Lepine, told the two male presenters to get out before shooting Maryse. He then turned and killed two female students who were frantically trying to flee. The students still in the room dived under their desks, but that was not enough cover. Lepine walked towards three of the girls, shot one dead and wounded the other two.

From Murder to Suicide

Calmly, he put a fresh magazine in his gun and walked to the front of the class, firing randomly. Maryse, critically wounded and lying on the stage moaned for help. Lepine unsheathed a hunting knife and callously stabbed her three times, snuffing out whatever life was left in her.

Suddenly, Lepine must have decided it was enough. He removed his white baseball cap, wrapped his parka around the barrel of his rifle and raised it to his head. He exclaimed, ‘Oh shit!’ and squeezed the trigger. Part of his skull was blown off and his lifeless body slumped to the floor.

It seemed to be over, but for some the hell was just beginning. Many entered counselling and therapy that continued for years. One young man, Sarto Blais, found himself unable to cope with the trauma and hanged himself. His parents subsequently also committed suicide.

Jonesboro Massacre

Year: 1998

Perpetrators: Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson

Murdered: 5

‘Tomorrow you will find out if you live or die. Everyone that hates me, everyone that I don’t like is going to die.’

It was Monday 23 March 1998 and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson was angry. His 11- year-old girlfriend, Candace Porter, had broken up with him but not only that; it was rumoured that she had also insulted him in some way. He was furious and wanted revenge. But, as usual, nobody believed his big talk. This was the same boy, after all, who had claimed to be a member of a gang called the Treetop Piru that had associations with the notorious South Central Los Angeles street gang, the Bloods. Everyone knew that it was just the efforts of a teenager with low self-esteem to gain respect from his peers.

Two Troublesome Boys

Johnson lived with his mother and stepfather and had difficulties at both home and school. In the past year, in fact, he had been suspended three times and had been charged with molesting a three-year-old girl on a visit to southern Minnesota with his family. The case was dismissed, however, on account of his age. Together with 11-year-old Andrew Golden, he was about to commit a much bigger crime, one that would scar a town’s population for generations.

Andrew Golden shared an interest in firearms with his father and had been given his first when he was just six years of age. He competed alongside his father in shooting competitions, even winning a few of them. He had recently shot his first duck and looked forward to going deer-hunting with his dad. Troublesome at school, Golden often got into fights with schoolmates and he was regularly in trouble for swearing at teachers. He was accused by one of his classmates of killing her cat with a BB gun and Johnson would later claim that it was after that incident that Golden approached him and suggested that they take guns to school and scare a few people. Johnson claimed he was initially reluctant to become involved but Golden told him that no one would get hurt and that all he had to do was find transport to move their supplies and weapons to the vicinity of the school. Golden told him he would provide the guns.

The two boys were both pupils of Westfield Middle School and had become friends on their twice daily bus ride to and from school. They often bullied the other children on the bus and boasted about their activities. Once, Johnson was heard to say, ‘I have a lot of killing to do.’

Gunshots from the Forest

On 24 March, the students and teachers of Westfield Middle School had just started fifth period at 12:35 p.m. when the fire alarm started ringing. Students and teachers began immediately to evacuate the building, following a well-rehearsed procedure. The alarm, however, had been triggered by Andrew Golden who, immediately afterwards joined Mitchell Johnson in woods next to the school. From there, the two boys had a perfect view of the exit doors that would be used in the fire drill. At 12:41 p.m., as the unsuspecting students and teachers flooded through the doors, gunshots rang out.

That morning Johnson had told his parents that he had stomach pains and they let him stay home from school. As soon as they had left the house to go to work, he got into his mother’s Dodge van and drove to Andrew Golden’s grandfather’s house. The van was already loaded with survival gear, a tent, a portable radio and food supplies. They planned to hide out in the wilderness after the shootings until things had quietened down.

Golden had planned to steal weapons from his own house but he had been unable to break into the gun safe. Nonetheless, he still managed to pick up a couple of pistols that had been left lying around. He thought they would have better luck at his grandfather’s house because he knew where his grandfather kept the key to his guns. He broke in through the basement and re-emerged with an armful of weapons. Altogether, their arsenal of weapons consisted of ten guns and a couple of hunting knives.

A Vast Arsenal

While Golden set off the fire alarm, Johnson had unloaded the guns from the van and carried them into the woods. When Golden returned, he pulled on a camouflage vest heavy with ammunition. He had 19 .44-caliber shells and 34 .357 shells in the middle front pockets, seven more .357 shells in an upper right pocket, a lower left pocket filled with 49 .380 shells, 16 .30 special shells, 26 .357 magnums shells, six .30-caliber shells, and three .30-caliber 30-shot clips in a back pocket. He had beside him a .30-caliber carbine rifle and three pistols. Johnson, meanwhile, had a Remington .30-06 deer-hunting rifle fitted with a powerful telescopic sight with which it would be hard to miss any target. He also had four pistols, two knives and a similarly huge amount of ammunition in his pockets, including a couple of speed loaders for a .38 revolver.

The teachers and pupils were following the fire drill procedure, lining up in single file in their class groupings. As they did so they began to hear odd sounds, like popping noises. Some thought they sounded like firecrackers or may have come from a nearby construction site but soon it became evident that these were more than just firecrackers.

Fifteen Second Slaughter

In 15 seconds, Johnson and Golden fired 26 shots. Eleven-year-old Brittany Varner was killed instantly; 32-year-old English teacher and mother of a young child, Shannon Wright, was killed by a bullet in the chest as she tried to protect the little girl standing next to her. On the ground, as she lay dying, she begged those tending to her wound to tell her husband and son that she loved them very much. Three other girls died – Paige Ann Herring and Stephanie Johnson, both aged 12, and 11-year-old Natalie Brooks. A teacher and nine other pupils fell to the ground wounded, amongst them Mitchell Johnson’s former girlfriend, Candace Porter, who was shot in the ribs.

The emergency services converged on the school, as did parents, anxious to ensure that their children were unharmed. Golden and Johnson, meanwhile, panicked and fled into the woods with police officers in pursuit. They were caught shortly after.

The two boys were amongst the youngest people ever to be charged with murder in American criminal history. Their youth did save them from the death penalty, however, and instead they received the maximum sentence available in Arkansas in the circumstances – confinement until the age of 18. Additional weapons charges meant that they actually remained incarcerated until the age of 21.

Mitchell Johnson was released on August 11, 2005 and Andrew Golden on May 25, 2007.

Thurston High School Massacre

Year: 1998

Perpetrator: Kipland P. Kinkel

Murdered: 4

May 20, 1998 was a disastrous day for 15-year-old Kipland P. Kinkel. A freshman at Thurston High School, Springfield in the Williamette Valley, Oregon, he had been caught in possession of a Beretta .32 handgun at school. He had bought the gun for £70 ($110) from another student, Korey Ewart who had stolen it from a friend’s father. Kinkel wrapped it in a paper bag and hid it in his school locker. Soon, however, the gun’s owner reported it missing and amongst the names he provided of those who had been in a position to steal it was Ewart. A short while later, it emerged that Ewart had sold the weapon to Kinkel.

Kinkel was summoned to the head’s office where he confessed to police to having the gun, telling them it was in the locker. He was held in police custody until his furious father, William, arrived to take him home. On the way they stopped at a burger restaurant and over dinner his father lectured him on his behaviour and how he had let him and his mother down. Kinkel’s already fragile temperament was in tatters by the time they arrived home.

‘A Bad Kid with Bad Habits’

He had always felt as if he was a disappointment to his parents. His older sister, Kristin, was a successful student and a brilliant athlete. She seemed to be everything that Faith and William Kinkel wanted in a child, while Kip was a constant source of disappointment to them. His father had described him as ‘a bad kid with bad habits’. Now, he was in more serious trouble than ever before and was almost certainly going to be expelled from school.

Kip Kinkel had always expressed an interest in guns and his father, having enrolled him in gun safety classes, had bought him a 9mm Glock 19 to practise with. But unknown to his parents, Kip had purchased a sawn-off Ruger 10.22 semi-automatic rifle from a neighbour. It was this gun that Kinkel fetched from his bedroom when he got home. He walked into the kitchen where William Kinkel was standing with his back to him having a drink, raised the gun, aimed and, from a distance of about 10ft (3m), shot his father in the head. He then dragged his body into the bathroom where he threw a sheet over it.

After that, he spent time on the phone to friends, talking about what had happened in school, acting as if nothing else had happened. At about 6 p.m., his mother’s car drove into the basement garage of the house. He heard her footsteps on the stairs and when she walked into the house, he said, ‘I love you,’ and then pumped six bullets into her. He dragged her body back downstairs, leaving her in the garage, again covered with a sheet. At this point, he later claimed, he intended to kill himself and, indeed, raised the Glock several times to his temple to do so, but could not go through with it.

The remainder of that night, he listened to music, mainly the piece Liebestod from the movie Romeo and Juliet. He played it continuously and, in fact, when police arrived at the house the following day, it was still playing.

Kip Kinkel was no stranger to trouble. On 4 January 1997, he had been arrested in Bend, Oregon for throwing rocks from a bridge onto traffic passing below. He was kept in custody for one night and, after appearing to show remorse, was ordered to perform 32 hours of community service. Faith Kinkel had taken him to see a psychiatrist who noted the boy’s predilection for making bombs using petrol and other household materials that he set off in nearby quarries to vent anger. The psychiatrist merely warned him that it was dangerous to play with petrol. He seems to have paid little heed, however, because after the shootings, in the crawl-space beneath the Kinkel house, police discovered five home-made bombs, two of which had electronic timing devices, and at least another 15 explosive devices, including a hand grenade. It was this discovery that led to the bodies of William and Faith Kinkel remaining in the house for almost 30 hours until the site was declared safe.

There were other signs too of the teenager’s troubled nature and of his poor relationship with his parents, especially his father. He had smashed a tractor’s windows with an axe, he had karate-kicked a fellow student in the head and he was known to behead cats and display their severed heads on sticks.

Armed to the Teeth

The following morning there was a relaxed atmosphere at Thurston High School, the next day, Friday and the following Monday were holidays and everyone was winding down towards the long weekend. The school cafeteria thronged with students chatting and laughing. It was especially busy that day because in the school library an early morning breakfast was being held to honour the contributions made to the school by some senior boys.

Meanwhile, Kip Kinkel was driving the 20 minutes to school, armed to the teeth. Under his coat were the Ruger rifle, a Ruger .22 pistol and the Glock his father had bought for him. He was also carrying a couple of knives and 1,200 rounds of ammunition.

Arriving at school, he immediately made his way to the foyer where he shot and wounded two students. He then strolled into the crowded cafeteria, calmly firing at random as he walked.

For a moment, there was a feeling of unreality in the cafe. Initially, some students thought it must be some kind of prank while others who could not see Kinkel believed the sounds to be coming from firecrackers. Suddenly, the reality and the horror of the situation struck home. Screams began to ring out as people threw themselves to the ground, hid under tables or ran frantically for the exits. The horror multiplied when students saw Kinkel walk up to a boy lying wounded on the floor and pump four bullets into his prone body. As one student later described it, the most frightening thing was the lack of expression on his face, ‘like it was something he did every day’.

A couple of male students – 6ft 4in (1.95m) Jake Ryker, who had already taken a bullet in the chest, and Adam Walburger – courageously decided to try to stop him. Ryker launched himself at Kinkel, knocking him to the ground, but not before he had been shot again. Ryker’s younger brother, Josh, and another wounded student, Tony Case, joined Walburger in restraining the teenage gunman and held him until police officers eventually arrived on the scene. Thankfully, all these boys survived the incident, including Jake Ryker who had a perforated lung. He was later honoured with their highest award for bravery and leadership by the Boy Scouts of America of which he was a member.

At the police station, Kinkel attacked a police officer with a knife he had concealed, hoping, he later claimed, that he would be shot dead.

In September 1999, Kip Kinkel pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to 111 years in prison with no possibility of parole. He apologized for his actions.

Signs of Schizophrenia

It has been claimed since Kinkel was sentenced that he was mentally ill when he carried out the shootings. One clinical psychologist has said that Kinkel exhibited all the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia but had made huge efforts to conceal it for fear he would be considered abnormal. He is said to have suffered from hearing voices and from delusions, and had a terror of being declared mentally ill. It has been claimed that he should have taken the case to trial and argued an insanity defense.

A note was found in his room after the killings. It read: ‘I have just killed my parents! I don’t know what is happening. I love my mom and dad so much. I just got two felonies on my record. My parents can’t take that! It would destroy them. The embarrassment would be too much for them. They couldn’t live with themselves. I’m so sorry. I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted. I destroy everything I touch. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I didn’t deserve them. They were wonderful people. It’s not their fault or the fault of any person, organization, or television show. My head just doesn’t work right. God damn these VOICES inside my head. I want to die. I want to be gone. But I have to kill people. I don’t know why. I am so sorry! Why did God do this to me. I have never been happy. I wish I was happy. I wish I made my mother proud. I am nothing! I tried so hard to find happiness. But you know me I hate everything. I have no other choice. What have I become? I am so sorry’.

Columbine High School Massacre

Year: 1999

Perpetrators: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

Murdered: 13

It took just 49 minutes.

During that time, 13 people lost their lives, 23 were wounded and terror stalked the corridors of Columbine High School, in Jefferson County, Colorado.

The perpetrators were two deeply disturbed teenagers – 18-year-old Eric David Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Bennet Klebold – who for more than a year had dreamt of creating an outrage on the level of the one carried out by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1995 in which 169 people had died. Their attack would be revenge for years of what they saw as snubs, insults and cruelties. Ultimately, it was not as devastating as they had hoped, but it would change American schools forever.

A Hatred Within

The signs were there, if anyone had troubled to look closely. In an angry blog Harris voiced his loathing for the society in which he lived, venting his spleen at parents, teachers and fellow students. The website that hosted the blog also provided instructions on bomb-making, and when Harris wrote death threats aimed at a fellow student, Brooks Brown, the authorities were alerted and his home was searched for explosives. Harris was ordered to see a psychiatrist and was put on a course of anti-depressants that brought with them unsettling side effects including increased aggression and depersonalization.

In the years following the massacre, there have been differing versions of the two boys’ lives. Some have described them as computer ‘nerds’ who spent an inordinate amount of time playing violent games such as Doom, while others have characterized them as sociable, with a wide circle of friends.

They chose Tuesday 20 April 1999 for several reasons. Firstly, it was the birthday of Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, but they also planned to commemorate McVeigh’s attack, which had taken place on 19 April as well as the infamous 51-day siege at Waco in Texas that ended on 19 April 1993 with the deaths of 82 Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh.

‘Today is Not a Good Day to be Here’

That morning, Harris and Klebold made a video, apologizing in advance for the actions that were to follow. They then set off separately for the school they attended, Columbine High. Their cars were loaded with an arsenal of weapons and explosives including a semi-automatic 9mm handgun, a 9mm carbine rifle, a sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun, and a sawn-off 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. They also had two duffel bags, each containing one 20lb propane bomb set to explode at 11:17 a.m. These were to be used to blow up the school cafeteria where 500 students would be relaxing between lessons. That morning, those students had ignored the ominous message which had run across the bottom of the scrolling school message board that was broadcast on television screens in various parts of the building. It had read, ‘Today is not a good day to be here’.

Harris and Klebold arrived at the school at 11:10 a.m., parking close to the cafeteria. Coincidentally, they bumped into Brooks Brown, the boy that Harris had threatened, but because he now liked him, Harris told him it would be best if he went home. Something in Harris’s eyes and tone persuaded Brown that he should do as he was told. He left the school.

The killers entered the cafeteria and left their bags containing the bombs beside a table. They then went outside and waited for them to go off. Meanwhile, bombs in their cars were also timed to go off around that time. Nothing happened. The bombs failed to detonate.

In a field three miles from the school, however, one of their devices did explode and 911 calls were reporting it. Harris and Klebold had set this up as a diversionary tactic to draw emergency services away from where the real action was going to take place.

The two teenagers, dressed in trench coats and carrying backpacks and duffel bags, were now located at the top of the school’s west exterior steps. A cry of ‘Go!’ was heard and they pulled their shotguns from the bags.

The Carnage Begins

The first to die, at around 11:23 a.m., was 17-year-old Rachel Scott, killed by shots to the head, torso and leg on a nearby grassy area where she had been eating lunch with 17-year-old Richard Castaldo who was wounded but not killed. At that moment, two 15-year-olds, Daniel Rohrburgh and Sean Graves, and 16-year-old Lance Kirklin, walked through a cafe door at the foot of the staircase. Rohrburgh was immediately felled by a shot to the chest while the other two fell to the ground wounded. As students scattered and took cover, another five were wounded. In the midst of this mayhem, Dylan Klebold ran down the staircase and shot Lance Kirklin in the face. Kirklin was critically wounded, but would survive. Klebold next moved to the wounded Daniel Rohrburgh, and callously shot him dead at point blank range. He then returned to the top of the stairs and was heard to say, ‘This is what we always wanted to do! This is awesome!’ The two continued shooting and tossing home-made bombs onto the roof and into the car park.

The first emergency call from the school occurred at 11:23 a.m. when a student reported an injured girl in the south car park. Police officers, en route to the field where the bomb had exploded, diverted to the school, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Their arrival momentarily distracted Harris and Klebold, allowing teacher Patti Nielson and student Brian Anderson, coming through the west entrance doors, to escape with only injuries from shattered glass.

After firing some rounds at the arriving police cars, Harris turned and entered the school. Meanwhile, realizing that the noise was more than just a prank, students began to flee from the school’s entrances or head upstairs from the cafeteria to the second floor. Others in classrooms were ordered to hide under their desks by teachers.

The killers were now just inside the school’s north-west doors, firing along the corridor. They then set off down the north hallway, firing their weapons and laughing. A 16- year-old named Stephanie Munson was shot in the ankle as she fled, and 47-year-old teacher Dave Sanders, trying desperately to evacuate students, was shot when he ran into them. He crawled into a science lab but bled to death. He had saved 100 students with his bravery.

Nowhere to Hide

Harris and Klebold arrived at the library, spending three minutes firing randomly into it and tossing pipe bombs in as students scrambled under tables. They entered and began firing as they walked towards the west windows. ‘Get up!’ screamed Harris, but no one moved. Then they ordered everyone wearing white hats to stand up; at Columbine, sports team members, particularly detested by Klebold and Harris, wore white hats. Again no one moved and Harris shouted ‘Fine. I’ll start shooting anyway!’ Sixteen-year-old Kyle Velasquez, who had curled up under a computer desk, was shot dead. They then turned their attention and their rifles to the police officers outside, firing at them through the windows. Turning inside again, Klebold wounded several more students before removing his trench coat. Harris fatally wounded 14-year-old Stephen Curnow and wounded 17-year-old Kacey Ruegsegger.

The killers were delighted when they discovered three of the school’s most popular athletes, two of whom – 18-year-old Isaiah Shoels and 16-year-old Matthew Kechter – they killed with shots to the chest. More random shots wounded several other students before Klebold walked up to the table under which 18-year-old Lauren Townsend was hiding. He shot her dead.

Sixteen-year-old John Tomlin tried to crawl away but was killed by multiple shots to the head and neck by Klebold. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Kelly Fleming was killed by Harris with a shot to the back.

It was 11:37 a.m. and shots still rang out in the library, dead and wounded students littering the floor. As they re-loaded, Harris and Klebold noticed John Savage, a student they knew. The unbelieving Savage asked Klebold what he was doing and the shooter replied, ‘Oh, just killing people’. He ordered Savage to get out; the terrified student escaping through the library’s main entrance.

At around 11:42 a.m., the gunmen left the library, making for the cafeteria again where they tried and failed to detonate the propane bomb they had placed there earlier. They wandered back upstairs, staring in at terrified students cowering in classrooms.

Back in the library, at 12:02 p.m., they took pot shots at the police officers outside and then at 12:08 p.m., as SWAT teams began to assemble outside, Eric Harris sat down on the library floor, his back against a bookcase. He put the barrel of his shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Death was instant. At the same time, Dylan Klebold fired his 9mm into his left temple. Their bodies were discovered in the library next to one another.

Red Lake Massacre

Year: 2005

Perpetrator: Jeff Weise

Murdered: 8

The Red Lake Indian Reservation in the remote town of Red Lake, Minnesota, close to the Canadian border, is home to around 10,000 members of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe. It was there, in 1988, that Jeffrey James Weise was born into a family already blighted by problems and parental separations. His parents, 21-year-old Daryl Lussier, Jr. and 17-year-old Joanne Weise, residents of the reservation, never married and had split up even before Jeff was born. His mother was an abusive alcoholic who was forced by her parents to let her former partner look after the three month-old Jeff in Red Lake while she moved to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.

Out of Control

The family’s problems multiplied. In 1997 Jeff’s father killed himself with a bullet in the head after being involved in a stand-off with police in Red Lake and in 1999, his mother was brain-damaged as a result of a car crash in Minneapolis that killed her cousin. Both had been drinking heavily before the accident. She was admitted to a nursing home while Jeff was taken in by his paternal grandmother, Shelda Lussier, back in Red Lake.

Jeff Weise grew into a deeply troubled young man. At school, he was forced to repeat the eighth grade and he was enrolled on a special educational programme. Although often described as quiet at school, he got into fights, one of which was with another student, who he had called a ‘Communist’.

In May 2004, as his life seemed to be spiralling out of control and he was becoming increasingly introverted, he attempted suicide, slitting his wrist with a box opener. He decided not to go through with it, however, and sought medical help.

He was also the victim of bullying by his schoolmates, mainly due to his size and appearance. The black trench coat he wore all year round and the white make-up he plastered on his face did not help and he was nicknamed ‘Goth kid’.

The problems worsened when he began attending Red Lake Senior High and by 2004, he was being prescribed antidepressants. On one occasion that year, while students were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school, Weise extended his arm in a Nazi salute. He was sent for counselling where he talked about his admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Then, rumours began to circulate that someone was going to ‘shoot up’ the school on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, which was also the date that the Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had chosen to enact their massacre. Jeff Weise was the number one suspect, although he always claimed to have been accused unfairly and nothing was ever proven. Nonetheless, he was finally expelled from the school in October 2004, being enrolled on a home-schooling programme for children on the reservation.

A Nazi Obsession

Meanwhile, Weise was very active on the Internet, posting regularly on the Neo-Nazi Libertarian National Socialist Green Party website under the aliases, ‘NativeNazi’ and ‘Todesangel’ (‘Angel of Death’). On forums, he posted statements such as ‘As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there is [sic] barely any full-blooded Natives left. Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run rampant...Under a National Socialist government, things for us would improve vastly…and that is why I am pro-Nazi.’ He also created violent and aggressive computer animations and was obsessed with drawing swastikas. An acquaintance described the drawings he made in his sketchbook as ‘disturbing’.

At around noon on Monday 21 March 2005, Weise took a .22-calibre pistol from his room and walked into the bedroom where his 58-year-old grandfather, Daryl Lussier Sr., was sleeping. Weise fired two bullets into his grandfather’s head and a further ten into his chest. Lussier was the owner of several guns through his work as a sergeant with the Red Lake Police Department. Weise grabbed his police-issue weapons – a .40 caliber Glock 23 pistol and a Remington 870 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. When Lussier’s girlfriend, 31-year-old Michelle Sigana, appeared on the stairs of the house carrying laundry, Weise killed her with two bullets to the head.

He jumped into his grandfather’s squad car which was parked outside the house, and drove it the few miles to his old school, arriving there at 2:45 p.m. At the main entrance to the school there was a metal detector, manned by two security guards. As Weise approached them, one of them, Derrick Brun, confronted him but Weise shot the unarmed man twice, killing him. The other guard fled.

Weise spotted a teacher, 62-year-old Neva Rogers, down the corridor and fired at her, but he was wide of the mark. She ran into a classroom and exclaimed, ‘Somebody’s shooting out there!’

Panic Ensues

It was the last lesson of the day and the students in Missy Dodds’ class had been restlessly eyeing their watches and the clock on the classroom’s front wall, eager to go home. Now, they were thrown into panic. Dodds quickly locked the door and switched off the lights, shouting at the students to hide at the back of the room. They frantically upended tables and threw themselves behind them. The room went silent as they waited.

They heard shots outside getting closer until suddenly the glass panel in the door was shattered by a blast from a shotgun. Weise climbed in through the two-foot-wide opening. He turned towards Neva Rogers and fired at her, hitting her in the head. She fell to the ground, already dead. Then, in homage to his heroes from Columbine who had reportedly asked the same question, he said, ‘Do you guys believe in God?’ One student answered ‘No’ but it made no difference. Weise let loose a volley of shots, killing Alicia White, Thurlene Stillday and Chanelle Rosebear who were all 15.

Suddenly, 16-year-old second-year student, Jeffrey May rushed at Weise, trying to stab him with a pencil he was carrying. Weise, however, was wearing his grandfather’s bulletproof vest and the pencil was deflected. Weise levelled his gun and fired into Jeff May’s face, the bullet entering his right cheek, fracturing his jaw and lodging in his neck, close to his vertebrae. His courageous intervention had given the 12 other students enough time to escape. After the shooting, May was airlifted to MeritCare Hospital, 105 miles (169km) away in Fargo, North Dakota. He suffered a stroke that immobilized his left side and needed surgery to remove the bullet. He remained in hospital for months but recovered from his injuries.

A few minutes after tussling with Jeffrey May, at 2:52 p.m., Weise was back at the main entrance where he shot dead another two students and wounded two others. By this time, however, police officers had arrived at the school. For about four minutes there was a gunfight during which Weise was hit in the arm and the abdomen. He staggered into an empty classroom, slumped against a wall, raised the barrel of his grandfather’s shotgun to his mouth and pulled the trigger. His was the ninth death on that dreadful day.

Amish School Shooting

Year: 2006

Perpetrator: Charles Carl Roberts IV

Murdered: 5

‘Paradise Lost’ was the headline used by one newspaper to sum up the reaction of the world to the news that five little girls had been killed in a gun attack on a US school. The girls had been shot dead, execution style, in the rural Amish hamlet of Nickel Mines, in the Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was the third deadly shooting in the United States that week, but surely one of the most shocking examples of this deadly phenomenon.

It had begun on the morning of October 2, 2006, a perfectly normal day, it had seemed, at the tiny one-room Amish schoolhouse. At around 10:25 a.m., a truck pulled up outside the building and a man, Charles Carl Roberts IV, wearing a baseball cap and wire-rimmed spectacles, appeared at the door. He told 20-year-old teacher, Emma Mae Zook, that he had lost a clevis, a metal shackle, on the road outside and asked if any of the children or teachers had seen it. Although she was slightly wary of the man – he seemed edgy and avoided eye contact – Emma Zook offered to interrupt the lesson to allow the children to go outside to help him search.

Roberts, however, simply turned round, walked to his truck and, to the surprise of the watching children and teachers, returned with a 9mm handgun. The horror was about to begin.

A Family Man

Born in Lancaster County in 1973, Roberts was the son of a police officer. Educated at home, he earned a diploma through a home-schooling association and by 2006, he was employed by Northwest Food Products Transportation. He lived in a mobile home in Bart Township with his wife, Marie, to whom he had been married for nine years, and his two sons and a daughter. Another daughter, born to the couple a year after their marriage, had died soon after birth.

Outwardly, Roberts seemed like an ordinary husband and father; caring and considerate. Normally devoted to his wife and children, it was later reported that he had become introverted and tense in the weeks leading up to the incident. He was also reported to have suddenly become very jovial the week before, as if, some surmised, he had made the decision to carry out the act and it had lifted a great weight off his shoulders.

Earlier that morning, Roberts and Marie had walked their children to the bus stop to put them on the bus to school in Bart Township. By 8:45 a.m., he was back home while his wife went into town. He wrote four suicide notes that she found on her return at around 11 a.m. To Marie he wrote, ‘I don’t know how you put up with me all those years. I am not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife you deserve so much better. We had so many good memories together as well as the tragedy with Elise. It changed my life forever I haven’t been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness. It seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.’

The Nightmare Begins

Roberts ordered the boys in the class to help him unload the truck. He had brought with him the 9 mm handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 bolt-action rifle, about 600 rounds of ammunition, cans of black powder, a stun gun, two knives, a change of clothes, sexual lubricant, and a box containing a hammer, hacksaw, pliers, wire, screws, bolts and tape. He started to barricade the doors with planks of wood, but as he did so, Emma Zoo, her mother and some other family members who were visiting the school that day, succeeded in escaping through another schoolhouse door. Furious, Roberts sent a boy, Peterli Fischer after them to tell them to come back. Peterli’s nine-year-old sister, Emma, seeing her brother run off, innocently followed him. She could only speak Pennsylvanian German; and when Roberts screamed at her to stay where she was or she would be shot, she probably did not understand. It was a misunderstanding that would save her life.

The fugitives from the school ran to a nearby farm and telephoned the police. Meanwhile, Roberts ordered the remaining adults and the 15 boys out of the schoolhouse, leaving him with ten girl hostages whom he ordered to line up in front of the blackboard.

By 10:42 a.m., the first police cars began to arrive and secure a perimeter around the building. Meanwhile, Roberts was binding the arms and legs of his hostages with plastic ties. Seeing some troopers beginning to edge closer to the schoolhouse, he screamed at them to move back or he would start shooting the girls. The officers retreated and tried to communicate with him using their PA systems. He paid them no heed and was, in fact, engaged in a conversation with two of the girls, the sisters of Peterli and Emma Fischer, the children who had just left the schoolhouse. Astonishingly, the girls asked him to shoot them first and to spare the lives of their friends.

Suddenly, the crowd that was gathering outside heard a scream from inside the building. A group of officers who had succeeded in getting round to the back of the schoolhouse requested permission to approach the windows, but it was not granted, the authorities worried that if the gunman caught sight of them a bloodbath would ensue. But at 11:07 a.m., when gunshots rang out from inside the schoolhouse, the officers rushed to the doors and windows. The volley of shots ended abruptly. As they later realized, Roberts had shot himself.

A Sickening Scene

He had shot several of the girls in the back of the head at point-blank range. Naomi Rose Ebersol, aged seven, Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, aged 13, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, aged 12, died at the scene while two other girls – seven-year-old Lena Zook Miller and eight-year-old Mary Liz Miller – would die in hospital the following day. The other five girls were wounded but survived their injuries.

Why did Charles Carl Roberts suddenly become a killer of little girls? We will probably never know the complete truth, but, while he was holding the girls hostage, he phoned his wife and recounted a story from 20 years previously. He told her that when he was 12, he had sexually molested two young female cousins and that recently he had been dreaming of doing it again. Oddly, however, when police questioned the girls he had mentioned, they could remember nothing of the incident to which he was referring.

A new school was built in a different location and the West Nickel Mines schoolhouse was demolished. The scene of such unimaginable horror was returned to quiet grazing land.

The Virginia Tech Massacre

Year: 2007

Perpetrator: Seung-Hui Cho

Murdered: 32

He sought to emulate his heroes, the Columbine High School murderers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. He succeeded. By the end of his rampage through the corridors of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, 23-year-old South Korean immigrant, Seung-Hui Cho, had amassed a death toll more than twice the size of theirs’.

An Erratic Loner

Cho’s family had long been concerned about the erratic behaviour of their only son. He had always found it impossible to make friends and rarely spoke, leading them to suspect that he might be suffering from autism. His behaviour brought bullying from classmates that only forced him to retreat even deeper inside himself. He was diagnosed with depression and a social anxiety disorder known as selective mutism that explained his lack of speech. He went into therapy but gave up on it very quickly.

At Virginia Tech, where he went to study English in 2003, his behaviour got worse. He would sign into class as ‘Question Mark’ and even used that name when introduced to people. His classmates began to call him the ‘Question Mark Kid’. He was thrown out of one class for photographing female students’ legs under their desks and his creative work became increasingly violent and obscene. Department Head, Lucinda Roy, thought that working on a one-to-one basis with him might help, but did not feel secure when she was with him, devising a secret signal that would let a colleague know if Cho started behaving inappropriately.

His attendance of classes fell away and he stopped doing any work. When he was not seated on a rocking chair staring emptily out the window, he could be seen typing relentlessly at the keys of his laptop. Once he rode his bike in endless circles around a dormitory car park, lost in thought. The song Shine by post-grunge band ‘Collective Soul’, played on a loop in his room, some of its lyrics – ‘Teach me how to speak/Teach me how to share/Teach me where to go’ – scrawled on his wall.

Psychiatric Care

One classmate, Andy Koch, revealed even more worrying incidents. He began to receive phone calls from Cho in which he claimed to be Koch’s brother. He told him of a girlfriend he had whose name was ‘Jelly’ and who lived in outer space and called him ‘Spanky’. He insisted during one phone call to Koch that he was holidaying with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Koch finally alerted the college authorities when Cho, who had been accused of stalking female students, threatened to kill himself after being rejected by a girl he had been texting.

Finally, it was decided that he needed treatment. In December 2005, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Christiansburg, Virginia, with a view to committing him to the institution. It was decided, however, that he should merely undertake a course of outpatient treatment and he was released.

He had not been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility which meant under Virginia law that he was still legally able to purchase firearms. Within a couple of months of his release, he had bought a 9 mm semi-automatic Glock 19 handgun. On the morning of 16 April, Cho woke up early and loaded his guns.

Guns Loaded; Let the Rampage Begin

The rampage began around 7 a.m. in West Ambler Johnson Hall. The 894 students who lodged there were just beginning to stir as Cho gained access. It has been suggested that an obsession with 18-year-old freshman, Emily Hilscher, led him there, but she did not know him and we will never know why he chose her as his first victim. He entered her room and fatally wounded her. Ryan Clark, a 22-year-old senior, was killed by a bullet in the neck as he rushed to help Emily.

Cho fled West Ambler Hall and returned to his room where he changed out of his blood-soaked clothing, deleted his emails and removed the hard drive from his computer. No trace of the hard drive, or his mobile phone, has ever been found.

Two hours later, Cho visited a nearby post office where he mailed a package of writings and videos to NBC News. Then, carrying a backpack in which were chains, locks, a hammer, a knife, his two guns and almost 400 rounds of ammunition, he set out for Norris Hall which housed the college’s Department of Engineering, Science and Mechanics.

Arriving at the entrance, he chained shut the main doors, leaving a message taped across them warning that efforts to tamper with them would set off a bomb. He climbed the stairs to the second floor where there were a number of classrooms.

In room 206, Indian-born Professor G.V. Loganathan was teaching an advanced hydrology engineering class when Cho walked in and opened fire, killing the professor and nine of his 13 students. Crossing the corridor to room 207, he shot dead Christopher Berman who was teaching German to ten students, four of whom Cho also killed.

Hearing the gunshots from down the corridor, the students and lecturers in rooms 211 and 204 tried to barricade the doors. In 204, Professor Liviu Librescu was killed by multiple shots by Cho through the door. His bravery, however, allowed most of his students to escape through the window and only one was killed. In 211, attempts to prevent Cho entering failed and the teacher and 12 students died.

Cho reloaded his weapons before returning to room 207 where survivors were tending to the wounded. Two of them were shot and wounded as they held the door, preventing Cho from entering. In room 206, he killed a further two students, one of whom, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, is thought to have tried to protect another student by lying on top of him. He died of multiple gunshot wounds, but the other student was unharmed.

The Final Gunshot

Meanwhile, Professor Kevin Granata, who had locked 20 students in an office on the third floor, went downstairs to find out what was going on. He encountered Cho who shot him dead.

Down below, police officers, initially hampered by the chained doors and Cho’s message, got in through another entrance. As they made their way to the second floor, they heard a gunshot. It would be the last. In room 211 Cho had raised his gun to his temple and blown out his brains.

This second attack had lasted around 12 minutes. Cho had fired 174 rounds, killing 30 people and wounding 17.

The following day, the package he had posted arrived at NBC’s offices. In one of the videos, Cho angrily ranted, ‘I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run…You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today, but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off. You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your Vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything.’

EUROPE

Cologne School Massacre

Year: 1964

Perpetrator: Walter Seifert

Murdered: 10

‘I am Adolf Hitler the Second!’ he screamed as he created mayhem on 11 June, 1964 at the Catholic elementary school in Köln-Volkhoven in the north-west of the city of Cologne, in Germany.

Walter Seifert’s life had fallen apart. Three years previously, his wife had died in childbirth and he had suffered from tuberculosis for some time, the illness preventing him from working. To make matters worse, he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. He also harboured a deep-seated grudge against the German government which he believed was treating him unfairly by denying him a war pension for his service in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He had written several muddled letters to the head of the health department, the town clerk and the head of the provincial government in which he complained that he had been treated unfairly by public health officers.

The Playground Becomes the Killing Ground

On that June day, Seifert’s simmering resentment and sense of injustice erupted in a volcano of hate directed at the children and teachers of the Catholic elementary school.

It began shortly after 9 a.m. when Seifert walked into the school playground. He barricaded the school gate with a piece of wood and made his way towards some temporary wooden pavilions containing six classrooms that had been built in the playground beside the main building. He was carrying a weed spray that he had converted into a flame-thrower. It was filled with a highly flammable mixture and could deliver a flame up to 19ft (6m) long. He also carried a 5ft (1.5m) long lance and a home-made iron catapult.

Ignoring 67-year-old teacher, Anna Langohr, who was giving a sports lesson in a corner of the yard to a group of girls, Seifert approached one of the pavilions. Using his catapult, he smashed the windows and then directed his flame-thrower in through the window at the class inside. The children’s clothing immediately caught fire as did the walls and floor of the wooden construction. Sixty-two-year-old teacher, Gertrud Bollenrath, helped by some of the children, frantically tried to extinguish the flames that had engulfed many of the pupils. She then ran out into the playground and confronted Seifert, trying to stop him repeating his action at another classroom. He lunged at her with his lance, stabbing her. Meanwhile, children, their clothes ablaze, came screaming out into the schoolyard. Seifert once again directed his flame-thrower at them.

He moved towards the group being taught in the playground and Anna Langohr positioned herself in front of the children, barring his way. He switched on his flame-thrower and aimed it at her, seriously burning her.

He turned and approached the other pavilion where two teachers, Ursula Kuhr and Ursula Kunz, tried to barricade the doors with their bodies. Seifert was too strong for them, however, forcing one of the doors off its frame. One of the teachers, 24-year-old Ursula Kuhr, tripped and fell to the ground and as she lay there, Seifert stabbed her several times with the lance. She would die shortly afterwards. Kunz, meanwhile, managed to escape.

A Lifetime of Scars

By this time, people were responding to the commotion at the school and they began to come out of the nearby houses to ascertain what was going on. Seifert panicked and ran into a nearby field and a short while later, was apprehended by the police officers who had converged on the scene.

Meanwhile, back at the school, men from a passing dustbin lorry had begun to extinguish the children and stopped passing cars to transport them to the nearest hospital as quickly as possible. Doctors and specialists fought for weeks to save the lives of the badly burned children, many of whose bodies were covered with 90 per cent burns. Survivors underwent many months of treatment for their physical injuries and even longer for their overwhelming psychological scars.

Both Ursula Kuhr and Gertrud Bollenrath died that day, as well as eight pupils. Anna Langohr hovered between life and death for a week, but survived her injuries, eventually being discharged from hospital after four months. The school was pulled down in an attempt to wipe out the memory of what had occurred there.

Walter Seifert, meanwhile, had no intention of being prosecuted for his crime. As he was being arrested, he bit on a cap in his mouth containing the plant poison parathion. He failed to die immediately as he had hoped, but lingered until that evening when his miserable life finally ended. His last words were, ‘The senior medical officer…wanted to kill me. This is the revenge for it.’

Dunblane School Shootings

Year: 1996

Perpetrator: Thomas Hamilton

Murdered: 17

Thomas Hamilton was born in 1952 in Glasgow, Scotland, to divorced parents, Thomas and Agnes Hamilton. Married for just 18 months, Thomas had left his pregnant wife for another woman and the new baby would never know his father.

When Hamilton was two, his grandparents adopted him and he was led to believe that they were his real parents and that his mother was his sister. He would not know the truth until 1974, when he was 22.

A Firearm Obsession

While still a teenager, Hamilton became fascinated by guns, joining a rifle club and collecting firearms. He also became involved with the Boy Scouts, in 1973, being appointed assistant Scout leader of a Scout group in Stirling where he was living. His leadership skills came into question, however, when he led a group of boys on a winter expedition. A number of them returned home wet and suffering from mild hypothermia. He was accused by parents of having been reckless with his charges and was forced to resign.

Following the failure of a do-it-yourself retail business he had started, he launched a new venture, setting up a number of boys’ clubs in and around Stirling and the neighbouring town of Dunblane. Renting out space at local gyms and schools, he organized activities for boys aged between seven and 11. The clubs were popular at first and membership increased rapidly. Soon, however, boys started staying away, complaining that Hamilton was too strict while others described how he would make them do things which they were not comfortable with and then pay them to remain silent about them. Eventually, the police began to take an interest in Thomas Hamilton.

Although there were stories of him getting boys to change into their swimming trunks to rub suntan lotion over his body while he groaned in ecstasy, police were unable to find anything at his house that implicated him. Nonetheless, a report was written recommending that his firearms permit be revoked because of the complaints against him and because he seemed to be an unstable character. However, nothing was done about it and he continued to run his clubs.

It didn’t stop the rumours spreading around the town though, and it made Hamilton increasingly paranoid. He began writing letters to important people within the community, claiming that he was being victimized. He also wrote threatening letters to teachers who had been telling parents not to send their children to Hamilton’s clubs. He even wrote to the Queen.

Murder on his Mind

On the morning of 13 March 1996, Hamilton, now 43, drove his white van away from his home in Kent Road, Dunblane. It was a frosty morning and before he drove off he had been forced to scrape the ice off his windscreen. A passing neighbour, who had a brief conversation with him, later reported nothing untoward in his behaviour and, indeed, in the days prior to the shootings, there was nothing to suggest the horror that he was about to perpetrate.

Pulling up in a car park at Dunblane Primary School at around 9:30 a.m., he got out and, using pliers, cut telephone wires at the foot of a nearby telegraph pole. He set off across the car park to the school building, armed with two 9 mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers. He had 743 cartridges, 109 of which he would fire that morning. He entered the school through a door on the west side of the building.

A class of 28 children – 25 aged five and the other three aged six – led by their 47- year-old teacher, Gwen Mayor, were in the school gymnasium, ready for a PE lesson. Sports teacher, Eileen Harrild, supervisory assistant, Mary Blake, and Gwen Mayor were discussing the lesson when they heard noises. Hamilton, it seems, was firing random shots outside the hall. The women turned towards the doors through which burst Thomas Hamilton wearing a dark jacket, black corduroy trousers, a woollen hat and ear protectors. In his hand was a gun.

Hamilton walked into the gym firing indiscriminately. Eileen Harrild was hit, blood seeping from wounds to her arms, her right hand and left breast. She staggered into a storage area in the gym, and a number of children scrambled in after her. Gwen Mayor, meanwhile, fell to the floor, killed instantly and Mary Blake, also shot, also made it to the storage area, taking a number of children with her. Screams rang out from the shocked and terrified children in the store and those who remained outside in the gym. Hamilton continued to fire into the terrified children, walking up one side of the gym. Moving to the centre of the hall, he walked in a semi-circle, firing 16 times into a group of them as they lay cowering on the floor. He then walked up to them and fired a barrage of bullets at point-blank range.

At the southern end of the gym, he fired a further 24 bullets, also shooting through a window at an adult that he spotted walking past outside. Opening the fire escape door, he let loose another four shots.

He stepped out and shot at the library cloakroom where teacher Grace Tweddle was wounded in the head. He fired another nine shots into a nearby classroom. Fortunately, however, the quick-thinking teacher had already ordered her pupils to lie on the floor and as a result no one was hit.

He returned to the gym and resumed firing. Suddenly he stopped. Pulled a revolver from his pocket, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Just four minutes had passed since Thomas Hamilton had arrived at the school. Fifteen pupils and their teacher Gwen Mayor lay dead and one more pupil would die later in hospital. As a result of the atrocity perpetrated by Hamilton, all .22 calibre handguns were banned in Britain.

Erfurt Massacre

Year: 2002

Perpetrator: Robert Steinhäuser

Murdered: 16

The Steinhäusers lived on Ottostrasse, on the outskirts of the picturesque old town area in Erfurt, capital of the region of Thuringia in Germany. Frau Steinhäuser, who worked for a local skin clinic, was estranged from her husband, a department head of the German multinational, Siemens, and shared her comfortable house with the couple’s 19-year-old son, Robert.

Background of a Spree Killer

Until October 2001, Robert Steinhäuser had been a student at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium school in Erfurt but he had been expelled after forging a medical certificate to explain an absence from school and he had also threatened a teacher. He was afraid to inform his parents about his expulsion, instead leaving the house every day, pretending that he was going to school.

His expulsion left him with no qualifications and a sense of victimhood and despondency about his future. This hopelessness, he felt, led him to commit the largest mass killing in Germany since the massacre of 17 Israeli athletes by the Black September terrorist group at the 1974 Munich Olympics.

Steinhäuser had always been interested in firearms and kept four guns at home, the two short- and two long-barrelled guns that he was permitted to own by law. He would use a couple of those guns during the outrage he was about to perpetrate. He also amassed a large quantity of ammunition and after the shootings, police reported finding a quantity at home as well as 500 rounds in a bag secreted in a lavatory at the school.

He was an inconspicuous and quiet boy, described by a friend as ‘not stupid, but bloody lazy’. Indeed, while he was at school, he frequently played truant and explained his absences with forged sick notes of the type that led to his expulsion. He had already been held back for a year, preventing him from sitting the ‘Arbiter’ – the final exam that he was required to pass if he was to gain entrance to university.

A Schoolbag Full of Murder Weapons

Steinhäuser’s murderous rampage began on the opening day of the Arbiter exams from which he had been excluded. He knew that his expulsion would come to light as soon as the exam results were published and was almost certainly becoming desperate.

That day, 26 April 2002, he left home for the Gutenberg-Gymnasium, his mother wishing him luck for the exam. What she was unaware of, however, was that his schoolbag didn’t contain books but a Glock 17 which took 17-round magazines and a Mossberg 590 Mariner 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with a Pachmayr pistol grip, 500 rounds of ammunition and a black outfit with a Ninja-style face mask. Arriving at school, he sneaked into the toilet where he changed into his outfit.

The shooting began shortly before 11 a.m. and his target was the teaching staff at the school. He moved from classroom to classroom, stopping briefly in the doorway of each to shoot the teacher. He paid no attention to the terrified pupils, although two were killed by gunshots fired randomly through a locked classroom door. He would, in most cases, wound the teacher from a distance before standing over the prostrate body to deliver the coup de grâce.

Cold, Callous Killing

He was cold-hearted in his approach. An art teacher was ushering her pupils from a classroom when Steinhäuser approached her. She turned and tried to run away from him, but he kicked her from behind and she fell to the ground. ‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed, ‘I’ve never done anything to hurt you!’ But he paid her words no heed. He merely stood over her and pulled the trigger.

A caretaker called the emergency services at 11:05, the first police officers arriving seven minutes later. Steinhäuser killed one of the first officers on the scene, a 42-year-old patrolman, with a shot to the head from a window.

Suddenly, Steinhäuser ran into one of the teachers he hated passionately – 60-year-old Rainer Heise – who taught history and art. Steinhäuser was just taking off his mask and Heise claims to have stared deep into his eyes. ‘You can shoot me now,’ the teacher said. Steinhäuser hesitated. ‘Mr. Heise, enough for today,’ he said. Heise continued talking to him, luring him towards the doorway of the empty room 111. The teacher leaned forward suddenly, pushing the gunman into the room and locking the door. Steinhäuser, realizing that his cause was hopeless, shot himself.

In ten minutes, Robert Steinhäuser had murdered 13 teachers, a policeman and two schoolgirls.

It would be four hours before the building was declared safe and the trapped and terrified pupils and surviving teachers were freed.

Winnenden School Shooting

Year: 2009

Perpetrator: Tim Kretschmer

Murdered: 15

He was ‘unremarkable’, according to local education authorities in Stuttgart, an inconspicuous, unexceptional student who never did anything that would have aroused suspicion. But on 11 March 2009, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer became one of Germany’s most notorious mass murderers when he went on a shooting spree that resulted in 16 deaths, including his own.

He was the only son of Jörg Kretschmer who ran a packaging company, employing 20 people, including his wife, Ute. They appeared to be a normal family that was well integrated into the relatively small community of Leutenbach in Baden Würtemberg in south-western Germany, where they lived fairly affluently.

No Friends – For Good Reason

Jörg had, on occasion, taken Tim with him to the local gun club where they would fire high-calibre weapons together. At home, he kept a small arsenal of guns and apart from a Beretta handgun – the one used by Tim in his spree – he stored them in a locked cabinet. The Beretta was kept in the bedroom of Jörg and Ute.

Tim had his own weapons cabinet, covering several square metres of his bedroom wall and filled with about 30 firearms, mainly air pistols. Every day, he could be heard shooting in the forest behind his house or in the basement. He was reported to be a good shot.

One friend who lived nearby later reported how Jörg and Ute had begged his parents to let Tim play with their son as he had no friends. The boy described how Kretschmer always took pot shots at him and his friends with his air pistol when they were playing outside. As a result, they were understandably reluctant to play with him.

A slightly overweight, bespectacled youth, Tim Kretschmer seemed to be disillusioned with his life, if his social networking pages were anything to go by. On one, he wrote, ‘What do I like? Nothing. What do I hate? Nothing. Job? I’m afraid I’m still a pupil’. Indeed, Kretschmer had graduated from Albertville Realschule in Winnenden in 2008 with relatively poor grades that had prevented him from obtaining an apprenticeship. Because of this he had to attend a ‘commercial high school’ to help him prepare for an apprenticeship instead.

When not playing violent video games and shooting his guns, Kretschmer played table tennis and harboured dreams of turning professional. His coach, however, remembers him as a spoilt young man whose mother gave in to his demands. As a result, he had great difficulty in accepting defeat, throwing tantrums and tossing his bat away. He had a very high opinion of his own abilities and denigrated the play of his teammates. The coach tried to talk to Kretschmer’s mother about his bad attitude but, unsurprisingly, she took the side of her son.

A History of Depression

Kretschmer had received treatment for depression as an in-patient at a psychiatric clinic but, after his discharge, failed to follow up the treatment as an outpatient. Although his parents later denied that their son had received any psychiatric treatment, a psychiatric report prepared for the prosecutor’s office after the killings told that he had met with a therapist on a number of occasions and had discussed the growing anger and violent urges that he was feeling. The therapist had informed Jörg and Ute Kretschmer. Finally, three weeks before the massacre, Tim had written a letter to his parents telling them that he was suffering and that he could not go on.

The day before Kretschmer ran amok, the television news had been full of an incident in Geneva County, Alabama in the United States in which 11 people had been shot and killed by Michael Kenneth McLendon, who later committed suicide. It has been suggested that Kretschmer was inspired by this atrocity to commit one of his own the very next day.

On the morning of March 11, Tim Kretschmer stole the Beretta from his parents’ bedroom and donned a black combat suit, the type used by German Special Forces troops. He also pulled on an SK4-Schutz bullet-proof vest before making his way to his old school, the Albertville-Realschule in Winnenden only a couple of miles away.

No Warning

Arriving there at around 9:30 a.m., he entered the school, heading straight for the classrooms on the first floor. At the chemistry laboratory, he stopped and fired through the door, wounding the teacher inside. He then proceeded to room 301 – his old classroom – burst through the door, and without saying anything, opened fire. The terrified children screamed and threw themselves to the floor, trying to hide under their desks, but six of them, aged between 15 and 17, died – Selina Marx, Steffi Kleisch, Viktorija Minasenko, Jacqueline Hahn, Nicole Nalepa and Ibrahim Halilaj. He returned twice more to this classroom, emptying his gun on each occasion.

Realizing the full horror of what was transpiring, the school headmaster broadcast a coded announcement – ‘Mrs. Koma is coming’, ‘Koma’ being ‘amok’ spelled backwards. This alerted the teachers to the fact that a shooting was in progress and that they should lock their classroom doors. This alert had been introduced after the Erfurt school massacre in April 2002 in which 19-year-old expelled student, Robert Steinhäuser, had shot and killed 16 people.

Back out in the corridor, Kretschmer encountered two young female teachers – 24-year-old German teacher Nina Mayer and 26-year-old Michaela Köhler who, it is believed, courageously tried to block his access to the other classrooms. He coldly shot them dead and continued on his way.

At classroom 9c, he stepped through the door and emptied his gun into the chaos of the room. Fourteen-year-old Jana Schober, 15-year-old Kristina Strobel and 16-year-old Chantal Schill died in the hail of bullets.

Murderer on the Run

At 9:33 a.m., a few minutes after the spree had begun, one of the pupils had succeeded in telephoning the emergency services. Afterwards she recounted how the man who answered could not understand what she was saying because she was screaming. He told her to go outside so that he could hear her better, but she shouted back at him, ‘I can’t go outside because a gunman is running around. There are many seriously injured. Come quickly!’

Police arrived and began to seal off the school. While they did this, however, Kretschmer escaped through a rear exit.

As he fled the scene, he shot and killed 56-year-old passerby Franz Just. In a car park, he then hijacked a Volkswagen Sharan minivan driven by Igor Wolf. Seated in the back seat, he ordered Wolf to drive to Wendlingen, about 25 miles (40km) from Winnenden.

Wolf asked him at one point why he was doing this and Kretschmer replied, ‘For fun, because it is fun’. The teenage gunman also asked Wolf, ‘Do you think we’ll find another school?’ obviously planning to continue the carnage.

At around noon, just before a junction leading to the A8 autostrasse, Wolf swerved his vehicle onto a grass verge and leapt out, running towards a nearby police car that he had spotted. Kretschmer jumped from the car and sprinted towards a nearby industrial area. He entered a Volkswagen showroom where he threatened to shoot a salesperson he encountered unless he was given the keys for a car. Luckily the man managed to get away from him while he was momentarily distracted. But Kretschmer turned and shot dead another salesperson and a customer, pumping 13 bullets into them. While he re-loaded the others managed to flee the showroom.

He emerged at around 12:30 p.m. and fired his gun at a passing car but by this time police were pouring into the area. One officer fired eight shots at the teenager, hitting him in each leg. Kretschmer limped back into the showroom and began firing at police from there before exiting through the rear of the building, firing at random. He re-loaded and suddenly raised the pistol to his head, pulled the trigger and crumpled to the ground, dead.

At last it was over, but not before 112 rounds had been fired and 16 people had lost their lives.

TERRORISM

Ma’alot Massacre

Year: 1974

Perpetrators: Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Murdered: 22

Ma’alot is an Israeli development town, one of a number of such settlements established by the Israelis in the 1950s. The intention was to provide permanent housing for the influx of large numbers of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, European Holocaust survivors and immigrants from around the world. It is situated on a plateau in the hills of Western Galilee, six miles (10km) from the Lebanese border.

In 1974, its Netiv Meir elementary school was the victim of a horrific attack by three members of the terrorist organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

The attack began during the night of Sunday 13 May when three members of the DFLP, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying a quantity of Czechoslovakian-manufactured plastic explosives, crossed into Israel through a nature reserve located to the south of the Lebanese village of Ramish. They spent the next day hiding in orchards close to the Druze village of Hurfeish. At one point that day, an Israeli border patrol discovered their footprints, but reported back to headquarters that they probably belonged to smugglers, smuggling being a common pursuit in that border area.

On the night of the 14 May, the three Palestinians emerged from their hiding place and set out for Ma’alot. En route, they encountered a van that was taking home some Christian Arab women from their work at the Ata textile works in the Haifa Bay area. One of the terrorists opened fire on the vehicle, killing one of the women passengers and wounding the others and the driver. One of the wounded women would later die from her injuries. With great presence of mind, the wounded driver immediately switched off his headlights and reversed at speed back up the hill in the direction from which they had come.

Terrorism Knows No Bounds

The terrorists continued to Ma’alot where they began knocking on doors. When Fortuna and Yosef Cohen opened their door, they were shot dead. The terrorists also killed their four-year-old son and wounded their five-year-old daughter. The couple’s 16-month-old baby, who was a deaf mute, was the only member of the family to survive the attack unhurt.

For the terrorists, however, this attack was merely an appetizer. Their real target was the Netiv Meir elementary school where a party of students on a school trip were currently staying. Meeting a sanitation worker, Yaakov Kadosh, on their way to the school, they asked him for directions before beating and shooting him – leaving him for dead.

They entered the three-storey school at 4 a.m. and announced that they were taking the 102 students hostage. A few managed to escape by jumping out of windows and running to safety, but by the time the terrorists had secured the building 85 students and several teachers remained. They were ordered to sit on the floor and the explosive charges the terrorists had brought were positioned amongst them.

Later that morning, the three Palestinians made their demands known to the authorities. They wanted the release of 23 Arab and three other prisoners, amongst whom was the Japanese national Kozo Okamoto. Okamoto had taken part in the 1972 Lod airport massacre in which three members of the Japanese Red Army had killed 26 people at Tel Aviv’s Lod airport. If the authorities failed to meet these demands by 6 a.m. the following day, all the students would be killed.

People were now gathering outside the school, kept at a safe distance by police and troops. At around 10 a.m. on 15 May, a young man named Sylvan Zerach, saw just how serious the terrorists were when he attempted to obtain a better view of the school by climbing a nearby water tower. As he did so he was shot dead by one of the hostage-takers from a window of the school.

You Cannot Negotiate with Terror

The Israeli parliament met in emergency session and it was decided to negotiate with the terrorists, but the Palestinians refused to extend their deadline.

As the situation became increasingly desperate, the government eventually decided to act. The order was given to the commander of the Sayeret Matkal Special Forces, specialists in counter-terrorism and hostage release, to storm the building. Sayeret Matkal was modelled on Britain’s Special Air Service – the SAS – and even borrowed its motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’.

The troops were split into three units. Two of the units would break in through the main entrance while the third would use ladders to gain access to a window. Hidden by construction work, the soldiers moved into position and awaited the signal to sniper fire on the three gunmen inside the school. At 5:32 p.m. the first unit entered the building through the main entrance, pushing aside the barricade of tables and chairs that the terrorists had constructed. The Palestinians opened fire on them as they took the stairs to the second floor and one of the Israelis tossed a phosphorous grenade into the second floor corridor to create a smokescreen. Unfortunately the smoke hampered the progress of the second unit that had orders to take care of the terrorist who was located at the third floor window, from where he had shot Sylvan Zerach.

When the Israelis broke into the classroom where the hostages were being held, one of the terrorists was immediately gunned down, but another seized student, Gabi Amsalem, and held a gun to his head. The third had made his way to the classroom from the third floor and managed to re-load his weapon. He turned to the terrified students and opened fire. He also tossed grenades out the window. Wounded on the wrist by gunfire, he still succeeded in throwing two grenades at a group of girls cowering together on the floor. Meanwhile, other students leapt from the windows to the ground below.

When the gunfire died away and the three terrorists lay dead, it was discovered that 22 students had died and more than 50 had been wounded.

The following day, Israel exacted revenge on the Palestinians, bombing seven Palestinian refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon, killing at least 27 people and injuring around 138. Once again innocent people found themselves at the forefront of the terror.

Beslan School Hostage Crisis

Year: 2004

Perpetrators: Ingush and Chechen Terrorists

Murdered: At least 385

Secondary School No. 1 in Beslan, in the Republic of North Ossetia, was a large institution with 110 teachers and 1,100 pupils. For Chechen and Ingush people, however, it brought back bad memories. It had been used in 1992 by Ossetian militia as an internment camp for Ingush civilians – women and children amongst them – during the short but bloody Ingush-Ossetian East Prigorodny conflict, in which hundreds of Ingush residents of North Ossetia lost their lives. Not far away was an airfield that had been used by Russian planes carrying out air attacks on Chechnya.

Under Siege

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a band of heavily armed rebel guerrillas set out from their Ingushetian base for Beslan, arriving at Secondary School No. 1 in Comintern Street at around 9:30 a.m. They were dressed in balaclavas and belts containing explosives and the locals thought they must be Russian police or Special Forces engaged in an exercise. Although the fusillade of shots fired into the air persuaded them otherwise.

A number of people escaped the school grounds and alerted police who arrived on the scene shortly afterwards, opening fire on the terrorists, killing one and wounding several others. The terrorists, meanwhile, rounded up everyone in the school grounds and herded them inside. They barricaded the doors but smashed all the windows in order to prevent the authorities from flooding the building with poisonous gas as had happened during a recent terrorist incident in a Moscow theatre.

The authorities issued the number of hostages as 345, but it was later estimated that there were actually 1,128 being held captive. The hostages were taken into the school gym where all their mobile phones were taken from them. The terrorists ordered them to speak only in Russian and not their local language so that they could be understood. One man trying to relay their instructions in the local language was immediately shot dead with a bullet to the head. Another – who refused to kneel – was also shot, this time being left to bleed to death.

The people who posed the greatest danger to the terrorists – around 20 of the adult hostages – were led out of the hall and into a corridor on the second floor. There, an explosive belt being worn by one of the women terrorists detonated, killing her and several of the hostages. It is believed that the explosion was detonated by the terrorists’ leader – a man known as ‘Polkovnik’ – because the woman had objected to kidnapping children. Those who did not die in the explosion were ordered to lie down and were executed.

By this time, Russian Special Forces had moved in, securing the perimeter and occupying three apartment blocks overlooking the school. Ossetian militiamen – the Opolchentsy – were also there in force as well as about 5,000 townspeople who had rushed to the scene, many of them parents of children being held in the gym hall.

Bombs and Booby Traps

The entire school building was booby-trapped and the terrorists sent a message out stating that they would kill 20 hostages for every member of their force who was wounded and 50 for every member killed. If the authorities tried to launch an assault on the school, they would quite simply blow it up. They wanted the president of North Ossetia, Alexander Dzasokhov, to come to the school to negotiate and would not allow the hostages access to food or drink until he did so. The Russian authorities, however, refused to let the president anywhere near the school.

A negotiator who had been involved in the Moscow theatre siege was brought in but by the second day had made little progress. There was resentment, meanwhile, that Moscow was saying nothing and President Vladimir Putin would later be heavily criticized for doing nothing during the crisis.

On the afternoon of the second day, Ruslan Aushev, former president of Ingushetia was allowed into the school and negotiated the release of 26 hostages – 11 nurses and 15 children. He was also given a video tape and a note containing a list of demands from Shamil Basayev, the militant Islamist leader of the Chechen rebels, a man responsible for numerous terrorist outrages. At the time, the Russians declared the video tape to be blank and refused to divulge the contents of the note, but it later emerged that Basayev was demanding ‘formal independence for Chechnya’ within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)’.

Conditions inside the gym hall were desperate. Children were becoming ill due to lack of water and as a result of the heat inside. Many are reported to have become so thirsty that they drank their own urine. They were tired and becoming increasingly weak. This weakness would prove fatal for many who, when the final gun battle broke out the following day, were not strong enough to escape.

On the Brink of Horror

Furthermore, the terrorists were becoming increasingly edgy, mainly because most of them were users of heroin or morphine. It was the quantity of these drugs in their bodies that permitted them to fight on even when horrifically wounded, the drugs helping them to endure unbearable levels of pain. This made it even more worrying that they had set up explosives linked to dead man’s switch detonators. If the foot was removed from the switch, the explosive would be detonated.

On the third day, it was proposed that the president of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov, should come to Beslan to negotiate with the terrorists and he prepared to fly out. It was also announced that 700 prominent Russians had offered to take the places of the schoolchildren. Nevertheless, before either of these initiatives could come to fruition, the crisis was brought to a bloody conclusion.

Agreement was reached that four men would be allowed to drive two ambulances into the school grounds to remove 20 bodies that were lying there. As the ambulances approached there was the sound of an explosion and shots were fired from inside the school. Two of the ambulance men fell dead while the others scrambled for cover.

It seems that the explosion was accidental, a terrorist’s foot simply slipped off the detonator switch. The terrorists were, however, momentarily distracted and the authorities seized the opportunity to launch an attack. It was chaos and many hostages escaping through the holes blown in the walls of the school were gunned down in the crossfire. Armoured personnel carriers and armed helicopters covered the advancing troops while flame-throwers and rocket-propelled grenades were fired from neighbouring buildings and a tank rumbled into the school playground.

After two hours of furious fighting, it was just about over. Sporadic firing by the terrorists continued into the night but by dawn the following day Secondary School No. 1 had fallen silent. 396 people – including 122 children and 31 hostage-takers – had died in what was one of the worst terrorist outrages ever perpetrated.

Toulouse Shootings

Year: 2012

Perpetrator: Mohammed Merah

Murdered: 7

It was just before 8 a.m. on 19 March 2012 and children were being dropped off at the Ozar Hatorah school, a private Jewish school in Toulouse in south-western France. A man rode up to the school on a Yamaha TMAX scooter. Still wearing his crash helmet, the man dismounted and was seen to be carrying what turned out to be a 9mm pistol in his hand. He began firing indiscriminately.

The Worst School Attack in French History

Just outside the gates to the school, Jonathan Sandler, a rabbi who was also a teacher at the school, tried frantically to protect his two young sons, six-year-old Aryeh and three-year-old Gabriel, but was gunned down. As he and one of his sons lay dying, his other son attempted to crawl away from the danger, but he was ruthlessly shot dead by the gunman.

The helmeted man then walked calmly into the school playground as people fled into the building to escape. He fired shots at everyone he saw, teachers, parents and children. An 8 year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, who was the daughter of the school’s head teacher, tried to run away from him, but he went after her, caught her by the hair and pointed his gun at her. For a moment, she was lucky – his gun seemed to jam. But, he pulled out another weapon, a .45-calibre gun, placed the barrel against her temple and squeezed the trigger, killing her instantly.

He turned and walked back to his scooter, jumped on it and sped off, leaving three dead and one boy, 17 year-old Bryan Bijaoui, gravely wounded. It had been the worst school-related attack in French history.

France was horrified and across the country streets in which there were Jewish institutions were closed to traffic. Campaigning in the French Presidential election was suspended and a minute’s silence was observed in all French schools the following day.

It soon became apparent that the shooting was not an isolated incident. The same weapon and the same mode of transport had been used in two other attacks.

Previous Shootings

On 11 March, 30-year-old Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a Master Sergeant in the French 1st Parachute Regiment had been killed by a single shot to the head outside a gym in Toulouse. Ibn-Ziaten was keeping an appointment with a man who had answered an advertisement he had placed selling a motor bike. The man who killed the soldier was later described as wearing a helmet and riding a scooter.

Four days later, on March 15, there had been an incident outside a shopping centre in Montauban, a town about 30 miles north of Toulouse. Two uniformed soldiers, 24-year-old Corporal Abel Chennouf, and 23-year-old Private Mohamed Legouad, were shot dead and a third, 28-year-old Corporal Loïc Liber, was seriously injured. The men – all from the 17th parachute Regiment that was based close to Montauban – had been withdrawing money from a cash machine. The gunman was viewed on CCTV cameras, riding a powerful scooter and wearing a black crash helmet. He rode up and pushed aside an elderly woman before taking aim and gunning down the three men.

A Known Potential Threat

The gunman, Mohammed Merah, had been brought up in a tough part of Toulouse by his mother after his parents divorced when he was five. He had displayed violent tendencies from an early age and suffered from behavioural problems. He was always in trouble and was arrested on numerous occasions, more often than not for purse-snatching. In 2005, he was sent to prison for 18 months for aggravated robbery and he returned to prison in 2009.

But Merah was also known to the authorities because of trips he made to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had been under surveillance since 2006 and was believed to be a member of the Islamist jihadist movement, Forsane Alliza, which was suspected of fostering violence and terrorism. The organization had been banned in France because it encouraged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan to fight a holy war against coalition forces.

Merah had a history of psychological problems and had tried to hang himself on Christmas Day, 2008. He was described by a psychiatrist he was seeing as having ‘suicidal intentions’ and as a polar introvert. The psychiatrist said that Merah was ‘anxious’ but not psychologically disturbed’. He displayed ‘neurotic fragility due to the departure of his father and lack of supervision on his mother’s part’. His complex personality seems to have allowed him to be a Muslim and enjoy nightclubs and drink alcohol whilst assembling an arsenal of weapons for the attacks against soldiers that he was planning.

A month after trying to kill himself, Merah tried to enlist in the French army, but his application was rejected. He next tried the Foreign Legion, but left the recruitment centre before being evaluated.

In 2010, he was arrested in Kandahar in Afghanistan while there on a tourist visa and after a trip to Pakistan in 2011, he was followed by the French secret service.

Events leading up to the attacks probably contributed to his increasing sense of injustice. On 24 February 2012, he was imprisoned for a month after being caught driving without a licence. He was due in court again a few months later. Furthermore, he had split from his wife not long before the shootings and had lost his job as a coachbuilder.

A Nationwide Search for the Perpetrator

Following the school shootings, the French authorities launched one of the biggest manhunts in French history. As the victims of the gunman had all been of Jewish or Arabic ethnicity, police initially suspected that the shootings were the work of neo-Nazis. It was a difficult investigation, as Merah had made sure not to leave any shell casings at the scenes and there were no fingerprints or DNA evidence. It was his computer that gave him away, eventually. He had emailed Ibn-Ziaten about the motorbike he was selling and that email led back to an IP address owned by a woman – Merah’s mother – both of whose sons turned out to be on the anti-terrorism watch list.

Merah also made the mistake of asking a motorcycle mechanic in Toulouse to remove a GPS anti-theft tracking device from his scooter. He also told the man that he had recently re-painted the bike.

An hour before police arrived at his apartment, he telephoned the French television show, France 24, and told an editor there that ‘these acts were not only necessary, but that they were to uphold the honour of Islam’. He told the editor that he was against the French banning of the veil and NATO’s operations in Afghanistan. He also claimed to have connections with al Qaeda and promised that there was a lot more to come.

At 3 a.m. on 21 March, officers arrived at Merah’s flat and tried to arrest him. He shot at them through the door, wounding three of them. Meanwhile, the French anti-terrorist unit, RAID (Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence) evacuated and surrounded the apartment block. Inside, Merah’s arsenal consisted of an AK-47, an Uzi, a Sten, a Winchester 12 gauge Pump-action shotgun, three Colt 45s, a 9mm Glock, and a Colt Python .357 Magnum.

He threw the Colt 45 out of the window in exchange for a walkie-talkie with which he could communicate with the authorities. He directed them to a bag containing the film of his attacks – he had carried a camera to each one. Meanwhile, one of his brothers was picked up and his car was found to contain weapons and explosives. His mother refused to become involved because she claimed he would not listen to her.

He promised to give himself up at 10:45 p.m., but then said that he would not give up without a fight. The police then began setting off explosions to intimidate him.

At 10:30 a.m. on the following day 15 specially trained officers entered the flat by the door and the windows. Merah emerged from the bathroom with guns blazing. He leapt from the window, still shooting and was shot in the head by a police sniper. At last, after weeks of rising fear, Mohammed Merah was dead, and France could breathe a sigh of relief.

Table of Contents

Introduction

NORTH AMERICA

Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre

Bath School Disaster

University of Texas Tower Shootings

Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

Jonesboro Massacre

Thurston High School Massacre

Columbine High School Massacre

Red Lake Massacre

Amish School Shooting

The Virginia Tech Massacre

EUROPE

Cologne School Massacre

Dunblane School Shootings

Erfurt Massacre

Winnenden School Shooting

TERRORISM

Ma’a lot Massacre

Beslan School Hostage Crisis

Toulouse Shootings