Mental health experts explain how he may have linked past molestation and death to attack.
The headstone of Elise Victoria Roberts is seen Wednesday in Georgetown, in the graveyard behind Georgetown United Methodist Church. Elise Victoria Roberts was the daughter of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the gunman at the Amish schoolhouse shooting in Nickel Mines, Pa. In suicide notes, Roberts said he was haunted by the death of his prematurely born daughter in 1997.
Charles Carl Roberts IV
By Cindy Stauffer
Updated Feb 20, 2007 12:19
The guilt he said he felt about molesting two young family members 20 years ago was being worsened by dreams that he would molest again.
He was angry and sick with grief over his own infant daughter’s death.
Today the community is trying to make sense of what seems like a senseless act.
But Roberts may have been following his own delusional sort of logic in the West Nickel Mines School, mental health experts say.
No one knows exactly what was going through Roberts’ mind.
But in suicide notes and a final conversation with his wife, the 32-year-old Bart Township man offered some clues about what led him to take 10 Amish girls hostage and then kill five and wound five others before killing himself.
To him, the molestation and the death of his child may have been linked in some way.
It sounds like he connected the two perhaps. “He was thinking he was being punished for what he did, through the death of this child,” said Kendra Saunders, a psychologist and assistant professor in the counseling department at Millersville University.
“There’s a sense that you can delusionally think you are being punished for past deeds,” said Perry Hazeltine, a psychologist with the local Samaritan Counseling Center.
And abusers sometimes see their victims as responsible in some way for the abuse.
“You may also think that, somehow, the thing attracting you is causing the problem,” Hazeltine said.
Roberts also likely was struggling with issues of power and control, therapists said.
“Somehow, the men who act out have been weakened or beaten down,” said John Weigel, a psychologist with Weigel Associates. “Something just happened to them. They lose control. They lose confidence. When they are feeling the most weak, the most vulnerable, the most scared, that’s when men tend to act out, with the emphasis on out.”
The most obvious thing hurting Roberts was the death of his daughter.
The other element could be the guilt over the molestation he said he committed, though police have found no evidence yet to support that it occurred.
“If he was carrying that around for 20 years, and not talking to anyone about it, that’s where it becomes dangerous,” said Meade Stoner, a local therapist who works with teens and with teens who are sexual offenders.
Pedophiles carry around twin burdens: guilt and compulsion.
“They know a lot of times what they are doing is wrong and they feel terrible about it,” Saunders said. “But they feel such a compulsion or strong need to do it. It’s an internal struggle that can be quite difficult.”
Any kind of stress could make that struggle even more difficult, Stoner said.
“The level of desires and urges he was struggling with, that’s what most likely led him to feel like he had to do something about it, deal with those urges in some way,” he said.
Abusers can regain a sense of power over their lives by hurting someone else, the therapists said.
“You think of this tremendous buildup of pressure,” Weigel said. “You act it out. It gets it out of you and onto someone else.”
“What he did and these little girls — it’s wrapped up in maybe it’s their fault, too,” Weigel added. “It gets fuzzy and the logic wouldn’t make any sense, but they’re part of what is stressing him, part of what he’s acting on.”
Hazeltine also noted that the dynamics of a murder/suicide are very different than that of just a suicide.
Most people who kill themselves are not capable or do not want to kill others, he said.
However, suicide has an element of anger. And by his own admission, Roberts was angry at himself and at God.
His dramatic end may have been his own way of putting things even.
“In some bizarre way, it’s settling a score,” Hazeltine said.
There is an important lesson for everyone to learn from the killings, Weigel and others said.
“If you’re hauling around some unresolved things inside you, you have got to deal with that,” he said. “Get in a counselor’s office. Get in a pastor’s office. You’ve got to get reconciliation on that.”
Talkback on LancasterOnline
Welcome to the new TalkBack on LancasterOnline. Please use the comment box below to share your opinion on this
article. If you would prefer to use the previous TalkBack forums instead, please use this link.
