Criminal experts say killer of Amish schoolgirls was obviously a deeply troubled man. But, they say, it’s just as obvious that sexually-motivated attack in Colorado school sparked tragedy here.
By Tom Murse
Updated Feb 20, 2007 12:19
The gunman then told the boys to leave and ordered the girls — just the girls — to line up facing the chalkboard. His intention was to sexually assault them.
In the end, the intruder opened fire on the young girls before finally turning the gun on himself, seconds before the police rushed in.
The scene is not only that of Charles Carl Roberts IV’s carefully planned massacre inside a one-room schoolhouse in Bart Township Monday morning.
It is also, almost to a T, the modus operandi used by murderer Duane R. Morrison inside a Colorado high school five days earlier.
And the similarities, experts say, are too striking to ignore: Roberts very likely copied Morrison when he held 10 young Amish girls inside West Nickel Mines School.
“Would Roberts have gone to a school had it not been for the shooting in Colorado? Maybe not. Maybe it would have been a mall or a restaurant,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.
“And would he have done it on Monday? Probably not. Maybe it would have been a Tuesday or a Friday,” Fox said this morning.
He and other criminal justice experts and sociologists stress, however, that given Roberts’ bottled-up troubles, he was likely to explode sometime. It was just a matter of when, where and how.
“I don’t think the Colorado incident triggered this event. I think the idea of sending out the boys may have sent a message, ‘Hey, this is the way to do it,’” said Joel P. Eigen, the Charles A. Dana professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College.
“I don’t believe people snap. I think these things build up over time,” Eigen said. “
Suzanne Youngblood, an associate professor of criminal justice at Harrisburg Area Community College’s Lancaster campus, said Roberts was clearly planning some sort of attack before the Colorado events even took place.
The 32-year-old Bart Township father of three purchased plastic ties from a hardware store on Sept. 26 — a day before Morrison’s rampage inside Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo.
“He probably had this at least in the initial stages,” Youngblood said. “Maybewhen he heard about what was going on in Colorado, he picked up on a couple of ideas.“I think he was going to do something. He had this in his head long before,” she added.
“Because of the past incident in his life, 20 years ago, something must have happened to him at that point to make him resent girls,” Youngblood said.
Minutes before shooting the 10 girls Monday morning, Roberts confessed to his wife, Marie, that he had molested two young family members two decades ago and was having dreams of doing it again.
Police could not confirm the claim and said family members knew nothing of the alleged molestation of the family members, who were said to be between 3 and 5 years old.
“Maybe he wasn’t punished, but maybe he wasn’t allowed to be in the same room as girls anymore or the girls ignored him,” Youngblood said. “There had to be something that, in his mind, triggered a resentment toward girls. And I’m not sure we’re ever going to really understand.”
In one of his suicide notes, Roberts also was clearly tortured by the death of his first child, Elise Victoria, 20 minutes after her birth in 1997.
“I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate toward God and unimaginable emptiness it seems like everytime we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger,” Roberts wrote to his wife.
Roberts’ difficulty coping with the death clearly fits the description of others who have gone on school rampages in the past, according to a 2002 study by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education.
In fact, 98 percent of attackers “appeared to have difficulty coping with losses, personal failures or other difficult circumstances,” the study found. “Almost all of the attackers had experienced or perceived some major loss prior to the attack.”
Of those, half were struggling with the death of a loved one.
Eigen, the F&M professor, cautioned against trying to explain why Roberts did what he did this week. The true depths of his rage will never be known.
“The more I study this — and I’ve been studying this for 30 years — I find that we really don’t know why people do things,” Eigen said. “We want an explanation. We want to know the reason he’s doing this.
“But trying to use a logical explanation for someone who could do such a brutal and bestial thing — that’s our attempt to unravel what happened. And our capacity to live inside that mind is very limited,” Eigen said.
“I think what this does is it reminds us how thin is the layer of civilization in which we live. The truth is, just below the surface of many people is a seething cauldron of resentment and anger,” Eigen said.
Fox said Roberts was clearly disturbed and would have acted out on his longstanding grudges — Colorado or no Colorado.
“Contented, happy people do not turn into gunmen by seeing some episode in the news,” he said. “This may have given him the idea of how to resolve the issue, but it didn’t create the issues, it didn’t create the motivation of murder.
“This is a man who had a great potential for violence,” Fox said. “Copycatting can influence the timing or form of crime, but not the motivation.”
