Innocent, young girls bound and killed by a man who had turned monster, in a place where such horrific crimes aren’t supposed to happen.


But Charles Carl Roberts IV’s deadly rampage at the Amish schoolhouse might not have been such an anomaly after all. Indeed, asks Dr. Rita Smith Wade-El, a professor of psychology at Millersville University:


Don’t most horror films take place in small towns?


“Psycho,’’ “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’’ “Deliverance.’’ The contrast of the macabre against the backdrop of an idyllic place has long been the stuff of fiction, but also of fact. Virtually all American school shootings over the course of the past decade have happened in small towns, such as West Paducah, Ky., population 26,307, and Columbine, Colo., population 24,095.


And these rampages, these crimes that aren’t supposed to happen in places like Lancaster County, have, in fact, been happening with a frightening regularity.


Since last November, when 18-year-old David Ludwig gunned down the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kara Borden, Lancaster County has been the scene of three lurid, high-profile, multiple-murder cases that made headlines around the world.


In April, Jesse Dee Wise Jr. was accused of killing six members of his family in their Leola home before being captured on the way to New York City, reportedly to kill his grandfather. Now, the Amish schoolhouse slayings have provided yet another opportunity for CNN and MSNBC, The New York Times, The Associated Press and more to swoop down on Lancaster County, shine their klieg lights and ask: What’s going on in Lancaster County?


And even folks from around here might have wondered how one small community could be the scene of such mayhem in such a short time.


Is something terrifyingly wrong with us?


The short answer, according to various psychologists, sociologists and law enforcement officials, is no: It’s all just a nightmarish coincidence.


But there are some similarities connecting the crimes not just to one another, but to similar “rampages” in other small towns in Middle America:


The easy availability of and cultural affinity for guns.


An isolation where psychological demons might be less evident to neighbors, who, in any event, might be less inclined than those in larger communities to make an issue of it.


A sense of entitlement, an idea that life in a small town is supposed to be idyllic, and when it’s not, angering some who feel “that they’re somehow really getting the short end of the stick” said Wade-El.


And the saturation media coverage itself, of the Ludwig/Borden murders and then the Wise killings, could have been a factor, one of a thousand, perhaps, in Roberts’ rampage last week.


With Roberts dead at his own hand, no one can ever know. And that, in the end, might be the most terrifying aspect of this most recent tragedy. People want to know exactly why this happened, that we might prevent it from happening again.


But we can’t. And it will.


‘Idyllic Middle America’




“People do want to have guarantees,” said David Hill, a clinical psychologist who also teaches at Millersville University.


“But we’re not going to get them.”


It wasn’t as if David Ludwig’s double homicide Nov. 13 was Lancaster County’s first entry in the Crime Files. The murder of Laurie Show by Lisa Michelle Lambert in 1991 and the subsequent courtroom dramas were covered by the nation’s largest newspapers and profiled on “20/20” and A&E’s “American Justice” series. Six years earlier, Lancaster tobacco heir Steven Benson killed his mother and brother in a car explosion in Florida; Court TV aired a drama on the case in 2003.


And it’s not even the first time that so many macabre crimes have been clustered so close together; in 2004 the Sunday News documented the murder of 11 children here during one 12-month stretch.


But when David Ludwig gunned down Michael and Cathryn Borden, it ushered in what might come to be seen as a particularly violent period in local history.


Including the Bordens, just four people were murdered in Lancaster County in 2005, a four-year low. Between 1998 and 2004, between 10 and 14 people were murdered here annually. The Wise killings and the Amish schoolhouse slayings alone resulted in 11 deaths.


That figure pales in comparison to the body count in some big cities, the most hair-raising case in point being Philadelphia, where there have been 300 murders so far this year.


But the nature of violence in big cities and small towns is vastly different, said Wade-El, herself a native of Washington, D.C.


“Where you have a big urban population, which is often a population of color, their life experiences are different,” said Wade-El. “The kind of things that set them off are different.”

Violence can be a reaction to a personal slight, real or imagined, the result of a drug deal gone bad, perhaps innocents caught in a crossfire.


But “you probably won’t get a Columbine in Philadelphia,” she said, most likely because the type of psychological factors that drove Roberts, Wise and even Ludwig to kill are harder to conceal in a larger community.


Beyond that, said Wade-El, people in urban communities “have a less romantic view of life ... [but] for whatever reason, people have an unrealistically rosy view of life in Middle America. It’s ‘idyllic.’ That’s why people move here.”


And should life turn out to be less than idyllic, “you feel like you were deprived; it’s easier to see yourself as the victim.”


Not everyone agrees with that theory, but experts indeed have identified other aspects of life in a small town that might make small towns more prone to murderous rampages.


Hidden family conflict




In 2004, Katherine Newman, now a professor of sociology at Princeton University, published “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.” In a review of the book, Sociological Research Online notes that “while American inner cities may be global symbols of violence and mayhem, almost all [school shooting] rampages occurred in small communities, those idealized by many as tight-knit, family-oriented, and relatively peaceable.”


“Most shooters had histories of strained family lives, but few were products of single-parent homes,” according to the review.


Psychologist Hill noted that in each of the three recent local cases, family conflict played a major role: the friction between Ludwig and Kara Borden’s parents; the increasing tension between Wise and his family caused by his brushes with the law; and Roberts’ claim that his molestation of family members some 20 years ago had haunted him ever since. The alleged victims of his abuse said they had no recollection of it.


“All of these perpetrators had serious issues with family members,” said Hill. But in small towns, family conflict is often well-hidden from the public.


Indeed, Newman concluded in “Rampage” that the very closeness of the small communities in which school shootings have taken place can restrain neighbors, friends, even family members from communicating what they know or suspect about troubled kids.


“Where everybody knows everybody, it’s harder to deal with” problems, said Dr. Mary Glazier, chair of the sociology department at Millersville University, who has taught Newman’s book.


“In a small town, when somebody is a problem, are you going to confront them?” she said. In a larger, more anonymous setting, the authorities [police or social service agencies] might be alerted sooner to warning signs.


And so while Roberts’ rampage last Monday wasn’t the typical school shooting, said Glazier, “Lancaster County is exactly the kind of place where a lot of school shootings have occurred.”


That such crimes aren’t supposed to happen in a small town might make them all the more notable.


“It reveals a level of brutality we’re not used to,” said Dr. Joel Eigen, a professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College; in that sense, the Ludwig, Wise and Amish schoolhouse killings stand out “simply because they are anomalies to our community. There is nothing that connects these murders.”


The gun factor




Many see the easy access to guns as an undeniable factor in small-town rampages.


As opposed to urban areas, where there is often a concerted, though too often unsuccessful, attempt to get guns off the street, small-town America cherishes its guns and its gun rights.


The Wise killings don’t fit this mold, in that Jesse Dee Wise Jr. is alleged to have killed his family members not with a gun but with his bare hands, strangling three of his victims and bludgeoning the others.


But the Lititz home that David Ludwig shared with his parents was fortified with an underground concrete “bunker” and more than 50 guns, including assault rifles.


When Roberts entered the Amish schoolhouse Monday, he was carrying three guns — a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun, a Springfield Arms semi-automatic pistol, and a .3006 scoped rifle — and 600 rounds of ammunition. All of it was legal, say authorities.


“It’s hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that as long as society believes it’s important to have virtually unlimited access to firearms, these things are going to happen,” said Millersville’s Glazier.


Roberts’ rampage was at issue as the state House of Representatives last week debated proposed new gun control measures, all of which were voted down. Lancaster County District Attorney Donald Totaro, while noting that his office has made a concerted attempt to take down armed drug dealers and gang members in Lancaster, said he does not believe that tougher gun laws would have stopped Roberts from legally purchasing his weapons, nor would mandatory sentences for gun crimes have deterred Roberts from his “horrific crime.”


“Unfortunately, when someone without a criminal record or history of mental illness has a death wish, there is very little law enforcement or the Legislature can do to prevent such tragedy from occurring,” Totaro wrote in an e-mail.


And then, perhaps, there is the media frenzy itself.


It was inevitable, given how compelling the “murder in a small town” story line is. It’s a study in contrasts, bucolic Lancaster County and the heart of darkness revealed in each of these killings. That’s the stuff media feeding frenzies are made of.


But the blanket coverage most definitely imparts a heightened sense of fear, experts say. “It’s in everyone’s face,” said Millersville’s Glazier. “But do we really know that these sort of events didn’t happen before [the advent of the 24/7 media]?”


And yet some believe that the wall-to-wall lurid coverage can actually be a factor in the crimes themselves. That’s the idea behind “copycat” crimes, though Hill, the clinical psychologist and Millersville professor, was quick to caution that even while Roberts’ crime bore a resemblance to a school shooting the week before in Colorado. “I don’t think [Roberts] saw that and thought, ‘This is the way to go,’ ” said Hill.


However: “If we see someone do something that reflects on our own turmoil, it increases the odds we may act.”


In that way, he said, it’s possible that the Ludwig/Borden murders and the Wise killings themselves could have been factors, albeit among many, that prompted Roberts’ crime last week.


“Think of it as stacking one domino after another,” Hill said. Something served as a catalyst, but there might in fact have been many catalysts, several “triggers.”


Society wants to know exactly what they are so a reoccurrence can be prevented. But that’s the hardest thing, say the experts: We can try to understand why these crimes occur, but given the variables both in society and within the individual minds of those who do and those who might pull the trigger, there will always be a next rampage.


In the wake of Monday’s tragedy, “People are now going to spend money, time and energy” trying to devise a sure-fire way to prevent it from happening again, said Millersville’s Smith Wade-El.


As well they should.


“But it still will not provide them with a guarantee.”