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"Childish logic has deadly consequences in adults with a curiosity about killing"

Professor David Canter
The Times, October 22, 2002

WHEN I was eight years old, I made myself a catapult and tried it out on passing cars.
The outcry my unthinking activity produced amazed me. It had never occurred to me at that tender age that such a primitive toy could cause real damage. Nor was I experienced enough in driving to know how much destruction an accidental hit on a windscreen could have caused.

Cars were just moving targets that rushed past with no apparent intelligence. There was no anger in my action, just a curiosity about how my elastic and wood device would work.

Most of us grow out of such uninformed exploration as soon as we learn their consequences, as I quickly did when I found out that cars had drivers in them who did not take kindly to my studies. But the process of learning that other people have an existence that deserves empathy and respect is never fully complete.

Some people learn how to act as if the feelings of others matter, but never totally internalise these reactions. When such people find themselves in distressing, confusing or even just meaningless situations and they have access to powerful weapons with the skill to use them, they can find that initial curiosity of what would happen “if” — untrammelled by any feeling of the consequences of the action — can set them on a path that eventually becomes a habit of destruction.

The apparent randomness of the Washington sniper’s victims is what causes such concern. If anyone can be a target, how can we control our fates? People cannot judge probabilities easily, so the fact that they still have a much higher chance of being killed in a car accident than shot at by a sniper takes people off the streets but not out of their cars.

But the shootings are not random. The first seven all took place in a relatively small area of suburban Maryland. The fact that the victims have no apparent similarity, young and old, male and female, from various ethnic groups, indicates that the offender is choosing opportunities rather than specific people.

Once the hue and cry had built up in that area (and the geographical profile had been published indicating where he may live) he moved south, returning to attack nearer his original area, then out again down Interstate 95, getting further afield as the pressure built up. Both the intensive police presence and the vigilance, or indeed absence, of possible victims has caused him to move on. All the shootings after the first half-dozen appear to be located quite close to big interstate highways — a further indication, together with the sightings of a van, that this may well be a marauder travelling from his base in the area of his early shootings.

The geographical pattern shows us the thought that has gone into the selection of locations, but also fits in with the determination and skill with which the sniper has carried out his killings. However, such rationality in carrying out the act does not necessarily mean that there is a clear rationale for why he would do it. Previous examples show how arbitrary and even meaningless such actions can be.

From 1989 to 1992 Thomas Lee Dillon travelled the back roads of Ohio shooting strangers. He had developed into a random killer after roaming remote areas shooting signs, electric meters and animals. He claimed that he wanted to show how difficult it was to get caught if you killed a stranger. Michael Ryan, who killed 16 people in Hungerford in 1987, appears to have started his spree after an unsuccessful attempt at rape, but the earlier games he created for himself in which his prowess with firearms figured largely had set him on the track.

Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother and then the next day, from the top of the University of Texas tower in Austin, he shot 45 people, killing 14 of them in 1966. He was a hard worker, a loving husband and a wonderful friend to all who knew him, as well as being an expert sniper. But he felt that he had become overpowered by violent impulses and could not find any clear reasons for what he did. The brain tumour he was found to have after his death may have been some explanation for his feelings, if not for how he acted them out.

The lack of inhibitions that we tolerate in children becomes dangerous in adults when they have access to destructive weapons and the skills to use them. The irrelevance of their victims to them is what make their actions appear random, but they are no more random than the unrestricted activity of a child.

David Canter is Professor of Psychology at The University of Liverpool where he Directs the Centre for Investigative Psychology. His television series Mapping Murder continues on Channel 5 next Friday.



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