Fame, isolation and terror: inside the mind of a lone mass killer
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What drives a person to commit mass murder?
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There's a small township not far from Dunedin called Aramoana. And a man went out and started shooting people, killed a number of people, shot dead the local constable who came to try and stop him.
The year is 1990. We're in the seaside town of Aramoana near Dunedin in New Zealand.
My family, we lived three, four kilometers from where the massacre took place.
And this is Professor Paul Mullen, a now-retired forensic psychiatrist.
So the first thing we knew was the sound of gunfire. And it's outside of the city. People shooting rabbits is not all that uncommon. But it was quite clear the guns being used were not rabbit shooting guns. This was a military semi-automatic that was being fired. And I got a phone call from the hospital not long afterwards to tell me there was an incident at Aramoana.
And the incident was this. A 33-year-old unemployed local man had gone on a rampage after an argument with a neighbor. He shot and killed 13 people before being shot and killed by police himself.
And I had a patient at the time, a lovely woman, very bright, young woman. And she was the next-door neighbor of this man. And for some months, she'd been telling me about this man. She was probably the only person he spoke to. And she was worried about him, and she somehow wanted to get him treatment. Looking back, the things she told me now would alert me to the possibility of what was going on.
Because you weren't doing forensic psychiatry at the time, were you?
No, no, I was just a local professor of psychiatry.
How do patterns of violence emerge from mass killings?
Right. What were some of those red flags that you now recognize were red flags?
First of all, the change in him. He'd been a sort of vaguely left alternative lifestyler. He'd become angry, right-wing ideas. The guns had become a big part of him, and she also worried about him possibly being depressed and suicidal. So all of that now would ring lots of bells. At the time, it didn't ring any. We didn't know about these things.
This was Paul Mullen's first brush with the lone actor mass killer. And it would be the start of a long career studying people who commit mass murder on their own. Paul is the author of Running Amok, an investigation of what drives someone to do the unthinkable.
It's about the psychology of those who go out into the streets, armed with guns usually, and kill as many people as they can, expecting to die among their victims.
And today, I'm speaking to him about some of the patterns that become clear over a life study of mass killers.
These people are full of anger and resentment.
And the actions, big and small, that we can take to prevent mass killings from happening in the first place.
Never at any stage name them. It matters because of the next one down the line. Who's watching what you're doing? He's seeing yet another mass killer become world famous.
I'm Sana Khadar, and from ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. Today, from incels to disgruntled former employees to sometimes terrorists, we go inside the mind of a lone actor mass killer, and we find out the broader social history of this particular kind of violence. The phrase running amok refers to behavior that is wild and uncontrolled and dangerous. It can be used in less serious ways, like there's a million kids running amok around here, but its origins have to do with murder, and specifically murder in Malaysia.
Hamok was a Malay term. When they first Portuguese contact with Malaya, one of the things they noticed was that there was a pattern of behavior which was utterly foreign at that time to Europeans. of young men going out into public places, usually carrying a bladed weapon, sometimes a large club, and killing people at random.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What drives a person to commit mass murder?
0:00–2:25
2
How do patterns of violence emerge from mass killings?
2:25–5:21
3
What role does isolation play in the psychology of mass killers?
5:21–7:58
4
How does fame influence the motivations of lone mass killers?
7:58–10:34
5
What are the red flags that indicate a potential mass killer?
10:34–12:42
6
How can we prevent future mass killings?
12:42–15:15
7
What cultural scripts contribute to the phenomenon of mass killing?
15:15–17:32
8
Why is it important to deny mass killers the fame they seek?
17:32–30:25