Rampage (2 page)

As Fox and Levin have astutely observed in
Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder
, “In striking contrast to the expanding scholarly interest in serial homicide … the slaughter of several victims during a single act or a short-lived crime spree — have received relatively little consideration.”
[1]
The authors go on to provide a series of plausible explanations for this: the lack of a mysterious identity for police to uncover, reactions of horror as opposed to apprehension about becoming the next victim, and the typical absence of sensationalistic acts of sex or sadism (though strangely, the Canadian rampage murders committed by
Swift Runner
,
Dale Merle Nelson, David Shearing, Jonathan Yeo,
and
Robert Poulin
are equally or more depraved than many of the cases I examined in
Cold North Killers
). I have chosen to write this book partially because I concur with Fox and Levin that rampage murderers have been underemphasized compared to serial multicide. For this reason, I have included significantly more personal analysis and opinion in
Rampage
than I did in
Cold North Killers
. I believe the field could benefit from a greater plurality of interpretations. In Part C, I have proposed what is, to my knowledge, the first in-depth typology of spree killers. As my formal academic background is currently in history rather than criminology or psychology, I anticipate this will ruffle some feathers. That said, I have gone to great lengths to educate myself in these areas, and have studied much of the current literature relevant to this topic.

As I did in my earlier work, I would like to reiterate that the primary intent of this book is to serve as a didactic encyclopedia. Again, I have purposefully avoided glorifying the killers or canonizing their victims. Nor have I bowdlerized the gruesome details of these murders. To understate the magnitude of what happened would be dishonest, as well as potentially dangerous, since some of the offenders are coming up for parole. It would also be unfair to those who suffered profound agony and indignity.

Let the lesson not be “fear,” but “vigilance.”

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by thanking Michael Carroll at Dundurn for proposing this book and offering to publish it: mind-reader! Cheers also to my agent, Robert Lecker, for facilitating the contract, and for his continued friendship and support.

Of all those who contributed their time and efforts to
Rampage
, one name deserves special mention. Christina FitzGerald spent countless hours scouring online newspaper and library archives to ensure I had as much information to work with as possible. Without her efforts, this book would be significantly less detailed and thorough. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.

My utmost gratitude also goes out to the author Robert Hoshowsky
(The Last to Die; Unsolved: True Canadian Cold Cases)
for sharing your account of the Bojcun/Danylewycz murders in the Foreword. After twenty-seven years, revisiting this tragedy must have been a harrowing experience. I thank you for adding a much-needed personal perspective and illuminating Marko Bojcun’s incredible resilience.

Once again, I am highly indebted to Kay Feely, Andre Kirchhoff, and Elizabeth Roth for their wonderful illustrations. If my ship ever comes in, I’ll take you all on a cruise. In the meantime, your generosity and talent are deeply appreciated.

I would like to thank my colleagues at the Multidisciplinary Collab-orative on Sexual Crime and Violence for accepting me into your fold. I hope that
Rampage
does something to further our collective understanding of the underexplored phenomena of mass and spree killings. For those who attended the San Antonio conference, forgive my resurrection of the spree murderer. I just don’t think they have been given a fair shake.

Finally, to my lioness, Jenn: for your love, support, and patience during this arduous process. Here’s to all of the ghoulish conversations yet to come!

Part A

Defining Mass Murder and Spree Killing

If you have purchased this book expecting to find names like Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, or Robert Pickton, then you are likely one of the many people who confuses a mass or spree murderer with a serial killer. Don’t lament — the media hasn’t made it easy for you. Before the term
serial killer
entered public consciousness with the release of Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs
, serial murders were routinely referred to as mass murders. To this day, the twenty-seven serial slayings perpetrated by Dean Corll are anachronistically known as “The Houston Mass Murders.” In the 1994 cult film
Natural Born Killers
, there is a misleading scene in which Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) is attempting to convince the psychopathic Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) to be interviewed for his sensationalist television program
American Maniacs.

Wayne: I have a television show. And every couple of weeks we do — it’s our thing about “Current America” — we do a profile on a different
serial killer
.

Mickey: Technically,
mass murderer
.

Wayne: Well, whatever you want.
[2]

Technically, neither Wayne nor Mickey was correct in their classification of the crimes portrayed in the film: the Knoxes were quintessential spree killers. Over the eighties and nineties, there were numerous paperback encyclopedias of “mass murderers” published consisting mainly of serial and spree slayers. Even as recently as 2011, the authors Kerr and Castleden entitled their book the blatantly oxymoronic
Spree Killers: Ruthless Perpetrators of Mass Murder
.

Given the frequent contradictions and misrepresentations of these terms, Chapter 1 is devoted to outlining the differences in multicide (a.k.a. multiple murder). Chapter 2 examines four cases from the great white north that illustrate the difficulty in attempting to sort every multiple murderer according to these classifications. After I’ve discussed how to discriminate between the various types of killers, Chapter 3 picks up where this book would have begun if it hadn’t been for the semantic confusion: chronicling the first four mass murderers in Canadian history.

If indeed you were looking for Bernardo, Homolka, and Pickton, please do not despair. Many of the cases in this book are as lurid and compelling as those of Canada’s most reviled serial killers. You just don’t know it yet.

Chapter 1

Two Kinds of Rampage Murderers

Table 1: Multiple Homicide Classification by Style and Type
[3]

Rampage murder
is a term commonly used to encompass the first two categories in Table 1: mass murder and spree killing. The FBI’s
Crime Classification Manual
originally defined mass murder as, “Any single event, single location homicide involving four or more victims,” though it drew a distinction between classical mass murder and family mass murder. According to the text, classical mass murder

[I]nvolves one person operating in one location at one period of time. The time period could be minutes or hours or even days. The prototype of a classic mass murderer is a mentally discolored individual whose problems have increased to the point that he acts out toward a group of people who are unrelated to him, unleashing his hostility through shootings or stabbings.
[5]

A family mass murder, on the other hand, occurs “if four or more family members are killed ... without [the offender committing] suicide.”
[6]
These first attempts at defining the phenomenon suffered from being too narrow; for example, the specification that mass murder “involves one person” excludes textbook cases such as the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shootings perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and those by their lesser-known predecessors in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The stipulation that an offender committing suicide alters a family mass murder into a simple murder-suicide has also recently been overhauled. In their
Mass Murder in the United States
, Holmes and Holmes fold multiple murders occurring during a single incident within a domestic situation into a subcategory of mass killer known as The Family Annihilator. They also remove the suicide clause altogether and reduce the tally of victims necessitating a mass murder from four to three. Regarding numbers, I believe the most pragmatic parameters are those proposed by Dr. Katherine Ramsland in her
Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers: Why They Kill:

For the purpose of this study, I tend to focus primarily on those who have killed at least four victims, but I sometimes make exceptions when it is clear that the killer’s intent had been to annihilate far more.…
[7]

In this book, I’ve made similar exceptions for
Denis Lortie
(three killed/thirteen injured) and
Joel Egger
(three killed in Canada, probably more overseas). I also follow Holmes and Holmes’s lead in doing away with a separate family mass murderer, including it as a permutation of a general mass murderer type. Whether the murderer committed suicide or not has no bearing on my classification, as I see the inclusion of this specification as completely arbitrary.

The definition of spree killing has proved so contentious that in recent years the FBI has deemed it merely a subtype of serial murder. Fox and Levin were the first to propose eliminating the category altogether, claiming that focusing “on motivation rather than timing eliminates the need for a spree killer designation — a category sometimes used to identify cases of multiple homicide that do not fit neatly into either the serial or mass murder types.”
[8]
John Douglas, one of the pioneers of the FBI’s Behavioural Sciences Unit, defined a spree murderer as “someone who murders at two or more separate locations with no emotional cooling-off period between the homicides. Therefore, the killings tend to take place in a shorter period of time [than most serial killers]….”
[9]
In this book, I make a case for the usefulness of designating spree murder as a separate phenomenon from serial murder, and propose a clearer definition and criminological understanding in Part C. The reader should also note that the FBI’s criteria for serial murder has recently changed to two or more victims in two or more separate events, with location no longer considered a factor.

Unlike in my first book,
Cold North Killers: Canadian Serial Murder
, I have made no attempt to create an exhaustive work. However, I have assembled a basic chronology of Canadian rampage murders in Table 2.

Table 2: A History of Canadian Rampage Murderers, 1828–2012

Italics
denote cases included in this book.