Rampage (3 page)

The first two slayers we look at represent the most infamous examples of Canadian mass murderers and spree killers.
Marc Lépine
stunned the world on December 6, 1989, when he callously executed fourteen female engineering students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, sparking debates over misogyny and national gun laws. Though spree killer
Peter John Peters
would not receive any level of international recognition or lasting notoriety, in January 1990 he held Ontario in the grip of terror for nearly a week. These men are similar in that they embarked on rampage-style murders just over a month apart. Yet in many aspects of their character, they are polar opposites. Lépine and Peters have been selected as introductory models, not just because of their infamy, but also because they reflect the fundamental difference between a mass murderer and a spree killer.

Andre Kirchhoff      

Marc Lépine

The Polytechnique Gunman

“Ah, shit.”

Victims:
14 killed/14 wounded/committed suicide

Duration of rampage:
December 6, 1989 (mass murder)

Location:
Montreal, Quebec

Weapons:
Sturm Ruger Mini-14 .223-calibre semi-automatic rifle

Raining Ice

December 6, 1989, was a surprisingly mild day for a Montreal winter, the freezing rain spattering against the yellow brick exterior of École Polytechnique like tears of ice. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine sat awkwardly on a bench in the office of the registrar, dark eyes peering from beneath the brim of his “Tracteur Montreal” baseball cap. Hours before, the barber had scraped a razor over his acne-marred skin, his brown tousled hair tumbling to the floor: shorn, like his dreams. Beneath his grey windbreaker and blue-striped sweater, he could feel the sheath of the hunting knife pressing against his body. Nervous, he patted the bulky green garbage bag concealing his .223-calibre semi-automatic rifle. Two months earlier he had purchased the Sturm Ruger Mini-14 at Checkmate Sports on St. Hubert, ostensibly for hunting small game. These hypothetical ducks and rabbits would have stood no chance — police SWAT teams routinely employ the same firearm. Though the scrawny young man did his best to avoid attention, he had seated himself by the office door, making it difficult for students to enter. After forty minutes, a female office employee politely inquired if he needed assistance. Without uttering a word, Lépine rose and relocated to somewhere less conspicuous.

It was close to 5:00 p.m., and through the windows the light was quickly fading. Many of the faculty and students were leaving the building to begin their Christmas holidays. This was the moment he had been waiting for: empty hallways meant less chance of somebody being alerted to the impending massacre.

He made his way to the second floor, where an engineering class was being held. The green bag fluttered to the tiles as he unveiled the Sturm Ruger and proceeded calmly through the doorless entrance into C-230. At first, neither of the two professors or sixty-nine students packing the room noticed anything amiss. Lépine smiled as if to acknowledge his tardiness. One of the students was giving a presentation on heat transference. Lépine surveyed the crowd, noting where the female pupils were seated, and moved toward the presenter.

“Everyone stop everything!” he barked. One of the professors cast him a stern glance. He did not recognize this “student.” Continuing in French, Lépine ordered the women to move to the left side of the room and the men to the right. Instead of compliance, his demands were met with laughter. Lépine felt the anger welling up inside him. Even now, in what should have been his moment of supreme control, they mocked him. In reality, most of the students had simply assumed it was an end-of-term practical joke. Furious, Lépine hoisted the Sturm Ruger and fired two shots into the ceiling. The room fell silent. Laughter became the first casualty in his personal war.

“I want the women!” Lépine roared. “You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!” Terrified, the two sexes separated accordingly.

“Okay, the guys leave,” he motioned toward the exit. “The girls stay there.” As the sixty male students and two professors reluctantly vacated, Lépine approached the nine remaining female students and ushered them into a corner.

“Do you know why you are there?” he asked. “I am fighting feminism.” When student Nathalie Provost attempted to explain that they were not necessarily feminists, Lépine proved his intellectual superiority by spraying the women with ammunition from left to right, until they lay in a crumpled mess of blood and limbs. He had fired approximately thirty bullets.

Outside the classroom, the exiled males listened in disbelief as gunshots and screams rang out in grim cacophony. As several hurried down the hallway to warn the rest of the school, Lépine exited C-230 and pointed the gun at the remaining men until they cleared a path. Keeping his back to the wall, he continued down the main corridor, firing into the photocopying centre and injuring three more victims: two women and one man. Turning, he strode into the doorway of C-228 and aimed at another female student. Fate intervened, and the Sturm Ruger malfunctioned. Frustrated, Lépine took cover in the emergency stairway near room C-229 and checked the weapon. As his fingers worked feverishly at a solution, an unsuspecting student descended the steps and brushed past him.

“Ah, shit, I’m out of bullets,” Lépine said aloud. The student remained oblivious, continuing down the hallway to the photocopiers. When he saw the bodies, he realized what was happening and raced for the escalators.

Meanwhile, several of the male engineering students had returned to room C-230 to find their classmates lying beneath a mural of blood. Some of the women were moaning in agony; some wept — others stayed horribly silent. As ambulances raced through the sleet, Lépine reloaded and made his way back to C-228. By now the door had been locked. Frustrated, he fired three shots into it, then proceeded to the foyer, past three wounded victims. Entering the foyer, he spied a female student stepping off the escalator, and shot her. She was injured but managed to escape via the emergency staircase, and took refuge on the fifth floor. Calmly changing his magazine, Lépine strode over to a person hiding behind a counter and fired twice, missing on both occasions. He moved across the cafeteria terrace to room B-218 — the financial services office — where a woman hastily locked the door. Lépine sighted her through the door window and shot her fatally through the glass. He had quit many things in his life, but in murdering women, he was surprisingly resolute.

Like Father, Like Son

Canada’s most notorious mass murderer had not always been named Marc Lépine. On October 26, 1964, Gamil Rodrigue Liess Gharbi was born to a French-Canadian mother, Monique, at Montreal’s Sainte-Justine Hospital. His Algerian father, Rachid, was notably absent, favouring a Caribbean business trip over his family obligations. Nevertheless, Rachid had left specific instructions that the boy was to be named Gamil, which meant
handsome
in Arabic. During her stay at Sainte-Justine, Monique learned from an admissions clerk that another “Monique Gharbi” had given birth at the hospital only a week earlier. Interestingly, this woman’s partner had also been called Rachid Gharbi. As the surname was rare in Montreal at the time, Monique deduced that her husband was carrying on an affair.

Shortly after returning to their home on Ridgewood Avenue, she checked his income tax returns, and found confirmation in the form of child support payments to two local children.
[10]
Confronted by Monique, Rachid confessed to the affair, but assured her that it had ended. She knew better than to believe him — while he had been away on business, a delivery truck had arrived from Eaton’s department store. Though Monique had ordered one of the items, the deliveryman insisted that he also had an expensive baby carriage for her. When she denied making the purchase, he checked his records and realized that it was intended for another Monique Gharbi who resided only blocks away. Given Rachid’s history, the revelation of his infidelity was hardly surprising.

Monique Lépine had first met the silver-tongued aircraft mechanic in 1961, when a female workmate invited her out for drinks with “two charming young men.” With his flashy clothes, confidence, and fluency in four languages, Rachid Gharbi swept the twenty-two-year-old nurse off her feet. He was unlike the hockey-obsessed suitors Monique had encountered before, and the two soon began a relationship. From the get-go, Rachid pressured her to have sex, but Monique, who was raised in a devout Catholic family, resisted his advances. After three months, she conceded when he threatened to break up. Sadly, the birth control pill was not easily available or acceptable in Quebec at the time, and Rachid stubbornly refused to wear a condom. The result was that Monique underwent three illegal abortions between May 1961 and October 1963, sparing her family the shame of bastard children. Though Rachid grudgingly footed each of the $300 fees, he made no bones about his unhappiness with the situation. As a non-practising Muslim, his concern was not with the termination of the pregnancies, but the financial cost of the operations.

When Rachid proposed marriage to Monique on October 13, 1963, she accepted because she feared becoming an old maid. In retrospect, she realized it was a foolish decision. Rachid was a volatile and controlling man, often calling her several times a day to check on her, despite his own infidelities. He would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, and Monique, who had been taught by nuns to placate her husband, unfailingly submitted to his will. Things only worsened after their marriage, as the abuse extended from the emotional realm to the physical. Though he forbade her to work outside the home, Rachid expected Monique to serve as his personal typist, slapping her whenever she made a mistake and forcing her to re-type the entire page. So relentless was her work that she was often unable to comfort her crying infant. When Gamil realized his screams would go unanswered, he sunk into a telling silence. In a vain attempt to become closer to her absentee husband, Monique uprooted to Puerto Rico with him when Gamil was just over a year old. Contrary to her expectations, she saw even less of Rachid, and he remained as selfish as ever. On one occasion he insisted that Monique go to the cinema with him, even though there was no babysitter available. The two went out for a night on the town, leaving the eighteen-month-old Gamil slumbering in his crib. When they returned, they found him sobbing in the middle of the bedroom floor. The abandoned child had climbed out of his crib, shattering a nearby lamp in the process.

In 1966, Monique discovered she was pregnant again, and decided to move back to Montreal to have their second child. On April 7, 1967, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Nadia, in the same room at Sainte-Justine Hospital where Gamil had been born. Instead of adoring his baby sister, Gamil was fiercely jealous. The newborn hadn’t been home for a day when Monique discovered Gamil violently rocking her cradle as if he were trying to tip Nadia onto the floor. Monique would later describe him as “a very possessive child” who “always wanted to be close to me, to the point of getting angry when I was absent, even for a short time and sulking when I looked after his little sister.” There were other problems too. By now Rachid’s violent temper had turned against his children; Gamil was already being spanked much more frequently and severely than was merited. One morning in 1970, the six-year-old had risen early, and inadvertently woke his father by singing. Enraged, Rachid burst into the room and struck Gamil across the face, bruising him badly. As the child sat weeping, Monique went to comfort him, but her husband intervened, ordering her not to “pamper” him. It was the last straw. The couple officially separated in July 1971, and she gained custody of the children. Their divorce would not be finalized for another five years. Angered by the split, Rachid took all of the photographs of the children with him, refusing to pay alimony or his $75-per-month child support. It wasn’t long before bailiffs descended upon their Prieur Street home, repossessing all of the furniture save for the beds, a table, and chairs. Monique learned that Rachid had secretly taken out a second mortgage on the property but had ceased making payments. Within days, what little they had left was lost, and Monique and her children had no choice but to move in temporarily with a kindly neighbour.