The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (33 page)

James Vance was obsessed with Judas Priest, attracted to the sinister and violent nature of their music and public persona. He liked the demonic themes of the artwork on their album covers, the monsters and gore, so at the instant he saw Ray shoot himself in the head, the sheer gruesomeness of it did not impress him. Like too many other young Americans, he had been getting comfortable with graphic violence for a long while, and images of gory skulls were fairly mundane to him.

Standing in the churchyard, he looked at his friend’s body and for a moment considered breaking the suicide pact they’d made. But then he figured that if he didn’t shoot himself, he’d get blamed for Ray’s death anyway, so he reached down into the blood, picked up the shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. But he did not die.

In his less than enthusiastic positioning of that shotgun in his mouth, he failed to kill himself but succeeded at creating an unsettling irony: He became as frightening to behold as anything that ever appeared on the cover of a Judas Priest album. In his hesitation to murder himself, James shot off the bottom of his face. His chin, jaw, tongue, and teeth, were all gone, blown around that churchyard. I cannot describe how he looked, and I also cannot forget it. I’ve seen my share of alarming autopsy photos, of people so injured that death was the only possible result, people so injured that death was probably a relief, but something about James Vance living in a body damaged more than enough to be dead was profoundly disturbing.

Even lawyers who thought they’d seen it all were shaken when he arrived at depositions, a towel wrapped around his neck to catch saliva that ran freely from where the bottom of his face had been. His appearance had become a metaphor for what had been going on inside him. He had wanted to be menacing and frightening. He had aspired to the specialness he thought violence could bring him, and he got there… completely.

Aided by his mother who helped interpret his unusual speech during the days he was questioned, James told lawyers about his case, and also about his time. I listened carefully. I learned that he and Ray had wanted to do something big and bad, though not necessarily commit suicide. It was the violence they wanted, not the end of life. They had considered going on a shooting spree at a nearby shopping center. Unlike thousands of teens who commit suicide, they were not despondent that night—they were wild. High on drugs and alcohol, their choice of music blaring, they destroyed everything in Ray’s room, then jumped out the window with the shotgun, and ran through the streets toward the church.

They were not unique among young people who commit terrible violences, and neither were their families. Mrs. Vance was not the only parent to bring a lawsuit against a rock band; in fact, such suits are becoming fairly frequent.

During the Vance case, there were plenty of other teenagers around the country who did horrible things. Three boys in a small Missouri town, one of them the student-body president, invited their friend Steven Newberry to go out in the woods with them to “kill something.” Steven wasn’t told that he was the something, though that became apparent when they began beating him with baseball bats. He asked them why, and they explained to the near-dead boy, “Because it’s fun, Steve.”

Within hours, they were caught and confessed matter-of-factly to murder. Like James Vance, they were fans of heavy-metal, but these teenagers did not blame a musical group. They jumped right over Judas Priest and went directly to blaming Satan. Just like Michael Pacewitz, who said the devil instructed him to stab a three-year-old to death. Just like Suzan and Michael Carson, who blamed Allah for telling them to kill people. But families can’t sue Satan or Allah, so record stores and musical groups are sometimes all they’ve got.

James Vance referred to the members of the band as “metal gods.” He said they were his bible and that he was “the defender of the Judas Priest faith.” Of his relationship with these people he’d never met, he said, “It was like a marriage—intimacy that developed over a period of time, and it was until death do us part.”

Can specific media products compel people to violence that they would otherwise not have committed? This is, perhaps, a reasonable question.

Could that record store have predicted that the
Stained Class
album was dangerous and would lead to the shootings? This is a less reasonable question, but great controversies are often tested at the outside edges of an issue.

When researchers in my office studied hazards that were supposedly associated with music albums, they found one man who had gotten sick after ingesting a vinyl record, another who had a heart attack while dancing to some jaunty polka music, another who made a weapon out of shards from a broken record. (The range of things people might do with any product makes it next to impossible to foresee all risks.) Researchers also found an article with a headline that at first seemed relevant: “
MAN KILLED WHILE LISTENING TO HEAVY-METAL MUSIC
.” The victim, it turned out, was walking along listening to an Ozzy Osbourne tape on headphones when he was struck by a train. On the news clipping, a dark-humored associate of mine had written the words “killed by heavy metal, literally.” The heavy metal in trains surely has resulted in many more deaths than the heavy metal in music, even so-called death metal music.

The group Judas Priest did not create James Vance, of course, but in a sense, he created them. When he was asked about a particular lyric, “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him by hand,” he recited it as “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him
a
hand.” So he had done more than just react to the songs; he had actually rewritten them, taken a lyric about someone being cared for and turned it into something about cannibalism. Even his admiration was expressed in violent terms. James said he was so enamored of the band that he would do anything for them, “kill many people or shoot the president through the head.” He told lawyers that if the band had said, “Let’s see who can kill the most people,” he would have gone out and done something terrible. In fact, the band said no such thing, and he did something terrible anyway.

As part of my work on the case, I studied fifty-six other cases involving young people who involved a music star in their violent acts, suicides, attempted suicides, or suicide threats. This sampling provides a window through which to view the topic:

• A teenager asked a famous singer to send him a gun he could use to commit suicide.
  
• A young man threatened to commit suicide unless a female recording artist visited him. He wrote to her, “I even tried to put myself into a coma in hopes that my mom would get ahold of you and you would come see me.”
  
• A man took an overdose of pills in order to “travel through time” and reach a recording artist.
  
• A man wrote to a female recording artist, “If you don’t marry me, I’ll take an overdose.” (In a turning of the legal liability tables, he sent along the lyrics to a song he had written for her entitled “
  Suicide Is on My Mind
  .”)
  
• A young man who believed that a female recording artist was his wife and that she was hiding from him attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.
  
• Another wrote to a media star in terms reminiscent of James Vance: “I smoke pot and listen to rock music; basically, my story is in the vinyl. Life as I live it really isn’t worth it. I’ll tell you this, when I attempt suicide it won’t be an attempt.”
  

Could the parents of all these people and the thousands like them reasonably blame some distant media star for the challenges their families faced, or would the answers be found closer to home?

To explore that, I started a hypothetical list of the hundred most significant influences, the PINs that might precede teen violence. An addiction to media products is somewhere on that list, but alcohol and drugs are closer to the top. They, unlike media products, are proven and intended to affect the perceptions and behavior of all people who ingest them. James Vance offered support for this position when he described an acquaintance who had attempted suicide a number of times. Asked if that individual had a drug problem, he replied, “Yes, that goes hand in hand.” He also stated, “An alcoholic is a very violent individual, and when you drink excessively, you become violent, and that has been my life experience.” (I wonder with whom he gained that experience.)

The list of PINs includes a fascination with violence and guns, which was a central part of James’s personality—to the point of his planning to become a gunsmith. Both he and Ray regularly went target shooting and played games involving guns. As part of what James called his “training to be a mercenary,” he often played “war,” pretending to be in gunfights. “There would be two cops and one criminal. The criminal would be behind you and would have to flush you out, you know, how cops check a house out. Ninety-nine percent of the time I always got both of the cops.” About his less violent friend Ray, he said: “I would usually get him because, you know, just watching TV, you learn. TV is a really good teacher.” James said he watched the news and saw “a lot of violence and killing and fighting go on.” He summarized all this succinctly: “
Violence excited me
.”

Finally, he unknowingly described one of the leading PINs for attention-getting violent acts: He said he felt “ignored for 20 years.” Explaining how Judas Priest motivated the shootings, he said that he perceived the song “Hero’s End” to be about how one has to die to be recognized.

When James was asked if anything other than the lyrics might have caused the shootings, he responded, “A bad relationship? The stars being right? The tide being out? No.” Though he was being sarcastic, any of these is probably as reasonable as blaming the lyrics on an album for what happened, for once he excluded family life and parenting from the inquiry, he might as well have cited anything. By pointing his trigger finger at a rock band, James washed away all of the scrutiny that might reasonably have been focused on himself, his family, or even his society.

After all, James was not the only young man who spent more time consuming media products than he spent on any other activity in his waking life. He was an avid patron of the violence division of the entertainment industry. In
Selling Out America’s Children
, author David Walsh likens it to “a guest in our families that advocates violence, but we don’t throw him out.” He notes that since children learn by modeling and imitation, the 200,000 acts of violence they will witness in the media by age 18 pose a serious problem. Dr. Park Dietz has said that “the symbolic violence in an hour-long episode of a violent television show does more harm, when summed up over the millions of participants, than a single murder of the usual variety.” Finally, writer (and mother) Carrie Fisher says that “television exposes children to behavior that man spent centuries protecting them from.”

The content of media products matters, but the amount may matter more, whether it is watching television too much, playing video games too much, listening to too much rock music, or for that matter listening to too much classical music. It isn’t only the behavior this consumption promotes that concerns me. It’s the behavior it prevents, most notably human interaction. I would admittedly be happier if my children chose Tina Turner or Elton John or k.d. lang over Judas Priest, but the bigger issue arises when media consumption replaces the rest of life.

No matter what their choice of music, in the lives of too many teenagers, recognition is more meaningful than accomplishment, and, as it was for James, recognition is available through violence. With the pull of a trigger, a young person whose upbringing has not invested him with self-worth can become significant and “un-ignorable.”

If you took away James’s obsession with Judas Priest, you would have just another young man with goals and ambitions that changed day to day, with unrealistic expectations of the world, and without the perseverance or self-discipline to succeed at any endeavor. At various times, James planned to write a book, be a gunsmith, be a member of a band, even be a postal worker, but in the end he will be most remembered for just a few seconds in his life—a few seconds of barbarism in a churchyard.

The court eventually decided that the proprietors of the record store could not have predicted the shootings, but James Vance did not get to finish his search for someone to blame. He died, finally, from that single shotgun blast to the head, though the complications took a long time to kill him, longer than anyone could have expected. I never got to ask James about his early years and never learned about the childhood which the lawsuit so effectively eclipsed.

▪ ▪ ▪

Some parents are unable to blame anyone for the violence their children commit because they are themselves the victims. Children kill their parents far less frequently than parents kill their children, but the cases so fascinate the public that it might seem they happen frequently. In fact, any kind of murder by a young person is relatively rare. Though Americans under eighteen make up almost 25 percent of the population, they commit less than 10 percent of the murders. Even so, people are afraid of teenagers, and at times with good reason.

So you’ll know which times those are, I want to inform your intuition accurately: Most people killed by teenagers are known to them, but about one in five is a stranger killed during a robbery, either because the teenager panicked or because of peer pressure. Murder is most likely to occur when two or more juveniles jointly commit a crime, so fear in that context is appropriate. A recent study shows that an astonishing 75 percent of homicides by young people occur when they are high or drunk, so encountering criminal teenagers under the influence is most dangerous.