Pod Insights All In The Mind Fame, isolation and terror: inside the mind of a lone mass killer About this episode What is it that drives a person to mass murder?
It's a question forensic psychiatrist Professor Paul Mullen has made a life's study of.
While these devastating events can at times appear random — he says that taken together, from Port Arthur to Dunblane to Texas — patterns emerge that tell us about the motivations of lone mass killers.
It's often to do with isolation, vengeance and fame. Which is why a growing number of people, including Paul, are pushing never to name the perpetrators of mass killings.
Today on All in the Mind: insights into denying mass killers the glory they seek and preventing future massacres.
Please note, this episode covers some heavy topics including massacres and suicide. Please take care while listening.
Guest:
Professor Paul E. Mullen Monash UniversityForensic psychiatristAuthor, Running Amok: Inside the Mind of the Lone Mass Killer https://newsouthbooks.com.au/books/running-amok/
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Antonia GauciSupport:
Lifeline https://www.lifeline.org.au/ 13 11 14
Beyond Blue https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ 1300 22 4636
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0:38 Speaker 01 There's a small township not far from Dunedin called Aromawana. 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.
0:55 Speaker 03 The year is 1990. We're in the seaside town of Aromawana, near Dunedin in New Zealand.
1:02 Speaker 01 My family, we lived three, four kilometres from where the massacre took place.
1:09 Speaker 03 And this is Professor Paul Mullen, a now retired forensic psychiatrist.
1:13 Speaker 01 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 that there was an incident at Aromawana.
1:36 Speaker 03 And the incident was this: A 33-year-old unemployed local man had gone on a rampage after an argument with a neighbour. He shot and killed 13 people before being shot and killed by police himself.
1:49 Speaker 01 And I had a patient at the time, a lovely woman, very bright, young woman, and she was the next-door neighbour 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. You know, looking back, the things she told me now would alert me to the possibility of what was going on.
2:20 Speaker 03 Because you weren't doing forensic psychiatry at the time, were you?
2:23 Speaker 01 No, no, I was just the local professor of psychiatry.
2:25 Speaker 03 Right. What were some of those red flags that you now recognize were red flags?
2:29 Speaker 01 First of all, the change in him. He'd been a sort of vaguely left, alternative lifestyle. 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.
2:52 Speaker 03 This was Paul Mullen' first brush with a 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 a Mock, an investigation of what drives someone to do the unthinkable.
3:08 Speaker 01 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.
3:20 Speaker 03 And today, I'm speaking to him about some of the patterns that become clear over a life study of mass killers.
3:28 Speaker 01 These people are full of anger and resentment.
3:32 Speaker 03 And the actions, big and small, that we can take to prevent mass killings from happening in the first place.
3:38 Speaker 01 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.
3:51 Speaker 03 I'm Sana Qadar, 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.
4:17 Speaker 03 The phrase "running amok" refers to behaviour 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.
4:37 Speaker 01 "Amok" was a Malay term. When they first Portuguese contacted with Malaya, one of the things they noticed was that there was a pattern of behaviour 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. And they'd go on killing people until they themselves were cut down. There was a lot of interest in this. When Captain Cook went through that area, he also noted them. They were very common and quite extraordinary, at least to the European mind.
5:21 Speaker 01 And it seemed that it was a form of suicide. And well, in fact, it was a form of suicide. Why did they choose this form of suicide? Well, then they were killed, rather than having to kill themselves, which was, of course, taboo for a Muslim nation. But the other thing is that the people who went in for this kind of suicide thought it would restore their prestige. They were almost all young men who felt that they had been ignored, humiliated, looked down upon. So it was their way of saying, "I am powerful, I am not to be ignored", and then to be killed.
6:00 Speaker 03 Paul says the authorities eventually cottoned on to this and they developed a system for trying to ensure these people were captured, rather than killed. And when they were captured, they were put into mental institutions.
6:12 Speaker 01 Now, in Malaya at that time, to be put into a mental hospital was a shame of the whole family. So far from being a glorious death, they had this humiliating outcome. Was it effective? Yes, extraordinarily effective. They almost died out completely over a period of about 10 years.
6:35 Speaker 03 So that's where the term running amok or running amok comes from. And Paul says what was playing out was essentially a cultural script, where this taboo against suicide led certain people to act in this uniquely violent way. And by denying them death, that cultural script was disrupted.
6:55 Speaker 01 Exactly right. I mean, it wasn't confined, in fact, to Malaya, but it was most intense there. There were other parts of so-called Far East, from the Europeans' point of view, where it occurred occasionally, but there, it really was embedded into the culture.
7:14 Speaker 03 Professor Paul Mullen says the first case we know of in the West of this kind of violence didn't happen until 1913, in Germany.
7:23 Speaker 01 There was a schoolteacher. He had quite a lot of personal problems. He killed his wife and children, and then he was shot and killed several people. But a couple of them ran at him, disarmed him, and he went to trial, was found insane.
7:37 Speaker 03 And then, more than a decade later, it happened again in Melbourne, in a case that's referred to as the Botanic Gardens massacre.
7:45 Speaker 04 On a January evening in 1923, a man named Norman List took a rifle into the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and calmly shot five people. Only one survived.
7:56 Speaker 01 And he then went on to commit suicide.
7:58 Speaker 03 There was another one in New York after the Second World War. But if you keep fast-forwarding the timeline to the last 30, 40 years, these kinds of lone actor mass killings have become far too common in the headlines.
8:11 Speaker 01 For Australians, it's the Port Arthur massacre which stands out.
8:16 Speaker 05 At least 32 people lie dead in the historic tourist reserve in Tasmania this morning.
8:21 Speaker 01 In America, there's almost too many to mention, but I suppose the massacre at Columbine was probably the one that would immediately jump to mind.
8:30 Speaker 06 Result of two boys' teenage rage, 25 feared dead.
8:34 Speaker 01 And of course, in Britain, in Scotland, it would be the Dunblane massacre.
8:39 Speaker 05 He shot and killed a teacher and 15 first-grade children. He then killed himself, with one child dying later in hospital.
8:46 Speaker 01 So it spread round the world.
8:51 Speaker 03 But Paul says there is one event that's responsible for accelerating this modern trend, and it happened at the University of Texas in 1966, when a man went to the top of the tower on the campus there and began shooting people. He eventually killed 14 before being shot and killed himself. But what made this case stand out is it was the first to receive wide-scale publicity. It was covered in major papers across the US, and it was eventually turned into a film as well.
9:22 Speaker 01 So it's the first time someone had committed one of these massacres, and they became famous. And then within literally a couple of months, another one of these massacres occurred. And the person wrote that he was seeking to replicate the Texas massacre. This is where it all starts. This is where it begins to become a part of our culture.
9:47 Speaker 03 And that's interesting, because when these kinds of tragedies happen now, you hear killers, when the press covers their sort of manifestos, that they've referenced other killers. You know, I think about incel-type violence, where other incel killers have been referenced as well. So these people are copying each other. They're watching each other, copying each other.
10:04 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, they've become part of the landscape of the 21st century.
10:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, depressingly so. And in terms of the psychological makeup of these men, and it's pretty much all men, you write that depression, obsessiveness, grandiosity, and resentment, in addition to delusions of persecution, make up the state of mind required for mass murder. Is that really the same kind of basic psychological script or personality traits for all of these types of killers?
10:34 Speaker 01 Not entirely, for most. You can separate them a little. I mean, for a while, there was a spate of workplace killings in America, which were motivated somewhat differently. And now, of course, we have the problem of distinguishing between those motivated by terrorism and those motivated by the, if you like, the resentment and the rage and the desire for suicide and for fame, which characterizes, as it were, the main group.
11:06 Speaker 03 Can you tease apart those differences a little bit more? What separates terrorism from some of these things? Because I imagine there's a lot of overlap as well.
11:13 Speaker 01 There is. I mean, a good case to examine for this. There was a major in the medical corps in Texas, back to Texas again. Who, he, his history was interesting. He was the child of, he was born in America.
11:29 Speaker 03 I think I know exactly who you're talking about. I don't remember his name, but he was a Muslim man, wasn't he?
11:33 Speaker 01 I'm not going to mention his name. I don't mention their name, ever. Yes, he was a Muslim. He was in the medical corps. And just what he did first, let me go back to why. He went out one day and he began shooting other military personnel. Kept on shooting till he himself was shot down. He didn't actually die. They kept him alive. And he went to trial. And at trial, he said, this was for jihad. That he was acting against America as part of jihad. Okay. Let's go back to this man's history. So on the face of it, it was a terrorist attack.
12:14 Speaker 03 But he was also a bit of a misfit.
12:17 Speaker 01 He never took up the housing within the base, but lived in rather poor accommodation in nearby town. He had nothing to do really with other doctors. He did not join in any social activities with other military, nor did he join in any social activities outside.
12:39 Speaker 03 So isolated.
12:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, a very isolated man. He did go to the mosque occasionally. He wasn't a regular attender at the mosque for many years, but he would go to the mosque.
12:49 Speaker 03 And then, at a certain point, this man was meant to be transferred to Afghanistan. But he didn't want to go. And that's partly what brought things to a head.
12:58 Speaker 01 He felt he just couldn't face going to Afghanistan. He blames the army for not recognizing his gifts. And he decided that he would strike back and become famous. Now, it's a real mixture there. Yes, on the first glance, it just looks like terrorism. But then, when you go into his psychology and you go into his personal history, he starts to look more and more like, say, the Port Arthur killer, or the Dumblane killer, or any of the other ones like that.
13:31 Speaker 03 In which way?
13:32 Speaker 01 He was isolated, he was resentful, he believed he'd been mistreated, he believed that people didn't recognise how great he was, he was almost certainly depressed, this is always a bit difficult, and he was suicidal, there's no question he was suicidal. So you have much more of the, if one wants to call it, your standard mass shooter, rather than a terrorist. But on the other hand, there were elements that made it perfectly reasonable for people to consider him a terrorist. And that's, these things overlap. Normally, it's quite easy to separate the terrorists from the other types of mass killer. But in his case, both elements are there.
14:16 Speaker 03 And interestingly, prosecutors opted not to bring terrorism charges against this person. Instead, in 2013, he was convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder. He was given the death penalty. You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. Professor Paul Mullen is the author of the book Running a Mock: Inside the Mind of a Lone Mass Killer. And as a forensic psychiatrist, Dr Mullen has assessed and managed many lone actor mass killers, including the Port Arthur killer.
14:58 Speaker 03 But I want to come back to this distinction and overlap between terrorism and lone actor mass killing, because I think this is really interesting in our current environment, where acts of mass violence hit the headlines not infrequently.
15:15 Speaker 03 And so in general, when you're talking about lone actor mass killers, are you, do you conceptualize it as something separate to terrorism? Or is terrorism one example of?
15:25 Speaker 01 Well, it can, terrorism can be one example. So if you look at the behavior, they look the same.
15:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
15:31 Speaker 01 Someone goes into a public place, kills as many people as they can with a gun, with a lorry, with a knife, et cetera, and then is killed among the victims. And so it looks much the same. The big difference is that terrorists are part of groups. They are not the isolated and friendless of the world. They are not the people who are full of resentment at how they're treated. They're full of resentment at how, whatever group they identify with, right-wing groups, males who are so badly treated by women in the 21st century.
16:12 Speaker 01 Or they identify with Muslim groups who they believe are persecuted by the West, with some justification perhaps. So the first thing about the terrorist is they're almost always part of a group. It's almost, they almost always plan their attack jointly with other members of the group.
16:34 Speaker 03 Right.
16:35 Speaker 01 They're usually provided with the weapons by other members of the group. So it is a group enterprise, even if it's only one man who goes out to kill and to die. They seek martyrdom, they do not seek personal fame. They seek to publicize their cause. And as I said, they are very much socialized within their potentially violent set of believers. So in practice, it's usually very easy to tell the difference.
17:10 Speaker 03 Okay.
17:10 Speaker 01 But of course, sometimes it isn't. If you look at the incel killers, which you mentioned earlier.
17:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:17 Speaker 01 I mean, they're a real problem. Are they terrorists?
17:19 Speaker 03 Well, exactly. I was about to go there. I'm like, what about those guys? Because they are part of a group in a sense.
17:23 Speaker 01 Absolutely, they are.
17:25 Speaker 03 Often chatting to each other online and inspired by each other, but you know, I don't think they're necessarily getting weapons from each other kind of thing to go out.
17:32 Speaker 01 No, and they plan it themselves rather than usually planning it jointly. They have some of the characteristics of the other, the more common mass killers. They're full of resentment and anger. They feel their life has become intolerable, so they're seeking suicide. But they're also seeking martyrdom because they believe, you know, they will forward the cause of male dominance, as if anyone needs to forward that particular cause sadly. So again, they have a touch of the terrorist and a touch of the, what I would call the standard mass killer.
18:11 Speaker 03 And why is it worthwhile understanding these differences? Because the end result is still many people dead. Why, why should we be interested and know the differences here? How does that help?
18:23 Speaker 01 I don't know that knowing the differences is. What we want to know is enough about these people to try and prevent it, to cut short this road they're on. So the more we know about them, the more we know what motivates them, the more we know what will make it less appealing for them to commit these crimes, the better. I mean, the focus has been almost entirely on guns. And to some extent, that can work. Australia's a very good example. I mean, thanks to the Howard government, I wouldn't like to say thanks to many things for the Howard government, but thanks to the Howard government, the response to the
19:05 Speaker 01 Port Arthur massacre was superb in the sense of the gun buyback, but also in the sense that it changed cultural attitudes in Australia towards the ownership of guns. We were definitely en route to follow the Americans into that kind of gun culture. And it put a stop to that. Mind you, unfortunately, over the intervening years, the gun lobby have chopped and chopped and chopped at the important legislation. So as it's getting less. And less effective, as we can tell from what happened in Bondi.
19:38 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yes.
19:39 Speaker 01 What in the world was a man living in urban Sydney doing obtaining legal licenses to hold six man-killing weapons? I mean, what is that about? It just shows you how far we've drifted. That's how gun control was a solution in Australia, but it's not a solution in America. Every time there's a mass shooting in America, the purchase of guns goes up. So particularly in America, we have got to think about other ways to reduce this toll on human life. And that is through understanding what may change the pattern of these mass killings.
20:24 Speaker 03 And on that, I'm wondering, so if there was a particular cultural script running in Malaysia where the term originated, running amok, and that was that, you know, it was taboo to commit suicide in a Muslim culture, and so committing this kind of violence and then inducing people to kill you was one way to commit suicide without doing it. What is the cultural script that you think is running predominantly now? And how can that be disrupted?
20:50 Speaker 01 First of all, it's suicide. This is an act of suicide that sits front and centre. These people are full of anger and resentment. They're almost what they are. I was going to say almost. I mean, I've not come across any of them who have, who are socialised in any real sense. These are lonely, isolated, forgotten people in a way. They're almost all white. Very few of these killers come from any other background than a relatively prosperous, white, middle-class background. They are not abused children. They don't have a history of severe sexual abuse.
21:31 Speaker 03 Interesting.
21:32 Speaker 01 They're just these odd, isolated kids.
21:36 Speaker 01 Their intelligence levels varies, so it's not about intelligence. And it's not about poverty and abuse, which most crime is about, actually. So what is it? Well, these are people who believe they have failed in life despite having really great abilities. And they have a deep resentment against the world in general. And they become hopeless about their lives. And at some point, they start contemplating suicide as a way out of this.
22:11 Speaker 01 Now, they have some other features. Most of them are fantasists. And what fantasies have they tend to favor? Military glory. It's remarkable how many of these people have tried to apply to the police or to the military and been turned down. They also share, many of them, a fascination with guns. So they are caught up in fantasies of glorious battles and glorious death. And this long predates the point at which they start thinking about the hopelessness of life and how badly they've been treated. So those things come together.
22:54 Speaker 03 So how can we deny them the glory they seek? Especially given that, like, you know, the algorithmic online world really kind of rewards resentment and isolation, you know, like it wants people isolated, you know, all of that kind of thing. How do we battle any of this?
23:12 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, there are a small group in this lot who are actually mentally ill. They have an illness of a schizophrenic type, about 10%. But that's no higher proportion than among homicide offenders, anyway. So they're a little bit more difficult. They have the same features, but they're driven by mental illness. But if we put the 10% to one side... Um. How do we do something about the rest? The first thing is, these people almost always put their hand up well in advance. You can tell from their searches on the internet, their obsessive search about previous mass killers. Uh. They also tend often put out statements on the internet.
23:56 Speaker 01 They leak, as it were, information. You know, they don't talk to many people. Uh. But sometimes they'll put into a school essay or a college essay. Or they'll get angry with someone and they'll they'll say what they're going to do. So they actually, you get hints of what they're planning. Uh. So i- it is possible to pick up by monitoring and responding to information.
24:22 Speaker 03 There's various national and state-based organizations that do this kind of work. They're called threat assessment centers.
24:29 Speaker 01 Now, of course, you've got to identify vast numbers of people, well not vast, large numbers of people, who are not going to go down this route. Uh. So what do you do? Well, once you, once you've got these people, as it were, tagged, uh, then you can start looking at other things. You can look at how many guns they have. Uh. You can look at their mental health histories. You can start to look at their employment and social histories. You know, you you sort out the ones that look high risk. So you can then approach them, approach them at two levels. One, a mental health approach. Two, a police approach. The mental health approach is to get to talk to these people. Uh. See if they can respond to any kind of attempt at assistance, psychologically and emotional assistance.
25:15 Speaker 01 You can take their guns away and the police can start observing them and keeping tabs on them, particularly if they try and obtain guns illegally, et cetera. So you've got them there.
25:27 Speaker 01 What's interesting, I've seen a number of people who've been identified. And one of the things that's always surprised me, yes, they've thought about it, yes, they've planned it, yes, they're definitely en route, but they've never really distinguished it from fantasy.
25:45 Speaker 03 What do you mean?
25:46 Speaker 01 It exists for a long time as a fantasy solution for them. It exists really up until, in many of them, almost the time they do it. The reality of it has not really penetrated. And when you've got someone in front of you who's taking it seriously, who really thinks you may go out and shoot people, club people to death and get killed yourself, suddenly you're confronted with the real world. The real world saying, "What are you doing? What has gone wrong? How can we help you? This is completely nuts."
26:28 Speaker 01 And that reality can sometimes be enough to get them to accept help. And you can help many of them, so it isn't futile.
26:37 Speaker 03 I guess one of the elements you talked about, How, is they want to go out in a blaze of glory often.
26:42 Speaker 01 Yes, absolutely.
26:43 Speaker 03 And so in terms of denying them the glory they seek, is that part of why you don't name these people? Like, and what else can we do to deny them that glory?
26:51 Speaker 01 Well, the first thing, never name them. Name their victims by all means. In fact, please, name their victims. Name where it happened. Don't name them. Give them no air at all. It doesn't matter, of course, they're dead, so why does it matter? 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 and getting the label of evil, horrific, terrible, which they seek for themselves.
27:27 Speaker 03 This is a bit tricky, because the media have to name names at a certain point for a few reasons, one of them being accuracy. But there is something to be said about how... How much that name is repeated in subsequent reporting.
27:39 Speaker 01 I find it difficult to understand why we've had so much difficulty getting through to some. I mean, journalists that I deal with in Australia, most of them are really good on this. Really, really good. But worldwide, they won't take any notice of this. Don't name them. I mean, with suicide, they did.
27:57 Speaker 03 Right.
27:57 Speaker 01 Famous suicides stopped being publicized. They recognized that if you publicized famous people's suicides, you killed people. And it's the same here. The numbers are less probably, but it's still killing people. So, no, never. And the other thing they desire is to die among their victims. Don't let them. Do everything you can to keep them alive.
28:22 Speaker 03 And so I guess the question I'm left with after talking about all these examples is, you said, you know, what we can do to help these people on the mental health front, policing front. What I'm wondering is if there's someone listening who has someone in their life that they think is struggling and there's a few red flags that you've talked about that they're recognizing, what should they do?
28:44 Speaker 01 Well, we do in, I think, all the states. We have threat management centers, which are police and mental health combined. It may not be easy to get directly in touch with them, but the local police will know how to, or they ought to know how to. They can look it up if they don't. And all you have to say is, I've got some real concerns. You don't even have to name the person to the local police who don't want to. And I'd like to be put in contact with these people to talk to them. And they would then be flagged and they would start looking at their internet traffic. They would start looking at their gun ownership. They would start looking at everything they could and they would find as much as they could about why the anxiety had arisen in this person. And then they go from there.
29:31 Speaker 03 That is retired forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen. He's also the author of the book Running Amok: Inside the Mind of a Lone Mass Killer. And that is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to senior producer James Bullen and producer Rose Kerr and sound engineer Antonia Gaochi. If you're interested in more crime-related psychology topics, we just wrapped up our four-part series on forensic psychology. We'll link to it in the show notes for this episode, but you can also scroll back in your podcast feed to listen to that. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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