just commits suicide is the
externalization of blame," said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern
University professor of criminal justice and author of six books on
mass murder.
"If you blame yourself for your problems, then
maybe you direct your violence inwardly. If you blame other people for
your failures, like Sodini did, you go after those people."
Sodini's blog vents his frustration and rage at the lack of
relationships and sex in his life, and he blames all women for letting
him down.
Although Sodini expressed intense hatred for his
brother and father, "it also didn't surprise me in this case that he
made some derogatory comments about his mother," said Dr. J. Reid
Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at
the University of California, San Diego. "A lot of times, when there's
this level of hatred against women, there's also a very antagonistic
relationship with the mother, but it gets shifted onto other women."
Sodini did not target specific women who had hurt him but all women, Fox said.
"He had an issue with women who were not giving him the time of day
-- all these young, beautiful, attractive, healthy, fit women at the
health club," Fox said. "And so he specifically chose the health club,
not just some random spot, to go after the people he blamed."
Mass killers feel that they have been victimized and that their actions are justified, Fox and Meloy said.
"They've been victimized by someone at work, by someone in the family,
by the world in general; they've been dealt a bad hand," Fox said. "And
... they feel at the very end they can stand up -- with a gun -- and
restore that power imbalance. They often see the gun as the great
equalizer.
"This act, this final act of murder, is a way to
leave this world feeling some degree of satisfaction of, in the end,
being the last one to have the best and last laugh," Fox said.
"The concept here is really, really hard for most people to grasp, and
that is the sense of entitlement, that 'I have a right to murder all of
these women because of my personal frustration,' " Meloy said. "It's
absolutely astonishing that a person can come to that mind-set."
Neither expert treated Sodini, but both noted that Sodini's act, like most mass murders, was anything but spontaneous.
"His blog is a striking example of how mass murders are planned,
relatively carefully planned, over the course of days, weeks or, in
this case, months," Meloy said.
"There's this myth that mass
killers just snap and go berserk and suddenly, without warning, shoot
indiscriminately," Fox said. "Well, he had been thinking about this for
some time. He had originally planned to commit the mass murder in
January [but] 'chickened out,' as he said. But this shows a lot of
methodical planning, thinking."
That hesitation, as well as his possible hesitation on the day of the killings, is unusual, Meloy said.
"Typically, as these guys are doing it, they have no ambivalence," he
said. "The have made the decision to maximize casualties and to also
kill themselves, as he did."
Often some humiliating event
"starts the clock" and sets long-laid plans in motion, Meloy said, but
he didn't see evidence of such an incident in the hours or days before
Sodini's rampage.
"These guys are very narcissistically
sensitive, meaning that the kind of insult or slight that you or I
would just fluff off, these guys will ruminate and think about it and
do that for long periods of time," Meloy said.
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