College Killers: School Shootings in North America and Europe - Columbine, Jonesboro, Bath, Thurston, Red Lake, Virginia, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Texas Tower, Beslan, Erfurt, Dunblane Read online

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  COLLEGE KILLERS

  School Shootings in North America and Europe

  © 2012 RW Press Ltd

  This 2012 edition published by RW Press Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission, in writing, of the publisher.

  The views expressed in this book are those of the author but they are general views only, and readers are urged to consult a relevant and qualified specialist for individual advice in particular situations. The author and RW Press Ltd hereby exclude any liability to the extent permitted by law, for any errors or omissions in this book and for any loss, damage and expense (whether direct or indirect) suffered by a third party relying on any information contained in this book.

  Although every effort has been made to trace and contact people mentioned in the text for their approval in time for publication, this has not been possible in all cases. If notified, we will be pleased to rectify any alleged errors or omissions when we reprint the title.

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  Contents

  Introduction

  NORTH AMERICA

  Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre

  Bath School Disaster

  University of Texas Tower Shootings

  Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

  Jonesboro Massacre

  Thurston High School Massacre

  Columbine High School Massacre

  Red Lake Massacre

  Amish School Shooting

  The Virginia Tech Massacre

  EUROPE

  Cologne School Massacre

  Dunblane School Shootings

  Erfurt Massacre

  Winnenden School Shooting

  TERRORISM

  Ma’a lot Massacre

  Beslan School Hostage Crisis

  Toulouse Shootings

  Introduction

  ‘This sure beats the hell out of algebra, doesn’t it?’

  Perpetrator of a shooting at Frontier Middle School, Moses Lake, Washington

  We send our children to school believing it to be a place of safety. Sometimes, however, it is far from that. College Killers describes how easily the classroom can become a killing ground, and school a place where death haunts the corridors and cafeterias.

  According to the United States Secret Service, it could be anyone. He – and almost all school atrocities have been perpetrated by young males – is more often than not the progeny of a troubled marriage or single parent upbringing, but there have also been instances where a killer has emerged from the sanctity of the all-American ‘Mom and Pop’ family. He might be a greasy-haired loner, a Death Metal aficionado who rarely leaves his room, but, alternatively, he could well be the life and soul of the party with a wide circle of close and admiring friends. No one suspects anything is wrong until they watch the gruesome CCTV footage of him stalking the corridors of his school or university, armed to the teeth, with murder, mayhem and revenge on his mind.

  It is baffling to most of us that someone could walk into a school or college and kill anyone that crosses his path – innocent student and teacher alike. The Columbine Killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of one of the most high-profile school massacres, committed their heinous crimes with staggering callousness. When asked by another student what they were doing, Klebold replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh, just killing people’. At Thurston High School, as he went about his grim business, the face of murderous student, Kipland P. Kinkel, has been described by a fellow student as expressionless, ‘like it was something he did every day’.

  But rarely do we find out what drove these, mostly young, college killers to such desperate lengths, because the majority of them remain silent during their horrific attacks. The 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech in 2007, and the older Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane in 1996, for example, went about their murderous business in a silence broken only by the sound of gunfire and screaming. Our lack of understanding is perpetuated by the fact that most of the perpetrators commit suicide when they run out of ammunition or are eventually cornered by the authorities.

  Hamilton was an outsider who picked on the innocents of Dunblane Primary School for reasons largely unknown, although he did feel an overwhelming sense of injustice and frustration. Other school killers’ motives have been a little more evident. Andrew Kehoe blew up Bath Consolidated School in Bath, Michigan, while burdened with crippling debts, while the political aims of terrorist organizations that were behind the Ma’alot Massacre in Israel and the shocking Beslan School Siege in Russia were obvious.

  The majority of these attacks have occurred in the United States where school killings are almost weekly occurrences, but they are beginning to spread to other countries with European schools beginning to figure in the statistics. Wherever they occur, however, it is evident that, more often than not, the violence derives from psychological imbalances within the minds of the perpetrators. In the cases in this book, it is evident that many of the killers become thus through poor parenting, a lack of respect for the institutions that have an influence over our lives and a casual approach to violence, perhaps fostered by over-indulgence in ultra-violent video and computer games. Several of the killers in this book – Thomas Hamilton, Kip Kinkel and Andrew Golden, for example – had displayed a morbid fascination for guns from an early age, a fascination indulged by parents who thought it was safe for their offspring to be around firearms.

  This book looks at the stories of 17 incidents – from the Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre in 1764 to the Toulouse shootings carried out by Mohammed Mehra in 2012, analysing the motives and examining the methods of some of the most heinous of all murderers – the College Killers.

  NORTH AMERICA

  Pontiac’s Rebellion School Massacre

  Year: 1764

  Perpetrators: Delaware Native American warriors

  Murdered: 11

  Folklore in Antrim Township maintains that on that particular morning, the children did not want to go to school and only 11 answered ‘Present’ when their names were called at registration. The previous day a woman, Susan King Cunningham had been murdered by Delaware warriors not far away from Antrim and the atmosphere in the area was tense. One of the absentees, Mary Ramsey, claimed to have had a premonition that something evil was about to happen. Her premonition came true.

  The last 20 years have seen an explosion of school and college atrocities, but it is generally believed that the first ever to take place was as long ago as 1764 in Antrim Township, a small community in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The four perpetrators were members of the Delaware Native American tribe who attacked a small schoolhouse, scalping and killing almost everyone inside.

  The backdrop to the incident was the conflict known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, a war that had been initiated by a loose confederation of Native American tribes mainly from the areas of the Great Lakes, the Illinois Country and the Ohio Country. The tribes were unhappy with the way the British were administrating the region following their victory in the French and Indian War that had been fought between 1754 and 1763. Former rulers of these territories, the French ha
d governed by forming alliances with the Native Americans. They had given presents such as guns, knives and tobacco to chiefs that were re-distributed amongst their people, giving the chiefs stature and authority. The British, however, regarding this approach as bribery, brought it to an end, causing insult to the Native Americans who began to feel that the British were treating them as a conquered people.

  Colonial Rule

  There was more resentment when the British general, Jeffrey Amherst, began to place restrictions on the amount of gunpowder and ammunition that the Native Americans were allowed to have, the French having imposed no such limits.

  The number of British settlers further exacerbated the situation. There had been relatively few French colonists but the British flooded in, clearing the territory of trees to occupy and farm it, displacing many Native Americans from their ancestral lands.

  Religion also played a part. It spread through the Native settlements in the 1760s, against a background of food shortages and disease. The most influential person in this religious awakening was Neolin, a member of the Lenni Lenape Native American people, also known as the ‘Delaware Prophet’. Merging elements of Christianity with traditional beliefs, he advocated that Native Americans should stop trading for the goods the whites offered. The British, he claimed, were a threat to the very existence of Native Americans. ‘If you suffer the English among you,’ he said, ‘you are dead men. Sickness, smallpox, and their poison [alcohol] will destroy you entirely.’

  The war began when Pontiac, chieftain of the Ottawa tribe, travelled from Detroit to Pittsburgh, attacking small colonies of settlers who had occupied lands that the British Crown had promised would remain in the hands of his people. The British fought back, trying to stop the attacks. This, in turn, led to a widespread retaliation by Native Americans across the settlements in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.

  Tribal Retaliation

  The tribes’ retaliation was also a response to the atrocities committed by the Paxton Boys, a white gang from the Dauphin County area. Governor John Penn of Pennsylvania had announced that bounties would be paid to white men for the scalps of Native Americans over the age of ten and the Paxton Boys obliged, rampaging through the region and eventually wiping out one whole tribe, the Conestoga. The response of the Native Americans was to kill and scalp any white person they encountered, regardless of age or gender.

  On the morning of 26 July 1764, at the small schoolhouse that served Antrim Township, Christian schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, and 11 pupils were preparing for another school day. Suddenly, three Native American warriors ran into the room, startling the teacher and his pupils. As two of the Native Americans guarded the door, the schoolmaster, knowing what was about to happen, begged them to kill him and take his scalp but to let the children live. His plea was futile. The Native American clubbed the schoolmaster and ten of the students to death and took their scalps.

  The 11th pupil, Archie McCullough, was scalped, but the blow to his head failed to kill him. When the Native Americans left, Archie crawled to the fireplace and, traumatized by the horror of what he had seen and experienced, hid in it until he was certain they had gone. He then staggered outside to a stream where he washed his bleeding head. Shortly afterwards, a neighbour found him. Remarkably, Archie lived to a good age, although he was mentally scarred by the incident.

  A Divided Land

  A few days after the massacre, the settlers of Antrim Township gathered to bury their dead. They were interred in a common grave in one large wooden box. Meanwhile, the warriors returned to their tribe with the scalps. One young man who was present when they returned was John McCullough. Aged eight, he and his brother James had been kidnapped from their homestead close to Antrim in 1756. James had been handed over to the French authorities, but John was still living amongst the tribe as an adopted son. He recorded in a diary that, when the young Native Americans returned with the scalps they had taken, they were accused of being cowards by their fellow Delaware because they had taken the scalps of children.

  The story passed into legend and, in the area, it was uncertain after several decades whether it had really taken place. Eighty years after the attack the people of the nearby town of Greencastle decided to find the grave to prove once and for all the truth, or otherwise, of the story. Their search finally uncovered a large grave containing the bodies of one adult and ten children. The Enoch Brown Memorial Park now marks the spot where the massacre occurred.

  In July 1766, Pontiac travelled to New York where he made a formal treaty with the British at Fort Ontario. The British had already realized that it would be sensible to keep their settlers and the Native American tribes separate and officials drew a boundary line between the British colonies along the seaboard and Native American lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, creating a vast ‘Indian Reserve’ that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Quebec. Pontiac’s Rebellion had served as a reminder that indigenous peoples had certain rights to the lands they occupied.

  Bath School Disaster

  Year: 1927

  Perpetrator: Andrew Kehoe

  Murdered: 44

  The woman was engulfed in flames when the oil stove she had been trying to light, unaccountably, exploded. She screamed in unimaginable pain, but the 14-year-old boy at the kitchen door just stood and watched, doing nothing. Eventually, after several minutes had passed, he picked up a bucket, filled it with water and poured it over her, dousing the flames. It was too late, though, and a few hours later she would die in hospital from the multiple burns she had suffered.

  The boy’s name was Andrew Kehoe and it did not pay to get on the wrong side of him. The woman was his stepmother and he had never gotten on with her since the day she had married his father. Neighbours knew what he was like, though, and there were whispers that young Andrew had probably done something to the stove to make it explode. Nothing was ever proven.

  Head Injury

  Andrew Kehoe was born in 1872 in Tecumseh, Michigan. After attending his local high school, he enrolled at Michigan State College in East Lansing where he met the woman he would eventually marry – Nellie Price.

  Before settling down, Kehoe left Michigan and lived in Missouri for several years, learning to be an electrician. Whilst there, he suffered a serious head injury in a fall and was in a coma for two months. He recovered and went back home to Tecumseh, but many questioned whether his subsequent behaviour and actions were caused in some way by that injury.

  He married Nellie and they bought a 185-acre farm near Bath Township. A fastidious man, known to change his shirt if there was the smallest speck of dirt on it, he was also moody and argumentative and very careful with his money. This last aspect of his character led to him being appointed to the Bath School board as treasurer in 1926. It was around this time that the board decided to invest in a new school for the town, to be known as the Bath Consolidated School. In order to fund the project, taxes were increased. This was bad news for Andrew Kehoe who, with his wife suffering from tuberculosis, was already heavily in debt. His mortgage lender had begun foreclosure proceedings on his farm. Kehoe was extremely vocal in his opposition to the tax hike, and he blamed one man for it – the school-board president Emory E. Huyck. At his wits’ end, he devised a plan to get back at Huyck.

  Pyrotol was an explosive, used by farmers for excavating or blowing up tree stumps. Therefore when Kehoe bought a quantity of it, it did not seem unusual. He was buying it, however, in several different locations and stock-piling it. In November 1926, he added a stock of dynamite to his deadly stash.

  Dynamite Stash

  Due to Kehoe’s natural flair with tools and machinery, he had been appointed handyman for the school, which gave him access to every part of it day and night. Whenever he visited the building, he took with him a little Pyrotol and began to put his horrific plan into action. He pretended to be re-wiring the school, but he was, in fact, wiring together various explosive charges that he had hi
dden all over the building, even in the roof. By early May 1927, he had completed his work. Under the classrooms, as the children studied, lay a massive charge of a 1000 lb of dynamite ready to ignite.

  The school was not the only place, however, where Kehoe had been busy. Back at his farm, he had set lethal firebombs in the farm buildings and outhouses.

  It began on the afternoon of 17 May 1927 when he beat his sick wife Nellie to death and hid her body behind a chicken coop. The following morning, he drove into Bath where, at the post office, he dispatched a package containing the school board’s financial records, including a meticulous analysis of a 22-cent discrepancy in the accounts. He was fastidious to the end.

  The Tragedy Begins

  That morning the school day was beginning as usual. Children were arriving and teachers were preparing their classrooms. Kehoe had returned to his farm where he hitched his five horses to posts in their stables and beside them piled up rubbish and branches. At his barn, he loaded his pickup with nuts and bolts and threw on old machine parts that were rusting in the yard.

  Explosions erupted at the Kehoe farm at exactly 8:45 a.m. and debris was thrown high into the air, some of it landing dangerously on neighbouring properties. People appeared at their doors and then ran to the farm to try to help. But it was already an inferno. Kehoe had connected his bombs to tanks of petrol and these were blazing intensely.

  Kehoe, meanwhile, jumped behind the wheel of his truck, but just as it left the farm, the ground shook and the air was filled with the sound of an even larger explosion. The bombs at the school had gone off.

  Those running to help the Kehoes turned in their tracks and frantically made for the school, where many had sent their children that morning. They were faced with a horrific sight. The force of the blast had made the entire north wing collapse. Part of the roof had been blown off and under it lay numerous children, those still alive screaming pitifully for help. One man returning home to get a rope to drag the roof away, passed Kehoe in his truck. He was grinning.