It seems like we’ve had more than our fair share of mass and spree murders this year. A review of the year so far.
Dr. Welner, Forensic Psychologist and Chairman of the Forensic Panel, offers insight and hope regarding the Sandy Hook massacre on ABC’s popular show The View, discussing the role of guns, mental illness, the media and the individual, in cases of mass murder.
A chilling, and very short, 911 call was received, "’No, no, no,’ and then gunshots. … A male party then picks up the phone and says he’s going to kill himself. The dispatcher hears another gunshot."
Some say you can still hear the souls of the murdered creeping listlessly around these famous crime scenes.
On October 19, 1970, a fire at a wealthy California doctor’s home led authorities to one of the most gruesome mass murders since the Manson murders. Scared hippies pointed police towards hermit and environmental nut John Linley Frazier. His motive? To wreak vengeance on those who rape the environment and restore the natural beauty of the hillside where the doctor’s luxury home once stood.
On October 17, 2006, Villisca, Iowa, mass murderer Shawn Bentler was charged with five counts of first-degree murder for killing his entire family in cold blood. This case, though solved, recalls another mass murder, this one unsolved, that occurred in the same town in 1912.
Self-proclaimed prophet of God Jeffrey Lundgren moved his flock to the quiet pastoral community of Kirtland, Ohio, in order to receive his true power from God. Once there he became drunk with power and his teachings extravagant; He embraced acts of violence and sexual assault. His orgy of power culminated in the slaughter of five of those who had trusted in him.
A workplace-related dispute in New York erupted into mass shooting and homicide today when Jeffrey Johnson, 58, shot and killed Steven Ercolino, 41, the man who allegedly had him fired from his job at Hazan Import Corp. in 2011.
In 1985 mass murderer Remeta and his companions killed their way through the South, and then descended on Grainfield, Kan., like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, leaving death, pain and misery in their wake.
Ex-Marine Charles Joseph Whitman, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, went on a shooting spree that began around midnight on August 1, 1966, with the murders of his mother and his wife. The next day he went to campus and dispensed death to 16, leaving 31 others wounded before turning a weapon on himself.
