‘They’re not wolves – they’re sheep’: The psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone mass killers | Australian books

DPaul E. Mullen and his family were living near Dunedin, New Zealand, when they heard gunfire one evening in November 1990. The gunfire continued into the night, followed by the sound of police and ambulances in the distance. At 9 p.m., a colleague at the hospital told him that a few kilometers away, in Aramoana, someone with a gun started shooting.

As it turns out, Mullen had heard of the perpetrator before; One of his longtime patients was the man’s neighbor, and Mullen soon learned that several other people he knew had been injured or killed.

“I never thought about these things,” Mullen tells The Guardian. “They were never on my radar.”

Born in Bristol, Mullen had always been involved in forensic work, but the events at Aramoana piqued his curiosity. He soon transitioned into becoming a full-time forensic psychiatrist, specializing in some of the most dangerous acts known to society, from stalking and child sexual abuse to mass murder.

Speaking on the phone from his home in Melbourne, the 81-year-old has the fresh, easy-going air of any ordinary semi-retired professional – but the trajectory of his career has brought him face to face with men whose violent crimes once brought them international notoriety.

Perhaps the most striking encounter came a few years after the Aramoana incident, when news emerged in April 1996 of an even deadlier attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By then Mullen was in Australia, where he was working as a professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University. He received a phone call summoning him to the Royal Hobart Hospital, where the latest perpetrator – whose name Mullen refuses to use – had been taken alive hours earlier after shooting 55 people, killing 35.

“That was my first experience spending time with one of these killers and starting to find out something about them,” Mullen recalls.

The 28-year-old was receiving treatment for burns after setting fire to a guest house in a recent confrontation with police. At the hospital, wary authorities disinfected the floor and strapped him to a bed.

At first, Mullen thought the blond-haired young man looked frightened, and saw no reason to fear for his safety. While the television crews and journalists gathered outside described him with terms such as “evil,” “unholy,” and “monster,” Mullen did not treat the young man as a “murderer,” but rather “a person who killed.” He sought to build a relationship with his subject, even seeking to remove his limitations.

“I thought things were going well, until suddenly, BlameHe says, “You got the record, right?”

Mullen was surprised. “But you just have to keep working,” he recalls, pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts. “You have work to do.”

While the Port Arthur killer angrily rejected Mullen’s suggestion that his actions might have been inspired by another major attack a month earlier in Dunblane, Scotland, Mullen says he soon began talking about other massacres.

“That’s how it is an act “A lot is known about these former killers,” Mullen says. “This is normal.”

The following decades saw Mullen interview numerous men in a similar situation to the perpetrators of the Aramoana and Port Arthur incidents, becoming a leading authority on what is often referred to as “lone mass killers.” But despite the implications of isolation, the man on the Hobart hospital ward revealed what would become a common thread in all of Mullen’s dealings with lone mass killers: they rarely act in isolation.

Today, Mullen reflects on the complex factors that have fueled an alarming rise in such events over the past half-century – the University of Texas in 1966, Port Arthur and the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011, Las Vegas in 2017, and Christchurch in 2019 to name a few – on a scale and regularity that seemed unimaginable not long ago. One of the most powerful of these factors, he says, is the emergence of the “cultural script,” a conclusion shaped not only by his direct experience but also by history books.

“The first time this happened in the Western world was in Germany in 1913.”

In September 1913, a schoolteacher killed his wife and four children before traveling to Mühlhausen armed with several rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He began shooting randomly, killing nine people before he was captured — but it was what happened next that Mullen found telling. “It had no effect – between 1913 and 1966 there were three incidents, one of which was actually in Melbourne. But there was no effect.” Cultural scenario creature.”

Things changed after the Austin, Texas, shooting in August 1966, Mullen says, when a 25-year-old student climbed onto the observation deck on the 28th floor of a University of Texas building and opened fire, killing 15 people and wounding 30 others.

“It was in every major newspaper in America, on the front page the next day with his picture and name, and it was covered all over the world over the next few days — and then they made a movie,” he says, referring to the 1975 film The Deadly Tower. Starring Kurt Russell as the red bandana-wearing gunman.

“It was the University of Texas Tower Massacre that created the scenario, which has now grown and grown and grown,” Mullen says. “The first copycat of the Texas killer was only five weeks old [later]”.

Like the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fueled by a mixture of resentment and a sense of vulnerability, drawn to the promise of infamy, fame, and noteworthy death that previous mass killers enjoyed. Some even dress like their ancestors, from Russell’s red bandana to the all-black outfits worn by Columbine school teens.

“They’re collecting grievances, grievances, grievances,” Mullen says, echoing common complaints he’s heard throughout his career. “People mistreated me,” “I was cheated on,” “They’re not fair,” and “No one loves me.” All those things, but they also feel like they should have fought.

“Resentment builds and builds, and your whole attitude towards the world becomes angry, full of a sense of injustice. But it is much worse, because you have not… an act anything. And this, more or less, is your final response.

In his new book, Running Wild: Inside the Mind of a Lone Mass Killer, Mullen reveals these cases along with other similar stories.

“What is shown is big Story, what is this? onHow did it develop and how can we He does “Something — not to stop it completely, but to reduce it,” he says. Along the way, Mullen deliberately avoids naming any contemporary perpetrators, instead focusing on the names and lives of their victims, and says that refusing to name the killers is “the quickest, cheapest and easiest way we can reduce this spiraling rate of killings.” He also warns against using terms such as “lone wolf.”

“That’s exactly how they want to be perceived as a lone wolf, a predator prowling around the edges,” Mullen says. “They’re not wolves. I mean, they are sheep“.

Likewise, the police and the media can thwart their ambitions by trying to capture perpetrators alive, avoiding reporting details of their lives and statements, and not allowing them to use the courtroom as a platform.

He recognizes that public safety must be carefully balanced with due process, transparency and a free press. Today, authorities also have to contend with an interest-driven media landscape, a vast and unregulated Internet that is increasingly addicted to sensationalized true crimes.

Ironically, Mullen says he initially struggled to find a publisher for his more nuanced approach to the subject. Some agents and publishers said he lacked a ‘profile’, and he had good reason for that: his closeness to numerous mass killers over the years – from Aramoana, to Port Arthur, to Melbourne’s Hoddle Street – aroused the suspicions of the conspiracy-minded. One conspiracy theory website called him “the mysterious Mullen from Monash”.

“How did you find out? Death threats,” he says. “My personal assistant at the time had a little drawer full of death threats. [So] Being anonymous helped a bit.

As for his personal feelings about a career spent face-to-face with those who committed unimaginable acts?

“I mean, they’re human,” Mullen says. “My job is to understand why they did something unusual. Understanding doesn’t mean forgiveness. Understanding doesn’t mean it’s okay – ‘I understand, now you can move on.’

Mullen’s interviews reveal that these crimes, rather than embodying “an utterly shameful and evil crime,” are often a convergence of predictable patterns and cultural scripts that can be interrupted before they end in tragedy.

“These people aren’t sure if they’re going to make it until the last moments,” he says. “Someone dropped a coin. The Tasmanian killer stopped at a café because his biggest complaint was that no one would ever talk to him. There were a couple of girls there, and he thought: ‘Well, if I go over there and talk to them, if they talk back to me, I won’t do it.’

“I’m curious,” Mullen says. “They’re human beings. I want to know the answers to why they do things, and I hope those answers will be useful in preventing this in other people – and I hope they will have some benefit in saving them.”