Mass Murderers and Women: What We're Still Not Getting About Virginia Tech

[Shallah Kali]

Evidence shows that many mass murderers begin and end their rampages with violence against women. With over 30 dead in Virginia, can we finally begin to take the issue seriously?
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/04/virginia_tech_women.html

The first person killed by Cho Seung-Ho, a freshman named Emily Hilscher, was initially rumored to be Cho's current or former girlfriend – the subject of his obsession or jealous rage. It now appears that she never had a relationship with Cho, but the rumors were spread quickly, especially by blogs and by the international tabloid press. The UK's Daily Mail headlined the "Massacre Gunman's Deadly Infatuation with Emily," while Australia's Daily Telegraph published a photo of a smiling Hilscher with the line "THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history." (The page is still up.) Some accounts stooped to suggesting, with zero evidence, that the victim had jilted Cho, cheated on him, or led him on.

More significantly, local police and university administrators appear to have initially bought this motive, and acted accordingly. In the two hours between the murders of Hilscher and her dorm neighbor Ryan Clark, and Cho's mass killings at another university building, they chose not to cancel classes or lock down the campus. (They did choose to do so, however, in August 2006, when a man shot a security guard and a sheriff's deputy and escaped from a hospital two miles away.) Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a "domestic dispute" and thought the gunman had fled the campus, so "We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur." The assumption, apparently, is that men who kill their cheating girlfriends are criminals, but they are not crazy, not psychopaths, and not a danger to anyone other than the woman in question. (Or, as one reader commented at Feministe sarcastically, "Like killing your girlfriend is no big deal.")

In fact, these attitudes ignore past evidence of both "domestic disputes" and a more generalized misogyny as motives in mass killings. Multiple murders in homes and workplaces often begin with a man killing his wife or girlfriend. Mark Barton, who in 1999 shot nine people in an Atlanta office building, began the day by bludgeoning to death his children and his wife; six years earlier he had been a suspect in the death of his first wife and her mother, who were also beaten to death. In another high-profile case, the December 1989 mass shooting at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, Marc Lepine was after women, whom he hated, and had a list of feminists he wanted to kill. He murdered four men and 14 women, and wounded 10 more women. In September 2006, Duane Roger Morrison walked into Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., and took six female students hostage, killing one. And last October, Charles Carl Roberts IV took over an Amish schoolhouse, let the boys go, and killed five girls.

One warning sign in such cases is a history of stalking and harassment of women. At Virginia Tech, in September 2005, poet Nikki Giovanni had Cho removed from her class at Virginia Tech after female students complained that he was using his cell phone to take pictures of their legs underneath the desks; some refused to come to class while Cho was there. In November and December of that year, two female students reported receiving threatening messages from Cho, and one said he was stalking her. But charges were never filed, and police and university officials didn't seem especially worried about the women. Yet, as Arlen Specter pointed out in comments on the VT shooting made during the Gonzalez hearings Thursday, Cho had been accused of a "crime against the state as well as against the students," and the local DA could have taken up the case.

[depakid]

1. Same EXACT thing happened with the U of Texas shooter

Charles Whitman. Killed his wife and his mother first.

Mark my words, around the time the Statute of limitations is about to run out, there WILL be lawsuits- and the University will either settle or lose at trial.

[Withywindle]

2. Another poster brought up days ago that sexism was involved

in the way the case was handled. There was a lot of shouting about it, but that poster was right. And this article is too. Recommended.

[Berry Cool]

3. Technically, I don't think it was possible to "lock down the campus"

I get the impression it's too spread out and bleeds too much into the community for that to be possible.

I'm not even sure I blame the authorities for how they mis-reacted to this at first. I think they may well have honestly had no idea what would happen, if anything, after the first two shootings, whether they assumed it to be a "domestic dispute" or not.

Having said that, though, I agree entirely that our society doesn't do well at all when it comes to taking violence against women seriously. I'm not sure this is a prime example of that, is all. After all, the first two dead people were female AND male.

[godai]

4. Campus WAS locked down...

too late to possibly save lives. It was also locked down last year, with the escaped convict on the loose. The campus is entirely separate from Blacksburg, with only a few roads to be closed. Lockdown might not be easy or complete, but lockdown is indeed possible.

The administration met for over an hour after the 1st 2 murders, apparently discussing how best to announce the murders. This was a huge mistake, I feel. Police cars circling the campus around 9 am might have prevented the massacre.

[ContraBass Black]

5. The main campus adjoins downtown Blacksburg, and spreads out for miles.

Just closing the main campus, and ignoring the many peripheries, requires the closing of fourteen streets and guarding several large lawns, parking lots, and alleys.

[godai]

6. Doesn't spread out for miles

Lockdown was 100% do-able. In fact, it was done, but too late. You do realize this, right?

The numbers you cite aren't really that large.

Nothing was done on campus following 2 murders on campus. Can you defend that?
I guarantee you that a much lesser incident will result in campus lockdown, next time.

[ContraBass Black]

9. From the golf course to CRC is 2.5 miles. From downtown to the Beef Center is 1.5 miles.

Checkpoints were established by afternoon on all 14 streets by state police, and foot patrols covered the intervening spaces.

Following the first two murders, police posted guards at WAJ and sealed the fourth floor. While severely insufficient, it was more than nothing.

[godai]

11. No need to lockdown Blacksburg or the golf course

The bottom line is that something needs to be done to have a better emergency response plan in place.
If Cho had seen a bigger police presence on campus at 9 am, I don't think he would have been driving around, or moving ouside, armed to the teeth. I think he would have run had he encountered police.

[ContraBass Black]

12. There is always a significant police presence here, and some people still keep guns in their cars.

He also knew that he had likely not been identified, and went to the post office downtown. In order to be effective at deterring him, the police would have had to establish checkpoints and thoroughly search every vehicle passing through. This is what they did during the Morva incident, when they believed that he might try to escape campus as a stow-away.

[Prophet 451]

7. Reasonable arguement

Of course, if we lived in a fair world, we wouldn't need to make this arguement to reinforce the fact that violence against women is a bad thing.

One thing though, be careful not to confuse spree killers with serials, the two are psychologically very different and the serial often doesn't have a history of violence against women.

[Igel]

8. The claim is valid, I think, but the conclusion goes astray.

They manage to say that a small percentage of cases in which men kill their female significant others leads to mass murder. It would be nice if they had actually come up with a statistic, but they don't. I think it's because it would be small.

It's something to be concerned about when a man kills a woman that he's close to (or imagines he's close to), but they don't show that there's a serious risk of a subsequent killing spree. Granted, *any* risk is serious, but we don't live in a zero risk world and never will. In hindsight they made the wrong choice. Only in hindsight.

They play the same game--wanting you to repeat the same kind of abductive logic that leads to racial profiling--with stalking. 76% of women murdered were stalked by their murderer; but it says nothing about how many stalkers kill those they stalk; young women have low mortality. If it's a fairly large number, MJ should have said because it buttresses their argument. Stalking bad, but most stalkers aren't murderers.

I'd like information that shows the conclusions MJ wants us to draw are plausible.

[MLFerrell]

10. The reference to Marc Lepine leaves out the most significant element of his misogyny...

He lined his victims up, and before the murderous carnage began, repeatedly shouted "You are all feminists!"

The sexist element of the media coverage utterly disgusts me.