Prominent spree killings and spree killers
August 1966: student Charles Whitman
kills his wife and mother then the following day shoots dead 14 people from a 27-storey clock tower at University of Texas, Austin, before being killed by police.
January 1979: Pupil Brenda Spencer kills two and wounds nine in the playground at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, USA. She later says, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." Her crime was the basis for the Boomtown Rats song "I don't like Mondays".
August 1986: Pat Sherrill, a postal worker about to be fired, shoots 14 people dead and kills himself at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma. This is one of the cases that lead to the coining of the phrase "going postal". Although the US Postal Service is perceived as having a high likelihood of spree killings, in reality more shootings take place in burger bars than in postal offices.
August 1987: Michael Ryan
kills his mother then walks through the streets of Hungerford, Berkshire, England, killing 16 and wounding 11 before shooting himself.
September 1989: employee Joseph T Wesbecker walks into Standard Gravure Corporation plant then kills 7 and wounds 12. One of the injured dies three days later. Wesbecker had a history of mental health problems and had been put on disability leave several months earlier, which he regarded as a gross injustice. Two weeks before his spree killing, Wesbecker had been prescribed Prozac. In a subsequent law suit, the allegation that Prozac had tipped Wesbecker over the edge was not proven, although it is believed that Eli Lilly, makers of Prozac, made an out-of-court settlement. John Cornwell, who covered the trial for the London Sunday Times, describes the case in his book The Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial (Viking Books, ISBN 0670867675). The case raised questions about possible side-effects of Prozac. Whilst many people seem to benefit from Prozac, some (like me) notice no difference, and a small number of people believe that Prozac can increase violent tendencies. Princess Diana's driver and Michael Hutchence (lead singer of INXS) were both taking Prozac, although given the large number of people who take Prozac, whether this is significant is unknown.
June 1990: James Edward Pough kills 10 and wounds 4 in a shooting spree in a General Motors office in Florida. He then kills himself.
October 1991: George Hennard shoots 24 people dead after crashing his truck into a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas.
April 1995: At a refinery inspection station in Texas, former employee James Simpson shoots and kills the owner , the owner's wife and three workers before shooting himself.
March 1996: in one of the worst spree killings ever, Thomas Hamilton walks into Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and shoots dead 16 children and a teacher before killing himself.
March 1997: Hundreds of pupils at two schools in Sanaa, Yemen, are shot at by a man wielding an assault rifle. Eight people are killed, including six children. the man was sentenced to death the following day.
June 1997: Daniel S Marsden kills 2 employees and wounds 4 more at a plastics factory in Santa Fe Springs. He later kills himself.
October 1997:
Two students including a former girlfriend are shot dead by a 16-year-old boy at Pearl High School, Mississippi. It transpires that prior to the shooting the boy had stabbed his mother to death.
December 1997: Former employee Arturo Reyes Torres kills his former boss and three others before being shot dead by police at a maintenance yard in Orange, California.
December 1997: three students are killed by a 14-year-old boy at a prayer meeting at Heath High School, West Paducah, Kentucky
March 1998: Following a dispute over pay, accountant Matthew Beck kills the Connecticut Lottery Corporation's president and three of his supervisors. He then kills himself.
March 1998: Four pupils and a teacher are killed by two boys aged 11 and 13 at Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, Arkansas.
April 1999: Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold, both pupils at Columbine High School in Littleton, Denver, Colorado, walk into the school armed with guns and home-made bombs and kill 15 before killing themselves. Ethnic minorities and jocks (the school's sporting heroes) appear to be singled out.
April 1999: In Salt Lake City, Sergei Babarin opens fire in the Mormon Family History Library. He kills two people, wounds 4 more and is then shot dead by police.
June 1999: In Michigan, former patient Joseph Brooks Jnr shoots his psychiatrist and five others dead before turning the gun on himself.
July 1999: In Atlanta, Georgia, day trader Mark Barton
kills his wife and two children, then visits two brokerage firms and shoots nine people and wounds a further 13 before killing himself.
November 1999: In the German town of Bad Reichenhall, a teenager breaks into his father's gun cabinet, then opens fire on people passing his apartment then kills his sister and himself.
November 1999: a 15-year-old student in Meissen, East Germany, takes bets from fellow pupils that he would dare to stab his teacher to death and then carries out the dare. He is later jailed for seven years.
November 1999: disgruntled former Xerox employee Byron K Uyesugi kills 7 people at a Xerox office in Honolulu.
Boxing Day, 26 December 2000: software consultant Michael McDermot age 48 walks into Edgewater Technologies at Wakefield near Boston where he has been employed for just less than a year and kills 7 people with an AK47. He carried a shotgun and a hand gun as well. He had been in dispute with the government about alleged unpaid back taxes.
March 2000: a 57-year-old teacher is shot dead by a 16-year-old pupil at a private boarding school in Branneburg, Bavaria, Southern Germany. The teenager, who was in the process of being expelled for failing a drugs test for cannabis, also shot himself.
5 March 2001: 15-year-old student Charles Williams shoots dead two fellow students at California's Santee High School. Williams had been talking about his planned shooting for several days but his comments were not taken seriously.
6 April 2001: after a long period of harassment which included making fun of his stuttering, employee Pierre Lebrun shoots four workers dead then turns the gun on himself at OC Transpo in Ottawa, Canada.
27 September 2001: fourteen members of a regional parliament in Zug, near Zurich, Switzerland, are shot dead in a spree killing by 57-year-old Friedrich Leibacher. Leibacher had a long-running dispute with bus drivers and transport officials and the killing appeared to be the result of a grudge.
February 2002: a pupil who had been expelled from a technical school in Freising, Munich, Germany, killed the headmaster and detonated pipe bombs before killing his boss and a foreman at his place of work. He then killed himself. Another teacher was shot and seriously injured but survived.
March 2002: 33-year-old Richard Durn shoots dead eight councillors and injures nineteen others in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Durn, who had a history of psychological problems and was frustrated at the lack of attention he was receiving, was arrested but committed suicide two days later by jumping from the window of the room where he was being interviewed.
April 2002: a pupil who was expelled from a school in Erfurt, East Germany, kills seventeen people including fourteen teachers before killing himself.
October 2002: Robert Flores walks into the University of Arizona School of Nursing and shoots dead three of his teachers before killing himself. He had previously mailed a 22-page suicide letter to the Arizona Daily Star.
October 2002: Dick Anderson shoots and kills co-workers David Martin and Jim McCracken minutes after he was fired from his job at a government office in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. He then killed himself.
8 July 2003: Doug Williams shot 14 people, killing six, before committing suicide. Twelve of the fourteen victims were black. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Lockheed Martin allowed a "racially charged atmosphere" to grow at its factory in Meridian, Mississippi.
July 2004: Elijah Brown kills five people at a Kansas meatpacking plant before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide. Co-workers described him as "strange" and report he was often teased at work, but not for anything in particular.
January 2005: Myles Meyers shoots dead fellow employee at the Toledo North Daimler Chrysler Jeep plant and wounds two others before turning the weapon on himself.
March 2005: 17-year-old Jeff Weise shoots dead 9 people including his grandparents, a teacher and fellow pupils at Red Lake High School on the Chippewa Native American reservation in Minnesota before shooting himself. Weise's father committed suicide four years ago and his mother lives in a nursing home in Minneapolis since suffering brain injuries in a car accident. Witnesses reported that he was teased at school. 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
