Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (21 page)

Ferri tried other ventures, all of which went under. He slid into financial decline. At work in his own firm, he displayed an explosive temper. His former assistant later noted that Ferri did not know such basic things as the procedure for verifying bank deposits. Ferri found himself unable to pay the rent on his one-bedroom apartment, where he lived alone. He received a notice that gave him 2 weeks to pay the money he owed or be evicted.

Although he had won a million dollars in his lawsuit, Ferri continued to harbor resentment against the legal system. It was that resentment that he focused on Pettit and Martin. When his rampage was over, a four-page letter was found on his body. Part of it said, “I spent the last 13 years trying to find legal recourse and to get back on my feet, only to find a wall of silence and corruption from the legal community.” He also blamed the food additive MSG for having nearly killed him on three occasions. Later, a videotape was found that showed him, weeks before the carnage, taking target practice in the Mojave desert.
Joseph Wesbecker, unlike Ferri, had been previously known as a violent person. When the emotionally disabled employee showed up unexpectedly at the Standard Gravure Corporation in Louisville, Kentucky, his recent history of violent tendencies and mental disturbances was well known to management. For the past 13 months he had been considered disabled and was on disability pay at 60% of his annual salary.

Wesbecker had begun working for Standard Gravure 20 years earlier. In the company, which prints Sunday supplements and inserts for newspapers, he had been very well liked by coworkers. However, his “nice-guy” image had begun to change with the onset of emotional problems and a divorce. Coworkers became worried when he began to read
Soldier of Fortune
magazine and when he let them know he had ordered through the mail an Uzi semiautomatic weapon.

Wesbecker went to management and requested a less demanding position because of his mental and emotional troubles. He became very agitated because he had been assigned to work on equipment that caused him extreme stress. Wesbecker believed that fumes from a chemical used in the printing plant were causing his physical ailments. A doctor’s report supported the request, and although Standard Gravure rejected it, the company did put him on disability. Wesbecker felt that the employer had inflicted a gross injustice upon him, considering his long years of service. Coworkers noted that his emotional problems seemed to get worse after that happened. Wesbecker clashed with management and openly complained to his union and to coworkers that he was being treated unfairly. Union officials learned from him that he was bitter toward the owner and CEO of Standard Gravure, as well as toward certain supervisors in the pressroom. He was worried that his disability benefits would end and that he would be left with nothing.

Wesbecker tried to commit suicide three times, and was, in the opinion of coworkers, becoming more paranoid each day. He was taking the antidepressant medication Prozac (fluoxetine). During the year he was on disability, Wesbecker made threats that he would get even with Standard Gravure. So it was no surprise to some coworkers when one morning he entered the plant carrying an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle, two MAC 11 semiautomatic pistols, a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, and a .38-caliber revolver with assorted ammunition and began shooting. Within a few minutes, he had killed 8 people, wounded 14 others, and taken his own life. In the lawsuit that followed, a jury found that Prozac did not cause the violence. Patrick Henry Sherrill was a 44-year-old part-time mailman in Edmond, Oklahoma. He had held his job for only 16 months, and during that time he had been suspended twice, once for failing to deliver mail and being rude to patrons, and a second time for spraying a dog with Mace. Coworkers thought him a total incompetent, unable to even find the local Wal-Mart. In fact, he was a strange and lonely man. He had no personal ties. He had never married. After his mother died, he had lived practically as a recluse in her house. As though to underscore his solitariness, he rode around Edmond, alone, on a bicycle built for two. He was viewed by coworkers as a very angry, surly person, whose best mood still revealed a dark sullenness. Neighbors reported him to the police for peeking in their windows and for spying on them with a telescope. Later on, a friend from his high school days would recall that Sherrill had confided to him a deep fear of becoming mentally ill, as his father had done in middle age. Sherrill was also overly sensitive about his premature baldness. He had a shooting range in his home. His interests were limited to the military, pornography, and his ham-radio hobby.

An ex-Marine, Sherrill was an expert marksman, with an excellent record as a member of the local National Guard marksmanship team. He boasted of having been in Vietnam, although in actuality he had never left Camp Lejeune, North Carolina during his tour of duty. He had received an honorable discharge from the Marines. Sherrill spent the next 20 years drifting from job to job, never spending more than 9 or 10 months at any of them, before being hired at the Edmond post office. At home he kept military uniforms, marksmanship medals,
Soldier of Fortune
magazines, and a pamphlet entitled, “Dying: The Greatest Adventure of My Life—A Family Doctor Tells His Story.”

On the day that Sherrill was rebuked at the post office for poor performance, he left in a rage. The next morning at 6:30
A
.
M
., he clocked in, then drew out of his mailbag two .45-caliber automatic pistols and 100 rounds of ammunition that he had signed out from the National Guard’s armory. Within 15 minutes, he had shot to death 14 postal workers and injured 6 others before killing himself.

Workplace Violence: Causes or Triggers?

The availability of sophisticated, rapid-firing guns has been suggested as one major cause of workplace violence because these weapons permit the killing of large numbers of people in a short period of time, as occurred at Columbine and Virginia Tech. However, practiced marksmen such as Gang Lu can kill people as quickly and efficiently with single-shot weapons as George Hennard did with his semiautomatics at Luby’s Cafeteria. Forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz believes that the problem is not guns but movies that “star” guns. His message is that guns do not kill but television and movies do. Mass murderers, he believes, take their inspiration from the mass media. Unlike serial killers, who elaborate their own deviant fantasies and carry them out, mass murderers do not have much imagination. In the instance of workplace killers, life imitates entertainment.

Before going on his rampage, Gang Lu left a typed statement for the media to find and print. It read, in part,

My favorite movies include
No Way Out
,
Die Hard
,
Indiana Jones
, and Clint Eastwood’s movies where a single cowboy fights against a group of incorporated bad guys who pick on little guys at their will or cover up each other’s ass. I believe in the right of people to own firearms…. Even today, privately owned guns are the only practical way for individuals/minority to protect themselves against the oppression from the evil organizations/majority who actually control the government and legal system. Private guns make every person equal…. They also make it possible for an individual to fight against a conspired/incorporated organization such as Mafia or Dirty University officials.

Violent movies and television programs may contribute to the violence potential of certain children. The reality of murder scenes—the terrible carnage, the awful suffering, the hideous aftermath for survivors and families of victims—is not and cannot be realistically portrayed by the entertainment media. Thus, a vital feedback mechanism to inhibit aggression is absent in dramatizations of violent acts. Individuals particularly at risk of being overly influenced by media representations of violence are those who have been abused physically and psychologically. They have felt helpless, terrorized, and angry as a result of their abuse. By identifying with the perpetrators of violence, they are able to temporarily ease their sense of terrifying vulnerability. They replay such depictions over and over because they have been traumatized. After chronic exposure to violent programs, identification with violent protagonists can become an entrenched defense against their own chronic fears and feelings of helplessness. Because all children must deal in varying degrees with feelings of fear, powerlessness, and dependency, no child is really immune from the adverse influences of violence as portrayed in the media.

More than 2,000 studies of the popular media and violent acts show a correlation, if not an absolute causal linkage, between television violence and aggression. I have no doubt that what we put into our minds strongly influences what comes out. But exclusive focus on popular media as the cause of upsurging violence in America ignores other important factors. Changing parenting styles that permit children to watch violent programs, the great increase in divorce rates that produce more single-parent households, escalating drug and alcohol use, the availability of guns, the collapse of urban communities, child abuse, and domestic violence—to name just a few—are other important contributors to violence.

Stanton E. Samenow, a clinical psychologist and the author of
Inside the Criminal Mind
, holds that television never made a criminal out of anyone. He thinks that emotional violence is rooted in the American tradition of personal liberty and individualism. It is this ethic that gives to a small group of people with deviant worldviews the freedom to violently act out their visions. Samenow cites the observation that these individuals are incapable of recognizing they are the agents of their own problems. They are unable to understand what Shakespeare’s Brutus was told in
Julius Caesar
: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Robert K. Ressler, former FBI agent and head of the consulting firm Forensic Behavioral Services, observes that 40 years ago, when people reached their boiling point, they had a nervous breakdown. Today, the aggrieved individual may pick up a weapon and “get even.”

On a different scale, I have treated patients who have destroyed multiple relationships because of an inability to tolerate their feelings of self-hate without projecting them onto others. It is very difficult for many of these patients to hold such feelings long enough to be able to examine them in therapy.

Unfortunately, the tendency to direct violence toward others is being facilitated by the availability of firepower capable of carrying out such actions on a mass scale. Roger Depue, former head of the FB I’s Behavioral Science Unit, notes that for years many commentators have been telling the public that the problems of individuals are caused by society. This, in effect, produces for certain individuals an excuse and a rationale for attacking society. Some perpetrators are quite open in stating that they want to strike back and to hurt as many people as they can, no matter who those people are. John Douglas, the former Unit Chief of the FB I’s Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit, states that violent individuals, having failed in their lives, take their own lives after a murderous incident (or have others kill them) because they cannot face the likelihood of being convicted and going to jail—of failing again.

Forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz has learned through interviews that killing does not exorcise the killer’s psychological demons. He states that “those who kill out of paranoia are shocked to learn that killing does not relieve their symptoms.” He believes wider circulation given to this notion may deter potential copycat killers.

Studies show that individuals who have been laid off, rather than fired, display a six to seven times higher level of violence against others, which is defined as inflicting harm requiring medical attention or producing loss of functioning for one or more days. The same six- to sevenfold increase also shows up in the consumption of alcohol after being laid off. The statistics are about the same for women as for men.

Work, Love, and Hate

Over a century ago, Freud observed that work and love give essential meaning to our lives. Satisfying work provides stability, direction, security, a sense of achievement and self-worth, a feeling of belonging, camaraderie, and, of course, a source of income. Although many people love their work, many others, more accurately, love work, though not necessarily their own jobs. When someone loses a job, it can be a severe blow to the psyche. For most individuals, losing a job is a traumatic event, but one that they eventually accept and resolve by going forward. For a small minority, the loss of a job can be a death sentence.

Some people’s entire identity and sense of worth are inextricably tied up with their jobs. The term
workaholic
is often used to describe people who live to work, rather than work to live. It is such people who are hit hardest by the loss of a job. It becomes a significant failure in life rather than a traumatic but survivable event, one that may be beyond the individual’s control. People who live to work can become totally devastated by the loss of their job. They can become psychologically ill, possibly because so much emphasis has been placed on work that relationships and resources that could sustain them through a crisis have not been developed. If there are other negative factors operating in their lives—divorce, financial difficulties, health problems, the lack of personal support, or failures in other venues—the loss of a job combined with other setbacks can further destabilize them mentally.

Particularly if the loss of the job is seen as abusive or unfair, some manifestation of rage, embitterment, and a desire for revenge may begin to surface in the individual. When companies treat their employees as disposable machine parts, this attitude may contribute to a discharged worker’s feelings of bitterness. Automation itself, which replaces human beings with machines, also engenders feelings of worthlessness in people who are displaced. These factors combined with corporate downsizing, increased stress at work, and the heightened competition for fewer available jobs all promote anger and violence, particularly in susceptible individuals. And among people who have recently been laid off, as we have seen, alcohol and other drugs can lower resistance to acting out violently. In the past, dedicated workers enjoyed job security and the esteem of their employers. These circumstances are rapidly vanishing, and workplace violence may be one unintended result.