Rampage (6 page)

Marc Lépine had left three documents in his pocket: a suicide note (which we will examine in detail later) and two letters to his friends. In the latter two, he instructed them to give his fridge to his landlord to compensate for missed rent, and everything else he owned he left to his old school chum Jean Belanger. Interestingly, one source claims that on December 7, an unnamed friend of Marc’s received a letter bequeathing him some personal belongings. We will refer to the mystery friend as “James.” Lépine’s cryptic letter suggested that the motive for the murders was hidden somewhere at 2175 Bordeaux. Donning a ski mask to hide his identity, James accessed the apartment using a key Lépine had entrusted to him, and passed through the narrow, linoleum-floored hallway into his late friend’s bedroom. The turquoise lair was piled high with books on science and the Second World War, along with videocassettes of violent pay-TV movies and a plastic skull. As journalists hammered on the windows and doors, James began to explore, and spotted a sliver of paper lodged between the floorboards. “The author is the solution,” it read. “If you have found this, it means you are already in the know.” The note suggested looking on the shelf for a book by an author mentioned in the earlier letter. It turned out to be a biography of American pilot Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 became the first person to break the barrier of sound. Inside the pages, James discovered a second message: “If you have found this letter you are on the right track. It contains my last wishes. At the back of the room is a suitcase with a few things I would like to pass on.” Given the context of this scavenger hunt, its contents were anticlimactic to say the least: hardware and computer games — hardly the secrets of Lépine’s derangement.

Overwhelmed by the magnitude of what had happened, Monique Lépine sought refuge with friends in Switzerland immediately after the massacre. Upon returning in January 1990, she discovered two bulky black garbage bags in her closet. The first was stuffed with Marc’s bedding, movies, and a Beta video player, while the second contained his outstanding report cards — a reminder of the potential he had once exhibited as a little boy. There was also a brief handwritten letter that read, “I am sorry, Mom. This is inevitable.” Without her knowledge, in the days preceding the murders
,
Marc had entered her condo while she was out and deposited the garbage bags.

To this day, the echoes of the Polytechnique massacre continue to reverberate. Many survivors of the massacre developed post-traumatic stress disorder and were haunted by terrible nightmares. On August 20, 1990, former student Sarto Blais hanged himself in his apartment bathroom. Among the reasons the Gaspé native offered in his suicide note was, “[I] could not accept that as a man I had been there and hadn’t done anything about it.”
[22]
Though Blais had finished school and found work with a Montreal construction firm, his guilt combined with the memories of blood-drenched hallways was unbearable. Within a year of his suicide, Blais’s parents killed themselves — the seventeenth and eighteenth lives annihilated by Marc Lépine’s actions.

The impact on Lépine’s own family was devastating. Twenty-two-year-old Nadia was looking forward to beginning a philosophy course at CEGEP du Vieux Montreal when the massacre occurred. Unable to cope, she became addicted to heroin and cocaine, eventually turning to prostitution to support her habits. On March 1, 1996, Nadia overdosed on cocaine and was taken to Notre-Dame Hospital, where doctors determined that she had severely damaged her cerebral cortex. After twelve hours of watching her daughter slip slowly into the abyss of death, Monique gave her approval to unplug her life support machines. The twenty-eight-year-old was buried next to her brother in a family plot at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.

The unfathomable depth of Monique’s suffering is detailed in her courageous book
Aftermath
, in which she writes not only of losing two children, but also of recurring nightmares that her son is coming to kill her. Even the chief investigator of the massacre, André Tessier — a man who had been exposed to countless acts of barbarism during his career — would be emotionally scarred by the events of December 6, 1989. For him, not only was the scope of the murders overwhelming, but the daughter of a friend had been among the victims.

In the end, Marc Lépine’s crude efforts to fight feminism backfired, and December 6 is now a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violenc
e Against Women in Canada. Female enrollment in Canadian engineering programs rose from 13 to 19 percent between 1989 and 1999. The Polytechnique massacre was to be the last in his long litany of failures. One can almost hear his pitiful voice muttering a final “Ah, shit” through the gates of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.

Lépine’s crimes created a dialogue surrounding the issue of misogynist violence in Canada and raised important questions regarding national firearms laws, spawning the Coalition for Gun Control. Many Canadians wondered how somebody as emotionally disturbed as Marc Lépine could gain access to such a powerful weapon. When Justice Minister Douglas Lewis promised to examine the issue, but warned, “We can’t legislate against insanity,” it seemed that the motivation for the attacks was being misinterpreted. Lépine had no known history of psychosis and had been plotting the murders in one form or another for years. Police learned that he had been spotted at the school on no less than seven occasions between October 1 and the murders. Given these facts, should we really dismiss the massacre as simply the work of a madman? There is wisdom in the words and actions of Nathalie Provost, the brave young student who had tried to reason with Lépine. A survivor of four bullet wounds, she went on to defy his plans for her by becoming a mechanical engineer. Speaking with the
Globe and Mail
on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Provost expressed her reluctance to label her attempted murderer as a monster:

That man was first a little baby, a child, a little boy who played ball, who tried to be loved by people around him; he was all kinds of things before he did what he did. I have four children and I try to love them with all my heart, but I know perfectly well that I don’t always control them. The horror was in the act he committed, which is unpardonable, horrible, and abominable. But behind the act was a human being.
[23]

In this spirit, let us now endeavour to understand Lépine’s psyche.

A Frustrated, Furious Failure

The suicide note retrieved from Marc Lépine’s pocket by police provides us with precious insight into the mind of a killer. As in many cases, what the murderer intends us to believe is of infinitely less value than the reality he attempts to cover up:

Forgive the mistakes. I only had 15 minutes to write this. (See also Annex)

Please note that if I commit suicide today 89/12/06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons.
For I have decided to send the feminists who have ruined my life to their maker.

It has been seven years that life does not bring me any joy and being totally blasé, I have decided to put an end to those viragos.

I had already tried as a youth to enlist in the [Armed] Forces as an officer cadet, which would have allowed me to enter the arsenal and precede Lortie in a rampage.
They refused me because of asociality.

So I waited until this day to carry out all my projects.
In between, I continued my studies in a haphazard way for they never really interested me, knowing in
advance my fate. Which did not prevent me from obtaining very good marks despite not handing in my theory assignments and studying little before exams.

Even though the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media,
I consider myself a rational and erudite person
that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to undertake extreme acts.

For why persevere in existing if it is only to please the government? Being a backwards-looking thinker by nature (except for science), I have always been enraged by feminists.

They want to retain the advantages of being women (e.g., cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventive leave) while trying to grab those of the men.

Thus, it is self-evident that if the Olympic Games removed the Men/Women distinction, there would only be women in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier.

They are so opportunistic that they [never] neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

Thus, the other day, people were honouring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontlines during the world wars. How does this sit with the fact that women were not authorized to go to the frontline at the time??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50 per cent of history’s ranks, although they never existed? A real Casus Belli.

Sorry for this too brief letter.

Marc Lépine

Annex

[Nineteen women’s names, including the six police officers he’d identified in the media] nearly died today. The lack of time (because I started too late) has allowed those radical feminists to survive.

Alea Jacta EST
.
[24]

Besides Lépine’s obvious misogyny, several subtler themes are evident. In the first half of the letter, he is obsessed with convincing society that he is a martyr instead of a failure (see text in
bold
). Yet he betrays himself by admitting that he was unable to realize the full extent of his mission because he “started too late.” Taking into account the brevity of the letter, there is also an abundance of references to the military, warfare, and Rome, including Latin terms (see text in
italics
). It is interesting to note that Lépine’s historical references seem to focus solely on military aspects, reinforcing the idea that he was enamoured with violence. There are also fatalistic overtones (underlined), as if he viewed his actions and personal situation as being totally out of his control. Lépine wrote that he was “forced” to kill because the “world doesn’t bring [him] any joy.” Instead of taking the time to prepare the perfect suicide note during his alleged years of planning, he lamented that he “only had fifteen minutes to write this,” as if he were lacking agency altogether.

Where the massacre certainly brought attention to the issue of misogyny in Canadian society, the origins of Marc Lépine’s contempt have rarely been discussed beyond the simplistic “like father, like son” argument. Lépine’s hatred of women resulted from a variety of individual experiences, which were shaped by a major personality disorder. Rachid Gharbi beat and dominated his wife, but to say that Lépine emulated his father would be to ignore the fact that he absolutely hated him. This early exposure to misogynist violence may account for elements of Lépine’s psychology; however, by examining the role that his mother and sister took in his life, we gain a much broader perspective. During Marc’s childhood, his mother spent very little time with him. Since he had already suffered psychologically as a result of his father’s abuse, this increased his vulnerability to negative emotions. Rather than rationally understanding his mother’s plight as an overworked single parent, Marc felt simply abandoned. To make matters worse, his sister, Nadia, mocked him mercilessly during his teens and early twenties. With the two primary female figures in his life projecting the notion that he was unworthy of a woman’s love (Monique doing so unintentionally, Nadia maliciously), the acne-ridden, bookish Lépine was unable to envision a woman ever wanting a romantic relationship with him. These impressions laid the groundwork for his misogyny, which his narcissistic intellect forged into ideology. Ultimately, this ideology created political justifications that masked the insecurities underlying his hatred of women. I present this as an explanation, not a justification.

Underpinning Lépine’s misogyny, obsession with violence, fatalism, and need to convince the world that he was a “somebody” was his extreme narcissistic vulnerability. We will explore the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder later, in the case of fellow Montreal school shooter
Valery Fabrikant
(Chapter 4). To quote Monique Lépine,

For him [Marc] … everything was, categorically, either black and white, good or bad, total belief or outright defiance. He could never be cheerful if he was down or believe he could succeed if anyone (his sister for example) thought he was a loser.… Because he couldn’t love himself, he became convinced that no member of the opposite sex could ever love him.… He was narcissistic, anti-social, and extremely sensitive to rejection. Whenever he experienced setbacks, he took refuge in violent, extravagant daydreams that compensated for his feelings of incompetence.
[25]