Rage (14 page)

He generally didn’t go to class either. Grewal couldn’t recall much of Cho’s behavior other than staring at the walls, typing away on his laptop and continuously riding his bicycle in circles in a nearby parking lot.

While Cho was strange as a junior, he was frightening as a senior. An aspiring writer, he took a poetry class taught by the distinguished poet Nikki Giovanni. While Giovanni is no stranger to tough situations, having been an important player in the civil rights movement and in early black activism, she was decidedly scared of Cho. She described him as having a “mean streak” and admitted that she was intimidated by him. She went to her department head, fellow poet Lucinda Roy, and complained about his habit of photographing female classmates’ legs under their desks and of his “violent and obscene” poetry. Giovanni was so concerned that she threatened to resign her position if Cho was not removed from her class. Roy took these concerns to the school’s chancellors, but they—ever mindful of litigation—told her there was nothing they could do unless Cho made a direct threat to someone, including himself.

A new Harper Hall roommate, Andy Koch, noted much of the same behavior from Cho that Grewal did. He saw the same repetitive, obsessive behavior—such as stabbing carpets and listening to Collective Soul’s 1994 hit “Shine” continually for hours on end. The unusual conduct became even more apparent once Koch realized that Cho had taken something of a shine to him. One morning, he woke up to find Cho taking photographs of him. Later, he received a barrage of rambling, incoherent cell phone calls from Cho, who claimed to be an imaginary brother named “Question Mark.” This was the same name Cho used when talking to girls he was attracted to, though he invariably creeped them out enough to make them want to have nothing to do with him.

Women were a big problem for Cho. Koch described a number of run-ins Cho had with uniformed Virginia Tech security guards, each of them the result of a woman’s complaint that Cho was stalking her. When Cho finally did talk one day, the first thing he told Koch was that he had a girlfriend. At first, Koch was relieved, until Cho told him that his girlfriend was a supermodel named Jelly and that she lived in outer space. He wasn’t joking; he wasn’t being sarcastic; Cho really did expect Koch to believe in his extra-terrestrial paramour.

Things got worse when Cho intercepted an instant message address of one of Koch’s female friends. He sent her a few incoherent messages and then he nailed a piece of paper with a quote from William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
to her door. It said: “By a name, I know not how to tell who I am. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word.”

The young woman thought nothing of it until she received a message from Koch, warning her about Cho. He told her all about his prior stalking arrests and wrote to her: “I think he is sch[iz]ophrenic, or however you spell it.” Alarmed, the young woman called campus security. Familiar with Cho, the campus cops dropped by and gave him a verbal warning. Cho then texted Koch, threatening to commit suicide.

Unsure of what to do, Koch called his dad. Astutely, his dad told him to call campus security, which he did. Just to be sure, Koch’s dad called them too. The security officers apprehended Cho, served him with a temporary detention order and escorted him to the New River Valley Community Services Board, a mental health facility in nearby Blacksburg.

Cho did everything to convince the doctors there that he was mentally healthy and not suicidal, but they determined he was “an imminent danger to himself and others” and referred him to detention at the larger, more intensely secure Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center farther along the road in Christiansburg. The psychologist who treated him there, Dr. Roy Crouse, considered him “depressed,” but noted that he denied thoughts of suicide and decided that “His insight and judgment are normal.” He recommended Cho be treated on an outpatient basis. On the strength of Crouse’s findings, Special Justice Paul M. Barrett signed a judgment that Cho be freed on the condition that he accepted follow-up treatment. He visited the facility just once after that, and no progress on his condition was reported.

Cho got up for school early on the morning of April 16, 2007. He had big plans that day and, to accomplish them, he brought along two handguns and hundreds and hundreds of hollow-point rounds of ammunition—the type of bullet that does by far the most damage to human tissue. While a normal bullet will pass through anything it hits largely intact, hollow points collapse on impact, creating large, flat surfaces that bulldoze their way through the human body. The difference in damage is enormous.

A few hours and hundreds of shots later, Cho had killed 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty and wounded another 25, before killing himself.

While Cho’s case is complex and interesting for a number of reasons, there are two aspects of his story that make his a very good example of sociopathic behavior. The first is that he didn’t think he had done anything wrong. In fact, it appears that he considered himself something of a hero.

During a break in his shooting spree, Cho sent a package via FedEx to NBC. It contained a number of photographs and videos of him posing with his guns and knives and trying to look cool; but, more important, it included a manifesto of sorts. In it, he wrote: “All the shit you’ve given me, right back at you with hollow points.” He railed against what he considered the sinful habits of his classmates and compared himself to Jesus Christ. He absolved himself of all responsibility, writing:

Later, investigators found a note in his dorm room that denounced the other students at Virginia Tech as “rich kids” and “deceitful charlatans” whom he felt he had to punish for their “debauchery.” In a sentence that appears to sum up his motive, he wrote: “You caused me to do this.”

While the world was horrified by the day’s events, there were those at Virginia Tech who weren’t surprised at the killer’s identity. “I knew when it happened that that’s probably who it was; I would have been shocked if it wasn’t,” Giovanni told reporters after the massacre.

“That’s the thing about Cho,” the doctor from New York said, when I spoke to him later. “Everybody knew he was different, he was strange, he was even potentially dangerous; but what could they do about it?”

It’s true, after the murders, nobody—not even Cho’s family—really tried to deny his sociopathy, nobody pretended he was just a misunderstood guy. It was universally acknowledged that he was a very sick young man and that his sickness was abundantly obvious, but there was little anybody could do to help him. He wouldn’t seek help because he was convinced there was nothing wrong with him; it was, in his opinion, everybody else who was at fault. Because of privacy laws and other civil liberties concerns, there was little the university could do but encourage him to seek help. The nature of his problem meant that he was unlikely to trust, tell the truth to, or confide in the medical professionals trying to help him—which, of course, defeats the purpose of therapy. His family, though, repeatedly tried to intervene. Deeply religious people, they prayed for him and brought him to church regularly, but to no avail. “Mental problems aren’t like other physical problems,” the doctor told me. “You can’t just clean the wound and apply pressure like you would a hemorrhage; it’s much more complicated than that—and, unlike a hemorrhage, you can almost always deny it.”

As much as Cho is a definitive example of a sociopath, Ted Bundy was a classic psychopath. Invariably described as handsome, charming, articulate and educated, Bundy used his superficial charm to seduce or at least temporarily gain the trust of women. Once they were alone with them, he would bludgeon, strangle and rape them, often after they died. While he eventually confessed to 30 murders, some—particularly those in law enforcement—are convinced there are more.

Bundy, originally from Vermont, had a childhood love of skiing that led to a habit of shoplifting items he couldn’t afford. He started by stealing small items, then moved up to skis and other equipment, eventually developing the nerve to forge ski passes and even lift tickets. He was arrested twice as a minor, but those records have been destroyed and he appears to have done no time in jail.

He was popular as a youth, despite being a compulsive liar and admitting, “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” This sort of revelation is not uncommon among psychopaths. Without the ability to care about other people, psychopaths are unable to understand or express many common emotions like grief. This was well illustrated when Nicole Kidman was preparing for a role as a psychopath in the film
Malice
. She turned to Dr. Robert Hare, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and one of the world’s leading authorities on psychopaths. Hare, who has written extensively on the subject and has consulted with the FBI, RCMP and other agencies on criminal investigations, told her to imagine a scenario:

As a student at the University of Washington, Bundy learned a lot about human behavior, not just through his studies in psychology, his major, but also by volunteering on the night shift of Seattle’s suicide prevention hotline. It’s as though he made a conscious effort to study how non-psychopaths behave.

While at school, he had his first-ever relationship with a woman and was crushed when she dumped him for being “too immature.” Many of the academic, law enforcement and media professionals who have studied Bundy since agree that this crisis impacted him so hard emotionally that it changed his psyche permanently. Not long after, he entered into another relationship.

He also became more successful financially. After graduation, he began to work for the Washington state Republican Party and became closely associated with Governor Daniel Jack Evans. More confident, he approached his original girlfriend and began dating her again, along with the new one. When he proposed to the first girlfriend and she happily accepted, he broke the relationship off, refusing to give a reason or even accept her phone calls. Later, he told psychologists: “I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have her.” He continued dating the second woman, who later said she also would have accepted an offer of marriage, at least until Bundy ran into legal trouble.

In the summer of 1975, police in Colorado saw Bundy’s VW Beetle driving around in a quiet suburban neighborhood in the middle of the night with its headlights turned off. Thinking it was an ordinary traffic violation, the police attempted to stop him by flashing their lights. He floored it. Shocked that anyone in a VW would try to outrun a police car, with a V8 engine the officers gave chase. When they caught him, they searched the car and found handcuffs, a crowbar, an ice pick, pantyhose with eyeholes cut out of them and other items police and courts often associate with crime. They also noted that the front passenger seat was missing.

About a year earlier, November 18, 1974, an 18-year-old woman named Carol DaRonch was working in a mall in Utah when a stranger, a handsome man, walked in and told her someone was trying to break into her car. She followed him out to the parking lot and later recalled she assumed he was a mall security guard because “he was so in control of the situation.” Although the car seemed okay, the man (who identified himself as “Officer Roseland”) asked her to accompany him to police headquarters. Suspicious, she asked to see some ID. He quickly flashed a gold-colored badge and she got into the backseat of his VW Beetle. She found it odd that the front passenger seat was missing, but didn’t say anything.

He drove in a direction she knew was opposite the police station. He eventually stopped in a vacant parking lot and tried to put handcuffs on her, accidentally locking both cuffs on one wrist. DaRonch screamed. The man pulled a handgun, pointed it at her head and threatened to shoot her if she screamed again.