Rampage Page 2
If indeed you were looking for Bernardo, Homolka, and Pickton, please do not despair. Many of the cases in this book are as lurid and compelling as those of Canada’s most reviled serial killers. You just don’t know it yet.
Chapter 1
Two Kinds of Rampage Murderers
Table 1: Multiple Homicide Classification by Style and Type[3]
Mass Murder
Spree Killing
Serial Murder[4]
Number of Victims
4+
2+
3+
Number of Events
1
1
3+
Number of Locations
1
2+
3+
Cooling-Off Period
N/A
No
Yes
Rampage murder is a term commonly used to encompass the first two categories in Table 1: mass murder and spree killing. The FBI’s Crime Classification Manual originally defined mass murder as, “Any single event, single location homicide involving four or more victims,” though it drew a distinction between classical mass murder and family mass murder. According to the text, classical mass murder
[I]nvolves one person operating in one location at one period of time. The time period could be minutes or hours or even days. The prototype of a classic mass murderer is a mentally discolored individual whose problems have increased to the point that he acts out toward a group of people who are unrelated to him, unleashing his hostility through shootings or stabbings.[5]
A family mass murder, on the other hand, occurs “if four or more family members are killed ... without [the offender committing] suicide.”[6] These first attempts at defining the phenomenon suffered from being too narrow; for example, the specification that mass murder “involves one person” excludes textbook cases such as the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shootings perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and those by their lesser-known predecessors in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The stipulation that an offender committing suicide alters a family mass murder into a simple murder-suicide has also recently been overhauled. In their Mass Murder in the United States, Holmes and Holmes fold multiple murders occurring during a single incident within a domestic situation into a subcategory of mass killer known as The Family Annihilator. They also remove the suicide clause altogether and reduce the tally of victims necessitating a mass murder from four to three. Regarding numbers, I believe the most pragmatic parameters are those proposed by Dr. Katherine Ramsland in her Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers: Why They Kill:
For the purpose of this study, I tend to focus primarily on those who have killed at least four victims, but I sometimes make exceptions when it is clear that the killer’s intent had been to annihilate far more.…[7]
In this book, I’ve made similar exceptions for Denis Lortie (three killed/thirteen injured) and Joel Egger (three killed in Canada, probably more overseas). I also follow Holmes and Holmes’s lead in doing away with a separate family mass murderer, including it as a permutation of a general mass murderer type. Whether the murderer committed suicide or not has no bearing on my classification, as I see the inclusion of this specification as completely arbitrary.
The definition of spree killing has proved so contentious that in recent years the FBI has deemed it merely a subtype of serial murder. Fox and Levin were the first to propose eliminating the category altogether, claiming that focusing “on motivation rather than timing eliminates the need for a spree killer designation — a category sometimes used to identify cases of multiple homicide that do not fit neatly into either the serial or mass murder types.”[8] John Douglas, one of the pioneers of the FBI’s Behavioural Sciences Unit, defined a spree murderer as “someone who murders at two or more separate locations with no emotional cooling-off period between the homicides. Therefore, the killings tend to take place in a shorter period of time [than most serial killers]….”[9] In this book, I make a case for the usefulness of designating spree murder as a separate phenomenon from serial murder, and propose a clearer definition and criminological understanding in Part C. The reader should also note that the FBI’s criteria for serial murder has recently changed to two or more victims in two or more separate events, with location no longer considered a factor.
Unlike in my first book, Cold North Killers: Canadian Serial Murder, I have made no attempt to create an exhaustive work. However, I have assembled a basic chronology of Canadian rampage murders in Table 2.
Table 2: A History of Canadian Rampage Murderers, 1828–2012
Italics denote cases included in this book.
The first two slayers we look at represent the most infamous examples of Canadian mass murderers and spree killers. Marc Lépine stunned the world on December 6, 1989, when he callously executed fourteen female engineering students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, sparking debates over misogyny and national gun laws. Though spree killer Peter John Peters would not receive any level of international recognition or lasting notoriety, in January 1990 he held Ontario in the grip of terror for nearly a week. These men are similar in that they embarked on rampage-style murders just over a month apart. Yet in many aspects of their character, they are polar opposites. Lépine and Peters have been selected as introductory models, not just because of their infamy, but also because they reflect the fundamental difference between a mass murderer and a spree killer.
Andre Kirchhoff
Marc Lépine
The Polytechnique Gunman
“Ah, shit.”
Victims: 14 killed/14 wounded/committed suicide
Duration of rampage: December 6, 1989 (mass murder)
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Weapons: Sturm Ruger Mini-14 .223-calibre semi-automatic rifle
Raining Ice
December 6, 1989, was a surprisingly mild day for a Montreal winter, the freezing rain spattering against the yellow brick exterior of École Polytechnique like tears of ice. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine sat awkwardly on a bench in the office of the registrar, dark eyes peering from beneath the brim of his “Tracteur Montreal” baseball cap. Hours before, the barber had scraped a razor over his acne-marred skin, his brown tousled hair tumbling to the floor: shorn, like his dreams. Beneath his grey windbreaker and blue-striped sweater, he could feel the sheath of the hunting knife pressing against his body. Nervous, he patted the bulky green garbage bag concealing his .223-calibre semi-automatic rifle. Two months earlier he had purchased the Sturm Ruger Mini-14 at Checkmate Sports on St. Hubert, ostensibly for hunting small game. These hypothetical ducks and rabbits would have stood no chance — police SWAT teams routinely employ the same firearm. Though the scrawny young man did his best to avoid attention, he had seated himself by the office door, making it difficult for students to enter. After forty minutes, a female office employee politely inquired if he needed assistance. Without uttering a word, Lépine rose and relocated to somewhere less conspicuous.
It was close to 5:00 p.m., and through the windows the light was quickly fading. Many of the faculty and students were leaving the building to begin their Christmas holidays. This was the moment he had been waiting for: empty hallways meant less chance of somebody being alerted to the impending massacre.
He made his way to the second floor, where an engineering class was being held. The green bag fluttered to the tiles as he unveiled the Sturm Ruger and proceeded calmly through the doorless entrance into C-230. At first, neither of the two professors or sixty-nine students packing the room noticed anything amiss. Lépine smiled as if to acknowledge his tardiness. One of the students was giving a presentation on heat transference. Lépine surveyed the crowd, noting where the female pupils were seated, and moved toward the presenter.
“Everyone stop everything!” he barked. One of the professors cast him a stern glance. He did not recognize this “student.” Continuing in French, Lépine ordered the women to move to the left side of the room and the men to the right. Instead of comp
liance, his demands were met with laughter. Lépine felt the anger welling up inside him. Even now, in what should have been his moment of supreme control, they mocked him. In reality, most of the students had simply assumed it was an end-of-term practical joke. Furious, Lépine hoisted the Sturm Ruger and fired two shots into the ceiling. The room fell silent. Laughter became the first casualty in his personal war.
“I want the women!” Lépine roared. “You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!” Terrified, the two sexes separated accordingly.
“Okay, the guys leave,” he motioned toward the exit. “The girls stay there.” As the sixty male students and two professors reluctantly vacated, Lépine approached the nine remaining female students and ushered them into a corner.
“Do you know why you are there?” he asked. “I am fighting feminism.” When student Nathalie Provost attempted to explain that they were not necessarily feminists, Lépine proved his intellectual superiority by spraying the women with ammunition from left to right, until they lay in a crumpled mess of blood and limbs. He had fired approximately thirty bullets.
Outside the classroom, the exiled males listened in disbelief as gunshots and screams rang out in grim cacophony. As several hurried down the hallway to warn the rest of the school, Lépine exited C-230 and pointed the gun at the remaining men until they cleared a path. Keeping his back to the wall, he continued down the main corridor, firing into the photocopying centre and injuring three more victims: two women and one man. Turning, he strode into the doorway of C-228 and aimed at another female student. Fate intervened, and the Sturm Ruger malfunctioned. Frustrated, Lépine took cover in the emergency stairway near room C-229 and checked the weapon. As his fingers worked feverishly at a solution, an unsuspecting student descended the steps and brushed past him.
“Ah, shit, I’m out of bullets,” Lépine said aloud. The student remained oblivious, continuing down the hallway to the photocopiers. When he saw the bodies, he realized what was happening and raced for the escalators.
Meanwhile, several of the male engineering students had returned to room C-230 to find their classmates lying beneath a mural of blood. Some of the women were moaning in agony; some wept — others stayed horribly silent. As ambulances raced through the sleet, Lépine reloaded and made his way back to C-228. By now the door had been locked. Frustrated, he fired three shots into it, then proceeded to the foyer, past three wounded victims. Entering the foyer, he spied a female student stepping off the escalator, and shot her. She was injured but managed to escape via the emergency staircase, and took refuge on the fifth floor. Calmly changing his magazine, Lépine strode over to a person hiding behind a counter and fired twice, missing on both occasions. He moved across the cafeteria terrace to room B-218 — the financial services office — where a woman hastily locked the door. Lépine sighted her through the door window and shot her fatally through the glass. He had quit many things in his life, but in murdering women, he was surprisingly resolute.
Like Father, Like Son
Canada’s most notorious mass murderer had not always been named Marc Lépine. On October 26, 1964, Gamil Rodrigue Liess Gharbi was born to a French-Canadian mother, Monique, at Montreal’s Sainte-Justine Hospital. His Algerian father, Rachid, was notably absent, favouring a Caribbean business trip over his family obligations. Nevertheless, Rachid had left specific instructions that the boy was to be named Gamil, which meant handsome in Arabic. During her stay at Sainte-Justine, Monique learned from an admissions clerk that another “Monique Gharbi” had given birth at the hospital only a week earlier. Interestingly, this woman’s partner had also been called Rachid Gharbi. As the surname was rare in Montreal at the time, Monique deduced that her husband was carrying on an affair.
Shortly after returning to their home on Ridgewood Avenue, she checked his income tax returns, and found confirmation in the form of child support payments to two local children.[10] Confronted by Monique, Rachid confessed to the affair, but assured her that it had ended. She knew better than to believe him — while he had been away on business, a delivery truck had arrived from Eaton’s department store. Though Monique had ordered one of the items, the deliveryman insisted that he also had an expensive baby carriage for her. When she denied making the purchase, he checked his records and realized that it was intended for another Monique Gharbi who resided only blocks away. Given Rachid’s history, the revelation of his infidelity was hardly surprising.
Monique Lépine had first met the silver-tongued aircraft mechanic in 1961, when a female workmate invited her out for drinks with “two charming young men.” With his flashy clothes, confidence, and fluency in four languages, Rachid Gharbi swept the twenty-two-year-old nurse off her feet. He was unlike the hockey-obsessed suitors Monique had encountered before, and the two soon began a relationship. From the get-go, Rachid pressured her to have sex, but Monique, who was raised in a devout Catholic family, resisted his advances. After three months, she conceded when he threatened to break up. Sadly, the birth control pill was not easily available or acceptable in Quebec at the time, and Rachid stubbornly refused to wear a condom. The result was that Monique underwent three illegal abortions between May 1961 and October 1963, sparing her family the shame of bastard children. Though Rachid grudgingly footed each of the $300 fees, he made no bones about his unhappiness with the situation. As a non-practising Muslim, his concern was not with the termination of the pregnancies, but the financial cost of the operations.
When Rachid proposed marriage to Monique on October 13, 1963, she accepted because she feared becoming an old maid. In retrospect, she realized it was a foolish decision. Rachid was a volatile and controlling man, often calling her several times a day to check on her, despite his own infidelities. He would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, and Monique, who had been taught by nuns to placate her husband, unfailingly submitted to his will. Things only worsened after their marriage, as the abuse extended from the emotional realm to the physical. Though he forbade her to work outside the home, Rachid expected Monique to serve as his personal typist, slapping her whenever she made a mistake and forcing her to re-type the entire page. So relentless was her work that she was often unable to comfort her crying infant. When Gamil realized his screams would go unanswered, he sunk into a telling silence. In a vain attempt to become closer to her absentee husband, Monique uprooted to Puerto Rico with him when Gamil was just over a year old. Contrary to her expectations, she saw even less of Rachid, and he remained as selfish as ever. On one occasion he insisted that Monique go to the cinema with him, even though there was no babysitter available. The two went out for a night on the town, leaving the eighteen-month-old Gamil slumbering in his crib. When they returned, they found him sobbing in the middle of the bedroom floor. The abandoned child had climbed out of his crib, shattering a nearby lamp in the process.
In 1966, Monique discovered she was pregnant again, and decided to move back to Montreal to have their second child. On April 7, 1967, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Nadia, in the same room at Sainte-Justine Hospital where Gamil had been born. Instead of adoring his baby sister, Gamil was fiercely jealous. The newborn hadn’t been home for a day when Monique discovered Gamil violently rocking her cradle as if he were trying to tip Nadia onto the floor. Monique would later describe him as “a very possessive child” who “always wanted to be close to me, to the point of getting angry when I was absent, even for a short time and sulking when I looked after his little sister.” There were other problems too. By now Rachid’s violent temper had turned against his children; Gamil was already being spanked much more frequently and severely than was merited. One morning in 1970, the six-year-old had risen early, and inadvertently woke his father by singing. Enraged, Rachid burst into the room and struck Gamil across the face, bruising him badly. As the child sat weeping, Monique went to comfort him, but her husband intervened, ordering her not to “pamper” him. It was the last straw. The couple officially separated in July 1971, and she gai
ned custody of the children. Their divorce would not be finalized for another five years. Angered by the split, Rachid took all of the photographs of the children with him, refusing to pay alimony or his $75-per-month child support. It wasn’t long before bailiffs descended upon their Prieur Street home, repossessing all of the furniture save for the beds, a table, and chairs. Monique learned that Rachid had secretly taken out a second mortgage on the property but had ceased making payments. Within days, what little they had left was lost, and Monique and her children had no choice but to move in temporarily with a kindly neighbour.
Rachid was permitted to see his children once a week, albeit under the supervision of a social worker. Gamil never looked forward to the visits. On one occasion, Monique was driving them to meet Rachid at an ice cream parlour when she informed her son that he was going to see his daddy. Without warning, the six-year-old seized the steering wheel and attempted to veer the vehicle off road. Fortune prevailed and nobody was hurt, but it would be the last occasion Gamil would ever spend in Rachid’s company. In fact, he never spoke of his father again unless he was forced to. Not long after, Monique discovered Gamil cowering behind a cupboard because he was afraid that a workman at their new apartment would hit him.
Desperate, Monique applied for social assistance, but was unable to get by without Rachid’s financial support. With few options, she returned to nursing full time at Royal Victoria Hospital, hiring a Francophone family in Pointe-aux-Trembles to care for her children. Overworked and taking professional development courses three nights a week, in 1972 Monique decided to leave Gamil and Nadia with their caregivers throughout the week. They would stay with her on weekends at her Sherbrooke Avenue apartment, where they would play board games and enjoy home-cooked chicken dinners. In January 1974, their caregivers moved away, and Monique passed them off to a retired nurse in Saint-Michel. The children did not adjust well to the disruption. Their school marks plummeted, and Nadia began bedwetting. After several months, Monique found another family for the children to live with during the week: two ex-teachers who owned a farm in the Eastern Townships village of Bethanie. To Monique, Gamil and Nadia seemed happier there, and they attended the same school as the couple’s daughters. Little did she know that her children were feeling increasingly abandoned by their mother, creating emotional instabilities that would ultimately lead them both to early graves. One of Marc’s caretakers would later tell Monique: