Killer Gives Clues

It has been just barely a year since December 14, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 first-graders and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. A year later, we know much more than was originally released to the media. A new official summary published last week says Lanza had serious mental health issues, but that he clearly knew what he was doing. He had a spreadsheet of his plans, smashed his computer hard drive to destroy evidence, and used earplugs while he fired. He also murdered his mother beforehand. Investigators revealed that as a fifth grader in the same school which became his killing field, Lanza kept a notebook called “The Big Book of Granny.” It told the tale of a woman with a gun in her cane who shoots people, especially children.  Other facts we now know about Lanza include: he was obsessed with mass murders; he played violent video games; he kept a spreadsheet ranking mass murders. The report offers no answers for the question, “Why?”

Well, look at the facts and the photo. His compulsion to kill was fed by the games he played and the obsessions that occupied his time. If anyone had been playing close attention they could have seen that something serious was coming. Toward the end, he stayed in his room and his mother had to communicate with him by email – in the house they occupied together. And then there’s that photo. It’s certainly not the only picture of Lanza, but this one is truly scary. It’s a view into a mentally tormented soul, one obviously enamored with evil. The clues were there, as is often the case with mass murderers. The problem is those who should have been watching, his mother and absent father, were somehow incapable of intervening. If I had seen those eyes before he killed, I could have seen it coming. So could any deliverance minister accustomed to gazing at the evil inside souls. Sadly, so long as our culture of fantasized violence and spiritual blindness continues, Sandy Hook School may not be the last case where we could have seen the clues.