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Thursday, July 4, 2024

The William Spengler Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     In past years murder-suicide in the United States has accounted for about five percent of all criminal homicides. A vast majority of murder-suicide victims are ex-girlfriends and estranged wives. These deadly  attacks regularly feature alcohol and drug intoxication, mental illness, depression and a variety of personality disorders. In terms of motive none of these killings make any sense to a rational person.

     Nationwide, murder-suicide is on the rise. In a country steeped in a culture of violence populated by a growing number of people who are unable to cope with modern life this is hardly a surprise. Criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, politicians and police administrators are clueless about how to reverse this trend. That's because nobody knows what causes drug addiction and mental instability or what makes disturbed people so murderous and self-destructive. 

     In the annals of crime 2012 might be remembered as the beginning of an era of the killing spree culminated with the self-inflicted death of the murderer. That year eighteen men, after murdering three or more people, killed themselves. The following homicidal rampage took place on December 24, 2012 in upstate New York.

William Spengler: The Suicidal Sniper

     In 1980 33-year-old William Spengler lived in the suburban Rochester area town of Webster, New York with his mother Arline and his 92-year-old grandmother. They resided in a middle-class home in a neighborhood of seasonal and year-round houses on a narrow Lake Ontario peninsula. Shortly after William's grandmother was found dead at the foot of their basement stairs the Monroe County district attorney charged Mr. Spengler with first-degree murder. He confessed to beating his grandmother to death with a hammer. (Since rational people don't bludgeon their grandmothers to death the motive behind this murder was pathological and therefore beyond rational comprehension.)

     Because William Spengler agreed to plead guilty, the prosecutor lowered the murder charge to manslaughter. The judge sentenced the defendant to eight to 25 years in prison. (The prosecutor may have been worried about a successful not guilty by reason of insanity defense.)

     In 1997, after serving 16 years behind bars, Mr. Spengler attended his first parole hearing. The inmate, when he learned that his presence at the hearing was not mandatory, said this to the parole panel: "Then it's not worth the time and effort." The parole officials denied Spengler his release. Since he hadn't expected to get out of prison this was no surprise. The surprise came six months later when these same officials granted Spengler his supervised release. The man who had murdered a 92-year-old woman walked out of prison in 1998 after serving two-thirds of his maximum sentence. (In the American system of criminal justice there are very few crimes that the government doesn't forgive. Judges and penologists seem hostile to the punishment rationale justifying sentencing and incarceration. In cases like this, whether or not the murderer has been rehabilitated should be irrelevant.)

     In 2006 while residing with his mother Arline and his older sister Cheryl in the dwelling next door to the house where he had murdered his grandmother Spengler's term of supervised parole expired. Because he was a convicted felon, under New York law he was not allowed to possess any kind of gun.

     In October 2012 William Spengler's mother Arline passed away. Although he hated his 67-year-old sister Cheryl, Spengler loved and doted on his mother. Since his parole in 1998, the gaunt, bearded loner had lived a quiet, uneventful life in the house across the road from Lake Ontario. Because of his low profile very few people in the town of 43,000 knew he existed. After Arline's death, William, in possession of a small arsenal that included handguns, rifles, shotguns and a lot of ammunition, began planning arson, mass murder and suicide. Spengler's years of living in obscurity would soon come to an end.

     Two hours before dawn on December 24, 2012, the 62-year-old ex-felon torched his house and set fire to his car. In possession of a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver and a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, Mr. Spengler took up a position behind a small hill not far from his burning house. It was from here he planned to ambush the first responders to the fires he started.

     At 5:35 that morning two members of the West Webster Volunteer Fire Department rolled up to the blaze in a firetruck. Spengler used his .223-caliber semi-automatic Bushmaster to kill 19-year-old Tomasz Kaczowka and his firefighting partner Michael Chiapperini, 43. When John Ritter, an off-duty officer with the Greece, New York Police Department pulled his car alongside the firetruck in an effort to shield the two firefighters, Spengler shot and wounded him. Two firefighters who arrived at the scene in their own vehicles, Joseph Hofstetter and Theodore Scardina, were also wounded by the sniper on the hill.

     An hour or so later the four firefighters and the wounded police officer where taken out of the line of fire by a SWAT operated armored vehicle. As the Spengler house fire began to spread to other homes, SWAT officers used the armored truck to evacuate 33 residents of the neighborhood. Amid all of the confusion William Spengler slipped away. Before it was all over seven homes burned to the ground.

     At eleven o'clock that morning police officers found William Spengler dead on a nearby beach. He had used one of his guns to shoot himself in the head. From a few feet from his body officers recovered a typed, three-page, rambling suicide note that contained the line: "I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down, and do what I like doing best, killing people."

     On Christmas day, arson and homicide investigators found Cheryl Spengler's charred remains in the fire debris. A forensic pathologist determined that Spengler's sister had been killed before the fire.

1 comment:

  1. The reason is quite simple: feminists promoted a number of extremely stupid ideas (literally brainwashed a large part of the population) and lobbied for absurd laws (against "stalking" etc) that go strongly against the human nature.
    Love is a very real and strong emotion, but unfortunately many people can't experience the feeling and have completely stupid attitude about it.
    The "modern" idea of getting out of a relationship without the partner's consent can cause extreme suffering. And it's not something that psychiatry can solve. Nowadays, someone who was left by their loved one, on top of the extreme suffering, faces threats from the state, in case he/she tries to get back together with the loved person, which only increases their suffering even more. Obviously, some people can't handle all this absurd mix - extreme suffering caused by the loved one, threats with imprisonment and so on.

    Besides, women tend to see in men other things than the person (sources of income, etc) which makes it far easier for them get out of relationships without any serious reason and change relationships as they wish. That's the reason for the pattern: men get desperate (and sometimes commit suicide and murder) while women don't care at all(and sometimes cause even more suffering to the ex in various ways).

    If there's anything to be done, that's related to education (don't play with love because it can bite back pretty badly) and decriminalization of certain absurd "modern crimes" (like "stalking" - which is nothing more than attempts to get (back) to the loved one - a thing that was perfectly normal in the not very distant past) that should have never been crimes in the first place.

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