Mind Of The Assassin

If you think what happened at Virginia Tech is incomprehensible, you're about to meet some people who understand that kind of madness very well: they're the people who protect the president of the United States.

For years, the U.S. Secret Service has sent psychologists into prisons and mental hospitals to interview those bent on assassination.

As Scott Pelley reports, their interviews bring extraordinary insight into the mind of an assassin; what has been discovered in the process is that many of the same characteristics found in assassins can also be found in school shooters.

In recent years, 60 Minutes has had unprecedented access to the Secret Service Intelligence Division.

This is practice for last ditch defense, but as one agent told 60 Minutes, "If the guns come out, we've already failed."

It's up to the Secret Service Intelligence Division to stop the assassin before he picks up a gun. They open new cases every month, investigating people who may want to harm those under Secret Service protection. The trouble is how to sort out those who just make a threat from those who actually pose a threat.

"Many of those who committed attacks did not threaten prior to their attack of violence," explains former Special Agent Brian Vossekuil.

In 1999, Vossekuil and psychologist Dr. Robert Fein were the primary authors of a groundbreaking Secret Service study of stalkers and assassins. They called it the "Exceptional Case Study."

They analyzed 83 attacks, and interviewed gunmen including Arthur Bremmer, who gunned down presidential candidate George Wallace, and Mark Chapman, who murdered John Lennon.

"What was it that struck you about these 83 cases you researched in the exceptional case study?" Pelley asks Dr. Fein.

"There was no, 'quote' profile of an assassin or a near assassin. People came from a range of backgrounds. Some had criminal records, most did not, some had histories of violence, most did not," Fein explains.

"The behavior in the acts generally included, things like communication to others, planning, target selection," Vossekuil explains.

"These were not impulsive, out of the blue, attacks. They were part of a process," Fein says.

"And we found, as Robert just said, acts that were in engaged in that was identifiable, understandable and consistent with someone on might be on a pathway toward mounting an attack," Vossekuil adds.

In one of their interviews, in a psychiatric ward, Vossekuil and Fein talked to a man called "J.D."

"I was looking for a location where I could test fire the gun," J.D. told the researchers.

In the late 1980's, J.D. stalked two presidents across the country, robbing banks to pay for the travel. What was his motivation?

"J.D. was a person who had dropped out of graduate school, who had served in the military, who became convinced that he had a choice to make, that aliens were ordering him either to kill innocent schoolchildren or to kill the president," Fein explains.

"He sounds too crazy to be a threat," Pelley remarks.

"Because he was quite organized, because he believed that he had this horrible choice. And the organization that he had to look normal, to explore security, to get weapons, to travel around the country that was quite chilling. Though if you talked with him, he was – he did not come across as a hostile, angry – fitting any stereotype of quote an assassin," Fein says.

"I decided I was going to dress up like a law enforcement person, so I bought a suit, the shoes and bought a trench coat and had a haircut," J.D. told the researchers.

He stalked the presidents for three years with a .38 caliber handgun. But before he got close enough, he was busted for robbing banks.

"What do we know about assassins that we didn't know before?" Pelley asks the researchers.

"The assassins, near attackers, followed a path, they planned, they thought, they made efforts to get weapons, assassination is the end result, we believe, of an understandable and often discernable process of behavior," Fein says.

"When someone is on a path to attack or considering an attack, other persons with whom this person comes in contact know to some degree of the activities and the planning that this person is engaging in," Vossekuil adds. "They knew enough that would cause a reasonable person to conclude that there's the basis for concern and that there's activity that might end in some lethal action."

"There were situations in which a person would communicate, for example, that he was considering killing himself," Fein says.

"So a desire for suicide, if you will, is an important marker?" Pelley asks.

"The line between suicide and homicide can be a very thin line," Dr. Fein replies.

It was after Columbine in 1999 that the Secret Service thought what it knew about assassins might apply to school shootings.

"After the Columbine attacks, Secretary of Education [Richard] Riley asked whether the department could work with the Secret Service to do a similar study to the one we'd done on assassination – to school shooters," Fein tells Pelley.

In 2000, Fein, Vossekuil and psychologist Marisa Reddy went back to the prisons and mental hospitals, this time to interview kids who attacked their schools.

"In my life things have never been o.k.; it ain't never seemed like anybody cared, never," school shooter Luke Woodham said during a Secret Service interview.

In 1997, Woodham killed his mother, two students at school, and wounded seven others. "I couldn't find a reason not to do it," he tearfully told researchers.

The new research evolved into a joint project with the Department of Education, called the "Safe School Initiative."

"With the school attackers that we studied there's no profile, there's no set of demographics that they share. But there are certain behaviors that they undertake," Georgeann Rooney, a threat assessment specialist at the Secret Service, tells 60 Minutes.

Behaviors that, she says, are like those of assassins. "This isn't an individual who just snaps and wakes up and decides they are going to attack their school. There's a planning process," Rooney says. "This planning, a lot of times, if you know what to look for it can be detectable."

And one theme they detected was bullying: two-thirds of the school shooters were victims of bullies. "They'd call you gay, call you stupid or fat or whatever. Kids would sometimes throw rocks at me and push me and kick me and hit me and stuff like that," Luke Woodham told researchers.

The Secret Service research reads like a road map to the mind of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho; he mentioned suicide to others, and he planned for months, buying one of his guns nearly three months before the attack.

Now, investigators are asking whether Cho told others about his plans. The Secret Service found that is much more common than you would imagine.

"These, for the most part, is an adolescent population; they really will talk about what they are intending to do and that's what we found in a majority of these cases, these individuals are communicating what they are intending to do to someone," Rooney says.

In 81 percent of school shootings they studied, other kids knew in advance and said nothing. Today, the Secret Service is trying to figure out why with a new study due out in the next few months.

Psychologist Dr. William Pollack gave 60 Minutes an advance look at his interviews with the kids who knew but didn't tell adults.

"Well, think about it from their point of view you're afraid to tell them because, one, you're afraid you'll get in trouble. Two, you're afraid your name will get out and people will hurt you and, three, you're afraid that the person you talk about won't get help. But, will somehow be harmed or adjudicated. So, you keep your mouth shut," Dr. Pollack explains.

"When you say 81 percent of these people told someone what they were going to do, what do you mean? How specific were they?" Pelley asks.

"It started out at from the lowest end being, you know, 'I'm so angry I might kill someone or hurt someone in the school' up to, including, 'Tomorrow, I'm coming with a gun. So, be careful. Don't come.' Or one shooter actually said 'Bring your camera to take pictures,'" Pollack replies.

"In that particular case, did the person who was told tell the authorities?" Pelley asks.

"No. They brought the camera," Pollack tells Pelley.

Another finding, common among most of the shooters, is what Luke Woodham said: that there was no adult in his life that he felt he could talk to.

"Tell me about that. Where were grownups?" psychologist Dr. Fein asked Woodham.

"Most of them didn't care. I kept a lot of hurt inside of me. I just felt like nobody cared," Woodham replied.

Much of what the Secret Service has learned is in a new interactive CD. Using actors, it teaches teachers the right questions to ask of students, parents and friends.

"How does this help you separate those who are talking about an attack and those who are really serious about making one?" Pelley asks Georgeann Rooney.

"Are they studying prior attacks? Are they trying to acquire a weapon? As you're seeing with these interviews of hypothetical students, for instance, they seem to be concerned about him," she says.

Since January, the Department of Education has been shipping the CDs to school districts nationwide but, until Virginia Tech, had no plans to send them to universities.

Brian Vossekuil and Robert Fein left the Secret Service in 2001; they don't speak for the service today. But they're presenting their research around the country; last week it was a meeting of school psychologists.

Their research found ten key characteristics of school shootings. So far, Cho meets seven out of ten.

"Here's a person who was suicidal, a person who felt they'd been bullied a person who felt there was no one else they could talk to, a person who had access to weapons. Just check the boxes off one after another," Pelley remarks.

"There was knowledge of this man's behavior in a number of different places that, perhaps if there had been a central place to pull the information together by a group of responsible adults people, might have said we have a problem here," Dr. Fein says.

A group of adults, like a task force set up in advance to watch for and manage the warning signs. Cho was referred to mental health counseling, but there's no evidence anyone followed up.

"In those situations it's important to not drop the ball, we think, to be determined, to be innovative, to find ways to do more than offer somebody help, to say 'We're going to maintain contact with you because you're scaring people,'" Fein says.

"You know, I'm curious, among the school shooters you talked to, how many of them regretted what they did?" Pelley asks.

Says Dr. Fein, "They saw that what they'd done was awful and a tragedy for everybody, for the victims, for themselves, for the families of the victims, for their families and they talked with us in the hope that sharing their story might lead adults to intervene in a determined way to prevent young people from engaging in this kinds of acts of violence."
Produced By Henry Schuster, Bill Owens and Rebecca Peterson