The Tucson Shooting: Descent Into Madness

If you think what happened in Tucson is incomprehensible, you're about to meet people who understand the madness behind a massacre. The United States Secret Service has studied 83 assassins and would-be assassins, and it has found remarkable similarities among them.

As you see what we've learned about the accused Tucson gunman, notice how he fits what the Secret Service discovered. The horrific loss of innocent life seemed to come from nowhere. But it appears Jared Loughner followed a well-worn path on his final descent into madness.

The Secret Service & An Assassin's Mind
A decade of "60 Minutes" reporting on the definitive Secret Service study, the best tool for understanding the Arizona shooting spree.

Descent Into Madness
Extra: Reacting To The News
Extra: Loughner and "Lucid Dreaming"
Extra: The College Police Chief

In the hours before the massacre, Loughner was busy wrapping up his troubled life. At a drug store, just before midnight, he dropped off a roll of film - pictures he shot of himself posing with his gun. Then he checked in to a motel two miles from his home and his parents.

At 2 a.m., the moon was out, it was a little above freezing, and life as he knew it would be over in about eight hours.

He seemed upset as he said his goodbyes. It appears he made one call to Bryce Tierney, a close friend. That call, at 2:05 a.m. went unanswered, so Loughner left this brief message: "Hey. Hey it's Jared. I just want to tell you 'good times.' Peace out. Later."

"Peace out" is slang these days for goodbye.

"There's this heavy sigh at the end," correspondent Scott Pelley remarked.

"It was all in past tense. And it sort of bothered me how he said 'We've had good times,'" Tierney replied.

Tierney heard his cell phone ring at 2:05 a.m., but instead of a number, his screen said "restricted" so he didn't pick up. "I was afraid I was going to wake up and find and see his name in an obituary in a couple of days," he told Pelley.

Tierney and Tyler Conway met Loughner in high school and hung out with him four or five times a week.

"Up until he was about 19 or 20 he was always, you know, pretty enthusiastic, pretty passionate. He was always quiet but you could see that there was that passion in him. He did care, he was happy. He was always an observer and especially around the time he started getting mentally ill," Conway said.

We don't know what was happening to Loughner and a lot of what you're about to hear isn't going to make sense. But Tierney and Conway say that's because their friend was slipping into insanity and it was showing up in the poetry he wrote.

"I started seeing heavy influence of just chaos and just non-connective patterning in his, in his poetry. Just ranting or mixing of ideas," Conway explained.

"Did you ask him what he was driving at, what he was thinking?" Pelley asked.

"Oh, yeah," Conway replied. "And I told him, I was like, 'Like, because I read it and I just don't find, I find nothing. It's like nothingness to me and he was like, 'Exactly!' You know, that's where the meaning is. He, people are gonna say he doesn't believe in anything but it's not that he doesn't believe in anything he literally believes in nothing, nothingness."

Tierney and Conway told "60 Minutes" Loughner was interested in a philosophy called nihilism; it essentially says life is meaningless. They say he was obsessed with the film "Waking Life" in which a man walks through his dreams listening to various philosophies.

A character in the film echoes something at the center of Loughner's apparent delusions: that big government and media conspire to silence the average guy.

To protest his lack of voice, the character in the film sets himself on fire.

Loughner told his friends reality has no more substance than dreams.

"He was obsessed with how words were meaningless, you know, you could say 'This is a cup.' And he'd be like, 'Is it a cup or is it a pool? Is it a shark? Is it, you know, an airplane?' You know?" Conway said.

In 2007, Loughner brought one of his nonsensical questions to one of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' community meetings.

"The question he asked her was: 'What is government if words have no meaning?' And she read it and obviously, you know, that's kind of a convoluted question," Conway told Pelley.

Loughner told them what he thought of her reaction.

"He thought it was a joke," Conway remembered.

"Yeah, a joke that someone who works in government can't answer that," Tierney added.

"What was her answer to that question as he put it to you?" Pelley asked.

"Nothing. She didn't answer it," Tierney said.

"She didn't. She didn't answer it," Conway said.

"She couldn't answer it. I mean how would you how can you?" Tierney added.

"But because she didn't answer the question he had distain for her?" Pelley asked.

"Oh, yeah," Conway replied.

"That's what he told you?" Pelley asked.

"I think that anyone who didn't connect to his lines of thinking he had distain for," Conway said.

His friends say Loughner's "lines of thinking" intersected with conspiracy theories that government controls people's minds and that U.S. currency is worthless.

His only known meeting with Giffords was three years and four months before the assassination attempt.

When police searched Loughner's home they found a form letter from Giffords thanking him for attending. On the envelope, he wrote "Die bitch." He held on to the letter all those years.

"These were not impulsive, out-of-the-blue events," Robert Fein told Pelley.

Fein and Bryan Vossekuil wrote a comprehensive study of assassins for the Secret Service in 1999.

In prisons and hospitals they talked to 20 subjects, including Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace, Mark Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, and Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert Kennedy.

They found that assassins come from all walks of life but travel a common path leaving distinctive clues.

"Rarely were there direct threats communicated to the target or to law enforcement authorities. But very often there was some kind of communication. Be it a communication to a family member or to a friend, that suggested that the attacker or potential attacker was moving out on the path that might lead to an attack," Fein explained.

"One of the things that we also saw were that there were common motives among a number of these to include drawing attention to a grievance. Possibly looking for notoriety. Potentially actually being suicidal and being willing to die or expecting to die in an attack and perhaps wanting to die," Vossekuil added.

"In the more than 80 cases that you studied, was politics, pure and simple, ever the motivation?" Pelley asked.

"I cannot think of a case where politics, pure and simple, was the motivation. Sometimes people used a political language but people are more complicated than attacking somebody over quote a political motive," Fein said.

A man named J.D. stalked two presidents. And in a prison interview with him, Fein and Vossekuil found it wasn't politics - it was madness.

"He believed that aliens were giving him a choice either to kill a bunch of school kids or to assassinate the president," Fein said.

"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. explained in a videotaped interview.

J.D. showed them that the mentally ill can be organized enough to plan an attack. Their research also showed that one of the last steps on the path to violence is practicing with a weapon.

That moment seemed to happen for Loughner around Christmas 2009. His friend Zane Gutierrez says that they shot target practice together and Loughner started researching the weapon that would ultimately be used in the Tucson attack.

"Jared only spoke of purchasing a Glock police-issue firearm. It was the firearm that he thought that he would enjoy owning, pretty much for every reason he felt like if it was good enough for the police to use, it was good enough for him," Gutierrez told "60 Minutes."

Something pivotal happened to Loughner in March 2010. He ended his friendships and then started disrupting his classes at Pima Community College.

Lynda Sorenson sat near him in algebra. "It was on the very first day within maybe half an hour at the very most," she remembered. "Jared started disrupting the class. He started shouting that this was all fraudulent. The teacher was trying to perpetrate a fraud. The material in the book was fraudulent. "

"You were witnessing behavior that was irrational," Pelley remarked.

"To be honest with you, I sat by the door because I wanted to be able to get out of the room quickly, if I had to," she replied.

Asked what she feared might happen, Sorenson said, "I was afraid he was gonna come into the room with a gun and shoot us."

The campus police were called to talk to Loughner five times. But they didn't take him into custody or seek to have him sent for psychological evaluation because he hadn't threatened anyone. Then, Loughner posted a video about the college on YouTube.

"We are looking at students who have been tortured," Loughner said in the clip.

You can hear the disconnected thinking that others saw in his writing.

"This is Pima Community College, one of the biggest scams in America. Here's the best part the bookstore, the bookstore, the book store, the book store. It's so illegal to sell this book under the constitution. We are also sheltered by our freedom of speech," he said. "This is genocide in America."

The video was the last straw for the college. It sent four officers to Loughner's home to tell him he was suspended.

He was banned from campus until he sought mental health treatment. And with that, the college felt it had done its job protecting students and staff.

"Just because you've expelled somebody doesn't mean you've gotten them off the path to violence. Indeed, you may have pushed them further down that path to violence," psychotherapist Barry Spodak told Pelley.

Spodak uses training sessions to teach Secret Service agents how to use the assassin research. He says that the Secret Service sometimes spends years managing people who may pose the most dangerous threats to the president.

Agents keep tabs on them, visit often, even make sure they're getting their medications and treatment.

"Is it the school's responsibility to see to it that Loughner has mental health care?" Pelley asked.

"A school could certainly see it that way if they believe that the person may come back with more resentment and more anger and shoot up their campus," Spodak said.

Since Virginia Tech, Spodak has been training college administrators, but, of course, no university and few police forces have the ability to manage a troubled mind the way the Secret Service does.

"I've worked with enough people in college communities to realize they are between a rock and hard place. They don't have the tools or the resources that would be necessary and a lot of them are very fearful about that," Spodak said.

The research on assassins shows that many killers started their final preparations after a life changing event.

And two months after his suspension from school, Loughner bought that Glock he admired. As the Secret Service study might have predicted, so far, it appears Loughner communicated no threat directly to Giffords. His focus on her lasted years.

Many saw trouble coming even though no one had the whole picture. And, in the end, Loughner let others know when time was up. At 2:05 a.m. on the day of the shooting, there was that call to Bryce Tierney.

After 4 a.m., investigators believe he wrote an Internet post that said "Goodbye friends, please don't be mad at me." He went to Walmart to buy ammunition and loaded 92 rounds into four magazines.

At 7:30 a.m. he was stopped in his Chevy Nova for running a red light. But the officer let him go with a warning. By 8 a.m. he was back home. His father confronted him about a black bag his son was carrying but Loughner ran away and caught a taxi to the Safeway supermarket, where, strangely, minutes from the massacre, he insisted on going inside to get change. He didn't want to give the driver a $20 bill for a $15 dollar.

By then, it was 10 a.m. Gabrielle Giffords was pulling into a parking space right on time.

"When I saw his mug shot, that face tells me exactly what Jared wanted to happen is happening. Like to the 'T.' Like even this right here, like he knew that his friends were gonna come out and speak about him and people were going to try to understand him. He, it's almost like he wants people to just question that…," Conway said.

"…to question why and to not be given an answer," Tierney said.

Like the assassins studied by the Secret Service, it's likely Loughner wanted a high profile target to make some point that only he understands.

There was one other thing that the Secret Service discovered was common: the assassins found their attacks didn't solve their problems. Nearly everyone had profound regret. They cooperated with the study in the hopes that the violence would never happen again.

Produced by Henry Schuster, Nicole Young and Jenny Dubin