HUNTER: Soo massacre shooter fits pattern of narcissistic child killers (2024)

Shirley Jane Turner would show them all.

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An 11 on the narcissism scale, the tortured mother would kill herself. And for good measure, she would murder her one-year-old son, Zachary, in the chilly waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland.

At the time, in 2003, Turner was wanted for murder in Pennsylvania, where she had shot to death Zachary’s dad, Andrew Bagby.

Three years later, Elaine Campione, made her stamp on Canadian criminal history when she drowned her daughters — Serena, 3, and Sophia, 19 months — in their Barrie apartment. She then posed her dead children in their pyjamas and jewelry.

Then, the mousy monster made a video addressing her ex-husband: “Leo, there, are you happy? Everything’s gone … The idea that you could actually have my children — God believes me, and God’s taking care of them now.”

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In three decades of covering crime, the idea of murdering one’s own children continues to baffle me. Academics and headshrinkers will, of course, have an explanation.

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“They are all twisted perspectives on love, loyalty and altruism,” Jack Levin, of Northeastern University in Boston, told USA Today in 2014. “There are mixed motives in many of these cases.”

Intellectually, I understand mental health issues and other woes that plague us as a species. I will never get murdering one’s own children. The husband, the wife, grandma, Uncle Ed, I can understand.

Killing the kids? Never.

But that sorry scenario was again played out in a quiet neighbourhood in Sault Ste. Marie on Monday night.

By sunrise, a rampaging shooter had murdered three children and another adult. One other person was also shot, but is expected to survive.

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So far, cops are not releasing the name of the killer or the victims, but added the massacre was “a result of intimate partner violence.” That gives us the framework.

Forensic psychologist Sara West summed it up best: “It’s an unfathomable concept.”

And now the “unfathomable” has happened in the Soo.

One man, who knew the 44-year-old killer, told Postmedia he displayed some concerning behaviour in the run-up to the massacre that kicked off in a bungalow on Tancred St. when a 41-year-old was shot to death.

Next up was a home on Second Line East. There, the shooter got busy and proceeded to kill the three children between the ages of 6 and 12. He also plugged a 45-year-old who is in hospital with serious injuries.

And then he killed himself.

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“He said stuff about shooting someone or something like that, but he would make it into a joke,” the neighbour said. “He wasn’t all there. You knew there was something wrong with him.”

The shaken man added: “Once and a while, we’d hang out, but I was iffy about him. Even me being around him was kind of scary, especially when I had my kids with me.”

In 2002, Jay Handel was white with rage. His wife Sonya had decided to leave him.

His response? He set the family’s Vancouver Island home ablaze, killing his six children. Handel knew it was wrong but, quite frankly, didn’t care.

“The killing of the children represented an extended suicidal act based primarily on narcissism,” Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe testified at Handel’s trial.

“People who are narcissistic have no difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong. But because they are preoccupied with themselves, they are indifferent to it.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun

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