Contagious Killer Copycats

People online are making the mistake of saying the Sikh Temple incident is not a copycat of the Aurora red dawn event. In general, there appears to be a general misunderstanding of the form that outbursts of contagion can take during a time of increased levels of violence. The modeling of killings to the vulnerable/violent/suicidal individuals, as expressed by these rare few people who engage in these behaviors, can present in many ways. The Aurora violence and resulting media attention was the eruption, and the minor and major seismic waves, including the significant Oak Creek shooting, are the ripples from that initial, renewed activity. These patterns are predictable, and they can take many articulations.

Don't you know it's darkest before the dawn

And it's this thought keeps me moving on

If we could heed these early warnings

The time is now quite early morning

~ Pete Seeger

Here is how I stated my sense of what's going on during times like what we are seeing right now, from my book, The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004):

It became clear by the late 1990s that reports of workplace violence were not always just followed by other copycats of workplace incidents a day or a week later, but sometimes by other forms of mass and rampage violence as well. For example in the first week of November 1999, two workplace shootings on a Tuesday and a Wednesday shook the United States, which was already reeling from a long string of office and school killings for the year. In Seattle and Honolulu, the families of nine victims grieved as observers debated how to keep violence out of public settings traditionally considered safe.

In Honolulu, seven people were shot to death when Xerox technician Brian Uyesugi walked into a second-floor meeting room of the Xerox's offices and opened fire. He shot all the victims at close range with a 9mm handgun.

In Seattle, the next day a gunman shot and killed two men and wounded two others in a shipyard office. Wearing a dark trench coat over camouflage clothing, the gunman had walked into the Northlake Shipyard building and proceeded down a long hallway and into a back office before wordlessly opening fire and shooting all four men in the room with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. Two 9 mm guns, two Pacific Rim cities, two days of killings. Ten days later, another school shooting occurred in New Mexico.
One type of copycat event was reinforcing another—and people were beginning to take notice.
In early July 2003, author Kate Randall, writing in WSW News, observed that in “the past week has witnessed an uncommonly large number of violent incidents—including two workplace shootings, murder-suicides and multiple homicides. Three teenagers were also arrested for allegedly plotting a killing rampage. Between July 1 and July 8, 20 individuals were killed in these incidents and another 14 wounded… Also on July 8, police found the bodies of four people, apparent victims of a murder-suicide, in a small, well-kept ranch-style home in Magnolia, N.J.…Another multiple shooting was discovered on July 8, this time in Bakersfield, Calif. The bodies of a grandmother, mother and three young children were all found shot dead in their home.”
When such clustering occurs, with its mix of violence types, the copycatting is spreading from one type of incident to another. "Absolutely, there's a copycat aspect to workplace violence," James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, told the Christian Science Monitor in 2001. "There's a copycat aspect to virtually all high-profile, high-visibility crimes."

To more clearly explain the "copycat effect," here is this section, also from The Copycat Effect:

The pattern is called the “copycat effect.” It is also known as “imitation” or the “contagion effect.” And what it deals with is the power of the mass communication and culture to create an epidemic of similar behaviors.
The copycat effect is the dirty little secret of the media. That doesn’t prevent the media from calling the various epidemics of similar behaviors the “copycat” phenomenon, often for shock impact. But curiously, their use of the phrase seems to put a distance between the events and the reporting media, and allows them the stance that implies we are not part of the problem. But they are.

Sociologists studying the media and the cultural contagion of suicidal behaviors were the first to recognize the copycat effect. In 1974, University of California at San Diego sociologist David P. Phillips coined the phrase, “The Werther Effect,” to describe the copycat phenomenon. The word “Werther” comes from a 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust. In the story, the youthful character Werther falls in love with a woman who is promised to another. Always melodramatic, Werther decides that his life cannot go on, and that his love is lost. He then dresses in boots, a blue coat, and a yellow vest, sits at his desk with an open book, and, literally at the 11th hour, shoots himself. In the years that followed, throughout Europe, so many young men shot themselves while dressed as Werther had been and seated at their writing desks with an open copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in front of them, that the book was banned in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.
Though an awareness of this phenomenon has been around for centuries, Phillips was the first to conduct formal studies suggesting that the Werther Effect was, indeed, a reality--that massive media attention and the retelling of the specific details of a suicide (or, in some cases, untimely deaths) could increase the number of suicides.

The August 1962 suicide of Marilyn Monroe presents a classic modern day example of the Werther Effect. In the month that followed it, one hundred, ninety-seven individual suicides – mostly of young, blonde women -- appear to have used the Hollywood star's suicide as a model for their own. The overall suicide rate in the US increased by 12 percent for the month after the news of Monroe’s suicide. But, as Phillips and others discovered, there was no corresponding decrease in suicides after the increase from the Marilyn Monroe-effect suicides. In other words, the star’s suicide actually appeared to have caused a whole population of vulnerable individuals to complete their own deaths, over and above what would be normally expected. This is the copycat effect working with a vengeance.

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Please see the updated "Aurora Copycat Effect: The Complete List" by clicking here. One of the recent copycats you might not have read about includes a man with the ghostly name Casper in Eagan, Minnesota. Recall that alleged Aurora suspect's name is James Eagan Holmes. Casper yelled to the police officers, as he was being arrested, that he should be the "Joker," and "I wouldn't own a gun, but if I did, I would do what Holmes did. I would blow people away. Put me in jail for the rest of my life, I don't care. Put me in jail with criminals. I grab them by the throat and kill them."

* * *

The overlapping ensemble cast between Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy, all Christopher Nolan films, is quite evident. One movie of Nolan's is a sychophant of the other, and is the elephant in the middle of the room.

"I'm going to improvise. Listen, there's something you should know about me... about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed 

of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." 

~ Christopher Nolan, Inception (2010).

Time For Copycat Talk

This week people reading the Time Magazine article, "Is Copycat Behavior Driving Murder-Suicides?" are emailing me. Readers are sending messages such as this one: "I was surprised that the article did not mention your book."

The column, upon which I am being asked to comment, is:

Time Magazine, Thursday, Apr. 23, 2009. "Is Copycat Behavior Driving Murder-Suicides?" by Maia Szalavitz.

On March 30, a Santa Clara, Calif., man shot five people to death, including three children, before killing himself. On April 3, a gunman went on a shooting rampage in an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y., killing 13 people before taking his own life. And on April 20, employees of a Sheraton Hotel in Maryland found the bodies of a husband and wife and two daughters, victims of another apparent murder-suicide.

These are only the most publicized of the recent murder-suicide crimes in the U.S. Since March 10, 2009, at least 43 people have been killed in murder-suicides, and there is no telling why the crimes occurred in such rapid succession. It is also not clear whether the spate of recent deaths represents an escalation in the typical murder-suicide death toll. But it has got some observers wondering why. Past research suggests that factors ranging from the time of year (suicides are more common in spring) to the financial climate may have an impact on the rates of suicide and murder; in the recent events, the apparent motive of the killers included sexual jealousy and economic despair.

But Steven Stack, professor of psychiatry and criminal justice at Wayne State University, offers another explanation: the copycat effect. The copycat theory was first conceived by a criminologist in 1912, after the London newspapers' wall-to-wall coverage of the brutal crimes of Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s led to a wave of copycat rapes and murders throughout England. Since then, there has been much research into copycat events — mostly copycat suicides, which appear to be most common — but, taken together, the findings are inconclusive.

In a 2005 review of 105 previously published studies, Stack found that about 40% of the studies suggested an association between media coverage of suicide, particularly celebrity suicide, and suicide rates in the general public. He also found a dose-response effect: The more coverage of a suicide, the greater the number of copycat deaths.

But 60% of past research found no such link, according to Stack's study. He explains that the studies that were able to find associations were those that tended to involve celebrity death or heavy media coverage — factors that, unsurprisingly, tend to co-occur. "The stories that are most likely to have an impact are ones that concern entertainment and political celebrities. Coverage of these suicides is 5.2 times more likely to produce a copycat effect than coverage of ordinary people's suicides," Stack says. In the month after Marilyn Monroe's death, for example, the suicide rate in the U.S. rose by 12%.

Stack also conducted the only study to examine whether murder-suicide (as opposed to suicide alone) is associated with copycat crimes. That study, published 20 years ago, analyzed the impact of media coverage of mass murders and murder-suicides between 1968 and 1980. The study found no associated increase in homicide rates, but did note an uptick in suicide after well-publicized events. "There was a significant increase in national monthly suicide rates," he said, "It is a fairly substantial association and was independent of major control variables like the unemployment rate."
For now, it seems that the reason behind the recent series of murder-suicides will remain unclear, but whether it's the economy, the season, gun availability or copycatting, it will be no simple task figuring out how to stop them.

While my research associates and readers may be startled to see that The Copycat Effect (NY: Paraview Pocket ~ Simon and Schuster, 2004) is not cited, it is a sign of the times that the "copycat effect" is now more acceptable for media discussions. All the examples and links mentioned within the Time article, from Jack the Ripper to Marilyn Monroe, of course, are explored and discussed within my book.

Instead of being upset, I merely shall reflect upon this generous prophetic endorsement on the back of my book from one Dr. Steven Stack, sociologist, Center for Suicide Research:

"The media are still largely in a state of denial on how their coverage of death contributes to the violence and destructiveness in our society - but Coleman's book should wake them up!"

Perhaps that is what is happening.