Berserk!: Motiveless Random Massacres

By Graham Chester

Book Overview

It could happen at the mall, post office, or local diner. For the innocent, there is no place to hide from the men and women who've gone Berserk! From journalist Graham Chester come terrifying true stories of notorious mass murders and the deranged killers who committed them. 8 pages of shocking photographs.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312954425
• ISBN13: 9780312954420
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 0.8" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

A detailed accounting of the modern phenomenon of the mass murderer

Mass murderers are the most enigmatic, and perhaps most fascinating, type of criminals in the world. All too often, they appear to be fairly normal men (and sometimes women) whose mass murder spree takes everyone that knew them by complete surprise. The fact that many of them end up dead by their own hand or killed by police leaves the experts with comparatively few subjects to analyze and study. What drives a man to take so many innocent lives so indiscriminately? More importantly, is there a way to recognize such a dangerous individual before he acts on his deranged, murderous instinct? These are the types of questions Graham Chester asks in the pages of Berserk! There are basically two aspects of this book: a description of assorted mass murderers and their deeds as well as the author's theories on the causes of such incomprehensively destructive behavior. Chester does a great job describing the details of individual crimes, important events in each killer's life, and the consequences of their dark and deadly deeds. His chosen subjects represent a good sampling of mass murderers from different parts of the world, and he is rather meticulous in giving us the timeline of events in each case. Some of his subjects are well known, such as Charles Whitman, the infamous University of Texas sniper who rained down death and destruction from on high for a full ninety minutes in 1966, and James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, in 1984. I was quite surprised, however, to read about so many equally deadly murder sprees that I had never even heard of. Michael Ryan literally shot up the whole town of Hungerford, Berkshire, England, in 1987, killing sixteen people before taking his own life inside a school building. In 1988, Australia was shocked by the Nightmare on Hoddle Street, which saw a young man named Julian Knight kill seven and injure an additional forty-six innocent people. The next year, in Canada, Marc Lepine killed fourteen young co-ed students in his own private war against feminism. Back in the United States, Laurie Dann embarked on a mission to poison and shoot as many victims as she could find, including school children. As long as he's giving us the details of these and several more incidents of mass murder in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chester completely captures the reader's attention and morbid curiosity. From time to time, however, Chester pauses to put forth his own speculative ideas about the root causes of what he terms the pseudo-commando killer. He does point to some interesting factors that most mass murderers seem to have in common: strict or absent fathers; doting mothers; an inability to truly socialize with others, beginning in childhood; a fascination with guns; etc. He goes much farther than this, however. His basic explanation for the modern phenomenon of mass murderers comes down to this: it's all America's fault. In Chester's mind, capitalism