Liddle Britain

Slaughter in Pennsylvania

7 October 2006

Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouse

It was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal in its denouement. Charles C. Roberts, a milkman, marched into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at 10.30 a.m. with a nine-millimetre automatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and buckets containing both plastic restraints and KY Jelly, a sexual lubricant. Roberts, who was not Amish and apparently harboured no grudge against the sect, ordered 15 boys (and a pregnant woman) out of the classroom and then began shooting; five children were killed, six more were seriously wounded. Roberts then turned the gun upon himself. His wife, speaking via a family friend, said Charles was really a quite lovely chap, all things considered, and very good with the kids — but also added that shortly before 10.30 he had called her to say he was tormented by dreams of molesting children, having sexually abused two young relatives many years before. This fact apparently came as news to her. There is no evidence, despite the KY Jelly, that he molested any of the schoolchildren.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page