TALKING TO WOULD-BE SERIAL KILLER
Podcaster interviews woman who was part of 2015 plot to open fire in Halifax Shopping Centre
There’s not much to do with a toddler in February.
So Jordan Bonaparte and his two-year-old son spent a lot of mornings wandering the Halifax Shopping Centre.
On the morning of Feb. 13, 2015, Bonaparte was marvelling at his boy who in turn was in awe of the food court lit by fluorescent lights and smelled of chicken fried rice.
That’s the morning Lindsay Souvannarath was arrested at the Halifax International Airport.
To the then-23-year-old unemployed, creative writing graduate, Bonaparte, his son and everyone else in the food court were just “sheeple.”
“You pretty well see the world as a giant chess board where there are pawns that can be sacrificed in the name of something greater,” Souvannarath told Bonaparte during a recorded interview from a federal prison where she is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder.
“What do they really have to contribute other than their equally unimpressive children? That’s really all it is.”
It was only when Bonaparte got home with his son that morning two years ago that he learned of the foiled mass shooting plot.
Souvannarath had been arrested at the airport as she arrived from her home in Illinois. The boyfriend she had met online, James Gamble, shot himself in Timberlea as police closed in on his parents’ house.
Randall Steven Shepherd, Gamble’s best friend who planned to assist but not take part in the shooting, was arrested at the airport while waiting to pick up Souvannarath.
Like the rest of us, Bonaparte was horrified.
But unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t rein in his curiosity.
This curiosity about unsolved crimes, the disappeared and what drives people to dark places has in recent years found an outlet in his Night Time Podcast.
And that podcast is now giving us a first-person insight into the mind of a woman who wanted to kill as many people in the food court of the Halifax Shopping Centre as possible.
“I was reading everything online and in press about it but there were questions I had that weren’t answered,” said Bonaparte.
The main question was why. And how does a person get to the point that they would want to kill a room full of people they’d never met.
So he wrote her a letter in prison, told her how the crime affected him and asked her why.
“It wasn’t my intent of having her on the podcast, it was just to see if I could get any kind of response,” said Bonaparte.
The curiosity always comes first with him.
The podcast comes second. But facing a life sentence with no chance of parole for 10 years, Souvannarath volunteered to explain herself to Bonaparte and by extension to all of us.
And, unlike Shepherd, she is unrepentant.
“A public massacre is very much an attack on the public itself,” Souvannarath tells Bonaparte in the podcast.
“Everything else is secondary. It’s about a sort of attack on the common people, not an open attack on one’s enemies ... It’s on people who just sort of blindly support them, people who are complacent. People who some people like to call ‘sheeple.’ You’re just purifying the world from those who just do not have very much to contribute to it.”
Despite being of half Asian descent — her father is a computer programmer from Laos — Souvannarath shares the Nazi belief in a racial hierarchy.
She is also what’s known as a Columbiner — one of those who sympathize with and often revere the teenage perpetrators of the 1999 massacre of 12 students and one teacher in Columbine, Colorado.
Bonaparte’s curiosity had brought him to an impasse.
In a time where school shootings have become a regular massmedia event in both Canada and the United States, he wanted to discuss how Souvannarath could come to be. He thinks our desire to ignore evil protects us from it.
After all, Souvannarath and those of like mind already have platforms to meet and celebrate each other on the internet.
He didn’t want his podcast to become another platform for Souvannarath.
So beyond stating the nature of her beliefs, he doesn’t allow her to speak about them in any detail.
“That’s the hardest part, finding that balance between allowing her to tell her story and describing her ideological views,” said Bonaparte.
“The goal with this series is to take the story in the news about this girl from the States who planned a shooting, introduce us to who she is, and what events in one’s life can lead someone to this unimaginable direction.”
The answers he got from Souvannarath were disturbing in their mundane nature.
She grew up in a supportive, middle class family with annual vacations to places like Disney World and experienced no significant trauma.
She became a Nazi sympathizer at about 16 years old. She was in a high school drama class, wrote short fiction and had a small, but close group of friends.
It was art that brought her to dark places.
First a painting she saw online led her to contact the artist, who was an avowed national socialist and who introduced her to a community.
Her writing took a dark turn, too.
Bonaparte’s research for the series on his podcast took him to what he calls the “online footprints” of the protagonists of the planned mall shooting.
He read dark short stories Souvannarath published online under a pseudonym that are still circulating amongst people who likely don’t know what became of the author.
While writing her novel about a boy who falls in love with death, she decided it needed a school shooting, which led her to researching Columbine.
That research became an obsession.
An obsession she shared with an entire online community.
It was in the online discussions about Columbine that she met Gamble.
“You’ve heard of a method actor that jumps in head first,” said Bonaparte.
“I almost feel that Lindsay is like a method writer. When she wrote elements of a mass shooting in a story, she dove into it headfirst. I feel like Lindsay’s writing has a part to play in this.”
At the time, Souvannarath had recently graduated from college, was living with her parents and had no career ambitions. Her application to the Peace Corps to go to Asia and teach English had been denied.
She stayed up all night surfing the websites of like-minded people and posting on her blog. She slept during the day.
“It was a very strange way to live,” said Souvannarath.
So is prison.