A window into shooter’s descent
Documents detail extent of Sandy Hook killer’s abject isolation and sinister worldview
NEWTOWN, Conn. — The extent of Adam Lanza’s abject loneliness, the intensity of his scorn for the world, his interest in pedophilia, his astounding list of daily grievances, the reach of his obsession with mass murder — some of the granular details of the Sandy Hook shooter’s last years have been elusive. Until now. More than 1,000 pages of documents obtained by the Hartford Courant from the Connecticut State Police, including hundreds of pages of Lanza’s own writings and a spreadsheet detailing the gruesome work of 400 perpetrators of mass violence, bring into sharper focus the dark worldview of a 20-yearold who shot his mother four times as she slept and then killed 20 first-graders and six educators before killing himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012.
Diagnosed as a child with a sensory disorder and delays in speech, he would exhibit a quick mind for science, computers, math and language. The few acquaintances he had as a teenager came from video game arcades and online gaming chat rooms. The newly released writings express a wide range of emotions and rigid doctrine, from a crippling aversion to the dropped towel, food mixing on his plate and the feel of a metal door handle, to a deep disdain for relationships, an intolerance of his peers, a chilling contempt for anyone carrying a few extra pounds and a conviction that certain aspects of living are worse than death.
At the same time, he also predicted that he would make a good father because he would treat children as independent little people who just didn’t know a lot yet. In a memo-style letter to his mother, Nancy, who lived in the same house, he encouraged her not to be dejected about her life.
These documents, which had been kept from the public until now, were part of the mass of writings, records and computer files seized by detectives from the Lanzas’ home after the killings. The Courant mounted a fiveyear quest to obtain the unreleased documents, eventually winning an appeal before the Connecticut Supreme Court.
From the journal entries, school assignments, a screenplay involving pedophilia, education records and psychiatrists’ reports spanning about 15 years of Lanza’s life, several parallel themes emerge, each moving inexorably toward the day when the emaciated loner, crippled by obsession, scornful of most other people and fascinated by the human capacity for murder, committed his unspeakable act of violence. Some of the writings and psychoanalysis are dated. Many are not.
The documents released by the state police aren’t in chronological order, and it’s unclear when Lanza wrote many of them. A number are unsigned. Lanza removed the hard drives from his computer and smashed them to pieces. The FBI was tasked with trying to retrieve data.
One thing becomes clear as the additional records are examined — Adam Lanza, from about age 3 to 18, was never off the radar of people who orbited him — his parents, the teachers and counselors in the schools he attended, the psychiatrists who later tried to figure out what was happening with him. It is evident now that no single person grasped the full picture of what he was becoming.
Growing isolation
Lanza would spend most of his life on the margins of society. He played Little League baseball, but he later said he never liked it. By 14, he was already becoming a “homebound recluse,” a psychiatrist at Yale worried.
And from that point on, the records suggest that his paralyzing obsessions, his raging germophobia and his rigid set of beliefs — not to mention the blacked-out windows of his bedroom and the countless hours he spent playing combat video games — would guarantee his place on the fringe.
His isolation had its roots in his developmental speech delays as a child, the first of a string of diagnoses that included obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory integration deficit and autism spectrum disorder. The boy was not yet 3, living with his family in New Hampshire, when he began to experience what it was like to be different, to be isolated.
“Adam’s parents said Adam’s speech attempts were not easily understood, and that Adam became quickly frustrated when others asked him to repeat himself.… Recently Adam reportedly began hitting, spitting and crying when he could not make his needs known,” began a speech evaluation of the 2-year, 10month-old boy by the Sanborn, N.H., regional preschool program in February 1995.
The speech pathologist noted, “When not understood, Adam raised his voice volume and repeated the same utterance in a frustrated way. He did not attempt to supplement his speech [with] facial expressions, gestures or body movements to help his listeners understand him better.”
Lanza’s parents separated when the boy was 9, and a mutual dependence developed between mother and son. Nancy Lanza maintained her social life, while Adam, six years younger than his brother, Ryan, spent much of his time in his bedroom or the basement of the large house in Newtown.
As a teenager, his sensory condition made him exceedingly sensitive to textures, sound, light and movement. He shunned his classmates, bothered by their choice of clothes and the noises they made. He cultivated a set of ground rules that fed his separateness.
In an eight-page communication written in Microsoft Word and titled “Me,” Lanza wrote, “Relationships have absolutely no physical aspect to me; all that matters is communication.”
The undated document appears to be a message to someone in a chat room. He told the person he was drawn to them because “you could actually type coherently.”
He had barred his mother from his room and his basement lair and probably shared little of what he was writing on his computer.
His only points of reference seemed to be his own thoughts and his impersonal online relationships with those who shared similar ideas, said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, who reviewed some of the documents for the Courant.
In this way, “you could see how you slip further and further away from a balancing of what’s normal,” O’Toole said.
Tutored at home for a portion of his time at Newtown High, Lanza was already building a wall around himself. A Yale psychiatrist, upon meeting Lanza for the first time, thought the isolation could be catastrophic.
“Are there kids you enjoy spending time with?” Dr. Robert King asked the 14year-old Lanza during an initial evaluation at the Yale Child Study Center in 2006.
“Why would that be significant?” young Lanza answered, appearing to King as “pale, gaunt, awkward … and standing rigidly with his eyes downcast and declining to shake hands, tremulous with discomfort and looking miserable.”
The psychiatrist wrote in the eight-page summary of his evaluation that Lanza was faced with “increasing social withdrawal and reclusiveness.” King reported that the teen’s at-home instruction created a harmful “prosthetic environment with no student encounters.” King said it was a mistake to adapt the world to Lanza, rather than the other way around.
Notes about looking ahead to college, which appear to have been written by Nancy Lanza, mention the possible use of medications to help calm her son. A number of records obtained by the Courant indicate that doctors had prescribed or suggested Adam Lanza take medication over the years but that he would often refuse to take them or declined to be prescribed.
Severe obsessions
Lanza ruled over his own experience with an unyielding hand. The slightest deviation from routine enraged and paralyzed him. He knew his compulsions and obsessions — spelled out in a scrawled, handwritten list titled “Problems” — had made life untenable for him. “I am unable to distinguish between my problems because I have too many,” he wrote.
Lanza’s obsessive behavior is also described in King ’s evaluation, obtained by the Courant. The report is a startling chronicle of severe obsessional behavior and dire warnings of what would happen to Lanza should there not be appropriate intervention.
Lanza was “intolerant if his mother brushes by his chair,” wrote King. He was upset when his mother leaned on something or if she walked too loudly. Lanza objected to how loudly she spoke on the phone and the smell of her cooking, which he mostly did not eat because of its texture.
Lanza’s writings bristle with his disdain for people living normal or privileged lives: mothers and fathers, his classmates, athletes.
“I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for humanity,” he wrote in what appears to be an online communication with a fellow gamer. “I have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone for my entire life.”
In the 2006 Yale evaluation, King wrote that “as for [Lanza’s] parents’ separation, Adam’s understanding was that they were irritating to each other as they are to him.”
Lanza wrote that he hated “fat people,” but it appeared that no one who ate a meal every day would have escaped his wrath. Lanza himself was emaciated when he carried out the shootings.
Dr. Harold Schwartz, former director of psychiatry at Hartford Hospital and a member of the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission that studied the shooting, said that Lanza may have been starving himself and that his anorexia probably was hastening his mental as well as physical deterioration.
“You will be FAT if you eat today, just put it off one more day,” Lanza wrote in a list of 53 reasons to remain skeletally thin.
“Bones are clean and pure. Fat is dirty and hangs onto your bones like a parasite.… Have you ever seen a person NOT notice a walking skeleton?”
Seeking connection
Even with years of isolation, there are indications in the documents released by state police that Lanza yearned for companionship. That yearning manifested itself in what appeared to be online communications with people he hoped to grow closer to and in notes for a chilling screenplay that detailed a relationship between a boy and man and included images of the killing of family members and gunplay.
In the same online document in which he expressed his scorn for humanity, he wrote to the fellow gamer: “I am capable of boundless affection. I had never been in a situation to feel that way before, so I thought that it was special…. I took my focus away from myself and directed it toward you.”
Lanza’s most startling manifestation of his yearning for a connection is in the notes for a play with a theme of pedophilia and familicide.
Lanza also wrote in a hopeful way of raising a family: “I’m certain that I would be a phenomenal father because I would foster a free environment for my child . ... Instead of treating her/him like a pet that can talk, I would treat her/him like a little person who doesn’t know very much.”
And Lanza seems to describe a perfect companion: “She needs to be contemplative, introverted, introspective, insubordinate, nonconfrontational, able to communicate with me, and engage in banter. And I think I want her to be at least vegetarian.”
Lanza’s attitudes about life and love softened when he wrote about pedophilia, which he describes as a nurturing type of love. In the outline for a screenplay that he was calling “Lovebound,” he wrote that the script would portray “the beauty in the romantic relationship between a 10-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man.”
Fixation on murder
The first hints of Lanza’s fixation with violence came when he was in fifth grade and he and another boy wrote the “Big Book Of Granny,” 52 pages replete with references to violence against children.
A character named “Dora the Beserker” enters a day-care center with “Granny” and her son. Dora says to Granny, “Let’s hurt children.” There’s a chapter where Granny slaughters people on the set of “Granny’s Clubhouse of Happy Children” and another that references a game called “Hide and Go Die.”
It is unclear whether anyone saw the book at the time it was written.
Schwartz said Lanza’s fascination with the act of mass murder and his anger by themselves were not sufficient to explain the Sandy Hook shootings. Nor were Lanza’s isolation and obsessions. One more factor would have to be present, Schwartz said — a lack of empathy and social connection so great that other people no longer seem real.
“In this mental state, known as solipsism, only the solipsist is real. Everyone else in the world is a cardboard cutout, placed there for your benefit and otherwise devoid of meaning or value,” Schwartz said. “It is the most extreme end of one form of malignant narcissism. If the victims have no value then there is nothing to constrain you from shooting them.”
Schwartz said the Sandy Hook commission was unable to declare that Lanza was psychotic by 2010. Little is known about Lanza’s mind-set during the next two years leading up to the shootings, other than a further descent into isolation.
Before the Sandy Hook killings, Lanza had access to weapons and practiced firing a Bushmaster AR-15style rifle on the range with his mother. The Bushmaster was his principal weapon during the massacre.
Recovered from Lanza’s computer was a spreadsheet that he produced over at least four years, from 2006 to 2010 — a list, chilling in its complexity, of mass killings dating to 1786.
In the spreadsheet, the killers are arranged not by date or alphabetically, but by numbers of people killed. The 17 columns of information include type of weapon, nature of the location, day of the week and fate of the shooter. The spreadsheet appears to have been last updated in 2010 or 2011.
“It’s as if he was looking to see where he would fit in on the list,” Schwartz said.
‘I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for humanity. I have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone for my entire life.’ — Adam Lanza, in what appears to be an online message to a fellow gamer