Spreadsheet marked a road map to murder
The spreadsheet contains exactly 400 names, dates to 1786 and includes 17 categories sorted by the number that seemed to fascinate its creator, Adam Lanza, the most – the amount of people killed.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter’s spreadsheet is remarkable for its attention to detail, with categories that included the weapons used, the number of dead or wounded, the date, time and place of the violence, and the fate of the perpetrator. Most of the incidents resulted in deaths. Most of the weapons were guns.
Relying on years of research, experts say, Lanza created a road map to murder.
The Courant obtained the spreadsheet along with more
than 1,000 pages of documents from Lanza’s Newtown home, gathered by state police as part of their investigation into the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Courant waged a five-year legal battle for the records, culminating in a state Supreme Court decision that ordered their release.
“He’s not doing this for a term paper, this took a lot of work and a lot of effort, and so what are other possible reasons he could be doing this?” said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. “He’s interested in mass shootings, now did he use this research to develop his own plan and his own strategy? It’s certainly possible.”
The Courant shared the document with O’Toole to get her analysis. While O’Toole said it will never be known with certainty why Lanza created the spreadsheet, it’s clear from the time he spent on it that it was important to him.
“It’s organized, it’s very detailed; he spent time particularly with some of these cases where some of the information that he is including was not easy to find and I think it is also interesting the type of information that he collected,” O’Toole said. “As the author, he had the flexibility to record anything on here but he was very selective on the information that he recorded — which is how many killed, how many injured, what the weapons were.”
The last entry on the spreadsheet was from June 2, 2010 — Derrick Bird, who killed 12 in Cumbria, England. The most prolific killers, with 57 victims each, were William Unek from the Congo in the 1950s and Woo Bum-kon from South Korea in 1982. Unek used a rifle and an ax; Bum-kon used an X2 M2 Carbine rifle, according to Lanza’s spreadsheet.
Lanza once acknowledged in a chatroom on the Columbine shooting that he’d have to update his spreadsheet and place Anders Breivik, who killed 77 in Norway in 2011, on top.
It’s not clear when Lanza made the last entry. On Dec. 14, 2012, Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and gunned down 26 people, including 20 first-grade students, before killing himself.
“The game plan that he ultimately carried out, the shooting itself showed planning, it showed organization, it showed thoughtfulness, it was detailed, he came ready, he came prepared, he knew how to enter the building so those kinds of behaviors are reflected in what we see here in the spreadsheet,” O’Toole said.
The former profiler said the spreadsheet is almost freakishly well-organized. The capital letters for each day of the week are lined up exactly for all 400 cases, the same with the months of the year.
There are no marks by any shooter’s name or extra capital letters in a name or anything to signify Lanza had any special interest in a particular mass murderer.
“I find the absence of that stuff like singling out certain killers very interesting,” O’Toole said. “Nothing distinguishing them in terms of who he liked better than other people. It begs the question, ‘why did you spend all of the time doing this?’ When you see someone spends this much time on a document it is either important or it’s enjoyable or sometimes it’s both.”
Before going to the Sandy Hook school he killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their Newtown home where he had slowly deteriorated from the little boy who drew pictures of his hamster, Skippy, to an obsessive, violent, profoundly lonely young man who hated the world.
“I incessantly have nothing but scorn for humanity. I have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone my entire life,” Lanza wrote in a document he titled “me,” one of the items released last week to The Courant by state police.
The newly released documents provide additional chilling details to what is already known about Lanza – his obsessions with murder and violence, the descent to loneliness that ended with garbage bags over his bedroom windows to keep light out, and his OCD tendencies.
More complete picture of Lanza
The papers also expand on themes that had only been hinted about in previous reports — such as his interest in homosexuality and pedophilia. As with earlier writings going back to grade school, there are the continuing themes of suicide and serial killers mentioned as well.
Among his newly released writings are:
A four-page typed, preliminary screenplay titled “Lovebound,” which discusses “the beauty in the romantic relationship between a 10-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man.” While the screenplay is theoretically about a forbidden relationship, it also has extensive references to violence. Lanza included scenes involving familicide, goths committing suicide and a kid lying on his bed while cocking and clicking a pistol.
The eight-page “me” document, which appears to partially be Lanza’s part of an online conversation with a person whom Lanza at one point says he loves partly because the person “referenced serial killers multiple times in ways people normally don’t.” He also discusses whether killing and suicide are moral acts. “It’s okay to kill an animal, but it’s not okay to kill a human,” Lanza wrote. As for suicide, he wrote “killing yourself would intuitively be moral because you would not have the capacity to commit immoral deeds, which you innately do through being alive; and yet many would somehow forbid suicide as being immoral.”
Lanza memorialized his contempt for “fat” people in a document he created about his daily schedule. On his list of 35 reasons to hate food and fat people: “Starve off the parts you don’t need. They’re ugly and they drag you down. Food is mean and sneaky. It tricks you into eating it and it works on you from the inside out making you fat, bloated, ugly and unhappy.”
Experts say the new documents provide clues to the elusive question of why Lanza committed one of the deadliest mass shootings by a single person in U.S. history. Lanza’s extreme anorexic condition might have contributed to his descent to madness, said Harold Schwartz, the former director of the Institute of Living who was a member of the governor-appointed Sandy Hook Commission tasked with examining issues surrounding the shooting. The Courant asked Schwartz to review some records.
“I made the argument in the report for both the commission and the [report put together by the state Child Advocate’s office] that
his extreme anorexia may have produced an organic brain syndrome — brain damage from starvation,” Schwartz said. “While still a theory, these documents support that conclusion.”
The 6-foot-tall Lanza weighed 112 pounds when he walked into the Sandy Hook school and started shooting.
Schwartz said the new documents are “further evidence of the very dark place that was Adam Lanza’s world” and “further evidence of his fascination with mass murder and with death in general.” He said they do not explain why he walked into the Sandy Hook school and became a mass murderer.
“The huge majority of people who have terrible psychiatric difficulty will never become killers. Likewise, there are very few people who are fascinated with mass murder of familicide who will ever shoot anyone,” Schwartz said.
The newly released documents also reveal a connection to one of the victims of the shooting. Among the several Planning and Placement Team meeting documents released is one going back to when Lanza entered the Sandy Hook school after his family moved to Newtown from New Hampshire. The records show that Mary Sherlach, among those Lanza shot and killed, was the chairperson of his PPT team as far back as 1998.
The records show she was in charge of communicating with Nancy Lanza and coordinating the school experts who were working with her son, including a speech therapist and an occupational therapist.
There also is correspondence between Nancy Lanza and school officials in which Lanza’s mother praised Sherlach’s efforts. “Mary Sherlock [sic] also has been very helpful in keeping Adam’s stress level at a minimum,” she wrote in 2001.
Sherlach was the second person killed after Lanza breached the front door of the school by shooting through the glass. She was in a PPT meeting with Principal Dawn Hochsprung when the shooting started and ran out behind her and was killed in a hail of bullets.
There are also numerous writings from Lanza’s childhood, including his Grade 3 writing journal from the Sandy Hook school that relives many happy moments from his childhood.
There’s the day his parents bought him Skippy the Hamster and a journal on how he wants to be a farmer when he grows up. He wrote a whole paper on a family summer vacation to a New Hampshire beach, but even that almost ends in tragedy because Lanza wrote he almost drowned when a wave crashed down on him.
For all the early school writings and drawings that seem to reflect a normal childhood, the documents take a sharply dark turn. The spreadsheet reflects Lanza’s interest in killers during his later years, but the first hint of violence comes in fifth grade, when he and another boy wrote the “Big Book Of Granny.”
State police released excerpts of the granny book when they completed their investigation into the massacre. They included parts of a chapter where a character named Dora the Beserker enters a daycare center with Granny and her son. Dora at one point says to Granny, “Let’s hurt children.”
It is unclear if anyone saw the book at the time it was written. But the entire book is 52 pages and depicts much more violence than the snippets that state police released. O’Toole noted there are violent references throughout the document.
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.” In another chapter Dora says she likes hurting people — especially children.
Investigators from the Child Advocate’s office pointed to the Granny book as a giant missed opportunity to find out why Lanza had such a fixation on violence that would only fester as he got older and grew more isolated.
But Lanza’s obsession with violence was only starting with the book.
In seventh grade, while attend- ing the St. Rose of Lima School, the local Catholic school, Lanza wrote essays about “battles, destruction and war” that was so disturbing that his teacher showed it to the school principal.
The essays showed that Adam was “deeply troubled by feelings of rage, hate and (at least unconscious) murderous impulses,” according to the state Office of Child Advocate report.
Lanza’s teacher at St. Rose told state investigators that the “level of violence was disturbing” and his “creative writing was so graphic that it could not be shared.”
Lanza lasted less than a year at the Catholic school and was in a “homebound” program for children not able to attend school before entering Newtown High School when he was 15 years old.
It is during this time frame that Lanza apparently began researching his spreadsheet.
It is also when he started making corrections on Wikipedia to mass shooters’ pages and posting comments about firearms in chatrooms, such as the one about the Columbine shooting.
He posted several Wikipedia entries under the alias of Kaynbred. The posts appear to have started in 2009 regarding George Sodini, a name in his spreadsheet.
Sodini killed three people and injured nine at a gym in the Pittsburgh area before killing himself. Lanza posted at least two things regarding the status of Sodini’s personal website.
So detailed was his research that Lanza noticed even a small error in the Wikipedia page of another person in his database — Kimveer Gill, who killed one person and injured nine during a school shooting in Montreal in 2006.
In his spreadsheet, Lanza noted that Gill was carrying a 9mm Beretta Cx4 Storm; Norinco HP9-1 and a 9mm Glock pistol. Lanza noticed on Gill’s Wikipedia page that someone had mistakenly added a decimal point before 9mm, writing a “Beretta Cx4 Storm .9mm” was used in the shooting.
Lanza removed the decimal point and posted the comment “9mm was listed as .9mm. People say that 9mm is anemic, but this is ridiculous.”
The documents released by the state police aren’t in chronological order and it’s unclear when Lanza wrote many of them. Several were downloaded from his computer where they had been stored on his desktop.
Lanza removed the hard drives from his computer and smashed them to pieces. The FBI was tasked with trying to retrieve data.
It is clear when he began research for the spreadsheet. In several online chats, Lanza referred to his project and indicated that he started researching it as far back as 2006 when he would have been in the “homebound” program, in which most of his schooling occurred at home. Besides “Kaynbred,” he also used the alias “Smiggles.”
“Compared to the legions of people who focus solely on serial killers, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who’s interested in mass murderers, so I thought that I might as well introduce myself,” Lanza wrote. “I’ve been researching this topic since 2006 and I started compiling a formal list at the beginning of 2010.”
The existence of the spreadsheet was first discussed at a law enforcement conference months after the 2012 massacre by a Connecticut state police official. State police detectives found the document on Lanza’s computer in his room and turned it over to FBI profilers.
Experts said the level of detail is striking as well as scary. In many cases Lanza lists the exact caliber of weapon used in the shooting.
When Michael McLendon killed 10 people in Alabama in 2009 he used a Bushmaster AR-15, a gun similar to what Lanza used at Sandy Hook. Friedrich Leibacher used a Sig Sauer 90 PE; Remington 870 Express and a Sig Sauer P232 when he killed 14 in a government office building in Switzerland in 2001.
“He has it listed in number of most killed. Is he looking at that and trying to understand ‘how did he kill that many people?’” O’Toole said. “Is he looking at that number and then comparing it to the weapons that were used? There’s no way to know that but it certainly makes sense.”
O’Toole said the identities of the killers may not even have mattered to Lanza.
“Frankly, I am kind of surprised that he even has the name in there because I don’t know that the name matters to him. Maybe it gave him opportunity to go back and do more research on that person. We know he is more interested in what weapon was used to kill or destroy that many people.”
For example, there’s the case of Richard Farley, who killed seven people during an office shooting in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1988.
In his spreadsheet Lanza, wrote that Farley used the following guns; a scoped .22-250 rifle; 12 gauge semi-automatic Benelli shotgun; pump-action shotgun; .357 Magnum S&W; 9mm S&W; .380 ACP Browning; and a .22WMR Sentinel.
On Feb. 4, 2010, Lanza went onto Farley’s Wikipedia page and corrected the weapons that were used to match his spreadsheet.
O’Toole said the spreadsheet is “remarkably sanitized” with no commentary or sign that he was specifically interested in any particular shooter.
“Did he aspire to be like [Columbine killers] [Dylan] Kleebold and [Eric] Harris or like [Texas tower shooter Charles] Whitman?” O’Toole said.
Lanza didn’t use the FBI’s standard for a mass shootings — four or more people killed during one shooting. In 31 of his entries, no one was killed, although in many of those cases there were a large number of people injured.
Lanza acknowledged the difference when he wrote about his spreadsheet online. “The main difference is that I leniently define ‘mass murders’ as involving a minimum of four causalities, whether through death or injuries,” he wrote. He acknowledged that the database should have been larger and downplayed it’s significance, writing that it wasn’t much to get excited about.
It is unclear if or why Lanza stopped adding to his database in June of 2010, although in a post on June 12, 2012 he wrote that “the enthusiasm I had back when Virginia Tech happened feels like it’s been gone for a hundred billion years.”
“I don’t care about anything,” Lanza wrote in that post. “I’m just done with it all.”
That Virginia Tech post was one of Lanza’s last before he went dark publicly, except for occasionally texting his mother and email conversations with a few people about mass murders.
In one of those emails to an unknown recipient, Lanza discussed why he didn’t research if shooters left suicide notes, writing, “I can’t remember ever thinking, “Whoa, that guy had a suicide note and I’m just finding out about this?!”
Fewer than three days later, he walked into the Sandy Hook school and killed 26 people in five minutes.