Now, in offering me advice, Bardo hoped to distinguish himself from other assassins. He would become, he thought, the anti-assassin, helping famous people avoid danger. Of course, he was now famous himself, a fact that carried him to an almost too ironic comment on public life: “All the fame that I have achieved from this results in me getting death threats and harassment. The media says things about me that aren’t even true. I have no control over them invading my privacy, bringing up my case over and over again on TV so they can make money off it. They portray me in ways I never saw myself.”
He didn’t like reporters calling him a loner, but the description was accurate. Bardo had no friends, and had never even kissed a girl romantically. (Almost certainly, he never will.) A lack of healthy intimacy is a common feature of many assassins. John Hinckley didn’t ever attain a developed romantic relationship; nor did Arthur Jackson, nor did Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace.
Bremer was a virgin who sought to change that in the weeks before his crime. Knowing he would soon be dead or in prison for life, he hired a prostitute, but their sexual encounter ended awkwardly. In his diary he wrote, “Though I’m still a virgin, I’m thankful to Alga for giving me a peek at what it’s like.”
Bizarre though it may seem, the greatest intimacy most assassins attain is with those they attack. Through stalking, they come to know their victims more closely than they know others in their lives, and through shooting them, they become partners of sorts. Bremer’s diary shows increasing intimacy with his first victim of choice, President Richard Nixon. As he stalked the president from state to state, the diary references move from “the President” to “he” to “ Nixon” to “Nixy,” and ultimately to “Nixy-boy.”
Those who attack with knives have even more intimacy, as is disturbingly described in multiple-murderer Jack Henry Abbott’s book In The Belly of the Beast. Of one of his murder victims, he wrote: “You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder.”
Bardo’s coarse act of murder was, with the saddest irony, inflicted on the only girl who ever gave him any positive attention. Rebecca Schaeffer had sent a kind reply to one of his letters.
Bardo: It was a personal postcard where she wrote, “Robert, dash, your letter was the nicest, most real letter I ever received.” She underlined “real.” She wrote, “Please take care,” and drew a heart sign and then “Rebecca.” That’s what propelled me to want to get some more answers from her.
GdeB: So what advice would you offer other famous people?
Bardo: Be careful about what you write. If you do answer fan mail, don’t let it be so over-glowing. That’s not the way to be with a fan, because it makes it seem like they’re the only one, and that’s how I felt. I felt I was the only one.
Like other assassins, Bardo had stalked several famous people, including a client of mine whom he decided was too inaccessible. He gave up on her and switched his attention to Rebecca Schaeffer. For assassins, it is the act and not the target, the destination, not the journey that matters.
Because targets are interchangeable, I asked Bardo how the security precautions taken by some public figures affected his choice. He said, “If I read in an article that they have security and they have bodyguards, it makes you look at that celebrity different and makes a person like me stand back. It kind of stands against this hope of a romantic relationship.”
Though Bardo’s defense tried to sell the idea that he expected a romantic relationship with Rebecca Schaeffer, he never really did. Bardo expected exactly what he got, an unenthusiastic reception and ultimately a rejection. He used that rejection as an excuse to do what he had long wanted to do: release his terrible anger against women, against his family, and against the rest of us.
Of course, to care about being rejected by a total stranger, one must first come to care about that stranger. Bardo did this by obsessing on each of his various targets. Even today in prison, he is still doing it, focusing intently on two women. One is a singer, and the other is someone who was not famous when he first heard of her but is very famous now: Marcia Clark, the prosecutor who sent him to prison for life. In a letter Bardo wrote to me, he explained: “Twice, the Daily Journal has profiled Marcia Clark… I learned a lot. Turn to Page Two to give you an idea.” Page 2 was a lengthy list of personal facts about Marcia Clark and her family.
It is a convoluted irony of the media age that Marcia Clark prosecuted a regular citizen who stalked and killed a famous person, then prosecuted a famous person (O.J. Simpson) who stalked and killed a regular citizen, then became famous herself, and is now the focus of a stalker.
▪ ▪ ▪
Media-age assassins are not unlike another uniquely American icon: the daredevil. If you understand Evel Kneivel, you can understand Robert Bardo. Like those of a daredevil, all of an assassin’s worth and accomplishment derive from one act, one moment. This is also true for most heroes, but assassins and daredevils are not people who rise courageously to meet some emergency. The assassin and the daredevil create their own emergencies.
The daredevil fantasizes about the glory of accomplishing his stunt, the fame that waits for him on the other side of the canyon. The media has portrayed the daredevil as a courageous hero, but what if someone got the motorcycle, painted it special, got the colorful leather pants and jacket, got the ramps, notified the press, got all set up at the canyon… and then didn’t do it? Suddenly he’s not cool and special; he’s pathetic. Now he’s a guy whose silly name and goofy accessories add up to geek, not hero. The whole thing loses its luster if he doesn’t do it.
Arthur Bremer wrote, “I want a big shot and not a little fat noise. I am tired of writing about it, about what I was going to do, about what I failed to do, about what I failed to do again and again. It bothers me that there are about 30 guys in prison now who threatened the Pres and we never heard a thing about them.”
Assassins, you see, do not fear they are going to jail—they fear they are going to fail, and Bardo was no different. He had gotten all the components together: He had studied other assassins, he had researched his target, made his plan, gotten the gun, written the letters to be found after the attack. But like the daredevil, he was just a guy who worked at Jack in the Box until he made that jump, until the wheels left the ground, until he killed someone famous. Everything that goes with fame was waiting for him on the other side of the canyon, where, in his words, he’d finally be “a peer” with celebrities.
When he found Rebecca Schaeffer and was face-to-face with her, he had all the credentials of an assassin, but he couldn’t pick up his prize until he shot her. Since he was fourteen years old, he had known what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he got there on the steps of Rebecca Schaeffer’s apartment building. Robert Bardo was a career assassin, a killer for whom the victim was secondary to the act.
Some people put years into their heroic accomplishments; assassins do not. While stalking Richard Nixon, Bremer wrote, “I’m as important as the start of WWI. I just need the little opening, and a second of time.” Such narcissism is a central feature of every assassin, and like many of their characteristics, it is in us all to some degree. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Denial of Death, Ernest Becker observes that narcissism is universal. Becker says every child’s “whole organism shouts the claim of his natural narcissism. It is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation.” Becker says we all look for heroics in our lives, adding that in some people “it is a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”
But the howls for glory of assassins had been unanswered in their mundane pre-attack lives. The assassin might be weird or unusual, but we cannot say we don’t understand his motives, his goal. He wants what Americans want: recognition, and he wants what all people want: significance. Peop
le who don’t get that feeling in childhood seek ways to get it in adulthood. It is as if they have been malnourished for a lifetime and seek to fix it with one huge meal.
The same search for significance is part of the motivation for the young gang member who kills, because violence is the fastest way to get identity. Murderer Jack Henry Abbott describes the “involuntary pride and exhilaration all convicts feel when they are chained up hand and foot like dangerous animals. The world has focused on us for a moment. We are somebody capable of threatening the world.”
Ernest Becker writes, “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society.”
Well, Bremer, Hinckley, and Bardo all admitted it, with devastating results. Each first aspired to make it in Hollywood but gave that up for a faster, easier route to identity. They knew that with a single act of fraudulent heroism, with one single shot, they could be forever linked to their famous targets.
▪ ▪ ▪
Like all endeavors, assassination is reached by a certain protocol, certain hoops one jumps through. Many of these are detectable, observable hoops that leave a trail we can follow. Assassins teach each other, each learning something from the ones before. When I worked on the Bardo case, I was struck by the fact that he did so many things that Hinckley had done before him. The two young men had early life experiences with some similarities, and that’s no surprise, but the similarities of the choices they made later are nothing short of remarkable. For example, Hinckley knew that Mark Chapman had brought along a copy of Catcher in the Rye on his trip to murder John Lennon, so he brought one with him on his trip to shoot President Reagan. Bardo brought the same book along when he killed Rebecca Schaeffer, later telling me he read it “to find out how it had made Chapman kill John Lennon.”
Look at this list of things that John Hinckley did before shooting President Reagan:
wrote letters to an actress
wrote songs
took a job in a restaurant
read Catcher in the Rye
criss-crossed the country
stalked public figures other than his final target
traveled to Hollywood
kept a diary
studied other assassins
visited the Dakota Building in New York City to see the place where John Lennon was murdered
considered an attention-getting suicide
sold off his possessions
wrote letters to be found after the attack
took a bus to the attack location
stalked his final target at more than one site before the attack
brought along Catcher in the Rye
didn’t shoot at the first opportunity
left the scene after the first encounter
waited about a half hour and then shot his target
Amazingly, Bardo also did every one of the things on this list. There are more than thirty striking similarities in the behavior of the two men. The predictability of pre-attack behaviors of assassins was confirmed by the work of Park Dietz, the psychiatrist and sociologist who first came to national attention as the lead prosecution expert in the Hinckley case. In 1982, when I was on the President’s Advisory Board at the Department of Justice, I proposed a research project to study people who threaten and stalk public figures. Dietz was the expert we chose to run the project. From this and his other pioneering work, he assembled ten behaviors common to modern assassins. Nearly every one of them:
1. Displayed some mental disorder
2. Researched the target or victim
3. Created a diary, journal, or record
4. Obtained a weapon
5. Communicated inappropriately with some public figure, though not necessarily the one attacked
6. Displayed an exaggerated idea of self (grandiosity, narcissism)
7. Exhibited random travel
8. Identified with a stalker or assassin
9. Had the ability to circumvent ordinary security
10. Made repeated approaches to some public figure
In protecting public figures, my office focuses on those who might try to kill clients, of course, but also those who might harm clients in other ways, such as through harassment or stalking. In evaluating cases, we consider a hundred and fifty pre-incident indicators beyond those covered above.
If we had to choose just one PIN we’d want to be aware of above all others, it would be the one we call ability belief. This is a person’s belief that he can accomplish a public-figure attack. Without it, he cannot. In fact, to do anything, each of us must first believe on some level that we can do it. Accordingly, society’s highest-stakes question might be: “Do you believe you can succeed at shooting the president?” Would-be assassins won’t always answer this question truthfully, of course, nor will society always get the opportunity to ask it, but to the degree it can be measured, ability belief is the preeminent pre-incident indicator for assassination.
If the truthful answer is “No, what with all those Secret Service agents and special arrangements, I couldn’t get within a mile of the guy,” the person cannot shoot the president. Of course, this isn’t a permanently reliable predictor, because ability belief can be influenced and changed.
If, for example, I believe I could not possibly dive into the ocean from a two-hundred-foot-high cliff, then I cannot. But a coach might influence my belief. Encouragement, teaching of skills that are part of the dive, taking of lesser dives—first from 20 feet, then 30, then 50—would all act to change my ability belief. No single influence is more powerful than social proof, seeing someone else succeed at the thing you might have initially believed you could not do. Seeing a diver propel himself off an Acapulco cliff, sail down into the Pacific and then emerge safely dramatically influences my belief that it can be done, and that I could do it.
Similarly, the enormous media attention showered on those who attack public figures bolsters ability belief in other. It says, “You see; it can be done.” Little wonder that in the period following a widely publicized attack, the risk of other attacks goes up dramatically. It is precisely because one encourages another that public-figure attacks cluster (President Ford—two within two weeks; President Clinton—two within six weeks).
Society appears to be promoting two very different messages:
1) It is nearly impossible to successfully attack a public figure, and if you do it and survive, you will be a pariah, despised, reviled, and forgotten.
2) It is very easy to successfully attack a public figure, and if you do it, you’ll not only survive, but you’ll be the center of international attention.
Since we are discussing what amounts to a form of advertising, information following a public-figure attack could be presented quite differently than it is now. Law-enforcement personnel speaking with the press about a criminal who has been apprehended have tended to describe the arrest in terms of their victory over a dangerous, powerful, well-armed and clever adversary: “Investigators found three forty-five caliber handguns and more than two hundred rounds of ammunition in his hotel room. Since the perpetrator is a skilled marksman, it was touch and go when we stormed the building.”
This attaches to the criminal a kind of persona doubtless attractive to many who might consider undertaking a similar crime. I have recommended a different approach on my cases, one that casts the offender in a far less glamorous light. Imagine this press conference following the arrest of a person who was planning an assassination:
Reporter: Would you describe the man as a loner?
Federal agent: More of a loser, actually.
Reporter: Did he put up any resistance when taken into custody?
Federal agent: No, we found him hiding in the bathroom—in the clothes hamper.
Reporter: Could he have succeeded in the assassination?
Federal agent: I doubt it very much. He’s never succeeded at anything else.
Ideally, the ag
ent would always switch the focus to the people and special methods that act in opposition to assassins, keeping the focus off the criminal.
Federal agent: I want to commend the eight-man team of special agents whose investigative work and application of new technologies made the apprehension possible so rapidly.
I propose that we don’t show the bullets on the bureau in the seedy hotel room; show instead the dirty underwear and socks on the bathroom floor. I propose that we don’t arrange photo opportunities that show the offender being escorted by ten federal agents from a helicopter to a motorcade of waiting cars. Show him instead in a mangy T-shirt, handcuffed to a pipe in some gloomy corridor, watched by one guard, and a woman at that. Not many identity-seeking would-be assassins would see those images and say, “Yeah, that’s the life for me!”
Conversely, guarded by federal agents (just like the president), whisked into waiting helicopters (just like the president), his childhood home shown on TV (just like the president), the type of gun he owned fired on the news by munitions experts extolling its killing power, the plans he made described as “meticulous”—these presentations promote the glorious aspects of assassination and other media crimes. Getting caught for some awful violence should be the start of oblivion, not the biggest day of one’s life.