The Many Faces of Murder

Even if you press him hard, Jim McBrair still isn't sure which one he shot first. In court, the police said it must have been his 15-year-old sister-in-law, Barbie. But all Jim remembers is being dressed in his tan-plaid hunting parka, holding the .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle he'd picked up back at the house and standing in the darkened kitchen, not quite knowing why he was there. Suddenly, he spotted a shadowy figure moving toward him from the living room and he shot at it. He heard a scream and the kitchen filled with light and someone was coming through the door and Jim wheeled and fired again. Then he fired again and again, the bullets punching the figure back over the telephone table. The tiny cabin exploded. People were running about, wailing and yelling, trying to get away from the man with the gun. And as if it were one of those little shooting galleries in a penny arcade, where a bear with the light in his shoulder lurches in and out of cardboard trees, Jim automatically pulled the trigger every time something came into view. Finally, his 15-shot magazine spent, he walked out the kitchen door into the chilled winter night, jamming fresh rounds into his rifle as he went.

That's when his wife, Carol, came to him, sobbing. "Please, Jim," she said, "let me get you some help." McBrair slipped and fell on the ice in the driveway. Still pleading, Carol grabbed the gun barrel and began wrestling with her husband.

"Every time I pulled on it," Jim remembers, "it seemed like the gun was going off. She said, 'You've hit me,' and she put her hands on top of her head and kneeled down and she said to finish her off." Instead, Jim went back toward his car. But as he watched Carol limp into the cabin, he remembered a rule his father had laid down on their first hunting trips: Never leave a wounded animal to suffer. So Jim returned to the cabin, where he found Carol leaning on an ironing board, her back to him, and it all began again. This time, he didn't stop shooting until he felt something tugging at his hunting pants.

He looked down and saw his seven-year-old daughter, Kristie. "Daddy, Daddy," she said, "please don't shoot any more." At that, Jim McBrair finally quit, tucked his two children into bed and went to tell his father what he'd done.

The only sound then was from the wind as it swept across the frozen lake into the trees. In the cabin, four people were dead: Jim's 24-year-old wife, Carol; her father, Marv, who ran the Pontiac agency in town; her sister, Barbie; and a fourth girl police couldn't identify until they took Jim back to look. She was Cheryl Oleson, a 15-year-old baby sitter. She was found lying face down in one of the beds, her head cradled in her arm. Beside her, where Jim had put them before he'd left, were the children, Kristie and Kathy, who was five. They were unharmed and fast asleep when the police arrived.

The bodies were barely cold that March Sunday in 1967 when the news began rolling out into the tiny farm community of Wautoma, Wisconsin. Bodie Severins, who knew Jim as well as anyone, said that he and the rest of the fellows were at a roadhouse called Camp Waushara that afternoon, drinking beer and watching a television set behind the bar. It was there they'd last seen Jim the night before. He was standing in front of the picture window that looks out over Silver Lake and he seemed then as if nothing were wrong. Bob Leitz remembers talking to him about a dog Leitz had sold him and Severins remembers asking Jim if he planned to stop off for a party at a place called the Coop after the bar closed. The jukebox was blaring with the usual Saturday-night din of rock 'n' roll and the place was filled with shouts and great whoops of laughter. The only untoward thing was an incident with Carol's brother, who came in around midnight and poked Jim hard in the shoulder. There were some angry words, but nobody heard what was said. Severins remembers someone remarking, "Oh, oh, looks like we got somethin' goin' here." But Carol's brother left and Jim went back to listening to his friends talk.

Now, the next day, Sheriff Virgil Batterman had let just enough news seep out, so that as the fellows drifted in to watch the game, they could add their own special pieces to the story. "Everyone," said Severins, "was just sitting around, and one guy would come in and say this and another, that. No one really knew all about it, only the part about Carol. We just stood around, shaking our heads; that's all we did. The first reaction, I would say, was just shock."

At the time, shock seemed the most logical reaction to the crimes of 27-year-old James Dennis McBrair. Blond, straight, fairly tall, with close-cropped hair--his mother called him Butchie--he had the good looks of a Kirk Douglas but with a softer gaze and gentle blue eyes. He came from strong Scotch-Irish stock; his father's family had been farming in the central part of Wisconsin for 100 years. As a boy, he worked hard, helping his father and mother till the family's 400 acres of cucumbers, which they sold for pickles. Jim, his mother said, "could plow like a charm." And often he'd work from four in the morning until ten at night, especially when his father was drunk and couldn't do his share of the work. No one in town held it against Jim, Sr., that he drank. He was a hard man and a good one, people thought, but he had a rage in him and sometimes, when he was drinking, he would abuse his family. Jim remembers getting mad at his father, but only once or twice, when he was "hurting Mom." But he never struck his father, he is quick to add--not once.

If life was grueling on the farm, it was eased by the hunting and fishing trips Jim would take with his father and by his daytime escape to Tri-County High School nearby. His high school coach, Chet Schraeder, who thought highly of him, recalled that the only unusual thing about Jim was that he had no particular goals in life. And he had no abiding interests other than hunting, which he thought he might be able to indulge in by getting into conservation work. One thing he was good at was being popular and in this he excelled--a B student all four years, vice-president of his class each year and king of the junior prom. In his junior year, he sang the lead in a Forties-style high school play about going to college and wearing beanies and raccoon coats. It was called The Singing Freshman and Jim was the freshman.

He was also a football hero, a basketball hero and a baseball hero. This is what Wautoma remembers best about Jim McBrair. And, as he sits in his cell in the Wisconsin State Prison at Waupun, Jim remembers fondly the time in high school he scored 36 points in the 1958 basketball play-off with High but saw victory snatched from his team in the last three seconds of the game, when a Winneconne player in desperation hurled the ball from center court and scored a miraculous winning basket. And he remembers the time, during the fall of his last year in high school as all-conference right end on the football team, that Johnny McAlpin, the Blatz Beer distributor, came over after a game and offered to help pay Jim's way through the state university.

Johnny McAlpin was the last nice thing to happen to Jim McBrair. From the girl he got pregnant and married that year, canceling his hope of going to college, through his quick divorce the following fall, the jobs he couldn't seem to keep, an Army stint he hated so much his mother had to get him a discharge with a hardship plea and, finally, to his marriage to Carol, he seemed caught in a chaotic downdraft that swept him, relentlessly, to the final tragedy.

Now, three years after the murders, while Wautoma is still puzzling over the question of how the high school hero next door could commit such an atrocity, the Jim McBrairs of this country are becoming increasingly and depressingly familiar to a growing number of researchers who are looking into the puzzling phenomenon of multiple murders committed coldly and methodically by seemingly average persons who one day go berserk. From prom king to football star, from altar boy to eagle scout, there isn't an icon in the American success story that doesn't seem to provide camouflage for such a killer.

Only the most spectacular make the national headlines. In 1949, a well-mannered, Bible-reading war veteran named Howard Unruh walked out of his house in Camden, New Jersey, and one by one shot 13 people during a 12-minute rampage. In 1965, it was Duane Earl Pope, 22, a quiet-spoken star athlete at McPherson College in Kansas and former president of his high school class, who one day walked into the Farmers State Bank in Big Springs, Nebraska, made three employees lie down on the floor and shot each of them with a pistol as casually as he might have filled out a (continued on page 209)Faces of Murder (continued from page 98) deposit slip. In 1966, it was Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, architecture student, former altar boy, youngest eagle scout in B.S.A. history, crack shot in the Marine Corps and husband of a beauty queen, who stabbed his wife and mother, took, the elevator to the 27th floor, then climbed the stairs to the top of the tower in the middle of the University of Texas campus and killed 14 more, including an unborn baby, and wounded 31 others. In 1967, it was Leo Held, 40, a balding lab technician, school-board member, boy-scout leader, churchgoer and affectionate father of four, who walked into the paper mill where he worked in Lock Haven. Pennsylvania, shot to death five of his fellow employees and wounded four others, then killed one neighbor and wounded two before being killed by police. Two years ago, it was a 33-year-old cub-scout leader and little-league coach named Martin Fitzpatrick from the tiny upstate New York village of Martville, who one night held up a service station in nearby Sherrill and shot and killed two policemen when he was stopped during his getaway.

Psychiatrists are fond of reassuring us that murder is the product of aberrancy. "No normal person will commit murder," said the late Dr. Ralph Banay, former head psychiatrist at Sing Sing prison. "Normally, people are able to control any impulse that is dangerous to themselves or to other people; they have sufficient defenses against the force to kill." Which tells us only that normal people don't act abnormally; that if they do, then, obviously, they're abnormal. The confusing and frightening thing is that murderers frequently appear in the guise of outwardly normal people who do not fit the image of the "bestial killer" or the "vermin in human form" described by J. Edgar Hoover. The public can understand a Mad Dog Coll or a Two-Gun Crowley as a psychopath for whom life has no meaning and who would as soon knock off a gas-station attendant as cash a bad check. Indeed, tracking them down and bringing them to justice is satisfying, if for no other reason than that it allows the public to punish itself in surrogate for the murderous urges that lurk in its own unconscious. "Society loves its crime," says psychiatrist Walter Bromberg, "but hates its criminals."

Similarly, the public can understand murder when committed by flat-out maniacs, who, after all, are not responsible for their actions. Letting them live in mental institutions is the humane thing to do. It's also the self-interested thing to do, because in recognizing that they are sick and we are merciful, we allow ourselves an escape route, should our own darker thoughts burst above the surface.

But the McBrairs, the Whitmans, the Popes and the Helds stir feelings of uneasiness. To the stranger who reads of them in the newspapers, even to the casual acquaintance who works with them or drinks beer with them, often they seem like decent enough fellows whose bad qualities, if any, do not mark them as potential madmen. The discomforting inference is that every average person with average problems harbors somewhere within him a similar demon that simply has not made its presence known.

This fear, like the fear of being killed, is grounded in a number of misconceptions about the nature of murder, the kinds of people who commit it and the kinds of people who become their victims.

Though the McBrair case may seem uncomfortably familiar, it is a statistical rarity. It warrants attention chiefly because it fits so neatly into our murder mythology that combines facts with cultural traditions and folk beliefs in order to explain a type of human behavior both threatening and mysterious. The fact is that people do kill one another. Cultural tradition holds this to be evil--and probably part of man's basic nature. Folk belief concludes that murder must therefore be the work of either an evil person or a good person who is overwhelmed by the evil impulses we all possess. The trouble with this devil theory of murder is that it has almost no bearing on the realities of homicide as a continuing and complex social problem; yet it still influences the thinking of the police, the press, the public and even social scientists. Traditionally, the public has imagined the majority of murderers to be bona fide criminals--men who kill simply to get what they want or make good an escape or leave no witnesses to a crime. This murderer is the cartoon character with bent nose, unshaven jaw, cap pulled down and collar turned up, poking a pistol into the ribs of an honest citizen walking home on some dark street. The killer who does not fit this stereotype is usually relegated to another: the malevolent stranger, belly full of booze, who provokes an argument and then whips out a gun or a knife.

This is a badly distorted picture of homicide--one that has been created chiefly by lawyers, lawmakers and law enforcers and promulgated by superficial journalistic accounts, e.g., "Police Seek Gunman in Tavern Death." In a murder trial, any good defense attorney seeks to prove, or at least to suggest, that his client's deadly deed resulted from impulse and circumstance and not from premeditation. Short news stories frequently convey nothing beyond the fact that somebody was found dead on the street as the result of an argument. At the same time, legislators and police tend to translate homicide statistics into "crime waves" and "crime in the streets," for the simple reason that this type of violence often persuades voters and taxpayers of the need for tougher laws or higher police appropriations.

Only in the past few years has this picture of the robber-killer and the homicidal stranger undergone some change. Going beyond the raw statistics, criminologists began to study actual cases and made the rather startling discovery that one's murderer is most often not a stranger at all, but a friend or a relative. For example, of the 13,650 murders committed in 1968, 42.2 percent occurred during arguments between acquaintances. An additional 33 percent involved even closer relationships: one spouse killing another (13.7 percent), parents killing their children (3.3 percent), more-distant relatives killing one another (8.7 percent), and lovers doing the same (7.2 percent). Only about one murder in four stems from the commission of some other crime or is the work of a total stranger. In his extensive study of murder in Philadelphia, sociologist Marvin Wolfgang discovered that, statistically, wives face more danger in their bedrooms from gun-wielding husbands than they do from strangers lurking in dark alleys. For husbands, the highest-risk area is the kitchen, where the wife has access to her butcher knife.

Compared with relatives and acquaintances, the professional criminal actually represents a surprisingly minor threat. Of the 986 murders recorded in New York City in 1968, only 83, or less than nine percent, were committed during muggings or holdups. Only 5 were committed by burglars and rapists accounted for 12.

If people are generally misinformed about who kills, they are equally misguided about where murders occur. More and more, researchers are finding evidence indicating that while murder may occur more frequently in the cities, its roots are rural. A study in St. Louis comparing murderers with sex criminals and chronic lawbreakers found that the one common denominator shared by the killers--and by none of the others--was an upbringing in the country. This appears to be supported by the fact that the South--which contains more than one quarter of the country's population and where most people are from relatively small towns and cities--accounts for nearly half the murders in the United States. In contrast, only 17 percent come from the highly urbanized Northeast. And while New York has the largest number of murders in the country, its rate--8.5 per 100,000--is relatively low. Houston's is 14.7; Baltimore's, 13.6; St. Louis', 11.8; Cleveland's, 9.6. What's more, no matter where you live, if you're black, your chances of getting murdered are about ten times greater than if you're white. Negroes, while comprising only 12 percent of the population, are the victims of 54 percent of the murders. And in some cities, the rate for a black male between the ages of 25 and 34 reaches an incredible 100 per 100,000. As for the murder trend over the years, it is not quite so depressing as J. Edgar Hoover would like to paint it. One of his favorite statistics indicates that since 1960, the murder rate has climbed a frightening 52 percent. What he neglects to mention, however, is that until 1958, the rate had been declining steadily for many years and that in 1968, at 6.8 per 100,000, it was still only half the rate of the early Thirties. And when you consider that the younger population, which accounts for most of the violence, is growing much faster than other age groups, the murder rate is even lower than the statistics imply.

The revelations of Wolfgang and others--that considering the deadliness of our friends, we don't need enemies--were surprising, indeed, and possessed sufficient irony to attract the attention of journalists and academicians alike. But if these findings helped correct the myth of the homicidal stranger, they provided the foundations for a new one: that the killer is an average law-abiding citizen who one day blows his cool.

This revised murder myth is almost as distant from reality as is the one it replaces. After conducting extensive studies of violent crime and victim-offender relationships, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence came to the following conclusions:

• Serious assault and homicide are essentially the same crime. It's the fate of the victim rather than the behavior of the assailant that distinguishes them. The two crimes, therefore, cannot be meaningfully separated in studies of violent behavior.

• Violent crime is primarily a big-city phenomenon, concentrated in the slums and committed by males between the ages of 15 and 24.

• Homicide and assault occur disproportionately among blacks living in urban ghettos and, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, this type of violence is overwhelmingly intraracial.

• The victims of assault and murder in the cities generally have the same characteristics as the offenders.

• By far the greatest proportion of all serious violence is committed by repeaters.

From these and other recent studies has emerged a more realistic picture of the killer, of his victim and of homicide itself. Instead of the "average law-abiding citizen" whose deed is out of character, the majority of murderers are persons with previous arrest records, often for other violent crimes, who cap their careers of antisocial behavior with a final, fatal deed. More surprising, the majority of their victims have arrest records as well and in many cases appear to precipitate their own murders by threats or provocative actions. In most cases, both the killer and his victim were drinking prior to the dispute that ended in murder and they were likely to be acquainted or related.

In short, people who kill and people who get killed tend to have a lot in common. Most of them live within what Wolfgang has called a "subculture of violence"--in urban ghettos or rural honky-tonk society--where physical aggression is often considered an appropriate, even requisite response to certain situations; where frustrated, deprived, angry young people live on the periphery of crime and pursue a life style that ultimately puts them at one end or the other of a bullet.

However, if killers and their victims seem to belong to a murder-prone class of people, they do not necessarily conform to the public's image of brawling barflies and shrieking wives. Such persons tend to represent what psychologist Edwin I. Megargee has described as the undercontrolled personality--one who has a low tolerance for frustration or provocation and who readily vents his temper and aggressive impulses. When such people do commit murder, it's more by chance than by choice: The desire to retaliate, humiliate, defeat or punish an antagonist rarely includes a genuine determination to kill. The murders that result from these "acts of passion" usually are the result of miscalculation or no calculation--a knife or a pistol was too close at hand, a whiskey bottle proved harder than the head it cracked. More genuinely "murderous" is the person whom Dr. Megargee describes as overcontrolled--one who constantly fights with himself to contain his temper and aggressiveness, until it bursts in what can only be called a homicidal rage. He is the person who rarely exchanges insults or black eyes but one day stands over the body of another, coldly and methodically firing shot after shot until the gun is empty.

Dr. Megargee compares the undercontrolled person to a low dam that easily lets water--or aggression--spill over the top. On the other hand, he says that "the chronically overcontrolled type is very different. He is like a dam that is both too high and too rigid. There is no water in the dam that can be discharged and forgotten, no emergency bypasses or spillways. Not a drop gets through and the people downstream are dry and careless, perhaps even contemptuous. The thought of disaster never occurs to them. But the pressure builds up and must finally have a vent. Since the structure was not built to handle major strains, one drop too many may cause a complete rupture and release the pent-up fury all at once."

In Jim McBrair's case, the dam was monumental. And if it existed merely to lull his friends into a false sense of security, it certainly accomplished its task. If there's one thing that everyone in Wautoma agrees on, it's that Jim McBrair never caused any trouble--until that one night. When asked what he was like, in fact, the people in town answer like members of a chorus. He was a mild-mannered guy. He never got into fights nor was he ever abusive. He was never mean and he seldom even became angry. The only time his father remembered his hitting anyone was when Jim was 12 years old and he beat up a boy who had socked his younger brother. Yet for Jim, the dam blew so fast and the fury burst forth with such a tremendous force that it scares him even today to think about it. "When I first got here," he says about prison, "I'd notice that people bringing me food would sort of edge away from me, as if they were frightened. And I'd say to myself. 'Damn, now, you've killed four people,' and sometimes I'd wonder just what sort of person I am. The psychiatrist told me I shouldn't think about it too much. He said that probably I'd never find the answer and it wasn't good to think about it."

While Jim doesn't think about it much, other people do and studies on the subject are legion. Some studies, such as those by psychiatrist Manfred Guttmacher in his book The Mind of the Murderer, provide a lively casebook of crime, filled with exotic killer types from fetishists to sadomasochists--but offer little basis for making generalities. Some present elaborate theories, ranging from Karl Menninger's "episodic dyscontrol"--a state in which a killer uses murder to ward off an attack of psychosis--to Frederick Wertham's "catathymic crisis," in which a person finds murder his only release from unbearable strain. Others look to the parents as the real culprits. In their study on Murderous Aggression by Children and Adolescents, Drs. William Easson and Richard Steinhilber see the parents as a pair of Freudian Fagins who unconsciously use offspring to vent their own aggression--the child's act of murder becomes simply the carrying out of his parents' inner-felt hostility. Then there are the more traditional parental failings: weak father, strong mother; overstrict father, overloving mother. Dr. Shervert Frazier, a psychiatrist at Columbia University's Psychiatric Institute, found in his examination of six killers in Minnesota that "remorseless physical brutality" was a common experience. This was not just a parental penchant for the strap. One of Frazier's killers as a boy was continually beaten black and blue by both his father and his mother; another was beaten while stripped naked and hung upside down by his feet. "It's hard," says Dr. Frazier, "when you've been treated cruelly and brutally not to break down and do the same to someone else."

There is little doubt, of course, that the brain damage suffered by Richard Speck--his prison psychiatrist toted up no fewer than eight times when he suffered head injuries severe enough to make him lose consciousness--had so weakened his resistance to violent impulses that his mental responsibility for the murder of eight Chicago nurses was decidedly diminished. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to be electrocuted. And recent studies at the Harvard Medical School found evidence of brain damage or malfunction in about half of a prison sampling of aggressive inmates. Yet the physical and the psychic are so intertwined that neither the organic theory of murder favored by some medical doctors nor the environmental theory favored by sociologists can claim supremacy. "Our organic theory doesn't account for all violent crimes," says Dr. Frank Ervin, one of the Harvard researchers, "and neither does the prevailing emphasis on environmental factors. The two influences undoubtedly overlap." Sometimes, figuring just where the blame does lie is itself a complicated task. The autopsy performed on Charles Whitman after he was killed by the Texas police revealed a small brain tumor. However, his life until the murders had been such an emotional slugfest with his father that Dr. Frazier, one of the doctors appointed by the state to study the case, considers the evidence of brain damage irrelevant. "You don't need that tumor to explain his murders," says Dr. Frazier. "He had enough other things going for him."

Similarly, the chromosome theory--that murderous behavior can be attributed to the presence in a killer's genetic make-up of an extra male chromosome--is now being labeled an equally unreliable test. There seems little question that the XYY imbalance--normally, the male gene contains one female chromosome (X) and one male chromosome (Y)--does exist more frequently in certain prison populations than in the outside world. For example, last January, Dr. Lawrence Razavi of the Stanford Medical School released a study in which he found six cases of imbalance among 83 men at the Treatment Center for Sexual Offenders in Bridgewater, Massachusetts--an incidence 35 times higher than the 1 in 500 found in the population at large. But he and others who have made similar studies are still unwilling to accept the genetic imbalance alone as a direct cause of antisocial behavior. In the first place, the things a chromosome imbalance does lead to--height a full six inches above the average, a propensity for skin problems such as acne--would only help compound the social difficulties faced by a man already plagued by emotional problems. "He may be teased," says researcher Dr. Gerald Clark of the Elwyn Institute in Pennsylvania, "and react with resentment and antisocial behavior. Even if his behavior were no more aggressive than the others', his fearsome height and build could bias the courts or the psychiatrists to institutionalize him at a younger age than a small or normal-sized delinquent." In the second place, no study has been made of the estimated 200,000 XYY people living outside prison and presumably leading normal lives. In fact, between 1965, when the condition was discovered, and 1966, the cases of XYY imbalance uncovered were all in otherwise normal people with no criminal records or unusual behavior patterns. Their very existence would seem to indicate that the violence found in XYY males is rooted in more than genetic happenstance. "It now appears," says Dr. Clark, "that the XYY male in general has been falsely stigmatized."

Simply describing the killer's state, physical or mental, at the time he commits his crime is of little more than academic value unless scientists can also describe the milestones along the way, unless they can help set up some kind of early warning system to tip off people before the explosion occurs. Here, unfortunately, is where theories become more shadow than substance. For one thing, society obviously cannot lock up every person whom a psychiatrist--let alone a policeman or a neighbor--suspects of being a potential killer. For another, the murder signs themselves tend to be so fuzzy and indistinct as to defy accurate interpretation--partly because such signs are difficult to distinguish from the normal expressions of hostility or anger that most people never translate into violent action and partly because murder itself is not a singular phenomenon but a variety of behaviors, differently motivated and differently expressed, that have in common only their final, fatal result. In their study of abnormal brain function in violence-prone prison inmates, Harvard researchers found a penchant for, among other things, wife beating and getting into automobile accidents. But to begin tracking down potential murderers by forcing electroencephalograph tests on everyone who dents a fender or abuses his wife would be, if not unconstitutional, at least highly impractical. In his own study of 11 murderers in Texas, Columbia's Dr. Frazier found that they all had failed markedly to develop normal relationships with people as early as elementary school age. They would stand in corners and refuse to play with other children. This may be a handy index for identifying problem children--but killers, too? "Not all children who don't participate in games eventually murder," Dr. Frazier hastens to add.

Nevertheless, murderers will occasionally reveal their intentions. "People who are going to kill will telegraph it in some way," says psychologist Richard Bard of the City University of New York. "But it depends on who's at the other end of the wire. Often, the message falls on insensitive ears." Some of the telegraphy is almost unmistakable. For instance, four months before he went to the top of the tower, Whitman talked to a school psychiatrist and told the doctor of his vague desires to do exactly what he ended up doing.

Sometimes the message comes as a burst of violence that seems completely out of character with the murderer's usual personality. After Leo Held shot the 12 people in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, reporters found out that he wasn't as sweet a guy as he let on. A year earlier, he had admitted to a doctor his fears that people where he worked were plotting against him. Later, during a spat with a 71-year-old widow who lived next door, Held hauled off and beat the old lady with the limb of a tree. Whitman--eagle scout, former altar boy, hard-working student, etc.--similarly turned out, on closer inspection, to be a deeply troubled individual who alternated between heavy doses of stimulants and depressants, between wife beating and expressions of remorse, and who had few friends capable of tolerating his moods, bad temper and irresponsible behavior.

Psychologists are aware that persons like Held and Whitman often make good impressions on casual acquaintances, while abusing strangers or people close to them. This denotes a poorly adjusted personality wrestling with conflicts and tensions but able to escape them briefly when confronted with the need to impress someone favorably and temporarily. It is this description of a murderer that reporters are first to pick up when interviewing the landlord and fellow employees of someone who has exploded into violence. But there is another force at work here--a seemingly universal human trait that searches for irony in situations. Just as the ugly duckling must turn into a beautiful swan (or you don't have much of a story), the notorious bank robber or the murderous maniac is almost invariably described as a good boy, a well-behaved student, from a good home and wonderful parents--an average fellow who, through some quirk of fate or circumstance, turns out to be bad. But in reality, whenever the history of a celebrated murderer does not reveal him to be an outwardly aggressive or hostile person, it usually finds him to be an individual suffering monumental personal and emotional problems that he has attempted to conceal from others but to which he ultimately surrenders. Depending on the individual--whether he internalizes his problems or projects them--he may either retreat to the privacy of his bedroom and blow his brains out or, like some cornered animal, lash out blindly at anyone who comes in range.

In mass murder, the victims typically play no role in the drama that brings them death; they are merely the convenient targets of an indiscriminate rage. In felony murder--homicide resulting from the commission of another crime, such as armed robbery--the victim may invite death through injudicious behavior or be killed out of panic or sadistic impulse, but he is blameless with respect to motives and circumstance. However, in the majority of homicides, which occur among relatives or acquaintances, the victim may unwittingly or unconsciously collaborate in his own destruction--a fact that only recently has attracted the attention of criminologists.

It may be an oversimplification to say that without victims, there would be no murders; but equally inaccurate is the traditional notion that the killer is ipso facto the aggressor and the corpse the innocent victim. For instance, Dr. Banay found evidence that some victims may actually use their murderers to effect a suicide they cannot pull off themselves--a situation usually much too subtle to be revealed either in police records of a killing or in the trial of the murderer. In caricature, the crime might evolve out of the classic barroom drama: A self-hating person, projecting his hostility, becomes the pugnacious drunk who wiles away his unhappy evenings getting plastered and picking fights--until he finally encounters a hothead with a pistol. If he presses his attack despite the gun (or, in some cases, because of it), he may well achieve his goal of self-destruction in a manner that relieves him of any sense of personal responsibility. Equally classic is the domestic brawl that concludes with one spouse brandishing a knife or a pistol and the other saying, "You haven't got the guts to use it!" In short, homicide is often a response to aggression, physical or psychological, by an unstable individual who simply has been pushed too far.

In the countdown months leading up to the murders, McBrair was going through personal hell. The relationship with his wife, Carol, begun five years earlier as a casual flirtation during a Saint Patrick's Day party, was always in a precarious state near misery for both of them. They were separating constantly; it got to be so often that McBrair can still rattle oil the pattern. "First there would be family fights," he says, "started with little or no reason. Then she would begin the anti-Jim campaign with her mother. The third step would be filing papers for divorce and then she'd be seen in public with other men." McBrair was so afraid of a second divorce that he was incapable of asserting himself. He thought he knew where the blame lay--it was, in his eyes, always his own fault. "Maybe I was causing the trouble," he remembers thinking.

His wife, on the other hand, continued to go out with other men; and whenever he confronted her with evidence of her affairs, she flicked them back at him like darts, daring him to object. Once, when Carol was working at the Moose Inn as a barmaid and she and Jim were living at his parents' house, it was Jim's mother who threw her out when she came home from her job at three in the morning.

"I don't know, it seemed like wherever I turned, there were problems," says McBrair. "The house payments, the car payments, the telephone and electric bills. I'd try to think things out, but they all seemed so big and I'd try to solve one thing and a bigger one would take its place." It was then he experienced the "tired" feeling. "It was not sleepy-type tired," he recalls, "but the sick type, like I wanted to vomit--but not from the stomach, from the brain." Even wild escape attempts provided no relief. Once, he took Carol and fled to a small town in Canada with $1700 he'd taken from his and his father's joint checking account. He was planning to set up a resort bar and somehow make a break to freedom. They were back within a week. What's more, there was trouble about the $1700 check.

Finally, around Christmas 1966, Carol was instituting her last set of divorce papers. Bills were mounting. Jim had bought her a cottage on Fox Lake, in the woods. There were payments on that to be made. He injured his back on the job at a local sand-and-gravel company and after that, just didn't bother going in to work. He lost 20 pounds within a few months. Along with the tired feeling then came thoughts of suicide, of lying down in the middle of the highway and letting a truck run over him. He tried to talk to someone--the family court commissioner, the judge, the district attorney, the social worker and the priest. His friends in town, meanwhile, noticed little. Bodie Severins, of course, knew that Jim always seemed to be getting into one kind of mess or another, but the depths were unsuspected. As for the others, they wouldn't even listen. Working all week on the farms, they had no thought on Saturday night but to go into town and drink and get a girl. "The guys around here," explained one paunchy crewcut farmer who said he, too, was one of Jim's friends, "they don't want to hear a guy crying the blues on their shoulder all the time, telling them what a bad time he's having and this and that. When we come into town, we want to have fun."

The day before the murders, though, even Jim's father noticed that he was acting strange. The two were to go ice fishing up at Devil's Elbow on the Wisconsin River. Jim dragged himself along, but instead of going down to the river with his father, he stayed in the camper truck and slept. "He stayed there all day," his father remembers. "I sent a boy back, to tell him his dad wondered where he was. But he never came down."

The next day, Jim got up and worked inattentively on his income-tax return. This time, he told his father he didn't want to go fishing. In the afternoon, he went over to the cottage to see Carol and talk about their income tax and about what to do with the children. She was in a bad mood and baited him and picked at him. At one point, she answered the telephone and Jim heard her talking to one of the men she'd been going with. Jim told Carol that he hadn't thought she was still seeing him. Carol said she couldn't stop him from calling. Jim left and went over to the man's house. The man denied seeing Carol. Jim stopped in a phone booth on the way back and watched the man drive by with Carol's brother. He followed them to the cabin, then crept up to a window to watch. He saw the man stand behind Carol and put his arm around her. Then he nuzzled her with his cheek and they kissed. After the two men left, Jim walked in and confronted Carol with what he'd just seen. Didn't he notice that advances were made by the man? Carol asked. Jim said yes, but insisted that she could have turned him away. Then Carol got angry. She asked him who he thought her real lover was. "I think then I just blurted it out," says Jim. " 'I think, it's your attorney,' I said."

It was a wrong guess and it encouraged Carol to sharpen her taunts. "What happened to the 'great detective'?" she asked. "Didn't the great detective notice that on Thursday night I wasn't wearing any underpants?" Jim and Carol had made love on Thursday night. "Where do you think I was all the rest of the evening?" she asked. Even to Jim, the answer was clear. Then Carol asked: "And how do you like seconds on the old punching bag, dear?"

Jim spun his car out of the driveway and drove over to Camp Waushara. He remembers Severins asking him something about stopping off at the Coop after closing, then Carol's brother poking him in the shoulder and accusing him of causing trouble between Carol and the other man. Jim remembers telling him he'd been out at the cabin and had seen it all, so there was no use lying about it. Carol's brother left. Jim finished his beer and got into his car to drive to his parents' home. "I was going 90 miles an hour and I remember looking down at the speedometer and thinking it was like I wasn't even moving." When he got there, he went into the house to get his hunting clothes--insulated underwear and boots, the tanplaid jacket. "Colleen [his sister] asked me where I was going and I said something about a snowmobile party. I remember taking the .22 and taking shells out of the cabinet. I remember feeling along the stock to see if there was a loading ramp." Jim drove into town and bought some beer and then drove around some more, ending up in a parking lot across from the restaurant in Wautoma run by Carol's mother. "I could see through the window and could see Carol working in there. There was something crazy going through my head, something about going in and shooting myself in front of her mother and all the people. It was something about letting everyone see what these people had driven me to and bleeding all over the restaurant floor."

Then Carol came out and got into a car with some other people. Jim followed them to the cabin by the lake. And that's when the shooting began.

At the trial, the jury found Jim McBrair guilty of premeditated murder and, since Wisconsin has no capital punishment, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. This means, says his lawyer, a state legislator named Jon Wilcox, that if things work out, Jim could be free by 1979. In the meantime, he is happy where he is. He works as a nurse in the prison infirmary. During his spare time, he reads psychology books and when he gets out, he says, he's thinking of becoming a social worker and helping other people in trouble. As for Carol, he still loves her. "But, and maybe this sounds funny." Jim says, "since that day, I can't remember her face. I don't have a picture, but you'd think after being with someone for that long, you'd remember. But I don't. I don't remember what she looked like."

His father said that friends had been very good to the family since the tragedy. When Mr. McBrair went into the hospital more than a year ago, he got maybe 100 get-well cards from neighbors. But Jim's father didn't get well. He died last fall of stomach cancer. Before he died, he talked a little bit about his son. "I've asked myself why a thousand times," he said, "but I still don't have the answer. We go up to see Jim whenever we can, and he seems more relaxed now. He's earning a dime a day and I guess he feels no one is after him anymore."