EDMONTON - Years may pass before Travis Baumgartner gets his day in court, finally giving the 21-year-old security guard the chance to answer charges in connection with the shooting deaths of three co-workers and the wounding of a fourth.
According to a criminal behaviour expert, speculations about possible motivations — and feelings of revulsion and incomprehension — about the June 15 shootings might say more about us than the crime itself.
“There’s nothing bizarre about it,” said Stanton Samenow, a forensic psychologist in Alexandria, Va. “That it was horrible, that it was unexpected, that it is despicable — you can use all those words — but not bizarre, because you have a mind that functions in a particular way.”
While writing his book, Inside the Criminal Mind, Samenow conducted hundreds of interviews with convicted criminals. And in the months to come, Samenow said, investigators will likely focus on Baumgartner’s relationships, his handling of money and history of employment, and any conflicts he might have had.
When it comes to explaining criminal behaviour, appearances can be deceiving. Samenow said friends and family often talk about a “very gregarious, charming, winsome” person not capable of such actions, while being unaware of the “other dark side of the personality that remains buried.”
Samenow has dealt with those who commit crimes for “the shock, the high, the high voltage of just doing it,” people who harbour homicidal thoughts “for months, even years” before an opportunity presents itself. Homicide is rarely someone’s first serious illegal act, he said.
While few details have surfaced thus far about Baumgartner, Samenow thinks “there has to be more to this story,” with social media postings offering some insights into what investigators might uncover.
By the time Baumgartner’s name was released Friday, police were already taking steps to investigate his Internet use, according to the sealing order for a search warrant of his family’s Sherwood Park home.
Baumgartner described himself on the Plenty of Fish dating website as “very laid back” and a “great guy” who intended “to become a CEO of a major corporation and use my power to help everyone I can.”
But other entries seemed darker. The banner from his Facebook page featured a flesh and skull logo from Gears of War — a first-person shooting video game — also found on a decal ripped from Baumgartner’s truck. And just two weeks before the shootings, Baumgartner openly mused on Facebook about whether he would “make the 6 o’clock news if I just started poping (sic) people off.”
He later made oblique references to the Joker, the homicidal super-villain in The Dark Knight, a film that opens with a violent bank heist.
“You know what I noticed,” Baumgartner wrote, paraphrasing the film two days before the shooting. “If I say a gangbanger or a truck full of soldiers will die tomorrow ... nobody panics. But if I tell them one little old mayor will die ... WELL THEN EVERYONE LOOSES (sic) THEIR MINDS!!!?!?”
A day before the shootings, Baumgartner took to Twitter with another bit from the movie: “One night she grabs a kitchen knife to defend herself, now he doesn’t like that ... not ... one ... bit.”
But MacEwan University criminologist Michael Gulayets believes it’s possible to read too much into Baumgartner’s online comments. Similar words and violent fantasies are written online every day.
“There’s probably not much there,” Gulayets said. “A lot of young men his age and in his social circumstances are probably making similar distasteful comments, but of course never commit crimes.”
Young males are the demographic most likely to commit violent crimes, but Gulayets said this case remains “highly unusual.”
He has never heard of a security guard turning against fellow officers. And unlike other university or school shootings, the setting seems almost incidental. Gulayets said the search for reasons for the crime may prove futile. It’s not an obvious crime of passion, and Gulayets said it doesn’t make much sense as a robbery.
“We may not morally agree with that behaviour, but we can see the rationale of stealing a lot of money,” Gulayets said. “But his attempts at getting away with it are rather poor. He didn’t get very far, and it makes you wonder if there are other motives.”
Samenow doesn’t read too much into Baumgartner’s capture — less than two days after the killings — when he was found in his own truck, without a passport, trying to cross into the U.S. just southwest of Abbotsford, B.C. A lack of detailed planning says little about motivation, since violent criminals can often be “super-optimistic” about their chances of getting away with it.
“They focus on committing the crime,” Samenow said. “In their own minds, they’re certain they’ll get away with it and there’s a kind of tunnel vision, and they shut off from their thinking the possible consequences.”
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