Understanding The Mind Of Adam Lanza: Insights From His Disturbing Audio And Writings

Everyone is talking this week about the creepy audio recording of Newtown, CT shooter Adam Lanza sharing his views on Travis, a chimpanzee who became famous after tearing the face off of a woman in 2009. Lanza posted the audio clip on a mass-killer website, devoted in large part to the Columbine shooters, on December 20, 2011. But lost in the public expression of shock at hearing the articulate, deliberate voice of the infamous killer for the first time, are the nearly 300 other postings on that site by Lanza, which, along with that audio recording, provide the clearest answer yet to the question many of us have been asking since that horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012: Why?

We all knew Adam Lanza was twisted with mental illness. In my book, Newtown: an American Tragedy, I document, through almost a decade of his mother’s emails, Adam’s downward spiral as he gradually lost his tenuous connection to reality. In 2010, his illness became so severe he broke off relations with almost everyone in his life and secluded himself in his bedroom, where he spent lonely hours playing violent video games and obsessing over mass murderers.

However, what remained unknown was the harrowing depth of the despair and paranoia that fueled his delusions. Adam joined the mass-killer website, Shocked Beyond Belief, creating the screen name “Smiggles” on December 29, 2009. It wasn’t long before he began to express his paranoia, and his belief that society was trying to manipulate him into following an immoral value system that led millions to both mental and physical sickness.

When Adam talked about that chimp’s act of violence that nearly killed a woman as an enviable act of self-liberation during his call-in on Anarchist Radio, a counter-culture Oregon radio station, on December 20, 2011, less than a year before he walked into Sandy Hook, he also laid out his justification for mass shootings: “Look at what civilization did to [Trevor]. It had the same exact effect on him as it has on humans,” Adam told the host in a steady, machine-like voice.

His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation for. Adam understood, felt, that chimpanzee's anger and frustration over trying to conform to society’s values. Adam, whose illness made bright lights, loud sounds, and certain textures unbearable, never had the opportunity to experience the best of what society had to offer.

In his posts on Shocked Beyond Belief, Adam may have also answered the most perplexing question: Why did he target children? The conventional wisdom in law enforcement is that Adam was just trying to get the most kills, but his postings suggest another answer. In Adam's Matrix-like world, children were indoctrinated from a very young age to become part of a sick machine that was self-perpetuating.

By killing them, he’d be saving them from the hell he was enduring. This disturbing mindset, combined with his isolation and mental health issues, paints a frightening picture of a young man who felt disconnected from reality and society.