The day before I saw the documentary The Killer Within, a quick news item on IMDB caught my eye. Something to the effect that, in the wake of the Virginia Tech Massacre, both the Meryl Streep film Dark Matter and the documentary The Killer Within had been indefinitely pushed back for release.
I don’t know anything about the Streep movie, but the day after this item posted, I had the opportunity to see The Killer Within, which apparently won’t be an option anytime too soon for a general audience. That’s a shame. Not because it’s a particularly good film, but because it is indeed eerily apropos of the recent massacre at Virginia Tech, and might provide some sort of illumination for some viewers.
Or perhaps not. The Killer Within is a difficult film to countenance, and might even be somewhat irresponsible, though not for the obvious reasons. In 1955, Bob Bechtel, an unassuming student at Swarthmore, executed one of his classmates, Holmes Stozier, with a shotgun while the latter slept. It was the first of a planned multiple homicide killing spree that never was fulfilled.
Committed to a mental institution and found not guilty by reason of insanity, Bechtel was released from state custody to resume his life, which, by all appearances, ended up being successful and happy. He’s a well-renowned professor at Arizona State, a devoted husband and father, living in bucolic bliss in Tucson. His wife and daughters know of his crime, and have variously come to terms with it as a specter that haunts all their lives, but also as something that happened in another life.
One day, Bob gets it in his head that he needs to confess this dark truth to his extended family, friends, colleagues, and students. His motives are vague. He claims that he’s lived a “lie” too long, that the psychological toll is starting to weigh too much on him. And yet, it’s unclear what he thinks these confessions will accomplish, except to disrupt other people’s lives unnecessarily; unnecessarily at best, maliciously at worst. No good can come of this.
Indeed, as Macky Alston’s The Killer Within progresses, Bob emerges not as the aw-shucks schlub he presents at the film’s outset, but as a deeply troubling borderline sociopath, seemingly devoid of the vestiges of any real guilt, displaying an almost nonchalant lack of affect when presented with his crime. He claims that constant bullying by the victim and others led him to his act of desperation, and all but explicitly admits that he hid behind his insanity defense.
He seems to still find his act justified, and he is unapologetic, even somewhat sadistic. He knows that he got away with murder.
Halfway through, The Killer Within shifts the focus onto Bob’s daughter Carrah, and how she has to come to terms with her father’s crime, yet again. She is beset by tough questions of guilt, the possibility of forgiveness, and even the question of her own existence, since her father’s freedom is the only reason she is alive. Unlike her father, she is gravely affected and tries to dig for some deeper understanding, even though it eludes her.
I initially admired The Killer Within for its refusal to dig for an agenda, to take a hard line. These questions, and their answers, are indeed unfathomable, as the wake of Virginia Tech reilluminates the issue of what drives one to kill his classmates. Indeed, the search for an answer, any answer at any cost, is perhaps irresponsible and dangerous.
However, the more I thought about The Killer Within, the more I realized that, like Bob, the film is cravenly hiding itself behind its impartial veneer, allowing Bob to get off the hook when it should be calling him to the mat. Alston’s film allows the man to have a forum to convince us of his “innocence”, despite his admitted culpability. Perhaps to cleanse his conscience, he admits to no actual guilt, which is more irresponsible on the filmmaker’s part than not questioning the man at all.