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5. THE KILLERS

The world of mass shooters and assassins – Finland recalled – a bloody day in a teaching college – the American mass shooter examined – Norway – travelling into the wilds – the scene of the worst mass shooting in history – an Oslo drink with a killer’s expert – a meeting with Julian Assange in London – the ugly offerings of the dark web

There are many types of people who kill other people with guns.

There are those who do so for the explicit control of power. They are, by and large, criminals, gang members, terrorists, policemen or military personnel. When they pull a trigger and a life is ended, people in one of these groups do so out of obedience to a specific ideology or dogma. It could be a desire to control the streets, an urge to rob, to protect their nation, to maintain order, even to exact retribution. Of course, when they take a life they all become killers. But their actions are generally not driven by a desire to kill for killing’s sake. Death is a by-product of something else – usually power and control.

There are the untold numbers of killers who are gun owners who use their weapons for acts of personal power. Those caught in a moment of passion, despair, anger or self-defence, who use their guns to take a life. Sometimes their actions are justified, often not. These deaths are usually not premeditated; rather they are a specific response to threats, passions or fears. And the motivations behind this use of the gun are so diverse that to understand what makes such people kill is as complex as understanding life itself.

Then there are those two groups who seek a darker form of power – for whom death is the thing they seek. Killing not as a by-product of protection, or defence, or desire, but death as a means to its own powerful end. These are the mass shooters: all too often young men who go on the rampage and kill in a single, public event. They defy the normal motives for violence – robbery, envy, personal grievance. They ignore basic ideas of justice.

Or the assassins. That rare breed of cruel men who are paid to kill, and for whom money cannot be the only reason they do this job, because you can always earn a living doing something else.

Mass shooters and assassins: two groups I felt had to be the first things to write about when I shifted my gaze away from those whose lives were lived and ended at the end of a gun and entered the world of those holding the gun in their hands.

The snow was beginning to fall on that September day in 2008 when I walked through a muffled forest that surrounded a small town in western Finland. I had travelled out to the creeping edge of Kauhajoki and there, caught within an endless line of trees, was trying to find a rifle range. A place where a now-dead man had been filmed a few days before, shooting at targets, and where his poisonous words foretold a horror.

I had left the road ten minutes earlier and cut into the claustrophobic woods and was now lost. The sound of my feet breaking the frozen ground cut the quiet. Thoughts about the Finnish wolf and bear, out there beyond the corridors of trees, distracted me. And then, ahead, between the pines, I saw the outline of a wooden shooting range.

The cracking of the leaves startled the man. I first noticed him as he began to turn; his coat blended well with the leafy surrounds. Then I saw the rifle loosely cradled in his arm. This was not the time, nor the place, to meet a stranger with a gun.

A few days before, a young Finnish man, a twenty-two-year-old called Matti Juhani Saari, had done the unthinkable. He had walked into his college and killed ten people. Saari had gone on the rampage about 5 miles from here, at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality. He had crept into the university buildings through the basement and, armed with a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol, wearing a balaclava and dressed in military black fatigues, had gone upstairs. He acted as if he was on a combat mission, but he was the only enemy in this quiet Finnish town.

At 10.30 that morning Saari had walked into an exam room, filled with his fellow students taking a business studies paper, and opened fire. He approached his victims one by one, shooting each at close range. He then stepped into the corridor, loaded a new clip and returned to kill his teacher. He slowly moved around the classroom, delivering a vicious coup de grâce to whoever made a sound.

After he had killed, Saari called a friend to boast about what he was doing. He then poured petrol onto the crimson-stained floor, dropped a match and walked outside, the fire rising behind him. As the flames rose, nine classmates and one teacher lay dead and eleven more injured in the cruel flickering. Saari watched the rest of the students running, screaming, out into the thin light of a Finnish autumn, then he shot himself in the head.

With a total of eleven people now dead, it was the deadliest peacetime attack in Finnish history. Saari had fired 157 shots, sixty-two of which later were found in the bodies of his victims.¹ Twenty rounds were in one person alone.

One bullet, the least lamented, was the round he used on himself.

With that final shot his pistol also sounded the start of a different race, a race for journalists to get to the scene, to report on the terror created by that most modern of things: the mass shooter.²

I happened to be in Oslo at the time and, because news desks in London do not think: ‘It would take him seventeen hours to drive there, and it’s 700 miles away,’ but rather: ‘Norway is close to Finland, so let’s send him,’ they called me.

‘Get packing. We’re going to send you to Finland.’

And that was it. I was with Jenny Kleeman, an up-and-coming journalist, and we were reporting for ITN on Norway’s immense oil wealth. We were analysing Oslo’s sovereign investment funds when we got the call, and death was the last thing on our minds. But a day later we had flown (not driven) to Kauhajoki, a place forever marked by what had unfolded there and one that left its mark on me – because it was my first encounter with the grotesque realities of mass shootings.

We hit the ground running. My editor back in London was hungry for facts about why Saari had done what he had done, and we quickly learned that the troubled killer, in the weeks leading up to the incident, had posted several videos online under the username ‘Wumpscut86’. His terrible message: ‘You will die next.’ The videos showed him firing his Walther P22 at a local range.

That was why I was lost in that wood. I was at that range – Saari’s last location captured on film. The young killer was dead, but at that moment no one knew who had been behind the camera – an accomplice, even? I looked down at the man’s rifle, and my mind clouded with the possibilities.

The man turned and stared intently. Then he tutted. And I realised what I had first mistaken for rage was actually annoyance. Saari had just filmed himself, and this man was not going to kill me. He was just bothered that I was here, stumbling about in the forest with my video camera. Because my presence, in this remote province of this little-visited country, was a clear signal to him of what was to come: a bloody media spectacle.

The modern mass shooter and the modern media are intrinsically linked. Columbine, Dunblane, Sandy Hook: journalists, responding to the final performance of a lone shooter, have ensured that these place names are forever marked. In news ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, so the saying goes, and that evening the news the world over led with the blood Saari had shed and the name of Kauhajoki. Bulletins showed the rows of flickering candles and teddy bears outside the school. Images of the Finnish emergency services standing around awkwardly were transmitted across the world. And the shooter’s vicious videos and his ugly testimonies were replayed endlessly.

Of course, this was a big story, not only because it was the second mass shooting that Finland had had in two years, but also because it was the death of young, hopeful white people. Such things are important in Western news agendas, because prejudices and priorities dictate the amount of airtime a story is given – what has been called a ‘hierarchical news structure on death’.³ A white shooter killing twenty kids in the US will dominate the global press. Twenty black adults dying in a hail of bullets in Nigeria will barely register. And when it comes to mass shootings, schools will always get more coverage than anywhere else, even though in the US businesses are almost twice as likely to be the blood-soaked epicentres of mass shootings.⁴

What it means is that, while mass shootings may only constitute about 1 per cent of all gun deaths in the US, their impact in terms of headlines and column inches is profound.

Some say it is too much, that the media’s saturated coverage of a mass shooting encourages others to carry out copycat attacks – tortured souls seeking to burn out in a blaze of infamy.⁵ They have a point. In 356 BC, a Greek called Herostratus torched the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was, contemporaries wrote, an attempt to immortalise his name.⁶ And it worked. The fact we know the arsonist’s name, the destroyer of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, shows us that terrible crimes can achieve eternal fame. In the same way we know the names of Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Breivik and, possibly in small part because of my efforts, Matti Saari.

This idea that the media can influence extreme behaviour is perhaps best illustrated by looking at the time when newspapers agreed to cooperate with the authorities following a spate of suicides in the 1980s subway system in Vienna. Negotiations led to local Austrian papers changing their coverage by avoiding any simple explainers as to why someone threw themselves in front of a train, by moving the tragic stories off the front page and keeping the word ‘suicide’ out of headlines. Subway suicides there fell by 80 per cent.⁷

This led some to ask: ‘Would the same happen if there was a media blackout on mass shootings?’ Certainly there have been very vocal critics of the media’s saturation coverage of some mass shootings. A forensic psychiatrist told ABC News the airing of the Virginia Tech killer’s video tape was a social catastrophe: ‘This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character . . . There’s nothing to learn from this except giving it validation.’⁸ Others have said that the gory details of shootings help ‘troubled minds turn abstract frustrations into concrete fantasies’.⁹

Perhaps these things are true. But the media’s focus also highlights things like the inadequacies of existing national gun law. The fierce coverage of Kauhajoki, for instance, encouraged the Finnish government to reduce the number of handgun licences and to raise the minimum age of gun ownership. The media helped do that.

So, when journalists descend on a sleeping town where lives have been shattered by the sharp retort of gunfire, they should tell themselves they are there to report on these horrors for one reason and one reason only – to try to stop this happening again. Not to titillate, but to warn.

We thought of these sensitivities as we lined up outside the school’s entrance that night – a straight run of white broadcast trucks in front of pools of candles and stunned locals. Then London called, and we were on-air.

In 1966, a twenty-five-year-old ex-marine called Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower. He carried with him three rifles, three handguns and a sawn-off shotgun. By the time he was killed a few hours later, Whitman had shot forty-eight people, sixteen of whom died, and the world was introduced to a very unique, modern monster: the mass shooter.

Of course, the terrible visitation of mass death on schools and offices is not just an American tragedy. The deadliest mass shooting was by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, where sixty-nine died in a shooting spree, and a further eight lost their lives in a bomb blast. Before that, the world’s deadliest attack by a lone shooter was in a small farming community in South Korea. There, in 1982, a policeman called Woo Bum-kon killed fifty-six. His rampage was triggered when the woman he was living with woke him from a nap; she had swatted a fly that had landed on his chest.¹⁰

Despite these global killings, the greatest media focus is on those carried out in the US. An Associated Press list of twenty of some of the ‘deadliest mass shootings around the world’ featured eleven US attacks.¹¹ It’s been calculated that there have been over 200 such incidents in the US since 2006.¹²

And if you define a mass shooting as one where at least four people are wounded, not killed, then in 2013 there were 365 American incidents: a mass non-lethal shooting every single day.¹³ It’s also seemingly getting worse. According to the FBI, the rate of deadly mass shootings went up from one every other month between 2000 and 2008 (about five a year) to over one per month between 2009 and 2012 (almost sixteen a year).¹⁴ Of the dozen deadliest shootings ever to have taken place in the US, half have been since 2007.¹⁵

Of course, the media focus not just on the numbers killed and the frequency of the killings, but also on the people who wielded the guns. People ask: ‘Who would do such a thing?’

It’s difficult to give a definitive answer. The US secret service looked at the phenomenon of mass shooters and concluded there was no single ‘profile’ of a school shooter. Each shooter differed from others in numerous ways. Despite this, there is a consensus that some trends exist. In 2001 a study looked at forty-one adolescent American mass murderers: 34 per cent were described as loners; 44 per cent had a preoccupation with weapons; and 71 per cent had been bullied.¹⁶ Other traits seem to dominate, too.

Mass shooters are almost always male. There’s only been a handful of cases of female mass shooters: one such was Jennifer San Marco, a former postal worker, who killed five at a mail-processing plant in California, as well as her one-time neighbour, before shooting herself.¹⁷ Why mass shooters are so disproportionately male is unclear. Some see men as having a different approach to responding to life’s disappointments. Others see their violence as highlighting gender differences in testosterone levels and mental development.¹⁸ Each reason is frustratingly nebulous, though, and, apart from banning access to guns to all men, does little to help us work out how to put an end to such murders.

Mass shooters are loners. In rare instances, there may be two shooters working together, such as in the Jonesboro massacre, where Mitchell Johnson, aged thirteen, and Andrew Golden, just eleven, shot dead four students and a teacher and wounded ten others.¹⁹ But, generally speaking, a mass shooter typically acts alone and is not affiliated to any group or cult, again making it hard for authorities to identify them and act preemptively.

They are relatively young; the Congressional Research Service puts US mass shooters average age at thirty-three.²⁰ It’s rare for them to be very young, though – ages eleven and thirteen are untypical. There are various things that go towards explaining why adolescents don’t go on rampages: children’s access to guns, the fact that teachers and parents are often able to intervene when adolescents exhibit worrying behaviour, and the reality that shorter lives are often not so filled with disappointment all play a part.

We know that mass shooters are typically socially awkward. They rarely have close friends and almost never have had an intimate relationship, although they sometimes have had failed flings. They don’t tend to have problems with alcohol and drugs, and they are not impulsive – indeed quite the reverse.

This might lead many to assume that mass shooters are all blighted with a long history of mental ill health. Not so. Obviously they all have a warped and broken view of the world to do what they do, but a diagnosed mental-health condition is an extremely poor predictive factor for profiling whether someone is likely to go on to become a mass shooter. A 2001 analysis of thirty-four American mass shooters found that only 23 per cent had a recorded history of psychiatric illness.²¹

Despite this, we still fixate on the mental oddities of these troubled men. We comment on the fact Martin Bryant, who carried out the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, was really into the soundtrack of the Lion King.²² We write how Adam Lanza, the man who murdered so many children at Sandy Hook, carried a black briefcase with him, while other students had backpacks. We recall how Seung-Hui Cho, the warped killer of thirty-two at Virginia Tech, enjoyed taking photographs up the skirts of fellow students under the desks with his cell phone.²³ But these are traits that, whilst odd, are far from proof of a mass murderer in the making. As one psychologist put it: ‘Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.’²⁴

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that mass shooters are often very focused outsiders who plan their actions obsessively. Many massacres have been in the pipeline for months, sometimes years: the Columbine shooting took thirteen months to plan.²⁵ Anders Behring Breivik in Norway claimed he had been plotting his actions for five years.

This planning reflects a fixated and resentful view of the world. Mass shooters want to fix their ideas in history: a sort of personal vindication through gunfire. Whereas terrorists use guns and the media to promote political or religious beliefs, mass shooters use guns and the media to highlight their own personal grievances. Like Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho, who sent NBC News an 1,800-word statement and twenty-seven QuickTime videos with him ranting to the camera.²⁶

Other trends emerge. Many mass shooters take their own lives.²⁷ Many wear tactical military clothing. They often use high-powered and rapid-fire weapons. Weapons used in sixty-two mass shootings over the last three decades were looked at by the website Mother Jones. Over half involved ‘semi-automatic rifles, guns with military features, and handguns using magazines with more than 10 rounds’.²⁸ One of the guns that James Eagan Holmes used to shoot seventy-one, killing twelve, in Aurora, for instance, was an assault rifle with a 100-round drum magazine.²⁹

This use of such legal weaponry should concern. FBI data shows that, between 2009 and 2012, mass shootings that involved assault rifles or high-capacity magazines led to an average of sixteen people being shot, 123 per cent more than when other weapons were used.³⁰

These are ugly and disturbing observations and statistics. But they only served to help a little in my analysis of the world of the lone mass shooter. So I looked at the long list of perpetrators again, seeking someone who was, perhaps, representative of all of these trends.

I was searching for an archetype – a shooter who was relatively young, alone and socially awkward; someone who wore a uniform and carried a semi-automatic rifle with high-capacity magazines; someone who was not clinically insane; a fantasist who had penned an angry manifesto. This Venn diagram of horrors showed up one ugly and familiar name. The most murderous mass shooter of them all: Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing killer.

When I arrived in Norway to learn more about Breivik, the only car the Oslo hire company was able to lease me ran on electricity. I had never driven an electric car before and, as I headed through the dynamite-blasted grey mountains that led from the capital, I was disturbed to see the number on its power-gauge drop dramatically. It had read 123 kilometres when I pulled out of the car park. Now, 50 kilometres out, the power meter read 13, and I had 18 more kilometres to go. The beginnings of mild panic shifted up my spine, because the cold here was profound, and there were few car-charging points. Images of freezing to death in a Norwegian electric car – a hypothermic victim to a green response to global warming – dominated my thoughts.

As the power dipped, so did the sun, casting its last shallow, anaemic light across the deep and broad lake of Tyrifjorden. And, as my car hugged the edge of the lake, my speed at an economic crawl, the wind lifted and caused the surface of the water to flutter. Beyond lay Utøya: the outermost island. Its name was still hard for some to say because this was where Breivik had killed dozens.

Then, as the gauge told me I had two kilometres of power left, the Sundvolden Hotel, one of the oldest inns in Norway, came into view. Framed beneath the pine-rimmed peaks of King’s View and the stretching cold-blue lake, it had a beauty unique to Scandinavia.

Its Gildehuset, with its tenth-century metre-thick walls and its foyer lined with the statues of glass-eyed bulbous trolls, could be considered idyllic. But this place will not be remembered for Norwegian fairy tales or Viking walls. It will be forever marked by what happened in 2011, because this is where the survivors staggered from the worst mass shooting by a single gunman ever recorded. And these rooms were filled with grief-wrapped relatives waiting for the cauterising news of how their sons and daughters had died.

A few days before the shooting, about 600 people, mostly between fourteen and twenty-five years old, had gathered on the pine-lined island of Utøya, across the lake, for their annual summer camp. They were diverse and liberal – the cream of Norway’s Labour Party youth. But Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-old from Oslo, saw betrayal in their tolerance and weakness in their ideals. So, on 22 July, he took a boat over to the island, hollow-point bullets in his pockets and murderous intent in his heart.

Breivik shot his first victim just after 5.20 p.m. He gave himself up to police seventy-five minutes later, and by then sixty-nine people had died. He had fired 297 shots – 176 with his Ruger and 121 with the Glock. Eight more people were killed, and over 200 injured, by a fertiliser bomb that Breivik had detonated in Oslo’s government district an hour and a half before he began his island rampage.

He carried out these horrors wearing the uniform of a police officer, playing on a trust in the state that is implicit in so much of Norwegian life. He was also wearing earplugs to protect himself from the sound of his gunshots. Two ugly details that tell you much about the man.

He was indiscriminate and brutal in his killings. He usually fired only when he was certain to hit, killing slowly and methodically with headshots at very close range. He said to those hiding in the bushes ‘Don’t be shy’, before he shot them. Others he murdered as they held on to each other. Stuck on the suddenly claustrophobic island, some students braved the freezing waters and swam to safety. They were plucked like white gulls, bloodied and blue, from the hard rocks of the shore.

Of the sixty-nine dead, sixty-seven had died from being shot, one drowned and one fell to their death from a cliff. Thirty-three of them were under eighteen years old. The youngest victim, Sharidyn Svebakk-Bøhn of Drammen, was just fourteen.

I fell asleep in my ancient bedroom with that thought.

The next day, my car recharged, I drove back out into the March light, the King’s View behind me, forests of pines and snow beyond. The silent road ran 30 metres above the shore, and Utøya stood beyond, distant and inaccessible. There were two signs pointing the way to the island but no bridge. Precisely why Breivik chose it for his massacre.

Where the route led down to the jetty someone had put up three plastic chairs and a sign that read ‘Private’. Beside it stood a row of neat postal boxes in wood, each hand-painted. The names on them spoke of long lineages and deep histories: Johnsrund, Aamaas, Syverson. Behind, on a stone, stood five memorial candles, gutted and unlit, circling a wet and dirty teddy bear. The Norwegian flag lay limply to one side, and a pine tree stood covered with broken decorations on its dripping leaves. A Christmas not celebrated.

I drove further along the road to a campsite and pulled up near the main house. The bone-marrow chill had forced me to wear all the clothes I had. I eased out of the car and waddled over to ring the bell. Nothing. But as I headed back, a man in heavy blue fatigues, black cap and thick boots came towards me through an icy drizzle that had punctured the morning. His name was Brede Johbraaten, the owner of the camping ground. I asked him about renting a boat to cross to the island, but he said this was still winter, and people did not hire out boats in winter.

He would answer some questions, though, so we sheltered from the growing rain in a wooden workshop. This man in his mid sixties, a grandfather of three, was quiet at first, but then he began to speak about how he had helped people, dripping and terrified, out of the lake on that terrible day, and a shadow entered our conversation. He had run this campsite since the 1990s, with regular visitors from Norway, Germany and Holland, but the shooting had deeply hurt his business.

‘I’m fed up with it,’ he said – a Norwegian understatement.

As he spoke he became more critical. First, he blamed the police, as people often do when tragedy arrives unbidden, because we need to blame someone. He said they had been too slow to respond, too disorganised. But so rare are mass shootings in Norway that you could understand why there was such confusion.

Then he said journalists come here and all they want to talk about is what happened on that day, and not what had happened to the community. So I began to ask him questions about his life, but I floundered. What had happened here made me feel almost shy. I was hesitant to talk about the horrors that had unfolded. So I asked if house prices had been hit, and we talked a little about this, as it was something we both understood.

Then, as if he felt obliged to, he spoke about Breivik.

‘He is a stupid man. They should not call him by his name. They should call him as the mass killer, and that is that.’ The easiest thing would have been if someone had just put a bullet in the head of that mass killer, he said.

The rain had begun to fall harder now, and the lake sparkled with the drops. There was not much more to talk about, or those things that could be said felt wrong to say. So we shook hands, and I left him, the permanent view of the island framing his land, and I wondered what it must be like to wake every day being reminded of what happened here.

Further along the lakeshore I parked at a small strip of rock that projected out towards the island. Here the government intended to set up a permanent memorial, a sharp cut-through grey stone to symbolise the unnatural tragedy that had engulfed this place. I sat and, through my misting windscreen, watched as the white clouds slid down from the mountains and shrouded Utøya.

I had been to a few places around the world which had been marked by guns, just as Breivik’s guns had done here. School massacres in Britain and America, mass graves in Somalia and the Philippines, genocide sites in Armenia and Germany. That same awkward quietude, that feeling that any question you ask is tinged and mawkish, an absence of any easy explanation for what happened – these things were always a feature. So it was here. And the space between the earth and the heavens grew slowly smaller as the clouds came in, and the rain lessened until silence was the only thing left.

Night had returned to Oslo’s glistening streets as I walked past endless shops selling kitchens and homeware: white candles and wooden floor-boards and Scandi-chic. Norway does not wear its wealth loudly. Things here are not grotesque or baroque. But good taste requires consensus; social order and criticism are there in case you step out of line. If you start doing your house up with pictures of dogs playing pool, if you don’t follow the correct sauna rituals, someone will tut and tell you so.

But where Norwegians see good taste and a proper way of living, others see intolerance and small-mindedness. Because, beneath the liberal attitudes, a provincial conservatism lurks. Norwegians might be friendly, open-minded, polite even, but you can’t escape the impression that some think they are better than you.

This, at least, was what a Pakistani taxi driver, who had once been a PhD student in Islamabad, told me in Oslo. He had grown a beard since they had taken his taxi licence photograph – he had rediscovered his Islamic faith in the Fjords. He spoke about the perpetual unsaid: that if you don’t like the rules of Norway, you had better go back from where you came. But it’s hard to say no to living in a place with one of the highest qualities of life in the world.

I thought about the driver’s words as I walked the neat streets and wondered perhaps where he saw intolerance, if others would see just a strong sense of conviction. You need self-assurance to have good taste and a highly functioning society. But with light always comes dark, and it was this national self-belief that, perhaps, found its most aggressive, most self-deluded form in the mind and actions of Anders Behring Breivik.

Such reflections occupied me, because I was on my way to meet a Norwegian writer, Aage Borchgrevink. Aage had spent many months investigating Breivik and the motivations that drove him to kill, and I wanted to know if such a murderous gunman as Breivik can operate outside the culture he wants to annihilate.

Aage was handsome without vanity. Wearing a high-collared grey sweater and a blue T-shirt, he was the sort of person you’d cast as a good guy in a Scandinavian police series. His English was impeccable. But he was, in a way, not a typical Norwegian. He had been a human rights investigator in the Balkans for over twenty years – Chechnya, Belarus, the Caucasus. He was self-critical and had lived long enough outside Norway to see it for its flaws as well as its beauty.

We met in a bar called Den Gamle Major, the Old Major, a place where Breivik himself was likely to have once drunk. I walked up to the counter and bought a glass of wine for Aage, a beer for me. It cost $30, and I had to ask twice to make sure I had heard the price right. But it was right, because Norway has the second-highest alcohol taxes in the world: the price of social order contained.

Taking the two glasses back to the table, Aage was quick to get to the matter at hand. We began at the beginning, as you do with such things: with the killer’s relationship with his mother.

Aage explained that Breivik’s family problems were well documented by mental-health workers. When Breivik was just four, his mother became preoccupied with the fear her son would violently assault someone and frequently told him she wished he would die. Psychiatrists in the 1980s had concluded that the timid boy was a ‘victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid aggressive and sexualized fear of men in general’.

Despite these terrible reports, Aage said that the response of the state was not to intervene. Their reaction to this abuse was moulded by a strong Norwegian self-conviction about what was right and wrong. In this case, Aage said a belief in biological determinism – that the ideal condition for a child was always to be with their mother – was presumptive at the time. Both the court and the Child Welfare unit disregarded the warnings of experts. Breivik stayed with mother.

‘The system,’ Aage said, ‘let him go.’

Such a failure to intervene meant, Aage thought, that there was a missed chance to stop the young boy evolving into the deeply troubled young man. Under cross-examination, even Breivik said his mother was his ‘Achilles heel’: ‘the only one who can make me emotionally unstable’. The killer told the court he would urge his mother, a solitary woman, to find a hobby. She would tell him, ‘But you’re my hobby.’

Then there was the sexual nature of their relationship.³¹ Aage said that social workers put in their reports ‘the mother and Anders sleep in the same bed at night with very close bodily contact’, but nothing was done about this. As an older man, Breivik would sit on top of her on the sofa and attempt to kiss her. He even once bought his mother a dildo.³²

The psychological impact of this childhood clearly distorted Breivik’s view of the world and of himself. ‘He was almost like a zombie,’ Aage said. ‘His manifesto was very consumer-driven but it was lifeless. He defined himself by his brands. He’d go and buy a sushi dinner for a hundred euros or go and buy a thousand-euro outfit. It was a form of hyper-consumerism.’

The interesting thing, though, was how much the Norwegian legal debate during the killer’s trial appeared to focus on the psychological past of Breivik. There were two forensic psychiatric reports done on him. The first came back with the diagnosis that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia – making him criminally insane. The other was a diagnosis of a compound personality disorder, with an emphasis on narcissism and paranoia – meaning he was criminally sane. The court settled for the second view.

The media, in turn, fixated on issues like right-wing extremism in Europe, the ability of the internet to help radicalise young men and the failures of the police on that dark day for not pre-empting the attack. But one issue was largely ignored in all of this.

‘No, there was not much debate about gun laws,’ Aage said. This surprised me. In the US most massacres stimulate the gun law debate. But here in Norway it was the focus on society and on Breivik’s upbringing that dominated.

Even by Breivik’s own account, though, guns and military paraphernalia were central to his planning. He had to overcome a problem – in Norway it’s not that easy to get your hands on a gun.³³ So he spent six days in Prague in the early autumn of 2010, because he believed the Czech Republic’s gun laws were amongst the most relaxed in Europe and that he would be able to buy what he wanted there: namely, a Glock pistol, hand-grenades and a rocket-propelled grenade.

Before Breivik left Norway, he even hollowed out the back seat of his Hyundai to clear space for the firearms he intended to buy. But he failed to get any, writing later that Prague was ‘far from an ideal city to buy guns’. His only ‘success’ was having sex twice.

Returning to Olso, Breivik ended up buying his weapons through legal channels. He said in his manifesto he could do this because he had a ‘clean criminal record, hunting licence, and two guns already for seven years’. In 2010 he got a permit for one more gun: a $2000 .223-calibre Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine; he said he was buying it to shoot deer.

The next thing he wanted was a pistol, but getting a permit for that proved much more difficult. He had to demonstrate regular attendance at a sport-shooting club and so, from November 2010 to January 2011, Breivik went through fifteen training sessions at the Oslo Pistol Club. And with each lesson, his ugly plan came closer and closer to its bitter end, like a spider patiently waiting for a killing.

By mid January his application to purchase a Glock pistol was approved. He then bought ten thirty-round magazines for the rifle from a US supplier, and six magazines for the pistol in Norway.

The rest we know.

Perhaps because it took Breivik so much time to arm himself, or perhaps because of a wider refusal to believe that firearms had a pivotal role in the massacre, guns did not play a major part in the debates following the killings. There was a brief suspension of Norwegians’ ability to buy semi-automatic rifles, but the hunting lobby there appears to have influenced the policy-makers, and that law was quietly dropped.³⁴ And today Norway still allows semi-automatic guns.

In a country where reasonable debate seems so lauded, this struck me as odd. Clearly, the numbers that Breivik killed was partly down to his having trapped the students on an island. But the fact he could shoot and shoot again without having to pause to cock his rifle must have given the children he was shooting less time to run into the trees and hide.

Rather, it seemed that for a society like Norway, one that has such self-belief, to comprehend what Breivik had done they had to focus more on the failure of the individual, his mother and the police response, not on their own gun laws or their own failings as a country. Maybe this was the right response, though. After all, you can’t let one idiot with a gun change the way you live. If you do that, then they win.

With that thought, I said goodbye to Aage. The blackness of what the mass shooter was capable of was in danger of consuming my attention. The more you looked into that abyss, the more your gaze was held. So I shifted my focus onto something else, but equally sinister: the way of the assassin.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the person who first inadvertently introduced me to the dark world of the assassin was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time, precisely because he feared one of their bullets.

It was a late springtime London when I received a phone call from someone I had never spoken to before, and they asked me if I would like to meet a man I had never met. I was told this could be of real interest to me, and on hearing his name I thought the same. Julian Assange – the Australian provocateur, a Scarlet Pimpernel for our digital age – wanted to talk.

Julian was at London’s choice venue for hard-bitten hacks and war correspondents, the Frontline Club in Paddington. Heading there, I found him holed up in one of their rooms, being interviewed by CNN. Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan.

Julian had some of the most controversial secret documents ever to find their way to the light of day. Millions of files from the US diplomatic and military operations overseas that had been leaked by their soldier Bradley Manning. And I was there, as the editor of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to see if my outfit could have a peek. Julian, interested in the Bureau’s ability to make documentary films, was keen to see if the contents of another set of files, this time the Iraq War military reports, could end up on TV channels the world over.

It was a treasure trove of documents that proved there were war crimes and human rights abuses, incompetence and intrigues on the part of the US military in Iraq. And Julian gave it over, countless classified military files, on a USB stick in a Lebanese restaurant near Paddington station.

As I got to know Julian, his appearance changed considerably as the world focused more and more on what he had leaked. He lost weight, dyed his hair bleach blond, took on a lined tiredness. But there was one thing that was constant: his bulletproof vest. He feared a CIA attack, that he was an assassin’s target, and I couldn’t help but look at the bulky blue vest and think: headshot.

A few days after giving the Bureau the files on the Iraq War, I was told by Julian to download a messenger system called Jabber. It was an encrypted service that lets people talk relatively securely. So that night, as London foxes barked outside my window and the streets were silent in sleep, I logged on and began a conversation with one of the most controversial men in the world at that time.

Caught in the green-blue glow of a screen, I was told to download certain applications, and his terse words guided me through a portal I had never known existed. I felt ashamed at my technological illiteracy. He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’ information around other servers’ information, hiding you behind peeled layers of anonymity, like an onion.

Clearly, the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it.

Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool. Where you could buy a soldier’s skull from Verdun for $5,000. Where fake euros cost a fraction of the real price. There was even an encyclopedic portal of links to ugly places I did not care for. Websites like ‘Pedofilie’ or ‘Boyloverforum’. Places that offered you the chance to commission drug experiments on homeless people. There was the opportunity to purchase snuff films made to order. You could buy the contact details of ‘crooked port and customs officials’ or ‘discreet lawyers and doctors’. And then there were the sites that promised assassinations.

‘Unfriendly solution’ was one. The text was chilling, if a word of it was true.

‘I will “neutralize” the ex you hate, your bully, a policeman that you have been in trouble with, a lawyer, a small politician . . . I do not care what the cause is. I will solve the problem for you. Internationally, cheap and 100 per cent anonymously.’

The text continued: ‘The desired victim will pass away. No one will ever know why or who did this. On top of that I always give my best to make it look like an accident or suicide . . . I don’t have any empathy for humans anymore. This makes me the perfect professional for taking care of your problems . . . I’ll do ANYTHING to the desired victim.’ The price varied. For non-authority, ‘normal’ people the cost was between €7,000 and €15,000.

Another site, ‘The Hitman Network’, offered a team of three contract killers in the US and the European Union. They charged $10,000 for a US hit, $12,000 for an EU one. They had two rules: ‘No children under 16 and no top 10 politicians.’

Of course on the dark web you have no idea who is and who is not genuine. It could just be some fat guy called Bob sitting in his underpants in his mother’s loft in Illinois. Or a cop. After all, the US’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged it runs agents who pose as fake hit men, men who wear the jewellery, sleeveless tank tops and facial hair of biker gangs, entrapping those who seek guns for hire.³⁵

In a twist of irony, it was even alleged that Ross Ulbricht, the supposed founder of Silk Road – a TOR portal that sells all manner of narcotics, drugs and illegal services – commissioned the murder of six people through hitmen he had contacted on the internet.³⁶ Nobody was actually murdered, although the FBI did say they had faked the death of one former employee of Silk Road and claimed they had convinced Ulbricht the murder had taken place. Ulbricht reportedly wired $80,000 to pay for the hit, though none of this has been proven in court.³⁷

But some of those on the dark web might, just might, be genuine. Because there are definitely men out there who earn a bloody living using the gun in an ugly and vicious way, and there have been for some time.

The first gun assassin to enter the history books appears to have been a Scotsman – James Hamilton. When James Stewart, the half brother of Mary Queen of Scots, was acting as regent for her son, he was shot dead by Hamilton. The sniping Scot, in support of Mary, had fired the lethal shot from an archbishop’s window, through a line of washing. Since then, we have seen world leaders gunned down in their cars, on motel balconies and in theatres, a single bullet spinning a nation into a state of mourning, spurring on a legion of conspiracy theories, and even triggering world events that have claimed the lives of millions.

So President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC by actor John Wilkes Booth, wielding a Philadelphia Derringer with a black walnut stock inlaid with silver.³⁸ Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, wearing such a tight uniform that some speculate it even helped speed his death.³⁹ And a host of others have fallen to the assassin’s bullet, Tsar Nicholas II, Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X among them, victims of the powerful political symbolism the assassin’s bullet delivers; potent propaganda in a bloody deed.

Like the best propaganda, the world of the assassin does not easily show its true face. But glimpses of it fascinate and endlessly inform the subject of films and dramas, which, in a way, seems ironic when you read that the father of Woody Harrelson, the star of Natural Born Killers, was actually a contract killer. Charles Harrelson was given two life sentences in 1981 for the assassination of district judge John H. Wood, the first murder of an American judge in the twentieth century.⁴⁰ The killing was carried out with a high-powered rifle in return for $250,000.⁴¹

Other shadows emerge from this world, such as the thirteen-year-old hitman working for the Mexican drug cartel. In 2013 Jose Armando Moreno Leos confessed he had participated in at least ten homicides, hired for his skill at shooting a high-calibre weapon. He was freed, because the Mexican constitution prohibits the incarceration of those under fourteen, but a few months later Jose too was found murdered, execution style.⁴²

Or there is the story of infamous Russian hitman Alexander Solonik, better known as Alexander the Great, who confessed to assassinating a string of Moscow underworld figures in the 1990s. He had a unique skill: he could shoot with both hands.⁴³ Or the time when, in 2011, Indian police arrested one of their most notorious contract killers, Jaggu Pehelwan, a man believed to be behind the deaths of over 150 people. He charged, it was claimed, between £12,500 and £32,500 for each kill and had even done a deal agreeing to two dozen murders for £200,000.⁴⁴ He died as he lived, shot by rival gang members in 2012.⁴⁵

Even Britain, with its hard gun laws, has had its share of hitmen. Santre Sanchez Gayle was Britain’s youngest, just fifteen when he shot a young mother for £200 in Hackney in London.⁴⁶ He was ripped off. Researchers found the average cost of a hit in Britain between 1974 and 2013 was just over £15,000. The highest was £100,000, £200 easily the lowest.⁴⁷

The assassin’s bullet, of course, is used for many reasons. For the assassin, cash has to be their sole motivation. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ is their cinematic shrug as the gunman leads a cowering accountant into a secluded wood with a shovel.

But what happens when the killer’s art is used for a darker purpose – for the pursuit of power?

It was a question that led my focus and research away from the depraved minds of psychotic killers and guns-for-hire towards the more calculated horrors of gangland murderers – the domain of the criminal with a gun.