When Macky Alston screened his latest film, "The Killer Within" at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 14, it couldn't have gone better. Alston was not only honored to screen his film at the festival, but also ecstatic to be back in his childhood home, Durham. "It was a great screening," Alston says, on the phone from New York.
"It was a packed house and a very engaged house. They were laughing and responding and clearly, I think, emotionally moved." But then two days later, on April 16, college student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.
Then he killed himself. After that, Alston's film began to resonate more with people who saw it, mainly because the movie deals with another campus shooting. "Within" tells the story of Bob Bechtel, a University of Arizona psychology professor who decides to come clean to his family, his friends and his students about a 50-year-old secret.
Back at Swarthmore College, he murdered fellow student Francis Strozier, with a .22-caliber rifle bullet to the head. Even more shocking was Bechtel's original plan: He was going to kill all 250 people in the dormitory.
If he hadn't stopped at Strozier and immediately turned himself in, it might have become the most murderous rampage in U.S history. After the Virginia Tech killings, Alston began fielding phone calls -- from his friends, from the people he interviewed in the movie, from various media outlets, from those who saw his movie over the weekend and received his business card.
Alston didn't expect to be a professional expert on school violence. But he's ready to accept the position. "Given that I've been living with this subject matter for the last four years, I feel, as so many people in the film do too, like we are sadly but fortunately prepared to offer insight into what's going on," he says.
"So we're obligated to." At the suggestion of Bechtel's young daughter Carrah, Alston made a movie about Bechtel's confession as well as the aftermath. In the movie, some students empathize but others call him an outright killer.
While Bechtel and his family come to terms with his announcement, the movie also delves into what caused him to commit such an act. Bechtel, who says he had been bullied and abused since age 4, explains that he was bullied by Strozier and other students (an explanation Strozier's brother and other Swarthmore alumni find questionable). The movie also points out Bechtel's history with mental illness.
Before the murder, he was hospitalized for psychotic episodes. That's what led Bechtel to be found not guilty by reason of insanity of the murder, and later sent to a state hospital. Alston interviews several experts on the subject of school violence in the film.
Princeton sociology professor Katherine S. Newman lays out five factors that have led to past school shootings: a shooter had access to guns, there was failure in the surveillance system, the shooter had some sort of mental illness, the shooter felt socially isolated, and the shooter had access to "cultural scripts" that glorify armed attack. Alston believes that a tragedy like Virginia Tech would not have happened if people took more consideration of these factors.
"I think that the school shooter is a specific category of criminal," he says. "And I think we can do a lot to reduce the number of school shootings that happen, to see it coming. And, at the same time, I think that the problem with school shootings is that they're very hard to predict.
" "Within," distributed by the film division of the Discovery Channel's parent company, is being shown at film festivals in Atlanta and Boston this week. It will also have a college tour -- a decision made before the Virginia Tech murders -- in hopes that the film will make people aware of what can happen, and what can be avoided. "I'm not surprised that it's happened again," Alston says.
"That said, I'm shocked and horrified. And I'm going to do everything I can with the movie, and with Discovery, who is partnering with us on the movie, to work on the other side of this fence, so that people who are headed in this direction are helped -- and stopped."
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