Philadelphia Film Festival: Blood Ties

Bob Bechtel doesn't sound like a killer. The voice coming over the phone from Tuscon is steady and warm, a little high-pitched perhaps, but more like that of a therapist than a former mental patient. If you didn't know better, you'd never suspect you were talking to a man who once planned to wipe out an entire dormitory full of college students.

"If I'd met Bob and didn't know this about him, I would think nothing of any symptoms that I now see as evidence of his past history," says Macky Alston, whose documentary, The Killer Within, screens as part of the 16th annual Philadelphia Film Festival. "I would think he's a quirky professor who is benign. The same goes if you told me that my father was a murderer. Then I would pathologize things that now I'm mildly frustrated by, or make me laugh. The lens through which you see someone dictates how you see them."

On the night of Jan. 11, 1955, Bob Bechtel left his room at Swarthmore College and drove home to Pottstown. He collected his guns from his mother's house, along with a slice of coconut cake, which he placed on the car seat beside him. When he returned to his dorm, he entered and fired three shots. The second and third hit a wall. The first hit Holmes Strozier, asleep in his bed. It killed him.

Today, you could make a strong case that Bechtel was guilty of first-degree murder. He admits he went into the dorm with the intent to kill, and the drive to Pottstown and back shows clear premeditation. In many states, he would be eligible for the death penalty. But Bechtel was not convicted, and never served a day in prison. A three-person panel found him not competent to stand trial, and he was committed to the Farview State Hospital for the criminally insane Waymart, Pa., with a recommendation that he be institutionalized for life.

Four years and eight months later, he was released for trial. A jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

On its face, Bechtel's case sounds like a miscarriage of justice: a cold-blooded killer turned loose to walk the streets. But his life, and the documentary about it, challenge the notion that any one act, no matter how heinous, can define a person entirely. The life Bechtel has lived since he was set free — and the likelihood that, in today's system, he would not be released for decades, if ever — is both an argument for the possibility of rehabilitation and a lesson in the power, and limitations, of forgiveness.

When he was released from Farview, Bechtel says he was advised to put his past behind him — forget what he'd done, even change his name. And so he did. Until three years ago Bechtel was known to his colleagues, friends and even some of his family as Dr. Robert Bechtel, a respected professor of environmental psychology at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and the loving father of two. Although he told his wife, Beverly, on their third date, he told no one else, not even their daughters, Carrah Bechtel and Amanda Willis, for years. (Willis is Beverly's child from a previous marriage.) When Carrah, the youngest, was in college, Bechtel told his daughters what he'd done, but no one else around him knew the truth.

Bechtel says he always planned to go public. For years, he's been working on Redemption, a book about his experiences, and he assumed that when it was published, he'd have a reason to come forward. But it wasn't until Carrah took a class from Macky Alston at New York's Union Theological Seminary that the pieces fell into place. A Master of Divinity, Alston had also directed several documentaries, including Family Name, which chronicles his family's complicated relationship to the buried legacy of Southern slavery. Initially, Alston says, it was Carrah's story that fascinated him, particularly her attempt to come to terms with her own dark inheritance.

In The Killer Within, it is Carrah who interviews Holmes Strozier's friends, trying to square the loving father she has known with the killer who cut short a young man's life. And it was she, along with Alston, who urged Bechtel to go public in front of the cameras. "They wanted to film me going public," Bechtel explains. "And I thought it might help Carrah with some of her problems with dealing with it. Both the girls, as far as that goes."

The Killer Within doesn't spend much time with Bechtel before revealing his secret, but it's enough to empathize with the students and family members whose jaws drop as Bechtel tells them about the events of that night in January 1955. After the shock wears off, reactions are mixed. Some of Bechtel's students empathize with his experiences; others condemn him outright. A member of his wife's family tells him, "There's a real piece of evil involved in your actions."

As Bechtel relates it, Strozier's murder was the result of a lifetime of bullying which began at the age of 4. He recalls having his pants stripped off and being pushed down an icy hill when he was in second grade: "I was bloodied and bleeding and naked, and this was great fun." By the time he got to Swarthmore, Bechtel thought his days of being bullied were over. He was a dormitory proctor; he had a girlfriend. But then, he says, a group of younger boys, including Strozier, began to taunt him, leaving orange peels and apple cores in his bed, chanting "Bechtel, eat shit," moving his bed to the quad and then urinating on it.

In the movie, several of Strozier's classmates, as well as his brother, John, reject out of hand the notion that Strozier was a bully, saying that he was, if anything, a peacemaker, the kind to rein in his friends when things got out of hand. At worst, they say, their actions amounted to "horseplay and rowdy behavior." Alston, who is gay, was also bullied as a teenager, so much that he recalls praying for God to "make my enemies go away." But even Alston says that Bechtel's descriptions of what happened at Swarthmore sound like "typical kids' behavior. The kids who were harassing, or engaging in horseplay, they probably sensed that he was a little off, or different, but had no idea that there was any danger involved."

"I do believe that he takes responsibility for what he does, and that his whole life since has been an effort to give back," says Alston. "But what's interesting about him as a person is that, simultaneously, he believes he's done something horrible, and, at the same time, he justifies it."

"It took me 30 years to really understand what happened," says Bechtel. It wasn't until the early 1980s that he became familiar with the work of Norwegian scholar Daniel Olweus, who formulated bullying as an institutional problem, rather than an individual one. It was also around that time that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) began to appear in psychiatric textbooks. Often associated with combat veterans and victims of domestic abuse, PTSD's symptoms, as listed in the DSM-IV (the manual used to categorize psychiatric disorders), include "persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event," "hypervigilance" and "numbing of general responsiveness."

"When I saw Olweus, I understood, this is what happened to me," Bechtel says. "This guy is telling exactly what happened to me."

In his 1958 book The Criminal Mind, Philadelphia psychiatrist Philip Q. Roche devotes several pages to Bechtel, whom he identifies as "the college student." A panel composed of two psychiatrists and one lawyer diagnosed Bechtel as a paranoid schizophrenic with "evidence of organic disease of the nervous system." But Roche takes issue with the ruling on several grounds. He says that the commission overstepped its bounds by declaring Bechtel's insanity permanent, saying that mental patients can only be committed for the duration of their illness. And he identifies the killing not as the result of an organic defect, but as "the culminating event of a psychotic process the significance of which is apparent only in hindsight."

Although Bechtel has never been formally diagnosed with PTSD, the descriptions seemed to match perfectly with his experience. "A lifetime of bullying since the age of 4, and then it happened at college," he says. "I thought it was all over by then. So when it started happening again, it created this PTSD world, just like the veterans who think they're back in the war."

The framework of PTSD helped Bechtel understand why there was no climactic event that set him off, no breaking point, and how he could calmly, and with no apparent rage, decide to kill a fellow student.

"It's hard for an average person to understand," he says. "A veteran probably could. Most people just aren't familiar with this. They think you must have had an angry look on your face." He describes the eyewitness account of a survivor of a school shooting, who looked into a teenage killer's face and saw nothing but blankness. "The person who is doing this is not experiencing any overwhelming emotion that they're aware of. They've just steeled themselves to do this, and they're going through it in an almost rote fashion."

In The Killer Within, Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, who has studied the school shooters at Columbine and elsewhere, calls Bechtel's case "hauntingly familiar." The similarity has often occurred to Bechtel, enough that he was moved to become an advocate for legislation aimed at curtailing bullying in schools. Bechtel expresses dissatisfaction with the film on several points, but the deepest cut seems to be the loss of a closing caption detailing his testimony in front of the Arizona Legislature on behalf of an anti-bullying bill which was later enacted into law. (The filmmakers, he says, "were afraid of making me look too good.")

Bechtel, whose current discipline, environmental psychology, concerns the effect of external environment on individual psychology, says it is crucial for schools and parents to intervene at an early age, before deep-seated psychological damage is done. "By the fourth grade, it's all over," he says. No such steps were taken in his case, as his daughter Willis makes clear: "The thing that is shocking to me is that he told people what was happening to him. And everyone pooh-poohed it, from grade school through college."

Bechtel says that his focus on bullying and external factors is in no way an attempt to pass the buck, or to implicate Strozier in his own death. "I never said or implied in any way that what they did justified what I did," he says. "There's no justification for what I did." But he also makes a clear connection between the bullying he suffered, at Swarthmore and before, and his actions that night. "My point is, let's understand bullying so this doesn't happen again."

When The Killer Within premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, the audience response was generally strong. But, based on the post-screening Q&A, one issue nagged at the crowd: Why won't Bob Bechtel say he's sorry?

They aren't the only ones asking.

During the Q&A, Willis freely admitted her frustration. "I don't like it," she said. "And I don't know what key would unlock that door. There is a block there that's extraordinary." Carrah echoed her stepsister's point, but with an added layer of self-consciousness. "I work on it with him from time to time, pushing him lovingly," she said. "But I have to remember that's what I want. Ultimately, we live our lives individually, so he's going to have to come to that conclusion. And what do I want it for?"

In the film and in person, Bechtel (who did not attend the festival) expresses unambiguous remorse for his actions. But he does so without visible emotion, and without ever offering a straightforward apology.

"How do you apologize for something like that?" he asks. "If you bump into somebody, you say you're sorry. It's just inadequate to say you're sorry you killed someone. Come on. That's too enormous. You have a lifetime of remorse, a lifetime of redemption. And even that's inadequate. Because you can't ever bring the person back."

In the age of the teary-eyed mass-market confessional, Bechtel's refusal to fit the social script has a certain appeal. But he seems unwilling or unable to acknowledge the solace an apology might bring his family, to say nothing of Holmes Strozier's brother, John, who lives a few hours away. Bechtel says he wrote John a letter of apology, "not that it did any good." But he shows no emotion when discussing Holmes' death, even when he and his family return to the scene of the crime. "People used to get me to cry for amusement, so I'm not interested in crying anymore," he told a CNN reporter.

"I still have that automatic response if someone wants me to cry," Bechtel says now. "Sorry, I'm not for sale. I feel like, to me, here's this pressure again. And I simply automatically resist it."

The question, of course, is whether Bechtel's argument that an apology would be so insufficient as to be unethical is simply a convenient rationalization, one that allows him to shirk his responsibilities while claiming the moral high ground. By his daughters' accounts, Bechtel is a highly ethical man. But when it comes to the worst thing he's ever done, he can't seem to free himself from the instinct to push against what others want, even if it might be the right thing to do. If he cries, the bullies win.

Alston finds Bechtel's logic both fascinating and disturbing. "It's so troubling, the notion that a smart person who has acted in ethical ways in other areas of his life won't do this seemingly elementary thing," says Alston. "He could apologize. And he could cry. For you. But the troubling thing is that he won't because he doesn't believe he should. I admire the fact that he's not pandering to an audience. But I'm deeply troubled that he thinks he ought not to do that."

"We have created this idea of how things should end," says Carrah. "There is this Hollywood plotline that ends with the killer apologizing and breaking down, and we have it in our heads that's how it's supposed to be. I do wish he'd apologize, but I wish it because that's what would make me feel better, not because it would make him feel better. I don't know to what degree he carries it around with him. I think he works very hard at things like social justice so he doesn't really have to feel burdened all the time. And that's how he redeems himself. That's his sorry."

Macky Alston likes to tell the story of the day after Carrah found out her father had killed Holmes Strozier. She was scheduled to argue the affirmative side in a college debate on capital punishment. But now that she knew her father was a murderer, the issue no longer seemed so cut and dried, especially considering that had Bechtel been executed, she never would have been born. "She'd say, 'If you're for the death penalty and you believe in God, do you believe that I am this awful aberration? That if God had God's way, I would not exist? Or are you interested in the good that can come of a life after it's done something horrible?'"

Carrah and Willis still struggle with their father's past. "It doesn't ever end," Carrah says. "I thought at some point my pain would end, or I would be able to crystallize it in some way, so I could have a perfect little plotline, to close the book and then move on with my life." But she has accepted, or at least reconciled to, the fact that her father's deeds will always be with her. "That never happens, and it never will happen. It's just about managing it."

"There isn't a start and an end," adds Willis. "It's a continuous thinking and rethinking."

It would be simpler if Bechtel were dead or in jail. But his life as a free man poses questions that Alston, for one, thinks are eminently worth asking: "The question is, what do you do with a life post-crime; and further, what do you do with a life you don't like? A life that's not a Hollywood life, where the guy apologizes in a teary fashion, without the denouement that satisfies every emotion in your heart. What do you do with that person? Do you lock him up? Or if he had burst into tears, would you set him free?"