Season of Savagery and Rage

Does violence beget violence? Can one lurid crime flashed instantly across TV screens and explored in the pages of newspapers and magazines inspire other crimes? Those were questions for policemen, psychiatrists and journalists to ponder last week as a rash of savagery --a kind of season of rage--erupted across the U.S. Items:

>In the western Indiana hamlet of Hollandsburg, four young robbers brandishing shotguns broke into a mobile home where a mother, her son and three stepsons were watching early morning television. As the climax to a robbery that netted only $30, the bandits ordered the boys, ranging in age from 14 to 22, to lie face down on the floor, then systematically shot all four in the head. The mother, Mrs. Betty Spencer, 43, survived only because her wig was blown off by a fifth shotgun blast and the robbers mistook it for the back of her head.

> In Detroit, pot-smoking Jesse Coulter, 42, was so overcome by the combination of grass and the televised version of Roots that he picked up a sawed-off shotgun and ordered Wife Rita to drive with him 260 miles to Cincinnati. There the two took eight hostages in a home for unwed mothers and held them for twelve hours, demanding to see the son they had given up at the same home 20 years earlier. Coulter finally surrendered after a young detective, pretending to be his long-lost son, persuaded him to end the siege.

>In New Rochelle, N.Y., a hulking 250-lb. furniture mover and Nazi cultist named Frederick W. Cowan, 33. returned to his job after a two-week suspension and exploded in a St. Valentine's Day massacre. Packing five guns, he burst into his moving company's warehouse, shot to death four co-workers and a policeman, wounded five other people, then put one of his guns to his head and blew his brains out.

Was there a single trigger that touched off all these violent outbursts? Probably not. Yet a number of psychiatrists speculated that a powerful influence might have been the episode that occurred two weeks ago in Indianapolis. There, a 44-year-old auto salesman named Anthony Kiritsis wired the muzzle of a 12-gauge shotgun to the neck of a mortgage executive and held him hostage for 63 terror-filled hours (TIME, Feb. 21). When Indianapolis TV stations acceded to his demand that he be put on the air, Kiritsis crowed: "I'm a goddam national hero." He was scarcely that--and Indianapolis authorities quickly made him a goat by reneging on their promise of immunity and slapping him in jail. Yet Kiritsis may have served as a model for a demented few.

Brigade of Bigots. Certainly, Fred Cowan showed disturbing similarities to Kiritsis. Both were lifelong losers. The balding Cowan was unable to make friendships with girls, contented himself instead with gun collecting and muscle building. Cowan's attic bedroom was jammed with rifles, pistols, bayonets, hand grenades and a collection of Nazi memorabilia. The muscle-bound six-footer had his arms tattooed with iron crosses and Nazi eagles. He joined the National States Rights Party, a Georgia-based brigade of bigots (see box following page). "There is nothing lower than blacks and Jews unless it's the police who protect them," Cowan had noted in a book found among his weapons last week. Once he kicked to death a tail-wagging black Labrador puppy because its color offended him.

Where Is Bing? One of Cowan's particular dislikes was Norman Bing, traffic manager at the Neptune World Wide Moving Co. Bing, who is Jewish, had suspended Cowan, a $6.11-an-hour helper, for refusing to move a refrigerator. "What would you think," Cowan said to a companion after one quarrel, "if I went into the office with my guns on, looking for Norman Bing?"

Leaving his home early last week, the hulking Cowan did exactly that. He carefully loaded the trunk of his red '71 Pontiac GTO with a Sako .308 rifle, four pistols and bandoleers of ammunition. Then he drove to the Neptune terminal two blocks away and parked outside the main entrance. "Somebody said that Freddie was outside putting on guns," a Neptune worker recalled later. "We thought it was a joke."

Some joke. Wearing brown pants, a khaki shirt and a black beret with skull and crossbones decorating it, Cowan entered the building and confronted 20 men lounging inside. He shot two black employees, Frederick Holmes, 54, and Joseph Hicks, 59, through the chest at pointblank range--from a distance of only 2 ft. "Where is Bing?" Cowan demanded, as he strode into an adjoining drivers' room. There, James Green, 44, another black, tried to run and was gunned down. An Indian immigrant, Pariyarathu Varghese, 33, came running down a flight of steps and was murdered. Cowan put a pistol to the head of another black driver, Charles Haskett, with whom he worked and for whom he had once even bought lunch. Then he relented and turned away.

Bing had seen Cowan coming in time to duck under a desk. He and most of the 50 other Neptune employees in the building were able to escape when police arrived. The first cop on the scene, Allen McLeod, 33, was picked off by the Sako rifle from a distance of about 30 ft. Three more policemen responding to the shooting calls were wounded.

For the next ten hours the New Rochelle freight terminal was a battleground. Twenty sharpshooters spread out into houses and onto nearby roofs waiting for a shot at Cowan, and police helicopters whirled overhead. By midafternoon, police got inside the building and moved cautiously from office to office, looking for Cowan. They finally found him, dead by his own gun, as darkness descended.

With New York's vast TV, radio and press forces so close, the massacre was not merely covered--it was smothered. As in the Kiritsis incident a week earlier, such publicity stirred critics.

Says University of Southern California Psychiatrist Frederick Hacker: "The media claim to be holding a mirror up to society. But the recent rash of hostage crimes indicates that the media have actually been promoting criminal behavior." Crime reporting has become more pervasive, and viewers appear to like that. As Chicago Psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn observes sadly: "All you need to do today to see violent crime is to turn on a switch." But he absolves the press--"It merely reflects what is happening on the streets"--and blames instead the growing assertiveness of the individual. "We are moving from a time of restraints back to total liberty."

Principal Offender. Within the press and broadcasting, some feel that coverage--especially on TV--has perhaps gone too far. Chris Duffy, general manager of Indianapolis' WTHR-TV, yanked Kiritsis' demented monologue off the air two weeks ago. Said Duffy: "That man might have pulled the trigger, and that wouldn't have been a picture for a TV audience."

Some critics who consider television news the principal offender suggest that news show ratings be scrapped so as to reduce the competition for sheer sensationalism. That is scarcely likely to happen. U.S.C.'s Hacker (author of a new study, Crusaders, Criminals, Crazies) suggests that news executives, sociologists and police set up "media action teams" to establish ground rules for sensational news breaks. That could be almost as difficult to accomplish; the boundary between restraint and suppression is obscure and hazardous.

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