Canada The Man Who Hated Women

By William R. Doerner

It was the last hour of fall-term classes at the University of Montreal's engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique. Students faced eleven days of exams, but at least they could look forward to the cheering prospect of Christmas vacation afterward. That tidy calendar was suddenly and tragically shattered last week in a hail of semiautomatic rifle fire ignited by a bizarre sexual hatred. When the climactic hour ended, Canada had suffered the worst mass murder in its history.

The bloodshed began shortly after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, when Marc Lepine, 25, an unemployed electronics buff who once aspired to study at the engineering school, arrived at the hilltop campus building. Armed with a hunting knife and a .223-cal. Ruger rifle manufactured in the U.S., Lepine climbed to the second-floor corridor and shot a woman student dead. Then, a carefree grin on his face, he entered the mechanical-engineering class of Professor Yvon Bouchard, where a student was in the midst of presenting his term project. "I want the women!" cried Lepine, ordering female students to one side of the room and men into the hall. "We thought it was a joke," said Bouchard. They learned otherwise when the gunman pumped several rounds into the ceiling. Shouting, "You're all a bunch of feminists!" to his women hostages, Lepine opened fire, killing six on the spot.

Proceeding on his mad mission, Lepine went down to the first-floor cafeteria, where he killed three more women, then up to the third floor, where he gunned down four others. Besides the 14 women killed, 13 people, four of them men, were wounded. Finally the attacker turned the weapon on himself, blowing away part of his head.

In Lepine's pocket, police found a three-page suicide note, in which police said he complained that "feminists have always ruined his life." Born to a French-Canadian mother and an Algerian father who left the family when his son was seven, Lepine studied intermittently at junior colleges and expressed the hope that he would be accepted at the university. Though he had no history of criminal behavior or mental illness, he existed on the margins; a loner who enjoyed war movies, he was unable to sustain relationships with women and claimed to have been turned down by the military for being "asocial."

Lepine purchased the rifle, a model that is popular with ranchers for killing coyotes, at a local gun store three weeks ago, after undergoing a police-file check as required by law. Canada regulates the sale of handguns much more strictly than does the U.S., but hunting guns, including semiautomatics, are widely obtainable. In the wake of last week's misogynic massacre, there were calls for tighter rules on the availability of combat- style weapons as well as soul-searching debates about the victimization of women. But the most touching commentary involved very few words. After a candlelight procession to the university, some 1,500 women and men sat silently in a Montreal chapel, the quiet broken only by the occasional hymn.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Montreal