What's News? 10/4/06 Death in a One-Room Schoolhouse: The Guilt of a Child Occasionally things happen that, at least initially, defy understanding, such was the case when Charles Roberts, a 32-year old milk truck driver, family man and supposedly a religious man, walked into a one-room Amish school house on Monday and began the well-thought out process that would end with the murder of five children, all girls, and his own suicide. News reports, initially full of equal parts of wonder, horror and speculation are now starting to be filled in with facts . . . facts that appear to illustrate how profoundly the experiences of a child can affect that child's behavior far into adulthood. The following is, admittedly, speculation but based on the facts we now know, I think it's pretty close to the reality that will eventually be pieced together: Charles Roberts claims to have molested two female relatives when he was just 11 or 12 years old; whether or not his actions at that time were technically, legally, morally or ethically "molestation" matters not a whit! All that matters is that he perceived what he did to be molesting two much younger girls and he has lived with the guilt and shame of the act for 20 years -- guilt that, we can speculate, must have been generated by a strong religious background. Many years later, when his first-born daughter died almost immediately after his wife Marie gave birth to her, Roberts did not see that death as a natural occurrence caused by some defective organ in the newborn, and regardless of the actual, medical cause of the newborn's death, Roberts, no doubt, saw it as his punishment . . . his punishment by God for his sins, and specifically he saw his daughter taken away from him to punish him for his act of "molestation" so many years before.

"I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptyness it seems like everytime we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us."

Those were his words in his last note to his wife, a note he left while she was at church where, ironically, she and a group of mothers meet regularly to pray for school children. At this final stage of his life it seems that Roberts has, in his own mind, gone from being a perpetrator to being a victim. He has probably convinced himself through twisted logic that the two little girls he was involved with as a young boy are responsible for seducing him and are therefore responsible for the incident that, those many years later, brought down the 'wrath of God' upon him. This is also evidenced by the fact that, in that same note where talked about what he had done, and about being filed with guilt and hate, he also admitted that for the past two years he had been having dreams about "doing it again." Dreams forced on him, he no doubt felt, by the two girls who seduced him. Having found the real 'culprits,' for all his misery he then set out for revenge -- and the rest is well documented in every news media outlet. He meticulously planned what he was going to do which evidently involved "doing it again" as he dreamed he would. Aside from the murder weapon, the police found that Roberts had, over the past week, purchased and otherwise gathered the things he planned to use when he walked into that one-room school house; he had extra clothing, toilet paper, a flashlight and a candle, other weapons and, most telling, he brought two tubes of K-Y Jelly and devices police feel were going to be used to restrain his young victims. It appears obvious, when you study the early lives of successes, failures, saints and sinners, that the power of the sum total of a child's experiences can contribute significantly to the behaviors and thought processes of the adult that child becomes. In the case of Charles Roberts, the experiences of childhood came back to destroy him and, as a terrible consequence, rob five young girls of their chance for a full childhood. News Links: Schoolhouse killer haunted by guilt Gunman told his wife he molested relatives