Dr Paul E Mullen and his family were living near Dunedin, New Zealand when, one evening in November 1990, they heard gunfire. The shots continued into the night, followed by the distant sound of police and ambulances. At 9pm, a hospital colleague told him that a few kilometres away, in Aramoana, someone with a gun had started shooting.
As it turned out, Mullen had heard of the perpetrator before; one of his long-term patients was the man’s nextdoor neighbor, and soon Mullen would learn that many other people he knew had been injured or killed.”I’d never really thought about these things,” Mullen tells the Guardian. “They had never been on my radar.”
The Bristol-born Mullen had always dabbled in forensic work, but the events at Aramoana piqued his curiosity. he would soon pivot to become a full-time forensic psychiatrist, specialising in some of the gravest acts known to society, from stalking and child sexual abuse to mass killings.
Speaking over the phone from his home in Melbourne, the 81-year-old has the spry, genial air of any ordinary semi-retired professional – but his career trajectory has brought him face-to-face with men whose violent crimes once brought them international notoriety.
Perhaps the most striking encounter came just a few years after Aramoana, when in April 1996 news broke of an even deadlier attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By then Mullen was in Australia, working as professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University. He received a call summoning him to Royal Hobart hospital where this latest perpetrator – whose name Mullen refuses to use – had been taken alive hours earlier after shooting 55 people, killing 35.
“That was my first experience of actually spending time with one of these killers and beginning to find out something about them,” Mullen recalls.the 28-year-old was being treated for burns, having set fire to a guesthouse in a final confrontation with police. At the hospital, cautious authorities had cleared the floor and strapped him to the bed.
At first, Mullen thought the blond-haired young man seemed frightened, and he saw no reason to be afraid for his own safety. While the television crews and journalists swarming outside were describing him in terms like “evil”, “unholy”, and “monster”, Mullen approached the young man not as a “killer”, but a “person who has killed”. He sought to build a rapport with his subject, even seeking to have his restraints removed.
“I thought it was going very well, until suddenly, blam, he says: ‘I’ve got the record, haven’t I?'”
Mullen was taken aback. “But you’ve just got to carry on,” he recalls, pausing for a moment to gather his thoughts. “You’ve got a job to do.”
while the Port Arthur killer angrily rejected Mullen’s suggestion his actions might have been inspired by another high-profile attack a month earlier in Dunblane, Scotland, Mullen says he soon started to talk about other massacres.
“So he did”The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance.But it’s much worse, as you also feel ashamed of feeling that way.”
This is how Paul E Mullen, a forensic psychologist, describes the internal experience of people consumed by feelings of injustice. They report thoughts like ‘I was mistreated’; ‘I was cheated’; ‘they’re not fair’; ‘no one likes me’. All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back.
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