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.