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Center Valley, Pennsylvania

T he image on their screens is mesmerizing.

A dark-haired twenty-two-year-old man with movie-star looks sits behind the wheel of his black BMW, his head tilted to one side. His face is bathed in the reddish glare of a setting California sun. He talks slowly, thoughtfully, to the camera, as if to hypnotize his viewers with his words.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “is the day of retribution. You forced me to suffer all my life. Now I’ll make you all suffer.”

His name is Elliot Rodger. He’s from a wealthy family. He flies first-class. His dad is a well-known movie director. He appears to be blessed in many ways.

But he’s still a virgin. And he’s furious about it.

In the video, one of a series he recorded in May 2014, he delivers a message to all the girls who have rejected him since he hit puberty. Hours later, he embarks on a murderous rampage.

In his apartment, he stabs his two roommates, Cheng Yuan “James” Hong and George Chen, and a friend, Weihan “David” Wang.

Outside the Alpha Phi sorority house near the campus of UC Santa Barbara, Rodger fatally shoots two women, Katherine Cooper and Veronika Weiss, and injures a third, Bianca de Kock.

At a local deli, he shoots and kills another young man, Christopher Michaels-Martinez.

Then he drives his sleek black BMW through the crowded streets of nearby Isla Vista, shooting indiscriminately out the window; he injures thirteen more people before crashing his car and committing suicide with a single bullet to the head.

Not only did Rodger meticulously plan the mass murder and suicide; he also broadcast his scheme in a series of videos on his YouTube channel.

If you hit the mute button, you’d think you were gazing at the next Tom Cruise.

But if you unmute…

“To all the girls that I’ve desired so much, they’ve all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man… I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve.”

In fact, Katherine Ramsland explains to her forensic psychology class, Rodger had waited.

His ultimate act of vengeance was carefully thought out, the result of years of pent-up anger about his lonely life.

He kept a journal outlining his sexual and social frustrations and his various coping mechanisms: video games, late-night drives, trips to the gun range, buying lottery tickets, a new life in Santa Barbara.

But none of it gave him sex or girls or the friends he so craved.

When he lost his only childhood male friend, he was triggered and began to plan the diabolical end. He intended his final act to be so performative that it would catapult him to global fame. The last words he wrote in his journal were “Finally, I can show the world my true worth.”

Rodger titled the 137-page manifesto “My Twisted World” and emailed it to his therapist, who sent it to his mother, who received it minutes before her son began his killing spree.

At the time of Rodger’s “day of retribution,” he was seeing multiple therapists. The month before, his parents had reported his troubling mental state to authorities, and the police visited his home. But as Rodger was well aware, the law was narrow and precise about grounds for search warrants.

He wrote in his manifesto: “If the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, I would have been thrown in jail, denied the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. That wasn’t the case but it was so close.”

Professor Ramsland explains that the police need better training to spot the telltale signs of a potential suicidal mass murderer. One key tool comes from the American Association of Suicidology. Each letter of the acronym IS PATH WARM represents a warning sign:

I—Ideation

S—Substance abuse

P—Purposelessness

A—Anxiety

T—Trapped

H—Hopelessness

W—Withdrawal

A—Anger

R—Recklessness

M—Mood changes

As they learn this, the students don’t realize that one of them, Bryan, exhibits every single one of these symptoms. No one person has full visibility on all the parallels between Bryan’s life and Rodger’s.

No one knows about the complaints Bryan texts to Jack Baylis about life on “Broke Batchelor Mountain.” He describes himself as “a good Catholic university student—full homo.”

No one knows that, like Rodger, Bryan is a virgin who hates women.

No one knows that Bryan copes with loneliness by immersing himself in video games. Like Rodger, he goes for night drives. Like Rodger, he visits the gun range.

And, like Rodger, he goes to a local bar and tries to pick up women.