Suspect’s writing ‘macabre,’ ‘twisted’

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Writing left behind by the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre — including screenplays and long, rambling notes discovered after the bloodshed — offer a glimpse into the macabre and angry mindset of 23-year-old senior Cho Seung-Hui.

The chilling picture emerged a day after the bloodbath that left 33 people dead, including Cho, who apparently killed himself as police closed in.

Cho's scripts, brought to public attention by a former classmate, feature dialogue packed with obscenity and violence.

In the screenplay called "Richard McBeef," a young man accuses his stepfather of murdering his father to get his mother, and then accuses him of pedophilia when the stepfather puts his hand on the young man's leg, apparently in a friendly gesture.

"What are you, a Catholic priest," the character John rails at the older man in the play. "I will not be molested by an aging, balding, pedophilic stepdad named Dick. Get your hands off me, you sicko. Damn you, Catholic priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson."

At the end of the play, the frustrated stepfather hits the 13-year-old stepson, killing him.

The plays, made available by Ian McFarlane, a former Virginia Tech student who now works for AOL.com, have been posted on AOL's "newsbloggers" site.

In a blog posted by McFarlane on Tuesday, he says that members of the class were asked to review each other's work.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," he writes. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of."

Looking back, McFarlane says, Cho fit the "stereotype of what one would typically think of as a 'school shooter' — a loner, obsessed with violence, and serious personal problems."

Referred to counseling
A Virginia Tech professor said that Cho’s creative writing was so disturbing that she referred him to the school’s counseling service, but he would not go.

“I kept saying, ‘Please, go to counseling; I will take you to counseling,’ because he was so depressed,” said Lucinda Roy, the English Department’s director of creative writing. But “I was told [by counselors] that you can’t force anybody to go over ... so their hands were tied, too.”

She described Cho as “an intelligent man — quite a gifted student in some ways.” But she said he also seemed to be an awkward and very lonely man who never took off his sunglasses, even indoors.

“There would be sometimes as long as a 20-second pause before he would respond ... so people were concerned about that,” Roy said. “We didn’t build up a rapport, because he wasn’t the kind of student who would permit that.”

By fall 2005, Roy removed Cho from her class after he became angry in the classroom. She said she tried several different ways to help him, including a decision to teach him one-on-one because “I didn’t feel comfortable with him being with the students.”

Roy would not comment at length on Cho’s writings, saying only that in general they “seemed very angry.”

“There was some concern about him,” said Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the English Department.

“Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be. But we’re all alert to not ignore things like this.”

Rude said Cho had been referred to counseling but she did not know the outcome of that effort. She refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

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