The Danes

Monday, December 1, 1997. Heath High School, Paducah, KY.

Michael Carneal - then 14 years of age - brought a .38 handgun to school and gunned down the school Christian prayer group, killing three and wounding five more. He then placed his pistol on the ground and said, "Kill me, please".

The day before, Carneal had bragged to everyone that "something big is going to happen on Monday".

Carneal had a history of having been bullied by other students. According to an essay by Mark Ames in the SoMA Review:

Many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life—smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.

But the story began to get a bit more complicated than the "Revenge of the Nerds" scenario, when Carneal gradually opened up to interviewers and admitted that he had once been controlled by a group of entities calling themselves "The Danes".

Wha? The Danes? Yup, that's what it says right here, the Danes. Here's what the Louisville Courier-Journal said on 9-11-08:

He says now that he had been warned not to reveal them and feared the therapists themselves may have been Danes.

Much of the information about the Danes is in sealed court files and Carneal's lawyer declined to go into detail about them.

"I felt that ... everybody I met might be a Dane," Carneal told a psychologist in 2004 who asked him why he hadn't initially said anything about the delusions. "Even though I didn't tell you, the talking in my head said, 'You told him too much, we're going to kill you now.'"

And LEO Weekly:

In 1998, several psychiatric experts who examined Carneal noted peculiar patterns of behavior leading up to the shooting. For example, the defendant explained that he always showered quickly and covered all of the heating vents in the bathroom to prevent people from watching him, and that he often feared there were people hiding under his bed and peering into his window.... The inmate eventually described hallucinations involving a group of tormentors he called “the Danes,” people he believed were trying to harm him.

Sounds nuts? Maybe so. And yet, the official position of the original prosecutors in the case is that Carneal was examined extensively and found to be perfectly sane and competent.

So... is he, or isn't he? And was he or wasn't he?

And, most importantly, were the Danes real or weren't they?

I'm not quick to believe it was a post-MKUltra mind control experiment, but on the other hand, nor do I instantly and unquestioningly accept the idea that his many experiences with these people were all entirely hallucinatory.