Every day for eight years, systems analyst Alan Winterbourne tried to find a job. And every day he failed. Then one day it all became too much.
At 11:15 on the morning of December 2, 1993, Alan Winterbourne, a 33-year- old computer engineer, appeared in the lobby of the Star-Free Press in Ventura, California, a placid coastal town about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Winterbourne was a husky six-footer dressed in a dark sport coat, gray slacks, a white shirt and clip-on tie, with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders and a scraggly beard reaching his chest. He asked for opinion page editor Timm Herdt. He handed Herdt a Manila envelope he said contained some documents relating to unemployment and asked the editor to look them over at his leisure - he would call back later to discuss them. Winterbourne then politely thanked Herdt for his time, turned, and left. Herdt put the envelope aside, unopened, and went back to work.
Winterbourne drove ten minutes south to the neighboring city of Oxnard, then parked his tan 1978 Dodge Aspen on a residential street near the state Employment Development Department. In the lobby of the nondescript, one- story building, about fifty people, some of them mothers with young children, waited for their turn to be called. Three dozen or so EDD employees busied themselves with their work behind the service counter.
At 11:41, Winterbourne walked through the main entrance. With-out a word, he stepped up to the service counter, pulled a .12 gauge shotgun from under his jacket and opened fire on the state workers.
Employees and clients hit the floor, scrambling across the linoleum in a frantic search for cover. Ignoring the unemployed, Winterbourne sprayed the office floor with random shotgun blasts aimed at EDD workers. A computer terminal exploded, and 65-year-old Richard Bateman, a retired businessman who was visiting the agency on behalf of a nonprofit group that helped disabled adults find work, fell to the floor in convulsions.
Phillip Villegas, 43, a clerk with a ready smile who had started at the unemployment office as a volunteer, turned to flee. A shell slammed into his back, knocking him to the ground.
Kicking open a gate, Winterbourne entered the work area, where those employees who had not barricaded themselves in offices tried to hide under their desks. He marched up and down the aisles in silence: firing, reloading, and firing again. As Bateman groaned in pain, Winterbourne finished him off with two more blasts to the upper body. He shot Anna Velasco in the hip - the popular 42-year-old worker had spent the prior evening translating a healing mass for her church's Spanish-speaking congregation - then fired a second round into her chest from close range as she cowered under her desk. When the shotgun jammed, he drew a Smith & Wesson Classic .44 magnum revolver and kept shooting at the others.
Suddenly, Winterbourne stopped. He leapt over the counter, stuck the pistol into his waistband, calmly straightened his jacket, and walked out a side door. Three workers – Anna Velasco, Richard Bateman, and Phillip Villegas – lay dying. Four others were wounded. Alan Winterbourne had never met any of them.
Outside, Winterbourne ran into four police officers arriving on the scene. They exchanged gunfire as he sprinted across the street to his car. Winterbourne sped off through an unincorporated green belt of lemon groves and produce farms between Ventura and Oxnard, only to get stuck in traffic at the corner of Victoria Avenue and Olivas Park Road. Sgt. James O'Brien, 35, a decorated Oxnard detective and the father of two young children, skidded to a stop about 200 feet away and took cover behind the open door of his unmarked police cruiser. Winterbourne leapt out of the Dodge, a Browning .300 deer-hunting rifle in hand. Peering through the scope, he aimed at O'Brien's car and started shooting. One bullet smashed through a police spotlight and struck O'Brien in the head, killing him instantly.
Fearing for the safety of the other motorists, the police held their fire. Winterbourne jumped back into his car and roared into the outskirts of Ventura. In a new development of concrete office parks and squat warehouses, he turned into the parking lot of the Ventura unemployment office. Half a dozen police cars followed, blocking driveways and taking position for a final standoff. When Winterbourne emerged from his car brandishing yet another rifle, a Ruger Mini-14 with a fresh 30-round clip, the officers cut him down in hail of gunfire.
Police handcuffed the body. The worst shooting spree in the history of Ventura County was over. Five people, including Winterbourne, died in less than twenty minutes.
At the Star-Free Press, Timm Herdt had been listening to the chase on the police radio when the receptionist approached and asked him what he wanted to do with the box his visitor left in the lobby. Puzzled, Herdt went out to take a look. He was startled by what he found inside the heavy cardboard container. Racing to his office, he tore open the manila envelope. Suddenly, it all clicked. Herdt grabbed his managing editor. "Listen, I think I know what's going on...."
Mass murders – generally defined as four or more deaths resulting from a spasm of violence in one location – occur, on average, about twice a month in this country. The killers are generally white, middle-aged males, who blame others for the frustration in their lives. Often that frustration has to do with unemployment - in an increasingly fragmented, career-driven society, being jobless can destroy a person's sense of identity. "No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work," wrote Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, "for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community."
The materials Winterbourne left at the office of the Star-Free Press included not one suicide note, but hundreds, leading to a single devastating conclusion: Alan Winterbourne, a computer specialist trained at a top defense contractor, couldn't get a job to save his life.
The manila envelope contained a set of documents relating to Winterbourne's brief experience as a computer systems engineer for the Northrop Corporation right out of college in 1985. Included were a pair of job performance reviews, a letter of resignation, a copy of a Department of Defense document listing penalties for violating a security oath, a letter to his congressman alleging illegal activities at the company and threats on his life, and the transcript of an appeal of his subsequent denial of unemployment benefits.
It was the last job he ever had. The cardboard box, a monument to tenacious effort and relentless defeat, was stuffed to the brim with want ads, job applications and rejection letters from nearly 300 different companies. Placed atop the papers was a small notebook, the words "At least one contact a day, five days a week, 2/14/86-12/2/93" written on the cover. Its pages were filled with a record of more than 2,000 job contacts.
Winterbourne's decision to vent his frustrations by shooting innocent people is a mechanism that will never be understood – it's most likely something even he would be unable to explain, were he still alive. But how did he arrive at that terrible place? All he wanted was the opportunity to pursue a career, doing the work he had been trained to do.
Why couldn't Alan Winterbourne get a job?
Following the shootings, the Los Angeles Times printed letters from readers sympathizing with Winterbourne as the victim of an impersonal bureaucracy and a heartless economy. But he was a computer engineer, one of the fastest growing occupations in the country. According to the US Department of Labor, the number of jobs in the field has doubled since 1985 and is projected to do so again by the year 2005. Even in Southern California, battered by recession and a shrinking defense industry, demand for computer systems analysts is so strong that Money magazine named the Ventura-Oxnard area one of the top 50 job markets in 1993.
When Alan Douglas Winterbourne was 10 years old, Patricia Osborne, a family friend who was studying palmistry, gazed into the boy's hands and was struck by the presence of an unusual line. "I looked it up in the book," she recalls. "It said that someone with that mark goes down a path like a horse with blinders on, so he best be put on a good path."
It would prove to be an eerily prescient observation. But there was little in Alan's early life that suggested any cause for alarm. Described as a shy, sweet, sensitive boy, he was the second child of Bill Winterbourne, who taught ceramics at the local college, and Ila Winterbourne, a music teacher who managed the Ventura County Symphony for a number of years.
The Winterbourne children grew up in a modest but comfortable home in a quiet Ventura tract of stucco and wood bungalows, where Ila, a staunch Lutheran, instilled them with the values of her faith. "We were brought up to have respect for everybody," says Carol Lockart, Alan's older sister, who is a flutist in the symphony her mother used to manage. "Not just for human beings, but for every living thing. We were taught to be good to people."
The kids were also encouraged to explore their creativity. But while Alan occasionally pounded a drum set and learned how to throw pots in his father's studio, he wasn't as interested in artistic pursuits as the rest of his family. "He didn't want to compete with Carol or Dad," says Ila, a plain-spoken woman with short gray hair. "He'd say, 'I'm gonna be myself.' " Alan applied his imagination to technology. He discovered ham radio as a teenager and spent hours in the garage, fiddling with the dials. By the time he was a senior at Ventura High, he decided that he would become an electronic engineer.
In 1978, Alan began his studies at California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo, a two-hour drive up the coast. After his first year, he switched his major from engineering to computer science. Later, on job applications, he would list the programming languages he had learned: Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, C+. He spent most college summers working with an environmental group for the Navy at Port Hueneme, once winning a US$300 award for his contribution to a steam energy project. The certificate was still hanging on his bedroom wall the day he died.
While Alan performed well at his summer job, he struggled in school. He had suffered from dyslexia since childhood, but pride kept him from seeking help. "He never told anybody," his mother says. "He didn't want people to feel sorry for him." As a result, he often had trouble finishing tests on time. He barely maintained a C average in college and had to repeat a number of courses he failed on the first try.
As Alan labored to complete his education, tragedy struck at home. Bill Winterbourne had fallen into a deep depression. A new school administration had reduced his responsibilities in the crafts department, and he feared he was being eased out of the teaching position he had held for more than 30 years. The prospect of losing his job was more than he could bear. Early on the morning of July 12, 1984, he went into his home studio and swallowed a lethal dose of a toxic liquid used to glaze pottery.
Alan was stunned by his father's suicide. But Ila says that he never blamed his father for giving up hope. "If Alan was angry about it," she says, "he never showed it."
Alan finally graduated from Cal Poly in 1985. It had taken him seven years to earn his degree in computer science, but his perseverance had paid off: Three companies were offering him jobs. Ila, still coping with the emotional and financial shock of widowhood, urged him to take the one that was in Ventura County – Alan could live at home and commute to work. Knowing his mother could use the company, not to mention the rent he insisted on paying her, Alan made his choice: He would go to work for the Northrop Corporation.
In late August 1985, Alan Winterbourne began his daily commute to the Northrop facility in Newbury Park. He was 25 years old, clean-cut, and thrilled with the prospect of beginning his career as a $30,000-a-year systems engineer at one of the country's leading aerospace firms. "He was so excited," his mother recalls. "He'd go out of here with his new leather briefcase, in his three-piece suit, all spit and polish. The only thing he lived for was to work and get ahead, to be a success."
Alan toiled in the division that made target drones used in the testing of anti-aircraft systems. As a systems engineer, his task was to design software; programmers would then write the code. In his initial job review, Alan's performance was rated "very good" in three categories and "good" in the other two.
It proved to be a brief honeymoon. About two months after he started at Northrop, Alan was abruptly transferred to the group working on Tacit Rainbow, a troubled secret missile project so highly classified at the time that its mere existence could not be acknowledged publicly. Immediately, his work began to suffer. In a second job review, his new supervisor, Val Egle, wrote: "Since assignment to Tactical Products Division, Mr. Winterbourne has exhibited considerable anxiety and difficulty in adjusting to his new job assignment. Considerable time and effort has been expended by his supervisors to alleviate Mr. Winterbourne's concerns."
The true nature of those concerns remains a mystery. Egle, who still works for Northrop, says Alan's anxieties stemmed from difficulty adjusting to the security requirements of his new physical working environment – a closed, windowless room with electronic locks on the doors. But to his family and others, Alan related a far more sinister story. He claimed he was being harassed and intimidated by his co-workers. He believed his phone was tapped and that he was being followed.
Eventually, he began to fear for his life. He told his mother that someone tried to run his car off the road. Later, after leaving Northrop, Alan testified at his subsequent unemployment hearing that co-workers would walk by his cubicle, point at him, and pretend to "pull the trigger." A supervisor, he went on, once told him that "there are three ways out of this organization – resignation, firing, or death," which Alan interpreted as a threat.
At the time, Alan's family found Alan's claims difficult to believe. "I just couldn't believe it," Ila says. "I just thought he was hypersensitive. I told him they're just joking if they do something like that. I mean, people can't do that. This is the United States of America."
But Alan didn't think it was funny at all. Without telling his family, he bought a pistol – the same gun he would use eight years later at the unemployment office. He applied to the police department for a concealed weapon permit but was turned down because he was unwilling – or unable – to explain why he wanted it.
Alan never told anyone, not even his family, exactly why he thought people at Northrop would want to hurt him – he claimed his security oath prevented him from discussing it. But he hinted vaguely that he had made some dark discovery that put him at odds with the company. "They're working on terrible things at Northrop that would kill millions of innocent people," he would tell his sister Carol. "Things you can't imagine." In the letter to his Congressional representative included among the documents he left behind the day he died, Alan alleged that federal laws were being broken at the company and requested a congressional investigation into the matter. Nothing came of his allegations.
Val Egle insists Alan never raised any of those issues with him, nor did he complain about being harassed or threatened. But whatever the reason, Alan had to get out. His mother urged him to wait until he found another job before quitting, but he told her that would be unethical – his employment agreement prohibited him from having contact with other companies. On February 14, 1986, he cleaned out his cubicle and left Northrop for the last time. But the experience at Northrop never left him.
lan plunged into his search for a new job right away. He clipped want ads, hammered out letters on his Mac, made appointments, and dusted off his pinstripe suit for interviews. It became the daily routine he would follow for the rest of his life.
At first, Alan didn't think finding a new job would be too difficult, as less than six months earlier he had had his pick of three. His appearance was professional – his hair was short and his mustache neatly trimmed – and he now had some experience to go with his degree. And the military buildup under Ronald Reagan put people with his skills in demand.
He couldn't believe it when nobody wanted to hire him. As the months passed, Alan decided that Northrop must be blackballing him. When the company contested the unemployment claim he filed six months after leaving, he saw it as further proof that Northrop had it in for him. Alan testified at an appeal hearing that he was forced to resign for reasons of "personal safety" and repeated all his vague charges, but the judge ruled against him. (Never one to give up easily, he pursued the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1990 declined to hear the case.)
The defeat at the unemployment office only fueled Alan's determination to succeed on his own terms. "He had to do everything his way," his sister says. "He had to prove that he could do it." He told Carol that people at Northrop warned him that he would never get another job comparable to the one he left; in defiance, he resolved not to accept a new position unless it paid as well and had the same perks as his old one. "If he said something," Carol recalls, "then that was going to be it, for all eternity."
Even his grooming became a matter of principle. Alan decided that he would let his hair and beard grow as a way of marking the time that he had been without work. He resolved to cut his hair and shave only after receiving his first paycheck at a new job. His mother argued that it would hurt his chances of getting a job, but he wouldn't listen. If any employer didn't want to hire him because of his appearance, well, that was discrimination. His blinders were on too tight for him to see it any other way.
Alan stepped up his job hunt as he entered his second year without work, signing on with employment agencies, placing ads in the newspaper, attending job fairs. He enrolled in job-training programs that would pay half his salary to any company that hired him. He applied for every computer-related position he could find. If he was rejected by a company once, he would apply again the next time they advertised an opening. None of it worked.
While Alan often stressed his "stubborn fortitude" in letters to employers, the professionals who were trying to help him get work found his willfulness exasperating. "He was sabotaging himself," says job developer Joanne Norton, who saw Alan when he first enrolled in a federally funded job program in 1987 and again a couple of years later. "He could be kind, polite, and gentle, but when it came to changing his looks so that he could fit in better, he'd become angry, agitated, and determined."
Even more vexing, says Norton, was that Alan actually turned down several jobs because they weren't as attractive as the one he had when he was first hired at Northrop. He declined one well-paid computer position because it didn't have a window office or a parking space for him, another because he wouldn't cut his hair.
Alan still blamed Northrop for all that was wrong with his life. His family began to wonder if maybe there wasn't something to his claims. He had never been known to lie or exaggerate before, and until he started working at Northrop, he never exhibited signs of anything resembling paranoia. His story seemed even more plausible after the family gathered to watch a 1987 episode of 60 Minutes exposing fraud and corruption in Northrop's development of the MX missile. "Alan wasn't surprised at all," Carol says. "After that, I didn't know what to think."
A letter written that same year to Rex Winters, a supervisor at his old summer job with the Navy, reflects Alan's confusion and frustration:
"I am still trying to recuperate from the severe negative circumstances that occurred at my last employment. I sometimes have a hard time explaining these experiences so as not to be in conflict with the law, but I also do not want to portray myself as being too rigid or possibly crazy .... I have had a number of individuals say they will shoot me. I never thought that I could get caught up in such terrible circumstances in this day and age. It is easy to understand how people may have a hard time believing me, or that I may respond unduly or rashly ... but all I can say is that I am still a very hard worker and continue daily to try to overcome my initial bad start in the job market."
Alan's struggles were compounded when suicide again claimed the life of someone close to him. Since returning home from college, Alan had grown close to a young woman named Linda Dong. Although Alan always denied to his family that he and Linda were romantically involved, he later told his mother he would have married her. But Linda, who had been treated for manic depression, was increasingly despondent over family problems. After dinner with her mother one night in May 1987, she put on her pajamas, crawled into bed, and shot herself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol. She was 25 years old.
Alan kept his feelings about Linda's death to himself. He simply placed fresh roses on her grave twice a year, and he carried her picture in his wallet for the rest of his days.
Despite the setbacks in his life, Alan tried not to let the frustration take over completely. He had played the stock market since he was a kid, and he still made a few thousand dollars a year trading options, enough to keep him going while unemployed. He jogged, rode his bike, and went hiking whenever he could. He took care of the orchids at his uncle Art's house, and when Art was stricken with the heart ailment that would eventually take his life, Alan took care of him, too.
Occasionally, he would go target shooting with a neighbor in the empty hills above Ventura. But while his cousins went hunting, Alan restricted himself to plinking at bottles and cans – he could never bring himself to kill anything.
On Sundays, he regularly attended Trinity Lutheran Church with his mother. "He seemed to have a deep faith," says Pastor Dave Hall. "I think he was very principled on a number of things." Twice a year, Alan would volunteer to spend a night in a Ventura homeless shelter, answering phones and visiting with clients. From the time he was a teenager, he raised money for the homeless in the annual church bike-a-thon, a grueling 100-mile ride that takes cyclists from downtown Ventura to a far mountain top in a single day; in seventeen years, he only missed one ride.
But try as he might, Alan couldn't escape the fact that the pile of rejection letters was growing ever higher. Most personnel directors turned him down after receiving his application and noting the mediocre grades, weak job history, and poorly written letters of interest. Others met with him but were turned off by the way he presented himself. "He was a space cadet, there's no nice way to say it," says Phillip Brandes, who interviewed Alan for a software engineering job at Comptek Research in 1989. "Everyone that talked to him was struck by the fact that he didn't seem to have a grasp of what the professional environment was. He struck us as being a harmless eccentric."
Stymied in his search for a computer job, Alan began applying for other kinds of work. He responded to ads for technical writers, despite the fact that his dyslexia resulted in spelling, grammar, and syntax mistakes that often made his letters read like those of a poorly educated man. He entered a brokerage training program and became licensed to sell options but was forced to leave after a month – he failed to sign up a single client. He took a certification class for security guards at Ventura College, then applied to the California Highway Patrol and the Oxnard airport security department; in both cases, he couldn't get past the written exam. He applied for some jobs for which he had no experience at all - park ranger, telephone line installer, district attorney's investigator – with predictable results.
In 1990, Alan's search for work even led him to run for Congress against Robert Lagomarsino, a popular incumbent who was unopposed in the Republican primary. "I'm unemployed," Alan told reporters. "I think it would be a good job." But it wasn't serious – he knew he wouldn't win. Alan just believed that voters should always have a choice. He wound up with 11 percent of the vote, which pleased him to no end.
The following year, he threw his energy into a different kind of civic campaign: The city had installed some stop signs on a quiet intersection near his home, and Alan wanted them removed – they slowed him down when riding his bike. With characteristic zeal, he spent the next three years circulating petitions, writing letters, and pestering officials. Nazir Lalani, a city traffic engineer, estimates his office spent over 2000 staff hours dealing with his complaints – they had to start a "Winterbourne" file to hold all the letters he wrote.
"He was totally obsessed with removing the stop signs," Lalani says. "If there was an argument with all the facts in the world, but it didn't fit with what he believed, then he just blew it off. I decided about two years ago that I wasn't dealing with a rational person."
As Alan entered his eighth year of unemployment in 1993, he needed a job more than ever. He was 33 years old, broke, and deeply in debt. He had inherited $10,000 after his uncle died in 1989, but it was gone, eaten away by the costs of living and bad bets in the options market. Later, his family learned he had been living off credit cards, covering the balance on one with a cash advance from another.
Despite his humiliation, Alan struggled to keep his pride intact. He would do odd jobs for neighbors and repairs for his mother, or he would baby-sit his sister Carol's new baby, Christopher, but he would never take any money in return – at least not directly. "You could give him money," says Carol. "But everything had to be a gift or a giving kind of thing."
Alan persisted in his methodical search for work throughout the year. He applied in vain to several engineering firms in the area. He signed up for a job-referral service at the Oxnard unemployment office in the summer, but nothing came of it. He took a brokerage test at Merrill Lynch in the fall and stopped by every week thereafter to see if there was anything available for him. There was not.
There were signs of his growing depression. He had put on weight and was out of shape. For only the second time since he was a teenager, he didn't participate in his church's annual bike ride – he was disgusted with himself after finishing in the back of the pack the last two years in a row. At Thanksgiving, a cousin thought he seemed withdrawn. It was always a hard time of year for him, since he never had money to buy Christmas gifts for his loved ones. And the seventh anniversary of his denied unemployment appeal was coming up the following week.
But there was a glimmer of hope. In late November, Ila, who now works as a secretary for the Navy in Port Hueneme, arranged for Alan to see a former supervisor of hers about an opening for a systems engineer with a private firm that does contract work for the military. Sandor Geiszinger met with Alan and was impressed – they even joked about his hair. Geiszinger told Alan that although they would still have to meet with the PRC Corporation's senior engineer on the project, things looked good.
Alan's second interview was set for Tuesday, November 30. But a few days before the appointment, a death in the engineer's family forced him to reschedule the meeting for the following Tuesday, December 7. It was a fateful delay.
Ila left for work early on the morning of December 2, while her son still slept. As far as she knew, Alan would spend the day like all his other Thursdays: checking the want ads, making some phone calls, maybe sending out a resume or two, then baby-sitting his nephew in the afternoon. At about 10:30 a.m., she called home to tell him the tenant at his late uncle's house was going to be late with the rent. Alan gave no sign that anything was wrong. "He said OK," Ila recalls, "and that was it."
A half-hour later, Alan packed up his box full of applications and rejection letters, carefully placed the Northrop documents in the manila envelope, loaded his guns, and set off in his old Dodge for the Oxnard unemployment office.
After it was all over and Ila had returned to work, Geiszinger asked her why Alan couldn't have waited just a few more days. "Maybe he was spooked," she says now. "Maybe he was afraid he'd get the job."
The victims were buried first. Flags flew at half-mast throughout Ventura County, as James O'Brien, Phillip Villegas, Anna Velasco, and Richard Bateman were laid to rest amid a massive outpouring of public grief.
Alan Winterbourne's memorial was private. Afterwards, about 450 people, mostly members of the congregation, attended the memorial service at Trinity Lutheran. Friends of Ila's played classical sonatas and sang "Blowin' in the Wind." The eulogies were marked by a tearful refrain: "It wasn't the Alan we knew." Pastor Hall spoke of a dying, fragmented society, in which "we are all guilty of the brokenness" but promised peace in the arms of Jesus.
Months later, Hall, like most who knew Alan, was still struggling to reconcile the young man's horrific actions with his kind, gentle persona. "What he did was an act of total despair," the pastor says. "Ever read Kierkegaard? He said that despair is a sickness unto death. I think that's what happened. He died inside."
And so Alan Winterbourne, who dreamed of success but lived with failure, entered the ranks of mass murderers. The final irony is that these lost souls, who seek attention for their grievances through random violence, are defeated even in death. For the fears and frustrations that drove them to commit their desperate acts soon fade from memory, as do their names. In the end, only the geographical signposts of the carnage left in their wake linger on. The San Ysidro McDonald's. The Stockton schoolyard. The Oxnard unemployment office.
