College Killings in Idaho: The Incel Danger Grows

College Killings in Idaho: The Incel Danger Grows
By Lt Joseph Pangaro, CPM, CSO, MOI

A blast of gunfire or the slashing of a knife and tragedy descends on innocent victims. Is it an active shooter angry at their school, or workplace? Who is this killer?

We have many kinds of dangerous people in the world today, and we have become familiar with some of them, like the school-age student shooter or the aggrieved workplace shooter who kills their classmates or co-workers, but have we ever heard of the incel killer?

“Incels” or involuntary celibates as they are known, are mostly males who believe that they are entitled to and are desirous of sexual relationships with beautiful women but are denied these relationships by some cruel realities of life. There are some “incel” females, but their numbers are very small.

The cruel realities of life they believe they suffer from are defined as a set of circumstances they believe are dictated by human nature. More specifically, they believe that women will only engage in sexual activity with a limited number of high-status and very attractive men. They call this the 80/20 rule.

Eighty percent of women have sex with only 20% of the very attractive and high-status men in the world. This leaves many men lonely and unfulfilled sexually and in relationships devoid of sex. 

So, as the belief system goes, an average-looking man has limited opportunity at best to find female sexual partners and an unattractive man has almost no chance of engaging with women.

This belief system and the inability to connect to the female partners they desire leaves these men involuntarily celibate, or as incels.

Several active shooter events have taken place in which the shooter was a self-described incel. The recent college killings in Idaho where four young college students were brutally stabbed to death, apparently in their sleep, is an example or I believe it could be an example of the killer being an incel or at least being on that road.

I posited this idea after seeing reports about the crime scene and method of operation of the killer in the house the victims were staying in. The violence of the attack, the repeated stabbings and the use of a knife as the weapon of murder all indicated to me that this was perhaps an incel-related attack.

In a recent news report, a retired FBI agent from the profile unit said he thinks there may be incel tendencies involved in this crime. 

The use of the knife in an up-close and personal attack such as these four killings is also indicative of the mindset of the killer. A knife, when used to repeatedly stab a victim, can be a sexually motivated action; the knife is a phallic symbol. We often see this pattern of behavior in a domestic violence homicide.

I have personal experience with this kind of investigation when I was the lead in a brutal double homicide investigation. The killer was the boyfriend and father of one of the victims’ children. The other victim was the killer’s elderly grandmother.

The killer was jealous of the girlfriend and believed a possible sexual affair was taking place between the girlfriend and another man. In an attempt to prove this, he sneaked into the home anticipating catching the girlfriend in bed with the boyfriend.

The killer did not find his girlfriend in bed with a lover, but the topic came up and a screaming fight ensured. The killer, in a rage, used a large knife to stab the victim 33 times.

This motive came out in the course of the investigation and revealed the repeated stabbing; the overkill with the knife was a statement of sexual power over the victim.

It is this experience and my research on the actions and thought patterns and beliefs of the incel community that leads me to believe these killings in Idaho are also incel-related. Time and evidence will tell.

The Idaho suspected killer (he is charged with the murders), used a large knife to repeatedly stab the victims, three of whom were attractive young women, with one being a male who was in bed with one of the women. The Idaho suspect was reported to be very awkward with women and was teased by women when he was in high school.The reports of his other behaviors have not been revealed yet, but a picture is starting to come together.

These facts all combined give indication that incel actions are involved in this case.

For all of us in law enforcement who investigate crime, this tells us clearly that we must consider this rising concern of incel crime as we look at incidents going forward.

Joseph Pangaro is a 27-year veteran of law enforcement. He retired in 2013 at the rank of Lieutenant and currently serves as the Director of School Safety and Security for a large school district in NJ. He is also the owner of Pangaro Training and Management, a company that provides training to the public and private sector on a host of topics. Email: JPangaro@Yahoo.com