Death On A Bus

I didn't want to write about this. Quite frankly, it turns my stomach.

But it's one of those stories that gets into your head. It sits there, quietly tumescent, causing you to consider things you've never thought before--should bus terminals have metal detectors? how, precisely, do you spot the madman before he goes mad?--and before you know it, the story's up and stampeding around with a hunting knife, hacking and whacking. To forestall that moment, I think I'd better vent some of the story-pressure.

The bare facts: Tim McLean, 22, was stabbed, beheaded, and partially cannibalized on a Greyhound bus en route to Winnipeg from Edmonton, allegedly by 40-year-old Vince Weiguang Li. All reports I've read suggest this was an unprovoked attack by a stranger.

The suspect does not have a criminal record.

Reading the coverage of this tragedy, amidst all the horror, one point fairly leapt out at me: Tim McLean was, by all accounts, asleep when the attack began. His murderer never said a word.

It's hard enough to come to terms with random vicious killings. When they're completely unprovoked, and the killer is so calm about it, that somehow makes it even worse. I doubt I'll ever look at a stranger sitting next to me the same way again.

I've rode the big grey dog on many occasions into my late twenties. They're not happy places, busses. Basically, they're mobile bus terminals. Ever been in a bus terminal? Sorrow and stigma commingle and produce an odour you can almost smell: the sickly-sweet miasma of misery. You learn real quick to pay attention on busses, especially if you're notoriously absent-minded and you look like easy pickings. My mother used to worry about me every time I took a bus. Even as a kid, I figured out that real people don't ride busses. Real people drive where they have to go, or fly; the bus is for disposable people too poor to do either. And wherever there are disposable people, there are other people willing to dispose of them.

Of course, no one is disposable. Tim McLean was anything but. Accounts make him out to have been a free spirit: no fixed address, but not homeless in the conventional sense; he had a multitude of friends he would stay with for a week or three months at a stretch. Everybody loved him. He'd never been in a fight in his life. If you could describe him in one word, happy would be a good choice.

The suspect doesn't sound much different, on the surface. His boss reports he was "a nice guy" who did "a good job". There was nothing to suggest he'd go off like a bomb, carve a stranger up, decapitate him, and then hold the head up to police and taunt them with it.
There are certain tropes in stories such as this. Often you can look at a photo of the suspect and convince yourself you see evil looking back at you; even more often, it seems, the neighbours knew nothing, suspected nothing, and thought the psycho next door was a nice, normal family man. What scares me is the thought that maybe he was. Maybe he was a nice, normal family man until one day he just turned into a monster. To dwell on that thought too long is to go slightly mad yourself.

One thing we're likely never to hear is the why of this. Of course, there can be no good reason for a man to die needlessly, but the murderer had what he felt was a perfectly valid reason to kill him, and I for one would like to know what it was. Something besides "because I'm crazy, booga-booga-booga!", I mean. The logic of the murderer, while seriously twisted by objective standards, is usually internally consistent. Knowing how killers think can prevent future killings.

If there's one scientific advance/discovery I most long for, it's the revelation that the impulse to murder is genetic in nature. That's one piece of in utero gene therapy I'd wholeheartedly support.

R.I.P. Tim McLean
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