Nurse Marilyn Luther sat next to Allaway during the movie and was scared by his reaction to scenes of zombies being shot in the head.
Allaway gripped the arm of his chair so tight his knuckles turned white, she said, his face contorted, and he didn’t appear to know where he was.
“How stupid. What a waste of a (expletive) bullet,” Luther said he snarled.
Two years later, Luther recalled the incident at a month-long sanity hearing to determine if years of therapy had chased away the demons that drove Allaway to shoot nine people, killing seven, in a library at California State University, Fullerton, in 1976.
Many of the psychiatrists argued he’d be fine as long as he was under the supervision of mental-health experts. But people like Luther and, of course, survivors and families of the victims found the prospect of Allaway’s freedom more terrifying than any horror movie.
Allaway had a long history of mental problems, starting years before the shooting spree that would forever be known as the Fullerton Massacre. He was born in a suburb of Detroit into a poor family, led by an alcoholic father. A stint in the Marines ended with a dishonorable discharge and he contracted a sexually transmitted disease.
As a civilian, Allaway bounced from job to job, unable to stay employed because he kept fighting with coworkers.
His love life was even more turbulent. A first marriage dissolved in a wave of paranoid fantasies about kidnapping, rape, castration and murder. At the urging of his wife, he entered a mental facility in Dearborn, Mich., but it didn’t save the marriage.
By 1975, he was divorced, working as a janitor at the university, and married to another woman.
Again, he wove paranoid sexual fantasies around his new wife, a pretty blond named Bonnie. He accused her of being unfaithful and threatened to cut her with a penknife if he caught her cheating. In one of his delusions, he became convinced his coworkers were planning to make X-rated movies starring his wife, and that they’d force him into homosexual acts.
Bonnie walked out on him during Memorial Day weekend, 1976, and filed for divorce soon after. In the weeks following her departure, the rejected husband grew increasingly sullen and hostile, as one co-worker put it, “awful hard to get along with.”
Sicko shoe fetishist goes on a killing spree
On Monday morning, July 12, Allaway reported for work at the university library carrying a semiautomatic rifle that he had purchased days earlier at a K-Mart. He walked into the basement and started shooting.
“I’m going to kill all these SOBs for messing around with my wife,” witnesses said he shouted.
Within five minutes, seven people were dead or dying: Paul Herzberg, 30, and Bruce Jacobson, 32, both employees in the library’s media center; custodial staff Donald Karges, 41, and Deborah Paulsen, 25, and Seth Fessenden, 72, a professor emeritus of speech. Graphic artist Frank Teplansky, 51, shot three times in the back of the head, died later at a hospital. Library assistant Stephen Becker, 32, son of the university’s dean of students, tried to stop the killer by grabbing for the gun, but he was stopped by a bullet.
Two others — supervising custodian Maynard Hoffman, 64, and associated librarian Donald Keran, 55, — were wounded but survived.
Allaway then left the building, got into his car and drove to an Anaheim hotel where his ex-wife worked, and called police.
“I went berserk at Cal State Fullerton, and I committed some terrible act,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you people would come down and pick me up. I’m unarmed, and I’m giving myself up to you.”
In 1977, Allaway became one of the rare mass murderers — fewer than 2% by some estimates — to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. He went off to a state psychiatric hospital.
Ten years later, Allaway said he was a changed man and asked to be released. He had been a model inmate, even declared “patient of the year” at the institution in 1983. This first bid for freedom failed, but he kept at it, petitioning the courts three more times. Psychiatrists said his paranoid schizophrenia appeared to be in remission, but no one was ready to test that theory on the streets. The last hearing was the one in 2001, where his reactions to zombie shootings in a horror movie played a role in determining that he should remain institutionalized.
Allaway insists he has no memory of his crime.
In 2006, the Orange County Register covered a meeting between the killer and the family of a victim, the first he ever agreed to. Patricia Almazan, Teplansky’s daughter, hoped Allaway would answer one question that has been haunting her since the killing: Why did he shoot her father?
“I don’t know,” was the best he had to offer.
Allaway may ask for freedom again, but Almazan is not alone in declaring that she will do her best to make sure that never happens. She told him: “If you ever. . . ever try to get out, I will be there, every single day until I die, to see that you don’t.”
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