August 17, 2009, Daily Mail (London) She 'Didn't like Mondays.' Now She'll See Many More of Them Dawn through the Bars of a Cell; Failed Freedom Bid by a Killer the Boomtown Rats Made Famous, by Philip Nolan,

August 17, 2009, Daily Mail (London) She 'Didn't like Mondays.' Now She'll See Many More of Them Dawn through the Bars of a Cell; Failed Freedom Bid by a Killer the Boomtown Rats Made Famous, by Philip Nolan, 

THE silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload, and nobody's gonna go to school today, she's gonna make them stay at home.

With that unforgettable intro, I Don't Like Mondays, a dazzling, piano-led operatic hit for the Boomtown Rats that went to No.1 in over 30 countries, staked a claim to being one of the finest pop records of the Seventies.

But while the song itself is now filed under nostalgia, the events that led to its composition continue to exert a hold on the present.

On Friday, Brenda Ann Spencer, who opened fire on a school across the road from her home with a .22 calibre rifle, killing two adults and wounding eight children, appeared for the fourth time before a parole board in California to ask for freedom, 30 years after she was jailed for the crime.

She failed yet again and it will now be ten years before she has another chance to seek a release.

School shootings are not unusual now, but in 1979, they were pretty much unheard of.

Even today, it is rare for a perpetrator to be a female - and when you throw an infamous justification for the crime into the mix, you are left with a crime that the world has never forgotten.

Because, when asked by a reporter why she did it, 16-year-old Spencer said simply: 'I don't like Mondays - this livens up the day.' It was 8.30 in the morning of Monday January 29, 1979, when Brenda Ann Spencer opened her bedroom window on Lake Atlin Avenue in San Carlos, near San Diego, and trained the sights of her semi-automatic weapon on Grover Cleveland Elementary School across the road.

Children were heading from the playground to their classes and Spencer simply mowed them down - 'They looked like a herd of cows standing around; it was really easy pickings,' she said.

The police arrived quickly and blocked her line of fire with a rubbish truck and opened negotiations.

'It was a lot of fun seeing children shot,' she told them, before finally surrendering after a sixhour standoff.

Police found over 40 spent cartridges in the house. At the end of her shooting spree, she had killed school principal Burton Wragg, 53, and caretaker Mike Suchar, 56. Eight children and a policeman were also wounded.

America was stunned. How could a pretty 16-year-old, the archetypal girl next door, commit such a repugnant crime? During the court case, there was little chance to find out, when she pleaded guilty and received a term of 25 years to life for two charges of murder and one of assault with a deadly weapon.

It is only since the parole process started in 1993, that Spencer has expressed remorse for her crime and offered clues as to why she committed it.

AN EPILEPTIC and a depressive, she said she was drinking alcohol and on the mind-altering drug phencyclidine, better known as PCP, when she opened fire.

Hallucinating, she claimed she saw a squad of commandos attempting to storm her home and opened fire.

Even more controversially, she alleged she had been sexually abused by her father, Wallace Spencer.

'I had to share my dad's bed 'til I was 14 years old,' she said, a claim later denied by her father.

'I know saying I'm sorry doesn't make it all right,' she added, 'but with every school shooting, I feel I'm partially responsible. What if they got their idea from what I did? 'I live with the unbearable pain every day of knowing that I was responsible for the deaths of two people and caused many others physical and emotional pain and suffering, but I'm not a murderer.' What was not disputed was that her father bought the gun a month before, as a Christmas present: 'I had asked for a radio,' Spencer said, 'but I got a gun instead. I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.' Her hope, she explained, was that the police would kill her in the siege. 'I had failed in every other suicide attempt. I thought if I shot at the cops, they would shoot me.' Others saw it differently. Richard Sachs, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted her, advanced his own theory. 'She probably was and still is a miserable person through and through,' he said. 'But her way of dealing with the misery was to spread it around.' Spencer alleged she was drugged at the time of the court case. 'People who saw me say I was a zombie. I said what they told me to say, I did what they told me to do.' She is an inmate at the California Institution for Women in Chino, 50 kilometres from Los Angeles, where fellow inmates include Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, both members of Charles Manson's 'Family', who celebrated another gruesome milestone just last week, the 40th anniversary of the Helter Skelter murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others.

Aside from minor disciplinary incidents, Spencer has been a good prisoner.

She completed school, took college courses and a vocational course in electronics, though staff were worried about her behaviour after a relationship with another female inmate ended.

She heated a paperclip and carved the words 'courage' and 'pride' on her chest.

Over the years, her victims have held different opinions on whether she should be paroled. Kathe Wragg, the widow of the principal, said: 'I could never feel trustworthy of a person like that. Just the idea that she felt she had to kill somebody, it's so self-serving and inward. I would never want her to be out. I have not seen any remorse.' But Norman Buell, whose daughter, Christy, was nine when she was hit twice by Spencer, believed Spencer's drugs and abuse claims and said: 'Those things put together are not a good chemical mix and I could see where it would happen. I personally would say that she's served her sentence.' Other victims have also spoken down the years, including brothers Jeff and Kevin Karpiak.

'I remember it like it happened yesterday,' Kevin said years later. 'I remember my principal and my caretaker being shot in front of my eyes.' 'I guess it is just something you get used to,' added Jeff. 'Evil can be outdone by the good in the world.'

PATTY SATIN-JACOBS, whose son, Scott, was not hit but who saw his classmates mown down, said: 'It really shatters your illusions of security and safety when something like this happens. It affects every area of your life.' As for Wallace Spencer, his subsequent activities somewhat validated his daughter's claims. He divorced his wife, Dot, and married a woman who, at 17, was Brenda's cellmate in juvenile detention, later fathering a child with her.

Yet, despite Brenda's claims of sexual abuse, he still visits her every Saturday. As for the Boomtown Rats, well, Bob Geldof was in a Georgia radio studio when the Telex machine spewed out the news of the shooting and he and Johnny Fingers immediately set about writing a song, which got its first airing within a month of the incident and shot straight to the top of the charts.

That may well be a part of musical history - but for Brenda Ann Spencer and the victims of a crime that stunned the world, the events of 30 years remain very much part of the present.

So at 47, the woman who was just 16 when the silicon chip inside her head got switched to overload, will find herself waking up to many, many more Mondays behind bars.

CAPTION(S):
Mad or bad? Spencer, 16, leaves court in chains