Good, evil and the mystery in between

TORONTO — After Macky Alston had finished teaching a film class one day at Union Theological Seminary, a young student named Carrah Bechtel cornered him in the hallway, saying she had a story to tell that she thought would make a good documentary. Carrah told him about her father, Bob Bechtel, a mild-mannered University of Arizona psychology professor, now in his 70s, who was a pillar in his community, devoted to his students, active in his church as well as in organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

But the story her father wanted to tell was one that most of his family and friends knew nothing about. In 1955, as a student at Swarthmore College, Bechtel, armed with a cache of guns, went on a rampage, killing a fellow student and shooting up his dormitory before he turned himself in to police. After serving nearly five years at a correctional facility for the criminally insane, Bechtel was released, moved to Tucson, and lived an otherwise normal life, marrying and raising two daughters, Carrah and his stepdaughter Amanda.

Bechtel had only recently told his daughters about his past. Now he wanted to shed light on the phenomenon of schoolyard bullying, believing he had run amok after being mercilessly bullied as a child and at college. The result is "The Killer Within," a riveting documentary financed by Discovery Films that premiered here.

The 40-year-old filmmaker has a master's degree in divinity from Union, and his father was a minister. So it is not a surprise that Alston has always made documentaries about moral issues. But he had never met someone as hard to decipher.

"There's no easy diagnosis," Alston told me Wednesday over coffee. "Either he's traumatized or mentally ill or he got away with murder. I thought to myself, 'I'm a good interviewer -- I'm going to crack this guy.' I had 10 ways to do it and I tried them all, but he was a total conundrum."

In the film, we see Bechtel tell his story to extended family members, his students and local reporters. Alston also films the family on visits to Swarthmore and the asylum where Bechtel served time. The film offers reminiscences about Bechtel by his Swarthmore classmates as well as footage of sessions Bechtel had with a Princeton University sociologist who specializes in youthful rampage killers.

"She'd been studying every type of rampage killer, but she'd never met anyone that old -- it's really considered a 1980s phenomena," Alston says. "If someone did today what he did then, they'd either have gotten the chair or been in prison for life."