Computer evidence shows Lanza's interest in pedophilia

This photo released by the Connecticut State Police on Friday, Dec. 27, 2013, and contained in a document titled "Sec 4 -Scene Search Day 3," shows a room in the home where Adam Lanza lived with his mother in Newtown, Conn. Lanza gunned down 20 first-graders and six educators with a semi-automatic rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, after killing his mother inside their home. Lanza committed suicide with a handgun as police arrived at the school. (AP Photo/Connecticut State Police) ORG XMIT: BX122 less This photo released by the Connecticut State Police on Friday, Dec. 27, 2013, and contained in a document titled "Sec 4 -Scene Search Day 3," shows a room in the home where Adam Lanza lived with his mother in ... more Photo: Connecticut State Police Photo: Connecticut State Police Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Computer evidence shows Lanza's interest in pedophilia 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

NEWTOWN -- Adam Lanza had an interest in pedophilia.

On his computer hard drive was a screenplay, "Lovebound," that describes a relationship between a 30-year-old man and a 10-year-old boy, as well as documents advocating for "pedophiles' rights and the liberation of children."

He also discussed with a friend how it was "a disease that needed to be treated and not looked at as evil," according to the State Police report on the shooting released late last month.

Smiggles, a screen name state police said Lanza used, made hundreds of posts on a now-defunct online forum, "Shocked and Beyond," that focused on mass shootings after Columbine.

In a post dated Dec. 30, 2009, Smiggles said, "I used to think I was asexual, but the primary reason why I thought that was because my BMI (body mass index) was 14." At the time of his death nearly three years later, he was 6 feet tall and weighed 112 pounds.

Smiggles also posted on the forum, "I castrated myself when I was 15 to rebel against society."

Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky said he was "unaware of any information" about Lanza attempting to castrate himself.

While there is still no concrete evidence that Lanza was a pedophile -- or a victim of one -- the material does point to an internal conflict that may have plagued Lanza in the years before he walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and took the lives of 20 young children and six educators before killing himself the morning of Dec. 14, 2012.

"Certainly, there isn't enough evidence to come to a firm conclusion," said Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the sexual behaviors consultation unit at Johns Hopkins University, "but it sounds like he was conflicted about these issues. It's possible he had an attraction (to children) or he knew people who had them and he was trying to sort it out. But it's still a long way from explaining what he did."

Berlin said one could speculate that Lanza, if he had pedophilia tendencies, could have targeted the elementary school in an attempt to eliminate temptation.

"The idea is that someone who has a strong desire for something and they're forbidden to act upon it, they can be angry at the source of temptation," he said. "It's not unreasonable, given what happened. There must have been a tremendous amount of rage inside of him."

He stressed, however, that the idea is just a hypothesis and there isn't enough evidence at this point to either refute or support the claim.

"It's just more pieces to an incredibly complex puzzle," he said.

It's a puzzle that may never be solved. Despite a nearly yearlong investigation and thousands of documents investigators have examined in a search for answers, what motivated Lanza to walk into Sandy Hook Elementary School that day remains a mystery.

Mary Ellen O'Toole, a retired FBI behavioral analyst whose expertise is in mass homicides and school violence, said there is a compulsive aspect to many pedophiles that isn't apparent in the evidence released to date on Lanza.

"These urges come back repeatedly, and they aren't satisfied by one instance," she said. "I would expect to see a more compulsive nature to the inquiry. When searching a home, you would expect to find volumes of material on the subject."

She added that investigators would expect to see some kind of searches pertaining to a sexual curiosity on most 20-year-olds' computers. Lanza's hard drive, however, was filled with documents pertaining to his research of mass shootings, images of Lanza holding a handgun to his head and a smattering of information related to the rights of pedophiles.

While additional evidence hasn't surfaced in the Lanza case, O'Toole said that doesn't mean it didn't exist.

"It could mean the investigators didn't find it or it was part of what was destroyed," she said.

Lanza made every effort to destroy his hard drive before his rampage, which included killing his mother in her bed at home. He also redacted a number of comments he left on social media forums that may have discussed the topic.

Dr. Charles Herrick, the head of psychiatry at Danbury Hospital, said it is difficult with the information released to date to know if Lanza's interest in pedophilia had any influence on his behavior.

"The material related to his obsession with mass shootings is far more compelling about what is driving his behavior," he said.

Herrick said that while perpetrators of any kind of abuse tend to have been abused themselves, there is no indication that Lanza was molested.

"That's pretty common," he said, "but they don't usually think about it in such a intellectual way. If abused, why would someone seek to justify it?"

Dr. Harold Schwartz, chief of psychiatry at the Institute for Living in Hartford and part of the 16-member Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, said there was not enough information in the documents to say whether Lanza may have been a victim himself of a pedophile.

Members of the commission, appointed by the governor last year to make recommendations on school safety, mental health and gun violence after the shooting, have been openly critical of the state police report on the shooting, saying the report released late on a Friday afternoon was all but indecipherable.

The report is so disorganized that the commission has accepted the help of a Hartford law firm to turn the 6,700-page file -- an online collection of hundreds of individual documents without a table of contents or index -- into a searchable database.

"I think all of us have gone into the document pages and were just never quite sure whether we missed something or have gotten to the thing that matters most to us," said Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson, chairman of the commission.

Staff writer John Pirro contributed to this report.