In 1992 a sophomore at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts named Wayne Lo went on a killing rampage with a semiautomatic rifle. He killed two people and injured four others. Why did he do it? The New York Times reports:

After the crime and for the first years of his imprisonment, he said not long ago, he believed that God had chosen him to commit carnage. Now, he calls that his period of denial.

"At the time I thought I did the right thing," he said recently. "But as I look back at it over time, more and more it doesn't make sense to me. And more and more I ask myself, Why? Why did I do it? I mean, Why?"…

The story Mr. Lo long told himself came down to this: In December 1992, he received a divine message to go to the gun store, order the ammunition with his mother's credit card, then lie and deceive and kill. He was so convinced that he was justified in his acts that he raged at his lawyers during his trial because they insisted on asserting that he was insane. Instead, he argued, his lawyers should have investigated his victims to uncover why a heavenly power had selected them to be shot.

Sitting back and talking one afternoon in a small, concrete-block room with a glass wall facing the main visiting area at the prison, he said the command to kill was a feeling. "It's not visual. It's not auditory," he said. "It's just, you realize it."

Seven years after the shootings, he had a change of mind:

Mr. Lo carefully described the evolution of his thoughts. As he had come to realize God would not have chosen him to inflict so much pain, he said, he had struggled to understand what made him into a killer. He remains convinced, he said, that it was something outside of himself that gave him a message to do what he did. Perhaps, he said in answer to a question, it was a supernatural or satanic force.