Brenda Ann Spencer: "Switched to overload"

Brenda Ann Spencer fired 36 rounds from a semi-automatic rifle through her bedroom window at a bustling schoolyard on January 29, 1979. Her shooting spree left two adults dead, and another nine people wounded (eight of them children). The rifle had been a Christmas present from her father, Wallace Spencer.

Amid the six and a half hour standoff, which eventually led to her arrest, she was asked what had compelled her to do such an unfathomably horrible thing. Young Brenda, only 16 years old at the time of the shootings, provided an equally horrifying response:

"I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

Like many people my age, my first exposure to the life and crimes of Brenda Ann Spencer came courtesy of the highly popularized song, "I Don't Like Mondays" by The Boomtown Rats. Singer/songwriter Bob Geldof had been in the midst of giving a radio interview when news of the tragedy came through on a Telex machine. Although the song has become a Monday morning radio classic across the globe, it is important to remember that it all began with a messed-up young woman, a telescopic rifle, and the haunting phrase which has since become ensconced in popular culture.

  

                                           Image: Nykta                                                    Image: margoaquato

"I don't remember, but I'm sure that I did it."

While Brenda has, in recent years, provided a somewhat clearer explanation for her terrible crimes than her initial 'Mondays' claim, it doesn't look like this broad is getting out of the Big House any time in the near future. Still very clearly detatched from what she did on that frosty morning back in '79, she claims to remember very little about what transpired that day, and nothing at all about the actual shootings.