By the age of twenty-five French-Canadian Marc Lepine had developed a deep and bitter hatred of women; or, more accurately, he was peeved because they did not like him. And, to be truthful, the cause was not difficult to identify - Lepine had a fanatical obsession with war and violence, and it showed; though he had a number of girlfriends none of them hung around for very long, and even female neighbours avoided his company. Perhaps it was the skull in the window that gave the game away, or the ceaseless sound of battle that vibrated from the room in which he watched non-stop a collection of war films. The result of Marc Lepine’s feelings of rejection was that, like most mass and many serial killers, he found the convenient scapegoat - feminists, or rather any woman who dared to think and speak for herself, especially when the word was goodbye. It is difficult to know how long Lepine would have been able to contain the growing anger and frustration had one of his girlfriends not become pregnant. This suited Marc Lepine quite well. It meant, for a start, that the mother was less likely to leave him, and it would also provide him with another human being to bully. Things turned decidedly sour when Lepine’s girlfriend insisted on her right to have the pregnancy terminated - this was militant feminism if ever he heard it; for Marc Lepine it was the final straw.

On a day in December 1989, Lepine burst into a classroom at the University of Montreal with an automatic gun in his hand - just as he imagined it felt in the films that had helped turn his fragile mind. First, he ordered the male students to one side of the room and the women to the other; then, shouting a few barely coherent curses against feminists, Lepine opened fire into the crowd of terrified women students. He claimed fourteen lives before turning the gun on himself.

In the wake of the massacre, two further revealing pieces of information were added to the Marc Lepine story. It turned out that earlier in the same year, 1989, he had been rejected for a place at the University of Montreal’s engineering faculty. There had also been an earlier rejection: the Canadian Armed forces which he so admired turned him down as a recruit - they thought he was mentally unstable.