Killer angry over infant's death

QUARRYVILLE, Pa. — A gunman who invaded a tiny Amish school may have had a plan that went beyond the execution-style slayings of five girls.

Investigators believe Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, spent nearly a week plotting his takeover of the one-room schoolhouse and may have been planning to sexually assault almost a dozen female students.

Based on the items he brought — including flexible plastic ties, eyebolts and lubricating jelly — "it's very possible that he intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them and killing himself," State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said Tuesday. But Roberts "became disorganized" when police arrived and shot himself in the head.

He confided to his wife during the siege that he molested two relatives 20 years ago when he was boy and was tormented by dreams of doing it again, authorities said.

Holding up a copy of the gunman's suicide note at a packed news conference, Miller also suggested that Roberts was haunted by the death of his prematurely born daughter in 1997. The baby, Elise, died 20 minutes after being delivered, Miller said.

Elise's death "changed my life forever," the milk truck driver and father of three wrote to his wife. "I haven't been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptyness it seems like everytime we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us and I go right back to anger."

The state police commissioner described the demons in Roberts' head a day after the shooting rampage shattered the sense of calm in Lancaster County's bucolic Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where the Amish live a peaceful, turn-the-other-cheek existence in an 18th-century world with no automobiles and no electrical appliances.

"He certainly was very troubled psychologically deep down and was dealing with things that nobody else knew he was dealing with," Miller said.

The death toll rose to six Tuesday — including the gunman — when two girls died of their wounds.

During the standoff, Roberts told his wife in a cell phone call from the schoolhouse that he molested two female relatives when they were 3 to 5 years old, Miller said. Roberts would have been around 11 or 12 at the time. Also, in a suicide note left for his family, he said he "had dreams about doing what he did 20 years ago again," Miller said.