From the Unabomber to Jared Loughner to Wade Michael Page: America’s ‘lone wolf’ killers, suspects

“Lone wolves’’ — people isolating themselves from others, hard to track down— have made up some of America’s most dangerous and violent people. A 2009 government report asserted that many had extreme right-wing views and branded them as ‘’domestic terrorists.’’ Of the suspects or killers in prominent U.S. cases, only some might fit into that political category, though many had been cut off from society.

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Wade Michael Page

The suspect in the killings of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Aug. 6 -- killed by authorities -- was dismissed from a military career and a recent trucking job because of excessive use of alcohol. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Page as ''a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.'' At left, Page, 40, is seen on a Myspace.com Web page for the musical group End Apathy.

/ Reuters

James Holmes

Holmes now sits in jail on charges that he murdered 12 people and wounded 58 more in the mass shooting July 20 during a showing of the latest Batman movie in an Aurora, Colo., multiplex. Holmes, 24, didn't appear to have many friends in Colorado and was considered bright but very quiet in his native California. Holmes, who had dyed his hair the color orange like the Joker, was undergoing psychiatric treatment at the University of Colorado but was dropping out of school when the attack occurred. Nothing has emerged so far to indicate a particular political point of view.

RJ Sangosti / AP

Jared Lee Loughner

Loughner has pleaded guilty in the shooting rampage at a January 2011 event hosted by then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, killing six and wounding 13, including Giffords. The plea on Aug. 7 will spare him the death penalty. Before the shooting, Loughner was kicked out of Pima Community College after several run-ins with police and the posting of a bizarre video online. In one class, the professor had requested a police officer for each class. Loughner was told to get a psychological evaluation.

/ AP

A. Joseph Stack

Stack crashed a Cherokee Piper plane into an Austin, Texas, office building housing 200 Internal Revenue Service employees on Feb. 18, 2010. He died in the crash, as did one person on the ground. Two dozen federal workers were injured. He had complaints with politicians in general, labor unions, the bailout of financial institutions, the Catholic Church and drug and health-care companies.

/ AP

Nadal Malik Hasan

On Nov. 5, 2009, a gunman killed 13 people and wounded at least two dozen at the Army base at Fort Hood, Tex. Hasan, the sole suspect, was an Army major serving as a psychiatrist. He was shot by Army civilian police and paralyzed from the chest down. He has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; he may face additional charges at court-martial.

/ AP

Seung-Hui Cho

On April 16, 2007, the 23-year-old Cho, an English major at Virginia Tech, killed two students in a dorm, then crossed campus to the engineering building, going room to room, shooting. He killed 32 people and himself. Federal investigators said Cho displayed many of the same characteristics of a criminal behavioral profile called the "Collector of Injustice," or someone who considers any misfortune against him the fault or responsibility of others. Cho's dorm-room manifesto said people had no respect for him or others he perceived were like him.

/ AP

Ted J. Kaczynski

The Unabomber is the very definition of a lone wolf. The Harvard-educated Kaczynski, who espoused views against technological change, lived in a cabin in Lincoln, Mont., when he was arrested on April 3, 1996. He was convicted of killing three people and wounding nearly two dozen over 17 years of mail bombings.

/ AP

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