In the 1960s, television news was pushing boundaries. Daily shows like The Huntley-Brinkley Report and Walter Cronkite’s The CBS Evening News were growing broader and bolder, covering not just political results but political movements, not just press conferences but American experiences on the ground.
And they were also covering crime, which was increasing in most American cities. From individual tragedies to large-scale crime waves, crime reporting was becoming a centerpiece of television news reporting.
In the summer of 1966, two major stories broke: Richard Speck murdered eight women on a single night in Chicago, and Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people from a clocktower in Austin. Neither was seeking fame, but with the new television news climate, they received it anyway.
Seeing this, 18-year-old Robert Benjamin Smith bought a gun. On November 12th, 1966, he walked into the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona. Seven people were inside: four cosmetology students, a customer and her two children.
When the women ignored Smith’s entrance, he fired a warning shot into the air. “He ordered them to go into the back room,” reported the New York Daily News, “and lie down in a circle, like the spokes of a wheel, with their heads in the center. Newspapers would call this the Wheel of Death.” He killed five people — four of the women and a toddler. The fifth woman survived by playing dead. The mother of the children threw herself on top of her infant, sparing the child from death, before succumbing to her injuries.
“I wanted to get known, just wanted to get myself a name,” explained Smith. He had hoped to kill nearly ten times as many people, but had arrived at the beauty college campus too early. Upon his arrest, he was without remorse, saying simply, “I wanted people to know who I was.”
Smith’s obsession with fame had started years prior. As a young teenager, he was captivated by the biographies of Napoleon and Caesar. But he soon discovered something even more seductive than fame: infamy. He became increasingly fascinated by Hitler. And in 1963, on the occasion of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Smith’s admiration for the president was eclipsed by adoration of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The “summer’s macabre mass murders in Chicago and Austin seemed irresistibly fascinating to Robert Benjamin Smith,” observed Time. Was Smith the first copycat killer? Certainly not. But was he the first fame-seeking, copycat mass shooter, inspired by television crime news, moved to action by the dream of media attention? It’s quite likely he was.