Good, evil and the mystery in between

After Macky Alston had finished teaching a film class one day at Union Theological Seminary, a young student named Carrah Bechtel cornered him in the hallway, saying she had a story to tell that she thought would make a good documentary. Carrah told him about her father, Bob Bechtel, a mild-mannered University of Arizona psychology professor, now in his 70s, who was a pillar in his community, devoted to his students, active in his church as well as in organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

But the story her father wanted to tell was one that most of his family and friends knew nothing about. In 1955, as a student at Swarthmore College, Bechtel, armed with a cache of guns, went on a rampage, killing a fellow student and shooting up his dormitory before he turned himself in to police. After serving nearly five years at a correctional facility for the criminally insane, Bechtel was released, moved to Tucson, and lived an otherwise normal life, marrying and raising two daughters, Carrah and his stepdaughter Amanda.

Bechtel had only recently told his daughters about his past. Now he wanted to shed light on the phenomenon of schoolyard bullying, believing he had run amok after being mercilessly bullied as a child and at college. The result is “The Killer Within,” a riveting documentary financed by Discovery Films that premiered here.

The 40-year-old filmmaker has a master’s degree in divinity from Union, and his father was a minister. So it is not a surprise that Alston has always made documentaries about moral issues. But he had never met someone as hard to decipher.

“There’s no easy diagnosis,” Alston told me Wednesday over coffee. “Either he’s traumatized or mentally ill or he got away with murder. I thought to myself, ‘I’m a good interviewer -- I’m going to crack this guy.’ I had 10 ways to do it and I tried them all, but he was a total conundrum.”

In the film, we see Bechtel tell his story to extended family members, his students and local reporters. Alston also films the family on visits to Swarthmore and the asylum where Bechtel served time. The film offers reminiscences about Bechtel by his Swarthmore classmates as well as footage of sessions Bechtel had with a Princeton University sociologist who specializes in youthful rampage killers.

“She’d been studying every type of rampage killer, but she’d never met anyone that old -- it’s really considered a 1980s phenomena,” Alston says. “If someone did today what he did then, they’d either have gotten the chair or been in prison for life.”

Sadly underscoring the film’s relevance, within minutes after Alston and I spoke Wednesday, a rifle-toting gunman walked into a Montreal college, methodically shooting at least a dozen people, killing one and wounding five others before being killed in a firefight with police.

What makes the film especially striking is that Bechtel is an eerily unsympathetic character. Clearly intelligent and thoughtful, he shows no emotion and almost no remorse. On the visit to the asylum, while his wife and daughter weep, he simply offers a few nervous chuckles. Some of the most moving moments in the film come from interviews with the murdered boy’s brother, now an older man, who has clearly wrestled with everything from vengeance to forgiveness in his efforts to deal with the tragedy.

Bechtel would probably come off much better if he had provided the modern-day media money shot -- crying for the camera. But he appears more belligerent than remorseful. At one point in the film, discussing the bullying he endured, he says flatly, “Why should I cry for people? People used to make me cry for amusement. Sorry, not anymore.”

I was worried at times that Alston might have grown too close to Bechtel and lost his objectivity. But the audience members I spoke to believed Alston provided a balanced portrait. That’s not to say the filmmaker doesn’t feel some identification with his subject, being a gay man who didn’t come out to his family until he was 21.

“I’ve lived with a secret for a very long time too,” he told me. “There’s a before and after in my life -- the before being before I told the world I was gay. So I’m definitely interested in stories about secrets. You always wonder -- and this certainly applies to Bob -- does it kill them or does it liberate them?”

Everyone will have their own visceral reaction to “The Killer Within,” which will air on the Discovery Channel sometime in 2007. Alston says that when he showed the film to his two sisters, they took opposite sides. “Being the son of a minister,” says Alston, “I was raised that good conquers evil. And yet there’s lots of evidence to the contrary. Making a film like this is my way of wrestling with life in order to make sense of it.”

Bechtel’s family has had similar wrestling to do. His stepdaughter is very blunt in her assessment of the man who had been a loving father to her. “I’ve lived with a murderer my entire life ... and I’m going to have to get used to it.”

“The Big Picture” is in Toronto this week, reporting on the Toronto Film Festival. To see more coverage, go to latimes.com/toronto.