Health club shooter ‘had a lot of hatred’ toward women

George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn’t understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He said he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn’t slept with a woman in 19 years.

“Women just don’t like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive,” the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented in a chilling diary he posted on the Internet.

For months, he also wrote vaguely about using guns to carry out his “exit plan” at his health club, where lots of young women worked out.

On Tuesday, Sodini put his plan into action.

He went to the L.A. Fitness in this Pittsburgh suburb, turned out the lights on a dance-aerobics class filled with women, and opened fire with three guns, letting loose with a fusillade of at least 36 bullets.

He killed three women and wounded nine others before committing suicide.

“He just had a lot of hatred in him and [was] hell-bent on committing this act, and no one was going to stop him,” Allegheny County Police Supt. Charles Moffatt said Wednesday.

The 4,610-word Web diary appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans to end his misery with a shocking act of carnage at the health club. He portrayed himself as painfully and inexplicably lonely.

“Every evening I am alone, and then go to bed alone,” he wrote. “I see twentysomething couples everywhere. I see a twentysomething guy with a nice twentyish young woman. I think those years slipped right by for me. Why should I continue another 20+ years alone?”

He listed his status as “never married” and, in a chilling addition, recorded the date of his death as Aug. 4, 2009.

It was unclear when the Web diary was posted and whether it had been updated online repeatedly since November or posted in its entirety recently. Investigators are trying to determine if anyone saw it online before the rampage.

“If anyone knew of it, they would have a moral and ethical obligation and legal obligation to bring it forward,” Moffatt said.