Montreal Looks Within Itself in Wake of Mass Killing : Violence: Some say the cold-blooded murder of 14 women was the work of a singular madman. Others aren’t so sure.

Female radio sports-show host Danielle Rainville says she has been plagued for years by men who contended that she had stolen a job that rightly belonged to a man. Sometimes the calls came as often as twice a week, she says, adding, “One of them said that he was going to break my neck.”

But Rainville says she ignored the male griping until Montreal’s shocking mass murder this week, in which the unemployed killer deliberately sought out female victims because he thought feminists in general had ruined his life.

Now, Rainville is so nervous she says that she can’t eat or sleep at night, and is not sure she will ever be the same again on the air. She has become both a subject of and a participant in a debate here over what the slayings may reveal about Canadian society.

Wednesday, 25-year-old Marc Lepine entered the Ecole Polytechnique of the University of Montreal and went on a shooting spree in which he hunted down women and left men alive. In one mechanical engineering classroom, he even asked the men to leave the room before lining up the female students and opening fire on them. He was reported to have accused the women of being “feminists” as he fired. Fourteen women died, and 13 other people were wounded.

Some Montrealers are saying now that the murders were the work of a one-of-a-kind madman, a lunatic whose actions say nothing about mainstream Canadian attitudes toward women. Indeed, the details emerging about the man make him appear uniquely disturbed.

Other Montrealers, however, argue that the killer’s actions are only the most extreme example of sexism and violence against women--and resentment of successful female professionals.

“This is a particularly gruesome expression of anti-feminist sentiment, but we get this kind of thing every day,” says Alice de Wolff of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. “Usually, people do a tirade: miserable feminists trying to ruin the world.”

Investigators handling Lepine’s case have said that the gunman’s Algerian father left home forever when the boy was only 7, and that as a young man, Lepine proved himself incapable of maintaining stable relationships with women. They said that when things did not go his way with women, he would cut off all conversation and retreat to his room.

Although given the name Gamil Gharbi at birth, he changed to his mother’s French name as a teen-ager. He constantly wore a baseball cap, as if to hide his curly hair.

Police have also learned that while Lepine aspired to study at the Ecole Polytechnique himself, he failed some of his preparatory classes and was never admitted to the elite engineering school. He was also turned down by the Canadian armed forces.

He seemed to seek refuge from his personal troubles in war movies, which police said he watched as if “obsessed.” He was known to frequent at least one Montreal gun shop.

Neighbors remember Lepine as a withdrawn and silent tenant.

“I had nothing against him, but the way he was looking at everybody with big eyes!” said Gerard Claveau, Lepine’s middle-aged next-door neighbor. “He was crazy.”

On the evening of the mass murder, police arriving on the scene found a suicide note in Lepine’s pocket, blaming his problems on feminists and containing an apparent hit list of prominent Canadian women. The next day, sports-show host Rainville found out that her name was on the list. (Police have been keeping the other names a secret, to protect the women.)

“I wish I didn’t know,” Rainville says. “It makes me think that someday something like this will happen (to me). I haven’t been able to eat since yesterday afternoon. I had nightmares last night.”

Rainville’s fears echo what some other women here are thinking: That the killer might just have easily have chosen them, that his notoriety might inspire other men to kill again and that his hatred of women might represent something larger than a single diseased mind.

“There’s more than one Marc in the world,” said the National Action Committee’s De Wolff, whose office received a disturbing call Thursday from an unknown man who asked whether there were any men on the premises, then hung up when told there were not. The woman who took the call, frightened that the man was planning an attack, fled the office.

After the mass killing, Montreal French-language newspaper writer Francine Pelletier said that she overheard male colleagues joking in the office that they sometimes felt like killing women themselves.

“Men have to find out what’s wrong with themselves,” she told a radio audience here. English-language newspaper columnist Albert Nerenberg aired a similar view in an article saying he felt “shame for my generation and shame for my cold-killing sex.”

“Marc Lepine took this society’s battering, woman-hating secret and made it senseless, unthinkable mass murder,” the column added. Nerenberg says he got a stream of angry phone calls the day the column was published, from men who felt he was vesting too much meaning in a single act of violence.