No Room Big Enough for Killer’s Secrets

There’s a world where I can go

And tell my secrets to.

When Brian Wilson wrote those lyrics to “In My Room” in 1963, people wondered what happened to the sunniness the Beach Boys had been known for. Their sound celebrated hot rods and surfboards and the carefree California life. But the young Brian Wilson, who would later sink into years of depression, also knew that teens have dark places where they sometimes go, whether they want to or not.

William Freund may or may not have known anything about the Beach Boys, but he knew all about dark places that the Southern California sun can’t get to. And he, too, had a room where you go. For him, it was a computer that linked him at all hours to an Internet chat group -- for people with the same behavioral syndrome he said he had -- but as we now see, it was a world he could tell his secrets to.

The online postings reveal Freund’s own set of mournful lyrics, often written in direct sentences that simultaneously defined the shrinking contours of his life while prophesying its destructive end.

The end came Saturday morning when Freund, 19, put on Halloween garb and shotgunned to death two Aliso Viejo neighbors before returning home and killing himself.

It was, literally, the explosive coda to his messages into the Internet void that described a life of “no friends, all enemies” and a belief that people considered him “creepy.” He attributed the latter to the fact that, “I stare and made odd eye contact, I believe.”

But as if to highlight the cloud cover that enveloped him, he’d written 10 days earlier that people seemed afraid and unfriendly toward him and “I don’t know why.”

In the three dozen postings from the final weeks of his life, Freund both acknowledged a sense of being a social misfit and announced, “Guess what I have -- A real shotgun.”

It’s fair to ask whether someone should have done something after reading his more dire postings, such as a declaration that he was going to do “Alot off damage with my remington 870.” Or, when answering a generic “Plans for the future?” question, he replied, “Start a Terror Campaign To hurt those that have hurt me, My future ended some time ago.”

Even that posting doesn’t represent a specific threat. It doesn’t identify other human targets. And in the context of other messages, Freund sounded much more suicidal than homicidal, with typical angst of a troubled, clueless soul talking about work failures and an inability to make any money.

“I feel like I need 10 thousand dollars,” he wrote two weeks before his murder-suicide spree. “Can you enter the stock market without any know-how?”

The website Freund sought out is for those with Asperger’s syndrome, described as a neurological disorder that can impair social skills. The condition isn’t linked with homicidal behavior, and several people on the site this week lamented not doing more to help Freund.

To do what? I have a hard time faulting them or the Web hosts, because the most I can picture is them telling police of a disturbed young man who said he had a shotgun and felt useless.

Absent a specific threat against someone, what could police have done? Freund was 19, a legal adult. Even had they been notified, it’s a stretch to expect police to knock on his parents’ door to alert them to his seeming slide.

Over the years, enough mental-health professionals and friends and relatives of the mentally disturbed have told me the answer lies in proper medication and a support system. The salvation of darkly troubled people doesn’t rest with total strangers in an online chat room.

Sadly, the thin strand holding up Freund snapped.

He had dire secrets, and he told them.

But for reasons that will forever haunt his victims’ loved ones and Freund’s own circle, he told them to the wrong people.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.