Although the Bermuda International Film Festival title ‘The Killer Within’ suggests a gory suspense film, the reality is a thought-provoking documentary about an apparently sweet, grandfatherly man who use to be a killer.

In January 1955, Robert B. Bechtel, a dorm monitor at the prestigious Swarthmore College in Pottstown, Pennsylvania walked into a dorm room and shot dead another boy, Francis Holmes Strozier. Both Mr. Bechtel and Mr. Strozier were top students.

Mr. Bechtel was planning to become a Unitarian Minister and was a member of a group called Students for Religious Understanding. He claimed that intense torment and bullying from college hazing pushed him over the edge. When he first walked into the dorm building carrying a rifle and pistol, he intended to kill, all of the residents.

While one would expect a lengthy prison sentence, Mr. Bechtel actually spent just five years in a mental institution and was released. He went back to college, got a degree in psychology, married and fathered a daughter and step-daughter. He is now a respected environmental psychology professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

‘The Killer Within’ is a Discovery Channel documentary about the reactions of Mr. Bechtel’s family and community when he publicly reveals his past. His two daughters, struggle with how the man who taught them right from wrong, could possibly have done this terrible deed.

It was produced by Sandra Itkoff, and directed by award winning film director, teacher and organiser Macky Alston. His first feature-length documentary, ‘Family Name’, premiered in January, 1997 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Freedom of Expression Award. Since then, ‘Family Name’ has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Programming, among other awards.

What is interesting about the film, is the way that Mr. Alston manipulates the audiences’ sympathy. At first the viewer is with the seemingly benign Mr. Bechtel, but gradually, support is withdrawn and replaced by some revulsion. Mr. Bechtel is just not sorry for what he has done. Instead, he still blames the victim. Can someone be truly rehabilitated if they feel no remorse for what they have done? As Mr. Bechtel leads his daughters back to the scene of the crime, and to various other relevant places, he appears to be relishing the trip down memory lane. The daughters seem to sense this as much as the viewer.

When you read newspaper accounts from the 1950s and then compare them to today’s documentary version, some facts have been softened. For example, Mr. Bechtel makes the crime sound almost random in its execution.

“I opened his door and fired into the darkness,” Mr. Bechtel said, which sounds quite different from the newspaper reports that Mr. Strozier received a 22-calibre rifle bullet to the temple. A bullet to the temple sound so much more deliberate than a random firing from the doorway, and Mr. Bechtel readily admits in the film that he was an excellent marksman.

There is softening of the facts on the victim’s side also. In the film, Mr. Strozier’s brother is shocked that Mr. Bechtel would blame the shooting on bullying, insisting that Francis Strozier was the nicest guy, and that no bullying occurred.

But his shock is baffling, when you consider that Mr. Bechtel’s defence of bullying was exactly the same in 1955, except he called it hazing. At the time, other dormmates admitted that this hazing did go on, but insisted that it was normal college student behaviour.

The documentary also makes it sound as though authorities had no real reason to put Mr. Bechtel in an insane asylum for life rather than prison. But again, according to newspaper stories in 1955, Mr. Bechtel had previously been hospitalised for an undisclosed mental health issue before<$> the incident. So it is not outside the realm of reason that the murder might have been attributed to his mental state.

The Killer Within is a documentary well worth seeing. Many people will want to debate its issues for hours afterwards.