Martin Bryant, the millionaire loner who slaughtered 35 people at a scenic Australian spot in 1996, has fulfilled the prediction of psychologists and is settling into his 10th year in prison as a lifeless hulk.
”Martin is like a zombie,” his mother, Carleen Bryant, told The Bulletin magazine in a story published on Tuesday. ”He won’t speak. He just stares into the middle distance. I can sit in front of him for 15 minutes, and he says nothing.”
In an unexplained shooting spree at Port Arthur in Tasmania on April 28 1996, Martin killed 35 people and seriously injured dozens more.
In a rare interview a month before the 10th anniversary of the killings, Carleen said her overweight 38-year-old son spends most days alone inside his cell.
He no longer reads, watches television or communicates with other prisoners. Although he is said to receive lots of letters, mostly from women, he never opens them.
Carleen said her son’s guilty plea was a big mistake.
”My poor Martin,” she said. ”He couldn’t have shot all those people down at Port Arthur. He didn’t have the brains to do it.”
Forensic psychologist Ian Joblin examined Martin after the massacre and concluded he was mildly intellectually disabled, with his IQ equivalent to an 11-year-old’s.
Joblin, it seems, correctly predicted that time inside Hobart’s Risdon prison would unhinge Martin because he didn’t have the intellectual capacity to cope with incarceration. — Sapa-dpa