The 1995 Shooting at the University of North Carolina

On Jan. 26, 1995, around 2 p.m., twenty-six-year-old University of North Carolina law student Wendell Williamson walked down Henderson Street near campus in Chapel Hill, N.C., carrying a semi-automatic rifle and wearing a camouflage jacket. He opened fire, killing 42-year-old restaurant worker Ralph Walker near his apartment. He continued walking, shooting at bystanders. Twenty-year-old UNC student and lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt was riding his bicycle in front of the Phi Mu sorority house, and he was killed instantly when Williamson shot him. Williamson then shot at police officer Demetrise Stephenson, who was driving by in her police cruiser. Injured, she crashed her patrol car into a curb. Police officers on Henderson Street began returning fire at Williamson. Around this time, the manager of a local bar, former Marine and UNC graduate Bill Leone, rushed Williamson from behind and tackled him to the ground. Leone later realized he had been shot in the shoulder, and Williamson had been shot in both legs by police during the alternation. All in all, Williamson had fired at least 10-15 rounds from his weapon.

The Shooting Was Planned

At the hospital, Williamson told an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation that he had planned the shooting spree and expected it to end in his own death. He believed unknown and malevolent forces were using telepathy to torture him. He felt he had to kill someone as a way of defending himself. In court, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

In an article that ran in the Asheville Citizen-Times on January 28, 1995, a UNC classmate of Williamson’s said acquaintances could tell Williamson was struggling with mental health issues. He would appear to be talking and laughing to himself in bars, stared at women and made them feel uncomfortable, and told one class he had telepathic powers. But this is not the person Williamson’s administrators, teachers, and classmates remember from his younger years.

Teachers Remembered Williamson as a Gifted Student and Athlete

Wendell Williamson grew up in Clyde, located in the mountains of Western North Carolina. In high school, he attended The Asheville School, where he was a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist who was in the top 20 percent of his class. He served as the president of The Student Council, worked on the school newspaper, and also played varsity football and swam competitively. He lived on campus with the other boarding students at the school and had no disciplinary infractions while he was there, the former headmaster told the Asheville Citizen-Times. He went on to attend the University of North Carolina and graduated with honors as an English major, where he was on the Dean’s List. A history buff, he was fascinated with World War II, according to his parents. He traveled for a few years after receiving his bachelor’s degree before returning to UNC and attending the law school for three years up until the shooting. A friend told the newspaper that Williamson had begun having psychological problems in his early 20s and was taking medication that didn’t seem to be helping.

At the trial, Williamson’s ex-girlfriend that he dated between 1992 and 1993 testified that he had told her about voices in his head. She said he focused on two images to drive those voices out, a dragon and a rifle. During a visit to the Dollywood amusement park in Tennessee, he grew angry with her when she wouldn’t stare at a live eagle display with him. He told her he felt the display had some sort of mental activity.

In November of 1995, a jury found Wendell Williamson, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, not guilty by reason of insanity. One of the jurors told The News and Observer the following:

“It’s a very tough decision for the jurors because we do not like having to say the words ‘not guilty,’ because of course, he committed the crime. But it’s the way the law is written and the only thing that we could do.”

After the verdict, Williamson was involuntarily committed to Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, where he was to remain until he could demonstrate that he no longer had mental illness, or was no longer a danger to others.  

For the families of Williamson’s victims, things only got worse. A few years after his trial, Williamson sued Dr. Myron Liptzin, for malpractice, claiming the psychiatrist should have foreseen that Williamson was likely to become dangerous, misdiagnosed his condition, and should have taken more forceful steps to ensure Williamson was aware of the perils of stopping his prescribed medication.

Was a Psychiatrist Liable for the Carnage?

In the spring of 1994, Dr. Liptzin, who had been treating Williamson through the UNC Health System, told the law student he was retiring. He advised him to make an appointment with his replacement and prescribed a 30-day supply of antipsychotic medication used to treat paranoid schizophrenia. Williamson did not take Dr. Liptzin’s advice. Instead, as Williamson said in a segment that ran on “60 Minutes,” he took up target practice. Almost nine months later, he went on his shooting rampage near the campus. He told “60 Minutes,” “I practiced pretty much walking up to trees and shooting them dead, because I thought that’s what I’d be doing to people.” Dr. Liptzin told the news producers that doctors cannot monitor their patients at home. He said, “Even if I give somebody a prescription, am I bound to go to their apartments or their homes and ask them to present the bottles and show me that they’ve been taking the medication?”

A jury decided in Williamson’s favor, awarding him $500,000.

In November of 1998, David R. Work, who was then serving as the executive director of the North Carolina Board of Pharmacy and an adjunct professor of pharmacy law at UNC’s School of Pharmacy, wrote a guest column for The Chapel Hill Herald. He wrote:

“All agree that Wendell Williamson was the perpetrator, killing two unsuspecting and innocent citizens, yet he was found not responsible for these acts. All also agree that Liptzin was the only person among the litigants in the courtroom to help, perhaps imperfectly, Williamson with his mental illness. The not-guilty Williamson was sent to indefinite confinement while the helping Liptzin had a $500,000 judgment as an epitaph to his medical practice. It’s obvious that something is not right here. There is an edgy feeling in the health care community about legal proceedings as well as lawyers, and cases like the Williamson one matter further aggravate that emotion.”

Work pointed out that prior to the 1960s, people diagnosed with schizophrenia were likely to have been institutionalized indefinitely in places like Dorothea Dix Hospital whether they committed crimes or not. A movement in the 1960s declared these types of incarcerations violated citizen’s rights, and the population of mental health institutions decreased by almost 50 percent. By the 1990s, fewer than 10 percent of the state’s mental patients were in state hospitals while more than 90 percent were in the community, including Wendell Williamson.

Work also said, “As a direct result of my job activities I have received the irrational, intense, and corrosive attention of a person diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He created havoc in my office, threatened me and my family, physically attacked others, producing fractures, sutures and time in Central Prison. It is clear to me that psychiatric physicians, nurses, and social workers who toil in mental health deserve our admiration, not our litigation.”

UNC Files an Appeal

The University of North Carolina, which would have been responsible for paying the $500,000 damage award since Liptzin had been a university employee, filed an appeal of the verdict. The appeal was supported by a brief written by the North Carolina Psychiatric Association, in which it emphasized the danger to seriously ill patients and threats to psychiatric care in general that would likely result if the judgment was allowed to stand, and psychiatrists became more selective in the patients they agreed to treat. In December of 2000, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina unanimously agreed with the arguments made the university and the NCPA and ordered the trial court judge to enter a verdict in favor of Liptzin. The court ruled that the alleged negligence “was not the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s (Williamson’s) injuries. No action the psychiatrist took or did not take as part of his treatment of Williamson contributed directly to the murderous rampage that landed Williamson in court and then a psychiatric hospital.

After his initial evaluation at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, Wendell Williamson was then transferred to Broughton Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina. In 1998, he was transferred back to Dorothea Dix after it was discovered he had a drinking problem. In 2001, he published a book through the Mental Health Communication Network titled “Nightmare: A Schizophrenia Narrative,” angering the families of Ralph Walker and Kevin Reichardt.

Williamson’s Life Today

According to news station WRAL, a doctor testified in 2002 that Williamson was a model patient. He received up to an hour of supervised time every day. In August of 2006, he disappeared from the hospital for 12 hours, before calling hospital officials the next day from a boating area at Lake Wheeler, located about six miles from the hospital. He was picked up and returned to the facility without incident. From what I can tell now, Wendell Williamson is now able to spend up to 12 hours off campus of the hospital unsupervised with family members with no notification to victims’ families or the community.

This story was featured on Episode 63 of the podcast, Missing in the Carolinas.