James Edward Swann Jr was born in 1964. His family had noticed him talking to himself and laughing without cause since childhood, at work and at family gatherings, and his condition deteriorated markedly through the late 1980s. He refused treatment. By early 1993 he had been evicted by his sister after a row and had lost a job as a security guard for walking backwards while on duty outside a drugstore, and was moving between New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia.
He said the voices began in a Harlem hotel room in 1993. One of them was Malcolm X, who told him to kill people in north-west Washington, the civil rights part of town, whose residents Malcolm X held responsible for his assassination in 1965. Swann said he refused, and the voices told him that if he did not comply they would kill him.
Between February 23 and April 19, 1993, he drove into Washington with a twenty-gauge shotgun, slowed the car alongside people on the pavement, fired, and drove off. Nine people were hit and four died. There was no connection between the victims and no pattern to where he struck beyond the quadrant of the city he had been told to attack. The press called him the Shotgun Stalker, and residents of several neighbourhoods were asked to stay indoors after dark. It is one of the most frightening episodes in the modern history of the city, and it was over in eight weeks.
He was arrested in April 1993. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1994 on all counts, the psychiatric evidence being unanimous, and was committed to St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, where he remains. His own account of it, that the chastising in his head felt as though it would make his head explode, is the only explanation of the case there has ever been.