Unhappy Mondays

Brenda Spencer, then 16, was sentenced to two life sentences in 1979 after pleading “guilty” to shooting dead two teachers, and wounding eight pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in Ohio. Contacted by a reporter during the ensuing six-and-a-half-hour siege, she explained: “I just did it for the fun of it. I just don’t like Mondays. I just did it because it’s a way to cheer the day up.”

Although Spencer offered little in the way of defence at the trial, she claimed at a failed 1993 parole hearing that she’d been under the influence of alcohol and the hallucinogenic drug PCP.

“I live with the unbearable pain every day of knowing that I was responsible for the death of two people and caused many others physical and emotional pain and suffering,” she told the board. “But I’m not a murderer.”

This claim received short shrift from one of the widow’s victims, Kathe Wragg, who responded that, “I could never feel trustworthy of a person like that. Just the idea that she felt she had to kill somebody. It’s so self-serving and inward. I never want her to be out. I have not seen any remorse.”

Unfortunately for Wragg, the State of Ohio Parole Board doesn’t see it that way, and has given Spencer the chance to live an adult life. Her current opinion on Mondays isn’t known.