1. If the love of money, which is greed, is the root of all evil, then it follows that the greatest good will be achieved by its eradication. 2. Since greed does not exist in a vacuum but exists in its human carriers, it follows that the way to eradicate greed is to eradicate its carriers. 3. The good shepherd culls the flock, removing the diseased sheep from the healthy sheep, because it is good to stop the spread of infection. It is good to protect the good animals from the bad. 4. Although patience is a virtue, it is no sin to lose patience with greed. It is no sin to take up arms against wolves who devour children. 5. This is our declaration of war on the vain carriers of greed, the pickpockets who call themselves bankers, the limousine lice, the Mercedes maggots. 6. We will free the earth of this ultimate contagion, carrier by carrier, replacing the silence of passivity with the shattering of skulls until the earth is clean, the shattering of skulls until the flock is culled, the shattering of skulls until the root of all evil is dead and gone from the earth.

The next nineteen pages reiterated these sentiments at length, the manifesto drifting back and forth in its tone from prophetic to academic. The rational aspects of the argument were supported by extensive wealth-distribution data, purporting to demonstrate the unfairness of America’s economic structure—complete with trend statistics showing the nation’s drift toward a Third World economy of extremes, in which enormous wealth is concentrated at the very top, poverty is expanding, and the middle class is shrinking.

The main body of the document concluded:

This gross and growing injustice is driven by the greed of the powerful and the power of the greedy. Moreover, the control exerted by this vile and devouring class over the media—society’s primary engine of influence—is virtually absolute. The channels of communication (channels which in free hands might be agents of change) are owned, directed, and infected by mega-corporations and by individual billionaires whose interests are motivated by the virulent quality of greed. This is the desperate condition which forces us to our inescapable conclusion, our clear resolve, and our direct actions.

The document was signed, “The Good Shepherd.”

In a separate note, clipped to the final page, the writer had included information on the precise times and locations of the two preceding attacks.

Since these facts had not yet been released to the public, they provided support for the writer’s claim to be the killer. A postscript to the note indicated that copies of the entire document had been simultaneously delivered to a long list of national and local news organizations.

Gurney went through it all again. When he put the folder down half an hour later, he understood why the case had achieved its iconic status in criminology—and why it had replaced the earlier Unabomber case as the academic archetype for societal-mission-driven murders.