An American woman has been sentenced to life in prison for plotting a 2015 Valentine’s Day massacre at a Canadian mall with her virgin boyfriend who she promised to sleep with him after the attack.
Lindsay Souvannarath from Geneva, Illinois, was sentenced in a Canadian court on Friday.
The 26-year-old plotted the attack on the Halifax Shopping Center along with her internet boyfriend James Gamble.
They met on Tumblr and for a month before the planned attack, discussed their mutual fascination with Columbine and Nazis on Facebook.
On the day of the attack, the pair planned to have sex afterwards to consummate their relationship then kill themselves in a suicide pact.
The plot was foiled when an anonymous tipster contacted police the day before it was supposed to take place.
Lindsay Souvannarath, 26, was jailed for life on Friday for plotting the massacre in Halifax , Canada, in 2015. She is pictured in July 2015, the last time she was seen arriving at court by the public
Souvannarath was arrested at the airport after flying in from Chicago with a one-way ticket and just $33 to carry it out. Gamble killed himself at home as police closed in on him at home.
Randall Steven Shepherd, 22, a friend of Gamble’s, was also involved but was not planning on taking part in it himself. He was jailed for a decade in 2016.
Among the pieces of evidence gathered was a diary in which Souvannarath detailed her motivation for the attack.
She described herself as being ‘racially and intellectually superior’ and ‘expressed her belief that she is a sex goddess with superior intellect who is entitled to cull the inferior.’
She also wrote that ‘racial and ethnic realities must be righted through violence.’
Souvannarath considered herself a ‘sexual goddess’ and told James Gamble, her virgin internet boyfriend, they would have sex after the attack before killing themselves in a suicide pact
Randall Steven Shepherd, Gamble’s friend, helped them plan the attack but was not going to take part in it. He picked Souvannarath up from the airport before she was arrested
The 26-year-old woman from Illinois alluded to the attack on Tumblr, where she met Gamble. She also planned a posthumous post which was due to go live after the attack had been carried out
She also posted this in the days before the attack. Der Untergang means ‘The Downfall’ in German
On Friday, a judge said she remained a threat to society as he jailed her for life.
Her lawyers asked that she only be put away for 12 years.
In notes found in her prison cell, Souvannarath said she and Gamble considered themselves destined to carry out mass murder.
They were obsessed with the 1999 Columbine massacre and believed that gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were reincarnated in them after they killed themselves.
‘I was to be his Eric Harris and He (sic) would be my Dylan Klebold.
‘Eventually, I realized that we really were Eric and Dylan, their minds having taken refuge in our bodies some time after their demise in 1997,’ she wrote.
Souvannarath said she felt destined to ‘die’ with Gamble and that she had never loved anyone in her life. She was driven by a superiority she felt she had over other races and people but did not specify in her ramblings who those people were. She is pictured in court in March 2015
This is the shopping center where they planned to carry out the mass attack with guns and Molotov cocktails
The pair killed themselves in 1999 after the massacre.
Before the attack, Souvannarath had written a suicide note which she planned to go live on her Tumblr page once it was over.
She had titled it ‘Der Untergang’ which means ‘The Downfall’ in German.
It read: ‘Perhaps you have already heard the news of a mass shooting in Halifax. This is where you’d expect me to post my reaction to it but unfortunately
‘I have no reaction for I am now dead. My head has been broken apart with a single shotgun shell.
Gamble killed himself as police closed in on his home in 2015 after someone called Crime Stoppers to alert them to the plot
The pair spoke on Facebook for a month before Souvannarath flew to Canada. They never met in person
Souvannarath uploaded this Nazi emblem sketch to social media in 2013
‘This is a queued post. It has always been my greatest dream to die in battle. But I do so not as a soldier but as a murderer. I fight no man’s war but my own.
‘I fight for principles, not politicians. Yet the modern world, with its wars fought for greed instead of glory, has forced me to bury these heroic longings deep beneath my surfaces where they have since festered at my core and metamorphosed into hate,’ it read.
Souvannarath said in other musings that she had never been able to ‘love’ another person but that she and Gamble knew they ‘ought to die together’ immediately after speaking online.
Shephard (left) was jailed in 2016 for 10 years. Gamble (right) shot himself in February 2015