The Making of a Murderous Fanatic

Everyone who knew him growing up agrees that Benjamin Goldstein -- Benjy, as they called him -- was a religious boy. In Bensonhurst, his middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, the piety of his Orthodox Jewish family set them apart from more secular Jewish neighbors. Though his father worked for the New York City Board of Education, the young Goldstein, with his side curls and yarmulke, attended school at a yeshiva. His faith seemed to draw him apart from others into an otherworldly solitude. If there was a tongue of flame in his heart, so much as a flicker of anything like bloodlust...