How A Family Killer Resurfaced As A Professor of Psychology

On August 4, 1967, 15-year-old James Gordon Wolcott grabbed a .22 long-barrel rifle and killed his father, mother, and 17-year-old sister in cold blood.

When asked what drove him to pull the trigger, Wolcott told the investigators that he hated his family.

Wolcott said he was tired of his mother’s loud chewing, his sister’s “bad accent,” and his father’s disapproval of Wolcott’s anti-war views.

The teenager told the police that his father did not want him to drive to Austin to attend peace marches and felt as though his family was “conniving against him to drive him out of his mind.”

Following a psychological assessment, doctors diagnosed Wolcott with paranoid schizophrenia.

At the end of the six-month trial, the jury acquitted Wolcott by reason of insanity. He was admitted to Rusk State Hospital on February 2, 1968, where he spent six years.

Two years after his release from the hospital, Wolcott changed his name and vanished.

Nearly 40 years later, James Gordon Wolcott resurfaced as an award-winning professor of psychology!

In 1976, after changing his name to James St. James, the teenager went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology and joined Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois.

Described as an “older hippie” by his colleagues, St. James has now been teaching at Millikin for over 30 years and won the college’s Teaching Excellence and Leadership Award in 1997. Soon after, Dr. St. James was offered the position of chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences.

After learning about the professor’s dark past, local officials, including the mayor of Decatur, were calling for his removal.

Still, the university stood by St. James’ side and refused to let him go, stating that “given the traumatic experiences of Dr. St. James’ childhood, his efforts to rebuild his life and obtain a successful professional career have been remarkable.”

Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty, who learned about St. James’ past from the press, noted that Wolcott ended up being a professor teaching at a small university, just like his father.

“It seems odd to me that he hated his father enough to kill him but then he’s living his father’s life,” Duty said.

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