Nine years after brutally slaying his 92-year-old grandmother with a hammer, the man who opened fire on volunteer firefighters on Christmas Eve in upstate New York told a parole board in 1989 that he was worried he might kill again if freed, according to court documents.
“If you were capable of it once, are you capable of it again?" William Spengler
wondered out loud at an Oct. 3, 1989, parole hearing, according to state criminal records released by the New York Department of Corrections in the wake of Monday’s shooting.
"There is no reason why it should have happened,” he told commission members. “It makes no sense whatsoever. You know, hindsight is a great thing but it does no good."
Spengler frequently quarreled with the parole board members during the hearings, disputing how many times he struck his grandmother with the hammer in the July 18, 1980, attack, for example.
He also blamed his grandmother for precipitating the attack by hitting him in the groin, and said he only had the hammer because he was preparing to board up a basement door to prevent his grandmother from going to the cellar.