Adam Lanza calls in radio station a year before Sandy Hook shooting and gives bizarre interview — Listen to the Tape

In audiotape of a call Lanza made to an Oregon college radio station obtained by the Daily News that was verified as authentic by an old friend, the madman waves a giant red flag that he is about to explode almost exactly a year before the Sandy Hook massacre.

Adam Lanza has spoken from the grave.  

In an audiotape of a call Lanza made to an Oregon college radio station obtained by The Daily News – and vouched for by two old friends – the madman waved a giant red flag that he was about to explode almost exactly a year before the Sandy Hook massacre.

Using the name Greg and apparently taking pains to disguise his voice, Lanza weighed-in on mass murder by comparing “a teenage mall shooter” to Travis, a chimpanzee who became infamous after ripping the face off a Connecticut woman in 2009.

In doing so, Lanza provided a frightening look not seen thus far into the twisted logic and troubled mind of the 20-year-old killer.

“His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation,” Lanza says of Travis at one point.

“I just … don’t think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that.”

Those words, uttered on Dec. 11, 2011, did not set off any alarms with “Anarchy Radio” host John Zerzan, who is himself a controversial fringe figure.

Perhaps it was because the caller delivered his seven-plus minute spiel in a soft voice and with the precise diction of a psychiatrist — rather than that of a mixed-up psychiatric patient.

“We remember the call,” Zerzan, 70, of Eugene, Oregon told The News. “The only thing that seemed odd was his voice seemed kind of robotic … but what he was saying made sense.”

But 21-year-old Kyle Kromberg, who attended Latin class with Lanza from freshman to junior year at Newtown High School, recognized his voice instantly.

“It’s him,” said Kromberg. “I talked to him every day for about an hour each day from freshman to junior year, so I know his voice. He’s a very soft-spoken kid, but very articulate.”

Kromberg said he and another classmate often made a point of talking to the extremely introverted Lanza, who he recalled would dart out of the classroom as soon as the bell rang.

“As soon as he opened his mouth (in the audio clip), I knew it was him,” said Kromberg. “There’s no voice distinction.”

Another of Lanza’s former high school classmates, who last spoke to the killer back in late 2010, said after hearing the recording that it sounded like Lanza was trying to disguise his voice.

“Yes, I think it’s him,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified. “It does sound like something he would say. But he is talking funny.”

Asked to elaborate, the friend said, “He doesn’t usually talk like that.”

Lanza, who police said used the alias ‘Smiggles’ when he ventured into online forums where mass murder was discussed, talked about going on Zerzan’s show in a Dec. 10, 2011 post.

“I’m really surprised that I haven’t been able to find anything he’s written or said about the incident, considering how often he brings up random acts of violence,” Smiggles wrote before calling into the show. “It seems like Travis would be a poster-chimp of his philosophy.”

A day after Greg called into the radio show, Smiggles posted this appraisal:

“It didn’t go as horribly as I anticipated. I wish that I hadn’t spoken nonstop about Travis for so long, but I didn’t want to seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee for unknown reasons.”

But Smiggles, touching on same point his friend made to The News, also critiqued his “failed attempt at having a normal voice.”

“I at least sounded less incoherent than usual,” he wrote. “I normally speak much softer and swifter, with less articulation, less inflection, and more mumbling.”

Danbury State Attorney Stephen Sedensky, who led the official probe of the Dec. 14, 2012 slaughter of 20 first graders and six staffers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, said investigators were aware Lanza reached out to a radio show.

“Adam Lanza may have called a radio station, but I do not specifically know whether or not that is Adam Lanza” on the audiotape, Sedensky said.

But evidence culled from Connecticut State Police search warrants strongly suggest it was Lanza who called the campus radio station at the University of Oregon, KWVA 88.1 FM.

Zerzan said he was stunned when he first learned from Connecticut-based blogger Reed Coleman that he might have spoken with the mass murderer.

“There’s nothing there indicating he was considering something so heinous and inconceivable,” Zerzan told The News. “It was a year before Sandy Hook, so no one has any idea what he was thinking a year before…I don’t see how anyone could have guessed that with what was said.”

Zerzan, a guru of the anarcho-primitivist movement that regards technology as a destroyer of society, added that he hasn’t spoken to authorities about his brush with Lanza.

“They haven’t come to me, either,” he said.

In addition to being obsessed with mass murders, Lanza was fixated with Travis, a 200-pound chimp who was raised like a human, police have said.

Travis, who appeared in several TV commercials, was shot and killed in Feb. 2009 after he mauled his owner’s friend Charla Nash, in North Stamford, Conn.

That’s just an hour’s drive from Lanza’s heartbroken hometown of Newtown.

In the call to Zerzan’s show, Greg did not sound like the public image of Lanza, the brooding and seemingly inarticulate man described by authorities who in his last days used only email to communicate with his doomed mother.

This ‘Greg’ insisted articulately that Travis’s lashing out “wasn’t simply because he was a senselessly violent, impulsive chimp.”

“Travis wasn’t an untamed monster at all,” the caller continued. “Um, he wasn’t just feigning domestication, he was civilized. Um, he was able to integrate into society.”

He added that Travis “was a chimp actor when he was younger.”

“His owner drove him around the city frequently in association with her towing business, where he met many different people, and got along with everyone,” the caller said. “If Travis had been some nasty monster all his life it would have been widely reported. But, to the contrary, it seems like everyone who knew him said how shocked they were that Travis had been so savage, because they knew him as a sweet child.”

Travis, he continued, “didn’t really act any differently than a human child would and the people who would use that as an indictment against having chimps live as humans do wouldn’t apply the same thing to humans so it’s just kind of irrelevant.”

Zerzan, who was not familiar with the Travis story, listened politely.

When Nash tried to “coax him back into his place of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so he attacked her, and anyone else who approached them,” Lanza said. “And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best.”

Lanza (aka Greg) is also heard saying that what happened with Travis “brings up questions about this whole process of child-raising.”

“Civilization isn’t something which just happens to gently exist without us having to do anything, because every newborn child — human child — is born in a chimp-like state, and civilization is only sustained by conditioning them for years on end,” the caller said.

Lanza, a socially-inept loner who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, might have been describing himself and his doomed mother.

Nancy Lanza was her son’s first victim. While she doted on her murderous spawn, she also displayed some stupendously bad parenting by teaching her mentally-ill son how to shoot. And she bought him guns.

Starting in Dec. 2009, Lanza began posting as Smiggles to Shocked Beyond Belief, which is fan web site for a video game based on the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Among other things, Smiggles praised Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik in an Aug. 28, 2011 post for topping the bloody handiwork of Woo Bum-kon, the South Korean police officer who killed 56 people and wounded 35 more before killing himself.

Lanza, in a Dec. 30, 2010 re-posting by a user named The Mighty Wez, mused about the proper hardware for wreaking bloody havoc.

“I’m still waiting for a mass shooter who eschews 9mm (sic) pistols and instead buys an AK-47 pistol, 30 30-round magazines, and 1000 hollow points,” he wrote.

Lanza used a .223-caliber Bushmaster Model XM15 rifle purchased by his mother to kill the kids and school staff members. He used a Glock-20 pistol to finish himself off as cops were closing in.

The killer was also armed with a SIG Sauer P226, which is a 9-mm. semiautomatic pistol. But there is no evidence he fired that weapon.

Cops also found an Izhmash Saiga-12, a 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, in the trunk of Lanza’s car. It also had not been fired.

Lanza, police said, hated being touched. And on Jan. 31, 2011, Lanza posted this jarring note on a thread called “body mods.”

“I castrated myself when I was 15 to rebel against society,” it said.

Later, in an Aug. 30, 2011 posting on a threat entitled “Are you a virgin?” Lanza apparently dodged the personal question and went on a tear, claiming “a degenerate capitalistic system results in a commodification of sexuality.”

“This enables the creation of a cultural notion that premarital sexuality is acceptable,” he wrote. “This results in sexuality becoming widespread.”

Smiggles offered more curious insights into himself on Sept. 6, 2011.

“I used to think I was asexual, but the primary reason why I thought that was because my BMI was 14,” he writes, using the acronym for body mass index.

That too fits the description of the painfully thin, 6-foot-tall Lanza, who weighed just 114 pounds when he killed himself.

— With Edgar Sandoval and Katie Nelson

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com

 

Click HERE to hear the segment

Click HERE to hear the whole show

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Click HERE to find out more about reporter Matthew Lysiak’s account of the Newtown tragedy