8 Killers With Bizarre Motivations

5. Brenda Spencer Hated Mondays

Brenda Spencer mugshot
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

For students attending the Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, the morning of 29 January 1979 started like any other.

The kids lined up outside the school gates, waiting for the principal to open them up - but tragedy struck when a nearby woman opened fire, resulting in eight children being wounded, and two adults being killed.

That woman was Brenda Spencer, who lived in a house opposite the school. After the shooting, she sealed herself inside her home, where she received a phone call from a journalist, who had been dialling local numbers at random. The journalist reached Spencer by pure chance, and she freely admitted that she was the one firing the gun.

During this phone conversation, Spencer also discussed her reasoning for carrying out the crime, telling the journalist that, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day".

Several hours later, Spencer surrendered, and eventually pleaded guilty to a deadly weapon assault, and two counts of murder. She was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, and is incarcerated to this day.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!