1966 Rose-Mar College of Beauty shooting

On the morning of November 12, 1966, Robert Benjamin Smith, an 18-year-old Mesa High School senior, entered the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona, armed with a handgun. The school's director, Earl Cummings, had let in a group of students and a customer with her two children about half an hour before opening. When Cummings noticed Smith outside with a weapon, she fled to a neighboring auto supply store to call police rather than risk being overheard calling from her office.

Smith entered the school and, after firing a warning shot to get attention, ordered five students, one customer, and the customer's two children into a back room. He made them lie in a circle with their heads together and attempted unsuccessfully to suffocate them with sandwich bags. When victim Mary Margaret Olsen began praying and another victim, Carol Farmer, asked Smith if he minded, Smith opened fire, killing three victims with shots to the head. A toddler, initially wounded, was then stabbed to death by Smith after she began moving. The customer, Joyce Sellers, shielded her infant daughter with her body; the infant survived with a gunshot wound to the arm. One student, Bonita Harris, survived by playing dead; she later told police that Smith laughed while shooting his victims.

The five people killed were students Mary Margaret Olsen and Glenda Sue Carter, both 18; student Carol Pope Farmer, 19; customer Joyce Faye Luth Sellers, 27; and Sellers's 3-year-old daughter, Debra LaRae Sellers. Two victims survived: a student who feigned death and Sellers's 3-month-old daughter, who was shielded by her mother.

Responding officers arrested Smith without incident inside the school; he told them he had "shot some people back there" and directed them to the gun he had left in a sack. Smith later told investigators he was inspired by Charles Whitman's University of Texas tower shooting and Richard Speck's murders, both earlier in 1966, and said he had hoped to kill roughly ten times as many people. He said he had planned the attack about three months in advance and had also scoped out a high school and another beauty school as possible targets, and considered attacking a location in his birth town of Houston, Missouri.

Psychiatric evaluations described Smith as viewing himself as "a god, born to rule others," displaying "total indifference" about the killings, and reporting homicidal ideation since age 13. Evaluators noted his fascination with historical and violent figures, including Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Smith remained incarcerated for decades, was repeatedly denied parole, and was disciplined early in his imprisonment for a physical assault. He died on April 21, 2024, at Abrazo West Campus hospital in Goodyear, Arizona, while still in custody.