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I feel like Adam Lanza deleted some of his data that he didn’t want the police to find. No one knows what was on there. I’m guessing some decide to leave it behind because they want people to see what they were like online, maybe leave some motivations behind. Most just don’t go through the trouble to delete all of it.

This is actually a really nice question.

I guess it depends on why each shooter decided to do what they did. Some of them leave a manifesto, describing why, like Seung-Hui Cho in the tape he sent to the news station. That was a deliberate move to get his message out to the public.
Then there are the shooters who leave behind manifestos to be found by law enforcement or the like. Anders Behring Breivik had one, and I would count the Basement Tapes as another form of manifesto as well (of course, without ever having seen them).

And then there are shooters who don't leave manifestos behind, like Adam Lanza. Of course, we don't know if there was in fact a manifesto with the pictures that were released earlier this year, of him in tactical gear, holding some of his guns. Nor do we know if there might have been one on one of the hard drives he destroyed before the shooting, that couldn't be recovered. This doesn't make much sense though, but then again, we are talking about a person who shot and killed 27 people.

emanresu wrote:

The most notorious mass shooters have done so? For example, why hadn't adam lanza completely erased all data of his online activity or completely disposed of his harddrive? Why hadn't seung hui cho erased his virginia tech forum, yahoo or ebay account? Or the same with james holmes and his dating profiles and nikolas cruz and his youtube? With the adam thing in particular, he had deleted a good amount of his posts on the forum - but not all of it. I don't see the point of leaving only some mundane ones when he could've just requested his account to be deleted altogether?

With Cho I can imagine that the accounts he left behind were insignificant and warranted little notice, by either himself or others.

For the rest of them I think unconsciously they want to leave some sort of digital monument to themselves behind. Take Jeff Weise for instance; do you think anyone would've paid his flash animations any attention if he had, say, killed himself in the confines of his own home? I doubt it. You could say something similar for people like William Atchison or Randy Stair. Those two left behind a massive digital footprint, and you can bet your ass they wanted people to look at it.

I have never heard that Cho had such social media accounts, can anybody show screenshots or something to that effect?

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] William Atchison had many accounts, but he don't saved them. He only saved some videos on another Youtube account one day before shooting. He don't writed list with accounts or something that. This all doing people who know him in Internet.

It's not same as with Randy Stair.

Russianman wrote:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] William Atchison had many accounts, but he don't saved them. He only saved some videos on another Youtube account one day before shooting. He don't writed list with accounts or something that. This all doing people who know him in Internet.

It's not same as with Randy Stair.

I understand that, but I kinda feel like he knew or expected people to find his accounts. I mean even though he only killed two people, a lot (IDK if it was all) of his accounts were uncovered for public viewing. Could you imagine if he had killed twelve instead of two? At least some of those accounts would've earned mentions in mainstream media.