The paranoid assertion above, as it turns out, is more or less true (much more so than the ones Gibson comes up with on his own time, certainly). For reasons that are not entirely clear even to themselves, news media in the United States (print as well as television) go out of their way to make sure every lone gunman and solitary crazed killer is identified by his full name, regardless of how he is called by relatives, friends and neighbors.
According to at least one broadcast journalism writing textbook, the reason for this is that a person is more likely to have the same two-part name as someone else than the same three-part name. So it lets John Henry Booth or Mark Daniel Chapman not have to wonder why everyone is looking at him funny. TV reporters also generally read the police report verbatim, figuring they can't be sued for slander if they merely report what is in a public document. Also note that this might be an American thing — in most European countries, middle names aren't that common, or used even if people have them, and people in Hispanic countries often have four names. Not to mention non-western countries. Furthermore, in many European countries middle name is often associated with sophistication, so it usually does not suit common criminals but can be a part of Career Killers image.
Note that this isn't the case for just any handgun-wielding punk who makes the news. It takes a special crime that catches the public's attention. "Ordinary" shooters — as well as the rare sympathetic figure — are accorded less formal (and less obsessive) address by the media.
An interesting case in point would be that of New York's so-called "Subway Vigilante" in 1984. When his actions were still viewed as a shocking unmotivated attack, the news media consistently referred to him by his full name, "Bernhard Hugo Goetz". However, as his story came out and public opinion shifted more and more in his favor, the news programs began calling him just "Bernhard Goetz" and finally "Bernie".
(The quoted assertion is false, as John Wayne Gacy/Sirhan Sirhan demonstrate.)
Also note that none of them has an Embarrassing Middle Name. (Then again, would you really laugh at someone about to kill you?)
This tendency is lampshaded in one What If? comic, where, during an alternate version of the Dark Reign storyline, Hawkeye follows through on his promise to kill Norman Osborn. The news gets out, and suddenly the whole world knows his full name.
Dom: "Brian Earl Spilner. Sounds like a serial killer."
In a variant (serial killer, not gunman) there's Charles Lee Ray (referencing Manson, Oswald and the guy who killed MLK), later known as Chucky, from Child's Play.
The X-Files had tons of these, including Eugene Victor Tooms, Luther Lee Boggs, Warren James Dupre, Darin Peter Oswald, Robert Patrick Modell (presumably not named after Robert Patrick, who wouldn't join the cast for another 5 years), John Lee Roche, and Wilson Pinker Rawls.
Then, of course, there is LoneGunman John Fitzgerald Byers.
And the Gunmen's sometimes-ally, sometimes rival, who goes by "Yves Adel Harlowe" or some alias that is an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald...probably just to mess with the Gunmen.
On Burn Notice, when the gang runs up against a serial killer, Sam suggests they call him by "Dennis Wayne Barfield" for that extra serial-killer flavor.
Buckwheat's assassin in the famous "Buckwheat has been shot" sketches on Saturday Night Live was named John David Stutts.
Dr. Charles Henry Moffett, the evil creator of Airwolf
The Dollhouse episode "Omega" references this, when looking at the file of Alpha's original personality:
Detective Robert Goren: "As serial killers go, this Mark Ford Brady is well within the hash marks."
Captain Danny Ross: "Right down to having three names."
Stand Up Comedy
Spoofed by Otis Lee Crenshaw, who suggests some people are just born with a 'Death Row name'; if your parents christened you 'Wayne Lee Turner', you've been marked down since day one, you are going to kill someone and fry for it. He then suggests changing your name before you kill someone, to something like 'Jizz Biscuits Murphy' or something equally stupid, so you get laughed out of the courtroom before your trial can begin.
John Wilkes Booth mentions this in a conversation with Lee Harvey Oswald (also referencing James Earl Ray, and referring to all three as "rednecks") in the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins.
The backstory of Mass Effect mentions a gunman named Michael Moser Lang who assassinated the US and Chinese presidents with a powerful submachine gun several years before the events of the first game. (Both at once. The Chinese president tackled the American, and the slugs fatally penetrated both bodies. It's implied he only intended to kill the American.) Shepard gets his/her hands on the original weapon in Mass Effect 2.
One of the American Wild West's greatest real killers was the poorly remembered John Wesley Hardin. He is commonly credited with inventing throwing cards into the air and shooting them as they fall, for instance, but was also said to practice his quick-draw in front of a mirror for hours a day. Then, there was the whole shooting a man for snoring too loudly thing.
He's probably better known for inspiring the name (and the name only) of a Bob Dylan album (John Wesley Harding).
A running reference in Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird column is that there seem to be an awful lot of murderers with the middle name "Wayne".
It is atually pretty hard to find an non-American assassin fitting the trope (Ramon Mercader who assassinated Trotsky, Nathuram Godse who assassinated Gandhi, Yigal Amir who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, Eligiusz Niewiadomski who assassinated Poland's first President, Gabriel Narutowicz, Volkert van der Graaf who assassinated Pim Fortuyn, Mohammed Bouyeri who assassinated Theo van Gogh, etc.)
Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 and previously murdered journalist Abdi İpekçi.
Jerry Seinfeld, on the allegations that his wife was plagiarizing another author's cookbook idea (each book happens to be about making healthy — yet inconspicuously tasty — meals for their kids; Missy Chase Lapine's is "The Sneaky Chef", while Jessica Seinfeld's is "Deceptively Delicious"). Seinfeld, in his wife's defense, appeared on talk shows joking around at how he's noticed assassins tend to often have, like Lapine, three names — Mark David Chapman, James Earl Ray, etc. (This, naturally, caused a bit of a stink.)
Christopher Wayne Hudson, who shot three people in the Melbourne CBD in 2007, killing one.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Washington, DC snipers in 2002.
Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter.
Although in this case, it's just because he was Korean-American, rather than any preference on the part of the media; it's quite common for traditional Korean names to be structured in such a manner, more akin to a double-barreled given name than separate given and middle names.
But definitely Played Straight for an earlier killer at Virginia Tech: a local crook named William Morva who murdered two people and spent a day or so on the lam in 2006, causing brief hubbub and the cancellation of a day's classes. Though Morva was known before and after the incident as "William Morva," for the couple of days surrounding the murders he was always "William Charles Morva."
Mark David Chapman, murderer of John Lennon.
James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr.
In Presidential assassins it's 50/50, but the three-named ones are a lot more famous:
Leon Czolgosz — assassin of President William McKinley (had no middle name)
Charles J. Guiteau — assassin of President James Garfield (his middle name was Julius, but he never used it)
Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assasinate President Gerald Ford.
Robert William Pickton, a Canadian pig farmer convicted of killing 6 women and charged with killing 20 more.
Jared Lee Loughner, the man who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and more than a dozen other people, killing six (Giffords survived) on January 8, 2011.
Johnny Paul Penry, convicted of killing Pamela Carpenter (sister of American Football player Mark Moseley) and sentenced to death. (Various anti-death penalty activists have since called his sentence unconstitutional, claiming that he only has the mental ability of a 7-year-old.)
This trope seems to apply to a number of serial arsonists as well. But a few examples are Paul Kenneth Keller, John Leonard Orr, Cayetano Santos Godino and Bruce George Peter Lee.
Classic example of how this prevents overlap with Name's the Same: Joel (Patrick) Courtney (b.1966), rapist and serial killer, not to be confused with Joel Courtney (b.1996), star of Super 8. It Gets Worse - the former's Tru TVCrime Library page is headlined "Bad Actor".
Poor kid. At least Rick Santorum earned his "Google problem".
The man arrested for the 2011 Norway massacre has been named as Anders Behring Breivik, despite being European where this trope is not usually in effect.
Brievik has taken a great deal of influence from the English speaking Western world so perhaps this can in part explain the phenomenom
The other part possibly being that both Behring and Breivik are surnames (his mother is Behring and his father is Breivik).
Michael Robert Ryan, who shot 16 people in Hungerford, England in 1987.
Chuck Shepherd's "News of the Weird" column runs a periodic feature called "The Fatal Middle Name" chronicling the bizarre antics perpetrated by people who go by "X (usually John) Wayne Somebody."
For whatever reason, TV news reports related to the LA Riots frequently referred to Rodney King as "motorist Rodney King," as though owning and driving a car were still a novelty in 1992. Even Wikipedia still calls him a motorist.
