Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (18 page)

When Kip was fourteen, he asked if he could go away with a friend on a snowboarding trip and his parents agreed, presumably glad that he’d found a non-violent interest. But after dark, the two boys sneaked out of their accommodation and threw stones from a road bridge. One stone hit a passing car, frightening and enraging the driver. Kip was arrested and immediately started crying, saying that his friend had thrown that particular rock. The Kinkels had to collect him from the police station and drive him home.

By now Faith wanted to get her son into therapy but Bill was against this as he wasn’t convinced
psychologists truly helped. He may also have wanted to avoid the stigma, as he was a proud man who
wasn’t
used to being publicly shamed.

Kip retreated further into a world where he was competent – a world of guns. He learned everything about them through magazines and through surfing the internet. He told friends that he’d like to kill someone to see what it was like and started carrying a knife to school.

Kip became increasingly distressed, spending hours in his room writing in his diary. He felt that there was nothing good about each day, that he had nothing to look forward to. At last even Bill had to admit that his son needed help.

The boy wept when he spoke to his psychiatrist, explaining that he couldn’t please his father no matter what he did. The therapist found the boy easy to talk to and asked Bill Kinkel to lighten up on his son.

The psychiatrist could see the fourteen-year-old was clinically depressed, though talking clearly helped. Halfway through the series of sessions he prescribed Prozac. Kip’s spirits and behaviour further improved.

He told the therapist that his main passion was explosives and guns – and the therapist said that he had a Glock which he was pleased with. Kip
immediately
wanted one – and several months later his father would indeed buy a Glock for him.

After nine sessions the Kinkels and the doctor agreed that Kip was doing so well that he could discontinue therapy. They also took him off Prozac after only three months.

Kip prepared to start high school. At this stage his father had a word with a teaching friend and they decided that Kip might fit in better if he joined the school’s American Football team. The teenager only weighed eight and a half stone and had no aptitude for or interest in the game but, once again, he did what he could to please his dad.

Kip’s need to be good at something grew. He began to stockpile guns, buying or being given rifles, shotguns, a pistol, a handgun and ammunition. He talked incessantly about them as he moved further into his high school years. The other students began to call him a psycho and twice voted him the boy most likely to start World War Three.

Then, for a few months, the guns were replaced by roses in Kip Kinkel’s life. For the first time he fell in love and felt wanted. The girl was an extrovert who liked the fact that he was different to the other youths. Kip’s life now had a purpose and he was ecstatic. Photos he had taken with her show him looking animated and proud. At last someone had accepted him for what he was, not what they’d like him to be.

But young love is a very fragile beast and soon the
girl tired of him. Kip wrote in his diary ‘It feels like my heart is breaking’ and added ‘I need help.’ Shortly after the break up, he studied Romeo & Juliet at school and clearly empathised when the young lovers committed suicide.

Death was increasingly on his mind. He wrote in his diary ‘I don’t know who I am… I try so hard every day.’ He wrote that he wanted to kill a particular boy at school but he hadn’t yet because he hoped that
tomorrow
would be better. He added ominously ‘as soon as my hope is gone, people die.’

In May he stayed over at a friend’s house, and a group of them wound hundreds of rolls of toilet paper around a neighbourhood house as a prank. The next day they had to clear it up. Kip was the only boy whose parents grounded him for it.

Relatively rich children like Kip are seen as lucky by many – but the reality is that when their family
scapegoats
them no one intervenes. Eventually the child snaps under the pressure and goes mad and at this stage the medical system and the parents conspire to say that the madness was already in the child. If he or she instead – or later – goes bad then the law steps in to find the child’s supposed inherent badness. No one looks for the root cause. Told daily that he was too wild, too moody, too loud, too quiet, too intense or too irresponsible, Kip turned his entire focus on his
growing
collection of guns.

He now purchased a gun at school – but the gun had been stolen the night before from the parent of another student. The police questioned everyone and Kip
nervously
admitted that the weapon was hidden in his locker. He was promptly arrested and charged with receiving stolen property and having a firearm in a public place.

Thurston High School had a sensible zero tolerance approach to weapons in school so immediately
suspended
him. A teacher who saw him at the point of the arrest said he looked totally miserable, unable to make eye contact and hanging his head. The teacher told Kip that he could expect to be suspended for an entire year – a year that Kip realised he would have to spend alone with his parents and without his friends.

Bill went to the police station to collect his
fifteen-year
-old son and the pair of them went to a burger bar for a meal. Afterwards Bill Kinkel spent the day phoning friends who had counselling experience asking if they could recommend a school for troubled teenagers. He was interested in sending Kip to an army-style boot camp which involved lots of physical activity – but Kip had always hated sports. The deeply depressed boy may have overheard one of these conversations and realised that his father was always going to force this particular square peg into a round hole. His father had also made it clear that his mother would again be
disappointed
in Kip when she came home.

Later that afternoon – 20th May 1998 – the fifteen-year-old fetched his .22 rifle and shot his father through the back of the head. Then he phoned a friend, pacing back and forward whilst speaking. He sounded edgy and depressed but the friend assumed this was because of his school suspension. He had no idea that Kip’s father lay dead. Kip said he had stomach pains and that he was waiting for his mother to come home. He
wondered
aloud why she was so late.

At 6pm Faith returned. As she walked up the steps Kip shot her. She was still alive so he shot her again, totalling five times in the head and once in the heart.

Determined to kill as many people as possible, Kip placed one of his home-made bombs under his
mother’s
corpse. He dragged his father’s corpse to the bathroom. Then – the sign of a killer who has some compassion for his victims – he covered each of them with a sheet. He wrote a note saying ‘I wish I had been aborted’ then added ‘God damn these voices inside my head.’

Kip kept the television on all night for company. At some stage he scattered dozens of bullets over the
living
room floor. In the morning he put his
Romeo 
&
Juliet
CD on continuous play and cranked up the volume. Then he gathered together his arsenal of guns
and drove his mother’s car to his school, Thurston High.

Walking into the school cafeteria at 7.30am, Kip started to shoot at the four-hundred students having breakfast there. Within minutes he’d fired forty-eight rounds, hitting twenty-four students. The innocent teenagers were variously hit in the arms, legs, abdomen, back and chest. Two students were shot in the spine and one boy lost part of a finger. Students screamed and moaned, whilst others mercifully lost consciousness as blood spurted from arterial wounds.

Seventeen-year-old Mikael Nickolauson was killed instantly and sixteen-year-old Ben Walker died within hours. Other students would spend weeks in intensive care.

Kip ran out of ammunition and was reaching for another weapon when he was overpowered by one of the larger boys. Like most spree killers, he had planned to shoot himself at the end of the massacre – and had taped a gun to his chest to use as his suicide weapon. Now he screamed ‘Just kill me. Kill me now.’

Taken into police custody, he lunged for the knife that he’d strapped to his leg, clearly hoping that the officers would shoot him. Again, he begged them to kill them and was clearly shocked.

The police asked how his father was and Kip admitted he was dead. Police cars raced to the Kinkels’
house. They entered to find the
Romeo
&
Juliet
music still blaring through every room. As they’d feared, they found Kip’s parents’ corpses and the trail of blood showing where they had initially been shot. They also found over twenty explosive devices, some of which were active, and had to call for specialists to detonate them.

Spree killings such as this, where innocent victims are shot dead, are incomprehensible to the general public. But they do make sense to the killer who believes he has been failed by everyone.

Kip’s parents had frequently communicated their disappointment in him. His sister would later say that he tried desperately to please them, ‘studying over and over.’ He also tried to overcome his lack of interest in sport when his father wanted him to play in the school team and play so-called recreational games.

Bill was an exceptionally strong character. A friend described him as ‘tenacious, like a bulldog’ and said that he always had to score the last point with other adults when playing sport. He wasn’t a bad man – his Spanish students liked him and he had many friends in the community, plus he and Faith had a loving marriage. But his relentless academic and sporting expectations were too much for a dyslexic, unco-ordinated, slightly-built child.

If most of us had to spend even one week on a
subject we hated, then we’d be understandably miserable. But Kip Kinkel had to take part in football, tennis and other sporting events almost every day of his life. And when he walked off the pitch at the end of a game, bruised and demoralised, his father would tell him that he hadn’t given of his best, that he had to try again tomorrow and the day after that. He also faced similar academic pressures. As a result, he felt an increasingly dangerous mixture of rage and despair.

Anthropologist Elliot Leyton’s book,
Sole
Survivor,
explores the lives of children who murdered their own families. He found that ‘familicide is more likely to occur in ambitious, even prosperous families.’ The parents who were murdered by their offspring tended to be very ambitious and over controlling, to the extent that the child felt that he or she could do nothing right. These parents chose their child’s hobbies, school
curriculum
and sometimes even their friends. Eventually, the child felt that he or she was little more than a robot to be programmed and would often retreat into depression and consider suicide. Elliot Leyton wrote the book long before Kip Kinkel killed his family – but his background is incredibly similar to those of the family killers who Leyton describes.

Such parents, he found, subconsciously set out to deny or even obliterate the autonomy of the developing child. This is certainly true of Kip’s parents for the Kinkel’s mantra was ‘we are a sporting and
academic
family.’ Kip was taken to watch games he hated, participate in sports he hated and study well past the point of exhaustion. He was given very few
opportunities to be himself. And in the end he decided to destroy himself, but to first destroy the people he believed had psychologically crushed him for sixteen years.

Having studied similar familicides, Elliot Leyton found that laypeople often didn’t understand the
distorted
family dynamics which had taken place. They’d then try to blame the killings on bad blood, peer
pressure
or mental illness and would label the distressed young killer as ‘an evil seed.’ Admittedly these children didn’t help their own cause, for they were in no fit state to do a realistic postmortem on their family’s
dysfunctionality
As a result, they’d blandly state that they
murdered
their parents ‘because they were yelling at me.’

But in Kip Kinkel’s case, many people were aware that the family dynamics had gone awry. His sister constantly begged her parents to be fair to him. The Kinkels’ friends suggested that Bill should ease off on his son during their interminable tennis games. Faith’s colleagues saw that she looked increasingly exhausted and knew she shouldn’t be making Kip study for hour after hour. The psychologist who evaluated Kip told Bill Kinkel to stop being so hard on his son. Bill
complied
for a few weeks – and during these few weeks the father-son relationship improved. But Bill soon slipped back into his usual endlessly-demanding parenting style. An old friend with psychological experience even warned Bill Kinkel that his son was a big suicide risk. The friend, who lived some distance away, urged Bill to phone him if he needed advice, but Bill never did.

Psychologist Dorothy Rowe (writing in the late eighties before Kip killed) said that ‘If we understand how aggression is a response to frustration, and if we understand how a certain young man has created a structure of meaning in which he sees himself as lacking all recognition except in his knowledge about guns, if he feels that he is frustrated in everything that he wishes to do, then we can see the series of connections which culminated one day in this young man shooting his mother and his neighbours. We do not approve of his act, but neither do we see it as a sudden, inexplicable action.’ Ironically, many crime writers made Kip’s parents out to be saints and said that the multicide had come completely out of the blue.

Prescription drugs may also have played a part in Kip’s increasing sense of malaise. He was prescribed Ritalin when he was eight years old – and the drug’s many opponents say that it causes a stunting of growth, loss of muscular control and self-esteem. Over time it also shrinks the brain.

Ritalin is a schedule 2 drug, ranked alongside cocaine and opium. If over-used it can lead to violence. The manufacturers themselves admit that, if the drug is abused, psychotic episodes can occur. Even coming off the drug can be dangerous as one of the side effects of Ritalin withdrawal is the risk of suicide.

The seratonin-enhancing drug Prozac also has its problems. Shortly before killing his parents and his schoolmates, Kip had been prescribed this drug. Like many users, he noted a swift improvement in his mood – but this improvement tends to be shortlived.
Children who take the drug can find it increasingly hard to differentiate between dreams and reality and can have appalling nightmares. Between 1988 and 1992, over ninety children were violent towards themselves or others whilst taking the drug and researchers noted in 1999 that it could cause manic episodes.

Sometimes it’s during the withdrawal phrase from the drug that the user becomes exceptionally violent. A 1995 Danish study concluded that withdrawal from such drugs could cause – amongst other symptoms such as fear, restlessness, irritability, aggression – an urge to destroy.