Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  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.

  A further deathtrap

  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.

  Class killing

  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.

  The rationale

  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 t
hemselves 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.

  The verdict

  At first, fifteen-year-old Kip offered an insanity defence, but later withdrew this. He was kept under constant suicide watch and charged as an adult. He also received so many death threats that he appeared in court wearing a bullet proof vest.

  In September 1999 Kipland Kinkel pleaded guilty to four counts of murder – and twenty-six charges of attempted murder – and was sentenced to 111 years in prison. He was immediately sent to the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, a prison for violent young men. He will stay there until his early twenties, when he’ll be transferred to an adult prison.

  Update

  After the trial, various friends of the family spoke publicly in his favour, explaining that he’d been pushed towards academia and sport all his life by a father who just couldn’t let him be himself.

  11 The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind

  Wendy (Gweneviere) Gardner & James Evans

  Gweneviere was born in October 1981 to Jann and Clarence Gardner. (The latter was always known by his nickname, Buzz.) Jann had taken heroin and cocaine during the pregnancy and continued to do so after Gweneviere’s birth. Buzz also enjoyed experimenting with soft drugs and alcohol, and the couple – who lived in New York – had a very volatile relationship.

  Gweneviere was a sunny natured and loving little girl. She was delighted when, at two years old, her parents gave her a sister, Kathy. But the new baby put pressure on an already rocky marriage so it was an increasingly unhappy home.

  When Gweneviere was three her parents had a fight about cigarettes during which her mother lunged at her father with a knife. Some reports say she stabbed him. Buzz fled, permanently ending their relationship.

  Jann’s drug addiction was getting worse so Buzz’s mother, Betty, applied to the courts for custody. Betty and her late husband had failed Buzz (who said that his father was a violent ogre and his mother a strict disciplinarian) but presumably she thought she’d succeed in parenting this time around.

  Betty was given custody of both girls and they moved to her Saugerties home in upstate New York. Meanwhile Jann had turned to prostitution to support her drug habit and moved to another part of the city, living in a squat.

  At first Gweneviere seemed to thrive in Betty’s care. After all, she now had three meals a day and was no longer neglected. Betty’s home was modest but well tended. She decorated the girls’ bedroom and made sure that they were neat and clean.

  Unfortunately, Betty followed the rules of a bygone age. She told friends that she lived her entire life by the teachings of the Bible. This seemed to include the maxim of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ for she beat Gweneviere and Kathy with a fly swat and a paddle. Neighbours sometimes heard shouts and screams emanating from the house.

  Gweneviere was glad to escape to school, where the other children shortened her name to Wendy. She will be known as Wendy in this profile from now on.

  Wendy learned to play the flute at school. She did well in her exams and on the sports field. Neighbours thought her a very well behaved child who clearly adored her younger sister. She also tried to please the devout Betty by frequently attending church. But whenever she did anything that Betty considered to be wrong, Betty would tell her that she’d end up like her ‘no-good mother’ who Betty despised.

  Wendy became an increasingly beautiful girl with long dark hair and sad dark eyes. Like any other human being, she yearned for love and acceptance rather than constant complaints. A neighbour even saw Betty dragging Wendy into the house simply because she’d lost a sewing needle in the grass. Betty made ongoing financial sacrifices in order to feed and clothe the girls, but what Wendy needed most was approval. At an alarmingly early age, she tried to charm this from the opposite sex.

  By ten or eleven she’d found herself two ‘boyfriends’ and wrote in her diary that she’d come close to going all the way with them. (Admittedly, her idea of going all the way might not have been anatomically accurate.) Friends noted that she was desperate for the boys’ acceptance, but one boy finished with her and the other told his friends that she was a slag.

  Betty had no idea that these early sexual relationships were taking place. She still treated Wendy as a baby, telling her that she couldn’t use the telephone to talk to boys or go to the shopping mall. But Wendy was becoming her own person and refused to take confirmation (a kind of adult baptism) in Betty’s church.

  In turn, Betty made it obvious that she loved Kathy more than Wendy, giving the former new clothes and the latter hand-me-downs.

  Love at last

  In the late summer of 1994, twelve-year-old Wendy was out playing tag with a group of other children when she bumped into fifteen-year-old James Evans, who’d just returned to the area to live with his mother. There was an immediate attraction between them and by November of that year, with Wendy now thirteen, they were having sex. Betty, who’d always hated the so-called sins of the flesh, said that James was evil and tried to stop the teenagers seeing each other. But Wendy loved the tall, thin youth and started playing truant to be with him.

  James Evans

  James had been born in 1979 to Dinah Evans. She and her husband already had a son and a daughter who were both at secondary school. The family lived in Kingston, New York.

  Dinah, whose own childhood had been violent, got into trouble with the law so she wasn’t around for part of James’s early years. When she was there she was sometimes beaten by her husband and James witnessed this violence. (Children have been known to copy their parents’ violence when they are as young as eighteen months.)

  When James was two, his parents’ marriage ended. He spent some time with his grandmother who he really cared for. He also spent some time with Dinah and some with other relatives. He was described as cheerful with a high IQ. By the time he was six his mother was a more permanent part of his life though she still had her problems. But James loved her and he also loved his older sister so he was a child with hope in his heart.

  When he was eight his father applied for custody on the grounds of Dinah’s instability. He won his case, the judge noting Dinah’s many brushes with the law and her various personal problems. But for some reason James’s father didn’t take up custody for another three years. By then James had become so close to his family that he had to be physically dragged from their home.

  He kept running away from his father’s house, which was a hundred miles away from his mother. Onlookers would describe his father as a hard worker but a disciplinarian.

  The arguments between the parents continued and in the end – at age fourteen – he was placed in a community home. Psychologists found him depressed, angry and tearful, though he tried to hide the latter emotion behind a wall of indifference. Like some of the other unhappy children in this book (Robert Thompson and Kip Kinkel) he found it hard to eat.

  The lonely, dispossessed teenager was overjoyed at finding love with tiny, slender Wendy who he described as ‘perfect.’ It would take a few weeks for him to discover just how troubled she was.

  Banned love

  Wendy was happy for the first time in years but Betty Gardner – and most of Wendy’s other relatives – didn’t approve of the match. Betty thought that fifteen-year-old James was too streetwise for her thirteen-year-old grandchild. He had a reputation for bullying, but his mother would later say he was hassling older kids for picking on the younger ones.

  Betty tried to break up the young lovers – but for once her grand-daughter stood up to her. The elderly woman continued to insult the boy.

  Self-harm

  Wendy became increasingly distressed. She thought she was pregna
nt and, terrified, asked James to punch her in the stomach. On another occasion after an argument she grabbed a knife and cut herself. James’s sister, a paramedic, also saw a deep slash on one of Wendy’s wrists as if she’d tried to commit suicide.

  In October she ran away and phoned home to say that she was living in a different part of America – but when the police were called in they found her hiding at James’s home.

  In December she again cut herself several times, deeply hurt by her grandmother’s ongoing assertion that she’d inherited her mother’s sin.

  Towards the end of December the situation at home was so tense that Wendy all but moved in with James and his mother. They knew that the clock was ticking, that her grandmother would eventually phone the police.

  But this time Betty started to make arrangements to have Wendy put into a home. She also told Wendy (according to a phone call which James overheard) that she could hit her at any time. A neighbour had seen welts on Wendy’s face which she claimed were inflicted by her grandmother and Wendy told James that when she was younger Betty had pushed her down the stairs.

  Wendy was hurt by the abuse and terrified of losing James. She’d effectively lost her parents – by now she hadn’t seen her mother, Jann, for years and the woman was dying of HIV-related complications. And when her father Buzz visited, he and Betty usually had huge verbal fights.

  On 29th December 1994 James suggested that Wendy phone her grandmother and ask if she could stay the night with James and his mother. Betty said no and Wendy told her to ‘fuck off’ and slammed down the phone.