Huffpost
Story by Jessica Schulberg
At 15, he shot and killed his parents, two classmates at his school, and wounded 25 others. He’s been used as the reason to lock kids up for life ever since.
In the spring of 1998, Kipland Kinkel, then 15, shot and killed his mother, his father and two students at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. He wounded 25 others. At the time, the country was only beginning to fear that mass shootings at schools might actually become a trend.
A shooting at a Mississippi high school the previous October was followed by a cluster of killings across the country perpetrated by students who seemed to select victims at random. After the third in eight months, at a middle school near Jonesboro, Arkansas, President Bill Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to take action. “We do not understand what drives children, whether in small towns or big cities, to pick up guns and take the lives of others,” Clinton said. Two months later, Kinkel’s crime marked the highest-casualty school shootings by a student in three decades. Less than a year after that, the tragedy at Columbine happened, followed by the horrifying string of school shootings that have become a routine of American life since.
Kinkel was sentenced to nearly 112 years without the possibility of parole, which to many in the community felt like the closest thing to closure. A parent of one of the students Kinkel killed said at his sentencing she had “no idea how long it will take before we can lead a normal life without all the constant reminders” of her son’s death. The media rushed to piece together a narrative about him. Friends and acquaintances described a boy with an all-American upbringing but who was obsessed with bombs and guns, dressed in black and listened to Marilyn Manson.
That image of Kinkel has remained frozen in time: the dangerous child people point to as the reason some kids need to be locked up for life. For decades, Kinkel never tried to correct it. He refused every interview request and even avoided being photographed in group activities inside the prison. He worried that reemerging publicly would only further traumatize his victims. But last year he agreed to speak to HuffPost.
Kinkel is one of about 10,000 people nationwide serving life or life-equivalent sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18, when their brains were not yet fully developed. The U.S. is the only country that allows juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole. The children condemned to die in prison are disproportionately Black and brown, the result of years of racist fearmongering about so-called “super-predator” youth. But in Oregon, which is overwhelmingly white and has had a high rate of juvenile incarceration, Kinkel is one of the most infamous prisoners.
In recent years, Oregon has undergone intense debates about whether it’s appropriate to lock up juveniles for life. Senate Bill 1008, a juvenile justice reform bill that dramatically changed the way Oregon punished people who committed crimes before they were 18 years old, was introduced in the state legislature in 2019. It eliminated sentences of life without parole for minors, made it harder to prosecute kids as adults and created early-release opportunities for those who demonstrated rehabilitation.
Prosecutors and conservative media personalities inaccurately claimed that S.B. 1008 would automatically allow Kinkel to go free. He was the subject of television commercials and testimony in the state Capitol urging lawmakers to vote against the bill. The legislation narrowly passed, but weeks later politicians clawed back a key part of the reform effort. In response to concerns about Kinkel, the state legislature passed another bill amending S.B. 1008 to specifically exclude people who were sentenced before its passage. That move makes it more likely Kinkel will spend the rest of his life behind bars, but it also affects hundreds of other people in Oregon who are in prison for crimes they committed as kids — including people who have played a role in Kinkel’s rehabilitation.
I have spoken with Kinkel over the phone for about 20 hours over the course of nearly ten months. It was a rare opportunity to hear from the perpetrator of a school shooting; those that survive almost never speak publicly again. No questions were off-limits. He described to me the childhood onset of hallucinations and delusions that would later be identified as symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He walked me through the events that drove him to amass weapons and his memory of the psychotic break he experienced during his crime. He described his intense guilt for what he had done. He told me about the treatment and support he received from his doctors, therapists, sister, volunteers and his community of juvenile lifers.
“I have responsibility for the harm that I caused when I was 15. But I also have responsibility for the harm that I am causing now as I’m 38 because of what I did at 15.”
Today, Kinkel is unrecognizable from the 15-year-old boy who inflicted devastating harm on his community. Within the confines of the prison system, where he has now spent most of his life, Kinkel has earned his college degree, become a certified yoga instructor and advocated for criminal justice reform before elected officials. He is diligent about his mental health treatment and says he rarely hears the voices anymore. When they do emerge, they are quiet and garbled. Even when he can make out what they are saying, he understands them as manifestations of his illness; they don’t hold a powerful influence over him anymore.
I found Kinkel to be a remarkably reliable narrator of his life. When listening back to recordings of phone calls months apart, he remained consistent on even the smallest details, and his version of events was supported by doctors and people who lived with him in the prison. Our conversations took place throughout the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and sometimes we’d go weeks without talking when his unit went into lockdown after a COVID-19 outbreak. In September, he and others incarcerated in his prison were evacuated to a nearby prison due to historically destructive wildfires.
Kinkel is still worried about hurting his victims by speaking publicly, but as he watched people use him as the reason to exclude some of his closest friends from getting a second chance, he began to feel as if his silence was causing harm, too.
We spoke for the first time last summer, about a year after the legislative roller coaster. “I’ve never done this. I’ve never done an interview,” Kinkel told me. “Partly because I feel tremendous, tremendous shame and guilt for what I did. And there’s an element of society that glorifies violence, and I hate the violence that I’m guilty of. I’ve never wanted to do anything that’s going to bring more attention.”
“I have responsibility for the harm that I caused when I was 15. But I also have responsibility for the harm that I am causing now as I’m 38 because of what I did at 15,” he said.
Kinkel heard voices in his head for the first time when he was 12 years old. He recalled getting off the school bus, walking up his driveway and hearing a male voice say, “You need to kill everyone, everyone in the world.”
Kinkel turned around, looking for someone behind him. But no one was there. He ran inside his house, but the voice followed him in, accompanied by a second. Frightened, he retrieved the rifle he had been given for his 12th birthday and held it tight, hoping it would protect him from the invisible intruders. He laid in bed, waiting for the voices to go away.
The two voices soon became three, all of them male. They had a hierarchy, and Kinkel could tell them apart. They sometimes argued with one another, and they often worked together to denigrate and manipulate Kinkel. They spoke about him as if he couldn’t hear them. Everything they said was ugly, negative and violent.
The voices terrified Kinkel. They warned him that everyone would think he was a freak if he tried to tell anyone about them. So Kinkel tried to make sense of what he was experiencing on his own. He didn’t grow up particularly religious, but he wondered if they came from God. Or maybe the devil.
Eventually, he settled on an explanation: “I believed that the Disney corporation was working in conjunction with the U.S. government, and they had planted a chip in my head and so the voices were coming from this chip,” Kinkel said during an interview.
Over time, he became fixated on the idea that the Chinese were going to invade the West Coast. “And I became obsessed with obtaining weapons. Not just guns, but knives and explosives.”
Kinkel’s interest in weapons didn’t seem entirely abnormal in his rural Walterville, Oregon. His parents weren’t gun enthusiasts, but he got rides to gun shows from a friend’s parents. Since he wasn’t old enough to buy firearms, he bought books or magazines filled with warnings about foreign invaders and government plans to seize Americans’ guns. The anti-government paranoia resonated deeply with him.
The news was buzzing with events that seemed to Kinkel like validation of his fears: the deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas, followed by the 1994 federal assault weapon ban. “The narrative was, ‘They’re gonna take our guns.’ And my fear, twisted into my illness, was, ‘Our own government is going to take away our guns before the Chinese invade, and we’re not going to be able to defend ourselves,’” Kinkel said.
The voices would come and go. “I wasn’t consumed with the symptoms of this illness all the time. I would kind of oscillate back and forth to being a fairly normal kid,” Kinkel said. He noticed the voices often appeared when he had a bad day, so he resolved to have only good days.
“That now, to me, sounds absurd because, of course, life is always filled with stress,” Kinkel said. “But as a kid, I really felt like, ‘OK, I have this figured out. I have this solution .… If I stop having bad days and I just am OK, then I won’t have to deal with this anymore.’”
But on the inevitable bad days, Kinkel was consumed by delusions. It was an isolating experience, and he slid into depression. His parents could tell something was wrong, but they didn’t know what. His dad, Bill, was skeptical of mental health professionals — he viewed them as quacks who existed to drive up the cost of insurance premiums.
When Kinkel was in eighth grade, he and a friend got in trouble with the cops for throwing rocks off a freeway overpass. His parents searched his room afterward and found materials that could be used to make a bomb. His mom, Faith, was at a loss. She insisted on taking Kinkel to a child psychologist.
Faith told the psychologist, Jeffrey Hicks, that Kinkel had been getting in trouble and that he and his friends had an unhealthy fascination with weapons and explosives. According to Hicks’s notes, Kinkel showed “no evidence of delusional thinking or other thought disorder symptoms.” That was intentional on Kinkel’s part. He was determined not to let anyone find out about the voices, fearing he would be diagnosed as “retarded.”
Childhood-onset schizophrenia is extremely rare and difficult to diagnose. It can be hard to differentiate between imaginative play and signs of mental illness, and hallucinations can occur in healthy children as part of regular development. It’s also not uncommon for people with schizophrenia to be secretive about hearing voices. Some of the more visible symptoms related to mood and behavior can be mistaken for other, more common mental illnesses, such as depression or bipolar disorder.
Read the full story at Huffpost.
