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As Springfield students, clustering around the squat, gray-green high school building, look back, the signs seem all too clear. For his middle school yearbook, Kinkel was jokingly voted "most likely to start World War III." "He was really open about making bombs," confides T.J. Harty, 13. "Once he showed me a pipe bomb with a white fuse and said, 'I'm going to blow something up.'" Kip would brag about cutting up cats and squirrels and even claimed to have blown up a cow. Like many local teenagers, he hunted deer, with a rifle his father gave him last year. He seemed to take pleasure in killing. "Other kids say, 'I got a deer,'" recalls Lindsay Parr, 14. "But he was, 'Oh, yeah, I sliced it open.'"
On an Internet service account unearthed by the Portland Oregonian, Kinkel logs on as "Kipper" and, in what seems almost a parody of adolescent rebellion, lists his hobbies as "role-playing games, heavy-metal music, violent cartoons/TV, sugared cereal, throwing rocks at cars." His occupation: "Student, surfing the Web for info on how to build bombs." The result is nothing to laugh at; when police searched the family house, they found five homemade bombs (two with electronic timing devices) in a crawl space under the house, along with at least 15 other explosive devices, including a hand grenade, two 155-mm howitzer shell casings and literature about bombmaking, some of it from the Internet.
In school, few took Kinkel's menace seriously. He was known as a class clown, a little weird but with plenty of friends. Although small for his age, he played football as a backup linebacker and took karate lessons. And if classmates failed to report his darker side, teachers seemed equally nonchalant. He reportedly gave a presentation in speech class on how to build a pipe bomb, complete with illustrations. In a literature course, he was said to have read from a diary in which he mentioned plans to "kill everybody." Asked at a news conference whether officials should have reacted, Springfield school superintendent Jamon Kent noted that funding cuts have reduced the counselor-to-student ratio to roughly 1 to 700. '"What do kids see every day in the movies?" he asked. "If we detained every student who said, 'I'm going to kill someone,' we would have a large number of students detained."
To neighbors in the Shangri-la subdivision, Kip came across as polite, even friendly. "This was an all-American kid," says urologist Dennis Ellison. "He had a caring mother and father. This was not a redneck family." By all accounts, Bill Kinkel, 60, who retired from Thurston High after 30 years of teaching Spanish, and Faith, 57, who was head of the language department at Springfield High School, were beloved by their students and cherished by a broad swath of friends. They took Kip and his older sister Kristin, 21, a university student in Honolulu, on skiing and hiking trips and vacations in Europe. Bill Kinkel took his son to basketball games and, when Kip insisted on getting a rifle, to a safety range for instruction.