Police Videotape of Teen Killer Released

On grainy police videotape, a red-haired boy in handcuffs stands in the school cafeteria just six hours after shooting two fellow students dead and wounding 24.

Blood is smeared across the white tile floor, and a body, covered in a white sheet, lies near a long table. Next to it are a pair of headphones. Books, backpacks--even shoes--lie abandoned by students who raced from Kip Kinkel’s gunfire.

“Why did you do this?” Det. Al Warthen asks the 15-year-old in the May 1998 videotape.

“I had no other choice,” Kinkel says quickly, his head hung low.

The video shows Kinkel, who earlier killed his parents, as police brought him back to Thurston High School to show him the carnage and ask him why he did it.

Springfield police released the raw videotape just days after the airing of a PBS documentary about the shooting.

Kinkel, now 17, was sentenced to 112 years in prison for the murders.

In the videotape, Kinkel is in handcuffs with a police jacket slung over his shoulders. His plastic, police-issue sandals shuffle along the floor.

He nods and murmurs one-word answers to Warthen’s questions as they retrace Kinkel’s steps from a spot near the tennis courts where he parked his mother’s Ford Explorer, through the school’s hallways, to the cafeteria.

As they stopped in the breezeway, Kinkel tells Warthen he didn’t focus on faces as he pulled the trigger and wasn’t targeting anyone in particular.

“It was a blur,” he says. “I told one kid he should probably leave.”

Warthen asks, “Did any of these students make you upset or hurt you or anything?”

While his eyes shift back and forth across the cafeteria, Kinkel answers: “No.”

It was in the cafeteria that Kinkel killed two students and wounded the others.

In a barely audible voice, the teen tells Warthen that he had a 50-round clip in his .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle when, wearing a trench coat, he walked into the cafeteria and began shooting.

Kinkel’s quiet, videotaped answers starkly contrast with his stuttering, boyish sobs as he confesses to killing his parents in an audiotaped interview with Warthen three hours earlier.

The day before, Kinkel had gotten in trouble for bringing a gun on campus. Facing expulsion, he was sent home early with his father.

Some time after they returned, the teen shot his father, Bill, in the back of the head, dragged his body into the bathroom and covered it with a sheet.

“I didn’t want to,” he says on the videotape when Warthen asks him about that shooting. “I loved my dad.”

His mother, Faith, was in the garage when he shot her several times.

“My dad kept saying how embarrassed she was going to be [about his expulsion] and how horrible I was. I couldn’t let my mom feel like that,” he says.

Kinkel said he turned on the television to “keep me company” but stayed up all night, talking to some of his friends and trying to decide what to do.

“I tried so hard to kill myself,” he says. “But I couldn’t do it.”

Moments before the audiotaped interview, Kinkel lunged at Warthen with a knife that he had taped to his ankle. Officers missed it when searching him.

“I wanted you to shoot me,” Kinkel told the detective during the interview. “I just want to die.”