Savage Spawn by Jonathan Kellerman

accomplishments with the robbery, sodomy, and murder of at least ten men. (Panzram claimed twenty-one victims, including children.) Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer’s protégé, dedicated
In the Belly of the Beast
to Panzram. Perhaps Mailer and others should have taken the hint.
    Not that admiration of psychopaths is limited to other psychopaths. The fact that American folklore has lionized the likes of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Bonnie and Clyde, elevating them to folk heroes, combined with our general glorification of the brutal and violent periods such as the Wild West, may tell us something about our true feelings toward youthful murderousness.
    We decry the latest schoolyard rampage, but soon we’re back to singing adulatory ballads about bad kids and flocking to movies about young guns. Talk about mixed messages.
    That same confused attitude was exhibited, to terrible effect, within the family of Kipland Kinkel, the fifteen-year-old who murdered his parents and shot up a school in Springfield, Oregon, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others.
    For years, Kinkel’s parents had complained to friends and neighbors about their fear of their son. And with good reason. Kip had long displayed classical characteristics of violent psychopathy: cruelty to animals, sadism, a previous arrest for throwing rocks at cars from an overpass, attention deficit combined with learning problems, multiple school suspensions, and an obsession with weapons and explosives. Efforts to remedy the situation included Ritalin, Prozac, short-term psychiatric counseling, and overindulgence—summer trips to Spain and Costa Rica, lessons in tennis, sailing, and skiing. An attempt to sublimate Kip’s aggression with martial arts training resulted in a school suspension for karate-kicking another boy in the head. Soon after, Kip threw a pencil at another boy and was suspended yet again (66).
    Kip was reinforced for his behavior by being allowed to remain out of school. Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel, both teachers, took turns instructing their son at home. Friends describe them as dedicated, hardworking parents whose other child, an older sister, was a model student.
    Yet Kip remained impervious to their efforts, boasting about stuffing firecrackers into a cat’s mouth and reading aloud in class from a journal in which he wrote about plans to “kill everybody.” He learned about explosives on the Internet, built five bombs, and hid them in crawl spaces around the family home.
    This was the boy Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel chose to favor with a semiautomatic Ruger rifle and two handguns. The rifle was the weapon Kip used to kill them and to fire fifty rounds into the cafeteria at Thurston High.
    One hesitates to blame victims. But . . .
why on earth?
    When I practiced psychology it wasn’t at all rare to encounter parents who brought a child for treatment and expressed great distress about the identified problem, but turned ambivalent and resistant when the patient began to improve.
    Sometimes ambivalence showed itself right from the beginning, like the father who bemoaned his son’s bullying tendencies during an intake session, only to smile at me across the desk and add, “He
is
pretty tough. Doesn’t take guff from anyone.” Other displays were more subtle—a wink and a nod, failure to comply with a treatment plan, failure to bring the child back once a treatment plan had been devised. I encountered parents who grew openly resentful toward the child
after
he got better and tried actively to undermine the therapeutic process. One particularly hostile mother went so far as to overdose on her seriously depressed daughter’s antidepressants.
    From what I could tell, this shift typically occurred when the child had been labeled the primary or sole problem in a
systemically
malfunctioning family. Focusing exclusively upon a problem child is easy to do even in cohesive families, because difficult kids