Columbine's forgotten dress rehearsal — the shooting nobody remembers.
In May 1998, a year before the massacre at Columbine High, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his mother and father, and then opened fire at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, killing two fellow students and wounding 25 others. In this first in-depth television examination of a school shooter, FRONTLINE reveals the intimate inside story of how the “shy and likeable” Kip Kinkel from a solid middle-class family became the boy police call “a cold-hearted killer.”
Direction
Kirk's patient, unflinching access to family and friends.
Editing
Home videos that shatter your assumptions completely.
Director
Michael Kirk
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Aired months before Columbine, this documentary was essentially buried by that larger event—becoming a grim footnote to the footnote.
Kinkel's 'hit list' was discovered but ignored by school officials weeks before the shooting—a pattern repeated at Columbine.
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