Of course the small town roots leave no clues. Just like the neighbor with the arsenal is always the "quiet one who would never hurt anybody."

thanks, seattle times for being such retards. you will always provide the stranger more alienated daily newspaper readers.

wtf is up with that headline? i'm guessing in the world of seattle times every boy who grows up in a small town in montana is given his guns back after blowing shit up and then never doing his assigned community service.

fucking tards.

I don't get it -- what's wrong with that headline and story? I was curious to see whether any of the people who knew the guy in Montana had any ideas about what might have driven him to this. Whether he'd always had a temper. Whether he'd been alienated or picked on as a kid, etc. I don't see what's wrong with going to Montana to poke around and ask questions of the people that grew up with him. Or what's wrong with using a headline that essentially says, "We went to Montana to poke around and ask questions, but we didn't learn anything interesting."

Better headline: "We went to Montana and all we got was this lousy headline."

I have to agree with Joel.

I take it then that you assume every small-town Montanan that moves to Seattle has a shoot-em-up rampage on the brain? C'mon, I can over-generalize with the best of them, but this is over the top.

Good example of stereotyping, Charles.

i just think it's lame not to see a motive as simple as "likes to shoot shit up" when the guy from montana WAS a shoot shit up kind of guy and liked to shoot shit up with his handy pistol grip gun.

it's not a generalization it's a fact of the matter.

The people calling this headline retarded seem to not understand the meaning of the word "motive". A motive is not a history of linked events; a motive is a *reason*.

Sure, you can connect the dots between shooting shit up in Montana and shooting people up in my neighborhood. But that is not a *motive*, people. From everything I have read, I think the headline is true.

I'm going to quote Chris Rock's take on people who tried to figure out the motive for the Columbine killings, "Why can't they just be crazy?"

i guess you're not a fan of occam's razor.

my guess is that his motive was hedonistic, and due to his prior actions in montana one can put 2 and 2 together and see, yeah he did it for sheer pleasure. I might be wrong, but that is a little more than "no clues" as the seattle times would put it.

Occam's Razor - totally.

Motive? I think sometimes there isn't one. I'm with Chris Rock and Occam both.

Gun nuts don't need reasosn for going on rampages. Sometimes they'll give an *excuse*, but it's not the same thing.

yeah, hedonistic... that's it. right up to the point that he blew his own head off it must have been pure pleasure for him - gimme a break.

i think we might be headed down a path of over analysis, but to reply to herethere, his suicide could have been to avoid the displure of a life in prison when confronted by a cop or even the simplest feeling of guilt triggered by the cop.

but i'm no bat shit murder/suicide expert, so i'll leave it to the professionals.

in the mean time all "no clues" point to his liking of blowing shit up with a pistol grip shotgun.

Anyone stop to think that if the cop hadn't shown up when he did Kyle would have got in his truck and drove off?

yeah, and then what?

Oh, come on, Stranger staff.

A 22-year-old kid in rural Montana blows away a fiberglass moose in front of his friends. Is that supposed to be an accurate predictor for violent crime?

"In the meantime"? It's only been three days! Did you expect them to find a note pinned to his pillow that laid it all out in plain language?

Clearly, there was more to this guy than just that he "liked to shoot shit up." Thousands and thousands of people in this country (heck, in Washington State, even) have guns and enjoy blowing stuff up with them -- yet we don't get "rampages" like this every day. Dismissing it with a "he's nuts" doesn't do anything to help figure out what drove his actions -- and until we understand why some people "snap" like this, we have no hope of ever stopping this kind of thing from happening again in the future. Maybe knowing what made Huff act this way CAN'T help us prevent a similar thing from happening in the future. But finding out what motivated him, beyond the pat gloss of "eh, he's just crazy," IS actually important. In fact, I'd say it's pretty vital.

Give the investigation some time, and stop ripping on the reporters for not having ALL the answers three days after the crime!

yes, I'd agree with overanalysis... a simple way of looking at it is that {I hope) nobody commenting would ever be capable of doing something so horrific, therefor there is now way to understand it. However, we all would love to understand a motive, at least. Or to know more clues. It's hard to believe that a twin brother who lived together had nothing to reveal...

The headline implies surprise by the paper, or the reader, or someone the reader might know, that the shooter's "small-town roots in Montana" might not have played a role in the killings. Of course, this is obvious...there are plenty of people with "small-town roots in Montana" who aren't killers of humans so the headline is a no-brainer. Or maybe the Times thinks its readers are imbiciles.

The problem as many pointed out, is that people can own weapons of that nature. Period.

well they did confiscate his computer ...

Yes, I think he was prepared to keep going and shoot more people if a cop hadn't shown up. And I think he was prepared from the get-go to blow his head off as soon as a cop did show up.

What we have here is a disconnected loser, just like all the hundreds of thousands of other disconnected losers, but this guy got a little further out than most. He decided that when the time came he was going to take as many people with him as possible. I think his rage was against the entire world.

It's ridiculous to see one prank six years ago as part of some pattern of "liking to shoot shit up". If that was all, there would have been more shit shot up much sooner.

I also don't think "crazy" is good enough. There's a lot of different kinds of crazy, and the general notion of what crazy is all about isn't any more accurate than the general notion of "home defense" is all about. Most crazy people don't blaze away with guns at parties; they suffer in silence in their own dark rooms. By some people's standards some of the people in that house were crazy; and more of them will be now.

Most crazy people don't have an arsenal of weapons, and even if they did most crazy people couldn't use them. Firing a gun at another human being is HARD. Unless you're so removed from the source of your own pain that you can't tell the difference anymore.

I don't have much use for the idea expressed here and elsewhere that you should just shrug and say "guy's nuts, nothing to do with me". These guys are everywhere in our society, and our society is hell-bent on making it a thousand times easier to get a truckful of weapons than it is to get someone to notice they exist.

I have to say, reading through the comments the past few days I've been disappointed to see how many Stranger readers seem to insinuate that coming from a small town is explanation enough for somebody's homidical act or mental illness. I grew up in small-town WA and have read the Stranger for years and never thought of it as a paper for the urban elite, but apparently there is a large contingent or ignorant, prejudiced urban readers out there who've never bothered to drive 30 minutes out of the city.

I completely understand the headline... I'm from Whitefish, and I went to high school with Kyle. He didn't have many friends and every single person that I have talked to from there is completely shocked by his actions. Everyone viewed the moose shooting incident as a prank. There were like 10 other people invloved. Maybe Flathead County shouldn't have let him off so easy, but he had no priors and there was nothing to indicate that he was the least bit violent. I always thought he was the more "normal" of the two twins. As a matter of fact, when I saw his picture on the news, the tv was turned down and I thought for sure it was Kane, not Kyle. I am interested to hear what the toxicology report reveals. I wonder if he was on something... I am also wondering what Kane had to say to the police. He and his brother were ALWAYS together... I just can't believe that there was no wierd behavior leading up to this.

Gomez

Orale homes, I agree with you, but I think the correct quote is "Whatever happened to crazy"

Kyle Huff was an artist, and his canvas was the human body, like the Renaissance Masters, his fascination was the human form.

Yet Kyle Huff's deconstruction of the human form places him in the Post Modern tradition. Where the Renaissance masters gained fame by constructing a perfectly proportioned human body, Master Artist Kyle Huff's fame rises out of his brillant
(de)construction of those same balanced proportions.

It is up to The Media to examine Kyle Huff's background in detail to explore the small town source of his talent, thus exposing for us the roots of his newly minted fame.

Like many great artists, initially Kyle Huff's work will be rejected. We the public must demand to see the coroner photographs of Kyle's artwork.

Where many in the public see only the senseless chaos of violence, the educated will read a discourse on fragile human beauty written early Sunday morning with a shotgun.

I really don't see an issue with the headline... the Times went to Huff's hometown and interviewed people who knew him and didn't come up with a "convincing" clue or motive.

Small-town roots in Montana reveal no clues on motive

Replace "no clues on motive" with "few clues on motive," and we wouldn't be arguing here.

THEORY:

John Waters already made that movie. Lame, dog.

As a black man, stepping into a town like Whitefish, Montana is the same as stepping into a den of underfed hyenas.

"Natural Born Killers" is another film on the same theme. But the public devours Hollywood remakes as quickly as they lap up ink spilled about grisly murders. So thoughtful writers never shy away from the latest massacre. The real horror of murder may be it's mind numbing banality, but that never stops The Media from spending months probing into the personal details of the killer. (what kind of deodorant might the killer have been wearing? could that be a clue into his motive?)

As we seek to uncover the "real truth" behind Mr. Huff's criminal artistry, it might be productive to review Capote's "In Cold Blood". Writer Capote also became fascinated by a seemingly senseless killing and spent three years getting to the "truth" about the killer's motives.

Writing about those murders made Capote an international star. There's no reason a clever writer couldn't line his pockets writing about these new killings. Perhaps there's a Pulitzer to be won writing about what CD Kyle Huff listened to driving his big black truck to the party.

So keep digging everyone, I'm sure somewhere in small town Montana lies the key to unlock the secrets of Kyle Huff's awesome inspiration.

Well, now we know why Charles isn't in Montana investigating this. Are any other Stranger reporters in Whitefish talking to the Huff family or friends of theirs? I'd be curious to see if Stranger reporters had as much luck getting young people to open up in Whitefish as they did here (great work on that here, by the way).

as someone with a lot of friends from Montana, and who grew up north of there in the Rockies (Kootenay region of BC), I don't think this will tell you much, quite frankly.

People are just looking for someone to blame.

Film Fan -

The trouble with trying to uncover truth on this crime ala Capote, is that the perpetrator is dead... and speculation is never as revealing as going straight to the source. Not to mention the fact that there aren't many writers who operate on a talent level to the degree of TC...

Your ignorance is showing, Charles. There are towns in the West where you might not be welcome, but Whitefish isn't one of them. As long as you bring money, of course.

There's even a modest chance that a fellow could get a motel room with a homosexual partner there, unlike a lot of other towns in Montana.

I believe the Times headline is indicitive of Seattles "News" business. The headline should read "We went to Montana and found zilch so were filling several inches of our newspaper with pointless drivel to justify the expense" Its so much fluff so they can appear to be "investigating" the one newsworthy event Seattle may have this year. Stringing out the increased sales this tragedy generated isnt news. Finding nothing substantive to add isnt news.

Actually, it looks like Whitefish is a bursting metropolis ;) amongst the rest of the towns in the Flathead Valley.

It boasts the only building in Montana designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Its not all white, after all, it sits on Flathead Indian reservation land.

The twin knows a great deal. The question is if he will ever talk. Twins who live together and are close are soul mates in ways no one else is so gifted.

My fmily is full of twins.

Clues to all this are in Seattle not Montana.

This is just the Stanger kicking and baiting other media, their ongoing habit. Overall, the Stranger has been excellent.

The tale of a Black reporter in small town Montana recording the intimate thoughts of the killer's classmates has the makings of at least a Novel, and perhaps a feature film.

A theme could be the writer as "the outsider" ruminating on the killer as "the other". A few 'bon mots' contrasting the bucolic rural landscape with the later interior urban scene of the murder location, and a literary career could be made.

Add in the typical cliches about rural red state rustics being ignorant bigots and there's plenty of meat there for the typical urban book buyer.

Kelly - your post is the most important one on this thread.

Most of us are just speculating based on our own small worlds and limited experiences. None of us has had any experience with this mass murder scene before.

Please, tell us about these guys and their sexual suff. I am gay and have had some speculations with other gay guys about there being some boiling problems with sexuality - and then an all consuming dead end blood rage when there are no easy answers. There are many murders out there, not this massive, that make no sense except they have the boil over sexual stuff and someone gets killed - usually the closest gay man.

Thanks.

If the twins are gay closet cases, then when they got beat up that night it was a gay bashing.

Many victims of gay bashings carry smoldering rage inside. This rage eventually comes out somewhere.

Matthew Shephard was also from small town Montana, only he didn't survive the gay bashing. So the Huff brother's murder spree may just be pay-back time for victims of gay bashing.

I really don't know if Kyle was gay. His close friends (the ones that I have spoken to) don't seem to think so. I still think the key to finding anything close to a motive is his twin brother, Kane. They were inseparable. This crime was so planned out, it's hard for me to believe that Kane had no idea that something was up.

I think it's kind of ridiculous how many people are saying that just because the Huffs were twins and lived together, that means Kane knew everything Kyle was thinking and planning. That argument makes no rational sense. It's like saying, "Hey, I tell MY brother everything, therefore, ALL brothers tell their brothers everything."

Unless Kyle Huff was stomping around their apartment muttering about killing people, his brother very likely would've had no idea at all what was going on in his head. Just like the parents of the Columbine kids had no idea. Just like the wives of serial killers had no idea. I'm sure there were signs and that in retrospect, Kane will be beating himself up over the fact he missed them. But isn't this what always happens after someone snaps? All their family and friends say, "My god, we had NO IDEA."

I feel badly for Kane Huff. Losing a twin under any circumstances must be utterly devastating. And under these circumstances, even more so.

Jolie - You're right to some extent... I don't think that there was anything obvouis to make Kane think Kyle would even be capable of doing this. But then again, you have no idea how close they were. Almost as if they were one person.