Crime lab says it is "highly probable" that Huff wrote note

It is "highly probable" that Capitol Hill gunman Kyle Huff authored a handwritten note found crumpled in a trash bin a month after Huff killed six young people and himself at an after-rave house party March 25, according to scientists with the State Patrol crime lab in Seattle.

A crime-lab report written June 7 by James Tarver, the State Patrol's supervising forensic scientist, was released by Seattle police Tuesday.

The report indicates that the letter — scrawled on the back of a flier from the Town & Country apartments in North Seattle where Huff lived with his twin brother Kane — was compared to seven "various pieces of paper and receipts, submitted as the known writing of Kyle Huff" and to a job application Huff filled out before being hired as a Pizza Hut delivery driver.

"It is highly probable that the questioned letter was written by Kyle Huff," Tarver concluded of the handwriting analysis. He later noted: "Further examination of known extended writing, such as notes or letters, might yield more definitive findings in this case."

In the letter, dated March 23, Huff rants against a "world of sex" — an apparent reference to the rave community — where people say and do things that "are just too disturbing to me to just ignore and try to live my life with."

The letter was found April 24 about a mile from the apartment building where the Huff brothers lived. It was discovered in the trash bin along with other items, including an alarm clock wired to a brick of modeling clay, outside an apartment building in the 2700 block of Northeast 115th Street. The Seattle Police Department's bomb squad destroyed the suspicious device, and a bomb detective forwarded the letter to homicide detectives, police said at the time.

Seattle police spokeswoman Debra Brown said officers "didn't necessarily make the connection" between the suspicious device, the letter and Huff's rampage a month earlier at a house on East Republican Street. Police searched Huff's apartment after the shootings but didn't find the apparent suicide note.

Brown said police don't know how the letter ended up in the trash bin.

"It's great that it's probably his [letter] because it does lend some perspective" into what Huff's mind-set may have been, Brown said.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com