Kyle Huff's "mission" was to kill rave-goers, expert says

Though Kyle Huff was an outsider when he was invited to an after-rave party in March, the 28-year-old Montana native had already selected the rave community to make a violent last stand, the head of a task force probing the massacre said Thursday.

Though professor James Alan Fox declined to delve into the killer's motive, he said Huff made killing rave-goers his "mission." But he said he doesn't know when Huff first directed his rage at the rave community.

"He perceived them as being evil," Fox, a criminal-justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said in an interview in Seattle.

"He perceived them as being disruptive. He saw himself as a revolutionary."

Fox was in Seattle this week to meet with Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske and others prior to completing a report on the March 25 rampage at a house party on East Republican Street on Capitol Hill, in which Huff killed six people before killing himself.

Fox said he expects to deliver the report to Kerlikowske by the end of the month, and he anticipates that it will be released publicly soon afterward.

The professor acknowledged that his opinions on Huff's mind-set are largely aided by a letter found in a Lake City trash bin.

In the letter, which the State Patrol crime lab says was probably penned by Huff, he wrote of his anger with the rave scene and declared that he was doing "... the most important thing to happen since man began."

Fox said he has also spoken to members of the rave community, as well as Huff's friends and family in Montana to generate answers. He declined to say which of Huff's family members he spoke with, nor would he elaborate on those conversations.

"In Montana, people want to remember the Kyle they knew," Fox said. "The content of the letter is surprising to the people who knew him."

Just before the house party, Huff attended a rave with some of the people he later killed.

Fox said that it wasn't the first rave Huff attended in Seattle, and while ravers welcomed Huff, he didn't feel comfortable with the scene. Fox, a leading authority on mass killings, called Huff "a mass murderer" who fits the profile of several other mass killers Fox has studied, but he declined to elaborate.

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com