THE TWISTING OF KENNY WHITE

Miami Herald, The (FL)
Date: March 10, 1985
Author: MADELEINE BLAIS Herald Staff Writer

There were four shots in all, one accidental, one test shot, and then the shots for the two victims.

Neighbors recollect hearing the gunfire, but they mistook it for something else. They heard the sound and they tamed it. It was the busy time of day in a nice part of town, the time when mothers call to their children to come in for dinner, when there is the clatter of garage doors opening and closing while bicycles and other equipment are stowed for the night, or that unmistakable thump!--one last toss of the ball into the hoop. The report from the gun was automatically, unconsciously processed into the expected reasons for such a sound in such a neighborhood.

Firecrackers.

Or, a car backfiring.

Or, the Jacksons must be working hard on their gazebo. Kenny White sits on a bench in the windswept courtyard of Youth Hall, dressed in the standard- issue gym shorts and T-shirt, studying his gnawed nails, and trying to summon the exact mood of the day when at the age of 12 he shot and killed his brother and his mother with a Colt Python handgun.

A year has passed.

"Have you," he says, "ever been in a fight?" He appraises his audience, and something about her, something she's wearing perhaps, the look around the eyes, a hesitancy in her manner, makes him shake his head violently and quickly conclude: "No you probably haven't. As soon as you start to move forward everything goes real fast. Every time you see a face you swing at it. That's the way the day went by, in a blur."

On Oct. 19, 1983 Kenny White woke up late.

He took a new shortcut to school that turned out to be even longer than the regular way.

Grades were issued and he got his first F of the year.

He had girlfriend problems.

An extra-credit report got messed up in the rain.

He deliberately economized on lunch and bought just milk so he could buy an Astro Pop from the ice cream man on his way home from school.

The ice cream man wasn't there.

When he got home it was his job to put supper in the oven: Every night it was pour-a-quiche or chicken, chicken or pour-a-quiche, one or the other. That afternoon he forgot to check the temperature of the oven and soon the odor of charred poultry overtook the whole house.

That afternoon, in the living room of their tract house in the suburbs, he sat watching television, and waited for his mother, and waited, and when he heard the door he thought: here she is. But no such luck. His younger brother, 9-year-old Kevin, came home first.

"It was," says Kenny, "a bad day all around."

"We are not the kind of people to have a tragedy like this," says Richard White, Kenny's father, a small balding man of 48.

He speaks in a quiet, even voice; it has the shy keep-the-peace tone of someone who wants very much to avoid a scolding. The words often have a formal flavor, as in a speech.

"We were a happy family. If there had been alcohol, or drugs, or child abuse, if there had been internal strife, or jealousy, or the belittling of one child versus another, well then what happened might have been if not something you could understand, well at least you could expect it. But there was nothing like that." Richard White is in his office at Rosen Management, where he supervises condominiums. Born in Atlanta, a graduate of The Citadel ("the West Point of the South"), a member of the Air Force's Strategic Air Command before his marriage to June August in 1967, he is the son of a boxer, and there is a hint in Richard White that if he had followed less sedentary pursuits, his frame--which now conveys an overall softness--might have possessed a measure of stocky pugnacity.

His most startling feature is the near-dazzling blueness of his eyes. It is a handicap of eyes like that, and an unfair burden to their possessor, the way they convey an impression of reflecting more than they absorb, as if their purpose is to be looked at rather than to look. He shakes his head, back and forth, sadly. He says there are two events in his life bonded by mystery and sorrow and he doesn't understand them and never hopes to: why Kenny did what he did and why his own father walked out on his mother when he was 1 year old.

"To me, there is no point in looking for an answer to either of these questions because there is no answer I can accept."

West Kendall resonates with upward mobility and easy living. There is an air of come-on and of carnival in the signs that beckon prospective buyers like those signs on highways that advertise tourists traps: 50 miles, then 10, and finally last chance to see whatever wonder is being proclaimed. The signs are propped up in empty lots, poking out from above the sawgrass: Ten thousand down and this lifestyle can be yours!

The Whites lived in the Calusa section in a four-bedroom house, built almost 10 years ago. The facades are all the same. The uniformity of the dwellings is experienced less as suffocating then reassuring. The neighborhood is so new that there are few trees, and the shade is grudging, like a fake smile, meager and ineffective.

The Whites were pioneers in that part of town. There was a shortage of classrooms. Richard and June White organized the first meeting of the homeowners association to fight for more schools. They were featured more than once in news stories in the late '70s.

Calusa Elementary School opened in 1981; located less than five minutes from the White's house, this is where the younger boy attended grades one through three and where Kenny spent the fifth and sixth grade. James Gould, principal at Calusa, says the calm of the area belies its true tension: More than half the children come from single-parent families. "You know what's missing from this area? Grandparents. Not for our children, but for our children's parents. They are on their own; they don't have that sense of heritage, of continuity."

A point of pride at his school are three bulging scrapbooks filled with school memorabilia, writings by the children, class photos and spontaneous pictures of students at play. The scrapbooks are a touching attempt at legacy in a school which, like the community it serves, has an atmosphere of unrelieved newness.

Gould likes to claim he runs the largest day-care program in Dade County: More than 150 students stay after school every day. Kevin stayed in this program every day. The school had on file a letter signed by his father: "Kevin, our son, may walk home from day-care by himself at 6 p.m. each day. If we are unable to sign him out by this hour, he has been instructed to walk home in any weather."

The Whites were very busy, often changing jobs but always working hard. Neighbors say both parents were gone from morning until evening. The principal remembers a time when Kenneth had misbehaved and he asked June White to leave her work and come sit with Kenneth in the office while her son was

made to eat lunch alone there every day for a week. She came, and stationed herself behind the boy, not across from him, and they barely exchanged a word. "She acted," he said, "like this was her punishment too."

The Whites' involvement in the daily life of the neighborhood was minimal. It boiled down to donating their gas grill to the annual block party. When Linda Riser, who lived next door, adopted her daughter, June White did something that suggested she was unusually touched by this event--perhaps because both her sons were adopted as well. "She brought over a pink dress, and the woman's face was just glowing." It was, in all the years of living next door, the only time Linda Riser could recall a moment of real connection with her neighbor. June White and Paula Conger, from across the street, collaborated briefly on a beauty and color analysis business, counseling women on how to obtain, through the meticulous orchestration of hue and cosmetics and the cut of one's clothes, A Certain Look. When the partnership dissolved, June White refused to acknowledge her neighbors, and even the children were ordered not to say hello. Kevin was extremely quiet. "He never talked," said one neighbor, "and he never showed emotion." In general, people familiar with both boys expressed more concern about Kevin than Kenneth, who had bounce and vitality and, in many respects, a very winning style.

Kenneth's parents often punished him for his poor academic performance and his bad attitude. "Kenny was always grounded," says his friend Brett. Kenny told one psychiatrist he used to like to put firecrackers in the mouths of lizards and watch them explode, but he knew lots of other kids who did lots worse to much nicer animals. The worse mischief in his life occurred when he and some friends went into a trailer and were accused of vandalism. His father had to pay $75 in damages. When he was allowed out, Kenneth liked to hang around the golf course and collect lost balls to sell to the players, or hide in the bushes far away with a BB gun, and when one of the players bent over to concentrate on a shot, he took aim on the broad targets and squeezed the trigger. He and his friends would laugh. He never got caught.

His favorite place was Kendall Lakes Mall; he was known among his friends for always being "up for the mall." He and Brett would eat pizza, play with the computers at Kmart, bang on the miniature pianos at Lucia's, steal candy bars and sometimes put Vaseline on the handles of car doors. But usually, Kenneth had orders to stay inside the house.

"Grounded," says Andy Jackson, Kenneth's friend from across the street, "was the most famous word in Kenny's house." "Friendship," an essay by Kenneth White, age 11, preserved in the scrapbooks at Calusa Elementary, accompanied by a snapshot of Kenneth playing tug-of-war:

"The dictionary deffination of friendship--The state of being friends. My deffination of friendship. A friend should be trust worthy, loile, a friend should be able to take some insults and know when to fight back. A friend to talk to a sholder to cry on but most of all someone who under stands you. He should be like you he should like most of the things that you do. He should a little crazy but make sure he doesn't like the same girl as you do. So far I have never found a friend like that but Im still looking."

There are many theories about rage. One favors the notion that rage has its catalyst, if not its roots, in the first home, the first relationships; and if that is so, most violence in society is the result of the child's postponed violent urges. By that rationale, violence by a child has, if nothing else, the flimsy merit of having occurred pretty much on schedule.

On the day of the murders, Andrew's mother, Elizabeth Jackson, a psychologist with the Dade County School system, remembers seeing Kenneth walking home from school by himself. There was peculiar loneliness in the sight--a child, unattended, on his own. Elizabeth Jackson did not stop that day; twice earlier in the week she had offered Kenneth rides, and with the customary polite respect he always showed adults, he had refused.

But the picture of him that day lives in the memory of Elizabeth Jackson: In Kenneth's hand was a willow stick, and as he moved through the whipping sawgrass, he seemed to be thrashing a path. Her mind never summons that picture without also summoning the misgiving: If only she had stopped. Maybe she could have helped.

Later, that evening, when the murders became public, meteoric fame, quick-lived and crashing, befell the otherwise quiet area. The house was cordoned and ambulances and police cruisers and media vehicles jammed the street in front. At one point, someone counted 19 cars out front. Residents of the neighborhood remember this scene as a vulturous assault on the zealously maintained serenity of the neighborhood. Reporters tried to take children aside and interview them without the permission of parents: The sight of these adults interrogating the children came to symbolize, almost as much as the murders themselves, the feeling of absolute violation that overtook Calusa on that day.

Kenny was watching television while the police conducted the investigation from the Risers' house next door. Linda Riser, a nurse, interpreted the mildness in his manner as testimony to the shock.

After midnight, Richard White went to stay with a relative. One of the police officers offered to drive Kenny to the same place, but first he wanted Kenny to point out a few of the neighborhood sights. The officer had noticed that Kenny's accounts of the afternoon contained some inconsistencies. As they drove past Andy's and Jeremy's house, past Shane's, past Brett's, the officer pursued the accident theory of the crime: Were you showing your brother the gun? Did it go off by mistake?

"Remember how we powdered your hands earlier today? The results of that test will tell us whether or not you handled a weapon today."

It was that easy.

Kenny confessed. He told the police that he and his mother had never gotten along. He said his parents were always sending him away, like to survival camp in the summers. His birthday was coming up in less than a week, and he was supposed to have a Bar Mitzvah, but his mother had canceled it months before. She'd told him the money for the party already had been spent on military school.

He had had birthday parties canceled in the past, but no previous cancellation disturbed him as much as the Bar Mitzvah.

Later, in the Youth Hall courtyard:

"It's something you get to do if you're Jewish and you're male. To do it you have to study Hebrew, a whole other language. It's a big party, a little like Sweet Sixteen for a girl, you get presents and stuff. The Rabbi gives a sermon, and you get admitted into manhood. It's fun. It's not like Seder, which is this celebration, sort of, where you just sit and look at food for three hours. After you're Bar Mitzvahed, you get to sit with the men and wear this special thing, the tallis, when you go to Temple. She said she wasn't going to let me have it. She cut it off right there."

He expected to enter seventh grade with his friends, but his parents decided in the summer of his 12th year that he should go to Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Ga.

Kenny had a plan. If military school didn't work out, he would kill his mother and then himself.

"Me and her were the problems. So, get rid of the problems."

He saw his scheme as an act of altruism: He would end the constant fighting and dissension and at the same time provide his father and brother with a chance at a decent life.

He was back in Miami in less than two weeks: "Before he even had time to dirty his uniforms," went the whispered talk.

When he came back to Miami he had bruises. He told everyone he had been hazed and tortured by the school officials.

Everyone believed him. Actually, much later he admitted that what happened was this: There was hazing and the older boys all had an apparent obsession with the shine of the younger one's shoes and they'd step on Kenny's shoes and then say they were scuffed and make him do 50 push-ups, and when he asked permission to get up, they'd say sure and then they'd kick his arms out from under.

But the black and blue marks that bought Kenneth his freedom were courted quite deliberately: He asked a buddy to punch him out in the middle of the night, and then he pretended he had been attacked in the dark by an anonymous gang.

After a year at Youth Hall, Kenny not only has learned how to pick locks (comb for the school door, shoelace for the gym, brute strength for the cafeteria), but also how to express himself in jailhouse jive. When he describes his leavetaking from military school he thinks of it as escape: "My dad came up and broke me out." Neighbors said taking Kenny out of school was one of the few times Richard White ever defied the wishes of his wife.

"This is what I don't understand," says Richard White. "When Kenny came home from military school, he actually had more freedom than he'd ever had in his life. We told him: You are on your own now. We're not going to bail you out or chaperone or escort you everywhere any more. It's all up to you to take care of yourself. We actually backed off from him."

"See what I mean," says Richard White, in that almost benumbed voice. "The pressure was off."

On the night of the murders, most of the men in Calusa, for some reason, were able to fall asleep, but most of the women stayed awake. By then, Kenny had confessed to the crime and had been arrested.

Linda Riser, from next door, remembers a feeling of gratitude at finding out Kenny committed the crimes: She was terrified to think a madman might be loose at 6:15 going around killing women and children.

Paula Conger, from across the street, felt the opposite.

"It would have been easier to accept a madman. I was terrified to think it was Kenny."

As for Kenny, his first night in Youth Hall was spent in wariness. Small, slim, with dark curly hair and dark eyes, he looked every bit as young as he was: a week shy of 13. The sense at Youth Hall of barracks and deprivation was not entirely unfamiliar to Kenneth; he was reminded immediately of summers at survival camp and of those two weeks at military school. That morning, he did at Youth Hall what he would have done at those other places. He spent half an hour making his bed: "You know, military style, corners on the sheets, real tight, you can bounce a dime. I thought Youth Hall was going to be real strict."

That same morning, when word reached Calusa Elementary that Kevin had been slain, his first grade teacher thought: At least before he died, Kevin had finally learned how to smile, at least in her classroom.

When Kevin, an intense child whose face showed no emotion, entered her class, she could think of only one word to describe the constriction that characterized his every gesture: Tight. By the end of the year he was, she says, "joking with his neighbors, and I actually had to chastise him." To her it was as great a triumph as any academic accomplishment.

Shortly after 9 that morning, Principal James Gould was told that Mr. White was on the phone and would like to speak to him.

"I am calling," said Richard White, speaking in that precise way, "to tell you Kevin won't be in school today."

The principal was speechless: "Mr. White," he stuttered, barely able to complete a sentence. "I know . . . I'm so sorry, Mr. White."

"I just wanted," said the boy's father, "to be sure I followed procedure."

Whenever an event this appalling occurs, an event that so undermines the established sense of rightful order, the curiosity on the part of everyone is insatiable. Images from the life of the family, fair and unfair, overwhelm the papers and the broadcasts.

The inquest into the linens is frantic.

We lie in wait for information, we decode it, hoping for the detail that is drenched in omen, something that sets these people apart, that makes them different and more likely candidates for this kind of grotesque mishap. We are not the kind of people to have a tragedy like this.

There is an almost bloodthirsty wish to assign blame, to isolate the source of the evil.

The Whites defied such obvious demonology.

The first media reports were of a model boy, Kenny was called a typical kid, all American. A little gentleman. He was very bright: His I.Q. is 131. The affluence of the family was appealing; the murders had occurred, after all, in the game room, and something about the repeated use of this term in all the stories created an impression of an emporium for kids, a kind of well- equipped arcade. These were people with all the advantages.

Then, inevitably, a few rips in the seamless idyll.

The family had had financial pressures. A real estate venture started by the Whites had failed. Lately, June White had taken up one of those pursuits with a slightly dubious ring: She was studying futurology. Neighbors say they never once observed the entire family getting into a car together. As a sideline, the Whites once tried to sell neighbors on a food plan for when the big war came. Years ago, June White stopped cooking for the family because she perceived her efforts were unappreciated.

Both boys were adopted, and that fact alone was enough to make many people cease their wondering. It feeds a common, if unkind, prejudice about adopted children:

The lineage is mysterious; who knows what kind of genetic endowment these children brought with them to the Whites, what unknown freight?

Both children had problems in school. Kevin had to repeat first grade, and for 2 1/2 years Kenneth had gone to McGlannan, a private school dedicated to helping children overcome dyslexia, a perception problem which impedes reading. The initial news stories created an impression, not really accurate, of a long list of psychiatric referrals and extensive therapy for the boy, all obviously to no avail. He was tested and evaluated, often, but never treated on a long- term basis.

After the murders, no one in this boy's family wanted anything to do with him. The father told authorities: "How can I? He killed the wife that I love, the son that I love. He has taken everything from me."

Peter Swartz, an uncle married to June White's sister, told a reporter: "Ever since he was a little boy he would walk up, shake your hand and punch you in the belly."

And the attitude of the mother's family was best summed up in the opinion they expressed to a police officer shortly after Kenny's confession:

"Hang him."

June August and Richard White met through relatives.

Their first date was spent at the Playboy Club, a choice that to this day, he regrets as possibly "inappropriate."

"I know it wasn't really the right thing to do." He was in the service, and she worked for Jordan Marsh, as a buyer.

They were married six months after they met. From the moment he met her, he says, "There was a concept there, she was the girl for me."

Her family is prominent locally. She was part of the August Brothers Brothers' Bakery. There was talk that her family wished Richard could be more of a go-getter, and June White suffered from comparisons to her sister Francine, whose husband Peter matched the August dynasty in entrepreneurial prominence. His was the East Coast Fisheries family. "The marriage," people used to say of Francine and Peter Swartz, of the "bagels and the lox." There was no such jovial slogan for June's union with Richard.

June White always was proud that in her family of two brothers and one sister she was the only one to graduate from college: the University of Miami. Shortly after they were married, Richard White resigned from the Air Force; he says he didn't think the hazardous missions he flew as part of his work were right for a family man.

Richard White said he and his wife were tested frequently to determine why they could not have children, but he cannot recall whether doctors were able to pinpoint the problem. He told one psychiatrist who had evaluated Kenneth there was a possibility his "semen was allergic to his wife's juices" or perhaps he had been affected by radiation while in the service. They decided they would adopt and applied at the Children's Home Society.

"We had a tragic situation occur just before we got Kenneth. Our social worker was inexperienced, and we were her first clients at the Children's Home Society. We received a call from her saying there was a little girl for us, and then she called back and said the mother had changed her mind, she did not want to give her up. It was a tremendous up, and down. I felt as though I had lost a child. It was one of the few times in my life I ever passed out from drinking.

"When the call came for Kenneth, we went right down. Both boys came from the same agency, and I tend to get the information mixed up. Both their mothers were young, one was 18 and one was 16, and they assured us the mothers hadn't taken drugs or anything like that. One of the fathers was a student, I believe, and the other was a policeman."

"I'll never forget what happens. They sit you down and talk to you for about 30 minutes and tell you a little about the background of the child, and then they ask, "Do you want to see the child?' They leave you sitting in a room for about 10 or 15 minutes and then they come and take you down a hall into the nursery. I still remember looking at that bassinet, and it was the most magnificent feeling in the world.

"I changed the diapers and fed both boys; it didn't scare me to get in there and clean up the messes. I enjoyed rocking the boys to sleep. Both boys. Kevin was special to hug; he was hard and skinny, but when you hugged him he went soft, every muscle in his body relaxed. But there was never any love differential between the two boys. Sometimes I'd crawl into bed with them and hold them and kiss them. I didn't have what I consider a male resentment when I held them. It's all part of life and makes for a better bond."

She felt a drive to get out of the house, to seek work. The conflict could sometimes be overwhelming: She got the call to come and adopt Kevin the day before she was supposed to take her real estate test.

A small woman, not much over 5 feet tall, about 103 pounds, tidy and boyish in her appearance, she had a pretty face and dark black hair. She favored, in her dress, a subdued, noncontroversial style; Linda Riser remembers thinking that it was almost odd how someone who liked to counsel others to express their personal style and inner being in their outward appearance would "give away nothing about herself in the way she dressed." Her style was strict and devoid of flourishes.

Paula Conger from across the street said June was so bitter when the partnership in their beauty business dissolved that when she started getting harassing phone calls shortly afterwards, she suspected her neighbor. After a time, the calls stopped, but they had started up again about a month before the murders.

Kenneth:

"My mother was short, she had short black hair, dark eyes, and milky white skin. She wore lots of makeup. Her perfume costs $32 an ounce. I know that because if I ever squirted it at my brother she yelled at me, 'Stop. That cost $32 an ounce.' She was greedy, power hungry, cold. Once I asked her for a quarter, I was at this video arcade with my friends and she was there to pick me up and she actually gave it to me. I thanked her and gave her a hug and she looked at me like 'What's that?' So I said, 'Somebody showed me how. My girlfriend.' And then we had an argument about how I was too young to have a girlfriend. She said, 'You're still a little boy.' I hated that more than anything, being called a little boy."

Belva White, Richard's mother, worked hard all her life. "I was," she says, "a waitress in the best of clubs. I made good."

She speaks with one of those gossamer Southern accents; every word is nearly sung. Even at 72, there is a trim, energetic nimbleness in the way she moves. These days she spends one day a week at her son's new townhouse, cleaning it for him, doing his laundry.

When Kenneth was 4 years old and Kevin an infant, she started living at the White household to supervise the children while her son and his wife worked, but she kept her own place and went home once a week to pick up her mail.

Her view of June White:

"You could not ask for a better daughter-in-law. If she wanted to buy a necklace, she'd buy two, one for me, and sometimes three, one for her mother too. June treated me like a child instead of a mother-in-law. She would tell me how to spell words, help me pick out makeup, and she told me the colors I should wear. Mostly light colors.

"Kenneth hit me once. Yes he did. He didn't like it when I told him to watch television in another room and he stood up and here come Kenny with his fist. ...

"You know, he's offered to kill his brother lots of times. Now I never heard him say that about his mother, though.

"You know what I think? It all goes back to that real mother. You never know what she was thinking. Maybe she took dope or something. She marked him some way."

She leans forward, and there is a passion in her voice. The slow Southern speech, with its molasses momentum, picks up ever so slightly: "Most of it was borned in him."

Kenneth White always knew he was adopted, and he says he didn't have any fantasies about meeting his biological mother. "She probably wouldn't recognize me now because I looked different when I was born. I probably didn't even have hair then or anything."

The Children's Home Society supplied this picture of the woman who gave birth to the child who became Kenneth Louis White:

"Kenneth is the child of single parents. His mother was 18 years of age at the time of his birth. His putative father was age 20. His mother came to Miami from another state for the purpose of completing the pregnancy. The mother came to C.H.S. in the fifth month of her pregnancy and had medical care from then until the time of birth.

"The baby was the product of a 40-weeks pregnancy, delivery was spontaneous and his physical development while in the care of the agency was normal.

"Mother had no communicable illnesses, injuries, accidents, drug usage or abortion attempts. Rh negative.

"The mother is an attractive young lady who presents a picture of neatness and confidence. She is a high-school graduate. . . . She's taken part-time college courses in English, composition, speech and psychology."

"What we noticed was a rebelliousness, where we thought he had developed an attitude where he thought women were inferior."

Richard White was trying to pinpoint the nature of Kenneth's problems.

"Later, though, he started to show disrespect for men too, so we were never sure about that."

It was in the second grade that a teacher noticed Kenneth's inability to read on grade level. When she brought this to June White's attention, her response was to place him immediately in a special school. She chose McGlannan, which specializes in helping overcome dyslexia. One of the boys' counselors at Calusa and at Arvida said she showed a peculiar eagerness to have both boys tested frequently for learning disabilities. "The warnings, the warnings, the warnings."

Frances McGlannan, the headmistress and founder of the private South Dade School, is speaking.

She said she had noticed in Kenneth an odd resistance to punishment, a coldness and stoicism in the face of criticism. Rather than plead or weep, the child would withdraw.

She suggested to the Whites that their child be evaluated.

Dr. Michael Hughes examined him in May of 1979. When the family said they did not have the money, or the time, for the boy to continue treatment, Dr. Hughes took it upon himself to recruit the family pediatrician to persuade the family, and he found low-cost public treatment for the boy. But the Whites did not cooperate.

Kenneth was 8 1/2 at the time; the complaints were that he was hyperactive, had trouble controlling himself and sitting still.

Dr. Hughes consulted his case notes. "The parents," he said, "described their son as always having been bright and verbal, but that in the second grade it was discovered he was not learning. They said no matter what they did to punish him the only time he would break into tears was when he was right. The father's punishments included a strap on the rear and isolation. The mother's punishment usually consisted of silence and cold scorn.

"Kenneth complained terribly about their working. His parents would say that they wouldn't have to work if he didn't require special schooling. His parents said that six weeks before he adopted Kenneth they almost adopted a girl and that psychologically they had prepared for a daughter. The mother said that she never felt as if Kenneth belonged to her until he was 6 months old. He wet the bed until he was almost 7, despite a system of buzzers and alarms, and the mother resented it and seemed ashamed. She seemed bleak and distant, very angry and competitive with her husband. She expressed little involvement except anger with the boys and showed a great desire to get away from home."

Dr. Hughes asked Kenneth to draw a person, and he had trouble sitting still to to it. When he was done, he wanted to tear up the paper. He had drawn a very scribbly clown with silly ears. When he was asked to tell a story about this clown, Kenneth said: "He couldn't get a job at the circus."

When he was asked what his father did for fun, he said work. His mother?

Work.

He said the family hadn't gotten together to do anything fun for three months: "They just want money."

Dr. Hughes: "He was a very driven kid. He wouldn't let up in his demands that things could be better."

"What," asked the doctor, "do you like about yourself?"

"Nothing."

Richard White is now living in Dadeland Walk, a townhouse development. It is, like Calusa, in its exterior at least, a calm and restful place, and the dwellings all have Calusa's consoling sameness. He has all new furniture; his color scheme is muted, with a strong emphasis on dusky mauves. "Some people might find this feminine, but to me it's just soft."

He has thrown away most of the artifacts from his old life; they are not important to his new phase.

He has kept a photo of his wife and Kevin taken during the summer before their deaths. It shows her close-cropped black hair, cut in the style that some people called severe, and an intelligent look to her face. Kevin is beautiful, and in an uncanny way, obviously just one of those accidental things--he was, after all, adopted--his looks favored his mother greatly; he had the same strong, good bones. Both of them are looking off to the left, away from the camera, and there is in their expressions a strange listlessness.

They are seated next to each other, and there is physical contact. Her arm is hanging over his shoulder. But the hand is limp, and the touch is not what could be called, with any precision, an embrace.

Richard White treasures the picture. It is one of his favorites.

"You have to have met June to believe what I'm going to say, but she could have been president of the United States. She was that kind of woman.

"After she died, I called an open house in our house to tell the neighbors how much pride I had in my wife, how it was a pleasure to hold June and touch her. I was proud of the emotional closeness we had and I wanted everybody to know. I also told them I was sorry to create a situation like this in the neighborhood, but this was a phase in my life, and now it's over, and I would be moving on to a new phase, and I didn't want people looking at me with pity and they shouldn't whisper behind my back.

"Throughout our married career June and I were real loners, we had no real close friends. June and I were enough for each other. "She was constantly trying to make me do a better job. She would critique me. She was a superb shopper, and she helped me with my spelling, and she would tell me if something was not a good way of saying something. I always went to her for guidance.

"It is true, right before her death, she was under pressure from her new job at the bank. It was a difficult job. She spent all day listening to people make complaints, and when she came home, yes, we sat down and she told me about her day and yes, sometimes she got emotional, but to me this was what marriage is all about. Now Kenneth might have felt she was attacking me, but I knew she wasn't. Her job was a hard job. When she poured all those things out at night, to me there was only one word for it. This was communication.

"I'm not sure Kenneth understood why I would just sit there and listen. I think he might have felt as if June was trying to destroy me. He couldn't see that I was always trying to take advantage of June's tremendous capabilities."

Because the family kept to itself, there were not many friends or acquaintances he could recommend who might be able to speak about his wife, about her good points. In the end, he suggested two former colleagues. Patting his pocket he reached for his glasses so he could read the entries in his address book.

"Do you want to know one of the results of this tragedy?

"For years my eyes were fine. I never needed glasses, and a month after this tragedy I had to get these. I have double vision, and I've been to the eye doctor three times."

He looks up. The eyes, as always, are overpoweringly light.

He shakes his head slowly and copies out two numbers.

"I can't see."

The two people Richard White recommended had little to say. One said: "A computer married to a computer."

And the other, "She was the most disturbing woman I ever met."

There were few father-son outings. Kenneth White remembers, with overwhelming fondness, the couple of occasions when Richard White took his oldest boy to the firing range, a rare time of closeness. Richard White always has liked guns and has had an extensive collection of firearms. "I was an expert shot with a pistol as well as a rifle. I never dwelled upon the records, all the newspaper articles they wrote about me when I was in high school, how I held the highest score in competitive rifle shooting in the city, I usually led the city, all those articles were put away, and certainly all the guns were secured."

All but one: the Colt Python .45 behind the nightstand in his father's bedroom, placed there for the family's protection. To this day, Kenneth speaks of it with admiration:

"A fine gun, the best."

There was in the White household a certain preoccupation with defect, or at least with its opposite, perfection. Of all the possessions in the White household, Richard White was proudest of his and his wife's collection of books about financial status and physical appearance. The shelves were crowded with volumes: Restoring the American Dream, Winning Through Intimidation, Pathfinders, Nothing Down, You Can Negotiate Anything, How You Can Use Inflation to Beat the I.R.S., Color Me Beautiful, Dress for Success, Short Chic, Looking Terrific, Complete Dress Thin System. "My wife and I had the most extensive library in self-improvement, I would say, in Dade County.

"No," he says, correcting himself, striving, as usual, for exactitude, "I would even say in Florida."

These books provided the sole sense of bounty or plentitude in the entire house.

It was on the whole a bare, contained place; airtight, with few moments of spontaneity. The color scheme was unyielding: browns and creams and beiges, concertedly neutral, no embarrassing revelations. There was very little on the walls. The game room consisted of a carpet with a game theme, and a sofa and not much else. There were a couple of books in each of the boy's rooms, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back for Kevin and A Light in The Attic for Kenneth, and a ball or two, but the rooms were almost eerie in their startling absence of the usual, cheerful, endlessly proliferating clutter of kids. "I was proud," Kenneth says, "I didn't have a lot of toys. My mom said toys were for babies, and I didn't want to be a baby."

"The thing I want to do most of all is ... a rifel."

Less than a month before the slayings Kenneth White was asked by the Dade County School system to take a sentence completion test.

Here are some other responses:

"If I could have three wishes come true, I'd like one million dollars, the whole earth to have peace forever, and an infinity more wishes."

"I know it's silly but . . . I'm afraid of nothing."

"When I was a baby . . . I liked to eat everything." "I think most girls are . . . pretty but I only like a few."

"My mother. . . doesn't cook so well."

"I would do anything to forget the time I . . . got cought busting a trailer."

"I sure wish my father would . . . take me to the rifel range."

"When I think of my brother I . . . think of a fish."

"I am not so good at . . . school, or staying on task."

"I like my father but . . .he can be a pain."

"My family treats me like . . . a son."

"The other kids in school are . . . . smarter."

"The thing that makes girls different from boys is . . . hair and muscel."

"Whenever I try to do something . . . I usualy mess up."

"Sometimes I'd really like to clobber (smash) . . . my brother."

"When I get worried . . . . when something out of the ordinary happens."

"My family is . . . the best family in the world."

"When I see my mother and father together . . . I think of a postcard."

"When I grow up I . . . want to live alone."

"I'd be really happy if . . . my parents would calm down."

"When I can't do what I want to I . . . punch my bed." "What I want the most is . . . me to get my own rifel."

"The thing that's most fun is . . . shooting."

"The thing I do best is . . . shoot."

"Tardy again, White."

These were the first words to greet Kenneth upon his arrival at school on the day of the murders.

"My patience span right now, I'd have cussed that teacher out, but back then I was respectful."

The early morning hours in the White household had been the normal rush to get out and launch the day. At 6 June White had awakened, and she was out of the house by 7 to beat the traffic to her downtown job. She was dressed in a typically tasteful outfit: a maroon blouse; navy skirt; sensible pumps. Kevin arrived for his first class at Calusa Elementary shortly before 8. Richard White drove Kenneth to Arvida Junior High School and then went to the post office and to work at Rosen Associates near Dadeland.

Kenneth's grades that day were a disaster: He got an F in English; no great surprise. He got a D in Math; how he always hated math. That day, as he sat in class trying to puzzle through a problem, he turned to a girl sitting near him: I wish I could kill my mother, he said. She barely paid attention.

He went to science and got the one and only good mark of the day. Not that it mattered. His parents had a favorite saying: You're only as good as your lowest grade. Their other famous saying was: If you mess up once, you have to be an angel for the rest of your life.

And then, on the way home from school, complete betrayal: no ice-cream man.

He couldn't even get an Astro Pop.

The thing about an Astro Pop is it's not ice cream, it's a sucker and it lasts all day.

He took a willow stick and began beating the brush.

Dinner was his responsibility that night. He took out some chicken and put it in the oven but forgot to check the temperature, which was on broil.

It burned. He was upset; and he remembered that when his father gets upset sometimes he fixes a drink, so Kenneth fixed one: Cranapple and vodka, in a tall tumbler. It was working; soon there was a spin in his head, just like at that wedding he went to, when the bartender snuck him a drink: Long Island iced tea; five kinds of something, Kenneth wasn't sure what, but he thought it was five kinds of rum. He played the plan in his head.

He went into his parents' room. He looked for his father's Colt Python in its secret place, on a hook, behind the nightstand.

The first shot went off accidently, inside the house, blowing a hole in the floorboards of one of the bedrooms.

Carrying the gun, Kenneth went outside to see if the exterior of the house had been damaged as well.

Then, just to make sure the gun was working OK, he aimed it at a tree: shot number two. A sizable chunk of bark splayed itself across the lawn.

At 5 o'clock, June White left for home; she would be a little later than usual because she planned to pick up some dry cleaning and was supposed to get a snack to bring to Kevin's Cub Scout meeting later that evening. Richard White had a meeting with a client scheduled for late in the day, and then he was planning to teach a class. Kevin stayed at the after care program until it closed; the sign-out sheet shows his child's scrawl and indicates he left at 6 p.m.

Kenneth was seated on the living room sofa. M*A*S*H was on the television. The Colt Python was at Kenneth's side, hidden beneath a pillow.

6:05 p.m. Kevin White enters his home.

Kenneth thought: "Oh, no, I'm going to have to abandon the mission."

"Where's Mom?"

"She's not home yet."

"Oh."

"Why don't you go out and play?"

"I don't want to." "Mommy said it would be OK."

"I don't want to."

He was following his brother. The gun was behind his back.

"Here, would you put this toy away, right there in that closet?"

It was the walk-in type, a utility closet, used to store paint and other household items.

As soon as you start to move forward everything goes real fast. Every time you see a face you swing at it. Kevin obeyed. He walked into the big closet, his back to his brother. Kenneth, coming from behind, lifted the hidden gun; he raised it level with the head of his brother, whose back was still turned.

The third shot of the day.

Kenneth closed the door of the closet and went back to watching M*A*S*H.

Over the sound of the set he thought he could detect words mixed in with the sounds of his brother's final breathing: he thought Kevin was urging him to keep up with his plan.

6:15: June White walks through the door.

"Attempt At A History":

That's what Kenneth White called an odd and disturbing document, a sort of fantasy essay he wrote while at Youth Hall, a disjointed piece that one wishes to find urgent with allegory, to read and then be able to declare: This is it, this contains the key, the confession, the apologia.

The hero is Sir Dane, a gladiator of "uncomparable heroism." Sir Dane had only one fault, a little known secret:

"His one and only flaw that could overthrow his great deffences was, for all he tried, he couldn't bring himself to harm a lady.

"Once the great wisard Daggermor heard this, he started conjuring. After days of conception he came up with a 'Blueprint' for the perfect feminine body. The eyes were white as the first snow of the season. With a hint of red to show the tiresome sole. In the center was eyes of blue as the bluest streams of heaven. "Her skin was as soft as a doney pillow . . . Her lips were as red as the flames of Hell. All this was so beautiful the prince forgot to look into her heart. After all her heart was black as night and filled with hatred and grief."

Sir Dane fell deeply in love with the lady. This distressed the wisard, who began to see the woman returning Sir Dane's love: He detected "small readings filled with 'emotions?' Emotions like love, affection and careing. Which he didn't programe in."

With his sword Sir Dane killed the wizard who was standing in front of the lady and it was with great shock that Sir Dane realized both had been stabbed. In her dying breath the princess said, " 'I love you with all my heart. But I must die, for I am evil.' Now only wispering she said, 'But my soul and heart will live on forever in the heart of the shiest chambermaid.' Then with a smile on her face and a shine in her heart, she died.

"She layed there limp and lifeless."

The prince sat beside her, half-crying and half-laughing over the princess.

"When morning came they barried the body in a mahgany casket covered with foral designs. After the funeral the prince met a beatiful chambermaid, but she wouldn't talk to him. She ran away but the prince ran after her and of coures cought her (BECAUSE BOYES ARE BETTER THAN GIRLS.) She had a hood over her head when the prince had grabbed her he knocked it off.

"She was the most beatiful woman the prince had ever seen. Her eyes prenetrated all his deffences and melted him to nothing. Right there on the spot the prince proposed. And the first word he ever heard out of her mouth was 'I do.' (CLEASHAY TIME). And they lived happly ever after. THE END!"

It is a puzzlement.

In it a boy wants desperately to hurt a girl.

But he can't.

He finally does, after hurting a boy first.

The death of the first girl frees him to find another one.

Miss Suzanne, his teacher at Youth Hall, gave the paper an "A." She called it very creative but warned her pupil to watch his spelling. There's one aspect to all this that continues to trouble Kenneth White. He doesn't understand why he didn't kill himself. He really was planning on it. It's just that right then, after the murders, when he tried to bring the gun to his temple, he couldn't. He wanted to, but he could not. He fled from the house. A friend saw him running toward the canal and asked him why he was crying. Kenneth said he had pinkeye. At the canal, he shot at some fish. Later he would tell police that was "pretty neat." Then he threw the gun in the water.

When he got back home he avoided the game room. At around 7 p.m., he called his father at his office, interrupting him in the middle of his real estate class.

"Daddy, I'm scared. Kevin is gone and Mom is gone and there's nobody in the house." He said he could not leave the class, but he arranged to call the scoutmaster and asked him to come by and check out the house. When the scoutmaster arrived he discovered June White, her shoes partially kicked off.

Later, the father expressed the fear that the boy was trying to lure him home to face the same fate.

When Richard White arrived home that evening, the paraphernalia of emergency, barricades and ambulances greeted him. Crime technicians and reporters swarmed in front of his house, modern day harpies.

He was immediately ushered into the Risers' house next door.

He knew the body of his wife had been found. When the police told him that Kevin had also been killed, he began to sob.

It was then that he suggested to the police that they check to see if the gun he kept behind the nightstand was in its place. The neighbors stood about and decried the horror of life in a city that routinely hosts acts of violence, and they reviewed the day for any unusual traffic in the vicinity, for any frightening strangers. Richard White's mind was not on a stranger. He had already formed a suspicion as to who the killer might be:

Kenneth.

When Kenneth White first arrived at Youth Hall, he did not speak with anyone. He was convinced that Doris Capri, the director, disliked him intensely even though she had virtually nothing to do with him. The aloofness of his manner, combined with knowledge of what he had done, kept other children, and workers, at a distance. Child care workers recall that Kenneth was different from most children arrested for murder: Usually at night they curl up and wrap their arms around themselves and rock back and forth and cry themselves to sleep.

Not Kenneth. He was composed. At first his father found it impossible to visit the boy, and their communication consisted of short letters about the Dolphins and the logistics in Richard White's life, how he wanted to find a nice place to live and soon he wanted to start dating. In the end, he did visit a few times.

"Do you know what it means to plead guilty?"

Circuit Court Judge David Gersten, ceremonial in his black robes, hunched forward and addressed the boy. "Yes." Kenny was dwarfed by the stern majesty of the judicial chambers, the oversized furniture and high ceilings. He had shaved twice in his life, and this was one of those times.

"How do you plead."

"Guilty."

Something about him, actually a combination of things, the nice background, his pleasant good looks, the high I.Q., and most notably his extreme youth, conspired on his behalf. Defense attorneys and prosecutors huddled to devise a sentence that combined confinement with some small sliver of hope.

"What we have here," said the judge, "is a child killer, and this sentence represents a noble effort to prevent a child killer from turning into an adult killer if it is possible to do so.

"Our approach today is a unique and especially important one.

"Perhaps now Kenneth can get the help he truly needs and was never able to obtain.

"I can't say I have the confidence but I have the hope."

The lawyers on both sides of this case, Michael Cornely and Shay Bilchik for the state, and Steve Levine for the defense, worked out an agreement where Kenny pleaded guilty to two counts of homicide and was sentenced to 20 years probation. He would begin with an indeterminate commitment to a psychiatric facility, St. Alban's Hospital in Virginia. He is unlikely to be free before he is 18. Before sentencing, Judge Gersten ordered the child evaluated by almost a dozen psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

Kenneth hated it:

"They ask stupid stuff, all sorts of first-grade questions, and they repeat themselves, like they'll ask, 'What's your favorite sport?' and 'What sport do you like to play most?' If you are smart enough, after a while, you catch onto their tricks. Like if they show you an inkblot and ask, 'What's it look like?' turn it around and ask them, 'What's it look like to you.' Or if they want you to draw people, like your family, they're always watching which one you draw first, and to see if the ladies are, you know, developed. Next time I'll draw myself bigger than everyone else in the family. I'll really fool them. I'll draw all the heads first, then the necks . . . really freak them out."

The judge and lawyers in the case relied most heavily on the recommendations of Dr. Alan Zients, of Washington D.C.

Dr. Zients:

"He's striking in that I think he does have some difficulties in differentiating his own fantasy life from the reality of the world. Kenneth, I think, at the time that he murdered his mother and brother, was trying very hard to get his mother's respect and was feeling put down by her in every area.

"One of the unique aspects, and I found it very very disturbing, was the length of time that passed."

He'd had the plan for at least six weeks before he executed it. But what troubled Zients at least as much was "the period of time between the death of the brother and the death of the mother. I see the passage of that time as very significant. I've been involved in other situations where a youngster would, at that point, be shocked, would become maybe even physically sick at what he had done and would not be able to go any further."

Dr. Zients said Kenneth's future depends upon whether he is able to experience empathy. It is not considered something a person is born with, but rather it is a learned ability, demonstrated by children at an early age. Usually, by the age of 2 1/2 or 3, a child who misses his mother should be able to summon a picture of her and be consoled even if she is not present. People who can't feel empathy, who can't imagine what another person is going through, usually have missed this stage somehow.

Can he do this? Can Kenny feel? Dr. Zients did not know.

"It was fair," Kenneth said, speaking of his sentence. "I thought the judge was real open-minded about my case."

At times when Kenneth speaks he brings a boggling mildness to the discussion; one might think, from his tone, that what was under discussion was not his sentence for homicide but something blander and less pressing, the weather or the time of day. His face also lacks a certain animation. It has, sometimes, a tightness like Kevin's did.

"I gotta always watch it," he said, motioning toward some very small boys in a lackluster lineup in the distance, marching from the intake unit to the cafeteria. "All I gotta do is beat the s--- out of one of them little shorties and they'll send me away for 30 years." Kenneth was looking forward to St. Alban's: "There's a lake, nice scenery. It snows."

By the end of his stay at Youth Hall, which lasted a little more than a year ("I am lucky," said Kenneth, "They waited to send me until after my birthday . . . and Halloween!") he was universally acclaimed "the sweetest kid here."

At Youth Hall, he says, he learned how to fight: "Most white people don't have to fight to stay alive, but black people are used to fighting. A lot of the black kids here dropped out of the seventh grade, and they've been stealing ever since. They had trouble understanding what I did. Usually all they have is their parents, usually just their mothers, and they have the highest respect and love for her. All they understand is being beaten. Some of those kids have marks all over their bodies from extension cords. I told them what I did, but I said it was a foster home, and my foster mother and brother were f---ing me over, they sent me to military school and told people to beat me up and made me hike 20 miles a day and I got bit by a raccoon. They were really messing me over, so I messed with them right back.

"The counselors here, I told the truth, like Roundtree and my teacher Miss Suzanne, and I guess they understood. At least they still like me."

Miss Suzanne had a nickname for him, and she meant it:

"Sunshine."

At rare intervals, Kenneth hears from old friends in Calusa. Andrew Jackson wrote him a letter and said the "neighborhood just isn't what it used to be."

Andy's younger brother wrote:

"Dear Kenny,

I hope you are haveing a good time because I haven't. I just got over a broken ankle. This years block party wasn't good.

There wasn't even a bon-fire."

It was signed: "Your life-time friend, Jeremy."

The house at 13260 S.W. 96th Terrace has been rented. At first, the new people were shocked to think that murder had occurred there, but they told neighbors they were able to rout the negative energy, and the Realtor was very apologetic, claiming she had no idea it was that house but also aware that even if she had known, there really is no ethical obligation to inform tenants because, technically speaking, homicide is "not a fault of the house."

Kevin is memorialized at Calusa Elementary: More than a thousand dollars was collected for a tribute. The money was used to retile a portion of the art room, to buy a globe for the media center and to plant some trees.

Kenneth is said to be doing well at St. Alban's. Richard White has visited his son in Virginia once. On the few visits he made to Youth Hall, child-care workers observed that father and son spoke little, with the father looking around the room and the boy looking at his nails.

The child who could not read now reads all the time, and he wanted very much to take his books up there but he thought better of it. They're pretty precious, and he had no idea what St. Albans would be like, "how bad the thieves would be."

He says that if all goes well, when he gets out he would like to join a branch of the military. He hopes someday to marry and would like to have one child, a boy. He would love a career as a manager of one of the lands at Disney World, and his favorite land is Frontierland, with the old wooden houses and muskets and pioneer stuff. To him, "Disney World is the only place in the world where it's peaceful."

He says he misses his brother and will never be able to fully repent for what he did to him. "He got on my nerves, as all brothers do, but he was OK. My brother didn't deserve that."

He thinks he killed his mother because:

"I wanted her love so bad it hurt me inside."

He does not miss her:

"How can I? She was never there."

Today if he could have three wishes they would be:

"To get my real parents back.

"To understand my emotions better.

"To travel through time."

The clock said 6:15. The calendar said October 19. Appearing as smart and put-together and in place when she returned from work as she had when she left, June White, burdened with the dry cleaning, saw Kenneth and asked:

"Where's Kevin?"

"I don't know."

"Didn't he come home?"

"Yeah, but he went out."

"What's burning?"

"Dinner."

She put down her purse and started for the game room, looking for Kevin. When she failed to see him, she turned around to re-enter the kitchen.

Her oldest son was waiting for her.

In the instant before he shot her, he recalled something he learned at military school: It is less painful if you shoot someone in the head.

He aimed for her eyes.

She staggered, slumped and fell.

The fourth and final shot.

He felt, he would say later, like the whole world was lifted off his shoulders.

Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald
Section: TROPIC