A stampede of teenagers charged down the halls of Redmond High every time the bell rang.

It was 2001, and more than 1,800 teens packed the school intended for 1,664. Students said it was so jammed, they struggled to make it on time to class.

Adam Squires Thomas had entered his fourth year of searching for his place amid the stew of jocks, cowboys, brains and goths.

None who roamed the halls that year predicted that the seemingly normal teenager would ride rebellion over the edge.

“He came off as a little weird, but most of the drama kids did,” said Sam Thomas, a friend who isn’t related to Adam.

At 18, Adam was groping his way toward adulthood. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall and carried just 138 pounds on his thin frame. He took to wearing contacts instead of glasses.

Early in high school, Adam wrote for the student newspaper, the Panther Scratches. Drama Club kindled more intense interest. He worked behind the curtain and in front of it.

“He was the drama guy in high school,” said Patricia Karle, Lucretia Karle’s sister. “Everybody knew him through that.”

He had embraced alternative chic and often wore black or Hawaiian print shirts. In a 1999 yearbook photo, he donned full camouflage fatigues and cap.

He bugged his mother, Barbara Thomas, to let him pierce his ear and bleach the tips of his coal black hair. Mom said no but relented after consulting her sister-in-law. The family had a good-natured laugh when the home dye job turned Adam’s hair orange. He liked it.

He avoided sports, in part due to a lifetime of asthma. Friend Robyn Gumm said that she and Adam would sit out of gym class.

“We were just kind of the white skinny people in the corner,” she said. “We just didn’t do exercise.”

Instead, Adam got excited when dashing off lines of poetry or dissecting the musical greatness of hard-core popular bands like Tool and Nine Inch Nails.

Poetry became one of Adam’s passions, and he excelled in English classes. Teacher Grant Windom recalled Adam volunteering to let the group analyze his poems.

“I found him to be respectful without being stiff in the classroom,” he said.

Another teacher wrote on a collection of his poems, “Your writing is sophisticated and skillful. Thank you for peppering our class with brilliance and talent.”

Acquaintances said he was more prone to one-on-one conversations than group discussions. Among his drama friends, eating in the cafeteria, he chatted and joked easily.

He had also established a reputation as a sensitive guy. Adam sought the company of women more than men, offering himself for support when their lives went awry.

One friend, Chavon Hofferber, met Adam right before his senior year. Her family was moving to Central Oregon, and she put a query into an Internet chat room about Redmond High. Adam answered.

Adam became a friend she could count on. When a snow storm hit, Adam drove Hofferber home to Crooked River Ranch. The two spent hours dissecting what went wrong with her latest boyfriend.

“He was always there to make people feel better. Always.”

“He was a ladies’ man,” she continued. “He gave women compliments. He would say to me, ‘You deserve happily ever after.’”

He also tried hard to fit in. Friends chuckled when Adam insisted he felt fine eating a favorite lunch of Burger King double cheeseburgers, even though his new piercing had swollen his tongue far beyond its normal size.

The swelling didn’t go down for weeks. Adam finally took the tongue stud out.

“He wanted to do it to be cool and be like everyone else,” Gumm said.

One classmate, Natalie Lauderdale, called Adam’s group the “outcast” crowd. Adam told Dr. William Sack, an Oregon Health & Science University psychiatry professor emeritus who analyzed him for the criminal case, that he was both popular and unpopular. He said school bored him with the exception of writing and his friends. Adam wanted to be liked, he said, even if it meant suppressing sadness on the inside.

To this day, the Adam whom friends and teachers knew isn’t one who could savagely beat his mother with champagne bottles and stand by as she took a bullet.

“It’s not like he sat around and bad-mouthed his mom all the time and was angry,” said Hofferber, who last hung out with Adam about 10 days before the murder. `That’s why it was such a shock.”

“I really wouldn’t have expected anything like this out of Adam,” Sam Thomas said.

“He’s not this evil, monster kid. He’s very average and very awesome.”

*****

Jason Thomas said his younger brother has a warm personality.

Barbara e-mailed acquaintances about how Adam made her laugh.

Barbara’s friends admired Adam’s literary skill, including a moving poem Adam wrote for his brother’s wedding.

Adam’s temper tantrums and darker side didn’t dominate life in the Thomas household. The troubling incidents were like puzzle pieces scattered over 18 years.

Even the incidents that did occur seemed at the time like typical sullen teenage insolence.

It was only in the final months before the murder that some people began to assemble the pieces into a disturbing picture.

Cathy McDaniel, one of Barbara’s closest friends, said it accelerated after Adam turned 18 in October 2000. Close to the time of Barbara’s death, at least four different people had told her that Adam needed help.

“There was always something weird going on in that house regarding Adam. Always,” McDaniel said.

Sometimes, Adam’s actions made others uncomfortable.

During his sophomore year, Adam hacked into a classmate’s Hotmail account. He deleted 25 files and items in the day planner. He also messaged:

“Heaven and hell spin a tangled web,

But those who question will wind up dead.

Never to wonder but only to see,

What sort of hell I’ll give to thee.”

“Howdy there Mr. ____.” the message continued. “You have just been killed.”

The message explained the mess made in the account and was signed “The Computer Killer.” After that were 12 lines of “ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

The Redmond Police Department’s computer expert easily traced the work back to an Internet connection paid for by Barbara Thomas. Tampering with computers is a felony. It was Adam’s first criminal offense, and a juvenile counselor decided to handle the case outside of court.

Adam later told the counselor that he had nothing against the classmate.

“I know it was stupid and immature and for all reasons, I’m not sure why I did it,’ Adam wrote in his mandated apology letter.

The juvenile counselor required him to complete a victim empathy course and six months of probation. The counselor wrote in a report that a flustered Barbara Thomas told him that Adam would have to earn back her trust and that she would monitor his computer use from now on. The counselor felt Adam would be disciplined at home.

“This seemed like an emotional trigger for both of them,” the counselor wrote.

Adam also tormented people close to him.

Several incidents led Adam’s uncle and aunt, Rod and Linda Jones, to ban him from their Redmond home when Barbara wasn’t there.

First, in February 2000, he sent an unsolicited e-mail to their middle school-aged daughter detailing how to masturbate.

The Joneses printed it off and went straight to the Thomas house. It so upset Barbara that she started to cry. But Adam didn’t apologize.

“He kept saying, ‘Well, what do you want me to say?’” said Rod Jones, Barbara’s brother.

Then in March 2000, Adam showed up at school wearing his cousin’s necklace. The necklace had disappeared from the cousin’s house. Adam had even helped look for it.

When acquaintances at school admired the necklace, Adam told them he found it. He told his mom he found it in his backpack and told his aunt someone must have put it there.

Less than two months before the murder, Adam’s girlfriend of three months broke up with him.

Adam penned a three-page letter to her saying that he put a gun in his mouth that night, thinking of her. He professed deep love for her.

“I think I’ll go home today and pull the trigger,” he wrote. “What would I be losing, I already lost the most important thing in my life, you.”

The shaken girl gave the letter to her mother, who called Barbara.

The day Barbara learned of the note, Adam didn’t come straight home from school. When he did return, he was intoxicated. He gave two different stories of where he had been. The letter, Adam told his mother, was just a joke.

Adam’s behavior grew worrisome.

Even relatives who saw him infrequently thought he grew more withdrawn.

“I noticed that after Dad passed away,” said Adam’s half-brother, Kevin Thomas. The Springfield resident said that from age 14 on, after his father died, Adam seemed less gregarious.

Rod Jones lived with his sister Barbara and nephew Adam for several months in 1999. He thought Adam treated Barbara with little respect, even as she cooked him breakfast each morning or brought home movies for him to watch.

“At times, he could charm the socks off of her,” Jones said. “Other times, he referred to her as ‘Woman, do this for me.’”

Relatives remembered Adam mimicking other adults as they tried to correct him or refusing to join the family at the dinner table.

Deborah Palmberg, a close friend of Barbara’s, recalled asking about Adam’s gift for her 52nd birthday, just weeks before her death.

Barbara said Adam gave her a hug. Palmberg expressed dismay.

“Oh no,” Barbara said. “Believe me, that’s a big deal.”

The temper tantrums of Adam’s childhood continued into his teens.

“If my PlayStation didn’t work, I’d smash it,” Adam later told Dr. Sack.

He kicked the door to the family computer room off the hinges. Once, he slammed a hammer into the living room floor and then pulled a rug over the hole to try to cover it.

“Mom and I used to joke that he was going to destroy the house before he gets out,” said Adam’s brother, Jason.

“Barbara wasn’t afraid of Adam, but she was afraid of Adam’s temper,” Linda Jones said.

Adam never attacked people during these fits. Indeed, he didn’t get in fights at school. But the anger bothered him.

When his uncle lived with the family, Adam confided to him that he couldn’t control his anger.

Then came Christmas 2000.

Family had gathered at the Thomas home.

Sara Jones, Adam’s cousin, went into Adam’s room.

Adam sat on the bed, trembling.

Scissors in hand, he stabbed four pictures of himself, his mother and his brother into tiny pieces.

Sara asked why he was doing this.

“I have to get rid of them,” he replied. “I just have to get rid of them.”

Sara told her mother, who told Barbara.

The teen recalled Barbara’s response.

Sara said: “She laughed a little bit and said, ‘It’s just a phase. He’ll get through it.’”

*****

Barbara Thomas projected a positive outlook to the world.

If troubles existed in the Thomas household, her boss and buddy, Ron Audette, didn’t know it.

The two sat within 15 feet of each other at the Prime Outlets of Bend main office. They chatted regularly throughout the day, often with Barbara cracking jokes or recounting the latest episode of “Seinfeld.”

On a few occasions over more than three years, Barbara asked Audette for parenting advice regarding Adam. Once she asked his opinion when Adam kicked in the computer room door.

But Barbara always remained upbeat and professional.

Even others in the family didn’t know to what extent Barbara might be experiencing trouble with Adam. She kept her problems private and rarely let others see her down.

“She made some comments about having some problems with him,” said Wendi Aguiar, Barbara’s stepdaughter and Adam’s half-sister, who lives in California. “But to me it sounded like the normal teenager compounded by Dad’s dying.”

Indeed, some of Adam’s troubling behavior seemed average for a teen. He stayed up late into the night, writing on the computer or watching movies, and then slept until midday. He resisted doing chores.

Family and friends who lived nearby heard more about Adam’s behavior.

The first time Adam stayed out all night, in early March 2001, the Joneses told Barbara that Adam needed professional help. She resisted, believing she and Adam could work anything out together as a family.

Barbara stopped talking about it with Palmberg when the friend bluntly said Adam needed tough love. His behavior embarrassed Barbara.

“She didn’t want anyone to criticize how she was being a parent,” Palmberg said.

McDaniel said Barbara at one point did try to convince Adam to talk to a professional.

“You can’t take a kid to a counselor if he doesn’t want to go,” she said.

Throughout Adam’s high school years, Barbara continued to agonize over her son.

“I continue to pray to God about him,” she wrote in an e-mail.

She brought Adam on outings with her friends to get him out of the house. Early in his senior year, she bought him the first of two cars, a 1993 Plymouth Sundance, believing that he needed more independence. He ran the car off South Canal Boulevard and hit a tree, totaling it.

Next, she struck a deal with him. She would get him a second car if he got a job. He landed part-time work at Wendy’s in Bend and she bought him a Ford Tempo. He wrecked that one, as well.

Barbara, like any mother, continued to worry.

“She was concerned that, after the loss of her husband, Adam’s father, that he hadn’t grieved properly,” Rod Jones said.

She asked her brother to talk to Adam about the grief process. Jones did, but the conversation foundered.

“It was an awkward situation for both of us, I thought,” Jones said.

Other activity going on inside Barbara’s home — and in her son’s head — eluded her.

*****

Adam dwelled regularly on death.

The fixation revealed itself sporadically in his school and home life. It spilled out in private.

He thought recurrently of suicide from a young age, he later told Dr. Sack. He recounted one actual attempt. He said he consumed a bottle of Tylenol. He vomited.

Sack testified in court that Adam suffered from long-term depression that started with his father’s death.

“He defended against depression through grandiose thoughts or music,” Sack said in his report.

Meanwhile, Adam’s fascination with death grew throughout high school.

Adam sought out horror movies and books. He also listened to speed metal music with dark lyrics, like Marilyn Manson.

Family members discussed his morbid interests and writing. “It progressively got darker after Dad’s death,” his brother Jason said.

But the material didn’t seem far-fetched for a teenager. Jason likened Adam’s tastes to reading Stephen King novels.

The family never saw the photos he kept out of sight in his room. There was one of him putting a knife to his throat with fake blood dribbling beneath it. Later, investigators found a roll of film containing shots of Adam cavorting in a graveyard.

Adam also pursued his interests on the Internet. He researched serial killers like Lizzie Borden, who killed her father and stepmother, and John Wayne Gacy, who raped and killed more than 30 men in Chicago.

“I used to love watching serial killer movies,” Adam told Dr. Sack. “I’d try to figure out how they got that way.”

He visited Web sites featuring pictures of gruesome death and murder. One site he checked out offers photo choices like “Ripped Chunk,” “Shot in Forehead” and “LA Freeway Suicide.”

And then there was Adam’s own Web site.

Adam told friends and family he wanted to attend college in fall 2001. He talked of majoring in journalism.

But his fantasy was to become rich and famous, either as a movie star or the songwriter and lead singer for his own heavy metal band.

“I wanted to be my own god,” he said to Dr. Sack.

Adam went through several band names, such as Shock the System, before deciding on Bonesaw. In early 2001, he was considering changing it again, as another band already had claimed that name.

Bonesaw became the focus of much of Adam’s energy. He wrote more than 800 pages of lyrics for albums with titles like “Into the Mind of a Killer,” “American Cannibal” and “Necromancy.”

Take the first stanza from “Jesus was the Devil,” off the album Adam called “11:59.”

“I am just your average son of a bitch in the sky,

I am only here for now to watch you die.

I can dig my own grave all the way down to hell,

And I can be the darkness in the hope you sell.

I am insane and pondering the facts of life,

I am just the blood rolling off your knife.

I can break into a frenzy skinning you alive,

And I am only here just to watch you die.”

Although the lyrics spewed anger and hate, they didn’t differ much from some metal bands that get coverage in Rolling Stone magazine. Lyrics by the band Tool are dark, and their biggest album recently went triple platinum.

Some friends knew of Adam’s Web site. They said the words weren’t meant to be taken literally. Adam just toyed with a genre of music he liked in the same way that upper-class suburban kids might try to talk like inner-city gangsters.

“A kid is expressing himself on paper and he gets slandered for it?” Hofferber said. “Marilyn Manson gets off a lot easier.”

The countless hours Adam spent on the computer, however, concerned Barbara. She told friends that Adam got in to her e-mail and deleted information. She asked one friend, Karen Davis, if she could bring the computer to her home.

She didn’t follow through. When asked later about the computer, Barbara said she had talked to Adam and they solved the problem.

Most family and friends said Barbara never knew exactly what Adam did during those hours at the computer. Linda Jones, however, said she sent Barbara an e-mail warning her about the Web site and its contents. Jones said Barbara didn’t respond, so it’s uncertain if she ever received the e-mail or checked the site out.

Near the end of her life, friends said Barbara suspected that Adam was harassing her by e-mail.

More than a year after her husband’s death, Barbara had begun dating. She also signed herself up on a personals site on the Internet, exchanging cordial e-mails with men.

She told friends in the winter of 2001 that she had started receiving e-mails from a man who seemed to know too much. He knew things that would only be possible if he were in close proximity to her. And he asked a lot of questions about what she thought of her youngest son.

He said his name was Richard Thomas. The name was also an alias Adam used for one of his five subscriptions to Columbia House CDs, Linda Jones said.

“She was spooked,” McDaniel said. “The only thing we could figure out was it had to be Adam.”

Friends said Barbara became increasingly fed up with Adam that year. She held “truth talks” in which Adam promised to tell her the truth.

Barbara’s friends’ view of Adam grew consistently more harsh.

“He felt like he had sadistic power over his mom, and he liked it,” McDaniel said.

And during those final months, Adam began hanging out with a new crowd.

Read Part 3 in the series.