POSTED AT 3:04 AM EDT ON 15/09/06

“What kind of world is this?” he wrote on his Web journal on July 13, exactly two months before he walked into the school and littered it with bullets in a half-hour rampage. “What the fuck is wrong with people. This world ... this life, is worst than hell.” (All posts are as they appeared on-line.)

In hindsight, Mr. Gill's on-line musings in the months leading up to his killing rampage were ominous — they showcase an outlook on life that was at times paranoid, racist, nihilistic and, almost always, uncontrollably angry.

In Mr. Gill's dark, insular world, none of his misfortunes were his fault.

Instead, he lay blame on the jocks, who used to bully Goths and never got punished for it. He blamed hip-hop music, which degraded women and featured “animals jumping up and down, like monkeys.” He blamed a government conspiracy. He blamed the police, whom he believed were monitoring his every move. He blamed the entire human race, which he felt ashamed to be a part of.

In the end, Mr. Gill departed the world he loathed in a horrific hail of gunfire, taking at least one innocent life along with him.

But his alienation did not begin in cyberspace. Growing up in the modest neighbourhood in Laval, Kimveer and his two younger twin brothers, Anmol and Balroop, never played with children from the area.

“They never played outside,” said Mélanie Mouralian, who lived across the street.

Just last week, she saw Kimveer outside his parents' home, looking straight ahead and avoiding eye contact as he strode by in his long black coat.

“He was a big guy who never had a smile on his face. He never said hi to anyone,” Ms. Mouralian said.

Despite his isolation, neighbours spontaneously recalled the lugubrious young man.

“He scared me. He'd be walking by himself, dressed in black, with his black boots,” Benoît Lavoie said.

The family has resided in the same suburban house for the last 15 to 18 years, according to neighbours, and seemed to live in an insular fashion, avoiding contacts with other locals.

His parents do not appear to be devout Sikhs. Neighbours did not see the men in the family wear turbans or beards, except for a much older man who visited them sometimes.

Mr. Gill once dressed in a more conventional fashion and sported long hair, but neighbours said he began wearing black clothes and a spiky Mohawk in recent years.

The family home is a raised grey-brick bungalow with a satellite dish on the roof. The house's ownership is registered to Gurvinder Gill and Parvinder Sandhu.

Decorative lights still hung on the porch, but otherwise nothing was festive about the home yesterday. Curtains were drawn and a delivery man who was briefly inside said all the lights were turned off.

There were signs that the occupants lived modestly. The house was valued this year at $136,100, according to municipal tax documents. An unused water-heating tank sat in the driveway.

Also there was a Ford Aerostar van, a model discontinued a decade ago. In addition, neighbours said the twins drove a rusty, duct-taped Toyota that was filled with dirty rags and a grease gun.

When Mr. Gill attended Rosemere High School, located in a comfortable bedroom community north of Montreal, he maintained average grades. But the lanky teen was showing signs of the interior personality that would characterize his later writings.

A former classmate said he had a few friends and was generally quiet. He eventually left Rosemere in 1998 without graduating, even though the school included his photo in its yearbook.

Despite claiming on his on-line postings that the police were “watching me” for years, Mr. Gill did not have a criminal record in Quebec. He also believed that secret service agents were monitoring VampireFreaks.com, the website where he posted his journal entries.

“The RCMP and CSIS in Canada and Local Law enforcement and F.B.I. in the States have been scouring this web site during the last 3 months. Looking to arrest you guys and girls for nothing,” he wrote. “Ever since that girl from Alberta killed her family, they've been going through the pros, and have arrested dozens of people because of what they wrote in their journals (like talking about killing someone), or the pics they got (like holding a gun) or whatever.”

Mr. Gill was referring to a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alta. A 12-year-old girl and 23-year-old man accused of the killings were alleged to have profiles on VampireFreaks.com. Three years earlier, a woman who testified in the murder trial that stemmed from the death of a 12-year-old Toronto boy said she posted on the site.If RCMP or CSIS agents were monitoring Mr. Gill's journal on VampireFreaks.com, they would have come across poetry such as, “Turn this fucking world into a graveyard / Crush all those who stand in your way / Let there be a river of blood in your wake /Walk through that river with pride.”

In the last months of his life, much of Mr. Gill's life was virtual. He spent more and more time on his preferred website, at times posting entries every 15 minutes.

“I love Vampire Freaks,” he wrote. “This is my new home. I shall reside here till the day I die.”

On the Web, he could indulge in his passions, foremost among which was death metal and Goth music. He posted at length his love for Ozzy Osbourne, Marilyn Manson and Metallica, among other musicians and groups.

But there was another, more sinister passion: guns.

The owner of a 12-gauge shotgun, 9 mm pistol and a semi-automatic carbine described firearms as “the great equalizer.” He mourned the fact that submachine gun-like TEC-9 pistols are illegal in Canada.

It was a volatile mix when combined with the recurring dreams he said he had about people being hung, shot in the head or otherwise murdered. He posted dozens of photos of himself decked out in combat boots, a trench coat and weaponry.

“Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime,” Mr. Gill proclaimed in one of his on-line signatures. “Give them what they deserve before you go.”

For Mr. Gill, “them” included a mind-boggling array of people, places and things. His list of most hated things included comedy films, all governments on Earth, sunlight, country music, bullies, people who talk with their mouths full and people who judge others.

But most of all, Mr. Gill hated jocks, the kind of brawny young men he universally identified as bullies.

“Why does society applaude jocks?” he asked. “I don't understand. They are the worse kind of people on earth.” His frequent diatribes on the subject matter strongly suggest Mr. Gill was on the receiving end of such bullying at one point in his life.

Bullying was one of many complaints Mr. Gill had with the world. He wrote about how slow the lines were everywhere he went: at the convenience store, at the liquor store, at the mall; how human beings at cash registers are being replaced with machines. He believed 85 per cent of guys are “assholes” and 85 per cent of girls are “bitches.”

To the select few people he did identify with — who are almost exclusively other VampireFreaks.com members — he penned this piece of reassurance: “None of what you feel is your fault, it's the worlds fault. It's your parents fault, it's the churches fault, it's your classmates fault, it's your co-workers fault, it's gods fault, it's societies fault, it's those so called friends of yours (who arn't really friends at all) fault.”

Mr. Gill's self-pity was evident when he talked about the video games he enjoyed, which are mostly first-person shooters in the style of the ultra-popular DOOM series.

He referred several times to his favourite game, Postal, about a man who believes the world is out to get him and eventually “goes postal,” killing everyone in sight. In describing what he'd like to see in a sequel to the game, he wrote: “... there should be more to do, other than just shooting people for no reason, there needs to be a plot, and a good story line.

“Postal dude was sad before he became angry and psychotic, that's the part we're never seen in the game,” he wrote. “He was normal, but the world made him the way he became ...”

Mr. Gill's world view is confirmed by the myriad Internet-based personality tests he enjoyed taking. The “Evil-O-Meter” rated him as “pure evil;” the “which dictator are you” quiz told him he had a personality consistent with Adolf Hitler; he's rated as having an 84 per cent chance of “going postal” and an 86 per cent chance of killing someone, with the latter quiz suggesting he seek professional help immediately.

“People live there lives according to fairy tales,” he wrote. “They believe things that aren't even true. And they know it's not true, but they still believe in it. I must be the only person in the world that thinks the world is FUCKED UP.”

At around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Gill watched the last few minutes of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Comedian Artie Lange was on. An hour later he posted to his female friends on Vampirefreaks.com that they should buy a kitten and play with it if they're feeling down. He signed his post: “I wuv you.”

He walked over to the fridge to get a Freezie. A few minutes later, he wrote about it on his journal, trying to post a picture of the Freezie but finding the batteries in his camera weren't charged. Nothing was going on, he said, so he wrote about how he had nothing to write about. By this time, it was 3:30 a.m. and he decided to go to bed.

About four hours later, Mr. Gill woke up. He put in his contact lenses and ate eggs and toast for breakfast, washing them down with whisky, then posted the details.

At 10:40 a.m., two hours before he walked into Dawson College, took the life of 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa and injured 20 others, he posted his very last journal entry. He decided to inform his readers that when he calls people “niggah,” it has nothing to do with their skin colour.

“I call white people niggahs too,” Mr. Gill wrote. “It's just fun.”

That was his last message to the virtual world in which he had taken so much solace. As Dawson College students settled into another school day, Mr. Gill packed his arsenal of guns into his black Pontiac Sunfire and left his parents' Laval house, heading for downtown Montreal.