Columbine

by Dave Cullen

More than fifty ensuing shooters have taken nearly three hundred lives and wounded over five hundred more, and every shooter on that page left evidence they were inspired or influenced by the attack at the center. And a 2015 investigation of Columbine copycats by Mother Jones found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded.2 It identified fourteen plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary, and thirteen striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted they are now competing with each other. Twenty-five years later, Columbine haunts our present and our future, with no end in sight.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

The typical TCC bravado seems comically obvious to me now, but it probably wouldn’t have been at sixteen.

I am a wicked man.… But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

he earnestly believed in motivation by candor.

Eric was always a dreamer, but he liked them ugly: bleak and morose, yet boring as hell. He saw beauty in the void. Eric dreamed of a world where nothing ever happened. A world where the rest of us had been removed.

Dreamland Eric had snuffed us out. He invented a world of precise textures, vivid hues, and absolutely no payoff for himself. When he did linger on the destination, it was to revel in the banality of the gloom.

The Web pages had come from Randy and Judy Brown. They had warned the sheriff’s department repeatedly about Eric, for more than a year and a half.

Thirteen months before the massacre, Sheriff’s Investigators John Hicks and Mike Guerra had investigated one of the Browns’ complaints. They’d discovered substantial evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs. Guerra had considered it serious enough to draft an affidavit for a search warrant against the Harris home. For some reason, the warrant was never taken before a judge.

But sometimes he felt a little sorry for them. Their point of view was indefensible, but he had to embrace it temporarily and empathize with them.

Dylan exceeded even Eric in his belief in his own singularity. But Eric equated “unique” with “superior”—Dylan saw it mostly as bad. Unique meant lonely.

Eric’s ideas began to fuse. He loved explosions, actively hated inferiors, and passively hoped for human extinction. He built his first bombs.

Depressives are inherently angry, though they rarely appear that way. They are angry at themselves. “Anger turned inward equals depression,” Fuselier explained. Depression leads to murder when the anger is severe enough and then turns outward. Depressive outbursts tend to erupt after a debilitating loss: getting fired, dumped by a girlfriend, even a bad grade, if the depressive sees that as significant. “Most of us get angry, kick a trash can, drink a beer or two, and get over it,” Fuselier explained. For 99.9 percent of the population, that’s the end of it. But for a few, the anger festers.

Dylan fantasized about suicide for years without making an attempt. He had never spoken to the girls he dreamed of. Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was.

A staggering number insisted they were the last ones out of the library—once they were out, it was over. Similarly, most of those injured, even superficially, believed they were the last ones hit. Survivors also clung to reassuring concepts: that they were actually hiding by crouching under tables in plain sight.

Dylan leaked the URL to Brooks the day before their admission interviews for the Diversion program. If Brooks told his parents—and Dylan knew he told Judy everything—the Browns would go straight to the cops, and Eric would be rejected and imprisoned for a felony. Dylan probably would be, too. He took that chance. Brooks did tell his mom. Randy and Judy called the cops. Jeffco investigators came out that night. They followed up, they filed reports, but they did not alert the DA’s office. Eric and Dylan proceeded into Diversion.

Laughing on the inside was insufficient. He would make them pay.

DeVita lamented how convincing the boys had been. “What’s mind-boggling is the amount of deception,” he said. “The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception.”

develop a hypothesis and then search for every scrap of evidence to refute it. Test it against alternate explanations, build the strongest possible case to support them, and see if the hypothesis fails. If it withstands that, it’s solid. Psychopathy held.

In 1885, the term psychopath was introduced to describe vicious human predators who were not deranged, delusional, or depressed. They just enjoyed being bad.

Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first.

It permeates the offender’s personality. Joy, grief, anxiety, or amusement—he can mimic any on cue. He knows the facial expressions, the voice modulation, and the body language. He’s not just conning you with a scheme, he’s conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you.

He submitted a paper analyzing the unusual brain waves of psychopaths to a scientific journal, which rejected it with a dismissive letter. “Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people,” the editor wrote.

An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair.

For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. “Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people,”

He believes that answers about the causes and treatment of psychopathy are coming within reach.

But Eric was already headed that way. He did not “snap.” Fuselier saw fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than cause.

Few angry boys can hide their feelings or sling the bullshit so convincingly. Habitual liars hate sucking up like that. Not psychopaths. That was the best part of the performance: Eric’s joy came from watching Andrea and the van owner and Wayne Harris and everyone who caught sight of the letter fall for his ridiculous con.

“I should have won a freaking Oscar,” he wrote in his journal.

Eric frequently made his research do double duty for both schoolwork and his master plan.

Manes’s lawyer described his client as a scapegoat. “There’s no one else to be angry at,” he told NBC. “These people have all this understandable anger. It has to go somewhere.”

They also had Diversion to put behind them. Eric was a star in the program. His sterling performance earned him a rare early release—something only 5 percent of kids achieve.

He is intelligent enough to make any dream a reality, but he needs to understand hard work is part of it.”

Submitting the story was probably an intentional leak. Dylan chickened out. “It’s just a story,” he said.

Dylan wasn’t quite ready to embrace murder. He would fight it almost until the end. But from here on, he was close. He would take the short story with him on April 20. It was found in Dylan’s car, alongside the failed explosives, to be torn to bits in his final act. The car was slated for destruction, so Dylan didn’t bring the story for our benefit. Perhaps he needed a little courage that day. Perhaps he wanted to read it one last time.

It had been a two-year evolution from frivolous prankster missions to a series of esclating thefts. Eric was turning into a professional criminal. He had crossed the mental hurdle from imagining crimes to committing them. This was how it would feel.

The affidavit was more damning than expected. Investigator Guerra had astutely pulled together the threads of Eric’s early plotting, and had documented mass murder threats and the bomb production to begin realizing them.

He settled on a compromise. The transcripts would be sealed at the national archives for twenty years. The truth would come out in 2027, twenty-eight years after the massacre.

Eric documented his parents’ frustration with his behavior, as well as their attempts to force him to conform. Their tactics might have been all wrong for a budding young psychopath, but how do parents even know what that is?

But they leaked. Kids nearly always leak. The bigger the plot, the wider the leakage.

Attackers came from all ethnic, economic, and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had no criminal record or history of violence.

A staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance. “The path toward violence is an evolutionary one, with signposts along the way,” the FBI report said.

He continued making camera adjustments after he was rolling—perhaps as a sneaky way to ensure his audience would be clear on the director.

Dylan gave himself away with his eyes. He would shout like a madman, then glance at his partner for approval. How was that?

Dylan was less predictable, but probably resembled a bipolar experiencing a mixed episode: depressed and manic at once—indifferent to his actions; remorseless but not sadistic. He was ready to die, fused with Eric and following his lead.

It was no contest. Even after eight years, nothing trumped a grieving dad.

see pretty mothers and their broods of children. They’re all going through their life without a major derailment. I kind of resent that.”

Wayne seemed mystified by Eric, too. Wayne and Kathy accepted that Eric was a psychopath. Where that came from, they didn’t know. But he fooled them, utterly.

“I don’t handle adversity nearly as well,” she says. “I’ve lost a certain resiliency. The younger are more resilient.”