Columbine

by Dave Cullen

depressives decide to make the tormentor pay. Typically that’s a wife, girlfriend, boss, or parent—someone close enough to matter. It’s a rare depressive who resorts to murder, but when one does, it nearly always ends with a single person.

Mr. D checked with the teacher. No job offer—they’d just sat down. Other witnesses had seen him run alongside his secretary. He came to accept that version of the truth, but he can’t picture it. His visual brain insists that the false memory is real. Multiply that by nearly two thousand kids and over a hundred teachers and a precisely accurate picture was impossible to render.

Misty found only the friend’s letters, but they suggested a receptive audience. Blood cocktails and vampires appeared throughout, in descriptions and illustrations. A teacher was shown stabbed with butcher knives, lying in her own blood. Figures labeled Ma and Pa were hung by their intestines. Bloody daggers were lodged in their chests. A gravestone was inscribed “Pa and Ma Bernall.”

Emily Wyant watched in disbelief as the story mushroomed. “Why are they saying that?” she asked her mother. Emily had been under the table with Cassie. They were facing each other. Emily was looking into Cassie’s eyes when Eric fired his shotgun. Emily knew exactly what had happened.

Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.

“I would be very surprised if Eric was being honest and straightforward with his doctor,” Fuselier said. “Psychopaths attempt to, and often succeed, in manipulating mental health professionals, too.”

Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.”

The two biggest myths were that shooters were loners and that they “snapped.” 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. Cultural influences also appeared weak. Only a quarter were interested in violent movies, half that number in video games—probably below average for teen boys.

For decades, terrorists and mass shooters trod their separate paths. Then Columbine. Eric and Dylan fused them. School murders had been done; Eric envisioned a school catastrophe.