Columbine

by Dave Cullen

Eric and Dylan weathered the punishment and remained close. Zack began drifting away, particularly from Eric. The tight threesome was over. From that day forward, Eric and Dylan committed their crimes as a pair.

Human memory can be erratic. We tend to record fragments: gunshots, explosions, trench coats, terror, sirens, screams. Images come back jumbled, but we crave coherence, so we trim them, adjust details, and assemble everything together in a story that makes sense.

Before they left, detectives asked the Klebolds if they had any questions. Yes. They asked to read anything Dylan had written. Anything to understand.

The NRA show went on. Four thousand attended. Three thousand protesters met them. They massed on the capitol steps, marched to the convention site, and formed a human chain around the Adam’s Mark Hotel. Many waved “Shame on the NRA” signs. One placard was different. Tom Mauser’s said “My son Daniel died at Columbine. He’d expect me to be here today.”

But Tom drew a deep breath, let it out, and addressed the crowd. “Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun so easily and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face,” he said. He urged them not to let Daniel’s death be in vain.

The final act of the killers was among their cruelest: they deprived the survivors of a living perpetrator.

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.

Wayne and Kathy both attended their session as well. Their surprise came in the mental health section. On a checklist of thirty potential problem areas, they marked three boxes: anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Eric had told them about those three, and he discussed them with Dr. Albert. He was getting help. Everyone agreed the Zoloft was helping, too. It was common for an adolescent to check several boxes. Eric picked fourteen.

Eric was getting serious about his plans now, and he would not risk posting anything about them on the Web again. He pulled out a spiral notebook and began a journal. For the next year, he would record his progress toward the attack and thoroughly explain his motives.

Eric stopped at their table, at Cassie’s end. Emily could see his legs and his boots, pointing directly at the right side of Cassie’s face. Cassie didn’t turn. Emily didn’t have to—she was facing perpendicular to Eric’s stance, so she could look straight at Cassie and see Eric just to her left at the same time. Eric slammed his hand on table, then squatted halfway down for a look. “Peekaboo,” he said. Eric poked his shotgun under the table rim as he came down. He didn’t pause long, or even stoop down far enough for Emily to see his face. She saw the sawed-off gun barrel. The opening was huge. She looked into Cassie’s brown eyes. Cassie was still praying. There was no time for words between them. Eric shot Cassie in the head.

Thursday, he stewed. Friday, April 10, 1998, he opened a letter-sized spiral notebook and scribbled, “I hate the fucking world.” In one year and ten days, he would attack.

Eric did not believe in God, but he enjoyed comparing himself to Him.

Eric was neither normal nor insane. Psychopathy (si-COP-uh-thee) represents a third category. Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down—no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent.

Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!

We will never understand why this tragedy happened, or what we might have done to prevent it. We apologize for the role our son had in your Cassie’s death. We never saw anger or hatred in Dylan until the last moments of his life when we watched in helpless horror with the rest of the world. The reality that our son shared in the responsibility for this tragedy is still incredibly difficult for us to comprehend.

For the final year, each boy knew his buddy could get him imprisoned at any time, though they would both go down together. Mutually assured destruction.

He used the book to vent his real feelings. It had come packed with motivational slogans and tips for better living. Eric went through hundreds of pages rewriting selected words and phrases: “A person’s mind is always splattered.… Cut old people and other losers into rags.… Ninth graders are required to burn and die.” He altered the Denver entry on a population chart to show forty-seven inhabitants once he was through.

The school’s American flags were raised from half-mast for the first time since April 20, symbolically ending the period of mourning. A ribbon across the entrance was cut, and Patrick Ireland led the student body in.

Eric amused himself with the idea of coming back as a ghost to haunt survivors. He would make noises to trigger flashbacks, and drive them all insane.

In a perfect world, Eric would extinguish the species. Eric was a practical kid, though. The planet was beyond him; even a block of Denver high-rises was out of reach. But he could pull off a high school.

For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art.

The new year began, and it got worse. A young boy was found dead in a Dumpster a few blocks from Columbine High. On Valentine’s Day, two students were shot dead in a Subway shop two blocks from the school. The star of the basketball team committed suicide.

There was one more day in the gun show. Who did they know who was eighteen? Plenty of people. Who would do it for them, who could they trust? Robyn! Sweet little church girl Robyn. She was nuts about Dylan; she would do anything for him. Wouldn’t she? The following day, it was done. In his journal, Eric labeled this “the point of no return.”

No significant national gun-control legislation was enacted in response to Columbine.

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.

said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, “if you guys live.”

Eric still couldn’t decide on the timing of the attack: before prom or after? “It is a weird feeling knowing you’re going to be dead in two and a half weeks,” he said.

Dylan wanted to be a good boy, but Eric understood he was evil.

It was funny, Eric told the television audience: all that razzing from his parents about goals and he was working his ass off. “It’s kinda hard on me, these last few days,” he said. “This is my last week on earth and they don’t know.”

The whole point was impressing people. Details mattered. Wardrobe, staging, atmospherics, audio, pyrotechnics, action, suspense, timing, irony, foreshadowing—all the cinematic elements were important. And for the local audience, they were adding aroma: sulfur, burning flesh, and fear.

Patrick got a perplexing voice mail one morning in the spring of 2005. It was an old friend he hadn’t heard from in a while, wishing him well “today,” hoping he was all right. Huh. Now, what could that mean? That afternoon, Patrick dated a document at work: April 20. Was it anniversary time already again?

The killers were apparently out of ideas. They’d expected to be dead by now, but never planned how. The cops were supposed to take care of that. Eric predicted he’d be shot in the head. No one had obliged.

Three hours later, police found Eric crumpled, Dylan sprawled leisurely. His legs flopped over to the side, one knee atop the other, ankles crossed. One arm draped across his stomach, underlining the word emblazoned on his black T-shirt. His head lay back, mouth open, jaw slack. Blood trickled out the corners, toward his ears. He looked serene. The red letters on his chest screamed wrath.

Patrick Ireland spoke on behalf of the injured. “The shootings were an event that occurred,” he said. “But it did not define me as a person. It did not set the tone for the rest of my life.”

Approximately ten years and four months after Eric Harris murdered their child, Linda and Tom drove into Denver to greet his parents.

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

Val also takes comfort in the suicides. “I’m glad they killed themselves. That was the best thing that could have happened for me.”

“To be happy and successful is the biggest F- you to them,” she says. “They wanted me dead. I’m alive. You’re dead. I get to be happy.”

Teen depression: the great unlearned lesson of Columbine.