Columbine

by Dave Cullen

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their hearts and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why--fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating.

The Klebolds were afraid to bury Dylan. His grave would be defaced. It would become an anti-shrine. They cremated his body and kept the ashes in the house.

"I need help," Dave said. "'I've got to get out of here." "Help is on the way," Aaron assured him. Aaron believed it was. Law enforcement was first alerted to Dave's predicament around 11:45. Dispatchers began responding that help was "on the way" and would arrive "in about ten minutes." The assurances were repeated for more than three hours, along with orders that no one leave the room under any circumstances.

Eventually, Aaron and Kevin lost the struggle to keep Dave conscious. "I'm not going to make it," Dave said. "Tell my girls I love them."

"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. Some depressives withdraw--from friends, family, schoolmates. Most of them get help or just get over it.

A few spiral downward toward suicide. But for a tiny percentage, their own death is not enough. They perform a "vengeful suicide"--a common example is the angry husband who shoots himself in front of his wedding photo. He deliberately splatters his remains on the symbol of the marriage. The offense is directed straight at his conception of the guilty party. A tiny number of angry 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.

A few lash out in a wider circle: the wife and her friend who bad-mouthed him; the boss and some coworkers. The targets are specific. But the rarest of these angry depressives take the reasoning one step further: everyone was mean to them; everyone had a role in their misfortune. They want to lash out randomly and show us all, hurt...

Late in 1997, Eric took notice of school shooters. "Every day news broadcasts stories of students shooting students, or going on killing sprees," he wrote. He researched the possibilities for an English paper. Guns were cheap and readily available, he discovered. Gun Digest said you could get a Saturday night special for $69. And schools were easy targets. "It is just as easy to bring a loaded handgun to school as it is to bring a calculator," Eric wrote. "Ouch!" his teacher responded in the margin. Overall, he rated it "thorough & logical. Nice job."

The killers leaked their plans in countless way, but there's no indication that anyone close to them ever breathed a word.

The problem, as Eric saw it, was natural selection. He had alluded to the concept on his Web site; here he explained--relentlessly. Natural selection had failed. Man had intervened. Medicines, vaccines, and special ed programs had conspired to keep the rejects in the human herd. So Eric was surrounded by inferiors--who would not shut their freaking mouths! How could he tolerate all the miserable chatter?

Dr. Fuselier set down the journal. It had taken him about an hour to read, that first time, in the noisy Columbine band room, two or three days after the murders. Now he had a pretty good hunch about what he was dealing with: a psychopath.

Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it. To a psychopath, both motives make sense. "Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling," wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. "They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."

"There's no one else to be angry at," he told NBC. "These people have all this understandable anger. It has to go somewhere."

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.

Chills

"Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised," Susan said. They were emphatic about that. "He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised."