Columbine

by Dave Cullen

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. ——Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”

The School Shooter Era. That phrase will not appear in the main body of this book. Because even ten years after the shooting, when it was first published, I still couldn’t perceive what we were living through that way. No one did.

They see “Eric” and “Dylan”—characters from the Columbine revenge fantasy, where two outcast loners from the Trench Coat Mafia finally stood up for all bullied teens everywhere and taught the jocks a bloody lesson for abusing them so badly for so long.

It’s a powerful story, but fictional. Imaginary heroes, concocted by a sloppy press corps, not quite overnight, but largely over the course of an afternoon. Most of the narrative was established by 8 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time, Tuesday April 20, 1999. The fictional avengers were fully realized by Friday. I spent the next decade lamenting how we had botched it for the public. Let me repeat the apology you’ll find in the Author’s Note for my role. We have one job as journalists, to tell the truth—after uncovering the truth—and we blew it.

What if we had told the true story of two selfish kids out for their own aggrandizement? How many shooters would be imitating them today? We can’t unwrite those myths. But we can expose them.

Earlier in the year, he’d rescued Rachel Scott, the junior class sweetheart, when her tape jammed during the talent show. In a few days, Eric would kill her.

nothing separated the boys’ personalities like a run-in with authority. Dylan would be hyperventilating, Eric calmly calculating. Eric’s cool head steered them clear of most trouble, but they had their share of schoolyard fights. They liked to pick on younger kids.

Eric was unflappable; Dylan erupted.

Eric and Dylan played every Friday night. They weren’t great bowlers—Dylan averaged 115, Eric 108—but they sure had fun doing it. They took bowling as a gym class, too.

Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you’ve never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets, and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.

The bomb squad disassembled and studied the big bombs. The centerpiece of Eric’s performance was a complete mess. “They didn’t understand explosive reactions,” the deputy fire marshal said. “They didn’t understand electrical circuitry.”

“Outcast” was a matter of perception. Kids who slapped that label on Eric and Dylan meant the boys rejected the preppy model, but so did hundreds of other kids at the school.

Eric and Dylan had very active social calendars, and far more friends than the average adolescent. They fit in with a whole thriving subculture.

Eric Dutro, Chris Morris, and a handful of other boys were pretty much the core of the TCM, but a dozen more were often associated with the TCM as well, whether they sported trench coats or not.

The Trench Coat Mafia was mythologized because it was colorful, memorable, and fit the existing myth of the school shooter as outcast loner.

We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia.

The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler’s birthday, minorities, or Christians.

Two hours in, the Trench Coat Mafia were to blame. The TCM were portrayed as a cult of homosexual Goths in makeup, orchestrating a bizarre death pact for the year 2000.

The killers did wear trench coats. A small group had named themselves after the garment a year earlier. A few kids put the two together, and it’s hard to blame them. It seemed like a tidy fit. But the crucial detail unreported Tuesday afternoon was that most kids in Clement Park were not citing the TCM.

Repetition was the problem. Only a handful of students mentioned the TCM during the first five hours of CNN coverage—virtually all fed from local news stations.

“All over town, the ominous new phrase ‘Trench Coat Mafia’ was on everyone’s lips,” USA Today reported Wednesday morning. That was a fact. But who was telling whom? The writers assumed kids were informing the media. It was the other way around.

The target myth was the most insidious, because it went straight to motive. The public believes Columbine was an act of retribution: a desperate reprisal for unspeakable jock-abuse.

The Rocky and the Washington Post refused to embrace the targeting theory all week, but they were lonely dissenters.

“Student” equaled “witness.” Witness to everything that happened that day, and anything about the killers. It was a curious leap.

Police detectives rejected the universal-witness concept. And they relied on traumatized witnesses for observations, not conclusions. They never saw targeting as plausible. They were baffled by the media consensus.

Everyone in Clement Park heard the rumors; most of the students saw through them. They were disgusted at the jocks for defaming the killers the same way in death as they had in life. Clearly, “gay” was one of the worst epithets one kid could hurl against another in Jeffco.

They were mistakenly associated with the killers on Tuesday by students unfamiliar with the Goth concept. Equally clueless reporters amplified the rumor.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had played out in full force: by observing an entity, you alter it.

Suicide was consuming him—no way Dylan was confessing that. He tried explaining some of the other ideas, but people were too thick to understand.

Everything about Dylan screamed depressive—an extreme case, self-medicating with alcohol. The problem was how that had led to murder. Dylan’s journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide.

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.

Oliver Stone’s satirical film Natural Born Killers would become the pop culture artifact most associated with the Columbine massacre. That was reasonable, since Eric and Dylan used “NBK” as shorthand for their own event, and the film bears considerable resemblances. It also captured the flavor of Eric’s egotistical, empathy-free attitude, but it bore no relation to Dylan’s psyche.

It was two or three years after the fact that Frank’s secretary recounted that version for him. He told her she was nuts. He had no memory of that. “In my version, I’m walking out calmly going to lunch,” he said. “We’ve finished the meeting, I’ve offered him the job. He’s happy.” DeAngelis had planned to offer the job. He liked the teacher and had pictured his joyful acceptance. Mentally, it had already happened. The actual events—gunfire in the hallway, his charge toward the girls’ gym class, and the desperation to hide them—wiped out everything in his mental vicinity. His secretary’s appearance was unimportant, and it conflicted with his “memory” of offering the job. One memory had to go. 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.

Emily and Bree knew Cassie never got a chance to speak. They gave detailed accounts to investigators. Bree’s ran fifteen pages, single-spaced, but their police reports would remain sealed for a year and a half. The 911 tape proved conclusively that they were correct. Audio of the murders was played for families, but withheld from the public as too gruesome. Emily and Bree waited for the truth to come out.

April 20 had been horrible, and now she was saddled with a moral dilemma. She did not want to hurt the Bernalls; nor did she want to embarrass herself by shattering Cassie’s myth.

The martyrdom had turned into a religious movement—taking that on could be risky.

Craig Scott, who had initiated the Cassie story, came through with several family members. He stopped where he had hidden, and retold his story to his dad. A senior detective listened. Craig had sat extremely close to Cassie, just one table away, facing hers. But when he described her murder, he pointed in the opposite direction. It happened at one of the two tables near the interior, he said—which was exactly where Val had been.

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.

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’s the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming.

Don’t look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don’t act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hu...

wasn’t until the 1970s that Robert Hare isolated twenty characteristics of the condition and created the Psychopathy Checklist, the basis for virtually all contemporary research.

Psychopaths are not individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start.

Despite a childhood of soldier fantasies, a military father, and a stated desire for a career in the Marines, Eric made no attempt to enlist. When a recruiter cold-called him during the last week of his life, he met the guy, but never returned the call to find out whether he had been accepted.

A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderers, little research has been conducted on them.

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

“It takes heat and cold to make a tornado,” Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying.

Eric craved heat, but he couldn’t sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.

So what’s the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. 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,”

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.