Columbine

20. Vacant

There is a photograph. A blond girl lets out a wail. Her head is thrown back, caught in her own hands: palms against her temples, fingers burrowing into her scalp. Her mouth is wide open, eyes squeezed shut. She became the image of Columbine. Throughout Clement Park Tuesday afternoon, and in the photos that captured the experience, the pattern repeated: boy or girl, adult or child, nearly everyone was clenching something—a hand, her knees, his head, each other.

Before those pictures hit the newsstands, the survivors had changed. Kids drifted into Clement Park on Wednesday morning unclenched. Their eyes were dry, their faces slack. Their expressions had gone vacant.

Most of the parents were crying, but almost none of their kids were. They were so quiet it was unsettling. Hundreds of teenagers and not a whiff of nervous energy. Here and there a girl would sob and a boy would rush over to hug her—boys practically fought over who would provide the hugs—but those were brief exceptions.

They were aware of the blankness. Acutely. They didn’t understand it, but they saw it and discussed it candidly. A vast number said they felt they were watching a movie.

The lack of bodies contributed to the problem—they were still inside the perimeter. None of the names had been released. The school was effectively gone. Nobody but police could get near it. It wasn’t even visible from the line of police tape where everyone gathered.

Students had a pretty good idea of who had been killed. All the murders had been witnessed, and word spread quickly. But so many stories had turned out to be wrong. Doubt persisted. Everyone seemed to have at least a few people unaccounted for. “How can we cry when we don’t know who we are crying for?” one girl asked. And yet she had cried. She had cried most of the night, she said. By morning, she had run out of tears.

No one from the sheriff’s department called Brian Rohrbough. No officer appeared on the doorstep to inform him that his son had been killed. The phone woke Brian Wednesday. It was a friend calling to warn him, before he picked up the Rocky Mountain News. There was a picture.

Brian flipped past the huge HEARTBREAK HEADLINE, the dozens of stories and diagrams and pictures of clenched survivors, none of whom were his boy. He stopped at page 13. It was an overhead shot from a news chopper, but the photo filled half the page, so the subjects were large and unmistakable. Half a dozen students huddled behind a car in the parking lot with a policeman squeezed in beside them, squatting behind the wheel for cover, his rifle mounted across the trunk, eyes to the gun sight, finger on the trigger. A boy lay unprotected on the sidewalk nearby. He was out in the open, collapsed on his side, one knee curled up toward his chest, both arms splayed. “Motionless,” the caption read. An enormous pool of blood, nearly the size of his body, stained the concrete a foot away and trickled down the crevice between two sidewalk squares. The victim was unidentified, his face blurry and almost completely obscured by the angle. But Brian Rohrbough knew. He never turned to page 14.

Brian was a tall man with the heavy build of a laborer. He had a long, puffy face with receding silver hair that accentuated his clenched brow: deep grooves stacked up across his forehead, over a pair of vertical gashes above the bridge of his nose. Danny looked remarkably similar, though he had yet to grow into all his features or develop the worry lines.

Danny was all Brian had. He and Sue had divorced when their son was four. Sue had remarried, but Brian had not. He had his custom audio business. It was successful, and he loved it, but the best part was that Danny did, too. He had been toddling around the workshop since he could walk. By seven, he was building wiring harnesses and running speaker wire. In junior high he started working for real weekdays after school. Brian and Sue had a friendly divorce and lived only a few blocks apart, but Danny could never get enough time with his father.

The shop was such a cool hangout for a high school boy: a big, greasy garage filled with power tools and hundred-thousand-dollar vintage cars up on blocks. Danny helped fit them with opera-caliber sound systems worth more than his wealthier friends’ cars. Depending on the project, the place might reek of burnt rubber or prickly epoxy fumes. When Brian manned the buzz saw, the sweet smell of fresh-cut cherrywood wafted into the street.

Danny was a natural. He loved cars and he loved sound. He was great with the PC and had an ear for pitch. He liked to mess around with computer programs and was promising to take the business in a new direction. And he knew how to behave. Brian catered to some of the oldest and richest families in Colorado. Danny had grown up in their houses. He knew the drill. He was a charmer, and Brian reveled in showing him off.

A few months ago, Danny had come to a decision: college was not for him. He would go straight into the business from Columbine, make a career of it. Brian was ecstatic. In three years, he would make his son a partner. In four weeks, Danny was going to spend his first summer working at the shop full-time.

Wednesday morning, as soon as he saw the picture, Brian got in his car. He drove to Columbine. He stormed up to the perimeter and demanded his boy’s body. The cops there said no.

Not only were they not turning Danny over, they had not brought him inside. Danny was still out there, lying on the sidewalk; he had weathered the elements all night. Too many bombs, the authorities said—the body could be booby-trapped.

Brian knew he wasn’t getting a straight answer. Bomb squads had been clearing the school since Tuesday afternoon; Brian’s son just wasn’t a priority. Brian couldn’t believe they were treating a victim’s body so cavalierly.

Then it began to snow.

Danny lay out on that sidewalk for twenty-eight hours.

Misty Bernall started Wednesday at three A.M. She had slept a little, drifting in and out. Nightmares would jolt her awake: Cassie trapped in the building, huddled in the dark in some closet or lying on the cold tile floor. Her daughter needed her. She’s over the fence a hundred yards away, Misty thought, and they won’t let us get to her.

She gave up and took a shower. Brad did, too. They dressed and crossed the backyard to the perimeter.

A cop was standing guard. Brad told him Cassie was in there. He implored the cop give it to them straight. “We just want to know if there is anyone still alive in there.”

The cop paused. “No,” he said finally. “No one left alive.”

They thanked him. “We appreciate your honesty,” Misty said.

But Misty wasn’t giving up. The cop could be wrong. Or Cassie might be lying in a hospital, unidentified. Misty kept trying the perimeter all morning. She was rebuffed each time.

Then the parents were alerted to return to Leawood. Brad and Misty headed right over. They waited for hours.

District attorney Dave Thomas arrived around 1:30. He still had the list of the deceased. It had not changed; nor had it been confirmed. The coroner required another twenty-four hours. So he decided to risk it. He informed the families one by one. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he told Bob Curnow.

“You don’t have to,” Curnow said. “It’s written on your face.”

Misty took it hard, but she did not take it definitively. The DA said Cassie was dead, but he also said it was unofficial.

Hope gradually dissolved into anger. If Cassie were dead, Misty wanted her body out of that library and attended to.

Linda Sanders’s family awaited the news at her home. By Wednesday afternoon, the house was packed with friends and relatives. Everyone knew what was coming. News crews set up a row of cameras to capture the moment of agony. “Be ready,” a victim’s advocate told Melody. “Be prepared to support your sister.”

A patrol car pulled up just before three P.M. The deputy rang the bell, and Melody let him in. Linda was still not ready to hear it. “We have tentatively identified your husband as a victim at Columbine,” he said.

Linda screamed. Then she threw up.

Frank DeAngelis didn’t know if he was safe yet. He woke up at his brother’s house on Wednesday, because he had been advised against staying at his own home. His car was sealed off inside the perimeter, so an assistant principal was on his way to pick Frank up before dawn. He was headed for meetings, to figure out what to do. What on earth were they going to do?

And what could he say? They were coming to hear him at ten A.M. Kids, parents, teachers—anyone aching—had been told to gather at Light of the World, a large Catholic church, one of the few venues large enough. They would look to him for answers. He had none.

Frank had lain awake much of the night grappling with it. “God, give me some guidance,” he’d prayed.

Morning came, and he was no closer. He was consumed with guilt. “My job is to provide an environment that’s safe,” he said later. “I let so many people down.”

Light of the World seats eight hundred and fifty and every pew was packed, with hundreds more students and parents standing against the walls. A parade of local officials took the podium in turn, trying to console the kids, who were inconsolable. The students applauded each speaker politely. Nobody was getting through.

Mr. D would settle for polite applause. He was hoping he wouldn’t get lynched. Did he deserve to be? He had no speech prepared, no notes—he just planned to tell them what he felt.

His name was announced, he rose to approach the microphone, and the crowd leapt up from the pews. They were shouting, cheering, whistling, applauding—kids who hadn’t registered a smile or a frown for hours were beating their palms together or pumping their fists, fighting back tears or letting them stream down their chins.

Mr. D. buckled at the waist. He clutched his stomach and staggered around, turning his back to the audience, sobbing uncontrollably. His torso was parallel to the floor, shaking so hard it was visible from the last row. He stood there for a full minute while the crowd refused to subside. He couldn’t face them; he couldn’t right himself. “It was so strange,” he said later. “I just couldn’t control it; my body just went into convulsions. The reason I turned my back is I was feeling guilt. I was feeling shameful. And when they started clapping and standing, knowing I had their approval and support, that’s when I broke down.”

He made it to the podium and began with an apology: “I am so sorry for what happened and for what you are feeling.” He reassured them and promised to stand by them—“I will be there for you, whenever you need it”—but refused to sugarcoat what they were in for. “I’d like to take a wand and wipe away what you are feeling, but I can’t do that. I’d like to tell you those scars will heal, but they will not,” he said.

His students were grateful for the candor. So many kids in Clement Park that morning would describe how tired they already were of hearing so many people tell them everything would be all right. They knew the truth; they just wanted to hear it.

Mr. D. ended his speech by telling them he loved them. Each and every one of them. They needed to hear that, too.

Kids were having trouble with their parents, especially their moms. “It’s kind of hard for me to sit at home,” a boy said. “Like when my mom comes home, I try to stay out of the house.” Lots of other boys nodded; more and more told the same story. Their mothers were so scared, and the fear hadn’t abated when they’d found their kids; now they just wanted to hug them. Hug him/her forever—that was the refrain Tuesday. Wednesday, it was My mom doesn’t understand. Emotionally, their mothers were wildly out of synch. At first, the kids needed the hugs badly; now they needed them to stop.

Most of the student body wandered the park, desperate to unload their stories. They needed adults to hear them, and their parents would not do. They found their audience: the press. Students were wary at first, but let their guards down quickly. Reporters seemed so understanding. Clement Park felt like an enormous confessional Wednesday. The kids would regret it.

In the midst of it, a shriek pierced the media camp. Mourners froze, unsure of what to do. More screams: different voices, same direction. Hundreds ran toward them: students, journalists, everyone within hearing range. They found a dozen girls gathered around a single car that remained among the satellite trucks in a small lot on the edge of the park. It was Rachel Scott’s car—the first girl shot dead. Rachel didn’t have an assigned spot, so she had parked half a mile from the school on Tuesday. No one had come to claim the car. Now it was covered front to back with flowers and candles. Messages to Rachel in heaven had been soaped across the windows. Her girlfriends held hands in a semicircle around the back of the car, sobbing uncontrollably. One girl began to sing. Others followed.

The Harrises and Klebolds both hired attorneys. They had good reason: the presumption of guilt quickly landed on their shoulders. Investigators didn’t expect to charge them, but the public did. National polls taken shortly after the attack would identify all sorts of culprits contributing to the tragedy: violent movies, video games, Goth culture, lax gun laws, bullies, and Satan. Eric did not make the list. Dylan didn’t either. They were just kids. Something or someone must have led them astray. Wayne and Kathy and Tom and Sue were the chief suspects. They dwarfed all other causes, blamed by 85 percent of the population in a Gallup poll. They had the additional advantage of being alive, to be pursued.

Their attorneys warned them to keep quiet. Neither family spoke to the press. Both released statements on Wednesday. “We cannot begin to convey our overwhelming sense of sorrow for everyone affected by this tragedy,” the Klebolds said. “Our thoughts, prayers and heartfelt apologies go out to the victims, their families, friends and the entire community. Like the rest of the country, we are struggling to understand why this happened, and ask that you please respect our privacy during this painful grieving period.”

The Harrises were more brief: “We want to express our heartfelt sympathy to the families of all the victims and to all the community for this senseless tragedy,” they wrote. “Please say prayers for everyone touched by these terrible events.”

Dylan’s brother stayed home from work for several days. Byron was nearly three years older than Dylan, but because of Dylan’s early enrollment, just two years out of school. He was doing gofer work at an auto dealership: washing cars, shoveling snow, moving inventory around the lot. “It was an entry-level job, but man, he’s good,” a spokesman for the store told the Rocky Mountain News.

His employers understood the need for time away. “It’s shocking for everyone,” the spokesman said. “We’re a family here and we look out for each other. Our hearts go out to Byron. This kid’s great.”

Supervisory Special Agent Fuselier’s concern Wednesday morning was the conspiracy. Everyone assumed the Columbine massacre was a conspiracy, including the cops. It was just too big, too bold, and too complex for a couple of kids to have imagined, much less pulled off. This looked like the work of eight or ten people. Every attack of this magnitude spawns conspiracy theories, but this time they appeared sound. The legacy of those theories, and Jeffco’s response to them, would haunt the Columbine recovery in peculiar ways.

Wednesday morning, Fuselier entered the ghastly crime scene. The hallways were scattered with shell casings, spent pipe bombs, and unexploded ordnance. Bullet holes and broken glass were everywhere. The library was soaked in blood; most of the bodies lay under tables. Fuselier had seen carnage, but still, it was awful. The sight that really stunned him was outside, on the sidewalk and the lawn. Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott were still out there. No one had even covered them. Years later, he shuddered at the memory.

Fuselier arrived at Columbine as an FBI agent, but he would play a more significant role as a clinical psychologist. Altogether, he had spent three decades in the field; he’d started in private practice, then worked for the air force. A hostage-negotiation course in Okinawa changed his life. He could read people. He could talk them down. In 1981, Fuselier joined the FBI. He took a $5,000-a-year pay cut for a detective job, just to get a shot at the Bureau’s Special Operations and Research Unit (SOARU)—the leading center of hostage-negotiation study in the world.

Agent Fuselier worked his way up through standard casework and discovered he liked detective work, too. He got the assignment at SOARU, finally, and began a new career defusing gun battles. He would handle some of the nation’s worst hostage crises, including the 1987 Atlanta prison siege and the Montana Freemen standoff. He was the FBI’s last hope at Waco, and the final person to talk to David Koresh before the tanks rolled in. Fuselier spent most of his time at SOARU studying prior incidents and analyzing success rates. His team developed the fundamental tactics for hostage standoffs employed today. Fuselier became known for steadiness under pressure, but his heart was weakening, his temples were graying, and eventually he sought a quieter life. He moved his family to Colorado in 1991, and they settled into a tranquil neighborhood in Littleton.

Fuselier would play the leading role in understanding the Columbine killers, but it was luck that drove him to the case. If his son Brian had not been attending that high school, Fuselier would not have even been assigned to the investigation. In fact, it’s unlikely that the FBI would have played a major role. But because Fuselier arrived on the scene, established a rapport with the commanders, and offered federal support, FBI agents would play a major role on the team. Fuselier was one of the senior supervisory agents in the region and already had a relationship with local commanders, so he was placed in command of the FBI team. Before April 20, Fuselier headed up the domestic terrorism unit for the FBI in the region. For the next year, he delegated most of that responsibility. This was more important.

Columbine was the crime of the century in Colorado, and the state assembled the largest team in its history to solve it. Nearly a hundred detectives gathered in Jeffco. More than a dozen agencies loaned out their best minds. The FBI contributed more than a dozen special agents, a remarkable number for a local investigation. Agent Fuselier, one of the senior psychologists in the entire Bureau, headed up the FBI team. Everyone else reported to Jeffco’s Kate Battan, a brilliant detective, whose work unraveling complex white-collar crimes would serve her well. She reported to Division Chief John Kiekbusch, a rising star who had just been promoted to senior command. Kiekbusch and Fuselier each played an active daily role and consulted regularly about the overall progress of the case.

The team identified eleven likely conspirators. Brooks Brown had the most suspicious story, and Chris Morris had admitted to hearing about bombs. Two others matched the descriptions for third and fourth shooters. Those four perched atop the list, with Dylan’s prom date, Robyn Anderson, close behind.

Bringing them to justice would require a Herculean effort. Detectives planned to question every student and teacher at Columbine and every friend, relative, and associate of the killers, past or present. They had five thousand interviews ahead of them in the next six months. They would snap thousands of photographs and compile more than 30,000 pages of evidence. The level of detail was exacting: every shell casing, bullet fragment, and shotgun pellet was inventoried—55 pages and 998 evidence ID numbers to distinguish every shard.

The Jeffco command team hastily reserved a spot for Fuselier in the Columbine band room. The killers had made a mess of the place without setting foot inside it. Abandoned books, backpacks, sheet music, drum kits, and instruments were strewn among the shrapnel. The door was missing—blown away by the SWAT team searching for gunmen.

Much of the school looked considerably worse. Pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails had burned through stretches of carpeting and set off the sprinkler system. The cafeteria was flooded, the library unspeakable. Veteran cops had staggered out in tears. “There were SWAT team people who were in Vietnam who were weeping over what they saw,” District Attorney Dave Thomas said.

The detective team was moving in. Every scrap of wreckage was evidence. They had 250,000 square feet of crime scene—just on the inside. Footprints, fingerprints, stray hairs, or gun residue could be anywhere. Crucial DNA evidence might be floating through the cafeteria. And live explosives might still be present, too.

Detectives had stripped down Eric and Dylan’s bedrooms, left the furniture, and hauled out much of the rest. The Klebold house yielded little—some yearbooks and a small stack of writings—but Dylan had wiped his hard drive clean. Eric’s house provided a mother lode: journals, more computer rants, an audiotape, videotapes, budgets and diagrams and timelines… Eric had documented everything. He’d wanted us to know.

Adding to the sense of urgency—and conspiracy—was a cryptic message suggesting more possible violence to come. “We went scrambling for days trying to track that down,” Fuselier said. They searched the school for explosives again. They raised the pressure on the probable conspirators.

The detectives conducted five hundred interviews in the first seventytwo hours. It was a great boost, but it got chaotic. Battan was worried about witnesses, who were growing more compromised by the hour from what they read and saw on TV. Investigators prioritized: students who had seen the shooters came first.

Other detectives headed to the suspects’ childhood hometowns.

21. First Memories

It didn’t start with a murder plot. Before he devised his massacre, Eric settled into a life of petty crime. Earlier still, even before adolescence, he was exhibiting telltale signs of a particular breed of killer. The symptoms were stark in retrospect, but subtle at the time—invisible to the untrained eye.

Eric wrote about his childhood frequently and fondly. His earliest memories were lost to him. Fireworks, he remembered. He sat down one day to record his first memory in a notebook and discovered he couldn’t do it. “Hard to visualize,” he wrote. “My mind tends to blend memories together. I do remember the 4th of July when I was 12.” Explosions, thunderclaps, the whole sky on fire. “I remember running outside with a lot of other kids,” he wrote. “It felt like an invasion.”

Eric savored the idea—heroic opportunities to obliterate alien hordes. His dreams were riddled with gunfire and explosions. Eric relished the anticipation of the detonator engaging. He was always dazzled by fire. He could whiff the acrid fallout from the fireworks again just contemplating the memory. Later the night of the fireworks display, when he was twelve, Eric walked around and burned stuff.

Fire was beauty. The tiny eruption of a cardboard match igniting. A fuse sputtering down could drive Eric delirious with anticipation. Scaring the shit out of stupidass dickwads—it didn’t get much better than that.

In the beginning, explosions scared Eric even as they exhilarated him. He ran for cover when the fireworks started in his “earliest memory” account. “I hid in a closet,” he wrote. “I hid from everyone when I wanted to be alone.”

Eric was a military brat. His father moved the family across five states in fifteen years. Wayne and Kathy gave birth to Eric David Harris in Wichita, Kansas, on April 9, 1981, eighteen years and eleven days before Eric attempted to blow up his high school. Wichita was the biggest town Eric would live in until junior high. He started school in Beavercreek, Ohio, and did stints in rural air force towns like Oscoda, Michigan, and Plattsburgh, New York. Eric enrolled in and was pulled out of five different schools along the way, often those on the fringes of military bases where friends came and went as fast as he did.

Wayne and Kathy worked hard to smooth over the disruptions. Kathy chose to be a stay-at-home mom to focus on her boys. She also performed her duties as an officer’s wife. Kathy was attractive, but rather plain. She wore her wavy brown hair in a simple style: swept back behind her ears and curling in toward her shoulders in back.

Wayne had a solid build, a receding hairline, and very fair skin. He coached baseball and served as scoutmaster. In the evenings, he would shoot baskets on the driveway with Eric and his older brother, Kevin.

“I just remember they wanted the children to have a normal, off-base relationship in a normal community,” said a minister who lived nearby. “They were just great neighbors—friendly, outgoing, caring.”

Major Harris did not tolerate misbehavior in his home. Punishment was swift and harsh, but all inside the family. Wayne reacted to outside threats in classic military fashion: circle the wagons and protect the unit. He didn’t like snap decisions. He preferred to consider punishment carefully, while the boys reflected on their deeds. After a day or two, Wayne would render his decision, and it would be final. It was typically grounding or loss of privileges—whatever they held dear. As Eric grew older, he would periodically have to relinquish his computer—that stung. Wayne considered a conflict concluded once he’d discussed it with Eric and they’d agreed on the facts and the punishment. Then Eric had to accept responsibility for his actions and complete his punishment.

Detectives discovered gross contradictions to Eric’s insta-profile already cemented in the media. In Plattsburgh, friends described a sports enthusiast hanging out with minorities. Two of Eric’s best friends turned out to be Asian and African American. The Asian boy was a jock to boot. Eric played soccer and Little League. He followed the Rockies even before the family moved to Colorado, frequently sporting their baseball cap. By junior high he had grown obsessed with computers, and eventually with popular video games.

In his childhood photos Eric looks wholesome, clean-cut, and confident—much more poised than Dylan. Both were painfully shy, though. Eric “was the shyest out of everybody,” said a Little League teammate from Plattsburgh. He didn’t talk much, and other kids described him as timid but popular.

At the plate, one of his core personality traits was already on display. “We had to kind of egg him on to swing, to hit the pitch sometimes,” his coach said. “It wasn’t that he was afraid of the ball, just that he didn’t want to miss. He didn’t want to fail.”

Eric continued to dream. Major Harris inspired military fantasies, but Eric usually saw himself as a Marine. “Guns! Boy, I loved playing guns,” he wrote later. The rustic towns he grew up in provided fields and forests and streams where he could play soldier. When Eric was eight, the family moved to Oscoda, Michigan, where the scenic Au Sable River meets Lake Huron in the rugged northern region of the state. Wayne and Kathy bought a house in town so the boys could grow up with civilians. Oscoda was dominated by the air force base; population 1,061 and dropping. Work for adults was sparse, but it offered a world of adventure for little boys.

The Harris house sat near the edge of Huron National Forest. It seemed vast, empty, and ancient to Eric’s young eyes. The air was thick with the scent of musty white pines. This was early lumberjack territory. The state proclaimed it Paul Bunyan’s home, and the Lumberman’s Monument had been erected in bronze nearby. Eric, Kevin, and their friend Sonia would spend afternoons hunting down enemy troops and withstanding alien invasions. They built a little tree fort out of sticks and branches to use for a base camp.

“Fire!” Eric screamed in one of their enactments. The three young heroes rattled off machine-gun fire with their toy guns. Sonia was always fearless—she would charge straight into the imaginary rifle fire. Kevin yelled for air support; Eric tossed a stick grenade into the trees. The three defenders took cover and felt the earth shudder from the convulsion. Eric hurled another grenade, and another and another, taking wave after wave of enemy troops down. Eric was always the protagonist when he reminisced about those days in high school. Always the good guy, too.

When he was eleven, id Software released the video game Doom, and Eric found the perfect virtual playground to explore his fantasies. His adversaries had faces, bodies, and identities now. They made sounds and fought back. Eric could measure his skills and keep score. He could beat nearly everyone he knew. On the Internet, he could triumph over thousands of strangers he had never met. He almost always won, until later, when he met Dylan. They were an even match.

In 1993, Wayne retired. The family moved again, this time to Colorado, and settled down for good in Jeffco. Eric entered seventh grade, and Kevin started at Columbine. Wayne eventually took a job with a defense contractor that created electronic flight simulators. Kathy began part-time work at a catering company.

Three years later the Harrises upgraded to a $180,000 home in a nicer neighborhood just north of the beautiful Chatfield Reservoir and two miles south of Columbine High School. Kevin played tight end and was the kicker for the Rebels before heading off to the University of Colorado. The color gradually drained out of Major Harris’s thinning hair. He grew a thick white mustache, put on a few pounds, but maintained his military bearing.

Eric loved a good explosion, but treasured his own tranquillity. Fishing trips with his dad were the best. He captured the serenity in a vivid essay called “Just a Day.” The night before, he had to go to bed early, which would normally provoke “a barrage of arguments and pouting,” but on these occasions he didn’t mind. He’d wake up to black skies and rich ground coffee vapors wafting up to his room. Eric didn’t like to drink the stuff, but he couldn’t get enough of the smell. “My brother would already be up,” he continued, “trying to impress our father by forcing down the coffee he hadn’t grown to like yet. I always remember my brother trying to impress everyone, and myself thinking what a waste of time that would be.”

Eric would scamper out to the garage to get his tackle together and help load the cooler into the back of their’73 Ram pickup. Then they headed into the hills. “The mountains were always peaceful, a certain halcyon hibernating within the tall peaks & the armies of pine trees. It seemed back then that when the world changed, these mountains would never move,” he wrote. They would drive out to a mountain lake in the wilderness, almost deserted, except for “a few repulsive suburbanite a$$holes. They always seemed to ruin the serenity of the lake.”

Eric loved the water. Just standing back on the bank and gazing at it: the waves dancing around the surface in peculiar patterns, getting caught suddenly by a burst of current, forming unexpected shapes and vanishing again—what a glorious escape. When his eye caught something interesting, Eric would cast into it, presuming the fish might have been attracted to it, too.

Then it was over. Back to shithead society, populated by automatons too dense to comprehend what was out there. “No regrets, though,” he concluded. “Nature shared the secret serenity with someone who was actually observant enough to notice. Sucks for everyone else.”

22. Rush to Closure

Healing begins, the Denver Post announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page 1 thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment The paper was trying to be helpful, but its rush to closure did not go over well in Jeffco. With every passing week, more of the community would grumble that it was time to move on. The survivors had other ideas.

The bodies were finally returned to the victims’ families on Thursday. Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died. There were plenty of witnesses, but a few were tempted to inflate their accounts, and the more dramatic versions of their stories tended to travel.

A heroic version of Danny Rohrbough’s death quickly gained currency and was widely reported in the media. “[He] held the school door open to let others escape and laid down his life for his friends,” the Rocky Mountain News reported.

“You know, he might have lived,” the Rohrboughs’ pastor would tell fifteen hundred mourners at Danny’s funeral. “He chose to stay there and hold the door for others so that they might go out before him and make their way to safety. They made it and Danny didn’t.”

The story was later disproved. Danny’s father, Brian, said he never believed it. “I know that Dan and his friends wouldn’t have been standing there if they had thought they were in danger,” he said. Brian was irritated by the urge to juice the story to make Danny’s death more tragic or meaningful. It was tragic enough, he said.

A hundred students in Clement Park crushed together in a throbbing teen prayer mosh. They stood on their toes, reached toward the heavens, and pressed their arms together in a mass human steeple. The mood was rapturous, the faces serene. They sang sweet hymns, swayed as one body, and cried out to Jesus to pull them through. They named The Enemy. “We feel the presence of Satan operating in our midst!” a young girl declared.

The school set up a second official gathering for students on Thursday afternoon. The megachurches were among the only structures in the area big enough to accommodate a crowd that large, so the gathering was held at West Bowles Community Church. This session was to be informal, just a designated place for students who wanted to find each other in one place. Mr. D wasn’t planning to speak, until a counselor interrupted his meeting with faculty down the hall. “Frank, they need you,” he said. “You need to go out there.”

Frank walked the hallway to the nave of the church, contemplating what to say. And again he faced the dilemma of how to act at the microphone. Several of his friends, and staff, too, had warned him not to cry again. “God, you’re going to be in the national media,” they said. “You can’t show that, it’s a sign of weakness.” He had gotten away with it once, but the media would crucify him if they discovered he was buckling.

The trauma specialists disagreed. These kids had been raised in a western mentality, they argued: real men fend for themselves; tears are for weaklings; therapy is a joke. “Frank, you are the key,” one counselor advised him. “You’re an emotional person, you need to show those emotions. If you try to hold your emotions inside, you’re going to set the image for other people.” The boys, in particular, would be watching him, DeAngelis felt. They were already dangerously bottled up. “Frank, they need to know it’s all right to show emotion,” the counselor said. “Give them that permission.”

The students were awaiting his appearance, and when he walked in, they started chanting the school’s rallying cry, which he’d last heard at the assembly before the prom: “We are COL-um-BINE! We are COL-um-BINE!” Each time they yelled it more loudly, confidently, and aggressively. Mr. D hadn’t realized until he heard them that he had been longing to draw strength from them, too. He’d thought he was there just to provide it. “I couldn’t fake it,” he said later. “I walked on that stage and I saw those kids cheering and the tears started coming down.”

This time he decided to address the tears. “Guys, trust me, now is not the time to show your manliness,” he told them. “Emotion is emotion, and keeping it inside doesn’t mean you’re strong.”

That was the last time Mr. D worried about crying in public.

The big question facing the school was how to finish out the year. These kids needed to get back together fast. But the cops weren’t going to open the building for months. The administration decided to restart classes a week later at nearby Chatfield High School, Columbine’s traditional rival. Columbine would take over the school in the mornings, and Chatfield would resume use in the afternoons. Classes would be shortened for both groups until the end of the school year.

The long-term solution was trickier. Some people suggested that the building be demolished; some parents insisted that their kids would never set foot in that murder scene again. But others pointed out that the psychological blow of losing their high school entirely would be much worse. The Rocky Mountain News led its Thursday edition with a letter from the publisher stating, “If students, teachers and parents feel there is no way they can return to the classrooms of Columbine, the Denver Rocky will lead the charge to raise the funds to build a new school and urge legislators to help. If they decide that they do not want to be driven from their school, we will support the community in rebuilding the campus.”

Reverend Bill Oudemolen began preparing two funerals. John Tomlin and Lauren Townsend had been faithful members of the Foothills Bible Church. The pastor walked through Clement Park and sniffed the air. Satan. The pastor could smell him wafting through the park. It was an acrid odor—had it been a little stronger, it might have singed his nose hairs. The Enemy had swept in with this madness on Tuesday, but the real battle was only now under way.

“I smell the presence of Satan,” Reverend Oudemolen thundered from the pulpit Sunday morning. “What we saw Tuesday came from Satan’s home office. Satan had a plan. Satan wants us to live in fear in Littleton. He wants us to see black trench coats or people in Goth attire and makeup and here’s what he wants us to feel: Look how powerful and scary Satan is!”

He’d watched an ABC special examining the fallout in West Paducah, Kentucky, thirteen months after its school shooting. West Paducah was still riven with hostility, Oudemolen told his congregation. “I know what Satan wants Littleton to look like in thirteen months,” he said. “He wants us to be angry. Satan wants us to stay right here, with uncontrollable grief. He wants evil to be repaid by evil. He wants hatred to be repaid by hatred. Satan has plans for Littleton.”

Cassie Bernall’s pastor, George Kirsten, charged the same culprit. This was so much more than two boys with guns or even bombs, in their eyes. This was spiritual warfare. The Enemy had taken the battlefield in broad daylight in Jeffco, and Reverend George Kirsten was eager to see Christ reappear to smite him. When Kirsten addressed his congregation at West Bowles Community Church, he likened Cassie to the martyrs calling out to God at the onset of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation: “How long? How long will it be until my blood is avenged?” he cried.

It’s a pivotal scene Reverend Kirsten was invoking. Immediately after the appearance of the four horsemen, the fifth seal is broken and all the Christian martyrs since the beginning of time appear under the altar, pleading for enemy blood to be spilled in return. Shortly thereafter, all true believers are raptured and the Apocalypse commences.

Reverend Kirsten happened to be teaching Revelation—one chapter a week—to his Bible study group at West Bowles. He believed, as they did, that the great signs of the Apocalypse were already under way and the moment might be at hand.

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.

Marxhausen had managed to reach the kids at the Light of the World assembly. He led the large Lutheran congregation near Columbine, and for years he’d headed up a council of mainline Protestant clergy—mainline being the common term for the large, moderate denominations such as Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists outside the Southern Baptist Convention. Marxhausen was only forty-five, but widely regarded on as the old wise man of the western suburbs. Mainliners were outnumbered by the Evangelicals, and probably even the Catholics, in Jeffco, but they maintained a strong presence, and Marxhausen’s thousand-seat church was packed solid every Sunday.

Most of the mainliners and the Catholics were averse to pinning the Columbine tragedy on Satan, but they were determined not to fight about it. Local ministers agreed very quickly that they needed to pull together and put factional bickering aside.

Barb Lotze faced her first test barely twenty-four hours after the massacre. She arranged a huge prayer service for Wednesday evening at Light of the World Catholic Church, where she served as youth pastor. Students from all faiths had been invited, and every pew was packed. She wanted to make them all feel welcome.

Midway through the service, an excited youth minister from an Evangelical church approached Lotze about performing an “altar call”—the practice where new or renewed believers are summoned forward to be born again. It was a decidedly un-Catholic ritual, and it seemed like an inappropriate time, but Lotze was determined to establish some sort of reciprocity with the Evangelical churches.

She reluctantly agreed.

The young pastor rushed to the microphone and proclaimed the power of Jesus. Who was ready to accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior? he cried.

No one moved. He was astonished.

“Nobody?” he asked.

He sat down, and the audience moved on. “They just want to be hugged,” Lotze said. “They want to be loved, told that we’re going to get through this together.”

The kids kept pouring into the churches. What began Tuesday night as a means to escape from their parents and find each other quickly became a habit. Night after night they returned to the churches in vast numbers—kids who had not seen an altar in years. For some it was a conscious choice to look to God in desperation, but most said it was just a place to go.

The churches organized informal services at night. In the daytime, they just opened their doors and gave the kids the run of the place. A handful saw a recruiting opportunity. Anyone who drove to Clement Park and stayed a few hours would find several flyers stacked under their wiper blades: “WE’RE HERE TO LISTEN AND ASSIST YOU,” “If you need: prayer, counseling, meals prepared…,” “FREE!! HOT CHOCOLATE COFFEE COOKIES, COME BE WARM AT CALVARY CHAPEL.” Boxes of pocket-sized Bibles were trucked to the park and distributed to passersby. Scientologists handed out Way to Happiness booklets to mourners filing past Rachel Scott’s car—still abandoned in the parking lot where she’d left it.

Eventually, investigators would escort dozens of witnesses back through the school to help re-create the attack. Mr. D was the first. A few days after the massacre, detectives walked him down the main hallway. Dr. Fuselier was with them. They passed the remnants of the trophy case and DeAngelis described it exploding behind him. They proceeded down the corridor and he indicated where he’d intercepted the girls’ gym class.

He re-created everything: the shouts, the screams, the acrid smell of the smoke. None of that fazed Frank DeAngelis. He was cried out by this time, as stoic as the boys he was hoping to open up.

They turned the corner, and Frank saw bloody smears on the carpet. He knew Dave Sanders had gone down there. He had not anticipated the stains. “You could see the knuckle prints,” he said. “He actually was on all fours and there were his knuckle prints—he was struggling. It tore me up.”

A trail of blood traced Dave’s path around the corner and down the hall. Detectives led Frank DeAngelis to Science Room 3. Nothing had been disturbed.

“They took me into where Dave died,” Frank recalled. “And there were sweatshirts there full of blood. That got to me.” In the science room, Frank broke down again. He turned to Fuselier. “I was glad he was here,” DeAngelis said later. “Most FBI guys wouldn’t have done anything. Dwayne gave me a hug.”

Aside from witnesses, the best hope for cracking the case seemed to lie in the physical evidence: the guns, first and foremost. Dylan was a minor; Eric had just turned eighteen. They had probably gotten help securing the weapons. Whoever turned up at the front end of those acquisitions would likely be co-conspirator number one.

Investigators worked parallel tracks hunting them down. ATF agents took the technical angle: they came up with a solid lifespan on the semiautomatics. Eric’s carbine rifle was less than a year old; it had been sold originally in Selma, Alabama, and had made its way to a gun shop in Longmont, Colorado, less than an hour from Denver. They traced Dylan’s TEC-9 through four different owners between 1997 and 1998, but then the records disappeared. The third owner said he’d sold it at the Tanner Gun Show but had not been required to keep sales records at that time. The shotguns were a bigger problem. They were three decades old, before serial numbers were required. They were impossible to trace.

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.”

Officials refused to be more specific, arguing that they didn’t want to give copycatters any hints. The deputy marshal summarized the primary mistake as “defective fusing.”

Detectives were having more luck working the suspects. Chris Morris had implicated Phil Duran the first day. If they could believe Morris, that could explain several guns, possibly all four. Duran was playing innocent, but they knew they could crack him. And then they heard from Robyn Anderson.

Unloading her secret to Kelli on Tuesday night had not appeased Robyn’s conscience. Wednesday morning, she called Zack again. This time, she told him. And she told him another small lie—that he was the only one who knew. Then she told her mom.

Robyn’s mom brought her down to the school. Jeffco had setup its Columbine Task Force inside the crime scene, headquartered in the band room. Detectives interviewed Robyn, with her mom by her side. Two detectives traded off questioning—one from the DA’s office, one from a nearby suburb’s police force. They videotaped the session. And they were harsh. The first time they asked about the guns, Robyn “visibly recoiled,” according to the detective’s synopsis of the videotape. And she looked to her mom for support. Did she buy the guns? they asked. No, she did not. She went to the show with them, but they bought the weapons. Why did they want them? Dylan lived out in the country, so she assumed they wanted to hunt. No, they never talked about hunting people, not even as a joke.

Detectives asked her about the prom, the Trench Coat Mafia, the killers’ personalities, and then returned to the guns. It was a private dealer, she said. The boys paid cash. They didn’t try to bargain, they just paid the asking price—somewhere around $250 to $300 apiece. No one signed anything, and she never showed an ID. The shotguns had very long barrels, but the dealer said they could cut them down.

The detectives began to press her harder: Dylan and Eric didn’t really seem like hunters, did they? Dylan lived in the mountains, there were deer all over the place. And her dad owned a gun—he never used it, but he had one. Lots of people have gun collections. Eric and Dylan were into that kind of stuff—why wouldn’t they want one? She’d actually asked the boys if they were going to do something stupid with the guns, she said. They’d assured her they would never hurt anyone.

Did Eric and Dylan tell you to keep the guns secret? the detectives asked. Yes. And that didn’t raise your suspicions? They were underage. It was illegal. They had to hide it from their parents. And where did they hide them? She didn’t know about Eric. Dylan dropped him off first, and Eric put his guns in the trunk of his Honda. She assumed he stashed them in the house later. Dylan tried to hide his in his bottom dresser drawer, but it was too big. He stuck it in the closet, but he told her later that he cut the barrel down and made it fit in the drawer.

And that didn’t arouse her suspicions? No, because the gun dealer had already suggested it.

Robyn said she never saw the guns again. The detectives moved on. They asked about a wide range of subjects; eventually, they got to the explosives. Had she seen any, had she helped make any, had any of Eric and Dylan’s friends assisted them? No, no, and… maybe Zack Heckler. Zack? Why Zack? Zack had told her he knew more of what was going on. She told them about the call with Zack, about his admission that he knew about the pipe bombs.

How strange, the detectives said—Eric and Dylan went bowling with her every week, Dylan called her every other night, they confided in her about the guns, and yet they never said a word about the pipe bombs. They must not have wanted me to know. Come on! the detectives said. You’re lying! Over and over, they mocked her about the disparity—the boys told Zack about the pipe bombs, but they never told her? No, no, never. That’s what they were like. When they wanted you to know something, you knew. When they wanted you in the dark, you stayed there. They could get very secluded about it, very isolated.

They kept on her. The guns were an isolated incident, she said. And Zack—he didn’t know much either. He knew they were making bombs, but he had no idea what they were up to.

The interrogation went on for four hours. Robyn held her ground.

Bomb squads had been through the school several times and found nearly a hundred bombs of varying sizes and composition—most exploded, some not. Most were pipe bombs or crickets, but one in the cafeteria stood out: a big white propane tank, standing upright, nearly two feet tall. It was wedged against a one-gallon gasoline can. The most ominous part was the alarm clock. There were remnants of an orange duffel bag, too, mostly burned away. The car bombs were also discovered, with more faulty wiring. The diversionary bomb in the field was disturbing for another reason. It had blown shortly after being moved, suggesting booby traps. Trip wires could be anywhere.

The FBI provided a group of crime scene specialists to assist in the massive effort of documenting the evidence. At 8:15 on Thursday morning, the team slogged through the cafeteria debris. Hundreds of backpacks, lunch trays, and half-eaten meals had been abandoned, many of them knocked over, singed by fire, or scattered by explosions, and everything had been soaked by the sprinkler system, which had run for hours. Muted pagers buried inside the backpacks beeped methodically, alerting the kids to phone home.

As they walked, an agent spotted a blue duffel bag ten feet from the burned-out orange bag with the big bomb. It was bulging and sized to fit the same contraption. They walked over. One of the agents pressed down slowly on the top. Hard. Probably another tank. They called help over: a couple of deputies and an FBI bomb technician. One of the officers was Mike Guerra, the same man who had investigated Eric Harris a year earlier. He sliced open the bag. They could see the end of a propane tank and an alarm clock that matched the other. There were still active bombs in here. How many more? They closed off the area immediately.

Had the propane bombs detonated, they would have incinerated most or all of the inhabitants of the commons. They would have killed five hundred people in the first few seconds. Four times the toll in Oklahoma City. More than the ten worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history combined.

For investigators, the big bombs changed everything: the scale, the method, and the motive of the attack. Above all, it had been indiscriminate. Everyone was supposed to die. Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings. It had not really been intended as a shooting at all. Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed.

That same day, officials announced the discovery of the big bombs, and their destructive power. It instigated a new media shock wave. But, curiously, journalists failed to grasp the implications. Detectives let go of the targeting theory immediately. It had been sketchy to begin with, and now it was completely disproved. The media never shook it off. They saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks. They filtered every new development through that lens.

23. Gifted Boy

Dylan Bennet Klebold was born brilliant. He started school a year early, and by third grade was enrolled in the CHIPS program: Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students. Even among the brains, Dylan stood out as a math prodigy. The early start didn’t impede him intellectually, but strained his shyness further.

The idealistic Klebolds named their two boys after Dylan Thomas and Lord Byron. Tom and Sue met at Ohio State University, studying art, Tom in sculpture. They moved to Wisconsin and earned more practical master’s: Tom in geophysics, Sue in education, as a reading specialist. Tom took an oil job and moved the family to Jeffco, before the Denver metroplex stretched out to reach them.

Dylan was born there, five months after Eric, September 11, 1981. Both grew up as small-town boys. Dylan earned merit badges in the Cub Scouts and won a Pinewood Derby contest. Sports were always big. He was a driven competitor, hated to lose. When he pitched in Little League he liked to whiff hitters so badly they tossed their bats. He would idolize major leaguers until the day he died.

The Klebold house was orderly and intellectual. Sue Klebold was a stickler for cleanliness, but Dylan enjoyed getting dirty. A neighbor—the woman who would struggle so hard to stop Eric before the massacre—fed Dylan’s early Huck Finn appetite. Judy Brown was the neighborhood mom, serving up treats, hosting sleepovers, and rounding up the boys for little adventures. Dylan met her son Brooks in the gifted program. Brooks had a long, egg-shaped face, like Dylan’s, narrowing at the jaw. But where Dylan’s eyes were animated, Brooks’s drooped, leaving a perpetual weary, worried expression. Both boys grew faster than their classmates—Brooks would eventually reach six-five. They would hang out all afternoon at the Browns’ house, munching Oreos on the sofa, asking Judy politely for another. Dylan was painfully shy with strangers, but he would run right up, plop down in her lap, and snuggle in there. He couldn’t be more adorable, until you tripped his fragile ego. It didn’t take much.

Judy first saw him blow when he was eight or nine. They had driven down to a creek bed for a typical adventure. Sue Klebold had come along—horrified by all the mud, but bearing it to bond with her boy. Officially, it was a crawdad hunt, but they were always on the lookout for frogs or tadpoles or anything that might slither by. Sue fretted about bacteria, hectoring the boys to behave and keep clean.

They’d brought a big bucket to haul the crawdads home, but came back up the hillside with nothing to show. Then one of the boys slogged out of the creek with a leech attached to his leg. The kids all went delirious. They plopped the leech into the frog jar—a mayonnaise bottle with holes punched in the lid—and watched it incessantly. They had a picnic lunch and then ran back for more fun in the creek. The water was only a foot deep, but too murky for them to see the bottom. Dylan’s tennis shoes squished down into the glop. All the boys were slipping around, but Dylan took a nastier slide. He wheeled his arms wildly to catch himself, lost the battle, and smacked down on his butt. His shorts were soaked instantly; dank black water splashed his clean T-shirt. Brooks and his brother, Aaron, howled; Dylan went ballistic.

“Stop!” he screamed. “Stop laughing at me! Stop! Stoooooooooooooooooooooooop!”

The laughing ended abruptly. Brooks and Aaron were a little alarmed. They had never seen a kid freak out like that. Judy rushed over to comfort Dylan, but he was inconsolable. Everybody was silent now, but Dylan kept screaming for them to stop.

Sue grabbed him by the wrist and whisked him away. It took her several minutes to calm him down.

Sue Klebold had come to expect the outbursts. Over time, Judy did, too.

“I would see Dylan get frustrated with himself and go crazy,” she said. He would be docile for days or months, then the pain would boil over and some minor transgression would humiliate him. Judy figured he would grow out of it, but he never did.

Detectives assembled portraits of the killers that felt maddeningly similar and vanilla: youngest sons of comfortable, two-parent, two-child, quiet small-town families. The Klebolds had more money; the Harrises were more mobile. Each boy grew up in the shadow of a single older sibling: a bigger, taller, stronger brother. Eric and Dylan would eventually share the same hobbies, classes, job, friends, clothing choices, and clubs. But they had remarkably different interior lives. Dylan always saw himself as inferior. The anger and the loathing traveled inward. “He was taking it out on himself,” Judy Brown said.

Dylan’s mother was Jewish. Sue Klebold had been born Sue Yassenoff, part of a prominent Jewish family in Columbus. Her paternal grandfather, Leo Yassenoff, was a philanthropist and a bit of a local tycoon. The city’s Leo Yassenoff Jewish Community Center was established by the foundation he funded. Classmates said Dylan never shared Eric’s fascination with Hitler, Nazis, or Germany, and some suggested it bothered him. Tom was Lutheran, and the family practiced some of each religion. They celebrated Easter and Passover, with a traditional Seder. Most of the year they remained quietly spiritual, without much organized religion.

In the mid-1990s, they took a stab at a traditional church. They joined the parish of St. Philip Lutheran Church; the boys went to services along with their parents. Their pastor, Reverend Don Marxhausen, described them as “hardworking, very intelligent, sixties kind of people. They don’t believe in violence or guns or racism and certainly aren’t anti-Semitic.” They liked Marxhausen, but formal church service just wasn’t a good fit for them. They attended for a brief time and then dropped away.

Sue spent her career in higher education. She began as a tutor, then a lab assistant, and finally worked with disabled students. In 1997, she left a local community college for a position with the Colorado Community College System. She coordinated a program there to help vocational/rehab students get jobs and training.

Tom did reasonably well in the oil business, but better at renovating and renting out apartments. He was great with repairs and remodeling. A hobby became a business. Tom and Sue formed Fountain Real Estate Management to buy and administer the properties. Tom continued consulting to independent oil companies part-time.

The Klebolds were rising financially, but worried about spoiling their kids. Ethics were central in their household, and the boys needed to learn restraint. Tom and Sue settled on appropriate figures to spend on the boys and stuck to them. One Christmas, Dylan wanted an expensive baseball card that would have consumed his entire gift budget. Sue was torn. One tiny present in addition to the card for her boy? Maybe she could spend a little extra. Nope. Austerity was a gift, too, and Dylan got what he’d asked for and no more.

In 1990, as metro Denver encroached into Jeffco, the Klebolds retreated beyond the hogback, the first strip of foothills hundreds of feet high, which from the air looked like the bumps along a hog’s back. The hogback functions like Denver’s coastline—it feels like civilization ends there. Roads are scarce; homes are distant and highly exclusive. Shops and commerce and activity are almost nonexistent. The family moved into a run-down glass and-cedar house on Deer Creek Mesa, inside a panoramic rock formation, a smaller version of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a few miles away. Tom gradually brought the house back into stunning shape. Dylan officially lived in the backcountry now—part-time country boy, riding over to the populated side every morning for school in suburbia.

In seventh grade, Dylan faced a frightening transition. He had been sheltered among the brainiacs in CHIPS. Ken Caryl Middle School was five times as big and it didn’t have a gifted program. Tom described Dylan lurching from “cradle to reality.”

24. Hour of Need

Reverend Marxhausen led a congregation of several thousand at St. Philip Lutheran Church. Quite a few attended Columbine. He spent much of the “hostage crisis” at Leawood, searching for students, calming parents. His parish appeared to be spared.

He organized a vigil that first evening, at St. Philip. He distributed communion, a task he found utterly soothing. The gently whispered interplay calmed him like a mantra: The body of Christ… Amen… The body of Christ… Amen…. It was a steady cadence: his softly commanding baritone punctuated by a brief, nearly inaudible response. A fluttering variety of tenors and sopranos colored his symphony, but the rhythm remained the same. As the communion line dwindled, a woman softly broke the spell. “The body of Christ…” he said.

“Klebold.”

What? It startled him at first, but this happened occasionally: a parishioner lost herself in prayer on the slow march up the aisle, and the pastor’s voice startled her out of it.

Reverend Marxhausen tried again: “The body of Christ…”

“Klebold.”

This time he recognized the word—from the TV; he had forgotten his brief association with the family.

He looked up. The woman continued: “Don’t forget them in their hour of need.”

She accepted the host and moved on.

That night, Marxhausen checked the parish rolls. Tom and Sue Klebold and their two boys, Dylan and Byron, had registered five years ago. They had not stayed long, but that did not diminish his responsibility. If they had failed to find a spiritual home, they remained under his care.

He found a family close to Tom and Sue and sent word that he was available.

They called a few days later. “I need your help,” Tom said. That was obvious; his voice was shaking. He needed a funeral for his boy. How embarrassing to ask after a five-year absence, but Tom was out of options.

He also had a requirement. “It has to be confidential,” he said.

Of course, Marxhausen said—to both counts. He talked to Tom and then Sue, asked how they were doing. “They used the word ‘devastated,’” he recalled later. “I didn’t want to ask them any more.”

Tom and Sue received the body on Thursday. The service was conducted on Saturday. It was done quietly, with just fifteen people, including friends, family, and clergy. Marxhausen brought another minister and both their wives. Dylan lay in an open casket, his face restored, no sign of the gaping head wound. He looked peaceful. His face was surrounded by a circle of Beanie Babies and other stuffed toys.

When Marxhausen arrived, Tom was in denial, Sue was falling apart. She crumpled into the pastor’s arms. Marxhausen engulfed her. Her frail body quaked; she sobbed there for perhaps a minute and a half—“which is a long time,” he said.

Tom just couldn’t see his little boy as that killer. “This was not my son” is how Marxhausen paraphrased his statements the next day. “What you see in the papers was not my son.”

The other mourners arrived, and the awkwardness only increased. A liturgy wasn’t going to help them. Marxhausen felt a terrible need to scrap his service and let them speak. “Do you mind if we just talk for a while?” he suggested. “And then we’ll worship.”

He shut the door and asked who wanted to begin.

“There was this one couple, they just poured out their hearts,” he recalled. “Their son used to play with Dylan when the boys were little. They loved Dylan.”

Where did the guns come from? Tom asked. They had never had more than a BB gun. Where did the violence come from? What was this Nazi stuff?

And the anti-Semitism? Sue said. She’s Jewish, Dylan was half Jewish, what kind of sense did this make?

They were such good parents, a friend said. Dylan was a great kid. “He was like our son!”

They went around and around—fewer than a dozen of them, but for forty-five minutes they spilled out anguish and confusion, and love for the awkward kid who’d had occasional outbursts.

Dylan’s brother, Byron, mostly listened. He sat quietly between Tom and Sue and finally spoke up near the end. “I want to thank you all for being here today, for my parents and myself,” he said. “I love my brother.”

Then Marxhausen read from Scripture and offered some muted encouragement. “True enough, there will be those who do not know grace and will want to give only judgment,” he said. But help would come in time and in surprising ways. “I have no idea how you are going to heal. But God still wants to reach out to you and will always reach out to you in some way.”

He read the Old Testament story of Absalom, beloved son of King David. Absalom skillfully ingratiated himself to his father, the court, and all the kingdom but secretly plotted to seize the throne. Eventually, he thrust Israel into civil war. He appeared poised to vanquish his father, but David’s generals prevailed. The king was informed first of the triumph, then of his son’s death. “David’s grief made the victory like a defeat, and the people stole silently into the city,” Marxhausen read from 2 Samuel. David wept and cried out, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son.”

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.

Marxhausen assumed the media would get wind of the service. He asked one of the Klebold attorneys how to handle the inquiries. The attorney said, “Just tell them what you’ve seen here tonight.”

So he did. He told the New York Times, which featured the account on the front page. Tom and Sue were racked by grief, guilt, and utter confusion, he said: “They lost their son, but their son was also a killer.” He told the story lovingly. He described Tom and Sue as “the loneliest people on the planet.”

Don Marxhausen made some of his parish exceptionally proud. That was their pastor—a man who could find compassion in his heart for anyone. A man capable of consoling the couple who had unwittingly produced a monster. That’s why they had packed the pews to hear him every Sunday.

Some of his parish, and much of the community, was appalled. Lonely? The Klebolds were lonely? Several of the victims were still awaiting burial. Survivors still faced surgery. It would be months before some would walk again, or talk again, or discover they never would. Some people had trouble rousing sympathy for the Klebolds. Their loneliness was not an especially popular concern.

Wayne and Kathy Harris presumably held some ceremony for Eric. But they have never once spoken to the press. Word never leaked.

25. Threesome

No one remembers for sure how Eric and Dylan met. Eric arrived at Ken Caryl Middle School in seventh grade. Dylan was already attending. The two boys met there at some point but didn’t connect right away.

They both continued on to Columbine High. Brooks Brown reentered the school district there. His friendship with Dylan had fallen off after his parents moved him into private schools years earlier. But he returned to public school his freshman year and met Eric on the bus. Pretty soon all three were tight.

They played video games for hours. Sometimes they played in person, but they also stayed up late competing online. They went to Columbine Rebel football games together freshman year. Eric was practically a celebrity because his brother was a starter on the varsity team.

Eric, Brooks, and Dylan were three aspiring intellectuals. They took an interest in classical philosophers and Renaissance literature. All three boys were shy at that point, but Eric began breaking through his shell. It started with occasional rumblings. Just two months into high school, he asked a classmate to Homecoming. She remembered him as nervous and quiet, largely forgettable, until he faked his suicide a few days after the dance.

“He had his friend take me over to his house,” she said later. “When I went there, he was lying with his head on a rock, and there was fake blood around him, and he was acting like he was dead.” It wasn’t an original stunt—probably ripped off from the 1970s classic movie Harold and Maude. But it weirded her out. She refused to date him again.

First semester freshman year, Eric turned in an “I Am” poem. His selfportrait informed the reader five times in eighteen lines how nice he was. “I am a nice guy who hates when people open their pop can just a little,” the poem began. Eric ended each stanza with that same line. He described himself flying above all the rest of us, bragged about his straight A’s, and demonstrated his emotional depth: “I cry when I see or hear a dog die.”

He kept much of the work he produced in high school. Apparently, he was proud of it. “I dream that I am the last person on earth,” he wrote in “I Am.”

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.

Eric shared his dreams in Internet chat rooms. He described them vividly to online chicks. In one, he was suspended inside a small dank room, like the interior hull of a ship. Futuristic yet decaying old computer screens lined the walls, covered with dust and mold and vines. The moon provided the only light, trickling dimly in through the portals, shadows creeping all around. A vast sea rose and fell monotonously. Nothing happened. Eric was overjoyed.

He rarely encountered humans in his creations—just the occasional combatant to extinguish or a disembodied voice to drop an ironic bon mot. 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. He described one of his dreamworlds to a girl in a chat room.

“wow kind of gloomy,” she responded.

“yeah. but its still nice. no people at all. kind of like, everyone is dead and has been for centuries.”

Happiness for Eric was eliminating the likes of us.

The girl said she could go for it, but only with some people. Eric said he’d only want a couple, and that led him to the burning question he loved to pose online:

With only a few people left, would she repopulate or choose extinction?

Probably extinction, she said.

Good answer. That’s what he was going for. That was the point of the entire conversation: “mmm,” he said. “i just wish I could actually DO this instead of just DREAM about it.”

Extinction fantasies cropped up regularly and would obsess Eric in his final years. But in his online chats, there was never a sense of him intending to do the deed. He had bold dreams for the world, but more modest ideas about himself. And he was pretty convinced that we would all take care of destroying the planet without his help anyway.

Zack Heckler had one class with Dylan freshman year—that was all it took. Finally, somebody understood him. Brooks and Eric were fun to hang with, but they never really got Dylan. Not the way Kibbie did. Zack did not care for that nickname, but it stuck. He was an insatiable snacker, so the kids had branded him “Kibble.” Great. Nicknames could be a bitch—almost impossible to shake a wussy one. So Zack was smart about it. He quit fighting the tag and adapted it. Kibble, KiBBz, Lord Kibbz—the last one wasn’t bad at all.

Zack and Dylan’s teacher gave them a lot of free study time. Eric would wander from the adjoining room. At first he came around to chat with Dylan, but pretty soon all three were cutting up. They played Doom, bowled, did sleepovers, went to ball games and drag races at Bandimere Speedway. They made fun of dumb kids and ignorant adults. Computer illiterates were the worst, especially when some fool put them in front of a class. The boys watched a ton of movies: lots of action and horror and science fantasy. They cruised the mall to pick up chicks. Eric did the talking. Zack and Dylan hung back and followed his lead.

Dylan joined the theater group. He was too shy for the stage, but he worked lights and sound. Eric had no interest in that. They got close with Nate Dykeman and Chris Morris, too. Mostly they hung at Dylan’s. “His parents were so nice to me,” Nate said. “Either they’d get doughnuts for me or they’d be making crepes or omelets.” Dylan also looked after his houseguests, worried about whether they were having a good time.

At Eric’s, it was totally strict when the major got home, but until then Eric had free rein down in the basement, where he’d set up his bedroom. They had girls over, and showed off how they nailed garden crickets with the BB gun.

Friendships came and went, but the bond between Zack and Dylan grew stronger. They were snarky, clever, and seething with teenage anger, but way too timid to show it.

Dylan and Zack needed Eric. Someone had to do the talking. Eric needed an audience; he also craved excitement. He was cool and detached, tough to rattle. Nothing seemed to faze him. Dylan was an unlit fuse. Eric led the parade. Perfect fit.

They were a threesome now.

Eric kept improving his Doom skills. When he got bored with the images id Software provided, Eric invented his own, sketching a menagerie of heroes and villains on his notepads. He hacked into the software and created new characters, unique obstacles, higher levels, and increasingly elaborate adventures. He created muscle-bound mutants with aviator-sunglass eyes, and hulk-sized demons with ox horns, claws, and fangs. Many of his warriors were decked out in medieval armor and submachine guns; one was blessed with flamethrowers for forearms. Victims were frequently on fire or freshly decapitated; sometimes they held their own head in their hands. Eric’s creations were unparalleled, in his view. “In this day and age it can be hard to find a skill that can be completely dominated and mastered,” he wrote in one assignment. “But I believe that I will always be the best at Doom creativity.”

Eric enjoyed the act of creation. “I often try to create new things,” he wrote in a freshman English paper titled “Similarities Between Zeus and I.” He hailed both of them as great leaders, finding no fault in their pettiness or malice but identifying common inclinations. “Zeus and I also get angry easily and punish people in unusual ways,” he wrote.

26. Help Is on the Way

Dave Sanders’s daughters were angry. Before they got confirmation that their dad was dead, they heard disturbing stories about his final hours.

“My concern is that my dad was left there,” Angie Sanders told an Australian newspaper. “[He] was still alive and not helped.”

The impression her family was getting was that twelve victims had been goners once the bullets left the chambers, but Dave Sanders had held on for well over three hours. From what Angie understood, her father could have been saved.

Dave’s daughters began looking into the reports but kept their mouths shut around their mother. They had to keep the TV off when she was awake. They snatched newspapers off the doorstep and magazines out of the mailbox. They had to protect Linda. She was already a wreck.

Dave Sanders was just a few feet from safety when the first shot hit him. He saw the killers, spun around, and ran for the corner, trying to save a few more students on the way there. One bullet got him in the back. It tore through his rib cage and exited through his chest. The other bullet entered through the side of his neck and came out his mouth, lacerating his tongue and shattering several teeth. The neck wound opened up one of his carotid arteries, the major blood routes to the brain. The shot to his back clipped his subclavian vein, a major vessel back to the heart. There was a lot of blood.

Everyone had been guessing which way was the safest to run. Rich Long, who was head of the technology department and a good friend of Dave’s, had chosen an opposite route. He first heard the shooting from the library, told students to get out, and directed a group down the main stairway right into the cafeteria, unaware that hundreds had just fled from that location. Toward the bottom of the stairs, they saw bullets flying outside the windows and reversed course. At the top of the stairs, they turned left, away from the library and into the science wing, which also included the music rooms. They arrived just in time to see Dave get shot.

Dave crashed into the lockers, then collapsed on the carpet. Rich and most of the students dove for the floor. Now Dave was really desperate.

“He was on his elbows trying to direct kids,” one senior said.

Eric and Dylan were both firing. They were lobbing pipe bombs down the length of the hall.

“Dave, you’ve got to get up!” Rich yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Dave pulled himself up, staggered a few feet around the corner. Rich hurried over. As soon as he was out of the line of fire, he ducked his shoulder under Dave’s arm. Another teacher got Dave from the other side, and they dragged him to the science wing, just a dozen feet away.

“Rich, they shot me in the teeth,” Dave said.

They moved past the first and second classrooms, then entered Science Room 3.

“The door opened, and Mr. Sanders [comes] in and starts coughing up blood,” sophomore Marjorie Lindholm said. “It looked like part of his jaw was missing. He just poured blood.”

The room was full of students. Their teacher had gone out to the hallway to investigate. When he came back, he told them to forget the test and ordered everybody up against the wall. The classroom door had a glass pane. To shooters who might be stalking through the halls, the room would appear empty if everyone huddled along the interior perimeter.

That’s when Dave stumbled in with two teachers assisting. He collapsed again, face-first, in the front of the room. “He left a couple of teeth where he landed,” a freshman girl said.

They got Dave into a chair. “Rich, I’m not doing so well,” he said.

“You’ll be OK. I’m going to go phone for help.”

Several teachers had arrived, so Rich ran back out into the melee, searching for a phone. He learned that somebody was already calling for help. He went back.

“I need to go get you some help,” Rich said. He went back into the smoky corridor and tried another lab. But the killers were getting closer, apparently right outside the lab’s door this time. Rich finally took cover. Dave had several adults with him, and plenty of calls had been made about the shooting. Rich had no doubt that help was on the way.

Kent Friesen, another teacher with Dave, went for immediate assistance. He ran into a nearby lab, where more students were huddled. “Who knows first aid?” he asked.

Aaron Hancey, a junior and an Eagle Scout, stepped up.

“Come with me,” Friesen said. Then all hell seemed to break loose out in the hallway.

“I could feel it through the walls,” Aaron said. “With each [blast], I could feel the walls move.” He was scared to go out there. But Friesen checked for shooters, bolted down the corridor, and Aaron followed.

Aaron ran through a rapid inspection of Dave’s condition: breathing steady, airway clear, skin warm, shoulder broken, gaping wounds, heavy blood loss. Aaron stripped off his own white Adidas T-shirt to stanch the flow. Other boys volunteered their shirts. He tore several into bandage strips and improvised a few tourniquets. He bundled others together into a pillow.

“I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go,” Dave said. He tried to stand, but failed.

Teachers attended to the students. They flipped over tables to barricade the door. They opened a partition in back to an adjoining science lab, and several kids rushed to the center, farthest from the doors. The gunfire and explosions continued. A fire erupted in a nearby room and a teacher grabbed a fire extinguisher to put it out. Screams filtered down the hall from the library. It was nothing like screams Marjorie Lindholm had heard before—screams like “when people are being tortured,” she said.

“It was like they were carrying out executions,” another boy in the room said. “You would hear a shot. Then there would be quiet. Then another shot. Bam. Bam. Bam.”

The screaming and gunfire both stopped. Silence, then more explosions. On and off and on again. The fire alarm began blaring. It was an earsplitting pitch designed to force people out of the building through sheer pain. The teachers and students could barely hear anything over the alarm’s shriek, but could just make out the steady flap of helicopters outside.

Someone turned on the giant TV suspended from the ceiling. They kept the volume off but the subtitles on. It was their school, from the outside. Much of the class was transfixed at first, but their attention waned quickly. Nobody seemed to know anything.

Aaron called his father, who used another line to call 911, so that paramedics could ask questions and relay instructions. Several other students and teachers called the cops. The science room group remained linked to authorities via multiple channels throughout the afternoon.

Sophomore Kevin Starkey, also an Eagle Scout, assisted Aaron. “You’re doing all right,” the boys whispered to Dave. “They’re coming. Just hold on. You can do it.” They took turns applying pressure, digging their palms into his wounds.

“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. The 911 operator instructed the group to open the door briefly: they were to tie a red shirt around the doorknob in the hallway. The SWAT team would look for it to identify the room. There was a lot of dissent about that directive in Science Room 3. Wouldn’t a red flag also attract the killers? And who was going to step out into that hallway? They decided to obey. Someone volunteered to tie the shirt to the doorknob. Around noon, teacher Doug Johnson wrote 1 BLEEDING TO DEATH on the whiteboard and moved it to the window, just to be sure.

Occasionally the TV coverage grabbed attention in the room. At one point, Marjorie Lindholm thought she spotted a huge mass of blood seeping out a door pictured on-screen. She was mistaken. Fear had taken control.

Each time Aaron and Kevin switched positions, they felt Dave’s skin grow a little colder. He was losing color, taking on a bluish cast. Where are the paramedics? they wondered. When will the ten minutes be up? Dave’s breathing began to slow. He drifted in and out. Aaron and Kevin rolled him gently on the tile floor to keep him conscious and to keep his airway clear. He couldn’t remain on his back for very long or he would choke on his own blood.

They pulled out wool safety blankets from a first-aid closet and wrapped him up to keep him warm. They asked him about coaching, teaching, anything to keep him engaged and stave off shock. They slipped his wallet out and began showing him pictures.

“Is this your wife?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Linda.”

He had lots of pictures, and they used them all. They talked about his daughters and his grandchildren. “These people love you,” the boys said. “This is why you need to live.”

Aaron and Kevin grew desperate. The treatment had exceeded scouting instruction. “You’re trained to deal with broken arms, broken limbs, cuts and scrapes—stuff you get on a camping trip,” Aaron said. “You never train for gunshot wounds.”

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.”

It was relatively calm for a while. The alarm kept blaring, the choppers kept thumping, and gunfire or explosions would periodically rumble through the hallways, somewhere off in the distance. Nothing had sounded particularly close for a while; nothing seemed imminent. Dave’s chest rose and fell, blood oozed out, but the boys could not rouse him. Aaron and Kevin kept trying.

Some of the kids gave up on police. Around 2:00 P.M., they informed the 911 operator they were going to hurl a chair through the window and get Dave out themselves. She insisted they abandon the plan, which she warned them might draw the attention of the killers.

At 2:38, the TV suddenly caught the room’s attention again. Patrick Ireland was tumbling out the library window. “Oh my God!” some of the kids yelled. They’d hidden quietly for hours, but this was too much. Coach Sanders was not an isolated case. A kid was just as bloody just down the hall. They had assumed it was bad out there; now they had proof. Some kids closed their eyes, pictured loved ones, and silently said good-bye.

Just a few minutes later, the danger suddenly drew close again: screams erupted from the next room. Then everything went silent for a minute. All at once, the door burst open and men in black rushed in. The killers were dressed in black. The invaders toted submachine guns. They waved them at the students, shouting fiercely, trying to outscream the fire alarm. “I thought they were the gunmen,” Marjorie Lindholm wrote later. “I thought that now I was going to die.”

Some of the men turned and pointed to the huge block letters on their backs: SWAT.

“Be quiet!” an officer yelled. “Put your hands on your heads and follow us out.”

“Someone’s got to stay with Mr. Sanders,” someone said.

“I will,” Aaron volunteered.

“No!” an officer said. “Everyone out.”

Then how about hauling Dave out with them, Kevin suggested. There were folded tables—they could improvise one as a stretcher.

No.

It seemed heartless, but the SWAT team was trained to make practical choices. Hundreds of students were trapped. The gunmen could reappear any moment. The team had to assume a battlefield mentality and evacuate the maximum number in the minimum time. They could send a medic back for the injured later.

The SWAT team led students single file down the stairs to the commons. They waded through three inches of water that had rained down from the sprinklers. Backpacks and pizza slices floated by. Don’t touch them, the officers warned. Don’t touch anything. A SWAT member held the door. He stopped each student, held them for two seconds, then tapped them on the shoulder and told them to run. That was a standard infantry maneuver. A single pipe bomb could take out an entire pack of children; a well-aimed machine-gun burst could do the same. Safer to space them.

Outside, the kids ran past two dead bodies: Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott. Marjorie Lindholm remembered “a weird look on their faces, and a weird color to their skin.” The girl just ahead of her stopped suddenly when she saw the bodies, and Marjorie caught up. A SWAT officer screamed at them to keep moving. Marjorie saw their guns trained right on her. She gave the girl a push, and they both took off.

Two SWAT officers stayed with Dave, and another called for help. It fell to a Denver SWAT member outside the building to recruit a paramedic. He spotted Troy Laman, an EMT who had driven out from the city and was manning a triage station. “Troy, I need you to go in,” the SWAT officer said. “Let’s go.”

Laman followed the officer through the flooded commons, up the stairway, past the rubble, and into Science Room 3. By that time, Dave had stopped breathing. According to emergency triage protocol, that qualified him as dead. “I knew there was nothing I could do for this guy,” said Laman, who had no equipment. “But because I was stuck in a room with him by myself for fifteen minutes, I wanted to help him.”

The SWAT officer eventually cleared Laman to keep moving. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said.

So Laman went on to the library. He was one of the first medics to go in.

Dave Sanders’s story got out fast. Both local papers, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, described his ordeal on Wednesday. On Thursday the Rocky, as it’s often called, ran a piece called POLICE DISPUTE CHARGES THEY WERE TOO SLOW. “A lot of people are angry,” one student said. But the bulk of the story focused on the police response.

“We had 1,800 kids rushing from the school,” said Jeffco sheriff’s spokesman Steve Davis. “The officers had no idea which were victims and which were potential suspects.”

The Rocky offered this summary of the SWAT response based on the department’s claims: “Within twenty minutes of the first panicked call for help, a makeshift six-man SWAT team rushed into the sprawling school, and within an hour, dozens of heavily armed officers in body armor launched a methodical, room-by-room search of the building.”

The department would eventually admit that it took more than twice that long, 47 minutes, for the first five-man team to enter. The other half of that team attended to wounded students on the lawn, but never proceeded in. A second team entered after nearly two hours. Until the killers’ bodies were found, that was it.

The situation grew hotter on Friday when a veteran suburban cop laid down thirteen roses in Clement Park and then described the SWAT response as “pathetic.”

“It pissed me off,” he told reporters. “I’d have someone in there. We are trained to do that. We are trained to go in there.”

The officer’s statement was widely reported. He became an instant symbol. And his department foolishly extended the story by placing him on nondisciplinary leave and ordering a “fitness for duty” evaluation. They backpedaled a few days later.

Members of the SWAT teams began responding in the press. “It was just a nightmare,” said a sergeant. “What parents need to understand is we wanted teams in there as quickly as we could. We were going into the situation blind. We had multiple explosions going off. We thought there could have been a band of terrorists in there.”

Officers were nearly as confused as TV viewers. Outside, they could hear the blasts. But once they entered, they couldn’t even hear one another. The fire alarm drowned out everything. Communication was limited to hand signals. “Had we heard gunfire and screaming, we would have gone right to that,” a SWAT officer explained.

The barrage of noise and strobe lights beat down their psyches like psychological warfare. Officers could not locate anyone with the alarm code to shut it down. They found an assistant principal, but she was so frazzled she couldn’t remember the digits. In desperation, officers tried to beat the alarm speakers off the walls. One tried to disable the control panel by smashing the glass cover with his rifle butt. The alarms and sprinklers continued until 4:04 P.M. The strobe light that flashed with the alarm continued for weeks.

Those were legitimate obstacles, the Sanders family acknowledged. But more than three hours after he was shot? Linda’s sister Melody was designated family spokesperson. “Some of his daughters are angry,” she told the New York Times a few days later. “They feel like, had they gone in and gotten Dave out sooner, he would have lived.”

Melody said the Sanders family didn’t hold the SWAT members responsible. But the system was a disaster. “It was utter chaos,” Melody said.

The family expressed gratitude for the efforts that had been made. As a gesture of goodwill, they invited the full SWAT teams to Dave’s funeral. All the officers attended.

27. Black

Eric was evolving inside. Sophomore year, the changes began to show. For his first fifteen years, Eric had concentrated on assimilation. Dylan had sought the same goal, with less success. Despite the upheavals of moving, Eric always made friends. Social status was important. “They were just like everybody else,” a classmate said later. Eric’s neighbor described him as nice, polite, preppy, and a dork. High school was full of dorks. Eric could live with that—for a while.

Sophomore year, he tried an edgier look: combat boots, all-black outfits, and grunge. He started shopping at a trendy shop called Hot Topic and the army surplus store. He liked the look. He liked the feeling. Their buddy Chris Morris began sporting a beret. That was a little much, Eric thought. He wanted to look different, not retarded. Eric was breaking out of his shell. He grew boisterous, moody, and aggressive. Sometimes he was playful, speaking in funny voices and flirting with girls. He had a lot of ideas and he began expressing them with confidence. Dylan never did.

Most of the girls who knew Eric described him as cute. He was aware of the consensus but didn’t quite accept it. He responded candidly to one of those chain e-mail questionnaires asking for likes, dislikes, and personal attributes. Under “Looks,” he wrote, “5’ 10’’ 140. skinny but handsome, some say.” The one thing he would like to change about himself was his weight. Such a freaking runt. He’d always hated his appearance—now at least he had a look.

Eric took some flack for the new getup—older kids and bigger guys razzed him sometimes, but nothing exceptional. And he was talking back now and provoking confrontations. He’d shaken off his silence along with the preppy uniform.

Dylan remained quiet right up until the end. He wasn’t much for mouthing off, except in rare sudden bursts that freaked everyone out a little. He followed Eric’s fashion lead but a less intense version, so he took a lot less ribbing. Eric could have silenced the taunts anytime by conforming again, but by this point, he got a kick out of standing out.

“The impression I always got from them was they kind of wanted to be outcasts,” another classmate said. “It wasn’t that they were labeled that way. It’s what they chose to be.”

“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. Their friends respected one another and ridiculed the conformity of the vanilla wafers looking down on them. They had no desire to emulate the jocks. Could there be a faster route to boredom?

For Dylan, different was difficult. For Eric, different was good.

For Halloween that year, Eric Dutro, a junior, wanted to go as Dracula. He needed a cool coat, something dramatic—he had a flair for theatrics—so his parents picked up a long black duster at Sam’s Club. The kids referred to this as a trench coat.

The costume didn’t work out, but the trench coat was cool. Eric Dutro hung on to it; he started wearing it to school. It made quite an impression. The trench coat turned a whole lot of heads, and Dutro loved turning heads.

He had a hard time at school. Kids at Columbine picked on him. Kids would ridicule him relentlessly, calling him a freak and a faggot. Eventually he fought back the only way he knew how: by upping the ante. If they were going to call him freak, he was going to give them one hell of a freak show. The trench coat made a nice little addition to his freakdrobe.

Not surprisingly, Dutro hung with a bunch of kids who liked turning heads, too. After a while, several of them were sporting trench coats. They would dress all in black and wear the long coats even in the summer. Somewhere along the line, someone referred to them as the Trench Coat Mafia, TCM for short. It stuck.

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.

Eric and Dylan were not among them. Each of them knew some of the TCM kids, and Eric, especially, would become buddies with Chris. That was as close as they came.

Eventually, after the TCM heyday was over, Eric got himself a trench coat. Dylan followed. They wore them to the massacre, for both fashion and functional considerations. The choice would cause tremendous confusion.

28. Media Crime

The Trench Coat Mafia was mythologized because it was colorful, memorable, and fit the existing myth of the school shooter as outcast loner. All the Columbine myths worked that way. And they all sprang to life incredibly fast—most of the notorious myths took root before the killers’ bodies were found.

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. Most of those elements existed at Columbine—which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders. The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler’s birthday, minorities, or Christians.

Few people knowledgeable about the case believe those myths anymore. Not reporters, investigators, families of the victims, or their legal teams. And yet most of the public takes them for granted. Why?

Media defenders blame the chaos: two thousand witnesses, wildly conflicting reports—who could get all those facts straight? But facts were not the problem. Nor did time sort them out. The first print story arrived in an extra edition of the Rocky Mountain News. It went to press at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, before the bodies in the library were found. The Rocky’s nine-hundred-word summary of the massacre was an extraordinary piece of journalism: gripping, empathetic, and astonishingly accurate. It nailed the details and the big picture: two ruthless killers picking off students indiscriminately. It was the first story published that spring to get the essence of the attack right—and one of the last.

It is an axiom of journalism that disaster stories begin in confusion and grow clearer over time. Facts rush in, the fog lifts, an accurate picture solidifies. The public accepts this. But the final portrait is often furthest from the truth.

One hour into the Columbine horror, news stations were informing the public that two or more gunmen were behind it. 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.

Ludicrous or not, the TCM myth was the most defensible of the big media blunders. 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. Few were even naming Eric and Dylan. In a school of two thousand, most of the student body didn’t even know the boys. Nor had many seen gunfire directly. Initially, most students told reporters they had no idea who attacked them.

That changed fast. Most of the two thousand got themselves to a television or kept a constant cell phone vigil with viewers. It took only a few TV mentions for the trench coat connection to take hold. It sounded so obvious. Of course! Trench coats, Trench Coat Mafia!

TV journalists were actually careful. They used attribution and disclaimers like “believed to be” or “described as.” Some wondered out loud about the killers’ identities and then described the TCM, leaving viewers to draw the link. 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. But reporters homed in on the idea. They were responsible about how they addressed the rumors, but blind to the impact of how often.

Kids “knew” the TCM was involved because witnesses and news anchors had said so on TV. They confirmed it with friends watching similar reports. Word spread fast—conversation was the only teen activity in south Jeffco Tuesday afternoon. Pretty soon, most of the students had multiple independent confirmations. They believed they knew the TCM was behind the attack as a fact. From 1:00 to 8:00 P.M., the number of students in Clement Park citing the group went from almost none to nearly all. They weren’t making it up, they were repeating it back.

The second problem was a failure to question. In those first five hours, not a single person on the CNN feeds asked a student how they knew the killers were part of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Print reporters, talk show hosts, and the rest of the media chain repeated those mistakes. “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.

Most of the myths were in place by nightfall. By then, it was a given that the killers had been targeting jocks. 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. Like the other myths, it began with a kernel of truth.

In the first few hours, a shattered junior named Bree Pasquale became the marquee witness of the tragedy. She had escaped unharmed but splattered in blood. Bree described the library horror in convincing detail. Radio and television stations replayed her testimony relentlessly: “They were shooting anyone of color, wearing a white hat, or playing a sport,” she said. “And they didn’t care who it was and it was all at close range. Everyone around me got shot. And I begged him for ten minutes not to shoot me.”

The problem with Bree Pasquale’s account is the contradiction between facts and conclusion. That’s typical of witnesses under extreme duress. If the killers were shooting “everyone,” didn’t that include jocks, minorities, and hat wearers? Four times in that brief statement, she described random killing. Yet reporters glommed on to the anomaly in her statement.

Bullying and racism? Those were known threats. Explaining it away was reassuring.

By evening, the target theory was dominating most broadcasts; nearly all the major papers featured it. The Rocky and the Washington Post refused to embrace the targeting theory all week, but they were lonely dissenters.

Initially, most witnesses refuted the emerging consensus. Nearly all described the killing as random. All the papers and the wire services produced a total of just four witnesses advancing the target theory Wednesday morning—each one contradicting his or her own description. Most of the papers advanced the theory with just one student who had actually seen it—some had zero. Reuters attributed the theory to “many witnesses” and USA Today to “students.”

“Student” equaled “witness.” Witness to everything that happened that day, and anything about the killers. It was a curious leap. Reporters would not make that mistake at a car wreck. Did you see it? If not, they move on. But journalists felt like foreigners stepping into teen culture. They knew kids can hide anything from adults—but not from each other. That was the mentality: Something shocking happened here; we’re baffled, but kids know. So all two thousand were deputized as insiders. If students said targeting, that was surely it.

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.

Journalists were not relying exclusively on “students.” The entire industry was depending on the Denver Post. The paper sent fifty-four reporters, eight photographers, and five artists into the field. They had the most resources and the best contacts. Day one, they were hours ahead of the national pack; the first week they were a day ahead on most developments. The Rocky Mountain News had a presence as well, but they had a smaller staff, and the national press trusted the Post. It did not single-handedly create any of the myths, but as the Post bought into one after another after another, each mistaken conclusion felt safe. The pack followed.

The Jeffco Parks and Recreation District began hauling truckloads of hay bales into Clement Park. It was a mess. Thousands of people gathered at the northeast corner of the park on Wednesday, and tens of thousands appeared on Thursday and Friday. The snow had begun fluttering down Wednesday, and the foot traffic tore the field to shreds. By Thursday it was an enormous mud pit. Nobody seemed to care much, but county workers scattered thick layers of hay in winding paths all along the makeshift memorials.

They didn’t know it yet, they had no idea there was a name for it, but many of the survivors had entered the early stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many had not. It wasn’t a matter of how close they had been to witnessing or experiencing the violence. Length and severity of exposure increased their odds of mental health trouble down the road, but long-term responses were highly varied, depending on each individual. Some kids who had been in the library during the shootings would turn out fine, while others who had been off to Wendy’s would be traumatized for years.

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a professor in psychiatry at Michigan State University and a leading expert on PTSD, would be brought in by the FBI a few months later and would spend years advising mental health workers on the case. He and a group of psychiatrists had first developed the term in the 1970s. They had observed a phenomenon that was stress-induced but was qualitatively more severe, and brought on by a really traumatic experience. This was something that produced truly profound effects and lasted for years or, if untreated, even a lifetime.

A far milder and more common response was also under way: survivor’s guilt. It began playing out almost immediately, in the hallways of the six local hospitals where the injured were recovering. At St. Anthony’s, the first week, the waiting rooms were packed with students coming to see Patrick Ireland. Every seat in every room was taken. Dozens of students waited in the hallways.

Patrick spent the first days in ICU. Most visitors were refused, but the kids kept streaming into the hospital room anyway. They just needed to be there.

“You have to realize that this was part of their healing too,” Kathy Ireland said.

All day, some of them stayed, and well into the evening. The staff started bringing food in once they realized some of the kids hadn’t been eating.

Patrick’s situation looked grim. His doctors were just hoping to keep him alive. They advised John and Kathy to keep expectations low: whatever condition they observed the first day or two would be the prognosis for the rest of his life. John and Kathy accepted this. And they saw a paralyzed boy, struggling mightily to speak gibberish.

The medical staff chose to not operate on Patrick’s broken right foot. They cleaned out the wound and placed a brace around it. Why? his parents asked. There were more pressing concerns, they were told. And Patrick was never going to use that foot.

John and Kathy were devastated. But they had to be realists. They turned their attention to raising an invalid, and figuring out how to help him be happy that way.

Patrick was unaware of the prognosis. It never occurred to him that he might not walk. He viewed the injury like a broken bone: you wear a cast, you build the muscle back, you pick your life up where you left off. He knew it would be tougher than the time he broke his thumb. A lot tougher. It might take three or four times as long to recover. He assumed he would recover.

Patrick’s friend Makai was released from St. Anthony’s Friday. He had been shot in the knee alongside Patrick. Reporters were invited into the hospital library for a press conference, broadcast on CNN. Makai was in a wheelchair. It turned out that he’d known Dylan.

“I thought he was an all right guy,” Makai said. “Decent, real smart.”

They’d taken the same French class and worked together on school projects.

“He was a nice guy, never treated me bad,” Makai said. “He wasn’t the kind of person he’s being portrayed as.”

Patrick made improvement with his speech the first week, and his vitals began returning to normal. On Friday, he was moved out of the ICU and into a regular room. Once he had settled in, his parents decided it was time to ask him the burning question. Had he gone out the library window?

They knew. They just had to know if he did. Did he know why he was there? Was the trauma of the truth still ahead?

“Well, yeah!” he stammered. Were they just figuring that out?

He was incredulous, Kathy said later. “He looked at us like, ‘How could you be so ignorant?’” She was OK with that. All she felt was relief.

That same week, Dr. Alan Weintraub, a neurologist from Craig Hospital, came to see Patrick. Craig is one of the leading rehab centers in the world, specializing in brain and spinal cord injuries. It’s located in Jeffco, not far from the Irelands’ home. Dr. Weintraub examined Patrick, reviewed his charts, and gave John and Kathy his assessment: “The first thing I can say to you is there’s hope.”

They were astounded, relieved, and perplexed. Later, the discrepancy made sense to them. The staffs had different expertise and different perspectives. St. Anthony’s specialized in trauma. “Their goal is to save lives,” Kathy said. “At Craig the goal is to rebuild them.”

They began making arrangements to transfer Patrick to Craig.

By Thursday, students in Clement Park were angry. The killers were dead, so much of the anger was deflected: onto Goths, Marilyn Manson, the TCM, or anyone who looked, dressed, or acted like the killers—or the media’s portrayal of them.

The killers were quickly cast as outcasts and “fags.”

“They’re freaks,” said an angry sophomore from the soccer team. “Nobody really liked them, just’cause they—” He paused, then plunged ahead. “The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them.”

Several jocks reported having seen the killers and friends “touching” in the hallways, groping each other or holding hands. A football player captivated reporters with tales of group showering.

The gay rumor was almost invisible in the media, but rampant in Clement Park. The stories were vague. Everything was thirdhand. None of the storytellers even knew the killers. 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.

Eric and Dylan’s friends generally shrugged off the stories. One of them was outraged. “The media’s taken my friends and made them to be gay and neo-Nazis and all these hater stuff,” he said. “They’re portraying my friends as idiots.” The angry boy was a brawny six-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants. He ranted for several hours, and he was soon all over the national press—sometimes looking a bit ridiculous. He stopped talking. His father began screening media calls.

A few papers mentioned the gay rumors in passing. Reverend Jerry Falwell described the killers as gay on Rivera Live. A notorious picketer of gay funerals issued a media alert saying, “Two filthy fags slaughtered 13 people at Columbine High.” Most significantly, the Drudge Report quoted Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks. But most major media carefully sidestepped the gay rumor.

The press failed to show similar deference to Goths. Some of the most withering attacks were reserved for that group: a morose-acting subculture best known for powder-white face paint and black clothes, black lips, and black fingernails, accented by heavy, dripping mascara. They were mistakenly associated with the killers on Tuesday by students unfamiliar with the Goth concept. Equally clueless reporters amplified the rumor. One of the most egregious reports was an extended 20/20 segment ABC aired, just one night after the attack. Diane Sawyer introduced it by noting that unnamed police said “the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before.” It was true, Goths had killed before—as had members of every conceivable background and subculture.

Correspondent Brian Ross described a double murder committed by Goths and two ghastly attempts in graphic detail. He presented them as evidence of a pattern: a Goth crime wave poised to sweep through suburbia and threaten us all. “The so-called Gothic movement has helped fuel a new kind of teenage gang—white suburban gangs built around a fascination with the grotesque and with death,” he said. He played other examples, as well as a horrifying 911 tape of a victim calling for help with a knife still protruding from his chest. “Hurry,” he pleaded. “I’m not going to last too much longer.” Ross described the killers in that case as “proud, self-proclaimed members of the Gothic movement, and like the students involved in yesterday’s shootings, focused on white extremism and hate.”

The only real problems with Ross’s report were that Goths tended to be meek and pacifist; they had never been associated with violence, much less murder; and, aside from long black coats, they had almost nothing in common with Eric and Dylan.

Where it avoided snap conclusions, much of the reporting was first rate. The Rocky passed on most of the myths, and it, the Post, and the Times ran excellent bios on the killers. On TV, several correspondents helped survivors convey their stories with empathy, dignity, and insight. Katie Couric was a particular standout. And several papers tried to rein in the Goth scare. “Whatever the two young men in Colorado might have imagined themselves to be, they weren’t Goths,” a USA Today story began. “The morose community, much too diffuse to be called a movement, is at its heart quiet, introverted and pacifistic… Goths tend to be outcasts, not because they are violent or aggressive, but the opposite.”

Thursday, a young Goth from a nearby school showed up in Clement Park. Andrew Mitchell was a striking sight, standing alone in a foot of snow. Black on black on white on white. Jet-black hair cut long on top, shaved on the sides, bare skin above his ears. A silver-and-blue support ribbon pinned to his black lapel. The densely packed crowd parted. A ten-foot perimeter opened up around him. Reporters rushed in.

“Why are you here!” one demanded.

“To pay my respects,” Mitchell said. Then he offered a plea: “Picture these kids, for years being thrown around, treated horribly. After a while you can’t stand it anymore. They were completely wrong. But there are reasons for why they did it.”

Mitchell was wildly mistaken about the killers’ lives and their intentions. But it was already the pervasive assumption. The massacre brought widespread tales of alienation out into the open. Salon published a fascinating piece called “Misfits Who Don’t Kill.” It consisted of first-person accounts from rational adults who had shared similar fantasies but lived to avoid them. “I remember sitting in biology class trying to figure out how much plastic explosive it might take to reduce the schoolhouse—my biggest source of fear and anxiety—to rubble,” one man wrote. “I scowled at those who teased me, and I had fantasies of them begging me for mercy, maybe even with a gun in their mouths. Was I a sick person? I don’t think so. I’m sure there were thousands of other students who had the same fantasies I did. We just never acted on them.”

The more animosity reporters sensed, the deeper they probed. What was it like to be an outcast at Columbine? Pretty hard, most of the kids admitted. High school was rough. Most of the students in Clement Park were still speaking confessionally, and everyone had a brutal experience to share. The “bullying” idea began to pepper motive stories. The concept touched a national nerve, and soon the anti-bullying movement took on a force of its own. Everyone who had been to high school understood what a horrible problem it could be. Many believed that addressing it might be the one good thing to come out of the tragedy.

All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. “Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school’s athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week’s deadly violence,” it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.

There’s no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High. After the tragedy, Mr. D took a lot of flak for bullying, particularly since he insisted he was unaware it had gone on.

“I’m telling you, as long as I’ve been an administrator here, if I’m aware of a situation, then I deal with that situation,” he said. “And I believe our teachers, and I believe our coaches. I turned my own son in. I believe that strongly in rules.”

That may have been part of his downfall. Mr. D did believe that strongly in the rules. He held his staff to the same standard, and seemed to believe they would meet it. His unusual rapport with the kids also created a blind spot. It was all smiles when Mr. D strode down the corridor. They sincerely warmed at the sight of him, and sought to please him as well. Sometimes he mistook that joy for pervasive bliss in his high school.

Personal affinities also obscured the problem. Mr. D knew he was drawn to sports. He worked hard to offset that by attending debate tournaments, drama tryouts, and art shows. He conferred regularly with the student senate. But those were all success stories. Mr. D balanced athletics and academics better than overachievers and unders.

“I don’t think he had a preference on purpose,” a pierced-out girl in a buzz cut and red tartan boots said. “He’s got a lot of school spirit, and I think he aims it in the direction he’s most comfortable with, like school sports and student congress.” She saw DeAngelis as a sincere man, making a tremendous effort to interact with students, unaware that his natural inclination toward happy, energetic students created a blind spot for the outsiders. “My Goth friends hated the school,” she said.

The crowds in Clement Park kept growing, but the students among them dwindled. Wednesday afternoon they poured their hearts out to reporters. Wednesday evening they watched a grotesque portrait of their school on television. It was a charitable picture at first, but it grew steadily more sinister as the week wore on. The media grew fond of the adjective “toxic.” Apparently, Columbine was a horrible place. It was terrorized by a band of reckless jock lords and ruled by an aristocracy of snotty rich white kids in the latest Abercrombie & Fitch line.

Some of that was true—which is to say, it was high school. But Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America. A few students were happy to see some ugly truths about their high school exposed. Most were appalled. The media version was a gross caricature of how they saw it, and of what they thought they had described.

It made it difficult for social scientists or journalists to come to Littleton later, to study the community in-depth and see what was really going on. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had played out in full force: by observing an entity, you alter it. How bad were the Columbine bullies? How horribly were the killers treated? Every scrap of testimony after day two is tainted. Heisenberg was a quantum physicist, observing electron behavior. But social scientists began applying his principle to humans. It was remarkable how similarly we behaved. During the third week of April, Littleton was observed beyond all recognition.

The bright side is that a tremendous amount of data was gathered in those first few days, while students were naive, before any developed an agenda. Hundreds of journalists were in the field, and nearly as many detectives were documenting their findings in police reports. Those reports would remain sealed for nineteen months. Virtually all the early news stories were infested with erroneous assumptions and comically wrong conclusions. But the data is there.

29. The Missions

Two years before he hauled the bombs into the Columbine cafeteria, Eric took a crucial step. He had always maintained an active fantasy life. His extinction fantasies progressed steadily, but reality held firm and was completely separate from his fantasy life. Then one day, midway through sophomore year, Eric began to take action. He wasn’t angry, cruel, or particularly hateful. His campaign against the inferiors was comically banal. But it was real.

The mischief started as a threesome. Dylan and Zack were co-conspirators and squad mates. In his written accounts, Eric referred to the two by their code names, VoDKa and KiBBz. They launched the escapades in January 1997, second semester of their sophomore year. They would meet at Eric’s house mostly, sneak out after midnight, and vandalize houses of kids he didn’t like. Eric chose the targets, of course.

They had to be careful sneaking out. They couldn’t wake his parents. Lots of rocks to navigate in Eric’s backyard and a pesky neighbor’s dog kept “barking its faulking head off,” Eric wrote. Then they plunged into a field of tall grass he compared to Jurassic Park’s Lost World. To Eric, it was one hell of an adventure. He had been role-playing Marine heroes on military maneuvers since grade school. Finally, he was in the field conducting them.

Eric dubbed his pranks “the missions.” As they got under way, he ruminated about misfit geniuses in American society. He didn’t like what he saw. Eric was a voracious reader, and he had just gobbled up John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, which includes a fable about the idiot savant Tularecito. The young boy had extraordinary gifts that allowed him to see a world his peers couldn’t even imagine—exactly how Eric was coming to view himself, though without Tularecito’s mental shortcomings. Tularecito’s peers failed to see his gifts and treated him badly. Tularecito struck back violently, killing one of his antagonists. He was imprisoned for life in an insane asylum. Eric did not approve. “Tularecito did not deserve to be put away,” he wrote in a book report. “He just needed to be taught to control his anger. Society needs to treat extremely talented people like Tularecito much better.” All they needed was more time, Eric argued—gifted misfits could be taught what was right and wrong, what was acceptable to society. “Love and care is the only way,” he said.

Love and care. Eric wrote this at the very moment he started moving against his peers. Sometimes he attacked their houses to retaliate for perceived slights, but most often for the offense of inferiority.

Between missions, the boys got into unscripted trouble. Eric got mad at Brooks Brown and stopped talking to him. Then he escalated a snowball fight by breaking a chunk of ice off a drainpipe. He hurled it at the car of a friend of Brooks’s and dented the trunk. He grabbed another hunk and cracked the windshield of Brooks’s Mercedes.

“Fuck you!” Brooks screamed. “You’re going to pay for this!”

Eric laughed. “Kiss my ass, Brooks. I ain’t paying for shit.”

Brooks drove home and told his mom. Then he headed to Eric’s. He was furious, but Kathy Harris remained calm. She invited Brooks in and gave him a seat in the living room. Brooks knew lots of Eric’s secrets, and he spilled them all. “Your son’s been sneaking out at night,” he said. “He’s going around vandalizing things.” Kathy seemed incredulous. She tried to calm the kid down. Brooks kept ranting: “He’s got liquor in his room. Search it! He’s got spray-paint cans. Search it!” She wanted him to talk, but he felt that she was acting like a school counselor. He was out of there, he said—he was getting out before Eric got back.

Brooks went home and discovered his friend had grabbed Eric’s backpack, taking it hostage, more or less. Brooks’s mom, Judy, took control of the situation. She ordered everyone into her car and brought them to see Eric.

He was still enjoying the snowball fight. “Lock the doors!” Judy demanded. She rolled her window down a crack and yelled over to Eric: “I’ve got your backpack and I’m taking it to your mom’s. Meet us over there.”

Eric grabbed hold of the car and screamed ferociously. When she pulled away, he hung on, wailing harder. Eric reminded her of an escaped animal attacking a car at a wildlife theme park. Brooks’s friend shifted to the other side of the back seat. Judy was terrified. They had never seen this side of Eric. They were used to Dylan’s tirades, but he was all show. Eric looked like he meant it.

Judy got up enough speed, and Eric let go. At his house, Eric’s mom greeted them in the driveway. Judy handed her the backpack and unloaded the story. Kathy began to cry. Judy felt bad. Kathy had always been so sweet.

Wayne came home and threw the fear of God into Eric. He interrogated him about the alcohol, but Eric had it hidden and played innocent convincingly. He wasn’t taking any chances, though—as soon as he got a chance, he destroyed the stash. “I had to ditch every bottle I had and lie like a fuckin salesman to my parents,” he wrote.

That night, he went with the confessional approach. He admitted a weakness to his dad: the truth was, he was afraid of Mrs. Brown. That explained a lot, Wayne thought.

Kathy wanted to hear more from the Browns; Wayne bitterly resented the interference. Who was this hysterical woman? Or her conniving little brat Brooks? Wayne was hard enough on the boys without outsiders telling him how to raise his sons.

Kathy called Judy that night. Judy felt she really wanted to listen, but Wayne was negative and dismissive in the background. It was kids’ stuff, he insisted. It was all blown way out of proportion. He got on the line and told Judy that Eric had copped to the truth: he was afraid of her.

“Your son isn’t afraid of me!” Judy said. “He came after me at my car!”

Wayne jotted notes about the exchange on a green steno pad. He outlined Eric’s misdeeds, including getting in Judy Brown’s face and “being a little bully.” At the bottom of the page he summarized. He found Eric guilty of aggression, disrespect, property damage, and idle threats of physical harm. But he did not look kindly on the Browns. “Over-reaction to minor incident,” he concluded. He dated it February 28, 1997.

At school the next day, Brooks heard Eric was making threats about him. He told his parents that night. They called the cops. A deputy came by to question them, then went to see the Harrises. Wayne called a few minutes later. He was bringing Eric over to apologize.

Judy told Brooks and his brother, Aaron, to hide. “I want you both in the back bedroom,” she said. “And don’t come out.”

Wayne waited in the car. He refused to supply moral support—Eric had to walk up to the door and face Mr. and Mrs. Brown alone.

Eric had regained his normal composure. He was exceptionally contrite. “Mrs. Brown, I didn’t mean any harm,” he said. “And you know I would never do anything to hurt Brooks.”

“You can pull the wool over your dad’s eyes,” she said, “but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

Eric gaped. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Yes, I am. And if you ever come up our street, or if you ever do anything to Brooks again, I’m calling the police.”

Eric left in a huff. He went home and plotted revenge. He was wary now, but he wouldn’t back down. The next mission target was the Browns’ house. The team also hit “random houses.” Mostly, they would set off fireworks, toilet paper the places, or trigger a house alarm; they also stuck Silly Putty to Brooks’s Mercedes. Eric had been bragging about the missions on his Web site, and at this point, he posted Brooks’s name, address, and phone number. He encouraged readers to harass “this asshole.”

Brooks had betrayed Eric. Brooks had to be punished, but he was never significant. Eric had bigger ideas. He was experimenting with timers now, and those offered new opportunities. Eric wired a dozen firecrackers together and attached a long fuse. He was fastidiously analytical, but he had no way to assess his data, because he fled as soon as he lit the fuses.

Judy Brown viewed Eric as a criminal in bloom. She and Randy spoke to Eric’s dad repeatedly. They kept calling the cops.

Wayne did not appreciate that. He would do anything to protect his sons’ futures. Discipline was a no-brainer, but the boys’ reputations were out of his control. Every kid was going to screw up now and then. The important thing was keeping it inside the family. One black mark could wipe out a lifetime of opportunities. What was the purpose of instilling discipline if one crazy family could ruin Eric’s permanent record?

Wayne scrutinized Eric for a while, but ultimately he bought into his son’s version. Eric was smart enough to cop to some bad behavior. His calm contrition made the Browns look hysterical.

Three days after the ice incident, Wayne was grappling with more parents and a Columbine dean. Wayne pulled out the six-by-nine-inch pad and labeled the cover “ERIC.” He filled three more notebook pages over two days. Brooks knew about the missions and had gone to see a dean. The dean was concerned about alcohol consumption and damage to school property. He would get the police involved if necessary.

Eric played dumb. The word “denial” appears in large letters on two consecutive pages of Wayne’s journal. Both times the word is circled, but the first entry is scribbled out. “Denial of even knowledge about alcohol subject between he & me,” the second entry reads. “Didn’t know what [Dean] Place was talking about.” Wayne concluded that the issue was “Over & done—don’t discuss with friends.” He repeatedly stressed that silence was key. “Talked to Eric: Basically—finished,” he wrote. “Leave each other alone don’t talk about it. Agreed all discussion is over with.”

Wayne Harris apparently breathed easier for a while. He didn’t write in his journal for a month and a half. Then come four rapid entries documenting a slew of phone calls. First, Wayne talked to Zack’s mom and another parent. The next day, two years and one day before the massacre, a deputy from the Jeffco sheriff’s department called. Wayne put his guard up. “We feel victimized, too,” he wrote. “We don’t want to be accused every time something happens. Eric learned his lesson.” He crossed out the last phrase and wrote “is not at fault.”

The real problem was Brooks, Wayne was convinced. “Brooks Brown is out to get Eric,” he wrote. “Brooks had problems with other boys. Manipulative & Con Artist.”

If the problem continued, it might be time to hire a mediator. Or a lawyer. Wayne’s last entry on the feud occurred a week later, on April 27, after a call with Judy Brown. “Eric hasn’t broken promise to Mr. Place—the dean—about leaving each other alone,” he wrote. At the bottom of the page he repeated his earlier sentiments: “We feel victimized, too. Manipulative, Con Artist.”

Eric totally rocked on the missions. Dylan enjoyed them, too—he liked the camaraderie, especially. He fit in there, he had a role to play, he belonged. But the missions were brief diversions; they were not making him happy. In fact, Dylan was miserable.

30. Telling Us Why

Jeffco had a problem. Before Eric and Dylan shot themselves, officers had discovered files on the boys. The cops had twelve pages from Eric’s Web site, spewing hate and threatening to kill. For detectives, a written confession, discovered before the killers were captured, was a big break. It certainly simplified the search warrant. But for commanders, a public confession, which they had sat on since 1997—that could be a PR disaster.

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. Sometime around noon April 20, the file was shuttled to the command center in a trailer set up in Clement Park. Jeffco officials quoted Eric’s site extensively in the search warrants executed that afternoon, but then denied ever seeing it. (They would spend several years repeating those denials. They suppressed the damning warrants as well.) Then Sheriff Stone fingered Brooks as a suspect on The Today Show.

It was a rough time for the Brown family. The public got two conflicting stories: Randy and Judy Brown had either labored to prevent Columbine or raised one of its conspirators. Or both.

To the Browns it looked like retribution. Yes, their son had been close to the killers—close enough to see it coming. The Browns had blown the whistle on Eric Harris over a year earlier, and the cops had done nothing. After Eric went through with his threats, the Browns were fingered as accomplices instead of heroes. They couldn’t believe it. They told the New York Times they had contacted the sheriff’s department about Eric fifteen times. Jeffco officials would insist for years that the Browns never met with an investigator—despite holding a report indicating they had.

The officers knew they had a problem, and it was much worse than the Browns realized. 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. Guerra’s affidavit was convincing. It spelled out all the key components: motive, means, and opportunity.

A few days after the massacre, about a dozen local officials slipped away from the Feds and gathered clandestinely in an innocuous office in the county Open Space Department building. It would come to be known as the Open Space meeting. The purpose was to discuss the affidavit for a search warrant. How bad was it? What should they tell the public?

Guerra was driven to the meeting, and told never to discuss it outside that group. He complied.

The meeting was kept secret, too. That held for five years. March 22, 2004, Guerra would finally confess it happened, to investigators from the Colorado attorney general. He described it as “one of those cover-your-ass meetings.”

District Attorney Dave Thomas attended the meeting. He told the group he found no probable cause for the investigators to have executed the draft warrant—a finding ridiculed once it was released. He was formally contradicted by the Colorado attorney general in 2004.

At a notorious press conference ten days after the murders, Jeffco officials suppressed the affidavit and boldly lied about what they had known. They said they could not find Eric’s Web pages, they found no evidence of pipe bombs matching Eric’s descriptions, and had no record of the Browns meeting with Hicks. Guerra’s affidavit plainly contradicted all three claims. Officials had just spent days reviewing it. They would repeat the lies for years.

Several days after the meeting, Investigator Guerra’s file on his investigation of Eric disappeared for the first time.

The cover-your-ass meeting was a strictly Jeffco affair, limited mostly to senior officials. Most of the detectives on the case—including the Feds and cops from local jurisdictions—were unaware of the cover-up. They were trying to crack the case.

Police detectives continued fanning out across Littleton. They had two thousand students to interview—no telling where the truth might be tucked away. They all reported back to the leadership team in the Columbine band room. It was chaos. Guys were coming in with notes on scraps of paper and matchbook covers.

At the end of the week, Kate Battan took control of the situation. She called everyone into the band room for a massive four-hour debriefing and information exchange. At the end of the meeting, three crucial questions remained: How had the killers gotten all the guns? How had they gotten the bombs into the school? Who had conspired to help them?

Battan and her team had a good idea where the conspiracy lay. They had nearly a dozen chief suspects. They pitted two against each other. Chris Morris claimed he was innocent. Prove it, they said. Help us smoke out Duran.

Chris agreed to a wiretap. On Saturday afternoon, he called Phil Duran from FBI headquarters in Denver, while federal agents listened in.

They commiserated about how rough it had gotten. “It’s pretty crazy, man,” Phil said.

“Yeah. The media’s going psycho.”

Chris went for the kill too soon. He had heard Duran had gone out shooting with the killers, and someone videotaped it. He mentioned the tape, but Duran brushed it off. For fourteen minutes, they spoke. Chris kept circling back to it; Duran deflected as many times. “I have no clue, dude,” he said.

Finally, Chris got an admission that Duran had been out shooting with Eric and Dylan. He got a name: the place was called Rampart Range.

It didn’t sound like much. It was leverage.

On Sunday, an ATF agent paid Duran a visit. Duran told him everything. Eric and Dylan had approached him about a gun. He’d put them in touch with Mark Manes, who’d sold them the TEC-9. Duran admitted to relaying some of the money but said he’d earned nothing on the deal. Every bit of that was true.

Five days later, detectives hauled Manes into ATF headquarters in downtown Denver, with attorneys for defense and prosecution. Manes made a full confession. Duran had introduced him to Eric and Dylan on January 23 at the Tanner Gun Show—the same place the killers had bought the three other guns. Duran identified Eric as the buyer, and he did the talking. Manes agreed to sell the gun on credit. Eric would pay $300 now, $200 more when he could raise it.

It was Dylan who showed up at Manes’s house that night. He handed over the down payment and picked up the gun. Duran delivered the $200 a couple of weeks later.

Detectives asked Manes repeatedly about the killers’ ages. Eventually, he admitted that he’d assumed they were under eighteen.

Manes had bought the TEC-9 at the same show, about six months earlier. He’d used his debit card. Later, he produced a bank statement, showing he’d paid $491. He’d made nine dollars on the deal. It could cost him eighteen years.

Dr. Fuselier didn’t think much about motive the first few days. It was kind of a moot point, and they had a conspiracy to rope in. Every minute, evidence could be vanishing, alibis arranged, cover stories coordinated. But curiosity soon intruded, and refused to be dented. His mind kept returning to the critical question of why?

With nearly a hundred detectives working the case, that central question largely fell to one. It began as a small part of Agent Fuselier’s job. He was primarily concerned with leading the FBI team. He met daily with his team leaders: they briefed him, he asked questions, shot holes in their theories, suggested new questions, and challenged them to probe harder. He spent eight to ten hours a day leading that effort, and on Saturdays he drove into Denver to sort through his in-box at FBI headquarters. He had to get up to speed on the federal cases he had handed off, and offer insight and suggestions where he could.

But he began to carve out a little time every evening to assess the killers. He had teams of people to assemble the data, but no one else was qualified to analyze it. He was the only psychologist on the team. He had studied this very sort of killer for years for the FBI, and he knew what he was up against. Even if it meant a few hours of extra work each night, he was going to understand these boys. It pissed him off, watching them brag on video about the people they would maim. “You damn little jerks,” he would hear himself mutter. 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. If he refused to see the world through their lens, how would he ever understand how they could do it? They were high school kids. How did they get this way? Dylan, in particular—what a waste.

Fuselier’s peers and subordinates were glad someone had taken on the informal role of chief psychologist. They had a lot of questions about the killers, and they needed someone to turn to: one person who deeply understood the perps. Fuselier quickly became known internally as the expert on the two boys. Kate Battan was leading the day-to-day investigation, and everyone deferred to her on logistical questions, like who’d been running down a particular hallway at a certain moment during the attack. But Fuselier understood the perpetrators. He returned to Eric’s journal over and over, and then Dylan’s, pouring over every line.

About a week after the murders, Fuselier was introduced to the Basement Tapes and earlier footage Eric and Dylan had shot of themselves. He took the tapes home and watched them repeatedly. He hit the Pause button frequently, advancing frame by frame, going back over revealing moments to dissect nuance. On the surface, much of the material was tedious and banal: little snippets of daily life, like the boys making dumb high school jokes with Chris Morris in the car, and bickering over the drive-thru order at Wendy’s. Nothing even tangentially related to the murders appeared on most of the tapes, but Fuselier soaked up ordinary impressions of his murderers.

Fuselier watched or read every word from the killers dozens of times. His big break came just a few days after the murders, before he saw the Basement Tapes. Fuselier heard an ATF agent quoting a ghastly phrase Eric Harris had written.

“What you got there?” Fuselier asked.

A journal. For the last year of his life, Eric Harris had written down many of his plans in a journal.

Fuselier zipped over and read the opening line: “I hate the fucking world.”

“When I read that first sentence, all the commotion in the band room ended,” he said later. “I just zoned out. Everything else faded.” Suddenly the big bombs began to make a lot more sense. The fucking world. “That’s not Brooks Brown,” Fuselier said. “That’s not the jocks. That is an all-pervasive hate.”

Fuselier read a bit further, then turned to the ATF agent. “Can I have a copy of this?”

The pages had been photocopied from a spiral notebook: sixteen handwritten pages and a dozen more of sketches and charts and diagrams. There were nineteen entries, all dated, running from April 10, 1998, to April 3, 1999, seventeen days before Columbine. They ran a page or two at the beginning, then shortened considerably, with the last five crammed into the last page and a half. They were dark and fuzzy from too many trips through the copier. Eric’s scrawl was hard to decipher at first, but Fuselier was reading again while the pages made another pass through the copy machine. “It was mesmerizing,” he said.

The journal told infinitely more than Eric’s Web site had. The Web site—which predated the journal by at least a year—was mostly vented rage. It told us who he hated, what he wanted to do to the world, and what he had already done. It said very little about why. The journal was angry but deeply reflective. And infinitely more candid about the urges driving Eric to kill.

Fuselier read while the photocopies ran, he read on the walk back to the ATF agent’s desk, and he stood there reading rather than return to his own chair. He didn’t notice his back stiffening up for several minutes, until the pain finally interrupted. Then he took a seat. And kept reading. Holy shit, Fuselier thought. He’s telling us why he did it.

Eric would prove the easier killer to understand. Eric always knew what he was up to. Dylan did not.