Columbine

31. The Seeker

Dylan’s mind raced night and day: analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was fifteen, he had tagged along on the missions, he was Eric’s number one go-to guy, and none of that mattered. Dylan’s head was bursting with ideas, sounds, impressions—he could never turn the racket off. That asshole in gym class, his family, the girls he liked, the girls he loved but could never get—why could he never get them?—he was never going to get them. A guy could still dream, right?

Dylan was in pain. Nobody got it. Vodka helped. The Internet did, too. Girls were hard to talk to; Instant Messenging made it easier. Dylan would IM alone in his room for hours at night. Vodka made the words flow but reduced his ability to spell them. When an Internet girl called him on it, he laughed and admitted he was sloshed. It was easy to hide from his parents—they never suspected. It all happened quietly in his room.

IMs were not enough. Too many secrets to hold on to; too many concepts zipping over their heads. Suicide was consuming him—no way Dylan was confessing that. He tried explaining some of the other ideas, but people were too thick to understand.

Shortly after the missions started, in the spring of sophomore year, March 31, 1997, Dylan got drunk, picked up a pen, and began the conversation with the one person who could understand. Himself. He imagined his journal as a stately old tome, with oversized covers extending just past the parchment, and a fine satin ribbon sewn into the binding, like in a Bible. All he had was a plain pad of notebook paper, college-ruled and three-hole punched. So he drew the imaginary cover on the cover. He titled his work “Existences: A Virtual Book.”

There was no hint of murder that first day, not even violence. Only traces of anger seeped out, mostly aimed at himself. Dylan was on a spiritual quest. “I do shit to supposedly ‘cleanse’ myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way,” he wrote. He had tried deleting the Doom files from his computer, tried staying sober, tried to stop making fun of kids—that was a tough one. Kids were so easy to ridicule.

The spiritual purge wasn’t helping. “My existence is shit,” he wrote. He described eternal suffering in infinite directions through infinite realities.

Loneliness was the crux of the problem, but it ran deeper than just finding a friend. Dylan felt cut off from humanity. Humans were trapped in a box of our own construction: mental prisons caging us from a universe of possibilities. God, people were annoying! What were they afraid of? Dylan could see an entire universe opening up in his mind. He was a seeker, he sought to explore it all, across time and space and who knew how many dimensions. The possibilities were breathtaking. Who could fail to behold the wonder of it all? Almost everyone, unfortunately. Humans loved their little boxes, so safe and warm and comfy and boring! They were zombies by choice.

Some of Dylan’s ideas were hard to put into words. He drew squiggles in the margins and labeled them “thought pictures.”

He was a profoundly religious young man. His family was not active in any congregation, yet Dylan’s belief was unwavering. He believed in God without question, but constantly challenged His choices. Dylan would cry out, cursing God for making him a modern Job, demanding an explanation for the divine brutality of His faithful servant.

Dylan believed in morality, ethics, and an afterlife. He wrote intently about the separation of body and soul. The body was meaningless, but his soul would live forever. It would reside either in the peaceful serenity of heaven or in the blistering tortures of hell.

Dylan’s anger would flare, then fizzle quickly into self-disgust. Dylan wasn’t planning to kill anyone, except, God willing, himself. He craved death for at least two years. The first mention comes in the first entry: “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE—me—my soul (existence).”

But suicide posed a problem. Dylan believed in a literal heaven and hell. He would be a believer right up until the end. When he murdered several people, he knew there would be consequences. He would refer to them in his final video message, recorded on the morning he called “Judgment Day.”

Dylan was unique, that much he was sure of. He had been watching the kids at school. Some were good, some bad, but all so utterly different from him. Dylan exceeded even Eric in his belief in his own singularity. But Eric equated “unique” with “superior”—Dylan saw it mostly as bad. Unique meant lonely. What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?

His moods came and went quickly. Dylan turned compassionate, then fatalistic. “I don’t fit in here,” he complained. But the road to the afterlife was just monstrous: “go to school, be scared & nervous, hoping that people can accept me.”

Eric and Dylan both left journals behind. Dr. Fuselier would spend years studying them. At first glance, Dylan’s looked more promising. Fuselier was hungry for data, and Dylan provided an impressive stack. His journal began a year earlier than Eric’s, filled nearly five times as many pages, and remained active right up to the end. But Eric would begin his journal as a killer. He already knew where it would end. Every page pointed in the same direction. His purpose was not self-discovery but self-lionization. Dylan was just trying to grapple with existence. He had no idea where he was headed. His ideas were all over the map.

Dylan liked order. Each journal entry began with a three-line heading in the right margin: name, date, and title, all written out in half-sized letters. He then repeated the title—or sometimes adapted it—in double-sized characters centered above the main text. Most of the copy was printed, but occasionally he would veer into script. He wrote one entry a month, nearly every month, but hardly ever twice a month. He would fill two complete pages and then stop. If he ran out of ideas or interest, he would fill out the second page with huge lettering or sketches.

His second entry came early: just two weeks after the first. His ideas were beginning to cohere. “The battle between good & bad never ends,” he wrote. Dylan would repeat this idea endlessly for the next two years. Good and evil, love and hate—always wrestling, never resolving. Pick your side, it’s up to you—but you better pray it picks you back. Why would love never choose him?

“I dont know what i do wrong with people,” he wrote, “it’s like they are set out to hate & (insult) me, i never know what to say or do.” He had tried. He had brought in Chips Ahoy cookies to win them over. What exactly would it take?

“My life is still fucked,” he wrote, “in case you care.” He had just lost $45, and before that it was his Zippo lighter and his knife. True, he had gotten the first two back, but still. “Why the fuck is he being such an ASSHOLE??? (god i guess, whoever is the being which controls shit.) He’s fucking me over big time & it pisses me off. Good god i HATE my life, i want to die really bad right now.”

32. Jesus Jesus Jesus

Sunday morning, April 25, the Columbine churches were packed. Afterward, the crowds trekked down to the Bowles Crossing Shopping Center, across from Clement Park. Organizers had planned for up to thirty thousand mourners in the sprawling parking lot. Seventy thousand showed up. Vice President Al Gore was on the platform, along with the governor, most of Colorado’s congressional delegation, and a whole lot of clergy. The TV networks broadcast the ceremony live.

“Put your faith and trust in the living son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ,” Reverend Billy Graham’s son Franklin instructed the crowd. “We must be willing to receive His son Jesus Christ.”

“Genuine lasting comfort comes only through Jesus Christ,” local pastor Jerry Nelson proclaimed. “We, your pastors, urge you: Seek Jesus!”

Jesus Jesus Jesus. There was a whole lot of Him that day. Reverend Graham dominated the ceremony with a long, impassioned appeal for returning prayer to public schools. He invoked the name of his personal savior seven times in a single forty-five-second flurry. “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?” he asked. He called upon God and Jesus nearly fifty times in course of the speech. Cassie had been ready, he said. She’d stood before a gunman who’d transported her immediately into the presence of Almighty God. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Christian pop star Amy Grant sang twice; a drum and bugle corps performed a stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace”; and a succession of thirteen white doves were released as Governor Bill Owens recited the names of the victims. Toward the end, it began to rain. A slow, steady shower. Nobody moved. Thousands of umbrellas went up, but tens of thousands of mourners just got wet.

For many, Cassie Bernall was the heroine of Columbine. Word spread quickly that her killer had held her at gunpoint and asked if she believed in God. “Yes,” she’d answered. She’d professed her faith and had promptly been shot in the head. Vice President Gore recounted her story to the crowd and the cameras. He quoted liberally from Scripture throughout his speech.

“To the families of the victims, may you feel the embrace of the literally hundreds of millions of Americans who grieve with you,” Vice President Gore said. “We hold your agony in the center of our prayers. You are not alone.”

The country was transfixed. In the first ten days, newsmagazines on the four main broadcast networks devoted forty-three pieces to the attack. The shows dominated the ratings that week. CNN and Fox News charted the highest ratings in their history. A week afterward, USA Today was still running ten separate Columbine stories in a single edition. It would be nearly two weeks before the New York Times would print an issue without Columbine on page 1.

And Cassie Bernall’s martyrdom was showing the most legs. “Millions have been touched by a martyr,” Pastor Kirsten proclaimed to his congregation. He shared a vision his youth pastor had received while ministering to the Bernalls: “I saw Cassie, and I saw Jesus, hand in hand. And they had just gotten married. They had just celebrated their marriage ceremony. And Cassie kind of winked over at me, like, ‘I’d like to talk, but I’m so much in love.’ Her greatest prayer was to find the right guy. Don’t you think she did?”

Kirsten consoled his grieving congregation, but he saw opportunity in the tragedy to unabashedly save more souls. “Pack that ark with as many people as possible,” he said.

Down the road at the Foothills Bible Church, Pastor Oudemolen was sharing a similar enthusiasm. “Men and women, open your eyes!” he declared. “The kids are turning to God! They’re going to churches!”

Much of the Denver clergy was appalled. The opportunism at the public service drew an outcry, particularly from mainline Protestant pastors. Reverend Marxhausen, the pastor who’d performed Dylan’s funeral, told the Denver Post he’d felt “hit over the head with Jesus” at the service.

Evangelicals faced a profound moral dilemma: respect for others’ beliefs versus an obligation to stand up for Jesus as the only way, every day. Eric and Dylan had terrorized the country, but they offered an invaluable opportunity as well. Evangelical clergy would answer to God if they wasted it. One thoughtful Evangelical pastor said he approved of using the massacre for recruitment, as long it was truly done for God. He bristled at “spiritual headhunters, just racking up another scalp. The Bible was never meant to be a club,” he said. “If I’m using it as a weapon, that’s really sad.”

Craig Scott was a sophomore, sixteen years old, and exceptionally good looking, like his sister Rachel. He had hidden under a library table with Matthew Kechter and Isaiah Shoels. While he was down there, one of the gunmen yelled, “Get anyone with white hats!” Craig was wearing one. He yanked it off and stuffed it under his shirt. Both killers passed his table several times. They stopped there, eventually, and both of them fired. Matt slumped; so did Isaiah. Craig was spared. The shots were so loud Craig thought his ears were going to bleed. He spent much of his time in the fetal position, with his head down, silently praying for courage and strength. When he looked up to assess the damage, Matt and Isaiah had collapsed leaning against each other and moaning. Their blood had pooled around Scott—he couldn’t tell whose it was that had soaked into his pants. Smoke or steam was rising up from the rupture in Matt’s side.

Then the killers moved into the hallway. “I think they’re gone,” Craig called out. “Let’s get out of here.” Other kids were getting up slowly, heading for a side exit. Craig dropped his white hat on the floor by his table. On his way out, a girl under the computer desk said, “Please help me.” Kacey Ruegsegger had a big hole in her right shoulder. Scott helped her up. He draped her good arm over his shoulder and led her out.

Outside, they ran for a police car parked on the side of the hill. Cops were there, pointing their guns at the library windows. Craig continued to pray. He asked other kids to join him. Craig had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and they needed Him badly now. He led a small prayer group.

The cops shuttled the wounded out first. When Craig’s turn came, he heard more gunfire behind him. “They’re shooting at us,” one of the cops said.

The officers dropped the kids off at a cul-de-sac just off the school grounds. Craig joined hands with others in a group to pray. Then he got to a phone, called his mom, and asked her to pray for his sister. He had a bad feeling about her. He prayed that Rachel was not injured. Within an hour or two, he began accepting that she might be dead. She was. Rachel had been the first one killed, on the lawn outside. Matt and Isaiah were dead too. Kacey lived.

Craig took it hard. He had seen horrible things, but he’d heard something wonderful. In the worst of it in the library, he’d heard a girl profess her faith. Amazing. Craig began telling the story early that first afternoon. It spread like brushfire. Among Evangelicals, e-mails, faxes, and phone calls whipped across the country.

On Friday it hit the mainstream media. Both Denver papers featured it. The Rocky’s piece, “Martyr for Her Faith,” opened with a play-by-play:

A Columbine killer pointed his gun at Cassie Bernall and asked her the life-or-death question: “Do you believe in God?”

She paused. The gun was still there. “Yes, I believe in God,” she said.

That was the last thing this 17-year-old Christian would ever say.

The gunman asked her “Why?” She had no time to answer before she was shot to death.

Bernall entered the Columbine High School library to study during lunch. She left a martyr.

The Post ran a similar account. The national press quickly jumped aboard. On Saturday, an Evangelical Teen Mania rally in Michigan “turned into a Cassie Bernall festival,” according to Weekly Standard writer J. Bottum. He described 73,000 teens in the Silverdome “weeping along with sermon after sermon about her death.” On Sunday morning, it was proclaimed from countless pulpits.

At first, her mother was unsure what to make of Cassie’s martyrdom. But soon Misty was bursting with pride, and her husband, Brad, was, too. “This tragic incident has been thrown back into the face of Satan,” Brad said in a statement. He called on teens to step forward while The Enemy was in retreat: “To all young people who hear this: Don’t let my daughter’s death be for nothing. Make your stand. If you’re not in the local church’s youth group, try it. They want you and will help support you.”

On Monday, Brad and Misty were featured on a 20/20 segment titled “Portrait of an Angel.” Stories were circulating that the killers had targeted Evangelicals as well as jocks and minorities. Brad’s community presumed that Cassie’s response had provoked the killer to shoot. “She knew where he was coming from,” Brad said. “And she was saying that, ‘You can’t defeat me. You can’t really kill me. You can take my body away, but you can’t kill me. I’m going to live in heaven forever.’”

Initially, Brad seemed to draw a bit more strength from Cassie’s bravery than Misty did. “You wake up crying,” she said. “I hope one day I can wake up in the morning and not cry. But I said to Brad, I wondered how they could do this. Why did they kill our baby girl? Why did they do that? Why?”

A few days after the 20/20 segment, Brad and Misty appeared on Oprah. “Do you wish she had said ‘No’?” Oprah asked.

“Knowing that a girl begged for her life and was released” made a big difference, Misty said. Eric had taunted Bree Pasquale for several minutes, repeatedly forcing her to beg, then finally dismissed her. “As a mom, you would have wanted her to beg,” Misty said. “So on the one hand, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’d have wanted her to beg.’ But I can’t think of a more honorable way to die than to profess your faith in God.”

33. Good-bye

Two years before Cassie’s murder, Dylan laid out his case for God. He enumerated the pros and cons of his existence. Good: a nice family, a beautiful house, food in the fridge, a few close good friends, and some decent possessions. The bad list went on and on: no girls—not even platonic, no other friends, nobody accepting him, doing badly in sports, looking ugly and acting shy, getting bad grades, having no ambition in life.

Dylan understood what God had chosen for him. Dylan was to be a seeker: “one man in search of answers, never finding them, yet in hopelessness understands things. He seeks knowledge of the unthinkable, of the undefinable, of the unknown. He explores the everything—using his mind, the most powerful tool known to him.”

Dylan thrashed about madly, but clarity sometimes emerged: “death is passing through the doors,” he wrote. “the ever-existant compulsion of everything is the curiosity to keep moving down the hall.” Down the hall, exploring the rooms, finding the answers, raising new questions—at long last, Dylan the seeker would achieve the state he was searching for.

Dylan took to referring to humans as zombies. That was a rare similarity to Eric. But pitiful as we zombies were, Dylan didn’t want to harm us. He found us interesting, like new toys. “I am GOD compared to some of these un-existable brainless zombies,” he wrote.

That was Dylan’s first brush with blasphemy. He immediately qualified it: he wasn’t claiming godhood, just that he was like God compared to humans. It would be months before he’d try it again. Each time, he would push the idea further, but he never quite seemed to believe. As spring 1997 progressed, he filled page after page with aborted attempts.

He saw history as good vs. bad, love vs. hate, God vs. Satan—“The Everlasting Contrast.” And he saw himself on the good side.

Eric had more practical concerns. Two months of heat from his dad taught Eric to cover his tracks better. The vandalism missions continued through spring and early summer, with no record of further detection. By mission 5 the boys were drinking again. Wayne appeared to have watched Eric closely for a while, then resumed trusting him. According to Eric, only one outing went alcohol-free.

The emphasis on larger explosives continued; some of the timing devices began to work. Eric discovered that he could light the tip of a cigarette and let it burn down toward the fuse for an added delay. The boys survived a few close calls, including near detection by a police officer in a squad car. On the sixth outing, they brought along Dylan’s sawed-off BB gun and fired randomly into houses. “We probly didnt do any damage,” Eric wrote, “but we arent sure.” That same night, they stole some Rent-a-Fence signs from a construction site. Eric didn’t make much of the swipe, but this appears to be the moment where they crossed the hazy boundary between petty vandalism and petty theft.

The missions had been satisfying for a couple of months. But sophomore year was over. Eric was hungry for more. In the summer of 1997, Zack Heckler went to Pennsylvania for two weeks. When he got back, Eric and Dylan had built a pipe bomb. Dylan was involved, but it was Eric’s baby.

Eric would not begin his journal until the spring of 1998. But he was active with his Web site the previous year. By the summer of 1997, he had posted his hate lists:

The list went on for pages, fifty-odd entries about hating “fitness fuckheads,” phony martial arts experts, and people who mispronounced “acrosT” or “eXspreso.” At first, his targets seem preposterously random, but Fuselier divined the underlying theme: stupid, witless inferiors. It wasn’t just the WB network Eric hated heart and soul, it was all the morons watching it.

Eric’s briefer love lists backed Fuselier’s analysis. Eric loved “Making fun of stupid people doing stupid things!” His greatest love was “Natural SELECTION!!!!!!!!!!! God damn it’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms. I wish the government would just take off every warning label. So then all the dumbasses would either severely hurt themselves or DIE!”

What the boy was really expressing was contempt.

Eric’s ideas began to fuse. He loved explosions, actively hated inferiors, and passively hoped for human extinction. He built his first bombs.

He started small: nothing that would kill anyone, just enough to injure people or their property. He went searching for instructions and found them readily available on the Web. During the summer of 1997, he built several explosives and began setting them off. Then he bragged about it on his Web site.

“If you havent made a CO₂ bomb today, I suggest you do so,” he wrote. “Me and VoDkA detonated one yesterday and it was like a fucking dynomite stick. Just watch out for shrapnel.”

That was an exaggeration. They had taken small carbon dioxide cartridges—which kids often called whip-its—and punctured them, then shoved gun powder inside. Eric called them crickets, and they were closer to a large firecracker than a bomb. Eric had also built pipe bombs, which were more powerful. He was still searching for a spot safe for detonation.

Eric realized his Web audience would doubt him. He backed his claims with specifications and an ingredient list. He wanted to make sure his readers understood that he was serious.

Someone sensed the danger. On August 7, 1997, a “concerned citizen”—apparently Randy Brown—read Eric’s Web site and called the sheriff’s department. On that day—one year, eight months, and thirteen days before Columbine—the killers’ names permanently entered the law enforcement system.

Deputy Mark Burgess printed out Eric’s pages. He read through them and wrote up a report. “This Web page refers to ‘missions’ where possible criminal mischiefs have occurred,” he wrote. Curiously, Burgess made no mention of the pipe bombs, which seem far more serious.

Burgess sent his report to a superior, Investigator John Hicks, with eight Web site pages attached. They were filed.

Eric and Zack and Dylan were working age now. They all got jobs at Blackjack together. There were flour fights and water chases all the time. Eric plunged right in; Dylan watched from the sidelines. They made dry-ice eruptions out back in the parking lot, watched how high they could get a construction cone to sail. It was great. Then Zack met a girl. Bastard.

Dylan took it hard. Devon was her name, and she totally ripped the team apart. Zack was with her all the time now, and that squeezed his buddies out of the picture. Eric and Dylan were nobodies. The missions were suddenly over. Eric didn’t seem to mind too much, but Dylan was a mess.

It wasn’t good for him now, he confided to “Existences.” “My best friend ever: the friend who shared, experimented, laughed, took chances with, & appreciated me, more than any friend ever did…. Ever since Devon (who i wouldn’t mind killing) has loved him—that’s the only place hes been!” They had done everything together: drinking, cigars, sabotaging houses. Since seventh grade, he had felt so lonely. Zack had changed all that. “hello I finally found someone who was like me! who appreciated me & shared very common interests. I finally felt happiness (sometimes).” But Zack had found a girlfriend and moved on. “i feel so lonely, w/o a friend.”

Who he wouldn’t mind killing? Dylan tossed out the comment in passing, and presumably it was just a figure of speech. Presumably. But he had verbalized the idea—a big step. And Dylan did not yet consider Eric his best friend. Dylan belabored the point that no one besides Zack had ever understood him; no one else appreciated him. That would include Eric.

Dylan was lonelier than ever. Conveniently, he stumbled into a solution: “My 1st love???”

“OH My God,” his next entry began. “I am almost sure I am in love w, Harriet. hehehe. such a strange name, like mine.” He loved everything about her, from her good body to her almost perfect face, her charm, her wit and cunning and not being popular. He just hoped she liked him as much as he loved her.

That was the wrinkle. Dylan had not actually spoken to Harriet. But he couldn’t let that stop him. He thought of her every second of every day. “If soulmates exist,” he wrote, “then I think I’ve found mine. I hope she likes Techno.”

That was the other hurdle. He had not yet established whether she liked techno.

Dylan felt happiness sometimes. He got excited about his driver’s license. But he couldn’t stay happy. Shortly after falling for Harriet, he returned to his journal to complain. Such a desolate, lonely, unsalvageable life. “NOT FAIR!!!” He wanted to die. Zack and Devon looked at him like he was a stranger, but Harriet had played the meanest trick: Dylan had fallen for “fake love.”

“She in reality doesn’t give a good fuck about me,” he said. She didn’t even know him, he admitted. He had no happiness, no ambitions, no friends, and “no LOVE!!!”

Dylan wanted a gun. He had spoken to a friend about getting one. He planned to turn the weapon on himself. That was a big step in the long suicide process: from writing about it to action.

At this point, nearly two years before Columbine, Dylan saw the gun as his last resort. He continued his spiritual quest “i stopped the pornography,” he said. “I try not to pick on people.” But God seemed intent on punishing him. “A dark time, infinite sadness,” he wrote. “I want to find love.”

Love was the most common word in Dylan’s journal. Eric was filling his Web site with hate.

When Fuselier examined a crime, one of his primary tactics was to begin ruling out motives. Dylan seemed like a classic depressive, but Fuselier had to be sure. With both Columbine killers, an obvious question loomed: Were they insane? Most mass murderers act deliberately—they just want to hurt people—but some truly can’t help themselves. Fuselier would describe those killers as psychotic. A broad term, psychotic covers a spectrum of severe mental illnesses, including paranoia and schizophrenia. Psychotics can grow deeply disoriented and delusional, hearing voices and hallucinating. In severe cases, they lose all contact with reality. They sometimes act out of imaginary yet terrifying fear for their own safety, or according to instructions from imaginary beings. Fuselier saw no indication of any of that here.

Another possibility was psychopathy. In popular usage, any crazy killer is a called a psychopath, but in psychiatry, the term denotes a specific mental condition. Psychopaths appear charming and likable, but it’s an act. They are coldhearted manipulators who will do anything for their own gain. The vast majority are nonviolent: they want your money, not your life. But the ones who turn sadistic can be monstrous. If murder amuses them, they will kill again and again. Ted Bundy, Gary Gilmore, and Jeffrey Dahmer were all psychopaths. Typically, murderous psychopaths are serial killers, but occasionally one will go on a spree. The Columbine massacre could have been the work of a psychopath, but Dylan showed none of the signs.

Fuselier continued ruling out profiles. None of the usual theories fit. Everything about Dylan screamed depressive—an extreme case, self-medicating with alcohol. The problem was how that had led to murder. Dylan’s journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide.

Fuselier had seen murder arise from depression, but it rarely looked like this. There is usually a continuum of depressive reactions, ranging from lethargy to mass murder. Dylan seemed muddled on the languorous side. Depressives are inherently angry, though they rarely appear that way. They are angry at themselves. “Anger turned inward equals depression,” Fuselier explained. Depression leads to murder when the anger is severe enough and then turns outward. Depressive outbursts tend to erupt after a debilitating loss: getting fired, dumped by a girlfriend, even a bad grade, if the depressive sees that as significant. “Most of us get angry, kick a trash can, drink a beer or two, and get over it,” Fuselier explained. For 99.9 percent of the population, that’s the end of it. But for a few, the anger festers.

Some depressives withdraw—from friends, family, schoolmates. Most of them get help or just get over it. A few spiral downward toward suicide. But for a tiny percentage, their own death is not enough. They perform a “vengeful suicide”—a common example is the angry husband who shoots himself in front of his wedding photo. He deliberately splatters his remains on the symbol of the marriage. The offense is directed straight at his conception of the guilty party. A tiny number of angry depressives decide to make the tormentor pay. Typically that’s a wife, girlfriend, boss, or parent—someone close enough to matter. It’s a rare depressive who resorts to murder, but when one does, it nearly always ends with a single person.

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

Fuselier had seen each of those types several times over the course of his career. Dylan didn’t look like a candidate. Murder or even suicide takes willpower as well as anger. Dylan fantasized about suicide for years without making an attempt. He had never spoken to the girls he dreamed of. Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was.

34. Picture-Perfect Marsupials

Patrick Ireland was trying to learn to talk again. So frustrating. The first couple of days he couldn’t manage much of anything. He struggled to spit out a single sentence, word by word, and when he had finished, it often made no sense. In his best moments, Patrick spoke like the victim of a severe stroke: slow, labored attempts would produce a single guttural syllable, then a sudden burst of sound. He could form the words in his head, but few made the passage to his mouth. Where did all the rest go? Any chance distraction could hijack the thought as it made its way to his vocal chords. Random phrases often slipped in to replace the ideas. His mom would ask how he was feeling, and he’d answer in Spanish, or recite the capitals of South American countries. His brain was never aware of the mix-up. He was sure he had just described his mood or asked for a straw, and was confused by her confusion.

Patrick’s brain tended to spit out whatever was in short-term memory. He had been studying the capitals just before the shooting, and recently returned from Spain. Often the memories were more immediate. Hospital intercom announcements were constantly echoing out of Patrick’s mouth, in response to unrelated questions. He had no idea he had even heard the voices in the background. Other times it was complete nonsense. “Picture-perfect marsupials” kept popping out. No one knows where that came from.

It got frustrating, for everyone. One of Patrick’s first meals out of the ICU was a juicy hamburger. He was so excited about it, and couldn’t wait to slather the bun with… something. Kathy gently asked him to repeat. That was annoying, but he answered with fresh gibberish. Over and over he repeated himself, more angry with each new batch of nonsense. He tried miming it, shaking the bottle—he really wanted that condiment. Kathy’s sister ran downstairs and got one of everything from the cafeteria: mustard, relish, salsa—big handfuls of packets. None of that. They never did figure out what he wanted.

Patrick understood that he’d been shot. He knew he had gone out the window. He didn’t grasp the scale of the massacre. He didn’t know he had been on TV—or that television shows were interested in him. He had no idea the networks had cast him as The Boy in the Window.

Now and then, Patrick would stammer out an intelligible answer. And it would make him extremely happy. His motor skills seemed fine on the left side. If his brain could control his left hand to work a fork, why not a pen? Someone fetched a pack of markers and a whiteboard.

“Oh boy, was that a mistake,” Kathy recalled.

“Big mistake,” John said. “It was just scribbles. Just scribbles, absolute.”

It was one thing to hear Patrick struggle. Seeing his inability sketched out in black and white, that was a shocker. It was like a diagram of a brain malfunctioning: scads of tiny neurons, misfiring randomly into nowhere.

The Irelands were also confronted with the realization that the problem lay deeper than the control centers for Patrick’s vocal cords: he couldn’t organize the thoughts behind them. He could respond emotionally, but he could not translate that into language, regardless of the medium.

“It frustrated him; it scared the hell out of us,” John said. “He can’t speak and now he can’t write, and how are we going to communicate with him?”

Sometimes, with a great struggle, Patrick formed the words out loud. Sometimes that posed bigger problems. The questions could be unsettling. Urgently, he begged them to tell him one thing: “How long is this going to be?”

This?

The hospital, the recovery—he didn’t have time for all this. He had finals in three weeks, he had ski season and basketball to train for, he was totally coming into his own on the basketball court. He couldn’t afford to get a B. He had gone three straight years without one; he had worked his ass off again all semester, and he was acing every class. The valedictorian thing was for real now, almost in reach. He wasn’t about to screw it up with this hospital crap. He was going to graduate as valedictorian.

It had been an ambitious goal. Patrick was a bright kid, but no genius. And Columbine was competitive. Some kids could cruise to easy A’s, but Patrick had to fight for some of his. Several students with unblemished records shared the valedictory title every year. He couldn’t afford even one B.

The geniuses could cruise to A’s without breaking a sweat. Patrick hated getting lumped in with them.

So Patrick made his parents a little uneasy when he announced his intention, freshman year, in the car, on the way to basketball practice. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, and he didn’t say he would try, he just said he was going to do it.

Two years later, in his hospital room, John and Kathy Ireland had let go of basketball, waterskiing, and academic honors. Walking and talking sounded ambitious.

The severity of his situation was more than Patrick could swallow. “I didn’t comprehend, really,” he said later.

Patrick Ireland did not see a television or a newspaper the first week. He didn’t realize his family was protecting him or how big the Columbine tragedy was. He had no idea the whole country was watching. He didn’t even know who had died.

The first indication of what he was involved in came when friends called to check on him from Europe. He had gone on a class trip a month earlier and stayed with a family near Madrid. Now they were worried about him. Patrick was taken aback. They were hearing about this in Spain?

Seven days out, he transferred to Craig Hospital. He began rehab and was quickly scooting around the hospital in a wheelchair. He returned from therapy one day and turned on the TV. It was the news, they were listing the people killed. They showed Corey DePooter’s picture. Patrick was stunned. Corey was one of his best friends. They had started in the library together, but gotten separated when the noises first started outside and Corey went to investigate. Patrick had never seen him since.

“I started bawling,” Patrick said later. “I think that was the first time I cried.”

The staff at Craig was not pushing for a first step—just a little movement. If he could get control of that leg and lift it up off the mattress, there was hope. His leg was fine. All the neural pathways up and down his spinal cord were intact. Signals passed unimpeded to the muscles wrapped around his femur. Millions of tiny nerve endings continued transmitting sensory data along the length of his thigh.

Patrick knew, intellectually, that all that fine machinery was functional. But he couldn’t reach it. There was just the tiniest little gap in the network inside his brain. Somewhere inside his head he could feel himself issue the command. He felt it moving in there, but then it got lost. He squeezed his eyes, squeezed his brain, tried to force it. Squeezing didn’t help. The leg refused.

Something was missing. The makeshift memorials in Clement Park had grown enormous over the first few days. Hundreds of thousands of flowers were piled up with poems, drawings, and teddy bears. Letter jackets, jewelry, and wind chimes added sprinkles of individuality. The district rented several warehouses to store them.

It wasn’t enough. The survivors didn’t know what they needed, or where or why, exactly, but they needed something. They were searching for a symbol, and they knew it immediately when it came.

Seven days after the massacre, shortly before sunset, a row of fifteen wooden crosses rose up along the crest of Rebel Hill. They stood seven feet high, three feet wide, and were spaced evenly along the length of the mesa. Clement Park’s floodlights lit up the low-hanging clouds behind them, and the crosses cast an eerie silhouette against the thunderheads. The tips seemed to glow. They were startling, too, for their imperfections. The dimensions seemed a little off: the crossbeams looked far too short, and were branched too close to the top. Some were planted poorly, leaning badly to one side. Within hours, the arms dangled beads, ribbons, rosaries, placards, flags, and so many blue and white balloons.

Over the next five days, 125,000 people trekked up the hill to reach the crosses. They trudged through the mud as a vicious storm pounded the hill. They tore away the grass. Many waited two hours in the rain just to begin the climb. It felt like a pilgrimage.

The crosses had come from Chicago. A short, pudgy carpenter built them out of pine he got at Home Depot. He drove them to Colorado in a pickup, planted them on the hill, and drove back. He’d taped a black-and-white photo of one victim or killer to each cross, and he left a pen dangling from each one to encourage graffiti.

“I couldn’t believe how fast people came up and started putting stuff around them,” an onlooker said. Soon each cross had sprouted a pile covering the base and making its way up to the arms. Christian dog tags were popular, with phrases like “God Is Awesome” and “Jesus Lives.” Several crosses were wrapped head to foot in flowers, others dressed in shirts and jackets and pants.

On thirteen crosses, the messages were loving and uncontroversial. The killers’ crosses hosted a bitter debate: “HATE BREEDS HATE.” “How can anyone forgive you?”

“I forgive you,” someone responded. Half the messages were conciliatory: “Sorry we all failed you.” “No one is to blame.”

It was exactly as Tom and Sue Klebold had feared. If they had buried Dylan, his grave would look like that.

A woman told a reporter she’d been spit on for grieving for the killers, then shoved into the mud. A woman with a baby wrote “Evil Bastard” on Dylan’s cross. The crowd didn’t like it. Then she wrote it again. Two teenage girls approached her; crying, they begged her to stop. Someone began singing “Amazing Grace.” Soon much of the hillside was belting out the refrain. The woman left.

“The crosses ask an implicit question,” Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin wrote. “Are you ready to forgive? When I first saw the crosses and understood what they meant, I wondered if it was too soon even to ask that question. Most people wouldn’t have defaced the cross, but many would have been tempted. Do those crosses defile what has become sacred ground?”

Hell yes, Brian Rohrbough said. Just when he thought the pain couldn’t get any worse, some jerk had raised a shrine to his son’s murderer. Who could be that cruel?

Despite the flare-ups, controversy was the exception. One woman marveled at the forgiveness in her community. “How many other places would allow this and not have taken [Eric and Dylan’s crosses] out of the ground already?” she asked.

Saturday’s edition of the Rocky led with a three-word headline: DAD DESTROYS CROSSES. A haunting photo captured thirteen remaining tributes, with two stark gaps. Eric and Dylan’s crosses had lasted three days.

“You don’t cheapen what Christ did for us by honoring murderers with crosses,” Brian said. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says to forgive an unrepentant murderer. Most Christians don’t know that. These fools have come out saying ‘Forgive everyone.’ You don’t repent, you don’t forgive them—that’s what the Bible says.”

Rohrbough divided the community. Some people understood his anger. Others found his response a little harsh. “People need to learn to forgive,” a woman on the hill told the Rocky. But then she thought for a moment. “I can understand his rage.”

Brian’s first response was not to destroy the two crosses. He initially affixed each one with a sign saying “Murderers burn in hell.”

The park district took them down. Officials said they had also removed a teddy bear smeared with ketchup and were prohibiting anything obscene.

Brian conferred with his ex-wife, Sue, and her husband, Rich Petrone. They agreed to a united front on everything. Rich called several officials: Sheriff Stone; Dave Thomas, the DA; and the man in charge of the parks department.

“The three of them said those crosses shouldn’t be there; we’re going to take them down—give us until tomorrow at five and we promise you they’ll be gone,” Brian said. He and the Petrones went to the hill at five and nothing had happened. “So we decided, let’s just go take care of this,” Brian said. “We don’t need to put up with this stuff.”

Brian wanted those symbols out, and he wanted the world to see it. He called CNN and a crew filmed it. “It wasn’t going be done in darkness,” Brian said.

Brian and the Petrones hauled the crosses away, hacked them into little pieces, and then tossed the rubble into a Dumpster.

“We got back and we were sitting there talking about it, and the phone rings,” Brian recalled. “It was Thomas: ‘Just give us a little more time.’ And Rich says, ‘Nope, we’ve already taken care of it.’”

Brian took charge of his tragedy that day. He discovered the power of being Danny Rohrbough’s dad. From that day forward, he would not hesitate to wield it.

But this particular battle was just getting under way. The carpenter drove back from Chicago and pulled out the thirteen remaining crosses. Now Brian Rohrbough was really fuming. The cruelest man of the aftermath had returned to tear down the monument to his son. Rohrbough also sensed opportunism. “I question his motives,” he said.

Brian had good instincts. The carpenter had made a family business out of similar stunts. He returned with a new set of crosses, and a pack of media on his heels. The highlight was a joint appearance with Brian on The Today Show. The showman apologized profusely and offered a series of solemn vows: he would never build another cross for the killers, or for any killer, and he would drive around the country removing several he had erected in the past.

He broke every promise. He built fifteen new crosses and took them on a national tour. He milked his celebrity for years. Brian Rohrbough returned to cursing him: “The opportunist, the great [carpenter], the most hateful, despicable person who would come to someone else’s tragedy.”

The world forgot the carpenter. Few had noted his name. Most never knew what a huckster he was, or the lies he told, or the pain he inflicted. But they remember his crosses fondly. They recall the comfort that they found.

35. Arrest

Eric was a thief now. He had a set of Rent-a-Fence signs. He liked the feeling, he wanted more. Junior year, the boys got right to work. Eric and Dylan and Zack hacked into the school computer and commandeered a list of locker combinations. They began breaking in. They got sloppy. On October 2, 1997, they got caught. They were sent to the dean, who suspended them for three days.

The Harris and Klebold parents responded the way they always did. Wayne Harris was a pragmatist. He would make Eric regret what he’d done. With outsiders he was focused on containment; Eric’s future was at stake. He called the dean and argued that Eric was a minor. The dean was unmoved. What would show up on Eric’s records? Wayne asked. He jotted down the answer in his journal: “In-house only because police were not involved. Destroyed upon graduation.” Good. Eric had a promising future ahead.

The Klebolds addressed the situation intellectually. Dylan had demonstrated a shocking lapse of ethics, but Tom disagreed with suspensions on philosophical grounds. There were more effective ways to discipline a child. The dean had rarely met such a thoughtful, intelligent parent, but the judgment stood.

Eric and Dylan were each grounded for a month and were forbidden contact with each other or with Zack. Eric also lost his computer privileges. Eric and Dylan weathered the punishment and remained close. Zack began drifting away, particularly from Eric. The tight threesome was over. From that day forward, Eric and Dylan committed their crimes as a pair.

Fuselier considered Eric’s psychological state at this point, a year and a half before the murders. Eric was not a depressive like Dylan, that was for sure. And there were no signs of mental illness. No signs of anything to predict murder. Eric’s Web site was obscenely angry, but anger and young men were practically synonymous. The instincts that would lead to Columbine were surely in place by now, but Eric had yet to reveal them.

Dylan fixated on Harriet. Fifty minutes a day, for one class period, Dylan lolled around in heaven. Harriet was in his class.

Sometimes she would laugh. What a darling little laugh she let out. So innocent, so pure. Innocence—what an angelic quality. Someday Dylan would speak to her.

One day Dylan saw his chance. He had a group project for the class, a report to work on together, and Harriet was on his team. Blessed day. This was it.

He did nothing.

Dylan described his trajectory as a downward spiral. He borrowed the phrase from Nine Inch Nails’s gripping concept album, which documents a fictional man unraveling. It climaxes with him killing himself with a gun to the mouth.

Oliver Stone’s satirical film Natural Born Killers would become the pop culture artifact most associated with the Columbine massacre. That was reasonable, since Eric and Dylan used “NBK” as shorthand for their own event, and the film bears considerable resemblances. It also captured the flavor of Eric’s egotistical, empathy-free attitude, but it bore no relation to Dylan’s psyche. It certainly wasn’t where he saw his life headed, at least not until the final months. For the first eighteen to twenty months of his journal, Dylan identified with two powerful characters to convey his torment: the protagonists of The Downward Spiral and David Lynch’s film Lost Highway.

After the murders, controversies raged about the role of violent films, music, and video games. Some columnists and talk-radio hosts saw an easy cause and effect. That seems simplistic for Eric—who was a gifted critical thinker with a voracious appetite for the classics—and absurd for his partner. Dylan identified with depressives on the brink of suicide. He focused on fictional characters mired in the hopelessness he already felt.

Eric got sloppy. He allowed the worst imaginable person to discover one of his pipe bombs: his dad.

Wayne Harris was beside himself. Firecrackers were one thing, but this was too much. He wasn’t even sure what to do with it. Eric told several friends about the incident, and their accounts of Wayne’s response varied. Zack Heckler said Wayne could not figure out how to defuse the bomb, so he went outside with Eric and detonated it. But Nate Dykeman said Wayne had merely confiscated the bomb. Sometime later, Eric took Nate into his parents’ bedroom closet and showed it to him. Wayne Harris never referred to the incident in his journal on Eric, which was dormant at this time.

Eric swore up and down to his parents that he would never make a bomb again. They apparently believed him. They wanted to. Eric probably shut down production for a while, and he definitely covered his tracks better. Eventually, he got back to business. At some point, he showed Nate two or three of his later products, which he was storing in his own room.

Dylan felt abandoned. He was grounded for the locker scam, home alone, and lonelier than ever. Then his older brother, Byron, was kicked out for drugs. Tom and Sue understood the tough love would cause an upheaval, so they went to family counseling with Dylan. That didn’t change their son’s outlook. He got a new room out of it, and he put his own stamp on the place: two black walls and two red ones, posters of baseball heroes and rock bands: Lou Gehrig, Roger Clemens, and Nine Inch Nails. Also, some street signs and a woman in a leopard bikini.

“I get more depressed with each day,” he complained. Why did friends keep deserting him? They did not, actually, but Dylan perceived it that way. He fretted about Eric dumping him, too. “wanna die,” he repeated. Death equaled freedom now; death offered tranquillity. He began using the words interchangeably.

Then he weighed the other option: He named a friend and said he “will get me a gun, ill go on my killing spree against anyone I want.”

It was Dylan’s second allusion to murder. The first had been ambiguous; this was overt. And now it was a spree.

He changed the subject immediately. That was unusual. As a rule, Dylan hammered ideas relentlessly. He would drill for two straight pages on the “Everlasting Struggle” or his destiny as a seeker. Murder was different. For the second time, he tossed in a single line, at the peak of despair, and promptly returned to his own destruction.

The idea was germinating, a year and a half out. Dylan appeared to be exploring a spree. With Eric? Probably. But the details of this critical moment are lost. Neither boy ever mentions those conversations in the paper trail they left behind. Eric recorded his actions: he was building bigger bombs. Coincidence? Unlikely. Eric’s thinking had been evolving steadily in one direction since freshman year.

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

“Ouch!” his teacher responded in the margin. Overall, he rated it “thorough & logical. Nice job.”

The last day of school before Christmas, something extraordinary happened. Dylan’s true love waved at him. Finally! Dylan was ecstatic; then he began to wonder. Had she waved? At him? Maybe not. Probably not. Definitely not. Just delusional, he decided. Again.

He sat down and considered who loved him. He listed their names on a page in his journal. He drew little hearts beside three. Nineteen people. Nineteen failures.

A few weeks later, Eric made it with a real woman. Brenda was almost twenty-three. She had no idea he was sixteen. “He acted a lot older,” she said. When he told her he was in school, she took it to mean college. They met at the mall, and he drove to her house. They started going out: bowling, drag racing, driving into the mountains to get drunk. He taught her about the computer, he told her how great she looked, and she could not have been more charmed. She described it to reporters later as “a friendship but more than a friendship.”

Sometimes Dylan would hang out with them. He was too shy to speak.

Eric and Dylan got cockier. They stole more valuable merchandise and started testing their pipe bombs. Outwardly, they seemed like responsible kids. Teachers trusted them and granted them access to the computer closet. They helped themselves to expensive equipment. At some point, Eric may have started a credit card scam. In his notebook, he listed eight steps to complete the scam, though there’s no evidence that he carried them out. He later claimed he had.

Dylan was no good at deception. He kept getting caught. Eric did not. Tom Klebold noticed Dylan had a new laptop. Eric could have weaseled out of that one without missing a beat—it was a friend’s… he’d checked it out of the computer lab. Dylan just confessed. His dad made him turn himself in. Eric and Dylan both had a penchant for picking on underclassmen, but Dylan got caught. In January 1998, he got sent to the dean for scratching a slur about “fags” onto a freshman’s locker. He got another suspension and paid $70 to get the locker fixed.

The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and man, were those things badass. They bragged to Nate Dykeman and then brought him along for a demo. Eric was in charge where bombs were concerned, so everything went according to plan. They waited until Super Bowl Sunday, when the streets of metro Denver were deserted. The Broncos were underdogs in their fifth shot at the championship, and everyone was watching the game. Eric took advantage of the lull. He brought Nate and Dylan out to a quiet spot near his house, dropped the bomb in a culvert, and let her rip. Whoa! Nate was appropriately impressed.

On January 30, three days after Dylan’s meeting with the dean, a crime of opportunity presented itself. It was a Friday night, and the boys were restless.

Eric and Dylan drove out into the country, pulled onto a gravel strip, and got out to break stuff. There was a van parked there, with lots of electronic gizmos inside. How cool would it be to steal it? The boys had no idea what they might use the stuff for, but they were sure they could get away with it. No witnesses and no fingerprints. Eric had a pair of ski gloves to mask detection.

“Everything seemed so easy,” he wrote later. “No way we would get caught.” Eric took guard duty and gave Dylan the dirty work. Dylan put one ski glove on and tried to punch out a window. They had no idea how solid a car window was. He hit it again and again. Nothing. Eric took over. Just as useless. Dylan went for a rock. He hauled up a boulder, hurled it into the glass, and even that was deflected. It took several blows before the rock crashed through. Dylan put the other glove on, reached in to unlock the door, and started digging through the pile like crazy. Eric again left Dylan to commit the act. He ran back to man the getaway car. Dylan grabbed anything that looked interesting. He flung everything else all over the van. By his count, he nabbed “one briefcase, one black pouch, one flashlight, a yellow thing, and a bucket of stuff.”

Dylan ran armloads of loot back to the Honda. Eric continued to “guard.” Another car approached. Dylan froze; the car passed. Unfazed, Dylan ran back to grab more. Eric had grown wary. “That’s enough!” he ordered. “Let’s go.”

They drove deeper into the country, over the hogback, to Deer Creek Canyon Park, a vast preserve that ran for miles up into the mountains. The park was deserted; it closed an hour after nightfall, and the sun had set four hours ago. They pulled into the parking lot, killed the engine, and checked out the take.

They cranked some tunes to enjoy themselves, then flipped on the dome light to hunt for another CD. Dylan reached back and hauled out his favorite item: a $400 voltmeter, the yellow thing with buttons along the base and black and red probes hanging off it. Dylan poked at the buttons; Eric watched intently. When the meter lit up, the boys went wild. Cool! Dylan pulled out the flashlight and switched it on. “Wow!” Eric howled. “That is really bright!” Then he spotted something cooler: “Hey, we’ve got a Nintendo game pad!”

They rummaged a bit more before Eric realized they had grown sloppy: time to resume precautions. “We better put this stuff in the trunk,” he said. He popped the latch and stepped out.

That’s when Jeffco Sheriff’s Deputy Timothy Walsh decided to make his presence known. He had been standing outside the car for several minutes, watching and listening to the entire exchange. You can see for miles out in the country; a lone vehicle in an empty lot in a closed state park just asked for intervention. The boys had been so immersed, they’d failed to see his car, hear his engine or his footsteps, or notice his tall frame looming right over the rear window.

When Eric stepped out, Deputy Walsh blinded him with a flashlight beam. What were they up to? the deputy asked. Whose property was all this? “Right then I realized what a damn fool I was,” Eric wrote later. He would claim remorse, but he didn’t show any, even then.

Eric thought fast but lied poorly. He was off his game that night. He said they had been messing around in a parking lot near town and had stumbled onto the equipment stacked neatly in the grass. He gave a precise location and described it vividly. Details were the key to a good lie. Good tactics, bad choice: he depicted the actual robbery location.

Walsh was incredulous. He asked to see the property. “Sure,” Eric said. He kept playing it cool. He kept doing the talking. Dylan shut up and went along. Walsh had the boys stack the goods on the trunk and tried again: Where did you find this property? Dylan summoned up his nerve. He parroted Eric’s story. Walsh said it looked suspicious. He would radio another deputy to check on any break-ins.

Eric was confident. He looked over at his partner. Dylan folded.

Wayne and Kathy Harris were waiting when Eric arrived at the police station. Tom and Sue Klebold were close behind. They couldn’t believe their boys could do something like this. The boys could be charged with three felonies, including a Class V, which carried up to a $100,000 fine and one to three years in prison. Eric and Dylan were questioned separately. With their parents’ consent, they waived their rights. Each boy gave oral and written statements. Eric blamed Dylan. “Dylan suggested that we should steal some of the objects in the white van,” he wrote. “at first I was very uncomfortable and questioning with the thought.” His verbal account was more adamant. He said Dylan looked into the van and asked, “Should we break into it and steal it? It would be nice to steal some stuff in there. Should we do it?” Eric claimed he responded, “Hell no.” He said Dylan kept pestering him and eventually wore him down.

Dylan accepted joint blame. “Almost at the same time, we both got the idea of breaking into this white van,” he said.

The boys were taken to county jail. They were fingerprinted, photographed, and booked. Then they were released into the custody of four furious parents.

36. Conspiracy

After the murders, the detective team sought convictions. It had three possible crimes to uncover: participation in the attack, participation in the planning, or guilty knowledge. At first it looked easy. The killers had been sloppy; they hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. And the primary living suspects were juveniles. Most of the friends had withheld something crucial: Robyn had helped purchase three of the guns, Chris and Nate had seen pipe bombs, and Chris and Zack had heard about napalm. They all broke quickly. They were kids; it was easy. But they broke only so far. They admitted to knowing details, but claimed to be clueless about the plan.

Detectives pushed harder. The suspects didn’t push back; they just threw up their hands. Fuselier had several solid agents on the case. He knew they could sniff out a liar. How are the suspects responding? he asked. Do they seem deceptive? Not at all. His team leader described them as wide-eyed and understandably anxious. Most had begun by hiding something, and it had been painfully obvious. They were awful actors. But once they spilled it, they just seemed relieved. They were calm, peaceful—all the signs of someone coming clean. Most of the suspects agreed to polygraphs. That usually meant they had nothing left to hide.

Two friends, Robert Perry and Joe Stair, had been identified by witnesses as shooters or at least present at the scene. They were both tall and lanky—and therefore matched a common description for Dylan. Both boys produced alibis. Perry’s was shaky: he had been sleeping downstairs until his grandmother woke him with news of the shooting. He said he walked upstairs, stumbled out onto the porch, and cried. Did anyone see him, other than his grandmother? No, he didn’t think so. But Perry had been seen by others—he’d just been too upset to notice them. Within a week, a neighbor who was interviewed described driving up around noon and seeing Perry crying just the way he’d described.

The physical evidence was even less damning. All the friends’ houses were searched. No weapons were found. No ammo, no ordnance, no refuse of any pipe bomb assembly. Zack had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, but there was no sign that he had used it to build anything. Fingerprints at the crime scene were all a bust. There was an extraordinary amount of material: guns, ammo, gear, unused pipe bombs, strips of duct tape, and dozens of components from the big bombs. All of it was covered with the killers’ prints; nobody else’s. The same was true at the killers’ houses: nothing on the journals, videotapes, camcorders, or bomb-assembly gear. No one appeared in the killers’ records. Eric had been a meticulous planner and recorder of dates, locations, and receipts. Detectives searched the stores’ files and credit card records. All signs indicated that the killers had purchased everything.

For months, Sheriff Stone publicly espoused a conspiracy theory. Fuselier could feel the conspiracy slipping away the first week. Within two, he knew it was remote. The most telling evidence came from the killers themselves. In their journals and videos, they cop to everything. They never mention outside involvement, except, derisively, when they talk about hapless dupes. The killers leaked their plans in countless way, but there’s no indication that anyone close to them ever breathed a word. Their friends’ e-mails, IMs, day planners, and journals were searched, along with every paper the investigators could find; there was no sign that any of the friends had known.

Rumors about a third shooter have continued right up to the present day, but publicly, it didn’t take long for investigators to put them to rest. Eric and Dylan were correctly identified by witnesses who knew them. No one else turned up on the surveillance videos or the 911 audio. Witnesses’ accounts were remarkably consistent about a tall shooter and a short one—but there seemed to be two of each: two in T-shirts and two in trench coats. “As soon as I learned Eric’s coat was left outside on the landing, I knew what had happened there,” Fuselier said. Witnesses exchanged stories, and reports of two guys in T-shirts and two in trench coats quickly turned into four shooters. Dylan’s decision to leave his coat on until he reached the library made for more combinations, and the number multiplied over the afternoon. The killers also lobbed pipe bombs in every direction. Their gunfire shattered windows and ricocheted off walls, ductwork, and stairs. Many kids heard crashes or explosions and positively identified the location as the source of activity rather than the destination. Several witnesses insisted that they had spotted a gunman on the roof. What they had seen was a maintenance man adjusting the air-conditioning unit.

So what accounted for all the confusion? “Eyewitness testimony, in general, is not very accurate,” one investigator explained. “Put that together with gunshots going off and just the most terrifying situation in their life, what they remember now may not be anywhere near what really happened.” Human memory can be erratic. We tend to record fragments: gunshots, explosions, trench coats, terror, sirens, screams. Images come back jumbled, but we crave coherence, so we trim them, adjust details, and assemble everything together in a story that makes sense. We record vivid details, like the scraggly ponytail flapping against the dirty blue T-shirt of the boy fleeing just ahead. All the way out of the building, a witness may focus on that swishing hair. Later, she remembers a glimpse of the killer: he was tall and lanky—did he have scraggly hair? It fits together, and she connects it. Soon the killer is wearing the dirty blue T-shirt as well. Moments later, and forever after, she is convinced that’s exactly what she saw.

Investigators identified nearly a dozen common misperceptions among library survivors. Distortion of time was rampant, particularly chronology. Witnesses recalled less once the killers approached them, not more. Terror stops the brain from forming new memories. A staggering number insisted they were the last ones out of the library—once they were out, it was over. Similarly, most of those injured, even superficially, believed they were the last ones hit. Survivors also clung to reassuring concepts: that they were actually hiding by crouching under tables in plain sight.

Memory is notoriously unreliable. It happens even with the best witnesses. Six years later, Principal DeAngelis described the shooting as if he had just experienced it. He retraced his steps through the building, pausing at the exact spot where he first saw Dylan Klebold fire his shotgun. Mr. D pointed out Dylan’s position and described everything Dylan was wearing: white T-shirt, military harness, ball cap turned around backward. But he has two entirely different versions of how he got there.

In one version, he learned of the shooting in his office. That was unusual: normally he would have been in the midst of the cafeteria hubbub. But Tuesday he was held up by an appointment. He had a meeting with a young teacher working on a one-year contract. Mr. D had been happy with the teacher’s performance and was about to offer him a permanent position. They had just shaken hands and sat down when Frank’s secretary’s face slammed into the glass on the top half of his door. She had run to warn him so frantically that she’d failed to turn the knob completely and had hurtled right into the door. A moment later, she burst in shouting.

“Frank! They’re shooting!”

“What?”

“Gunshots! Downstairs, there are gunshots!”

He bolted up. They ran out together—into the main foyer, just past the huge hanging trophy case. Dylan fired, and the case shattered behind Frank.

It was two or three years after the fact that Frank’s secretary recounted that version for him. He told her she was nuts. He had no memory of that.

“In my version, I’m walking out calmly going to lunch,” he said. “We’ve finished the meeting, I’ve offered him the job. He’s happy.”

DeAngelis had planned to offer the job. He liked the teacher and had pictured his joyful acceptance. Mentally, it had already happened. The actual events—gunfire in the hallway, his charge toward the girls’ gym class, and the desperation to hide them—wiped out everything in his mental vicinity. His secretary’s appearance was unimportant, and it conflicted with his “memory” of offering the job. One memory had to go.

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

Investigators went back to interview the killers’ closest friends several times. Each new interview and lead would raise more questions about the killers’ associates. Sometimes new evidence revealed lies.

An FBI agent interviewed Kristi Epling the day after the murders. Kristi was connected to both killers, particularly Eric. They were close, and she was dating his buddy Nate Dykeman. She didn’t seem to know much, though. Her FBI report was brief and unremarkable. She said Nate was in shock, the TCM connection was silly, and Eric had probably been the leader. Kristi did not mention any of his notes in her possession.

Like most of the killers’ friends, Kristi was exceptionally smart; she was headed to college on an academic scholarship. She played it cool about the notes during her FBI interview, then mailed them to a friend in St. Louis who was unconnected to Columbine and unlikely to be questioned. Kristi was careful: no return address on the envelope. The friend went to the police. She did not inform Kristi.

The pages included notes passed back and forth between Kristi and Eric in German class—a rambling conversation, conducted in German. They mentioned a hit list. That was old news to investigators—most of the school was on one of Eric’s lists. But they had withheld that information from the public. Kristi had been hiding it; maybe she was hiding more. Detectives returned to question her. They asked about German class, and Kristi said she had exchanged notes with Eric but had thrown them away months ago. She assured them repeatedly that Eric had never made any threats. She would have told a teacher, she insisted. Kristi also said Nate had fled to Florida, to stay with his father and avoid the media hounds. They had talked on the phone that morning.

The detectives asked Kristi what should happen to someone who had helped the killers. “They should go to jail forever,” she said. “It was a horrible thing.” And what about someone who withheld information after the attack? “I don’t know,” Kristi said. “It would depend on what it was.” They should probably get counseling, she suggested, but some sort of punishment, too.

They asked again: Did she know anything more? No. Had she destroyed any notes from Eric? No. They kept repeating the questions, assuring her that she could disclose anything now without repercussions. No, there was nothing. They continued questioning her, repeated that offer, and finally she went for it. OK, there were notes, she admitted. And Nate was not in Florida; he was staying with her. He was there in the house right now. She said the notes had been very painful to hold on to but she did not want to destroy them. If she could just get them somewhere far, far away, she hoped to retrieve them someday when everything was more clear.

Once she copped to the truth, Kristi was forthcoming. She agreed to turn over her PC and her e-mail accounts and to take a polygraph. Beyond that, she didn’t know anything significant. She told them about some things Nate had confessed to, but detectives knew about them already. Kristi had just been afraid. She’d thought she had something incriminating, and she’d panicked. No evidence of a conspiracy. Another dead end.

Nevertheless, Dr. Fuselier learned a great deal from the German conversation. It revolved around Kristi’s new boyfriend; she’d had a short-lived romance with a sophomore named Dan. Eric couldn’t believe she was going out with that little fuck. Why, what was wrong with Dan? she asked. For one thing, the prettyboy had punched him in the face last year, Eric said. Eric, in a fistfight? That surprised her. He always seemed so rational. He got mad when kids made fun of his black clothes or all his German crap, but he always kept his cool. He would calmly figure out how to get even.

Kristi worried about Eric getting even. She asked her boyfriend about it, and he said he was afraid Eric might kill him.

Kristi decided to play peace broker. She took it up with Eric in German class again. She told him straight out how scared Dan was. She used the phrase “kill him.” That made Eric nervous. He was in the juvenile Diversion program because of the van break-in, and threats like that could get him in trouble. Kristi said she’d be careful about it. But how could Dan make it up to him?

How about if he let me punch him in the face, Eric suggested. Seriously? Seriously.

Dr. Fuselier was not surprised by the notes. Very cold-blooded. Any kid could get in a fight. Dan had gotten really angry, and in the heat of a fistfight had clocked Eric. Eric was planning his punch. He wanted Dan to stand there defenseless and let him do it. Complete power over the kid. That’s what Eric craved.

As the conspiracy theory crumbled, far from the eyes of the public, a new motive emerged. The jock-feud theory was accepted as the underlying driver, but that had supposedly gone on for a year. What made the killers snap? Nine days after the murders, the media found yet another trigger. The Marines. The New York Times and the Washington Post broke the story on April 29. The rest of the media piled on quickly.

They learned that Eric had been talking to a Marine recruiter during the last few weeks of his life. They also discovered he’d been taking the prescription antidepressant Luvox—something that would typically disqualify him (because it implied depression). A Defense Department spokesman verified that the recruiter had learned about the medication and rejected Eric. The media was off to the races, again.

Luvox added an extra wrinkle, as it functioned as an anger suppressant. The Times cited unnamed friends of Eric’s as saying that “they believe that he may have tried to stop taking the drug, perhaps because of his rejection by the Marines, five days before he and his best friend, Dylan Klebold, stormed onto the Columbine campus with guns and bombs.”

The story added a bit of evidence that seemed to confirm it: “the coroner’s office said no drugs or alcohol had been found in Mr. Harris’s body in an autopsy, but it would not specify whether the body had been screened for Luvox.” It was finally coming together: the Marines rejected Eric, he quit the Luvox to fuel his rage, he grabbed a gun and started killing. It all fit.

Fuselier read the stories. He shuddered. All the conclusions were reasonable—and wrong. Eric’s body had not initially been screened for Luvox. Later it had: he’d remained on a full dose, right up to his death. And investigators had talked to the Marine recruiter the morning after the murders. He had determined Eric was ineligible. But Eric had never known.

By this time, Fuselier had already read Eric’s journal and seen the Basement Tapes. He knew what the media did not. There had been no trigger.

April 30, officials met with the Klebolds and several attorneys to discuss ground rules for a series of interviews. Kate Battan was aggravated that she could not question the family directly. So she asked them to tell her about their son. They were still dumbfounded. They described a normal teenage boy: extraordinarily shy but happy. Dylan was coping well with adolescence and developing into a responsible young adult. They entrusted him with major decisions when he could articulate his rationale. Teachers loved him and so did other kids. He was gentle and sensitive until the day he died. Sue could recall seeing Dylan cry only once. He came home from school upset, and went up to his room. He pulled a box of stuffed animals out of the closet, dumped them out, burrowed under, and fell asleep surrounded. He never did reveal what disturbed him.

His parents granted Dylan a measure of privacy in his own room. The last time Tom recalled being in there was about two weeks before the murders, to turn off the computer Dylan left on. Otherwise, they monitored Dylan’s life aggressively, and forbade him from hanging out with bad influences.

Tom said he was extremely close to Dylan. They shared Rockies season tickets with three other families, and on his nights, Tom usually took one of his sons. Tom and Dylan hung out all the time together. They played a lot of sports until Tom developed arthritis in the mid-1990s. Now it was a lot of chess, computers, and working on Dylan’s BMW. They built a set of custom speakers together. Dylan didn’t like doing repair work with Tom, though, and sometimes he got testy and snapped off one-word responses. That was normal. Tom considered Dylan his best friend.

Dylan had a handful of tight buddies, his parents said: Zack and Nate, and of course Eric, who was definitely closest. Chris Morris seemed like more of an acquaintance. Dylan had fun with Robyn Anderson—a sweet girl—but definitely nothing romantic. He hadn’t had a girlfriend yet, but had been kind of group dating. His friends seemed happy. They sure did laugh a lot. They were always polite and seemed laid back—pretty immune to social pressure, they said.

Eric was the quietest of the group. Tom and Sue never felt they knew what was going on in that head. Eric was always respectful, though. They were aware Judy Brown had a different opinion. “Judy doesn’t like a lot of people,” Sue said.

Tom and Sue didn’t perceive Eric to be leading or following their son. But they did notice that he got angry at Dylan when he “screwed something up.”

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

Battan left frustrated. “I didn’t get to ask any questions,” she said later. “All I got was a fluff piece on their son.” She documented the interview, which remained sealed for eighteen months. The series of interviews never occurred. Lawyers demanded immunity from prosecution before they would talk. Jeffco officials refused. The Harrises took the same position. Battan didn’t even get a fluff piece from them.

While Battan interviewed the Klebolds, the National Rifle Association convened in Denver. It was a ghastly coincidence. Mayor Wellington Webb begged the group to cancel its annual convention, scheduled long before. Angry barbs had flown back and forth all week. “We don’t want you here,” Mayor Webb finally said.

Other promoters gave in to similar demands. Marilyn Manson had been incorrectly linked to the killers. He canceled his concert at Red Rocks and the remainder of his national tour. The NRA show went on. Four thousand attended. Three thousand protesters met them. They massed on the capitol steps, marched to the convention site, and formed a human chain around the Adam’s Mark Hotel. Many waved “Shame on the NRA” signs. One placard was different. Tom Mauser’s said “My son Daniel died at Columbine. He’d expect me to be here today.”

Tom was a shy, quiet man. It had been a rough week, and friends weren’t sure he was up to public confrontation. “He had a tough, tough day yesterday,” one coworker said.

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

Tom had been struck by another coincidence. In early April, Daniel had taken an interest in gun control and had come to his father with a question: Did Tom know there were loopholes in the Brady Bill? Gun shows were excluded from the mandatory background checks. Two weeks later, Daniel was murdered by a gun acquired at one of those shows.

“Clearly it was a sign to me,” Tom explained later.

Critics had already blasted Tom for profiting off his son’s murder, or getting duped by gun control activists. “I assure you, I am not being exploited,” he told the crowd.

Inside the Adam’s Mark, NRA president Charlton Heston opened the show. He went straight at Mayor Webb. The crowd booed. “Get out of our country, Wellington Webb!” someone yelled. Conventioneers were amused.

Heston charged on. “They say, ‘Don’t come here,’” he said. “I guess what saddens me most is how it suggests complicity. It implies that you and I and eighty million honest gun owners are somehow to blame, that we don’t care as much as they, or that we don’t deserve to be as shocked and horrified as every other soul in America mourning for the people of Littleton. ‘Don’t come here.’ That’s offensive. It’s also absurd.”

The group observed a moment of silence for the Columbine victims. It then proceeded with the welcome ceremony. Traditionally, the oldest and youngest attendees are officially recognized at that time. The youngest is typically a child. “Given the unusual circumstances,” Heston announced that the tradition would be suspended this year.

When the conspiracy evaporated, it left a dangerous vacuum. Dr. Fuselier saw the danger early on. “Once we understood there was no third shooter, I realized that for everyone, it was going to be difficult to get closure,” he said. The final act of the killers was among their cruelest: they deprived the survivors of a living perpetrator. They deprived the families of a focus for their anger, and their blame. There would be no cathartic trial for the victims. There was no killer to rebuke in a courtroom, no judge to implore to impose the maximum penalty. South Jeffco was seething with anger, and it would be deprived of a reasonable target. Displaced anger would riddle the community for years.

The crumbling conspiracy eliminated the primary mission of the task force. The all-star team was left to sort out logistical issues: exactly what had happened, and how. Those were massive investigations, easy to get lost inside. Investigators wanted to retrace every step, reconstruct each moment, place every witness and every buckshot fragment in place and time and context. It was a Herculean effort, and it drew the team’s attention from the real objective: Why? The families wanted to know how their children died, of course, but that was nothing compared to the underlying question.

Early on, officials began to say the report would steer clear of conclusions. “We deal with facts,” Division Chief Kiekbusch said. “We’ll make a diligent effort not to include a bunch of conclusions. Here are the facts: You read it and make your own conclusions.”

The families were incredulous. So was the press. Make our own conclusions? How many civilians felt qualified to diagnose mass murderers? Isn’t that what homicide detectives were for? The public was under the impression that a hundred of them had been paid for months to perform that service.

Of course homicide teams draw conclusions. What Kiekbusch meant was that they avoid discussing those conclusions externally. That’s the DA’s role. The cops develop the case, but the DA presents it to the jury—and to the public, as necessary. But aside from the gun providers, there was no one to try for the Columbine killings.

Sheriff Stone kept talking up the conspiracy theory with the press. He was driving his team nuts. They had all but ruled it out. Every few days, Jeffco spokesmen corrected another misstatement by the sheriff. Several corrections were extreme: arrests were not imminent, deputies had not blocked the killers from escaping the school, and Stone’s descriptions of the cafeteria videos had been pure conjecture—the tapes had not even been analyzed yet. They did not try to correct some of his mischaracterizations, like when he quoted Eric’s journal out of context to give the impression that the killers had been planning to hijack a plane when they’d started their attack. He was quickly becoming a laughingstock, yet he was the ultimate ranking authority on the case.

His staff begged him to stop speaking to the press. But how would it look if subordinates spoke about the case while the head man was muzzled? A tacit understanding developed on the team: if Stone kept his mouth shut, they would, too. (Though they continued background interviews with the Rocky.) For the next five months, until an impromptu interview by lead investigator Kate Battan in September, law enforcement officers would divulge virtually nothing more publicly about their discoveries or conclusions. After that, it would be a slow trickle, and a fight for every scrap of information. Nine days after the shootings, the Jeffco blackout began.

Columbine coverage ended abruptly, too. A string of deadly tornadoes hit Oklahoma, and the national press corps left town in a single afternoon. The school would return periodically to national headlines over the years, but the narrative of what had happened was set.

37. Betrayed

Eric needed professional help. His father made that determination within forty eight hours of his arrest. Wayne picked up the steno pad that had sat idle for nine months and began filling half a dozen pages: “See psychologist,” he wrote. “See what’s going on. Determine treatment.” Wayne gathered names and numbers for several agencies and services and added bulleted items to them: anger management, life management, professional therapist, mental health center, school counselor, juvenile assessment center, and family adolescent team. Wayne documented several conversations with lawyers. He wrote “probation,” circled it, and added, “take any chances for reformation or diversion.”

Wayne checked out half a dozen candidates for therapist. Their rates varied from $100 to $150 per hour. He settled on Dr. Kevin Albert, a psychiatrist, and made an appointment for February 16.

Wayne logged page after page of calls to cops, lawyers, and prosecutors, working through their options. The juvenile Diversion program sounded ideal: a year of counseling and community service, along with fines, fees, and restitution. If Eric completed it successfully and kept clean for an additional year, the robbery would be expunged from his record. But the DA’s office had to accept him.

Eric told Dr. Albert he had anger problems. Depression was an issue. He had contemplated suicide. He apparently did not mention the bombs he took to the park the previous evening. Dr. Albert started him on Zoloft, a prescription antidepressant. Eric continued meeting with him biweekly, and Wayne and Kathy began occasional sessions as well.

At home, the boys received similar punishments. Each was grounded for a month, and forbidden contact with the other. Eric also had his computer access revoked. He went to work on his pipe bombs. He lost one—or perhaps left it as a warning or clue. On February 15, the day before Eric’s first appointment with Dr. Albert, someone in the neighborhood stumbled upon his work: a duct-taped PVC pipe in the grass with a red fuse protruding. Kind of an odd sight for a suburban park in Jeffco. The Jeffco cops sent out an investigator from the bomb squad. Sure enough, it was a homemade pipe bomb. Officers didn’t find a whole lot of those around here. The investigator defused the bomb and filed a report.

Eric and Dylan hid their arrest from friends. They made excuses about their restrictions. Finally they began to come clean. Eric fessed up to a girl at Blackjack, and word traveled to Nate Dykeman. Nate couldn’t believe Dylan had been hiding it from him.

“Is this the reason you can’t go out?” Nate asked. Dylan turned red.

“He didn’t want to talk about it,” Nate said later.

After word leaked, Eric told friends it was the most embarrassing moment of his life.

Both boys were humiliated. And Eric was raging mad. Dylan’s response was more complex. Three days after his arrest, Dylan pictured himself on the road to happiness with Harriet. He sketched it out in his journal as a two lane highway with a road sign off one shoulder and a dashed stripe down the center. His road led off to a majestic row of mountains, with a giant heart guiding him onward. “Its so great to love,” he wrote. He was a felon now, but he was ecstatic. He filled half the page with drawings and exclamations: “I love her, & she loves me.”

Anger boiled up with the ecstasy. Dylan was beginning to see it Eric’s way: “the real people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies, but we know & love being superior…. either ill commit suicide, or ill get w Harriet & it will be NBK for us. My happiness. her happiness. NOTHING else matters.”

Suicide or murder? The pattern solidified: homicidal thoughts occasionally, self-destruction on every page. “If, by love’s choice, Harriet didn’t love me id slit my wrist & blow up Atlanta strapped to my neck,” he wrote. Eric had named one of his pipe bombs Atlanta.

Wayne Harris kept working the phones. By early March, he secured an evaluation with Andrea Sanchez, a counselor with the juvenile Diversion program. Sanchez placed calls to Eric and Dylan to prescreen them. They passed. She sent a dozen forms and set up appointments. Each boy would come to her office with a parent and the stack of paperwork. Both intake sessions would take place on March 19.

For two months, Wayne Harris worked to get his son into Diversion, to keep his record clean. Eric was busy, too. He was detonating his first pipe bombs. He boldly posted the breakthrough on his Web site: “Mother fucker blew BIG. Flipping thing was heart-pounding gut-wrenching brain-twitching ground-moving insanely cool! His brothers haven’t found a target yet though.”

This time, Eric was producing to kill. Contempt had been the undercurrent in his “I HATE” rants; now he made it explicit. Morons had nerve to judge him, he said. To call him crazy just for envisioning mass murder? Empty, vacuous morons standing in judgment? “if you got a problem with my thoughts, come tell me and ill kill you,” he posted. “DEAD PEOPLE DON’T ARGUE! God DAMNIT I AM PISSED!!”

As Eric embraced murder, Dylan retreated. After the arrest, he had the one brief outburst in his journal, and then he dropped all mention of it for nearly a year. Dylan still fretted about “this toilet earth,” but his focus shifted dramatically toward love. Love. It had been prominent from the first page of his journal, but now, a year in, it grew overwhelming. He emblazoned entire pages with ten-inch hearts, surrounded by choirs of smaller, fluttering hearts.

Eric had no use for love. Sex, maybe. He shared none of Dylan’s desires for truth, beauty, or ethereal love. Eric’s only internal struggle concerned which stupid bastard was more deserving of his wrath.

Eric’s dreams changed after his arrest. Human extinction was still his aim, but for the first time he made the leap from observer to enforcer. “I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole fucking area full of you snotty ass rich mother fucking high strung godlike attitude having worthless pieces of shit whores,” he wrote. He posted this openly on his Web site. “i dont care if I live or die in the shootout,” he wrote. “all I want to do is kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can!”

It was too much for Dylan. Kill? Everything? Apparently not. He made a stunning move behind Eric’s back. He told. He told the worst possible person: Brooks Brown. Brooks knew about the petty vandalism, and his parents saw Eric as a young criminal, but they had no idea how serious it was.

On the way to class, Dylan handed Brooks a scrap of paper. Just one line was written on it: a Web address.

“I think you should take a look at this tonight,” Dylan said.

“OK. Anything special?”

“It’s Eric’s Web site. You need to see it. And you can’t tell Eric I gave it to you.”

Brooks pulled up the site that night. Eric was threatening to kill people. He threatened to kill Brooks personally, in three different places.

Dylan leaked the URL to Brooks the day before their admission interviews for the Diversion program. If Brooks told his parents—and Dylan knew he told Judy everything—the Browns would go straight to the cops, and Eric would be rejected and imprisoned for a felony. Dylan probably would be, too. He took that chance.

Brooks did tell his mom. Randy and Judy called the cops. Jeffco investigators came out that night. They followed up, they filed reports, but they did not alert the DA’s office. Eric and Dylan proceeded into Diversion.

Only one parent was required at the Diversion intake meeting. Tom and Sue Klebold both attended. They considered it important. They filled out an eight-page questionnaire about Dylan, he did the same, and then Andrea Sanchez walked them through the results. The Klebolds were in for a few surprises. Dylan copped to five or six drunken bouts, starting at age fifteen. “Was not aware of it at all—until Andrea Sanchez asked the question a few moments ago,” his parents wrote. Apparently they were unaware his nickname was VoDKa.

Dylan claimed he had quit drinking. He didn’t like the taste and said it “wasn’t worth it.” He had tried pot, too, and rejected it for the same reasons. His parents were stunned about marijuana, too.

Tom and Sue were candid; it was the only ethical course. “Dylan is introverted and has grown up isolated,” they wrote. “He is often angry or sullen, and behaviors seem disrespectful to and intolerant of others.” They wrote a line about disrespecting authority figures, crossed it out, and then said that teachers had reported that he didn’t listen or take correction well.

Eric was more cautious. He revealed just enough to appear confessional. He said he had tasted alcohol three times, had never gotten drunk, and had given it up for good. Exactly what a parent wanted to hear. It was vintage Eric—more believable than abstinence and reassuring to boot: he had faced the temptation already and the danger had passed. He understood how his parents thought, and in no time he’d read Andrea Sanchez. In their first meeting, he turned an admission into a virtue. He lied about pot, too. He claimed he had no interest. The alcohol admission gave the claim credence.

Wayne and Kathy both attended their session as well. Their surprise came in the mental health section. On a checklist of thirty potential problem areas, they marked three boxes: anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Eric had told them about those three, and he discussed them with Dr. Albert. He was getting help. Everyone agreed the Zoloft was helping, too. It was common for an adolescent to check several boxes. Eric picked fourteen. He marked virtually everything related to distrust or aggression. He checked jealousy, anxiety, suspiciousness, authority figures, temper, racing thoughts, obsessive thoughts, mood swings, and disorganized thoughts. He skipped suicidal thoughts, but he checked homicidal thoughts.

Wayne and Kathy worried about Eric suppressing his anger. They admitted that he would blow up now and then—lashing out verbally or hitting an object. He never tried it in front of his dad, but they’d gotten reports back from work and school. It didn’t happen often, but they were concerned. Eric responded well to discipline. They had controlled his behavior, but how could they contain his moods? When he really got mad, Eric said, he would punch a wall. He had thought about suicide, but never seriously, and mostly out of anger. He got angry all the time, he said, at almost anything he didn’t like.

Eric was seething as he scrawled out his answers, and he practically told them so on the form. The nerve of these lowlifes judging him. He explained how he hated fools telling him what to do. In the interview, he apparently directed his anger at other fools. They fell for it.

Eric would howl about it later. The partial confession was his favorite con of all. He could turn over half his cards and still pull off the bluff.

He posted his actual thoughts about the legal system on his Web site at around this same time: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. If you don’t like it, you die.” He described going to some random downtown area in some big city and blowing up and shooting up everything he could. He assured us he would feel no remorse, no sorrow, no shame. Yet there he sat, submitting. He bent to their will; he filled out their degrading form. Laughing on the inside was insufficient. He would make them pay.

Sanchez worried about the boys’ failure to accept full responsibility. Eric was sticking to his story that the break-in was Dylan’s fault. Dylan thought the whole thing was a little overblown. Sanchez noted her reservations but recommended them for enrollment.

The final decision was up to the court. A week later, on March 25, Eric and Dylan stood before Jeffco Magistrate John DeVita during a joint hearing. Their fathers stood beside them. That impressed DeVita. Most of the juveniles appeared alone, or with just a mom. Dads were a good sign. And these dads appeared to be taking control of the situation. DeVita was also impressed by the punishments they had imposed. “Good for you, Dad,” he said. “It sounds to me like you got the circumstances under control.”

“This has been a rather traumatic experience,” Tom Klebold told him. “I think it’s probably good, a good experience, that they got caught the first time.”

“He’d tell you if there were any more?”

“Yes, he would actually.”

DeVita didn’t buy it. “First time out of the box and you get caught?” he asked Eric. “I don’t believe it. It’s a real rare occurrence when somebody gets caught the first time.”

But he was impressed by the way the boys presented themselves: dressed up, well behaved, deferential. Yes, Your Honor and No, Your Honor. They respected the court, and it showed.

DeVita pegged Dylan as well. The B’s and C’s on his report card were a joke. “I bet you’re an A student,” DeVita said. “If you put the brainpower to the paperwork.”

DeVita gave them a lecture; then he approved them for Diversion. This pair was going to do just fine, he thought.

Fourteen months later, after the murders, DeVita lamented how convincing the boys had been. “What’s mind-boggling is the amount of deception,” he said. “The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception.”

Judy and Randy Brown kept calling the cops. They were sure Brooks was in danger. Their other son was so scared he slept with a baseball bat. After two weeks of their pestering, the case was bumped up to Investigator John Hicks, who met with Judy. On March 31, he sat down with two other investigators, Mike Guerra and Glenn Grove, to discuss it. The situation looked pretty bad—bad enough for Investigator Guerra to type out a two-page affidavit for a search warrant, “duly sworn upon oath.”

Guerra did good work. In the affidavit, he dramatically outlined all the crucial elements of the case against this kid. He detailed the specificity of Eric’s plans, his methods, and his ordnance. He quoted liberally from Eric’s Web site to provide proof. But most important, Guerra drew the connection to physical evidence: a bomb matching those in Eric’s descriptions had recently been discovered near his home. The Harris house was to be searched for any literature, notes, or physical material related to the construction of explosives, as well as all e-mail correspondence—presumably to include the Web site.

The affidavit was convincing. It was filed. It was not signed or taken before a judge. It was not acted upon in any way. A plausible explanation for inaction was never provided. Years later, one official said Guerra was drawn away to another case, and when he returned, the affidavit, as written, lacked the timeliness required to take it to a judge.

The Browns said that Investigator Hicks also knew about Eric’s arrest for the van break-in. There was no indication that he or anyone from the sheriff’s department ever relayed their damning evidence about Eric to the Diversion officers. Magistrate DeVita was provided no indication before he approved them for the program.

Senior officials from the sheriff’s department, the DA’s office, and the criminal court were unaware of one another’s actions concerning Eric. But Eric apparently knew what they were all up to. Eric got wind that the Browns were on to him, so he took his Web site down for a while. There is no indication he ever learned of Dylan’s betrayal. There is no sign that he suspected.

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

38. Martyr

She’s in the martyrs’ hall of fame,” Cassie’s pastor proclaimed at her funeral. That was not hyperbole. A noted religious scholar predicted Cassie could become the first officially designated Protestant martyr since the sixteenth century. “This is really quite extraordinary,” he said. “The flames of martyrdom are being fanned by these various preachers, who apparently have embellished the story as they have told it. It takes on a life of its own.”

In the Weekly Standard, J. Bottum compared her to the third-century martyrs Perpetua and Felicity and “the tales of the thousands of early Christians who went joyously to their deaths in the Roman coliseums.” And the response felt like the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, Bottum said. He foresaw a generation of kids rising up to recast our cultural landscape. He later described a national change of heart, “trembling on the cusp of breaking forth…. It’s an ever-widening faith that the whole pornographic, violent, anarchic disaster of popular American culture will soon be swept away.”

It was a great story. It gave Brad and Misty tremendous relief. They were due. The Enemy had taken on their little girl before. And in the first round, The Enemy had won.

It had been possession, pure and simple; that’s how Misty saw it. The Enemy had crept into her house a decade earlier, but remained hidden until the winter of 1996. She discovered his presence just before Christmas. She had just quit her job as a financial analyst at Lockheed Martin in order to be a better, full-time mom. It was a tough transition, and Misty went looking for a Bible for inspiration. She found one in Cassie’s room, and she also discovered a stack of letters. They were disturbing.

The letters documented a vigorous correspondence between Cassie and a close friend. The friend bitched about a teacher and then suggested, “Want to help me murder her?” The pages were filled with hard-core sex talk, occult imagery, and magic spells. They hammered a persistent refrain: “Kill your parents!… Make those scumbags pay for your suffering…. Murder is the answer to all of your problems.”

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

“My guts are hungry for that weird stuff,” one letter said. “I fucking need to kill myself, we need to murder your parents. School is a fucking bitch, kill me with your parents, then kill yourself so you don’t go to jail.”

Misty called Brad, then the sheriff. They waited for Cassie to come home. First, Cassie tried to downplay the letters. Then she got angry. She hated them, she said. She admitted to writing letters in kind. She screamed. She said she would run away. She threatened to kill herself.

Rev. Dave McPherson, the youth pastor at West Bowles, counseled Brad and Misty to get tough. “Cut her phone, lock the door, pull her out of school,” he said. “Don’t let her out of the house without supervision.” That’s what they did. They transferred Cassie to a private school. They let her leave the house only for youth group at the church.

A bitter struggle followed. “She despised us at first,” Reverend McPherson said. She would threaten to run away and launch into wild, graphic screaming fits.

“I’m going to kill myself!” Brad recalled her yelling. “Do you want to watch me? I’ll do it, just watch. I’ll kill myself. I’ll put a knife right here, right through my chest.”

Cassie cut her wrists and bludgeoned her skull. She would lock herself in the bathroom and bash her head against the sink counter. Alone in her bedroom, she beat it against the wall. With her family, she was sullen and spoke in monosyllables.

“There is no hope for that girl,” Reverend McPherson thought. “Not our kind of hope.”

Cassie described the ordeal in a notebook her parents found after her death:

I cannot explain in words how much I hurt. I didn’t know how to deal with this hurt, so I physically hurt myself…. Thoughts of suicide obsessed me for days, but I was too frightened to actually do it, so I “compromised” by scratching my hands and wrists with a sharp metal file until I bled. It only hurt for the first couple minutes, then I went numb. Afterwards, however, it stung very badly, which I thought I deserved anyway.

Suddenly, one night three months later, Cassie shook The Enemy free. It was after sunset, at a youth group praise and worship service in the Rocky Mountains. Cassie got caught up in the music and suddenly broke down crying. She blubbered hysterically to a friend, who couldn’t make out half of what she said. When Misty picked her up from the retreat, Cassie rushed up, hugged her, and said, “Mom, I’ve changed. I’ve totally changed.”

Brad and Misty were skeptical, but the change took. “She left an angry, vengeful, bitter young girl and came back brand-new,” Reverend Kirsten said.

After the conversion, Cassie attended youth ministry enthusiastically, sported a WWJD bracelet, and volunteered for a program that helped ex-convicts in Denver. The following fall, Brad and Misty allowed her to transfer to Columbine High. But she struggled with social pressures right up to her last days. She did not attend prom that last weekend. She did not believe that kids liked her. The day before Cassie was killed, the leaders of her youth group gathered for a staff meeting. One of the items on the agenda was “How do we get Cassie to fit in better?”

Brad and Misty Bernall were forthcoming about Cassie’s history. A few weeks after the massacre, it was widely reported in the media. By then, two other martyr stories had surfaced. Valeen Schnurr’s account was remarkably similar to Cassie’s, except for the chronology and the outcome. Val was shot before her exchange about God. Dylan pointed his shotgun under her table and fired several rapid bursts, killing Lauren Townsend and injuring Val and another girl. Val was riddled with shotgun pellets up and down her arms and torso. Dylan walked away.

Val dropped to her knees, then her hands. Blood was streaming out of thirty-four separate wounds. “Oh my God, oh my God, don’t let me die,” she prayed.

Dylan turned around. This was too rich. “God? Do you believe in God?”

She wavered. Maybe she should keep her mouth shut. No. She would rather say it. “Yes. I believe in God.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe. And my parents brought me up that way.”

Dylan reloaded, but something distracted him. He walked off. Val crawled for shelter.

Once she made it out, Val was loaded into an ambulance, transported to St. Anthony’s, and rushed into surgery. Her parents, Mark and Shari, were waiting for her when she came to. Val started blurting out what had happened almost immediately. She made a full recovery, and her story never varied. Numerous witnesses corroborated her account.

Val’s story emerged at the same time as Cassie’s—the afternoon of the attack. It took a week longer to reach the media. It never caused much of a ripple there.

If the timing had been different, Val might have been an Evangelical hero: the brave girl who felt the brunt of a shotgun blast and still stood up for her Redeemer. She proclaimed her faith, and He saved her. What a message of hope that would have been. And the hero would have been alive to spread the good news.

It didn’t work out that way. Val was seen more often as a usurper. “People thought I was a copycat,” she said. “They thought I was just following the bandwagon. A lot of people just didn’t believe my story.”

The bigger Cassie’s fame grew, the more Val was rejected. An Evangelical youth rally was particularly disturbing. She told her story to a crowd gathered to honor Cassie and Rachel Scott. She got a very cold reception. “No one really comes out and says that never happened,” she said. “They just skirt around the issue. Like they ask, ‘Are you sure that’s how it happened?’ Or, ‘Could your faith really be that strong?’”

Val’s parents were supportive, but it wore on her. “You know, it gets frustrating,” she said. “Because you know in your heart where you were and what you said, and then people doubt you. And that’s what bothers me the most.”

Cassie’s fame grew. Reverend Kirsten embarked on a national speaking tour to spread the good news. “Pack as many onto the ark as possible,” he said. By summer’s end, the local youth group Revival Generation had blossomed from a few local chapters to an organization with offices in all fifty states. The organizer put on national touring shows with Columbine High survivors. Cassie’s name sent teenage girls storming to the stage.

Fame could be intoxicating. Brad and Misty were already celebrities in their world—blessed parents of the martyr. They resisted the temptation and carried on as humbly as before. For some time, Brad Bernall had been a greeter at Sunday worship services at West Bowles. He returned to the volunteer role almost immediately after Cassie’s funeral. He offered a smile with each handshake. The smiles looked sincere, but his pain bled through.

In early May, the church brought in a grief expert and conducted a group counseling session open to anyone in the struggling community.

Misty arrived first. Brad would be a little late, she said—he was having a really bad day. He had not gone into Cassie’s room since she’d died, but tonight, he was going in there alone. Brad showed up, shaken. He downplayed his trouble and offered to help. Misty did the same.

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

Emily was supposed to be in science class when the shooting happened. But they had a test scheduled, and because she had missed class the day before, she wasn’t ready. Her teacher sent her down to the library to look over her notes. She pulled up a seat by the window, at a table with just one girl—Cassie Bernall, who was studying Macbeth. They heard some commotion outside, and some kids came to the window to check it out, but it dissipated. Emily stood up for a look, saw a kid running across the soccer field, and sat down, returning to her notes.

A few minutes later, Patti Nielson ran in screaming and ordered everyone to get down. Cassie and Emily got under the table and tried to barricade themselves in by pulling some chairs around their tiny perimeter. That made them feel a little safer. Cassie crouched by the window side of the table, looking in toward the room, and Emily got down at the other end, facing Cassie two feet away. They could keep in contact with each other that way and collectively maintain a view of the whole room. The chairs created a lot of blind spots, but the girls were not about to move them. That was the only protection they had.

Emily heard shots coming from down the hallway—one at a time, not in bursts. They were getting closer. The doors opened; she heard them come in. They were shooting, talking back and forth, and shouting stuff like “Who wants to be killed next?” Emily looked over her shoulder to watch. She saw a kid near the counter jump or go down. The killers walked around a lot, taunting and shooting, and Emily got a good look at them. She had never noticed them before—she was a sophomore—but was sure she could pick them out again if she ever saw them again.

The girls whispered back and forth. “Dear God, dear God, why is this happening?” Cassie asked. “I just want to go home.”

“I know,” Emily answered. “We all want to get out of here.”

Between exchanges, Cassie prayed very quietly. Eric and Dylan passed by several times, but Emily never expected one of them to “come under the table” and shoot.

Eric stopped at their table, at Cassie’s end. Emily could see his legs and his boots, pointing directly at the right side of Cassie’s face. Cassie didn’t turn. Emily didn’t have to—she was facing perpendicular to Eric’s stance, so she could look straight at Cassie and see Eric just to her left at the same time. Eric slammed his hand on table, then squatted halfway down for a look. “Peekaboo,” he said.

Eric poked his shotgun under the table rim as he came down. He didn’t pause long, or even stoop down far enough for Emily to see his face. She saw the sawed-off gun barrel. The opening was huge. She looked into Cassie’s brown eyes. Cassie was still praying. There was no time for words between them. Eric shot Cassie in the head.

Everything was muffled then. The blast was so loud, it temporarily blew out most of Emily’s hearing. The fire alarm had been unbearably loud, but now she could barely hear it. She could see the light flashing out in the hallway. Eric’s legs turned.

Bree Pasquale was sitting there, right out in the open a few steps away, beside the next table over. It had been jammed with kids when she got there—she couldn’t fit, so she sat down next to it on the floor.

Bree was a bit farther from Cassie than Emily—the next closest person—but she had a wider view. She had also seen Eric walk up with the shotgun in his right hand, slap Cassie’s tabletop twice with his left, and say, “Peekaboo.” He squatted down, balancing on the balls of his feet, still holding on to the tabletop with his free hand. Cassie looked desperate, holding her hands up against the sides of her face. Eric poked the shotgun under and fired. Not a word.

Eric was sloppy with that shot: a one-hander, in an awkward half squat. The shotgun kicked back, and the butt nailed him in the face. He broke his nose sometime during the attack, and that’s the moment investigators believe it happened. Eric had his back to Bree, so she couldn’t see the gun hit his nose. But she watched him yank back on the pump handle and eject a red shell casing. It dropped to the floor. She looked under the table. Cassie was down, blood soaking into the shoulder of her light green shirt. Emily appeared unhurt.

Bree was exposed, just a few feet from Eric, but she couldn’t take it anymore. She lay down and asked the boy beside her, who was just barely under the table, to hold her hand. He did. Bree was terrified. She did not take her eyes off Eric. He stood up after ejecting the round and turned to face her. He took a step or two toward her, squatted down again, and laid the shotgun across his thighs. Blood was pouring out of his nostrils. “I hit myself in the face!” he yelled. He was looking at her but calling out to Dylan.

Eric took hold of the gun again and pointed it in Bree’s direction. He waved it back and forth in a sweeping motion—he could shoot anyone he wanted—and it came to rest on her.

That’s when Dylan’s gun went off. Bree heard him laugh and make a joke about what he had done. When she looked back at Eric, he was staring her straight in the face.

“Do you want to die?” Eric asked.

“No.”

He asked once more.

“No no no no no.” She pleaded for him to spare her, and Eric seemed to enjoy that: The exchange went on and on. He kept the gun right to her head the whole time.

“Don’t shoot me,” she said. “I don’t want to die.”

Finally, Eric let out a big laugh. “Everyone is going to die,” he told her.

“Shoot her!” Dylan yelled.

“No,” Eric replied. “We’re going to blow up the school anyway.”

Then something distracted him. He walked away and continued killing.

Bree looked back at Cassie’s table. The other girl, Emily, was on her knees now, still facing Cassie’s crumpled body, blood everywhere. She looked scared as hell.

How could she tell? an investigator asked Bree later.

The girl was biting her hands, she said.

Bree kept an eye on that girl. When the explosions moved out into the hallway, Bree figured the killers had gone, and she called out to the girl to come join her group. Emily couldn’t hear much, so Bree started waving her hands. Emily saw her, finally, and crawled over. She was not about to stand up. She sat next to Bree and leaned against some bookshelves. Time got blurry for Emily then. Later, she couldn’t recall how long she’d sat there.

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

Emily and Bree waited for the truth to come out.

Emily Wyant was sad. She went to counseling every day. April 20 had been horrible, and now she was saddled with a moral dilemma. She did not want to hurt the Bernalls; nor did she want to embarrass herself by shattering Cassie’s myth. The whole thing had gotten so big so fast. But by keeping quiet, Emily felt she was contributing to a lie.

“She was in a tough position,” her mother, Cindie, said later. Emily had told the cops, but they were not sharing much with the media anymore. Definitely not that bombshell.

Emily wanted to go public. Her parents were afraid. The martyrdom had turned into a religious movement—taking that on could be risky. “She didn’t know the ramifications that could come afterwards,” Cindie said. “She was just thinking about ‘I want to tell the truth.’”

Her parents were torn, too. They wanted the truth to come out, but not at the expense of their daughter. Emily had already faced more than any child should. This might be too much. Don’t do anything drastic, her parents advised. “It’s a wonderful memory for [Cassie’s] family,” Cindie told her. “Let’s not aggravate anything.”

In early May, the phone rang. It was the Rocky Mountain News. Dan Luzadder was one of the best investigative reporters in the city, and he was sorting out exactly what happened in the library. They were tracking down all the library survivors, and most were cooperating. Emily’s parents were wary. Her situation was different.

The reporters showed the Wyants some of the maps and timelines they were building. The family was impressed. The team seemed conscientious, and their work was thorough and detailed. The family agreed to talk. Emily would tell her story, and the Rocky could quote her but not identify her by name. “We didn’t want her to be some national scoundrel,” Cindie said.

After the interview, Emily was glad she had participated. What a relief to get that off her chest. She waited for the story.

The Rocky editors felt they needed more. This could get ugly. They wanted somebody on the record.

Emily kept waiting. Her frustration grew.

The Rocky Mountain News was waiting, too. They had conducted their investigation and had an incredible story to tell. Much of the public perception about Columbine was wrong. They had the truth. They were going to debunk all myths, including jocks, Goths, the TCM, and Cassie’s murder. All they needed was a “news peg.” The story would travel much farther if they timed it right.

They were waiting for Jeffco to finish its final report. A week or two before the release, the Rocky planned to stun the public with surprising revelations. It was a good strategy.

Misty Bernall had been hit hard. Telling Cassie’s story made it more bearable. Someone suggested a book. Reverend McPherson introduced her to an editor at the tiny Christian publisher Plough. Plough had published the book Cassie had been reading before she died, and Misty liked what she had seen of the company.

Misty was apprehensive at first. Profiting off Cassie was the last thing on her mind. But she had two terrific stories to tell: Cassie’s long fight for spiritual survival would be the primary focus, and her gunpoint proclamation would provide the hook.

A deal was struck in late May. It would be called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall.

The family had no idea the Rocky had discovered that title was untrue. Misty, who had gone back to work at Lockheed Martin as a statistician, would take a leave of absence to write the story. To reduce expenses, Misty agreed to forgo an advance in lieu of a higher royalty rate. Plough also agreed to set up a charity in Cassie’s name for some of its proceeds.

Plough Publishing foresaw its first bestseller. It planned a first printing of 100,000 copies, more than seven times larger than its previous record.

On May 25, something unexpected happened. Police opened the school up so families of the library victims could walk through the scene. This served two functions: victims could face the crime scene with their loved ones, and revisiting the room might jar loose memories or clarify confusion. Three senior investigators stood by to answer questions and observe. Craig Scott, who had initiated the Cassie story, came through with several family members. He stopped where he had hidden, and retold his story to his dad. A senior detective listened. Craig had sat extremely close to Cassie, just one table away, facing hers. But when he described her murder, he pointed in the opposite direction. It happened at one of the two tables near the interior, he said—which was exactly where Val had been. When a detective said Cassie had not been in that area, Craig insisted. He pointed to the closest tables to Val’s and said, “Well, she was up there then!” No, the detective said. Craig got agitated. “She was somewhere over there,” he said. He pointed again toward Val’s table. “I know that for a fact.”

Detectives explained the mistake. Craig got sick. The detective walked him out and Craig sat down in the empty corridor to collect himself. He apologized for getting ill. He was OK now, but he would wait for his family out there. He was not going back into that library.

Friends of the Bernalls said Brad was struggling much more than his wife. It was visible in the way he carried himself into worship on Sunday mornings. Brad looked broken. Misty took great solace in the book she was writing. It gave her purpose. It gave meaning to Cassie’s death. Misty had put herself in God’s hands, and He had handed her a mission. She would bring His message to a whole new audience. Her book would glorify her daughter and her God.

Investigators heard about the book deal. They decided that they owed it to Misty to alert her to the truth. In June, lead investigator Kate Battan and another detective went to see her. Misty described the meeting this way: “They said, ‘Don’t stop doing the book. We just wanted to let you know that there are differing accounts coming out of the library.’”

Battan said she encouraged Misty to continue with the book, but without the martyr incident. Cassie’s transformational story sounded wonderful. Battan said she made the details of Cassie’s murder clear, and later played the 911 tape for Brad and Misty.

Misty and her Plough editor, Chris Zimmerman, were concerned. They went back to their witnesses. Three witnesses stuck by the story that it was Cassie. Good enough. The martyr scene was going to be a small part of the book anyway. Misty wanted to focus on Cassie overcoming her own demons. “We wanted people to know Cassie was an average teenager who struggled with her weight and worried about boys and wasn’t ever a living saint,” she said.

Misty lived up to her word. That was the book she wrote. She described Cassie as selfish and stubborn on occasion, known to behave “like a spoiled two-year old.” Misty also agreed to run a disclaimer opposite the table of contents. It referred to “varying recollections” and stated that “the precise chronology… including the exact details of Cassie’s death… may never be known.”

Emily Wyant was getting more apprehensive. Her parents continued urging caution.

They had a dinner with the Bernalls. Brad and Misty asked Emily if she’d heard the exchange. Emily was a bit sheepish about answering, but she said no. Cindie Wyant felt that Emily had made herself clear, but afterward the Bernalls recalled no revelation. Cindie later surmised that they’d taken Emily’s response to mean she didn’t remember anything.

Val Schnurr’s family was uneasy, too. Investigators had briefed them on the evidence and told them about Craig Scott’s discovery in the library. Val and her parents wondered which was worse: hurting the Bernalls or keeping quiet. They also went to dinner with the Bernalls. Everyone felt better after that. Brad and Misty seemed sincere, and utterly distraught with pain. “So much sadness,” Mark Schnurr said. Clearly, the book was Misty’s way of healing.

The Schnurrs were less understanding with the publisher. The editor attended the dinner, and Shari asked him to slow down. Her husband followed up with an e-mail. “If you go ahead and publish the book, just be careful,” he wrote. “There’s a lot of conflicting information out there.” He suggested that Plough delay publication until the authorities issued their report. Plough declined.

In July, the Wall Street Journal ran a prominent story titled “Marketing a Columbine Martyr.” The publishing house was obscure, but Zimmerman had called in a team of heavy hitters. For public relations, the firm hired the New York team that had handled Monica Lewinsky’s book. Publication was two months away, and Misty had already been booked for The Today Show and 20/20. The William Morris Agency was shopping the film rights around. (A movie was never made.) An agent there had sold book club rights to a unit of Random House. He said he was marketing “virtually everything you can exploit—and I mean that in a positive way.”

39. The Book of God

The screws were tightening. Eric met with Andrea Sanchez to receive his Diversion contract. He looked ahead to senior year. It would be consumed writing an apology letter, providing restitution, working off fines, meeting a Diversion counselor twice a month, seeing his own shrink, attending bullshit classes like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, maintaining good grades, problem-free employment, and forty-five hours of community service. They would periodically hand him a Dixie cup and direct him to a urinal. No more alcohol. No more freedom.

Eric’s first counseling session and his first drug screening would commence in eight days. He met with Sanchez on a Wednesday. Thursday, he stewed. Friday, April 10, 1998, he opened a letter sized spiral notebook and scribbled, “I hate the fucking world.” In one year and ten days, he would attack. Eric wrote furiously, filling two vicious pages: people are STUPID, I’m not respected, everyone has their own god damn opinions on every god damn thing.

At first glance, the journal sounds like the Web site, but Fuselier found answers in it. The Web site was pure rage, no explanation. The journal was explicit. Eric fleshed out his ideas on paper, as well as his personality. Eric had a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority, and an excruciating need for control.

“I feel like God,” Eric announced. “I am higher than almost anyone in the fucking world in terms of universal intelligence.” In time, his superiority would be revealed. In the interim, Eric dubbed his journal “The Book of God.” The breadth of his hostility was equally melodramatic.

Humans were pathetic fuckheads too dense to perceive their lifeless existence. We frittered our lives away like automatons, following orders rather than realizing our potential: “ever wonder why we go to school?” he asked. “its not to obvious to most of you stupid fucks but for those who think a little more and deeper you should realize it is societies way of turning all the young people into good little robots.” Human nature was smothered by society; healthy instincts were smothered by laws. They were training us to be assembly-line robots; that’s why they lined the school desks up in rows and trained kids to respond to opening and closing bells. The monotonous human assembly line squelched the life out of individual experience. As Eric put it, “more of your human nature blown out your ass.”

Philosophically, the robotic conception was a rare point of agreement between the killers. Dylan referred often to zombies, too. Both boys described their uniqueness as self-awareness. They could see through the human haze. But Dylan saw his distinction as a lonely curse. And he looked on the zombies compassionately; Dylan yearned for the poor little creatures to break out of their boxes.

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

He had lots of ideas. Nuclear holocaust, biological warfare, imprisoning the species in a giant Ultimate Doom game.

But Eric was also realistic. He couldn’t restore the natural order, but he could impose some selection of his own. He would sacrifice himself to accomplish it. “I know I will die soon,” he wrote; “so will you and everyone else.”

By soon, he meant a year. Eric had a remarkably long time horizon for a seventeen-year-old contemplating his own death.

The lies jumped out at Fuselier. Eric took giddy pleasure in his deceptions. “I lie a lot,” he wrote. “Almost constant. and to everybody. just to keep my own ass out of the water. lets see, what are some big lies I have told; ‘yeah I stopped smoking’ ‘for doing it not for getting caught,’ ‘no I haven’t been making more bombs.’”

Eric did not believe in God, but he enjoyed comparing himself to Him. Like Dylan, he did so frequently but not delusionally—they were like God: superior in insight, intelligence, and awareness. Like Zeus, Eric created new rules, angered easily, and punished people in unusual ways. Eric had conviction. Eric had a plan. Eric would get the guns and build the explosives and maim and kill and so much more. They would terrify way beyond their gun blasts. The ultimate weapon was TV. Eric saw past the Columbine commons. He might kill hundreds, but the dead and dismembered meant nothing to him. Bit players—who cared? The performance was not about them. Eric’s one-day-only production was about the audience.

The irony was, his attack was too good for his victims—it would sail right over their heads. “the majority of the audience wont even understand,” Eric lamented. Too bad. They would feel the power of his hand: “if we have figured out the art of time bombs before hand, we will set hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations.” “it’ll be like the LA riots, the oklahoma bombing, WWII, vietnam, duke and doom all mixed together. maybe we will even start a little rebellion or revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. i want to leave a lasting impression on the world.”

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