Columbine

40. Psychopath

“I will choose to kill,” Eric wrote. Why? His explanations didn’t add up. Because we were morons? How would that make a kid kill? To most readers, Eric’s rants just sounded nuts.

Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.

Fuselier spent the next twelve weeks contesting his theory. That’s how he approached a problem: develop a hypothesis and then search for every scrap of evidence to refute it. Test it against alternate explanations, build the strongest possible case to support them, and see if the hypothesis fails. If it withstands that, it’s solid. Psychopathy held.

Diagnosis didn’t solve the crime, but it laid the foundation. Ten years afterward, Eric still baffled the public, which insisted on assessing his motives through a “normal” lens. Eric was neither normal nor insane. Psychopathy (si-COP-uh-thee) represents a third category. Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

To a psychopath, both motives make sense. “Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,” wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. “They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. “its just all nature, chemistry, and math,” he wrote. “you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay.”

Psychopaths have likely plagued mankind since the beginning, but they are still poorly understood. In the 1800s, as the fledgling field of psychology began classifying mental disorders, one group refused to fit. Every known psychosis was marked by a failure of reasoning or a debilitating ailment: paralyzing fear, hallucinations, voices, phobias, and so on. In 1885, the term psychopath was introduced to describe vicious human predators who were not deranged, delusional, or depressed. They just enjoyed being bad.

Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It’s the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It’s usually a him—more than 80 percent are male.) Don’t look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don’t act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.

In 1941, Dr. Hervey Cleckley revolutionized the understanding of psychopathy with his book The Mask of Sanity. Egocentrism and failure of empathy were the underlying drivers, but Cleckley chose his title to reflect the element that trumped those. If psychopaths were merely evil, they would not be a major threat. They wreak so much havoc that they should be obvious. Yet the majority have consistently eluded the law.

Cleckley worried about his title metaphor: psychopathy is not a two-dimensional cover that can be lifted off the face like a Halloween mask. It permeates the offender’s personality. Joy, grief, anxiety, or amusement—he can mimic any on cue. He knows the facial expressions, the voice modulation, and the body language. He’s not just conning you with a scheme, he’s conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you.

Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them. Lies become the psychopath’s occupation, and when the truth will work, they lie for sport. “I like to con people,” one of Hare’s subjects told a researcher during an extended interview. “I’m conning you right now.”

Lying for amusement is so profound in psychopaths, it stands out as their signature characteristic. “Duping delight,” psychologist Paul Ekman dubbed it.

Cleckley spent five decades refining his research and publishing four further editions of The Mask of Sanity. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Robert Hare isolated twenty characteristics of the condition and created the Psychopathy Checklist, the basis for virtually all contemporary research. He also wrote the definitive book on the malady, Without Conscience.

The terminology got muckier. Sociopath was in introduced in the 1930s, initially as a broader term for antisocial behavior. Eventually, psychopath and sociopath became virtually synonymous. (Varying definitions for the latter have led to distinctions by some experts, but these are not uniformly accepted.) The primary reason for the competing terms is that each was adopted in different fields: criminologists and law enforcement personnel prefer psychopath; sociologists tend toward sociopath. Psychologists and psychiatrists are split, but most experts on the condition use psychopath, and the bulk of the research is based on Hare’s checklist. A third term, antisocial personality disorder, or APD, was introduced in the 1970s and remains the only diagnosis included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV). However, it covers a much broader range of disorders than does psychopath and has been roundly rejected by leading researchers.

So where do psychopaths come from? Researchers are divided, with the majority suggesting a mixed role: nature leading, nurture following. Dr. Hare believes psychopaths are born with a powerful predisposition, which can be exacerbated by abuse or neglect. A correlation exists between psychopaths and unstable homes—and violent upbringings seem to turn fledgling psychopaths more vicious. But current data suggests those conditions do not cause the psychopathy; they only make a bad situation worse. It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad.

Symptoms appear so early, and so often in stable homes with normal siblings, that the condition seems to be inborn. Most parents report having been aware of disturbing signs before the child entered kindergarten. Dr. Hare described a five-year old girl repeatedly attempting to flush her kitten down the toilet. “I caught her just as she was about to try again,” the mother said. “She seemed quite unconcerned, maybe a bit angry—about being found out.” When the woman told her husband, the girl calmly denied the whole thing. Shame did not register; neither did fear. Psychopaths are not individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start.

Hare created a separate screening device for juveniles and identified hallmarks that appear during the school years: gratuitous lying, indifference to the pain of others, defiance of authority figures, unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment, petty theft, persistent aggression, cutting classes and breaking curfew, cruelty to animals, early experimentation with sex, and vandalism and setting fires. Eric bragged about nine of the ten hallmarks in his journal and on his Web site—for most of them, relentlessly. Only animal cruelty is missing.

At some point—as either a cause or an effect of psychopathy—the psychopath’s brain begins processing emotional responses differently. Early in his career, Dr. Hare recognized the anatomical difference. He submitted a paper analyzing the unusual brain waves of psychopaths to a scientific journal, which rejected it with a dismissive letter. “Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people,” the editor wrote.

Exactly! Hare thought. Psychopaths are that different. Eric Harris baffled the public because we could not conceive of a human with his motives. Even Kate Battan would describe him as a teenager trying to act like an adult. But the angst we associate with teenagers was the least of Eric’s drives. His brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.

The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel. A psychopath’s grasp of fear and suffering is particularly weak. Dr. Hare’s research team spent decades studying psychopaths in prison populations. They asked one psychopath to describe fear. “When I rob a bank, I notice that the teller shakes or becomes tongue-tied,” he said. “One barfed all over the money.” He found that puzzling. The researcher pushed him to describe his own fear. How would he feel with the gun pointed at him? The convict said he might hand over the money, get the hell out, or find a way to turn the tables. Those were responses, the researcher said. How would you feel? Feel? Why would he feel?

Researchers often compare psychopaths to robots or rogue computers, like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey— programmed only to satisfy their own objectives. That’s the closest approximation of their behavior, but the metaphor lacks nuance. Psychopaths feel something; Eric seemed to show sadness when his dog was sick, and he occasionally felt twinges of regret toward humans. But the signals come through dimly.

Cleckley described this as a poverty of emotional range. That’s a tricky concept, because psychopaths develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. Three have been identified: anger, frustration, and rage. Psychopaths erupt with ferocious bouts of anger, which can get them labeled “emotional.” Look more closely, Cleckley advised: “The conviction dawns on those who observe him carefully that here we deal with a readiness of expression rather than a strength of feeling.” No love. No grief. Not even sorrow, really, or hope or despair about his own future. Psychopaths feel nothing deep, complex, or sustained. The psychopath was prone to “vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, absurd and showy poses of indignation.”

Cleckley could have been describing Eric Harris’s journal. “how dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are sooooooooo different,” Eric wrote. “you arent human. you are a robot…. and if you pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you.”

Indignation runs strong in the psychopath. It springs from a staggering ego and sense of superiority. Psychopaths do not feel much, but when they lose patience with inferiors, they can really let it rip. It doesn’t go any deeper. Even an earthworm will recoil if you poke it with a stick. A squirrel will exhibit frustration if you tease it by offering a peanut, then repeatedly snatching it back. Psychopaths make it that far up the emotional ladder, but they fall far short of the average golden retriever, which will demonstrate affection, joy, compassion, and empathy for a human in pain.

Researchers are still just beginning to understand psychopaths, but they believe psychopaths crave the emotional responses they lack. They are nearly always thrill seekers. They love roller coasters and hang gliding, and they seek out high-anxiety occupations, like ER tech, bond trader, or Marine. Crime, danger, impoverishment, death—any sort of risk will help. They chase new sources of excitement because it is so difficult for them to sustain.

They rarely stick with a career; they get bored. Even as career criminals, psychopaths underperform. They “lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing the way typical career criminals do,” Cleckley wrote. They make careless mistakes and pass up stunning opportunities, because they lose interest. They perform spectacularly in short bursts—a few weeks, a few months, a yearlong big con—then walk away.

Eric spent his young life that way: he should have been a 4.0 student, but collected A’s, B’s, and C’s. He made one yearlong commitment, to NBK, but he had no ambition, zero plans for his life. He was one of the smartest kids in his high school, but apparently never bothered to apply to college. No job prospects either, beyond Blackjack. Despite a childhood of soldier fantasies, a military father, and a stated desire for a career in the Marines, Eric made no attempt to enlist. When a recruiter cold-called him during the last week of his life, he met the guy, but never returned the call to find out whether he had been accepted.

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

A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderers, little research has been conducted on them. We know that the partnerships tend to be asymmetrical. An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. “It takes heat and cold to make a tornado,” Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn’t sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.

Day after day, for more than a year, Dylan juiced Eric with erratic jolts of excitement. They played the killing out again and again: the cries, the screams, the smell of burning flesh…

Eric savored the anticipation.

Dr. Hare’s EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. After Eric’s death, a colleague advanced our understanding with a new technology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging tests (fMRIs) create a picture of the brain, with light indicating active regions. Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain’s emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths’ amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotions instead of experiencing them.

“He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words interesting and fascinating,” Dr. Hare said. For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

So what’s the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. “Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people,” Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. “These programs are like a finishing school,” a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare’s team. “They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.”

Eric was blessed with at least two unintentional coaches: Bob Kriegshauser, in the juvenile Diversion program, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Albert. Eric was a quick study. The notes in his Diversion file document a steady improvement, session by session.

Oddly, a large number of psychopaths spontaneously improve around middle age. The phenomenon has been observed for decades, but not explained. Otherwise, psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.

Dr. Kiehl has a mobile fMRI lab and a research team funded by the University of New Mexico. He mapped about five hundred brains at three prison systems in 2008. Because of the skewed sample pool, about 20 percent met the criteria for psychopathy. He believes that answers about the causes and treatment of psychopathy are coming within reach.

While Eric was devising his attack, Dr. Hare was working on a regimen to address his kind. Hare began by reexamining the data on those spontaneous improvers. From adolescence to their fifties, psychopaths showed virtually no change in emotional characteristics but improved dramatically in antisocial behavior. The inner drives did not change, but their behavior did.

Hare believes that these psychopaths might simply be adapting. Fiercely rational, they figured out that prison was not working for them. So Hare proposed using their self-interest to the public advantage. The program he developed accepts that psychopaths will remain egocentric and uncaring for life but will adhere to rules if it’s in their own interest. “Convincing them that there are ways they can get what they want without harming others” is the key, Hare said. “You say to them, ‘Most people think with their hearts, not with their heads, and your problem is you think too much with your head. So let’s change the problem into an asset.’ They understand that.”

While Eric was in high school, a juvenile treatment center in Wisconsin began a program developed independently but based on that approach. It also addressed the psychopathic drives for instant gratification and control: subjects were rated every night on adherence to rules and rewarded with extended privileges the next day. The program was not designed specifically for fledgling psychopaths, but it produced significant improvements in that population. A four-year study published in 2006 concluded that they were 2.7 times less likely to become violent than kids with similar psychopathy scores in other programs.

For the first time in the history of psychopathy, a treatment appears to have worked. It awaits replication.

Psychopathy experts are cautiously optimistic about coming advances. “I believe that within ten years we will have a much better perspective on psychopathy than we do now,” Dr. Kiehl said. “Ideally we will be able to help effectively manage the condition. I would not say that there is a cure on the horizon, but I do hope that we can implement effective management strategies.”

41. The Parents Group

Fuselier was sure Eric was a psychopath. But the kid had been sixteen when he’d hatched the plot, seventeen for most of the planning, and barely eighteen when he opened fire. There would be resistance to writing Eric off at those ages.

Three months after Columbine, the FBI organized a major summit on school shooters in Leesburg, Virginia. The Bureau assembled some of the world’s leading psychologists, including Dr. Hare. Near the end of the conference, Dr. Fuselier stepped up to the microphone and gave a thorough briefing on the minds of the two killers. “It looks like Eric Harris was a budding young psychopath,” he concluded.

The room stirred. A renowned psychiatrist in the front row moved to speak. Here it comes, Fuselier thought. This guy is going to nitpick the assessment to death.

“I don’t think he was a budding young psychopath,” the psychiatrist said.

“What’s your objection?”

“I think he was a full-blown psychopath.”

His colleagues agreed. Eric Harris was textbook.

Several of the experts continued studying the Columbine shooters after the summit. Michigan State University psychiatrist Frank Ochberg flew in several times to help guide the mental health team, and every trip doubled as a fact-finding mission. Dr. Ochberg interviewed an assortment of people close to the killers and studied the boys’ writings.

The problem for the community, and ultimately for Jeffco officials, too, was that Fuselier was not permitted to talk to the public. Early on, both local and federal officials were concerned about Jeffco getting overshadowed by the FBI. The Bureau firmly prohibited any of its agents from discussing the case with the media. Jeffco commanders had decided the killers’ motives should not be discussed, and the FBI respected that decision.

Failure to address the obvious intensified suspicion toward Jeffco. It exacerbated a credibility problem already hovering over the sheriff’s department. In addition to why, the public had two pressing questions: Should authorities have seen Columbine coming? And should they have stopped it sooner once the gunfire began? On both those controversial questions, Jeffco had obvious conflicts of interest. And yet they charged ahead.

It was a staggering lapse of judgment. Jeffco could have simply isolated the two explosive issues into an independent investigation. It would have been easy enough; they had nearly a hundred detectives at their disposal, few of whom worked for Jeffco.

The independent investigation didn’t seem so obvious in 1999. The commanders were essentially honest men. Not one had a reputation as a dirty cop. John Kiekbusch was deeply respected inside and outside the force. They believed they were innocent, and that the public would see that. And many of them were. Stone and his undersheriff had been sworn in only three months earlier—they bore no responsibility for missing any warning signs from Eric Harris. Most of the team had no role in command decisions on April 20. Kate Battan was running the day-to-day operations; she was clean.

But some good cops made really bad decisions after April 20. Survivors were right to suspect a cover-up. Jeffco commanders were lying about the Browns’ warnings about Eric, and Randy and Judy made sure everyone knew. Inside the department, someone was attempting to destroy the Browns’ paper trail. Shortly after the massacre, Investigator Mike Guerra noticed that the physical copy of the file he had put together on Eric a year earlier disappeared from his desk. A few days later, it reappeared just as mysteriously. Later that summer, he tried to call up the computer record and found it had been purged.

The physical file again disappeared and has never been recovered.

Over the next several months, division chief John Kiekbusch’s assistant took part in several activities she later found disturbing.

Each day Patrick tried to lift his leg again. Concentrate, they instructed him. Each time Patrick concentrated, electrons dispersed through the gray matter of his brain. Each time, those electrons sought fresh routes through the lacerated left hemisphere. Once they established a signal—faint, almost imperceptible—they laid the mental equivalent of fresh power lines. The signal grew stronger.

People were always in and out of his room. In the first week of May, a friend from waterskiing and some aunts and uncles were visiting. Patrick lay on his bed, the useless leg up on a pillow. The brace was wrapped around it, so it was extra heavy, but he bore down anyway. Slowly, barely, the thigh rose. “Hey!” he shouted. “Check out what I can do!”

They couldn’t see anything. He had raised it just enough to expand the pillow below his brace. But he could feel it. The pillow wasn’t supporting it, he was.

Patrick made steady progress once he reestablished contact with his limbs. Every morning, he could feel some change. The strength returned to the center of his body first, beginning in his torso, then radiating out through his hips and his shoulders and down toward his right elbow and knee. In a few more weeks, they had him on his feet. They started him off standing between a set of hip-high parallel bars. He had sort of a towrope around his waist that a therapist held on to, to steady him and guide him the short distance through the bars. That was a good day. The bars were tough, because his right arm was as feeble as his leg. But together, he gathered the strength for each step.

Later, he progressed to a walker and then a forearm crutch with a cuff that straps over the arm below the elbow. The wheelchair was always there for long trips, or any time he grew tired. Dexterity with his fingers and his toes would be the hardest thing to regain completely. It would take him months to hold a pen without shaking. His walk would be hindered by all sorts of fine adjustments we never notice our toes making.

Anne Marie Hochhalter progressed more slowly. She had barely made it through the attack. Her spinal cord was ruptured, causing unbearable nerve pain. She spent weeks lying delirious on morphine, with a ventilator and a feeding tube keeping her alive. She couldn’t talk with the tubes, and through the fog, she didn’t understand what had happened or what was ahead.

Eventually, she grew more lucid and asked whether she would walk again.

“Well, no,” a nurse told her.

“I just cried,” she said later. “The nurse had to go get my parents because I was crying so hard.”

After six weeks, she joined Patrick at Craig. Danny Rohrbough’s friend Sean Graves was there, too, partially paralyzed below the spine. He managed a few steps with braces over the summer. Lance Kirklin’s face was reconstructed with titanium implants and skin grafts. Scarring was severe, but he made light of it. “It’s cool being five percent metal,” he said.

In the weeks just after the murders, nearly all the families of the library victims walked the crime scene with investigators. They needed to see it. It might be horrible—they had to find out. Dawn Anna stopped at the spot where her daughter Lauren Townsend had been killed. First table on the left. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the backpacks and personal effects, which had been photographed, inventoried, and returned to the families. “The emotional impact, I don’t even know that I can adequately describe it,” Anna said. But she could not avoid it. “I needed that connection, as did all of us, to get back and identify, in part, with what had happened there.”

The thought of sending any schoolkid back inside was unthinkable. The library had to go. Independently, and collectively, most of the thirteen families came to that conclusion quickly.

Students reached the opposite consensus. They spent the spring battling for the idea of Columbine, as well as the proper noun: the name of a high school, not a tragedy. They were repulsed by phrases bandied about like “since Columbine” or “prevent another Columbine.” That was one day in the life of Columbine High School, they insisted.

Then the tourists arrived. Just weeks after the tragedy, even before students returned, tour buses started rolling up to the school. Columbine High had leapt to second place, behind the Rocky Mountains, as Colorado’s most famous landmark, and tour operators were quick to capitalize. The buses would pull up in front of the school, and tourists would pile out and start snapping pictures: the school, the grounds, the kids practicing on the athletic fields or milling about in the park. They captured a lot of angry expressions. The students felt like zoo specimens. Everyone still needed to know constantly, How do you feel?

Brian Fuselier was heading into his sophomore year at Columbine. Weeks under the microscope had been miserable; the tourists were too much. “I just want to walk up and punch them in the nose!” he told his dad.

On June 2, most of the student body finally reconnected with the physical Columbine. It was an emotional day. Students had two hours to go back inside and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it. Their parents were allowed in as well. It gave everyone a chance to face their fears. Hundreds of kids stumbled out in tears. Useful tears. Most found the experience stressful but cathartic.

They were kicked out again for two months, while construction crews renovated the interior. The students had mixed feelings about anything changing, but they were taking that one on faith. The district had open enrollment, so everyone expected a big drop in Columbine’s student body the next fall. Students reacted the opposite way: transfers out were minimal. Fall enrollment actually went up. Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!

Mr. D and the faculty were focused on the kids: getting them into therapy and watching out for trauma symptoms. School officials formed a design review board to address the library. It included students, parents, and faculty. Consensus came readily: gut the room and rebuild it. Redesign the layout, replace and reconfigure the furniture, change the wall color, the carpet, even the ceiling tiles. It was a drastic version of the plan put together for the entire school. Trauma experts advised the board to balance two objectives: make the kids feel their school had survived and surround them with changes too subtle to identify. The library was the exception: it would feel completely different.

Renovation of the school would cost $1.2 million, and would be tough to complete before school resumed in August. The design board moved quickly, and the school board adopted its proposal in early June. The parents of the murdered kids were aghast. Rearrange the furniture? Slap on some paint and recarpet? The design team saw their plan as a complete overhaul. Their adversaries called it “cosmetic.”

Initially, the students and the victims’ families assumed they were all in this together. It took them several weeks to realize they were about to battle each other. Parents of the Thirteen saw that they were outnumbered; they formed the Parents Group to fight back. On May 27, just as they were organizing, a notorious lawyer and media hound flew to Denver for a boisterous press conference. Geoffrey Fieger had become a cable news staple via splashy media trials, like that of Dr. Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide doctor. Fieger teamed with Isaiah Shoels’s family to make an ostentatious demand sure to return Columbine to national headlines in the worst possible light: a wrongful death suit against the killers’ parents, for a quarter of a billion dollars.

“This is not about money!” Isaiah’s stepfather declared. “This lawsuit is about change! That’s the only way you get change, if you go rattling their pocketbooks.” He was right, but the public was skeptical about motives. Fieger insisted he would spend more money mounting the case than he could hope to recover. Colorado law limited awards from individuals to $250,000, and governmental entities were capped at $150,000. “This lawsuit is a symbol,” he said. “There will be cynics who would chalk the lawsuit up to greed.”

Lawsuits had been anticipated, but nobody had foreseen one so garish, or so soon. Colorado law gave victims a year to file and six months to declare intent. It had only been five weeks. Families had been talking about lawsuits as means of leverage, and a last resort.

The lawsuit served as a trial balloon that sank. The survivors were particularly repulsed. Many of them had dedicated the next phase of their lives to some form of justice: anti-bullying, gun control, prayer in schools, SWAT protocols, warning signs, or just reclaiming their school or destroying the library. Lawsuits threatened to taint all that. They also shed a bad light on the next big battle, which was already developing when the Shoelses conducted their press conference. That fight revolved around money, too. The public donations had been astonishing, but the good fortune came at a price.

More than $2 million rolled in the first month. A month later, the total was $3.5 million. Forty different funds sprouted up. The local United Way set up the Healing Fund to coordinate the distribution of monies. Robin Finegan was a veteran therapist and victim’s advocate who had worked closely with Oklahoma City survivors. “It is predictable that this will become a very difficult, painful process,” she told NPR. There were too many competing interests. “We’re going to leave people, some people, not feeling great about this.” That was an understatement.

When a pair of teachers were collectively granted $5,000 for anxiety treatment, Brian Rohrbough blew his stack. “That’s criminal,” he said. He wanted the money divided equally between the families of the injured and the dead. But was equality fair? Lance Kirklin’s father estimated his medical bills at $1 to $2 million; the family was uninsured. Mark Taylor needed surgery for four gunshots to the chest; his mom couldn’t afford groceries or pay the rent. The process was humiliating, she said. She felt like a beggar. “My son’s in the hospital. I can’t work. We’re broke and they have millions of dollars in donations. I’m disgusted.”

The attorney for the Taylors and Kirklins suggested that some families needed compensation more than others. Brian Rohrbough erupted again. That implied that Danny’s life had no value, he told the Rocky Mountain News. For Brian, the money was symbolic: the ultimate valuation of each life. For others it was purely practical.

In early July, the Healing Fund announced its distribution plan: 40 percent of the $3.8 million would go to direct victims. A clever compromise was reached for that money: the four kids with critical injuries got $150,000 each; $50,000 went to each of the Thirteen. That totaled $650,000 for the dead versus $600,000 for the critically injured, giving the Thirteen the appearance of preeminence. Twenty-one injured students got $10,000 each, a fraction of the medical bills for many. Most of the remainder went to trauma counseling and tolerance programs. Roughly $750,000 was earmarked for contingencies, a compromise to cover unpaid medical bills without appearing to favor the injured over the dead.

Brian Rohrbough backed off once he felt heard.

Tom Klebold was dealing with a lot of anger. “Who gave my son these guns?” he asked Reverend Marxhausen. He also felt betrayed by the school culture that picked on kids outside the mainstream.

Tom did his best to shut out the angry world. His job allowed him to hunker down at home, and he took full advantage. Sue was not wired that way. “She has to get out,” Marxhausen said.

May 28, Kathy Harris wrote condolence letters to the Thirteen. Many of the addresses were unpublished, so she sealed each one in an envelope with the family’s name, put them all in a manila envelope, and mailed it to an address the school district had set up as a clearinghouse for correspondence to victims. A week later, Kathy sent a second batch for the families of twenty-three injured. The school district turned them all over to the sheriff’s department as potential evidence. It sat on them. Officials decided not to read them or deliver them.

In mid-July, the media discovered the snafu. “It’s really not our job” to distribute them, Sergeant Randy West said. The letters had no postage or addresses, so commanders decided to return to sender. West complained about the family’s refusal to meet without immunity, and said his team had trouble reaching their attorneys. “They’re busy, we’re busy and we can’t seem to connect with them,” Sergeant West said. “I guess if you want to make things easier you could just talk to us.”

The Harrises broke their three-month silence to issue a statement disputing “misstatements” on the letters. Their attorney insisted Jeffco had never tried to contact him about them.

The letters were eventually returned.

Sue Klebold also wrote apologies in May. She mailed them directly to the Thirteen. Brad and Misty received this handwritten card:

Misty was moved—enough to publish the full text in the memoir she was drafting. She generously described the act as courageous. Tom and Sue lost a son in the same disaster, she wrote. At least Cassie had died nobly. What comfort did the Klebolds have? Misty also addressed the charges against the killers’ parents. Should they have known? Were they negligent? “How do we know?”

42. Diversion

A year before the attack, the boys settled on the time and place: April 1999, in the commons. That gave Eric time to plan, build his arsenal, and convince his partner it was for real.

Shortly after starting Diversion, Eric and Dylan received their junior yearbooks. They swapped and filled page after page with drawings, descriptions, and rants. “We, the gods, will have so much fun w NBK!!” Dylan wrote in Eric’s. “My wrath for january’s incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons.”

January’s incident was their arrest. Eric was pissed about it, too. “Jan 31 sux,” he wrote in Dylan’s. “I hate white vans!!”

The arrest was a critical moment—the yearbooks confirmed Fuselier’s tentative conclusion on that score. Eventually, Fuselier would see it as the single most important event in Eric’s progression to murder. The arrest was followed, in rapid succession, by Eric detonating his first pipe bombs, threatening mass murder on his Web site, confiding worse visions to his journal, and settling on the outlines of his attack. But Eric was already headed that way. He did not “snap.” Fuselier saw fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than cause.

Eric was an injustice collector. The cops, judge, and Diversion officers were merely the latest additions to a comically comprehensive enemies list, which included Tiger Woods, every girl who had rejected him, all of Western culture, and the human species. What was different about the arrest, in Fuselier’s eyes, was that it was the first dramatic rein-in on the boys’ ability to control their own lives—“the screws are tightening,” as Dylan put it. They were juniors in high school now, a time when personal freedom expanded faster than ever before. They had just gotten their driver’s licenses, they had jobs with paychecks and their first rush of disposable income, their curfews were getting later, parental oversight was easing, Eric was dating… their universe of possibilities was expanding. They had suffered setbacks before, but those were mild and short-lived. This time, it was a felony. A felony, for the smallest trifle: some moron’s van—so what? All freedom was lost. Eric’s twenty-three-year-old was dumping him because he was grounded all the time and could never see her. He kept working Brenda, but it didn’t look good.

Eric filled Dylan’s yearbook with drawings: swastikas, robokillers, and splattered bodies. The dead outnumbered the living. An illustration in the margin suggested hundreds of tiny corpses piling up to the horizon, until they all blended together in an ocean of human waste.

Eric went through his own book, marking up the faces of kids he didn’t like. He labeled them “worthless,” said they would die, or just made an X over their pictures. Eric had two thousand photos to deface, and eventually he got to almost all of them.

Eric had it in for a couple of traitorous assholes: “God I cant wait till they die,” he wrote in Dylan’s book. “I can taste the blood now.”

Psychopaths want to enjoy their exploits. That’s why the sadistic ones tend to choose serial killing: they enjoy the cruelty as it plays out. Eric went a different route: the big kill, which he would relish in anticipation for a full year. He loved control—he couldn’t wait to hold lives in his hand. When his day finally arrived, he took his time in the library and enjoyed every minute of it. He killed some kids on a whim, let others go just as easily.

He also used his Web site to enjoy a certain notoriety in his lifetime. He loved the irony of his online world, where all the other kids were posing but his fantasy was real.

One contradiction to Eric’s control fetish is apparent in his willingness to entrust power to Dylan. The yearbook exchange represented a huge leap of faith for each of them. They had been talking about murder for months now, and corresponding catchphrases in both journals suggest they had been riffing on these ideas regularly. Eric had gone semipublic with his threats already, posting them on his Web site, but no one seemed to notice or take it seriously. This time, he scrawled out incriminating evidence of his plot in his own handwriting and turned it over to Dylan.

They hinted about plans in a few friends’ yearbooks, but it all sounded like jokes. Dylan said he would like to kill Puff Daddy or Hanson, while Eric went with irony: don’t follow your dreams, follow your animal instincts—“if it moves kill it, if it doesn’t, burn it. kein mitleid!!!” Kein mitleid is German for “no mercy,” and a common shorthand for his favorite band, KMFDM. This was just the kind of move that delighted Eric: warn the world, in writing, to show us how stupid we all are.

In each other’s books, they took a real gamble, particularly Dylan. He wrote page after page of specific murder plans. They were at each other’s mercy now. Exposure of the yearbooks could end their participation in Diversion and bring them back on felony charges. For the final year, each boy knew his buddy could get him imprisoned at any time, though they would both go down together. Mutually assured destruction.

Dr. Fuselier considered the yearbook passages. Both boys fantasized about murder, but Dylan focused on the single attack. Eric had a grander vision. All his writing alluded to a wider slaughter: killing everything, destroying the human race. In a passionate journal entry a month later, he would cite the Nazis’ Final Solution: “kill them all. well in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND.’”

It’s unclear whether Eric and Dylan were aware of the discrepancy—neither one addressed it in writing. It’s hard to imagine that Eric failed to notice Dylan’s focus on a more limited attack. Was he including Dylan in the full dream? Perhaps Dylan just didn’t find it plausible. Blowing up the high school, that could actually happen—killing mankind… maybe that just sounded like science fiction to Dylan.

Despite the press’s obsession with bullying and misfits, that’s not how the boys presented themselves. Dylan laughed about picking on the new freshmen and “fags.” Neither one complained about bullies picking on them—they boasted about doing it themselves.

The boys changed dramatically after they began Diversion—in reverse directions, once again. Eric launched a new charm offensive. Andrea Sanchez became the second most important person in his life. Snowing her was the best way to appease the first, his dad. It also kept the program from diverting Eric from his goal. Eric had a plan now. He was on a mission and he was revved. His grades dropped briefly after the arrest, but they rebounded to his best ever once he had his attack plan. It was a lot of work, which he complained bitterly about in his journal; but he worked his ass off to excel.

Dylan didn’t even try to impress Andrea. He missed appointments, fell behind in community service, and let his grades plummet. He was actually getting two D’s.

NBK was nothing but a diversion to Dylan—fantasy chats with his buddy about what they would like to do. Dylan didn’t believe it; he didn’t plan to go through with it. All he knew was that he was a felon now. His miserable life had grown pathetically worse.

Eric was the star performer in the program, at work and at school. He even earned a raise, and when school let out for his last summer, he got a second job at Tortilla Wraps, where his buddy Nate Dykeman worked. Eric started putting away more money to build his arsenal. His cover story was that he was saving up for a new computer. He worked both jobs, in addition to the forty-five hours of community service the judge had ordered for the summer. That was boring, menial crap, like sweeping and picking up trash at a rec center. He despised it but pasted on a smile. It was all for a good cause.

Dylan did not appear to contribute much to the attack, financially or otherwise. He quit Blackjack and didn’t bother with a regular job over the summer; he just did some yard work for a neighbor.

Eric kept both his employers and the rec supervisors satisfied. “He was a real nice kid,” his Tortilla boss said. “He would come in every day with nice T-shirts, khaki shorts, sandals. He was kind of quiet but everyone got along with him.” Nate liked to wear his trench coat to work, but Eric didn’t feel that was professional.

The boys were required to write apology letters to the van owner. Eric’s exuded contrition. He acknowledged he was writing partly because he’d been ordered to “but mostly because I strongly feel that I owe you an apology.” Eric said he was sorry repeatedly, and outlined his legal and parental punishments so the victim would understand that he was paying a price for his actions.

Eric knew exactly what empathy looked like. His most convincing moment in the letter came when he put himself in the owner’s position. If his car had been robbed, he said, the sense of invasion would have haunted him. It would have been hard for him to drive it again. Every time he got in the car, he would have pictured someone rummaging through it. God, he felt violated just imagining it. He was so disappointed in himself. “I realized very soon afterwards what I had done and how utterly stupid it was,” Eric wrote. “I let the stupid side of me take over.”

“But he wrote that strictly for effect,” Fuselier said. “That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: ‘Isnt America supposed to be the land of the free? how come if im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions. If he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Frifucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot.’”

Eric betrayed no signs of contempt to Andrea Sanchez. In her notes, she remarked on Eric’s deep remorse.

Few angry boys can hide their feelings or sling the bullshit so convincingly. Habitual liars hate sucking up like that. Not psychopaths. That was the best part of the performance: Eric’s joy came from watching Andrea and the van owner and Wayne Harris and everyone who caught sight of the letter fall for his ridiculous con.

Eric never complained about those lies. He bragged about them.

Eric could be a procrastinator—a common affliction among psychopaths—and Andrea suggested he work on time management. So Eric bought a Rebel Pride day planner, filled a week in, and brought it to his biweekly counseling session to show off. He gushed about what a great idea it was. It was really helping, he said. Andrea was impressed. She praised him for it in his file. Then he quit. He used the book to vent his real feelings. It had come packed with motivational slogans and tips for better living. Eric went through hundreds of pages rewriting selected words and phrases: “A person’s mind is always splattered…. Cut old people and other losers into rags…. Ninth graders are required to burn and die.” He altered the Denver entry on a population chart to show forty-seven inhabitants once he was through.

Andrea Sanchez was delighted with Eric. She worked with the boys directly for a few months and then transitioned them over to a new counselor. In Eric’s file, Andrea ended her last entry with “Muy facile hombre”—very easy man.

Dylan got no affectionate sign-off. And why wouldn’t Andrea Sanchez like Eric more? Everyone did. He was funny and clever, and that smile, man—he knew just when to flash it, too; just how long to hang back, tease you with it, make you work for it, and then lay it on.

Dylan was a gloom factory. The misery was self-fulfilling: who wanted to hang around under that cloud all day?

Inside, he was a dynamo of wild energy, hurtling in eight directions at once, jamming music in his head, thinking clever thoughts, bursting with joy and sadness and regret and hope and excitement… but he was scared to show it. Dylan kept it behind a veneer—you could see him silently simmering sometimes, but he mostly came across as sheepish and embarrassed. Anger was the one thing that would boil over sometimes. The loving part, that stuff could be singing inside from the highest mountain, only he wasn’t about to let it show. The anger would just erupt. That would freak people out. You never would have expected it out of that kid.

Eric complained about his medication. Before he transitioned from Andrea Sanchez, he told her the Zoloft wasn’t doing enough. He felt restless and couldn’t concentrate. Dr. Albert switched him to Luvox. The change required two weeks unmedicated, to metabolize the Zoloft out of his system. Eric told Andrea he was worried about going without. He told a different story in his journal. Dr. Albert wanted to medicate him to eradicate bad thoughts and quell his anger, he wrote. That was craziness. He would not accept the human assembly line. “NO, NO NO God Fucking damit NO!” he wrote. “I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts. but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.”

It’s not clear exactly what Eric was up to with Dr. Albert. He might have actually complained about the Zoloft because it was too effective. Every patient reacts differently. The maneuver definitely solidified the facade of Eric working to control his anger.

“I would be very surprised if Eric was being honest and straightforward with his doctor,” Fuselier said. “Psychopaths attempt to, and often succeed, in manipulating mental health professionals, too.”

Wayne Harris was the hardest person for Eric to fool. He had seen Eric’s boy scout act. It never lasted. Wayne made one undated entry in his journal sometime after the orientation meeting for Diversion in April. He was frustrated. He listed bulleted points for a lecture for Eric:

He put Eric on restriction again: a 10:00 P.M. curfew except for studying, no phone during study time, and possibly another four weeks away from his computer.

The crackdown was the last entry Wayne Harris would record—and nearly the last words the public would get from him. The search warrant exercised on his home a year later was specific to Eric’s writings. Nothing else from Wayne or Kathy or Eric’s brother was confiscated. In the ten years since the attack, they have issued a few brief statements through attorneys, met with police briefly, and with parents of the victims once. They have never spoken to the press. The outlines of Eric’s relationship to his father came through in their journals, and from testimony of outsiders. Kathy Harris is murkier, and a full picture of the family dynamic remains elusive.

With Eric, Dylan paid lip service to NBK. Privately, he was juggling two options: suicide or true love. He wrote Harriet a love letter, confessing all. “You don’t consciously know who I am,” he started, bluntly. “I, who write this, love you beyond infinince.” He thought about her all the time, he said. “Fate put me in need of you, yet this earth blocked that with uncertainties.” He was actually a lot like her: pensive, quiet, an observer. Like him, she seemed uninterested in the physical world. Life, school, it was all meaningless—how wonderful that she understood. Dylan caught a glimpse of sadness in her: she was lonely, just like him.

He wondered if she had a boyfriend. Odd that he’d never checked that out. He hardly saw her anymore. He realized this might be a bit much: “I know what you’re thinking: ‘(some psycho wrote me this harassing letter.)’” But he had to take the chance. He was sure she had noticed him a few times—none of her gazes had gone unnoticed. Dylan confessed his scariest intentions—just like Zack, who had found a soul mate in whom to confide his suicidal desires. At first Dylan was a little coy: “I will go away soon… please don’t feel any guilt about my soon-to-be ‘absence’ of this world.” Finally he conceded that she would hate him if she knew the whole truth, but he confessed it anyway: “I am a criminal, I have done things that almost nobody would even think about condoning.” He had been caught for most of his crimes, he said, and wanted a new existence. He was confident she knew what he meant. “Suicide? I have nothing to live for, & I won’t be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction.” But if she loved him as strongly as he loved her, he would find a way to survive.

If she thought he was crazy, please don’t tell anyone, he pleaded. Please accept his apologies. But if she felt something for him, too, she should leave a note in his locker—No. 837, near the library.

He signed his name. He did not deliver it. Did he ever intend to? Or was it just for him?

Eric, meanwhile, was upset. He lashed out at Brooks Brown by e-mail. “I know you’re an enemy of Eric’s,” it said. “I know where you live and what cars you drive.”

Psychopaths do not attempt to fool everyone. They save their performances for people with power over them or with something they need. If you saw the ugly side of Eric Harris, you meant nothing to him.

Brooks told his mom; Judy called the cops. A deputy wrote up yet another suspicious incident report and added it to the ongoing investigation of Eric. It said the Browns were worried. They’d requested an extra patrol for the night.

The threesome was over. Zack was not included in NBK, and Eric froze him out completely. Eric went cold on him that summer, Zack said—he never figured out why. Open hostilities erupted that fall. Dylan kept clear of it. He stayed close to Zack, away from Eric, chatting away by phone every night.

Randy Brown called the cops again. Somebody had tagged his garage with a paintball gun. He was sure it was that same old little criminal, Eric Harris. A deputy interviewed Randy and wrote up a report. “No suspects—no leads,” he wrote.

“Eric is doing well,” his new counselor, Bob Kriegshauser, wrote in Eric’s file at that time. Eric was exceeding expectations and covering his mistakes. He got into a bit of a procrastination jam on his last four hours of community service. He waited until the last day, and he wasn’t going to get to complete his full forty-five hours. So he sweet-talked the stranger in charge at the rec center that day, who was impressed enough to lie for him. As far as Bob Kriegshauser knew, Eric completed his service on time. Eric used the work for brownie points with a teacher that fall. He boasted about the summer he’d dedicated to the community.

The boys continued diverging philosophically: Eric held mastery over man and nature; Dylan was a slave to fate. And Dylan had a big surprise. He had no intention of inflicting Eric’s massacre. He enjoyed the banter, but privately said good-bye. He expected his August 10 entry to be his last. Dylan was planning to kill himself long before NBK.

Senior year started for the killers. Eric and Dylan began a video production class. That was fun. They got to make movies. The fictional vignettes were mostly variations on a formula: aloof tough guys protecting misfits from hulking jocks. Eric and Dylan outwitted the bullies, but saved the real contempt for their clients. They bled the losers financially, then killed them just because they could. The victims deserved it; they were inferior. The story lines spilled right out of Eric’s journal.

What an opportunity. Eric was guiding his unsteady partner: fantasy to reality, one step at a time. Dylan ate it up. He came alive on camera. His eyes bulged. You could sense true rage smoldering beneath his skin. The boys had riffed on NBK for months, but now they were acting out bits on film. They were celluloid heroes, screening their exploits for classmates and adults. Eric loved that. Hilarious to reveal his plans that way. He was right in the open, and they still couldn’t guess. And he had Dylan out there with him.

Eric was gobbling up literature: Macbeth, King Lear, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He could never get enough Nietzsche or Hobbes. Once a week, he wrote a short essay for English class on one of the stories or sometimes on a random topic. These essays reached Dr. Fuselier weeks after the murders. He found them revealing, particularly for what they omitted.

In September, Eric titled one of his short essays, “Is Murder or Breaking the Law Ever Justified?” Yes, he responded—in extreme situations. He described holding pets and humans hostage, threatening to blow up busloads of people. The irony of masking grisly murder fantasies in moralistic essays amused him. A police sniper could save many by killing one, Eric argued. The law must bend. Eric made the same case in his journal but took it a step further: moral imperatives are situational, absolutes are imaginary; therefore, he could kill anyone he wanted.

It’s revealing that Eric took on a provocative issue and gauged exactly how far he could run with it. Fuselier saw no moral confusion, clearly no mental illness—Eric demonstrated his sanity by his ability to navigate such tricky terrain. He got the satisfaction of warning us in yet another way without giving himself away.

Dylan expected to be dead soon. What was the point of school? He had a light schedule and was still pulling two D’s. He was sleeping in class. He missed the first calculus test and didn’t bother making it up. Those grades are not acceptable, Bob Kriegshauser, his Diversion officer, said. He could get them up ASAP or do his homework at the Diversion office every afternoon. Kriegshauser was thrilled with Eric’s progress. Eric was working on a speech about foreign music and memorizing “Der Erlkyoethe’s darkly operatic poem. He’d taken a road trip to Boulder to catch a University of Colorado football game. He was making a batch of doughnuts for Octoberfest, and soaking up everything he could find on the Nazis. He pored through books such as The Nazi Party,Secrets of the SS, and The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. He cited a dozen scholarly books for his paper “The Nazi Culture.” It was a strong piece of work: vivid, comprehensive, and detailed.

The paper let Eric indulge in depravity right in the open. It began by asking the reader to imagine a stadium packed with murdered men, women, and children—not just filling the seats but piled high into the air above it. That would still represent just a fraction of the people exterminated by the Nazis, he said. Six million Jews they did away with, and five million others besides. Eleven million—now, there was a body count. Eric fantasized about topping it.

He described Nazi officers lining up prisoners and firing into the first man to see how many rib cages the bullet would penetrate. “Wow,” his teacher responded in the margin. “This is scary…. Incredible.”

Eric photocopied a passage from Heinrich Himmler’s infamous speech to SS group leaders and kept it in his room. “Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany,” Himmler said. “[Germans] will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals.” Here was someone who got it! The Nazis used human animals for labor; Eric only needed his to explode. Five or six hundred dismemberments ought to be enough for one awesome afternoon of TV.

Eric was feeling rambunctious. He started wearing T-shirts with German phrases, he littered his papers with swastikas, and he yelled “Sieg Heil” when he landed a strike at Rock’n’ Bowl. For Eric’s buddy Chris Morris, all the damn Nazi shit was wearing a little thin. Eric was quoting Hitler, spouting off about concentration camps… enough.

In October, Eric faced a setback. A speeding ticket. His parents were strict, and it cost him: they made him pay the fine, attend Defensive Driving, cover any increase in insurance premiums; plus, he was grounded for three weeks.

All the open Nazi lust was beginning to paint Eric into a corner. Four days after turning his paper in, Eric confided to his journal that he was showing too much. “I might need to put on one helluva mask here to fool you all some more,” he wrote. “fuck fuck fuck. it’ll be hard to hold out until April.”

He tried a new tactic: recast what he had already revealed. He wrote a deeply personal essay for government class and turned it in to Mr. Tonelli—they called him T-dog. Eric admitted he was a felon. He had faced the horror of the police station as a criminal. But he was a changed man. He’d spent four hours in custody, and it had been a nightmare. When they put him in a prison-style bathroom, he had broken down. “I cried, I hurt, and I felt like hell,” he wrote.

He was still trying to earn back the respect of his parents, he said. That was the biggest blow. Thank God he and Dylan never drank or did any drugs. In the closing lines, he made a classic psychopathic move: “Personally, I think that whole entire night was enough punishment for me,” he wrote, explaining that it forced him to face a whole new world of experiences. “So all in all,” he concluded, “I guess it was a worth while punishment after all.”

T-dog fell for every move. What chance did he have against a clever young psychopath? Few teachers even know the meaning of the term. Tonelli typed up a response to Eric: “Wow what a way to learn a lesson. I agree that night was enough punishment for you. Still, I am proud of you and the way you have reacted…. You have really learned from this and it has changed the way you think…. I would trust you in a heartbeat. Thanks for letting me read this and for being in my class.”

Fuselier compared the dates of the public and private confessions: just two days between them. It was remarkable how often Eric addressed the same ideas in both venues, and how craftily he obscured his true intent.

Months after the attack, following a briefing on the killers, Tonelli went to see Fuselier.

“I have to talk to you,” he said. Fuselier sat down with him. Tonelli was racked with guilt. “What did I miss here?” he asked.

Nothing, Fuselier said. Eric was convincing. He told you exactly what you wanted to hear. He didn’t play innocent; he confessed to guilt and pleaded for forgiveness. Civilians always believe a good psychopath.

Eric bragged about his performances again in his journal, and then took a turn: “goddammit I would have been a fucking great marine, It would have given me a reason to be good.” That was unusual for Eric. He usually reveled in his “bad” choice, but just for a moment there he toyed with the other road: “and I would never drink and drive, either,” he added. “It will be weird when we actually go on the rampage.”

Dr. Fuselier read the passage with only mild surprise. Even extreme psychopaths show flickers of empathy now and then. Eric was extreme but not absolute. This was the closest he would come to betraying reservations, and it was a logical pass. The plan was becoming real now. Eric finally had the means to kill. He felt the power; he had to make a decision—keep it fantasy or make it real?

Eric’s reflection lasted two lines. The sentences run together as if he was writing rapidly, and the next one envisioned a massive attack. A jumbo ammo cartridge would be great: “just think, 100 rounds without reloading, hell yeah!”

43. Who Owns the Tragedy

There is a house, outside of Laramie. It’s a rugged Wyoming town on the fringe of the Rockies. That’s where Dave and Linda Sanders were going to retire. A quiet college town, Laramie may appear desolate to most eyes, but it teems with youthful energy and is the intellectual capital of the state. Dave’s Ford Escort could get them there in under three hours, and they made several trips a year.

They were closing in on it now—two years away, maybe three. They were looking forward to it. They called it retirement, but it was a work addict’s version: off with one career, on to the next. Dave would move up to a college position; Linda had her eye on an antiques store. After twenty-five years at Columbine, Dave had qualified for his teaching pension. It was just a matter of an opening. University of Wyoming was a good bet: he had been scouting for them for years and coaching the summer camp, and was great friends with the head basketball coach.

They would watch their retirement home glide by from the highway every time they approached town. It was a gray ranch house with a wide porch running all the way around. They would add rocking chairs, and a porch swing for the grandkids.

Linda Sanders thought about that house in Laramie a lot after Dave died. She thought about how different her struggle was from all the other victims. All the attention was on the students and their parents.

Kathy Ireland had wanted to save her boy. Now she wanted to get her hands on the kids who did this to him. She looked into Patrick’s eyes. Serene. Like hers, before this horror struck. Kathy had breathed tranquillity into her family, but it took all of her effort to stay calm around Patrick.

Kathy stood by Patrick’s bed and asked if he understood who’d done this to him.

It didn’t matter, he said. They were confused. Just forgive them. Please forgive them.

“It took my breath away,” Kathy said later. At first she assumed Patrick was confused. He was not. He had too much work to do. He was going to walk again, and talk again, like a normal person. And he insisted he would still be valedictorian. Anger would eat him up inside. He couldn’t afford that.

OK, Kathy said. She had been praying incessantly that Patrick would come through this with a sense of happiness—that in time he would find a way to let it go. This, she had not expected. She feared that it was more than she could do, but she would try to forgive, too. It would take her years to let go, and she never shook the anger completely, but she kept looking to Patrick leading the way.

Patrick Ireland was struggling. His days at Craig Hospital that first summer were exhausting. Speech therapy, muscle therapy, testing, prodding, poking, and the endless efforts just to communicate. Retrieving the right word often eluded him. At night Patrick would lie quietly in his room, winding down before settling off to sleep. John or Kathy would stay with him. They took turns each night; one of them would sleep on a fold-out chair beside his bed. Just in case.

They would turn the lights off around eleven or twelve and just sit there in the dark with him, quietly at first; then he would begin to ask questions. He needed to know everything. What exactly happened in the library? How did he respond? What was going to happen now? Patrick wanted to know about the other victims, too, and the killers sometimes—what could make them do something like that?

“There were certainly times that I was mad,” Patrick said later. “But I think a lot of those were more for realizations of what was taken from me, rather than actually what transpired. My life was going be completely changed.” Patrick tried not to stay angry on the basketball court. Make a mistake, brush it off. “Keep your eye on the ball,” he could hear his dad say. Patrick focused on the present.

His speech was returning slowly. Short-term memory was a struggle. There were exercises for everything. A therapist would recite a list of twenty things, and he’d have to repeat them in the same order. It was hard.

Patrick shed his anger toward the killers early, but his condition could be infuriating. Outbursts are typical with head wounds. Anger and frustration commonly last several months. The blue period, they call it. His therapists were tracking that as well. When Patrick shook his fist at them, they would note it in his chart.

Patrick stayed at Craig Hospital for nine and a half weeks. He walked out on July 2, using a forearm crutch to support himself. He wore a plastic brace on his right leg. His doctors sent him home with a wheelchair for when he needed to cover long distances. A banner signed by friends welcomed him back.

The summer went quickly. Patrick wasn’t ready for school to start. He was overbooked already: occupational, physical, and speech therapy, and neuropsychology. They were exhausting days. But he was walking more steadily. His speech was pretty intelligible, and the extended pauses while he searched for words grew briefer. A sentence might be interrupted only once now, or sometimes not at all. The blue period passed.

As he continued working, Patrick thought more about the lake. He knew he couldn’t get on the water. He could hear the buzz of the boat, smell the water lapping the pier. Eventually, Patrick convinced his father to take him out to watch his sister make some practice runs. He loved waterskiing. John started the boat. As the engine sputtered, Patrick smelled the fumes, closed his eyes, and he was out there riding the surface again. He sat on the dock reliving it all. Then he began to cry. He shook violently. He swore. John rushed over to comfort him. He was inconsolable. He wasn’t angry at his parents or himself or Eric or Dylan—he was just angry. He wanted his life back. He was never going to get it. John assured him they would get through this. Then he held on to Patrick and let him cry.

Four months after the police tape went up, Columbine was set to reopen. August 16 was the target date. The atmosphere that morning would mean everything. If students came home feeling like they had made a clean break over the summer and moved on, then they would have. The first few minutes of that morning would set the tone for the entire year. Administrators had gathered students, faculty, victims, and other stakeholders and brainstormed all summer. They’d consulted psychologists and cultural anthropologists and grief experts and had come up with an elaborate ritual. It would be called Take Back the School.

For the ceremony to have impact, they needed an adversary to overcome. And the more tangible and odious the adversary, the better. It was an easy choice: the media. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were still running Columbine stories every day—several a day. As the fall semester beckoned, coverage shot back up: ten stories a day between the two papers. And the national outlets were back. How do you feel? everyone constantly wanted to know. Students started sporting bite me T-shirts, and quite a few faculty members did, too.

The media had made their lives hell. And reporters could be counted on to appear in record numbers. The rally would include speeches and cheers and rock music and a ribbon cutting, but the heart of the event was a public rebuke of the media and a ceremonial reclaiming of the school—from them. Thousands of parents and neighbors would be recruited to form a human shield to rebuke the press. The shield would function both symbolically and practically. It would prevent reporters from performing their despicable job. They literally would not be able to see what was going on. The rally could have easily been planned for inside—virtually every school rally was. This event would be held outside specifically to stick it to the media. No doors or locks or walls would keep out the media; they would be blocked by a human wall of shame. And the school would dare them to try to cross it.

Reporters were kept in the dark about the agenda until seven days before the rally. On August 9, the school convened a Media Guidelines Summit. Forty news organizations attended, local and national. The invitation was filled with conciliatory phrases like “exchange ideas” and “balance the interests.” The district lined up a group of trauma experts. A professor outlined bereavement: these kids were still in the early stages, and many were suffering from PTSD. Mental repetition of the trauma trapped them there. The TV stations kept recycling the same stock footage: SWAT teams, bloody victims, hugging survivors, kids running out with hands on their heads.

Reporters did not like where this was going. Then victim’s advocate Robin Finegan introduced the larger idea: kids felt as if their identities had been stolen. “Columbine” was the name of a tragedy now. Their school was a symbol of mass murder. They had been cast as bullies or snotty rich brats. “There comes a point where victims need to have ownership of their tragedy,” Finegan said. So far, the media owned the Columbine tragedy. That was about to change, the district said—or good luck getting your precious “Columbine returns” stories. Administrators outlined the gist of the ceremony.

“What’s the human chain for?” a reporter asked.

“To shield the students from you folk,” district spokesman Rick Kaufman said.

Most media would be excluded. A small pool would be escorted in. Reporters were incredulous. One print reporter? The White House didn’t limit its pool that tightly. Reporters for the big national papers huddled in the back of the room, discussing options to “lawyer up.”

The district wouldn’t back down, Kaufman said. In fact, the pool would come only with major concessions: no helicopters, no rooftop photographers, and no breach of school grounds. “If we can’t get agreement, then there’s no pool,” he said.

Try it, reporters threatened; it will backfire. “As long as parents understand that by saying no to everything, again it’s going to be a situation where we’re coming out of rocks and stuff in order to get sound and pictures,” a TV executive said. “And I wonder if the parents really understand, if they think they control us by just saying no, they’re really not; they’re forcing us to go in other directions.”

Kaufman said his back was to the wall. Angry parents had objected to any pool at all. “Parents and faculty, they have really hit the wall with you folks. They’re saying, ‘We’re done! Enough is enough.’”

Later that week, a compromise was reached. The pool was expanded slightly, and a “bullpen” was added within the shield, where interested students could approach cordoned-off reporters. The press agreed to all previous demands and two new ones: no kid would be approached on the way to school that morning, and no photographs of any of the injured survivors would be used. The kids finally felt a sense of victory.

Mr. D was excited about the rally. But he was also worried about the new kids. It was a principal’s thing—the incoming freshmen always commanded his thoughts this time of year. Kids would either assimilate quickly or spend four years struggling to fit in. The first two weeks were crucial.

Mr. D chose to combat the chasm by highlighting it. He met with the academic and sports teams and the student senate over the summer, and he gave every kid and every teacher the same mission: These kids will never understand you. They will never endure your pain, never bridge the gap between social classes that you did. So help them.

By and large, they went for it. Kids thought they were overwhelmed by their own struggle, but what they really needed was someone else to look out for. They had to salve a different sort of pain to comprehend how to heal their own.

Mr. D’s team brainstormed up a slew of activities to grease the transition. The wall tile project seemed like an easy one. For three years, kids had been painting four-inch ceramic tiles in art class. Five hundred had been plastered above the lockers to brighten the Columbine corridors. Fifteen hundred new tiles would be added before school resumed, representing the single most noticeable change to the interior. For one morning, kids could express their grief or hope or desires visually and abstractly, without the intervention of words that wouldn’t come.

Brian Fuselier didn’t want his parents standing in the human shield. “The more you do that, the more you make it unnatural,” he told his dad. Brian was doing OK with the trauma; he just wanted his life back, and his school back, the way it had been.

“That’s just not going to happen,” his father said.

Agent Fuselier took Monday morning off from the investigation to join the chain. Mimi stood beside him. By seven A.M. kids were streaming in with their parents. By 7:30, the shield was five hundred strong. It would grow much larger. The parents applauded each student’s arrival.

Most of the kids wore matching white T-shirts emblazoned with their rallying cry: WE ARE on the front and COLUMBINE on the back. Small contingents had opted for their own messages: YES, I BELIEVE IN GOD OR VICTORS NOT VICTIMS.

Frank DeAngelis took the microphone and a group of kids screamed, “We love you, Mr. D!”

He teared up at the welcome, then delivered a touching speech. “You may be feeling a little anxious,” he said. “But you need to know that you are not in this alone.”

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

44. Bombs Are Hard

Eric was counting on a slow recovery. He was less concerned about killing hundreds of people on April 20 than about tormenting millions for years. His audience was the target. He wanted everyone to agonize: the student body, residents of Jeffco, the American public, the human race.

Eric amused himself with the idea of coming back as a ghost to haunt survivors. He would make noises to trigger flashbacks, and drive them all insane. Anticipation satiated Eric for months. Then it was time to act.

Senior year, just before Halloween, he began assembling his arsenal. Eric sat down in his room with a stack of fireworks, split each one down the side, and tapped the shiny black powder into a coffee can. Once he had a sufficient volume, he tipped the can and guided a fine little trickle into a carbon dioxide cartridge. He measured it out carefully, almost to the rim. Then he applied a wick, sealed it off, and set it aside. One cricket, ready for detonation. He was pleased with his work. He assembled nine more.

The pipe bombs required a lot more gunpowder, as well as a PVC pipe to house each one. Eric assembled four of those that day. The first three he designated the Alpha batch. Not bad, but he could do better. He set them aside and tried a different approach. He built just one bomb for the Beta batch. Better. Still room for improvement. That was enough for one day.

Eric drew up a chart to record his production data. He set up columns to log each batch by name, size, quantity, shrapnel content, and power load. Then he rated his work. Six of his eight batches would earn an “excellent” assessment. His worst performance was “O.K.”

The next day, Eric got right back to it, producing six more pipe bombs—the rest of the Beta batch. Later, he would create Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot, using military lingo for all of the batches, except that soldiers use Bravo, not Beta.

Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months. “I have a goal to destroy as much as possible,” he wrote, “so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that.”

It was a mark of Eric’s ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. “I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom,” he wrote. “I have to turn off my feelings.”

Keep one thing in mind, he said: he wanted to burn the world. That would be hard. He had begun producing the explosives, and it was a lot of work. Ten pipe bombs and ten puny crickets after two days’ effort. Those would not destroy much. “God I want to torch and level everything in this whole fucking area,” he said, “but bombs of that size are hard to make.”

Eric took a few moments to enjoy the dream. He envisioned half of Denver on fire: napalm streams eating the skin off skyscrapers, explosive gas tanks ripping through residential garages. Napalm recipes were available online. The ingredients were readily attainable. But he had to be realistic. “It will be very tricky getting all of our supplies, explosives, weaponry, ammo, and then hiding it all and then actually planting it all,” he said. A lot could go wrong in the next six months, and if they did get busted, “we start killing then and there. I aint going out without a fight.”

Eric repeated that last line almost verbatim in an English essay. The assignment was to react to a quote from literature, and Eric had chosen this line from Euripides’ tragedy Medea: “No, like some yellow-eyed beast that has killed its hunters let me lie down on the hounds’ bodies and the broken spears.” Medea was declaring that she would die fighting, Eric wrote. They would never take her without a struggle. He repeated that sentiment seven times in a page and a quarter. He described Medea as brave and courageous, tough and strong and hard as stone. It is one of the most impassioned public essays Eric left behind.

For years after his death, Eric would be seen as a bundle of contradictions. But the threads come together in “I aint going out without a fight.” Eric dreamed big but settled for reality. Unfortunately, that passage remained hidden from the public for years. Scattered quotes from his writings would leak out, and viewed as fragments, they could seem contradictory. Was Eric planning a gun battle or a plane crash or a terrorist attack bigger than Oklahoma City’s? If he was so intent on mass murder, why did he kill only thirteen? Trying to understand Eric from the information available was like reading every fifth page of a novel and concluding that none of it made sense.

Dr. Fuselier had the advantage of reading Eric’s journal from start to finish. Without the holes, the thrust was obvious: humans meant nothing; Eric was superior and determined to prove it. Watching us suffer would be enjoyable. Every week he devised colorful new scenarios: crashing planes into buildings, igniting blocks of skyscrapers, ejecting people into outer space. But the objective never wavered: kill as many as possible, as dramatically as imaginable.

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

A high school was pragmatic, but the choice was not arbitrary. If jocks had been his target, he would not just have hit the gym. He could have killed the few thousand packing the bleachers at a Columbine football game. If he’d been after the social elites, he could have taken out prom just three days before. Eric attacked the symbol of his oppression: the robot factory and the hub of adolescent existence.

For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school.

Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.”

The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully.

“During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained.

Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.

Eric miscalculated again. It was about drinking this time. He and Dylan talked a friend’s mom into buying lots of liquor. She took requests. Eric ordered tequila and Baileys Irish Cream. Dylan asked for vodka, of course. There was also beer, whiskey, schnapps, and Scotch. The group had a little boozefest that weekend. Eric made off with the leftovers and stashed them in the spare-tire compartment of his car. He was pretty proud of himself. He had all the booze he needed for a long time. He bought himself a flask and loaded it up with smooth, potent Scotch. Eric didn’t actually like alcohol, but he loved the idea. He took only three sips in the month he owned the flask, but he could sip Scotch whenever he wanted—how cool was that? He got a little cocky and bragged to a friend. The jerk ratted him out to Eric’s dad.

There was one hell of a fight at the Harris house that night. Wayne was livid. When are you going to get on track? What are you going to do with your life?

Eric spun a fresh batch of lies. He had been keeping up his grades just to maintain his cover story, setting the stage for a fresh round of bullshit. Man, he was good that night. He even quoted lines out of his favorite movies and delivered them like he was totally in the moment. “I should have won a freaking Oscar,” he wrote in his journal.

Despite the fighting, Eric convinced his Diversion officer that everything was great with his parents. Kriegshauser noted the happy home life in his notes for every session from that period. Eric had an instinct for when the truth would placate an adult, how much to reveal, and to whom. When he attended anger management class for Diversion, he wrote the required response paper, dutifully sucking up about how helpful it was. In person, he sensed Bob Kriegshauser would respond to a different tack. Eric admitted that the class was a waste of time. Bob was proud of him for coming clean. In his session notes, he praised Eric’s honesty.

Dr. Fuselier found Eric’s paper interesting for another reason. Eric really had learned something from the session. He’d listed the four stages of anger and several triggers: quick breathing, tunnel vision, tightened muscles, and clenched teeth. The triggers served as warning signs or symptoms of anger, Eric wrote. Just the kind of information he could use. Eric was a prodigy at masking his true emotions and simulating the desired effect, but prodigy was a long way from pro. Clarifying tiny giveaways where an expert might see through his act—that kind of data was invaluable. Eric described himself as a sponge, and mimicry of agreeable behavior was his number one skill.

Eric’s grades were up, and his teachers were happy. He would end the fall semester with glowing comments on his report card about a positive attitude and cooperation. Dylan was still tanking. On November 3, he brought Kriegshauser another progress report. Calculus was no better, and now he had a D in gym, too. It was just tardiness, he explained.

You will get there on time, meaning not one minute late, Kriegshauser demanded. That better be a passing grade by next session.

By their next session, the grade had dropped to an F. Kriegshauser confronted Dylan on the situation, and Dylan tried to weasel out. There was a pattern, Kriegshauser said. Dylan wasn’t even trying. The comments from his calculus teacher showed a bad attitude. He wasn’t making use of his class time effectively. What was going on there? Dylan said he’d been reading a book in class. Kriegshauser was incredulous. Dylan wasn’t much of a smooth talker. Listen to yourself, Kriegshauser told him. Think about what you’re saying. You are minimizing everything. You’re full of excuses. You sound like you think you’re the victim.

Kriegshauser said there would be consequences if Dylan’s efforts didn’t change. That could include termination. Termination would translate to multiple felony convictions. Dylan could find himself in prison.

Eric manufactured three more pipe bombs: the Charlie batch. Then he halted production until December. What he needed was guns. And that was becoming a problem.

Eric had been looking into the Brady Bill. Congress had passed the law restricting the purchase of most popular semiautomatic machine guns in 1993. A federal system of instant background checks would soon go into effect. Eric was going to have a hard time getting around that.

“Fuck you Brady!” Eric wrote in his journal. All he wanted was a couple of guns—“and thanks to your fucking bill I will probably not get any!” He wanted them only for personal protection, he joked: “Its not like I’m some psycho who would go on a shooting spree. fuckers.”

Eric frequently made his research do double duty for both schoolwork and his master plan. He wrote up a short research assignment on the Brady Bill that week. It was a good idea in theory, he said, aside from the loopholes. The biggest problem was that checks applied only to licensed dealers, not private dealers. So two-thirds of the licensed dealers had just gone private. “The FBI just shot themselves in the foot,” he concluded.

Eric was rational about his firepower. “As of this date I have enough explosives to kill about 100 people,” he wrote. With axes, bayonets, and assorted blades, he could maybe take out ten more. That was as far as hand-to-hand combat would get him. A hundred and ten people. “that just isn’t enough!”

“Guns!” the entry concluded. “I need guns! Give me some fucking firearms!”

45. Aftershocks

Milestones were hard. First day of school, first snowfall, first Christmas, first anything. All the ugly memories, all the feelings of helplessness swelled back to the surface.

The six-month anniversary was unnerving. Surveillance video of the killers roaming the cafeteria had just been leaked to CBS. The network led its national news broadcast with the first of footage inside the building during the attack. Eric and Dylan strolled around brandishing their weapons. They picked up abandoned cups from the tables and casually enjoyed a few sips. They shot at the big bombs, and terrified kids scurried away.

“It’s one thing to hear or read about it, and another thing to see it,” Sean Graves’s mother said. She cried while she watched. She made herself sit through it—she needed to know. She was coming to terms with inevitability. “I wish it wasn’t out,” she said. “But I knew that it was going to come out. It was just a matter of time.”

Her son took a pass. Sean did his homework in the other room.

Sean was semiparalyzed—one of the critically injured kids. Everyone was watching their progress. Anne Marie Hochhalter was struggling. She went to school for physics class, and a tutor taught her the rest at home. Her family had just moved into a new house, outfitted by volunteers to accommodate her wheelchair. Anne Marie was fighting her way toward walking again. A few days before the six-month anniversary, she finally moved her legs—one at a time, three to four inches high. It was “a tremendous, tremendous achievement,” her dad, Ted, said. But the pain was still excruciating.

The six-month anniversary jitters made it harder. Rumors were rampant: Eric and Dylan couldn’t have done it alone. The TCM is still active—they could strike again at any moment.

October 20, the six-month mark, seemed like the perfect moment. On October 18, a fresh rumor surfaced: a friend of Eric and Dylan’s who had worked on their school videos told someone he was going to “finish the job.”

The next day, police raided his house, searched the premises, and arrested him. His parents cooperated. He was charged with a felony and held on a $500,000 bond. He was put on suicide watch. He was seventeen.

The kid made a brief appearance in juvenile court on Wednesday, in leg shackles and a green prison uniform. He faced Magistrate John DeVita, the same man who’d sentenced Eric and Dylan a year and a half earlier. Because the suspect was a minor, his name was withheld and the record sealed. But DeVita confirmed the police had found an incriminating journal. “That was the basis for the allegation,” he said. A diagram of the school was also recovered, but no signs of activity to carry anything out. In the twelve-page diary, the boy lamented his failure to help Eric and Dylan with their troubles. He contemplated suicide. He wrote about it. He talked about it when they came to arrest him.

That same day, the six-month anniversary, 450 kids called in sick. Why set foot in that deadly school? More drifted out all day. By the closing bell, half the student body was gone. Three of the critically injured kids, Richard Castaldo, Anne Marie Hochhalter, and Patrick Ireland, stuck it out. Sean Graves stayed home and baked chocolate chip cookies with friends. “I didn’t want to risk it,” he said.

Thursday, 14 percent were still out. The normal absentee rate was 5 percent.

The tension subsided. On Friday, attendance was back near normal. Anne Marie Hochhalter and her dad went to Leawood Elementary that morning to thank fund-raisers and accept donations raised on her behalf. Around ten A.M., Anne Marie’s mother walked into an Alpha Pawn Shop south of Denver. She asked to see a handgun. The clerk offered several options; she looked at them through the glass case. She settled on a .38-caliber revolver. That one. While he got started on the background check, she turned her back to the counter and loaded. She had brought the ammo with her. First she fired at the wall. The second shot entered through her right temple.

Paramedics rushed Carla June to Swedish Medical Center, the same hospital that had treated Anne Marie. Carla June died a few minutes later. A counselor who had worked with the family came by the house to notify the family. Anne Marie answered the door, and the counselor asked to talk to Ted. “I started to breathe really fast,” Anne Marie said later. “I just had an ominous feeling.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” the counselor said. “Carla’s dead.”

Ted Hochhalter crumpled.

“No!” Anne Marie said. “No! No! No!” Her dad pulled up and hugged her. It took him a few minutes to compose himself, and the counselor explained how it had happened.

“We just broke down again,” Anne Marie said. “The look on my dad’s face will be etched in my memory forever. It was just a look of sorrow and horror.”

Columbine’s mental health hotline was flooded with calls on Saturday. Several distraught messages were cued up on the machine when counselors arrived. They added an extra weekend shift. “It’s been a hard week,” a Jeffco official said. “They’re sad and depressed and they want to talk.”

Parents had watched their kids sputtering on the brink for months. Especially this month. Other parents had no idea what their kids were thinking. Were they getting that desperate, too? Would Carla’s choice seem like a way out? Some kids fought the same thoughts about their parents.

“I just can’t take it,” Steve Cohn told the Associated Press. “I can’t believe someone killed themselves over those idiots.”

Steve’s boy Aaron had made it out of the library unscathed physically, but the stress was wrenching the family apart. “I drive by the school and I’m looking behind every tree,” Steve said. “I feel like a cop. I want to prevent it before it happens again.”

Steve and his son had both gone to counseling, but that was useless while Aaron was shut down. “Until he opens up, there’s nothing we can do,” his dad said.

Connie Michalik was especially rattled. She’d spent months beside Carla at Swedish Medical Center, watching their children recover. Connie was Richard Castaldo’s mom. Neither child was expected to walk again. “This just destroyed her,” Connie said. “You’d look in her eyes and see she was lost. It didn’t seem like she was there anymore. She was sweet and loving and kind, but it was too much for her.”

Connie had felt herself waver, too. “When it first happened, [Carla] was just like any other parent,” she said. “We were all depressed and devastated. There was a time where I thought I had nothing to live for. She was no different from us.”

Connie worked past it; Carla could not. “We kind of saw her slipping,” Connie said. “I saw her slide downhill.” But Connie never foresaw that deep a plunge. She assumed Carla would pull out of it, especially when Anne Marie moved her legs.

What most people in the community did not know was that Carla was at the end of a long struggle with mental illness.

The Hochhalter family wanted the public to understand that. After her death, they released a statement saying she had been battling clinical depression for three years. She had been suicidal in the past. She had been on medication. A month earlier, Ted had called the authorities at three A.M. to report her missing. She walked into a local emergency room the next day, seeking treatment for depression. She was hospitalized for a month. Eight days before her suicide, she was transferred to an outpatient program.

The family later revealed that Carla had been diagnosed as bipolar. Columbine aggravated Carla’s depression horribly. She may or may not have gone over the edge without it, but the Columbine tragedy was not the underlying cause.

The school suspended the boy who’d made the anniversary threat, pending expulsion. That made eight expulsion proceedings in Jeffco since April, for a variety of gun threats and bomb scares. Everything was zero tolerance now. No one was taking chances.

The boy spent seven weeks in jail, through Thanksgiving. It was during this period that the community learned of his plan. He’d intended to fill his car with gasoline canisters and plow into the school as a suicide bomber. In December, he pleaded down to two minor charges and was sentenced to a one-year juvenile Diversion program, just as Eric and Dylan had been. Other charges were dropped, including theft. He had stolen a hundred dollars from the video store he worked at, to run away to Texas. He had begun seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication. The sentence required both to continue. “This is a troubled young man, and he will be getting the help he needs,” the prosecutor said.

The half-year anniversary also brought a deadline. Colorado law requires that anyone who wants to sue a government agency for negligence must file an intent notice within 180 days. Twenty families filed. Notices came from families of the dead, families of the injured, and the Klebolds.

Tom and Sue Klebold charged Stone’s department with “reckless, willful and wanton” misconduct for failing to alert them about its 1998 investigation into Eric’s behavior, particularly his death threats. That warning “would more likely than not have caused the Klebolds to become aware of dangers of which they were not aware and demand that their son, Dylan, be excluded from all contacts with Eric Harris,” the filing read. The failure “caused the Klebolds to be subject to substantial damage claims, vilification, grief and loss of enjoyment of life.” The notice said the family expected to be sued by victims, and sought damages from Jeffco equal to those eventual settlements.

The Klebolds had cause for concern. The two families still topped most blame lists.

The filing took the community by surprise. No one had heard from the Harrises or Klebolds in months.

The harshest rebuke came from Sheriff Stone. “I think it’s outrageous,” he said. “It’s their parenting thing, not our fault for their kid doing this thing.”

He also lamented the tragedy degenerating to “an ugly stage.”

Brian Rohrbough took the Klebolds’ move in stride. It surprised him at first, he said, but on reflection, “it seems reasonable.” He directed his outrage at Sheriff Stone’s response. “We felt that it was really ugly April 20th,” Brian said.

Wayne and Kathy finally agreed to meet with investigators without immunity, October 25. It was a brief session led by Sheriff Stone. There is no record of it being documented in a police report.

Only two people would be charged with a crime: Mark Manes, who’d sold the TEC 9, and Phil Duran, who’d brokered the deal. Months earlier, Agent Fuselier had predicted that the two would be savaged—with both legitimate and displaced anger.

“Those two guys stepped in front of a freight train,” he said.

He was right. Manes was up first. He copped to a plea agreement and was sentenced on November 11. It was ugly. Nine families spoke at the hearing. Every one of them demanded the maximum.

“I ask you clearly to make a statement,” Tom Mauser, one of the Thirteen, implored.

“If we had our way, the defendant would never be allowed on the streets again,” the Shoels family said.

The testimony lasted for two hours. Manes hung his head. Videos made by two families hit especially hard. The court reporter passed boxes of Kleenex around the gallery.

Manes’s lawyer described a rough childhood: his client had gotten in trouble, then mended his ways. Manes had gotten off drugs, gone to college, and obtained a steady job in the computer field. “His character today is exemplary,” he said.

That infuriated the relatives. “Having that attorney talk about how wonderful Mark Manes is, that was tough,” Dave Sanders’s daughter Coni said. “He wasn’t misunderstood. He was in the wrong.”

Manes spoke last. He faced the judge and assured him that he’d had no idea what Eric and Dylan were planning. “I was horrified,” he said. “I told my parents I never want to see a gun for the rest of my life. There is no way I can adequately explain my sorrow to the families. It is something I will regret for the rest of my life.”

Manes was eligible for eighteen years in prison, but his plea agreement knocked that down to a maximum of nine. Judge Henry Nieto said he had no choice. “The conduct of this defendant was the first step in what became an earthquake. All of us have a moral duty when we see the potential for harm to intervene.” Nine years. But he would assign them concurrently, so Manes would serve only six—with parole, maybe as little as three. Nieto warned the families not to expect comfort from the sentence.

Manes looked calm, but he took it hard. His lawyer put his hand on Manes’s neck and whispered that he loved him. Manes was led away in handcuffs. The families applauded.

Manes’s lawyer described his client as a scapegoat. “There’s no one else to be angry at,” he told NBC. “These people have all this understandable anger. It has to go somewhere.”

Christian martyr Cassie Bernall offered hope. In September, Misty went on a national book tour. She Said Yes leapt onto the New York Times best seller list in its first week. The Rocky Mountain News editors had a dilemma. They knew Cassie had never said yes. They had expected to shatter the myth by now, but they were still waiting for the sheriff’s report. They had to cover the book’s release. The editors decided to run two pieces on publication day, affirming Cassie’s myth.

A few weeks later, another publication broke the news. The Rocky followed up with Emily Wyant’s testimony. With the story out, Emily agreed to allow her name to be used. The Bernalls’ publisher lashed out at Emily. The news made front pages as far away as London. Brad and Misty were caught by surprise. They felt humiliated and betrayed—by Emily, by the cops, and by the secular press.

The evidence against martyrdom was overwhelming, but Cassie’s youth pastor saw stronger forces at play. “You will never change the story of Cassie,” Reverend Dave McPherson said. “The church is going to stick to the martyr story. You can say it didn’t happen that way, but the church won’t accept it.”

He didn’t mean just his church. He meant the vast Evangelical community worldwide. And to a large extent, he was right. Book sales continued briskly. A vast array of Web sites sprang up to defend the story. Others just repeated it, without even mentioning that it had been debunked.

Jeffco also faced a series of embarrassing leaks. Investigators had let the video get loose to CBS and had revealed the truth about Cassie Bernall; lead investigator Kate Battan had broken her silence and spoken to one reporter; and the first passages from Eric’s journal had slipped out. And yet the department maintained its official silence. It delayed the report again.

The victims’ families were furious. The sheriff’s department’s credibility plummeted. Its officers had done a thorough job of detective work on the case, but the public had no way to see that. Jeffco expressed shock and bewilderment at the leaks; officials offered flimsy excuses and assurances. A spokesman insisted that only two copies of Eric’s journal existed, when in fact it had been run through photocopiers repeatedly, and no one had a clue how many copies were floating around.

Then the undersheriff let a Time reporter watch the Basement Tapes. He had assured the families repeatedly they would be the first to see the videos.

The magazine ran an expose cover story shortly before Christmas. Stone and Undersheriff John Dunaway posed in their dress blues with white gloves, armed with the killers’ semiautomatics.

Many families were aghast. Several called for Stone to resign. Charges of cowardice against the SWAT teams resurfaced. Prominent law enforcement officials joined the chorus. Stone insisted that his department would be exonerated by the final report—which was delayed again.

Turbulence was expected that fall. Everyone knew they would face anniversaries and hearings. No one foresaw the string of aftershocks. The school was sued over a craft project gone awry—the Rohrboughs charged infringement of their religious expression. Brian Rohrbough repeated the crosses incident at a memorial garden created at Cassie’s church: his group picketed Sunday services and then chopped down two of the fifteen trees in front of the horrified youth group that had planted them. They inadvertently chose the tree symbolizing Cassie.

Bomb threats were a regular occurrence, but one gained traction in the wake of the Time story. The school was shut down until after Christmas. Finals were canceled. Legal battles over the Basement Tapes began.

“When will it end?” a local pastor asked. “Why us? What is happening in our community?”

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

“Two weeks ago they found the kid in the Dumpster,” a friend of the Subway victims told reporters. “Now—I kind of want to move. This is worse than Columbine.” Students had grudgingly come to adopt their school’s name as the title of a tragedy.

Some events were unrelated to the massacre or even the school. But much of the community had lost the ability to distinguish. Perspective was impossible. A fight with your girlfriend, a car crash, a drought… it was all “Columbine.” It was a curse. Kids were calling it the Columbine Curse.

Appointments at the mental health facility set up for Columbine survivors rose sharply through the fall. “Many come in after they’ve tried everything they know how to do,” a psychologist on the team said. Utilization peaked about nine months after the tragedy and held steady until a year and a half out. At any given time during that period, case managers were following about fifteen kids on suicide watch. Gradually, each one came down from the brink, but another took that kid’s place. Substance abuse spiked. The area experienced a marked increase in traffic accidents and DUIs.

“By definition, PTSD is a triad of change for the worse, lasting at least a month, occurring anytime after a genuine trauma,” wrote PTSD pioneer Dr. Frank Ochberg. “The triad of disabling responses is: 1) recurring intrusive recollections; 2) emotional numbing and a constriction of life activity; and 3) a physiological shift in the fear threshold, affecting sleep, concentration, and sense of security.”

Response to PTSD varies dramatically. Some people feel too much, others too little. The over-feelers often suffer flashbacks. Nothing can drive away the terror. They awake each morning knowing it may be April 20 all over again. They can go hours, weeks, or months without an episode and then a trigger—often a sight, sound, or smell—will take them right back. It’s not like a bad memory of the event; it feels like it is the event. Others protect themselves by shutting down altogether. Pleasant feelings and joy get eliminated with the bad. They often describe feeling numb.

It was a rough year. The football team offered a respite. Matthew Kechter had been a sophomore when he was killed in the library. He had played JV on the defensive line in the 1998 season and had hoped to make varsity this fall. At his parents’ request the team dedicated the season to Matt. Each player wore Matt’s number on his helmet and Matt’s initials, MJK, on his cap. They finished the season 12-1. They came from 17 behind in the fourth quarter to win the first playoff game. The players wept on the field. They chanted MJK! MJK!

They were heavy underdogs for the state championship. Denver powerhouse Cherry Creek High had taken five of the last ten titles. Columbine had made it to the big game only once: a loss two decades back.

Supporters flew in from around the world. Eight thousand people packed the stadium. The media were everywhere. The New York Times covered the game. The temperature dropped below freezing. Patrick Ireland sat in the front row, trying to keep warm.

Cherry Creek went ahead early. Columbine tied it up at the half, and then their defense came on strong. They allowed just two first downs in the second half, and a third touchdown put it away. Columbine won 21-14. Fans rushed the field. The familiar chant thundered through the stands. We are… COL-um-BINE! We are… COL-um-BINE!

The school held a victory rally. A highlight reel of the game was projected, ending with a picture of Matt. “This one’s for you,” it said. A moment of silence was held for all thirteen.

Some kids seemed immune to the gloom. Others fought private battles on completely different chronologies. Patrick Ireland made steady improvements, kept his 4.0 average that fall, and made sure valedictorian was still in sight. But a more significant problem loomed.

Patrick had had his life pretty well figured out junior year. Before he got shot, he was going to be an architect. His grandfather had been a builder, and Patrick had taken to drawing in his junior high drafting class. He lined up that T-square against the drafting table and he could feel it. He liked the precision. He enjoyed the artistry. At Columbine, he worked with sophisticated computer-aided design software. While Eric and Dylan finalized their plot, Patrick was deep into research on college programs and had started investigating internships.

He was still going to be an architect. Patrick clung to the dream straight through outpatient therapy. He took breaks for three out-of-state campus visits, at schools with leading architecture programs. They all accepted him. But they stressed how rigorous the work would be. Architecture programs are known for their massive workloads: five years of relentless all-nighters. All night was not an option for Patrick. He could cheat himself out of a couple hours’ sleep, but his brain would take years to recover. He would slow his progress by taxing it too hard, and possibly even bring on seizures.

In March, he took a school trip to England. The jet lag was tough. Kathy went with him, and Friday night she noticed his face went blank and his eyeball fluttered for a few seconds. “Did you do that on purpose?” she asked.

“Do what?”

Kathy believes it was a precursor to the event two days later. Patrick was walking through London and collapsed in the middle of a street. He shook violently, made it almost to the curb, and called out to a friend for help.

A London doctor prescribed antiseizure medication. The family confirmed the treatment back home, and Patrick will be on it for life.

Architecture school wasn’t going to work. John and Kathy understood that from the start, but they waited for Patrick to accept the situation. He opted for Colorado State, just over an hour away. He would try business school for a year. CSU had an architecture program, too. If, a year later, he felt he could handle it, he could transfer.

Despite the cloud over his future, Patrick regained his bearing through the year. Socially, he was having the time of his life. Patrick had always been a catch. He’d been bright, charming, handsome, and athletic. He had been a little short on confidence, from time to time. Laura would have given anything to go to the prom with Patrick. She might have become his girlfriend if he had asked. The shotgun blasts had robbed him of some of his best assets, but he was a star. He was the most celebrated figure to live through the tragedy. And he had put up an incredible fight. Girls flirted unabashedly.

But Patrick wanted Laura. That first summer, he told her how much he wanted her—how deeply and how long.

God, me too, she said.

What a relief. Finally, after all this time, it was out in the open.

Laura confessed everything: all those nights flirting on the phone, hinting her heart out for him to ask. If only he had asked her to the prom.

OK, Patrick said: I like you, you like me, let’s do something about it. Too late. She was dating the prom dude.

That didn’t seem like an obstacle. Do you want to be with me? Yes. Then break up with him. She said she would do it.

He gave her time. He asked again. When are you going to do it? She said it would be soon. But nothing happened.

Girls were fighting for the chance to date him, so he got tired of waiting and asked one out. Then he asked another one. And another—this was fun!

Things grew strained with Laura. They never went out. They began avoiding each other. It was fourth grade all over again.

46. Guns

Eric named his shotgun Arlene. He acquired her on November 22, 1998, and declared it an important date in the history of Reb. “we……. have…….. GUNS!” he wrote. “We fucking got em you sons of bitches! HA!!”

Eric and Dylan had driven into Denver for the Tanner Gun Show the day before. They’d found some sweet-ass weapons. A 9mm carbine rifle and a pair of 12-gauge shotguns: one double-barreled and one pump-action single. They’d tried to buy them, and that was a great big no go. Eric’s charm was not getting them over this hurdle. No ID, no guns. They drove back to the suburbs.

Eric would be eighteen shortly before their attack date in April. They could have just waited, but Eric wanted real firepower to keep the plan on track. There was one more day in the gun show. Who did they know who was eighteen? Plenty of people. Who would do it for them, who could they trust? Robyn! Sweet little church girl Robyn. She was nuts about Dylan; she would do anything for him. Wouldn’t she?

The following day, it was done.

In his journal, Eric labeled this “the point of no return.” Then he waxed nostalgic about his dad. He’d had a lot of fun at the gun show, he wrote: “I would have loved it if you were there, dad. we would have done some major bonding. would have been great. Oh wait. But, alas, I fucked up and told [my friend] about the flask.” That had been the end of good relations with Wayne for a while. Now his parents were on his ass more than ever about his future. What do you want to do with your life? That was easy. NBK. “THIS is what I am motivated for,” he wrote. “THIS is my goal. THIS ‘is what I want to do with my life.’”

Eric and Dylan sawed the barrels off their new shotguns—cut them way below the legal limit. The first week in December, they took the rifle out and fired it. A bullet erupted in the chamber, and the butt slammed into Eric’s bony shoulder. Wow! That thing packed a lot of power. This wasn’t a pipe bomb in his hands. This could kill somebody.

Psychopaths generally turn to murder only when their callousness combines with a powerful sadistic streak. Psychologist Theodore Millon identified ten basic subtypes of the psychopath. Only two are characterized by brutality or murder: the malevolent psychopath and the tyrannical. In these rare subtypes, the psychopath is driven less by a greed for material gain than by desire for his own aggrandizement and the brutal punishment of inferiors.

Eric fit both categories. His sadistic streak permeated the journal, but a late autumn entry suggests the life Eric might have led had Columbine not ended it. He described tricking girls to come to his room, raping them, and then proceeding to the real fun.

“I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can,” he wrote. “I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is god.”

Eric had not given up on the twenty-three-year-old. For months, he kept calling Brenda. She told him she had a new boyfriend, but he persisted. Late in the year, she met him at a Macaroni Grill. “He was really bummed out,” she said. She thought he was bummed because she’d dumped him. He denied it, but offered no explanation. She never saw him again.

Just before Christmas, Eric celebrated his last final, ever. He laughed at his classmates, who assumed they had another batch ahead.

The next day, Eric ordered several ten-round magazines for his carbine rifle. Those would do some damage. He could peel off 130 rounds in rapid succession.

There was a problem. Eric gave Green Mountain Guns his home number. They called just before New Year’s, and his dad answered.

“Your clips are in,” the clerk told him.

Clips? He didn’t order any gun clips.

Eric overheard the conversation. Oh God. He described the incident in his journal: “jesus Christ that was fucking close. fucking shitheads at the gunshop almost dropped the whole project.” Luckily, Wayne never stopped to ask the guy if he had the right number. And the guy never asked any questions either. That could have been the end of it right there. If either one of them had handled that phone call a little differently, the entire plan might have come crashing down, Eric said. But they didn’t.

But Wayne was suspicious.

“thank god I can BS so fucking well,” Eric wrote.

Once they got the guns, Eric lost interest in “The Book of God.” It was on to implementation. After New Year’s, he would leave just one final installment, a few weeks before they did the deed.

Eric was raring to go; Dylan continued to waver. “Existences” had been silent for five months, since he said good-bye. But on January 20, Bob Kriegshauser called Dylan in for an important meeting. Dylan resumed his journal the same day.

“This shit again,” he began. He didn’t want to be writing this again, he wanted to be “free,” meaning dead. “I thought it would have been time by now,” he wrote. “The pain multiplies infinitely. never stops.” Eric’s plan offered the solace of suicide: “maybe Going ‘NBK’ (gawd) w. eric is the best way to be free. i hate this.” Then more hearts and love. He hardly seemed committed to the plan. But he appeared to be putting up a good front to Eric. Neither boy ever recorded a suggestion of Dylan’s resistance, but Eric seemed to be doing most of the work.

Eric was also working hard to get laid. He made a final stab with Brenda, leaving a string of messages on her answering machine. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “There’s something we need to talk about. I’m seventeen.” He was through lying, he said—he wanted to take their relationship to the next level. And she could keep the Rammstein CDs he’d left at her house. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

The last part made her nervous. She called back to make sure he was all right. And she reiterated one more time that they were just friends.

Eric wasn’t bothered. He was working another chick. Kristi was the girl he had passed notes with in German class. Lately she seemed interested in more. So they tried a sort of informal group date to Rock’n’ Bowl night at Belleview Lanes.

Kristi liked him, but she was conflicted. There was this other guy, a friend of Eric’s, Nate Dykeman. Bastard!

Eric turned on the charm, and Kristi went for it—just not enough. It was sex he really wanted; he had no interest in a real relationship, and maybe Kristi picked up on that.

Nate moved in on Kristi fast. They started dating, got serious, and Eric turned on Nate.

As Eric wrapped up plans for April 20, Dylan was laying into his journal in a frenzy. They were short entries and erratic, tossing aside all his conventions. Several ran half a page or less. He was expressing himself more and more in pictures, all his old icons returning, linked together in wild, feverish strokes. Fluttering hearts were everywhere, filling up entire pages, blasting out the road to happiness, bursting with stars and powered by an engine shaped like the symbol for infinity. Dylan was focused on one topic now: love. Up until his final week, Dylan wrote privately of almost nothing else.

47. Lawsuits

Ten days before the first anniversary, Brian Rohrbough threw a Hail Mary. The cops had been stonewalling, and litigation looked like the only answer. Families could sue for negligence or wrongful death, and use the process to force out information. The verdict would be less important than discovery.

Should they sue? How could they know? It all rested on Jeffco’s final report. If Jeffco released all the evidence, most families would be satisfied. If Jeffco held back, they were going to court. No one had anticipated that the report would take this long. Way back in the summer of 1999, Jeffco had said its report was six to eight weeks away. It was April now, and officials were still saying they had six to eight weeks to go.

The investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information. Yet the longer they waited, the more leaks they risked, the more rebukes, and the higher the stakes to get every sentence right.

Even the school administration was frustrated. “We keep getting ready,” Mr. D told a magazine in April. “I keep telling the community, ‘OK, we’re about two weeks away, we’re two weeks away.’ There’s only so many times you can get so wound up saying, ‘Oh, I’m ready now, I’m ready,’ and then all of a sudden, ‘No!’ There’s a level of frustration.”

The delays were maddening, but a practical problem was also arising. The first anniversary coincided with the statute of limitations. By delaying the report past April 20, 2000, Jeffco forced the families to trust them or sue. That was an easy choice. On April 10, the Rohrboughs and the Flemings filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately—one last option to avoid a lawsuit. Since they were filing, they asked for everything, including the Basement Tapes, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. Rohrbough wanted to compare the raw data to the narrative under construction by Jeffco. He predicted a chasm.

“They lie as a practice,” he said.

District Judge R. Brooke Jackson read the request. He said yes. Over furious objections from Jeffco, three days before the anniversary, he allowed the plaintiffs to read the draft report. He also granted them access to hundreds of hours of 911 tapes and some video footage. He agreed to begin reading the two hundred binders of evidence himself, but noted that would take months.

The ruling stunned everyone. But it was too little, too late. Fifteen families filed suits against the sheriff’s department that week. They would add additional defendants later.

The Klebolds chose not to sue. Instead they issued another apology letter. The Harrises did the same.

The lawsuits were expected to fail. The legal thresholds were too high. In federal court, negligence was insufficient; families needed to prove officers had actually made the students worse off. And that was only the first hurdle. But the main strategy was to flush out information.

The one suit with a plausible chance came from Dave Sanders’s daughter Angela. She was represented by Peter Grenier, a powerhouse Washington, D.C., lawyer. They charged that Jeffco officials went beyond neglecting Dave Sanders for three hours: they impeded his movement and prohibited others from getting him out of there. They deceived volunteer rescuers with false claims about an imminent arrival, to discourage them from busting out a window or taking him down the stairs. By doing so, the suit argued, Jeffco accepted responsibility for Dave and then let him die. In legal terms, they’d denied his civil rights by cutting off all opportunities to save him when they were not prepared to do it themselves.

The Rohrboughs and others followed similar logic. The library kids could have escaped easily, they said, unencumbered by police “help.” It looked ugly. But legal analysts were skeptical about any case holding up. “It’s going to be tough to ask a jury to say we know better than a SWAT team how to handle this situation,” said Sam Kamin, law professor at the University of Denver.

In legal circles, the lawsuits had been expected, but their ferocity shook the community. The anniversary was overwhelmed by animosity again, and media were everywhere. Many of the Thirteen left town. The school closed for the day and conducted a private memorial. A public service was held in Clement Park.

A few days after the anniversary, Judge Jackson ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. He also released more evidence, including a video that drew a lot of heat. For months, Jeffco had referred to it as a “training video” created by the Littleton Fire Department. It was based on footage shot in the library shortly after the bodies were removed. It would be the families’ first look at the gruesome scene. It would be “difficult” to watch, Jackson’s ruling stated, but that was no reason to suppress it.

“There is no compelling public interest consideration that requires that the video or any part of it not be disclosed under the Open Records Act,” Jackson wrote.

The next day, Jeffco began duplicating the tape and selling copies for $25. Spokesmen said the fee was to defray copying costs. The families were aghast. Then they saw the tape. There was no instruction, no narration, no attempt at “training.” It was someone’s ghastly attempt at commemoration: grisly crime scene footage set to pop music, Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.” McLachlan’s record company threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Jeffco removed the music. Sales remained strong.

Brian Rohrbough had broken through Jeffco’s armor. Judge Jackson kept ordering releases. In May, he unleashed all the 911 tapes and a ballistics report. For a while, everything he read, he released. The killers’ families tried to stop him. On May 1, they filed a joint motion to keep materials seized from their homes private. That would include the most vital evidence: the journals and the Basement Tapes.

Jeffco released its report on May 15, as ordered. The focus of the package was a minute-by minute timeline of April 20, 1999, in great detail. It dramatically illustrated how fast everything happened: just seven and a half minutes in the library, all the deaths and injuries in the first sixteen minutes. How convenient, critics said. The cops’ report was dedicated to illustrating that the cops had never had a chance.

As expected, the report ducked the central question of why. Instead, it provided about seven hundred pages of what,how, and when. The logistics were useful, but they were hardly what people had been waiting for.

There were three paragraphs about advance warning by the Browns: one paragraph summarizing and two defending. The department claimed it had been unable to access Eric’s Web site, despite the fact that officials had printed the pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found. But a year after the murders, Jeffco was still suppressing the file and the search warrants. So the families suspected a lie, but they couldn’t prove it.

Jeffco was ridiculed for its report. Officials seemed truly bewildered by the response. Privately, they insisted they were just acting the way they always did: building a case internally, keeping their conclusions to themselves. Communicating the results was the prosecutors’ role. It wasn’t their job. They still couldn’t grasp that this was not any normal case.

As the battles intensified, compassion fatigue set in. Hardly anyone said it out loud.

Chuck Green, a Denver Post columnist and one of Denver’s nastier personalities, broke the ice. He stunned the families with a pair of columns, charging them with “milking” the tragedy.

They had gotten millions, he wrote. “It has been an avalanche of anguish never before witnessed, yet the Columbine victims still have their hands out for more.”

The Parents Group was caught unaware. They’d had no idea. They were more stunned by the support for Green’s ideas. “All of us are sick and tired of the continued whining,” a reader responded. Another said those sentiments had been circulating for quite a while—“whispering in small circles, amongst clouds of guilt.”

It was out in the open now.

The anniversary also offered a window of political opportunity. Tom Mauser had been energized at the NRA protest and devoted himself to the cause. “I am not a natural leader, but speaking out helps me because it carries on Daniel’s life,” he said. Tom took a one-year leave of absence to serve as chief lobbyist for SAFE Colorado (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic). They supported several bills in the Colorado legislature to limit access to guns for minors and criminals. Prospects looked good, especially for the flagship proposal to close the gun-show loophole. It was narrowly defeated in February. A similar measure bogged down in Congress.

So a week before the anniversary, President Clinton returned to Denver to encourage survivors and support SAFE’s new strategy: to pass the same measure in Colorado with a ballot initiative.

Colorado Republican leaders rebuked the president and refused to appear with him. Republican Governor Bill Owens supported the ballot initiative but refused to attend an MSNBC town hall meeting hosted by Tom Brokaw until President Clinton left the stage, midway through the show.

The visit appeared to force a little movement in Washington. Just before the meeting with Brokaw, House leaders announced a bipartisan compromise on gun-show legislation. But it had been a year already, and there was still a long way to go.

Tom Mauser kept fighting. At a rally the same week, SAFE spread 4,223 pairs of shoes across the state capitol steps—one for each minor killed by a gun in 1997. Tom took the sneakers off his feet and held them up to the crowd. They had been Daniel’s. Tom took to wearing them to rallies. He needed a tangible link to his son. And they helped the shy man connect Daniel to his audience.

May 2, the governor and attorney general—the state’s most prominent Republican and Democrat—put the first two signatures on the petition for the Colorado ballot initiative. It required 62,438 signatures. They gathered nearly twice that many.

The measure would pass by a two-to-one margin. The gun show loophole was closed in Colorado.

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

The season ended well. On May 20, the second class of survivors graduated. Nine of the injured crossed the stage, two in wheelchairs. Patrick Ireland limped to the podium to give the valedictory address.

It had been a rough year, he said. “The shooting made the country aware of the unexpected level of hate and rage that had been hidden in high schools.” But he was convinced the world was inherently good at heart. He had spent the year thinking about what had gotten him across the library floor. At first he assumed hope—not quite; it was trust. “When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me,” he said. “That’s what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time.”