Columbine

48. An Emotion of God

Eric had work to do. Napalm was hard. It’s an inherently unstable substance. Eric found lots of recipes online, but they never seemed to produce what the instructions predicted. The first batch was awful. He tried again. Just as bad. He kept varying the ingredients and the heating process, but it was one failure after another. Multiple batches were no easy feat, either. Eric didn’t specify how or when he conducted his experiments; presumably he carried them out in the same place he did everything else: his house, when his parents were out. Each batch was a chore, time-consuming and risky. It involved mixing gasoline with other substances and then heating it on the stove, trying to make it congeal into a slushy syrup that would ignite with just a spark but burn continuously for some time when shot with force through a projectile tube.

Eric had to construct the flamethrowers, too. He drew out detailed sketches of his weaponry in the back of his journal notebook; some were quite practical, others pure fantasy. Dylan seemed to be no help with any of it. Each killer left hundreds of pages of writings and drawings and schedules in their day planners, and Eric’s are riddled with plans, logs, and results of experiments; Dylan shows virtually no effort. Eric acquired the guns, the ammo, and apparently the material for the bombs, and did the planning and construction.

Figuring out how to sneak the huge bombs into the crowded cafeteria was another big problem. Each contraption would bulge out of a three-foot duffel bag and weigh about fifty pounds. They couldn’t just trot them into the middle of the lunchroom, plop them down in front of six hundred people, and walk out without notice. Or could they? At some point, the boys gave up scheming. They decided to just walk right in with the bombs. It was a bold move, but textbook psychopath. Perpetrators of complex attacks tend to focus on weak links and minimize risk. Psychopaths are reckless. They have supreme confidence in their work. Eric planned meticulously for a year, only to open with a blunder that neutralized 95 percent of the attack. He showed no hint that he had even considered the gaping flaw.

Now he had to concentrate on getting Dylan a second gun. And Eric had a whole lot of production work. If only he had a little more cash, he could move the experiments along. Oh well. You could fund only so many bombs at a pizza factory. And he needed his brakes checked, and he’d just had to buy winter wiper blades, and he had a whole bunch of new CDs to pick up.

They also had Diversion to put behind them. Eric was a star in the program. His sterling performance earned him a rare early release—something only 5 percent of kids achieve. Kriegshauser decided to let Dylan out with him, despite Dylan’s failure to raise his D in calculus. Kriegshauser advised Dylan to be careful about his future choices. His exit report said Dylan struggled with motivation in school, but the summary was all rosy: “Prognosis: Good. Dylan is a bright young man who has a great deal of potential. If he is able to tap his potential and become self-motivated he should do well in life…. Recommendations: Successful Termination. Dylan has earned the right for an early termination. He needs to strive to self-motivate himself so he can remain on a positive path. He is intelligent enough to make any dream a reality, but he needs to understand hard work is part of it.”

Dylan responded with a bleak “Existences” entry. This was the meeting that drove him back to the journal. He wrote the same day, but failed to mention the good news. He insisted life was getting worse. In one sense it was. Release from Diversion was a painful sign. Dylan had not planned on leaving the program alive.

Eric earned a glowing report, start to finish: “Prognosis: Good. Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life. He is intelligent enough to achieve lofty goals as long as he stays on task and remains motivated…. Recommendations: Successful Termination. Eric should seek out more education at higher levels. He impressed me as being very articulate and intelligent. These are skills that he should grow and use as frequently as possible.”

Both boys arrived at murder gradually, but one event pushed each of them over the hump. Eric’s occurred January 30, 1998, when Deputy Walsh shackled his wrists. From that night on, the boy was set on murder. Dylan’s turn came a full year later and was more gradual, but the turning point seems clear. It was February 1999. They had agreed on April a year in advance, and it was almost here. Eric was serious. He was really going through with it. Dylan was conflicted, as always, still leaning against, heavily against. Dylan wanted to be a good boy. He had three choices: give in, back out, or perform a hasty suicide.

Those three choices had been hanging there for a year or more. He could not decide.

Then Dylan wrote a short story. It revolved around an angry man in black methodically gunning down a dozen “preps.” The man did it for vengeance and amusement, and to demonstrate he could.

Dylan lifted most of the details right out of the NBK plan. He armed and outfitted his killer the way they planned to dress themselves. The story included a duffel bag, the diversion bombs, and reconnoitering the victims’ habits. The smallest details match. The killer is a blend. His height matches Dylan’s, but he behaves exactly like Eric: callous and methodical, viciously angry yet detached.

It was easy to imagine how Eric would react to pulling the trigger on April 20, but Dylan seemed baffled about his own response. He set Eric in motion on paper, with himself as narrator to observe. How would murder feel?

It felt wonderful. “If I could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man,” he wrote. “I not only saw in his face, but also felt eminating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness. The man smiled, and in that instant, thru no endeavor of my own, I understood his actions.”

The story ended there: not with the murders but with the impact on the man behind them.

Nobody observed Dylan typing the story, but he appears to have spilled it all onto the screen in one great rush. He didn’t stop to spell-check or fix errors or hit Return. It’s all run together in a single paragraph that would have filled five pages in a normal font.

Dylan turned the story in as a creative writing assignment on February 7. His instructor, Judy Kelly, read it and shuddered. It was an astounding piece of writing for a seventeen-year-old, but she was deeply disturbed. Dylan wasn’t the first kid to write a violent story—Eric had been writing combat scenes about heroic Marines all semester. Eric was obsessed with warfare; he mimed machine-gun fire in class all the time. But war stories were different; Dylan’s protagonist was killing civilians, ruthlessly, and enjoying it. Kelly wrote a note at the bottom instructing Dylan to come see her. She wanted to talk to him before assigning a grade. “You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one,” she wrote.

Dylan came to see her. The story was grossly violent and offensive, she said—unacceptable.

Submitting the story was probably an intentional leak. Dylan chickened out. “It’s just a story,” he said. This was creative writing class. He had been creative.

Creative was fine, Kelly said, but where was all this cruelty coming from? Just reading the thing was unnerving.

Dylan maintained it was just a story.

Kelly didn’t buy it. She called Tom and Sue Klebold and discussed it with them at length. They did not seem too worried, she told police later. They made a comment about how understanding kids could be a real challenge.

Even after the murders, one of Dylan’s classmates agreed. “It’s a creative-writing class,” she told the Rocky Mountain News. “You write about what you want. Shakespeare wrote all about death.” The girl was not a friend of the killers’.

But Kelly knew she had picked up on something different. She had seen boys captivated by violence. She had read innumerable accounts of murder. She had never been confronted with a story this sadistic. It was not just a question of the events in the story but the attitude of the author conveying them. Dylan had a gift for bringing a scene to life: he conveyed action, thought, and feeling. A creepy, merciless feeling. Kelly described the story as “literary and ghastly—the most vicious story I ever read.”

Kelly brought it to Dylan’s school counselor, Brad Butts. He talked to Dylan, who downplayed it again. Good enough.

Kelly had done the right thing: she’d contacted the three people most likely to have other information about Dylan: his guidance counselor and his parents. If the counselor or parents knew Dylan had been setting off pipe bombs and showing them around at Blackjack Pizza, they could have connected fantasy with reality and NBK might have come to an end. They did not. Jeffco investigators had most of the pieces. Most of the adults close to the killers were in the dark.

In his journal, Dylan returned to his love obsession. He wanted to get to godliness, but he had been seeking for two horrible years now and none of his dreams had come true. Eric offered hope. Eric offered the very feelings Dylan was searching for. Eric offered reality, of all things.

Maybe seeking was a sham.

Dylan wasn’t quite ready to embrace murder. He would fight it almost until the end. But from here on, he was close.

He would take the short story with him on April 20. It was found in Dylan’s car, alongside the failed explosives, to be torn to bits in his final act. The car was slated for destruction, so Dylan didn’t bring the story for our benefit. Perhaps he needed a little courage that day. Perhaps he wanted to read it one last time.

It was time for target practice. They picked a beautiful spot. The place was called Rampart Range: a winding network of unpaved roads through rugged national forest in the Rockies, not too far from Dylan’s house. For their first extended gunplay, they picked an area set aside for dirt bikers and joyriding on ATVs. An off-roading Web site urged readers to experience the vistas slowly: “let your imagination run wild as the boulders take on ever-changing faces.”

Three friends went with them on March 6: Mark Manes and Phil Duran, who had teamed up to get Dylan the TEC-9, and Mark’s girlfriend, Jessica. They brought the guns acquired for the attack, and their friends had a couple more. They packed bowling pins stolen from Belleview Lanes to use as targets. And they took a camcorder. It was important to document historic events.

It was cold up there, still plenty of snow on the ground. They dressed sensibly, in layers. Eric and Dylan started with their trench coats on, but worked up a sweat and shed them. They had ear protection and eye gear. Some of the time they wore it.

They shot a bowling pin full of lead, and then Eric had another idea. He aimed his shotgun at an imposing pine five feet away. He missed. And it hurt. The gun had a vicious recoil, which his arm had to absorb. Every inch you cut a shotgun back magnifies the kick. Eric and Dylan had cut theirs back ridiculously short, almost to the chamber, and now they were going to pay.

He directed Dylan to follow. “Try to hit a tree,” he said. “I want to see what a slug does to the tree.”

Dylan punched a two-inch wide hole in the trunk. They rushed forward to inspect the damage. Eric dug his finger around and produced a pellet.

“That’s a fucking slug!” Dylan squealed.

Eric’s voice was subdued. “Imagine that in someone’s fucking brain.”

“It hurt my wrist, the son of a bitch!” Dylan said.

“I bet so.”

Dylan was laughing now. “Look at that! I’ve got blood now!” He loved it.

Eric kept working the human metaphor. He picked up a bowling pin with a small hole drilled through the front and a crater out the back. He showed off each side to the camera: “Entry wound, exit wound.” His buddy laughed, but he didn’t understand. He got the little joke, missed the big one. The battle was already under way around him. Eric loved foreshadowing. Everyone there was implicated. Only two could see.

Most of the time they worked methodically to improve their skills. One kid would fire while another stood beside him, calling out results to make real-time adjustments: “High to the right… low to the left… left again…”

Single-barrel shotguns require a reload every round, and that would seriously impact the body count. Eric prepared by drilling himself in a rapid shoot-and-load technique. Every shot was punishing. The blast would tear the barrel out of his left hand and whip his gun arm back like a rubber band. But he learned quickly. Soon he was riding out the recoil to catch the barrel-stub as it swung around, snap it open, feed a shell, lock it down, squeeze a round, and repeat the process in one fluid, continuous motion. He pounded out four shots in five seconds. He was pleased.

It had all been theoretical up to that point: How much damage could they really do with that gun? They had their answer now. Eric was a killing machine.

Eric and Dylan approached the camera to show off their war wounds: large patches of skin scraped off between thumb and forefinger, where they needed to work on tightening their grip.

“When high school kids use guns,” somebody said. Everybody laughed.

Manes tried Eric’s gun, and winced at that handgrip. “You should round that out,” he advised.

“Yeah,” Eric said. “I’m gonna work on that.”

They fired more and showed the wounds again: bloodier, more severe. “Guns are bad,” Manes said. “When you saw them off and make them illegal, bad things happen to you.” That got lots more laughs. “Just say no to sawed-off shotguns.”

They were on a roll now. Eric grabbed hold of his gun barrel and mugged for the camera. He spanked the firing assembly several times. “Bad!”

Dylan waved his index finger at it. “No! No! No!”

Dr. Fuselier watched the Rampart video a few days after the massacre. It showed the final progression from fantasy to fact. It had been a two-year evolution from frivolous prankster missions to a series of esclating thefts. Eric was turning into a professional criminal. He had crossed the mental hurdle from imagining crimes to committing them. This was how it would feel.

The boys continued training. They made three target-practice trips with Manes.

Dylan leaked again. He had been excited about his weapons, and sometime in February, he told Zack he had gotten something “really cool.”

Like what?

Something in Desperado, Dylan said—a violent film they thought Quentin Tarantino directed.

Zack confronted him: It was a gun, wasn’t it?

Yeah, a double-barreled shotgun, Dylan said, just like the piece in Desperado. Eric had gotten one, too. And they had fired them. Freaking wild!

They never spoke about it again, Zack told the FBI later.

49. Ready to Be Done

Mr. D knew the date his mission would wrap: May 18, 2002. He had one objective after the massacre: to shepherd nearly two thousand kids to emotional high ground. The last class of freshmen would graduate that May.

Frank had no idea what he might do afterward. He could not plan yet—his hands were full. He had three school years to get through. He had seriously underestimated the turmoil of the first. Nobody had foreseen that torrent of aftershocks. He would not make that mistake again. The second summer offered a respite, just like the first, but when the doors reopened in August 2000, the faculty braced for the next onslaught. It never came. There was never a year like that first one—never anything close.

The second school year got off on a high note. An addition had been constructed over the summer, with a new library. The old one was demolished, converting the commons into a two-story atrium. Most of the Parents Group attended the opening. Sue Petrone glowed. For the past sixteen months, she had felt physically weak every time she’d stepped inside the school. “Like you’re underwater and can’t breathe,” she’d said. All that was lifted away. She had been fighting for more than a year, and she was done. Nearly all the parents were.

Sue’s ex-husband was the exception. Brian Rohrbough and Frank DeAngelis dominated the ceremony, standing thirty feet apart in the cafeteria with a cluster of reporters around each, talking about each other. Mr. D was diplomatic and tried to avoid the feud altogether. But reporters kept shuttling over from Rohrbough, with fresh accusations for Mr. D to respond to. Brian was brutal and direct. The school caused these murders, he said. The administration must pay.

Mr. D developed a heart condition. It appeared the first autumn after the shootings. Stress, the doctors said. No kidding.

Frank was riddled with symptoms of PTSD: numbness, anxiety attacks, inability to concentrate, and reclusiveness. Therapy helped him sort them out. Immediately after the murders, he had trouble making eye contact. It got worse. What was that about? “Guilt,” he discovered. “I had never heard of survivor guilt. I felt guilty that Dave and the kids died and I lived.”

His wife wanted to help. It was eating him up, but he couldn’t express it to her. He was just like his students. “Don’t shut your parents out,” he begged them. He could cry in front of them. But his wife… she didn’t understand. And he didn’t particularly want her to. He just wanted solace at home.

The years after the tragedy were tumultuous. He got to Columbine at 6 A.M., left at 8 or 9 in the evening. Weekends he came in for shorter stints—quiet time to catch up. At any given time he had a dozen kids on suicide watch. Breakdowns were a daily occurrence among the students and the staff. He got tremendous satisfaction out of helping the kids, but it was a terrible drain. He had a couple of hours every night to forget it all. “I needed that time to regenerate,” he said. “The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was talk about it.”

His wife implored him to open up. His son and daughter were concerned. His parents and siblings seemed to call constantly. Are you eating? Should you be driving? “I think I know when to eat,” he would say. Everyone had to know how he was feeling. How are you doing? How are you doing? “Enough!” he would say. “Please stop!”

Mr. D struggled with some of the staff, too. A therapist complained that she spent years in his school after the tragedy and he never learned her name. He could name all two thousand students. He had a strong team of administrators who were great at heading off problems, but some of them needed support themselves. One was brilliant but chatty—she had to talk out all her pain. Frank wouldn’t do it. He confessed to his staff that he knew he wasn’t there for them. He just didn’t have the juice. He had so much in him, and it was all going to the kids. It got the kids through.

Frank sought out avenues for relaxation. He joined a Sunday night bowling league with his wife. Strangers would approach every frame. How are you doing? How are the students? “Once again, it was Columbine,” he said. Out to dinner, same thing. “People would come right up to the booth. It got to the point where I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to stay home.”

Home was just as bad. “I would go down to my basement, to avoid my wife and kids,” he said. His golden retriever followed. That was nice.

His family resented him. “They could not understand why I was acting that way,” he said. He felt awful, too. “I wasn’t the person I wanted to be.”

He started counseling immediately after the attack, and he credits it with saving him. If he could do one thing over, it would be to include his family in the therapy. “They had no idea what PTSD was,” he said. “If they had just understood what I was going through, it would have been all right.”

His marriage didn’t make it. Early in 2002, he and his wife agreed to divorce. He said Columbine had not been the sole reason, but it was a big part.

As he prepared to move out, Frank came upon four thousand letters he’d received in 1999. Most were supportive, some angry, a few threatened his life. He had tried to read twenty-five a day; that proved traumatic. Now he was ready to face them. He read through a big stack, and one name caught him off guard. Diane Meyer had been his old high school sweetheart. They had broken up before graduation and lost touch for thirty years. He looked her up. Her mom was in the same house. He called Diane and she was so understanding. They spoke several times, never in person, but long comforting chats. She helped him through the divorce and the emotional upheaval ahead of him in May. He had one more thing he had to do.

Columbine was a cathartic experience for much of the faculty. They reevaluated their lives. Many started over on new careers. By the spring of 2002, most of them had moved on. Every other administrator but Frank was gone. As May approached, Mr. D considered what had made him happiest. How did he really want to invest his remaining years?

No compromises, he decided; he would follow his dream. He chose to remain principal at Columbine. He loved that job. Some of the families hated him; they were disgusted by his announcement. Others were pleased. His kids were ecstatic.

Rohrbough was furious. But he was having success with the cops. His Hail Mary pass had broken the dam: Judge Jackson continued releasing evidence. Eventually, Jeffco was ordered to release almost everything, except the supposedly incendiary items: the killers’ journals and the Basement Tapes. The mother lode came in November 2000: 11,000 pages of police reports, including virtually every witness account. Jeffco said that was everything.

It was still hiding more than half. Reporters and families kept chipping away, demanding known items. Jeffco acted comically in its attempts to suppress. It numbered all the pages and then eliminated thousands, releasing the documents with numbered gaps. One release indicated nearly 3,000 missing pages.

Jeffco was forced to cough up half a dozen more releases over the next year; in November 2001, officials described a huge stack as “the last batch.” More than 5,000 pages more came by the end of 2002, and 10,000 in 2003—in January, February, March, June, and three separate times in October.

Halfway through all that, in April 2001, district attorney Dave Thomas inadvertently mentioned the smoking gun: the affidavit to search Eric’s house more than a year before the massacre. Jeffco had vigorously denied its existence for two years. Judge Jackson ordered it released.

The affidavit was more damning than expected. Investigator Guerra had astutely pulled together the threads of Eric’s early plotting, and had documented mass murder threats and the bomb production to begin realizing them. The purpose of the cover-up was out in the open. Yet it continued for several more years.

Finally, in June 2003, the search warrant Kate Battan had composed on the afternoon of the massacre came out. It demonstrated conclusively that Jeffco officials had been lying about the Browns all along—that they knew about the warnings from the beginning, and the “missing” Web pages were so accessible they’d found them in the first minutes of the attack.

Anger and contempt kept rising. A federal judge finally had enough. He ruled that Jeffco could not be trusted even to warehouse valuable evidence. He ordered the county to hand over key material such as the Basement Tapes to be secured in the federal courthouse in Denver.

Agent Fuselier beat Mr. D to retirement. Six months after the massacre, the investigation was largely complete. Fuselier continued studying the killers, but he transitioned back to his role as head of domestic terrorism for the Colorado-Wyoming region. Few Americans had heard of Osama bin Laden, but a life-sized WANTED poster of him greeted visitors to the FBI branch office. Fuselier saw enemy number one’s picture every morning as he got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor.

“He’s a dangerous man,” Fuselier told a visitor. The Bureau was determined to stop him.

Fuselier also resumed training hostage negotiators and went back on call for serious incidents. Two years later, he concluded one of the most notorious prison breaks in recent history. The Texas Seven had escaped a maximum-security facility and embarked on a crime spree. The ringleader was serving eighteen life sentences—he had nothing left to lose. On Christmas Eve 2000, they stole a cache of guns from a sporting goods store and ambushed a police officer. They shot him eleven times and ran him over on the way out, to be sure he was dead. He was. A reward was posted: $500,000.

The gang kept moving. On January 20, 2001, they were spotted in a trailer park near Colorado Springs. A SWAT team captured four of them, and a fifth killed himself to avoid recapture. The two holdouts barricaded themselves in a Holiday Inn. It took Agent Fuselier’s team five hours to talk them out. They were fixated on corruption in the penal system, so Fuselier arranged a live interview on a local TV station at 2:30 A.M. A cameraman came inside the room so the holdouts could see they were actually broadcast live. Both convicts then surrendered and were sentenced to death. All six survivors await lethal injection in Texas.

The stress wore Fuselier down. He would have twenty years at the Bureau that October and be eligible for his pension. He announced his retirement for that date. He would be fifty-four.

On September 11, 2001, the country was attacked. Bin Laden was behind it. Fuselier postponed his retirement and spent most of the next eleven months on the case. By the summer of 2002, the United States had taken over Afghanistan, bin Laden had fled into hiding, and the urgency had abated.

Fuselier’s son Brian graduated from Columbine High that May—the last class Mr. D had been waiting for. Brian was leaving for college in July. Dwayne scheduled his retirement for the week afterward, so Brian wouldn’t see his dad lazing about jobless.

“I could see a change the next day,” Brian told his dad when he returned home for a visit. “You had mellowed out more than I had ever seen.”

Fuselier missed the work, though. Within months, he was consulting for the State Department. It sent him to conduct antiterrorism training in Third World countries. He spent a quarter of the year in sketchy sections of Pakistan, Tanzania, Malaysia, Macedonia—anywhere terrorists were active.

Mimi worried. Dwayne didn’t think about it much, and Brian didn’t hear the tension return to his voice. Fear wasn’t the problem at the FBI; it was the responsibility.

“It was getting harder going to work knowing someone’s life might depend on me not making any mistakes that day,” he said.

Shortly before Brian left Columbine, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine drew raves at Cannes. It became the top-grossing documentary in U.S. history. It wasn’t really much about Columbine, and the title featured a minor myth—that Eric and Dylan went bowling on April 20—but it included a dramatic scene where Moore and a victim went to Kmart and asked to return the bullets still inside the guy. The stunt and/or publicity around it shamed Kmart into discontinuing ammunition sales nationwide.

Marilyn Manson was interviewed in the film. Moore asked Manson what he would say to the killers, if he had a chance to talk to them: “I wouldn’t say a single word to them,” he said. “I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.” That was the story the media had told.

The connection to KMFDM, the nihilistic band Eric did idolize and quote frequently, was ignored by the major media. Fans got word, however, and the band issued a statement of deep remorse: “We are sick and appalled, as is the rest of the nation, by what took place in Colorado… none of us condone any Nazi beliefs whatsoever.”

The killers’ parents remained silent. They never spoke to the press. Pastor Don Marxhausen stayed close to Tom and Sue Klebold. He was a great comfort. Sue went back to training disabled students at the community college. That helped her cope.

“It’s amazing how long it took me to get up and say my name at a meeting, to say, ‘I’m Dylan Klebold’s mother,’” she said later. “Dylan could have killed any number of the kids of people that I work with.”

Shopping could be intimidating—anticipating that moment of recognition as a salesperson examined her credit card. It was a distinctive name. Sometimes they noticed.

“Boy, you’re a survivor,” one clerk said.

Tom worked from home, so he had a choice about when to go out. He stayed in all the time. Pastor Don worried about him.

Reverend Marxhausen paid for that compassion. Much of his parish loved him for it; others were outraged. The church council split. That was untenable. A year after the massacre, he was forced out.

Marxhausen had been one of the most revered ministers in the Denver area, but now he could not find a job. After a bout of unemployment, he left the state to head up a small parish. He missed Colorado, and eventually moved back. He got a job as a chaplain at a county jail. His primary function was to advise inmates when loved ones had died. He was born for the job, ministering to the desperate. He empathized with each one, and it sucked the life out of him.

The lawsuits sputtered on for years. They got messier. A rash of new defendants was added, including school officials, the killers’ parents, the manufacturer of Luvox, and anyone who had come in contact with the guns. The suits were consolidated in federal court. Judge Lewis Babcock accepted the county’s two major arguments: that it was not responsible for stopping the killers in advance, and that cops should not be punished for decisions under fire. Babcock said the authorities should have headed off the massacre months earlier but were not legally bound.

In November 2001, he dismissed most of the charges against the sheriff and the school. The families appealed, and the county settled the next year: $15,000 each—a fraction of their legal fees. The discovery process never brought much to light; it didn’t need to. The Rohrboughs’ initial offensive had set the legal process in motion, and it continued under its own power.

Judge Babcock refused to dismiss the Sanders case. He balked at the contention that Dave’s rescue involved split-second decisions.

“They had time in the third hour!” Babcock boomed.

The cops had hundreds of people to rescue, their attorney responded. They’d had to allocate resources.

More then 750 cops had been on the scene, the judge reminded him. “It’s not as though they were a little shorthanded out there that day,” he said.

In August 2002, Jeffco paid Angela Sanders $1.5 million. It admitted to no wrongdoing. The last Jeffco case to close was Patrick Ireland’s. He got $117,500.

After years of wrangling, most of the fringe cases were dismissed. Luvox was pulled from the market. That left the killers’ families. They wanted to settle. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they had insurance. It turned out their home owner’s policies covered murder by their children. About $1.6 million was divided between thirty-one families. Most of it came from the Klebolds’ policy. Similar agreements were reached with Mark Manes, Phillip Duran, and Robyn Anderson, for an estimated total of approximately $1.3 million.

Five families rebuffed the Harrises and Klebolds: no buyout without information. It really wasn’t about the money for the Rohrboughs and four others. They were battling for information, and they proved it.

But they were caught in a stalemate: the killers’ parents would talk if the victims dropped the lawsuits; the victims would drop the suits if the parents spoke.

For two more years, it continued. Then the judge brokered a deal. The holdouts would dismiss their suits if the killers’ parents answered all their questions—privately, but under oath. It was a bitter compromise. The holdouts wanted answers for the public as well as themselves. They settled for themselves.

In July 2003, the four parents were deposed for several days. Media came to photograph them. They had remained so private that few reporters even knew what they looked like. Two weeks after the depositions, an agreement was announced. It appeared to be over.

But Dawn Anna called for the depositions to be made public: understanding the warning signs could prevent the next Columbine. A chorus gathered behind her. A magistrate ruled that the transcripts would be destroyed, per the agreement. That set off a public outcry and a wave of open records requests. Judge Babcock agreed to consider arguments.

It had taken four years to reach this point. They were only halfway there.

In April 2007, Judge Babcock finally ruled. “There is a legitimate public interest in these materials so that similar tragedies may hopefully be prevented,” he wrote. “I conclude, however, that the balance of interests still strikes in favor of maintaining strict confidentiality.”

He settled on a compromise. The transcripts would be sealed at the national archives for twenty years. The truth would come out in 2027, twenty-eight years after the massacre.

Though he was retired, Fuselier hoped to see the depositions, too. Optimally, he would like to question the parents himself. He knew where the boys ended, psychologically, but their origins were a mystery, particularly Eric’s. Only two people had an eighteen-year perspective on his path to psychopathy. When did Eric start exhibiting the early hallmarks, and how were they visible? Wayne had adopted a stern parenting style—how had that worked? Eric wrote little about interaction with his mother—what had Kathy’s approach been? Were there any successes? Anything that could help the next parent?

Fuselier understood their refusal to talk.

“I have the utmost sympathy for the Harris and Klebold parents,” he said. “They have been vilified without information. No one has sufficient objective information to draw any conclusions.”

Fuselier said he had raised two sons, and either one could have emerged with traits beyond his comprehension. Eric documented his parents’ frustration with his behavior, as well as their attempts to force him to conform. Their tactics might have been all wrong for a budding young psychopath, but how do parents even know what that is?

“I believe they have been unjustifiably criticized for what their sons did,” Fuselier said. “They are probably asking themselves the same questions that we in the profession are asking.”

Patrick Ireland left home for Colorado State in fall 2000. He did fine. He really took to campus life. And he was surprised by how much he enjoyed business school. Letting go of architecture turned out to be easy. He had been forced into something he liked more.

He still fought memory battles, struggled a bit to find words, and would probably remain on antiseizure medication for life. He met a girl his first night. Kacie Lancaster. She was clever, attractive, and a little shy. They clicked immediately and became close friends.

In May 2004, he graduated magna cum laude. Armed with a BS in business administration, he accepted a job as a financial planner at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network. He loved it.

One finger troubled him a little. His right pinkie jutted out away from the others, which caused a minor issue when he shook hands. It could poke the other person in the palm a little—just enough to signal that something was off. You could catch him glancing down there nervously, if you knew what to look for. It was not the first impression he wanted to make. But he had such a commanding presence once he spoke. Clients trusted him. His bosses were happy. He was becoming a star.

Patrick had retired the wheelchair and the crutch in high school. The foot brace remained. His right leg lagged behind a little: noticeable, but not debilitating. Running was out of the question, but water skis were not.

Balance, strength, and agility were all hurdles Patrick could overcome. But he would never regain the dexterity in his right foot to grip the ski. So he worked with an engineering friend to build a custom boot he could slip on as he tried to rise up on the water. They spent months working on prototypes and experimenting with them at the lake. John went with them for encouragement. Every time, the boat dragged Patrick uselessly behind.

They tried stripping the shell off a Rollerblade and adhering it to the ski. Nope. They refined it, and returned to the lake. Useless. Patrick tried over and over. He had made about ten runs that evening, and it was getting late. John was sure Patrick was exhausted, and thought it was time to break. No, I can do this, Patrick said.

John agreed. He sat in the passenger seat facing backward. The driver throttled the engine, and John watched his boy rise up onto the surface of the lake. Wow.

Patrick felt the spray pelt his face. The sun danced on the waves. The towrope jerked his arms. He dug in for a turn. A sheet of water shot up and sliced into his calf. It hurt, just a little. Ahhhhhh. The pain of competition. It felt great.

Everyone expected copycats. The country braced for a new level of horror. School shooting deaths actually dropped 25 percent over the next three years. But Eric and Dylan gave young eyes a fresh approach: terrorist tactics for personal aggrandizement. In 2001, a pair of ninth graders at a Fort Collins, Colorado, middle school procured a similar arsenal: TEC-9, shotgun, rifles, and propane bombs. They planned to reverse Eric’s chronology: seal off exits, mow down students, and save the bombs for stragglers. They would finish by taking ten hostages, holding them in the counseling office for fun, then killing the kids and themselves.

But they leaked. Kids nearly always leak. The bigger the plot, the wider the leakage. The Fort Collins pair went recruiting for gunmen to cover all the exits. One of the plotters told at least seven people that he planned to “redo Columbine.” He bragged to four girls that they would be the first to die. They went straight to the police.

Teen peers were different after 1999. “Jokes” scared the crap out of kids. Two more grandiose plots—in Malcolm, Nebraska, and Oaklyn, New Jersey—were foiled in the first five years.

School administrators around the country responded with “zero tolerance”—meaning every idle threat was treated like a cocked gun. That drove everyone crazy. Nearly all supposed killers turned out to be kids blowing off steam. It wasn’t working for anyone.

A pair of government how-to guides helped. The FBI and the Secret Service each published reports in the first three years, guiding faculty to identify serious threats. The central recommendations contradicted prevailing post-Columbine behavior. They said identifying outcasts as threats is not healthy. It demonizes innocent kids who are already struggling.

It is also unproductive. Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile.

All the recent school shooters shared exactly one trait: 100 percent male. (Since the study a few have been female.) Aside from personal experience, no other characteristic hit 50 percent, not even close. “There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of attackers,” the Secret Service said. Attackers came from all ethnic, economic, and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had no criminal record or history of violence.

The two biggest myths were that shooters were loners and that they “snapped.” A staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance. “The path toward violence is an evolutionary one, with signposts along the way,” the FBI report said.

Cultural influences also appeared weak. Only a quarter were interested in violent movies, half that number in video games—probably below average for teen boys.

Most perps shared a crucial experience: 98 percent had suffered a loss or failure they perceived as serious—anything from getting fired to blowing a test or getting dumped. Of course, everyone suffers loss and failure, but for these kids, the trauma seemed to set anger in motion. This was certainly true in Columbine: Dylan viewed his entire life as failure, and Eric’s arrest accelerated his anger.

So what should adults look for? First and foremost, advance confessions: 81 percent of shooters had confided their intentions. More than half told at least two people. Most threats are idle, though; the key is specificity. Vague, implied, and implausible threats are low-risk. The danger skyrockets when threats are direct and specific, identify a motive, and indicate work performed to carry it out. Melodramatic outbursts do not increase the risk.

A subtler form of leakage is preoccupation with death, destruction, and violence. A graphic mutilation story might be an early warning sign—or a vivid imagination. Add malice, brutality, and an unrepentant hero, and concern should rise. Don’t overreact to a single story or drawing, the FBI warned. Normal teen boys enjoy violence and are fascinated with the macabre. “Writings and drawings on these themes can be a reflection of a harmless but rich and creative fantasy life,” the report said. The key was repetition leading to obsession. The Bureau described a boy who’d worked guns and violence into every assignment. In home ec class he’d baked a cake in the shape of a gun.

The FBI compiled a specific list of warning signs, including symptoms of both psychopathy and depression: manipulation, intolerance, superiority, narcissism, alienation, rigidity, lethargy, dehumanization of others, and externalizing blame. It was a daunting list—that’s a small excerpt. Few teachers were going to master it. The FBI recommended against trying. It suggested one person per school be trained intensely, for all faculty and administrators to turn to.

The FBI added one final caution: a kid matching most of its warning signs was more likely to be suffering from depression or mental illness than planning an attack. Most kids matching the criteria needed help, not incarceration.

Columbine also changed police response to attacks. No more perimeters. A national task force was organized to develop a new plan. In 2003, it released “The Active Shooter Protocol.” The gist was simple: If the shooter seems active, storm the building. Move toward the sound of gunfire. Disregard even victims. There is one objective: Neutralize the shooters. Stop them or kill them.

The concept had been around for years but had been rejected. Pre-Columbine, cops had been exhorted to proceed cautiously: secure the perimeter, get the gunman talking, wait for the SWAT team.

The key to the new protocol was active. Most shootings—the vast majority—were labeled passive: the gunman was alive but not firing. Those cases reverted to the old protocol. Success depended on accurately determining the threat in the first moments.

Officers face a second decision point when they reach the shooters. If the killer is holed up in a classroom, holding kids but not firing, responders may need to stop there and use traditional hostage techniques. Storming the classroom could provoke the gunman. But if the shooter is firing, even just periodically, move in.

The active shooter protocol gained quick and widespread acceptance. In a series of shootings over the next decade, including the worst disaster, at Virginia Tech, cops or guards rushed in, stopped shooters, and saved lives.

Sue Petrone asked for and received the two sidewalk blocks her son Danny died on. They were jackhammered out of the ground and installed in her backyard, in the shadow of a fragrant spruce tree. Around the slab, she created a rock garden, with two big wooden tubs overflowing with petunias. She had a sturdy oak truss constructed over the slab, and a porch swing suspended from the crossbeam. She and Rich and their shaggy little dog can nestle comfortably into the generous swing.

Linda Sanders kept the Advil tablet found near Dave’s body. He had trouble with knee swelling, so he always carried one in his pocket. Just one. She took his bloody clothes, a swath of carpet from under his head, a little fragment of tooth that chipped off when he fell, and his glasses.

She would never let those glasses go. She snapped them into an eyeglass case and placed them on the nightstand by her bed. She intends to leave them that way forever.

The lawsuit on behalf of Dave Sanders outlived all the others, but his widow chose not to take part. She was not angry at the police, or the school, or the parents. She was angry at her situation. She was lonely.

50. The Basement Tapes

Eric wanted to be remembered. He spent a year on “The Book of God,” but five weeks before Judgment Day, he decided that wasn’t good enough. He wanted a starring role on-camera. So on March 15, he and Dylan began the Basement Tapes. It would be a tight shooting schedule, with no time for editing or postproduction. They filmed with a Sony 8mm camcorder, checked out from the Columbine High video lab.

The first installment was a basic talk-show setup: a stationary camera in the family room in Eric’s basement, outside his bedroom. He continued making camera adjustments after he was rolling—perhaps as a sneaky way to ensure his audience would be clear on the director. The video project was entirely about his audience. Ultimately, the attack was, too.

Eric joined Dylan on-set. They kicked back in plush velvet recliners, bantering about the big event. Eric had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and Arlene laid across his lap. He took a swig and tried not to grimace. He hated the stuff. Dylan munched on a toothpick and took little sips of Jack as well.

They ranted for more than an hour. Dylan was wild and animated and angry, obsessively hurling his fingers through his long, ratty hair. Eric was mostly calm and controlled. They spoke with one voice: Eric’s.

Eric introduced most ideas; Dylan riffed along. They insulted the usual inferiors: blacks, Latinos, gays, and women. “Yes, moms, stay home,” Eric said. “Fucking make me dinner, bitch!”

Sometimes, Eric got kind of loud. That made Dylan nervous. It was after 1:00 A.M., and Eric’s parents were upstairs, snoozing away. Careful, Dylan warned.

They rattled off a list of kids who’d pissed them off. Eric had been dragged across the country: the scrawny little white guy, constantly starting over, always at the bottom of the food chain. People kept making fun of him—“my face, my hair, my shirts.” He enumerated every girl who had refused his advances.

Dylan got fired up just listening. He faced the camera and addressed his tormenters. “If you could see all the anger I’ve stored over the past four fucking years,” he said. He described a sophomore who didn’t deserve the jaw evolution gave him. “Look for his jaw,” Dylan said. “It won’t be on his body.”

Eric named one guy he planned to shoot in the balls, another in the face. “I imagine I will be shot in the head by a fucking cop,” he said.

No one they named would be killed.

It went back so much further than high school. From prekindergarten, at Foothills Day Care center, Dylan could remember them: all the stuck-up toddlers sneering at him. “Being shy didn’t help,” he said. At home it was just as bad. Except for his parents, his whole extended family looked down on him, treated him like the runt of the litter. His brother was always ripping on him; Byron’s friends, too. “You made me what I am,” Dylan said. “You added to the rage.”

“More rage, more rage!” Eric demanded. He motioned with his arms. “Keep building it.”

Dylan hurled another Ericism: “I’ve narrowed it down. It’s humans I hate.”

Eric raised Arlene, and aimed her at the camera. “You guys will all die, and it will be fucking soon,” he said. “You all need to die. We need to die, too.”

The boys made it clear, repeatedly, that they planned to die in battle. Their legacy would live. “We’re going to kick-start a revolution,” Eric said. “I declared war on the human race and war is what it is.”

He apologized to his mom. “I really am sorry about this, but war’s war,” he told her. “My mother, she’s so thoughtful. She helps out in so many ways.” She brought him candy when he was sad, and sometimes Slim Jims. He said his dad was great, too.

Eric grew quiet. He said his parents had probably noticed him withdrawing. That was intentional—he was doing it to help them. “I don’t want to spend any more time with them,” he said. “I wish they were out of town so I didn’t have to look at them and bond more.”

Dylan was less generous. “I’m sorry I have so much rage, but you put it in me,” he said. He got around to thanking them for self-awareness and self-reliance. “I appreciate that,” he said.

The boys insisted their parents were not to blame. “They gave me my fucking life,” Dylan said. “It’s up to me what I do with it.”

Dylan bemoaned the guilt they would feel, but then ridiculed it. He pitched his voice to mimic his mom: “If only we could have reached them sooner. Or found this tape.”

Eric loved that. “If only we would have asked the right questions,” he added.

Oh, they were wily, the boys agreed. Parents were easy to fool. Teachers, cops, bosses, judges, shrinks, Diversion officers, and anyone in authority were pathetic. “I could convince them that I’m going to climb Mount Everest,” Eric said, “or that I have a twin brother growing out of my back. I can make you believe anything.”

Eventually, they got tired of the talk show and moved on to a tour of their arsenal.

Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. “I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn’t have any remorse,” Eric said. “But I do.”

Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn’t done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him.

“Those are the most worthless apologies I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, “if you guys live.”

“If you live?” Fuselier repeated. “They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry, they would not do it!”

This is exactly the sort of false apology Dr. Cleckley identified in 1941. He described phony emotional outbursts and dazzling simulations of love for friends, relatives, and their own children—shortly before devastating them. Psychopaths mimic remorse so convincingly that victims often believe their apologies, even from a state of ruin. Consider Eric Harris: months after his massacre, a group of experienced journalists from the top papers in the country watched him perform on the Basement Tapes. Most reported Eric apologizing and showing remorse. They marveled at his repentance.

The boys got the camera rolling again three nights later. Same place, same setup, same time frame.

They laughed about how easy it was to build all the stuff. Instructions for everything were right there on the Internet—“bombs, poison, napalm, and how to buy guns if you’re underage.”

In between the logistics, they tossed in more bits of philosophy: “World Peace is an impossible thing…. Religions are gay.”

“Directors will be fighting over this story,” Dylan gushed. They pondered whom they should trust with their material: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino?

Agent Fuselier watched the tapes dozens of times. In one respect, they were a revelation. While the journals explained motive, the tapes conveyed personality. There was ample testimony about them from friends, but there’s nothing like meeting a killer in person. The tapes offered the best approximation.

Fuselier understood that the Basement Tapes had been shot for an audience. They were partially performance—for the public, for the cops, and for each other. Dylan, in particular, was working his heart out to show Eric how invested he was. To laymen, Dylan appeared dominant. He was louder, brasher, and had much more personality. Eric preferred directing. He was often behind the lens. But he was always in charge. Fuselier saw Dylan gave himself away with his eyes. He would shout like a madman, then glance at his partner for approval. How was that?

The Basement Tapes were a fusion of invented characters with the real killers. But the characters the killers chose were revealing, too.

Eric had a new idea. Columbine would remain the centerpiece of his apocalypse, but maybe he could make it bolder. Trip bombs and land mines? Nothing fancy, just simple explosives.

Expansion would require additional manpower. Eric began recruitment plans.

Around the end of March, Eric approached Chris Morris. What if they strung up a trip bomb right there behind Blackjack? That hole in the fence would be perfect—kids crawled through there all the time.

Chris was unenthusiastic. A bomb for pesky kids? Sounds a little extreme, he said.

Eric backpedaled. The bomb would not actually hit the kids, just scare the shit out of them.

No, Chris said. Definitely not.

Chris was starting to worry. Eric and Dylan were making a lot of bombs. They had blown a bunch off. And he was hearing stories from all kinds of kids about them getting guns.

Chris noticed a change in Eric. He was acting aggressive all of a sudden, picking fights with people for no good reason. Nate Dykeman saw something, too, in both Eric and Dylan: cutting classes more, sleeping in class, acting secretive. No one said anything.

Eric made at least three attempts to recruit Chris Morris, though Chris did not grasp that at the time. Some of the overtures came in the form of “jokes.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun to kill all the jocks?” he asked in bowling class. Why stop there, why not blow up the whole school? How hard would it be, really? Chris assumed Eric was joking, but still.

Come on, Eric said. They could put bombs on the power generators—that ought to take out the school.

Chris had enough. He turned to talk to someone else.

That is a standard recruitment technique for aspiring mass murderers, Fuselier explained. They toss out the idea, and if it’s shunned it’s a “joke”; if the person lights up, the recruiter proceeds to the next step.

When news of Eric’s crack about killing the jocks was reported, many took it as confirmation of the target motive. Eric was a much wilier recruiter than that. He always played to the audience in front of him. He nearly always gauged their desires correctly. Suggesting the jocks didn’t mean he wanted to single them out, it indicated he thought the idea would appeal to Chris.

Of course Eric would enjoy killing jocks, too, along with niggers, spics, fags, and every other group he railed against.

Dylan was leaking indiscriminately now. He made several public displays of the pipe bombs. These grew far more frequent as NBK came within sight. A lot of people knew about the guns. And the pipe bombs. Eric and Dylan were setting off more and more of them, getting bolder with whom they let in on it.

In February or March, Eric spilled something even scarier: napalm. It happened at a party at Robyn’s house. Eric had not been friends with Zack since their falling out the past summer, but Eric needed something. He could not get the napalm recipes off the Web to work. Zack was good with that kind of thing. Eric had a pretty good idea that Zack was the man to help him.

Eric walked up to Zack good-naturedly, asked him how he was doing, chatted him up awhile. They talked about their futures.

Zack and Eric left the party at the same time, and drove separately to a supermarket, King Soopers. Zack bought a soda and a candy bar, and waited for Eric back in the parking lot. Eric came out and showed him a soda and a box of bleach. Bleach? What was the bleach for? Zack asked.

Eric said he was “going to try it.”

Try what?

Napalm. Eric said he was going to try napalm. Did Zack know how to make it?

No.

Zack told the story to the investigators after the murders, but he lied the first time. He described Robyn’s party, but edited out the napalm. He agreed to a polygraph, and just before they strapped him in, he confessed to the rest. He said the conversation went no further, and he never discussed napalm or the shotguns again—with Eric, Dylan, or anyone else. The results of his polygraph were inconclusive.

Eric also asked Chris to store napalm at his house. Eric and Dylan joked about it on the Basement Tapes: “Napalm better not freeze at that certain person’s house.” They disguised his identity at first, but then referred to “Chris Pizza’s house.” Crafty. (Chris Morris later testified that it was indeed him, and that he’d refused.)

No time. Less than a month to go. Eric had a lot of shit left to do. He organized it into a list labeled “shit left to do.” He had to figure out napalm, acquire more ammo, find a laser-aiming device, practice gear-ups, prepare final explosives, and determine the peak killing moment. One item was apparently not accomplished: “get laid.”

April 2, Staff Sergeant Mark Gonzales cold-called Eric about enlisting in the Marines. Eric said maybe. They talked several times.

That same month, he returned to “The Book of God.” Months had passed; a whole lot had happened. He had thirty-nine crickets ready, twenty-four pipe bombs, and all four guns. Eric closed up the journal. That was done.

Eric met Sergeant Gonzales. He wore a black Rammstein T-shirt, black pants, and black combat boots. He took a screening test and got an average score. The sergeant asked Eric to describe himself by selecting among tabs labeled with personal attributes. He chose “physical fitness,” “leadership and self-reliance,” and “self-discipline and self-direction.” He would think about enlisting, and talk it over with his parents. He agreed to a home visit, with his parents.

It’s not clear what Eric was getting out of the exercise. He probably had multiple motives. He had always pictured himself as a Marine—he might enjoy a last-minute taste. And he needed information: he was still struggling with the time bombs and the napalm. He told Gonzales he was interested in weapons and demolitions training, and he asked a lot of questions. But his parents were probably the key motive. They kept hounding Eric about his future. This would get them off his back. Two weeks of tranquillity. Breathing room to maneuver.

Eric shot the next video scene on his own, in his car, driving, with the camera facing him from the dash. He had the music blaring, so much of what he said is unclear. He talked about the Blackjack crew, and apologized for what was ahead: “Sorry dudes, I had to do what I had to do.” He was going to miss them. He was really going to miss Bob, his old boss who’d gotten drunk on the roof with them.

Eric still couldn’t decide on the timing of the attack: before prom or after? “It is a weird feeling knowing you’re going to be dead in two and a half weeks,” he said.

April 9 was Eric’s birthday. Eighteen years old—officially an adult. He got together with a bunch of friends at a local hangout.

A couple of days before or after, a friend saw Eric and Dylan in the cafeteria, huddled over a piece of paper. What was going on? she asked. They tried to hide it. She played it cool, then snatched the paper away. It was a hand-drawn diagram of the cafeteria, showing details like the location of surveillance cameras. That was weird.

Eric made several more diagrams. He conducted his inventory of cafeteria traffic. He did not allow that to be seen.

The boys shot more tapes. NBK would make for one hell of a graduation, they said. Lots of people crying, probably a candlelight vigil. Too bad they wouldn’t see it. They congratulated themselves for documenting all this. But the cops would get the tapes first. Do you think they’ll let people see them? Dylan asked. Probably not. The cops would chop up all their footage and show the public how they wanted it to look. That could be a problem. They resolved to copy the videos and distribute them to four news stations. Eric would scan his journal and e-mail it with maps and blueprints.

They never got around to that.

On Sunday, the boys headed into Denver for supplies. Of course they brought the camcorder. This was history. They picked up fuel containers and propane bottles. Dylan got his army pants. Eric seems to have been funding most of the operation, but Dylan paid his share this time. He brought $200 in cash; Eric had a check for $150.

The next shot was in Eric’s bedroom, alone. He sat on his bed, pointing the camera at his face from a few inches away, producing an eerie fish-eye effect. Eric talked about his “best parents” again—and the cops making them pay.

“It fucking sucks to do this to them,” he said. “They’re going to be put through hell.”

They could not have stopped him, Eric assured them. He quoted Shakespeare: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.”

He wrote the same line in his day planner on the page for Mother’s Day. That was revealing, Fuselier thought. Dylan wanted to be a good boy, but Eric understood he was evil.

It was funny, Eric told the television audience: all that razzing from his parents about goals and he was working his ass off. “It’s kinda hard on me, these last few days,” he said. “This is my last week on earth and they don’t know.”

The payoff would be worth it. “The apocalypse is coming and it’s starting in eight days,” he said. He licked his lips. “Oh yeah. It’s coming, all right.”

Then he held up his masterpiece: “This is ‘The Book of God,’” he said. “This is the thought process”—if you want to understand why, read this. He flipped through to show off his best work. “Somehow, I’ll publish these.”

He stopped at a sketch in the back, of himself or Dylan in battle gear. The soldier was outfitted with a huge tank to be strapped to his back. It was labeled “napalm.” He pointed to it and said, “This is the suicide plan.”

Five days before Judgment, Dylan finally accepted that he was enacting it. “Time to die,” he wrote. “We are in wait of our reward, each other.”

We. The word dominates the entry, but does not include Eric. Dylan was addressing Harriet. He was grateful to Eric for providing the exit, but was uninterested in spending eternity with him.

Thursday evening, the Marine recruiter showed up for the home visit at 6:00 P.M. Wayne and Kathy had lots of questions about job opportunities in the corps. Kathy asked whether antidepressants would affect Eric’s eligibility. She fetched the prescription bottle, and Sergeant Gonzales wrote down “Luvox.” He said he would check and call back.

Like Eric cared. He had been invoking the Marines in his war fantasies all his life, but all he really wanted out of the corps was the prestige of its patch on his shoulder. Eric never depicted himself supporting a squadron, and certainly not taking orders. It was always an army of one or two, and the mission was about him, not country or his corps.

Gonzales phoned on Friday or Saturday and left a message to call him back. Eric never bothered.

Mr. D provided a dose of irony. He wrapped up Friday’s assembly talking about everyone coming back alive. Perfect.

The boys picked up more propane that day. Eric hounded Mark Manes for ammo. The delay probably pushed NBK from April 19 to April 20.

Eric spent the night at Dylan’s. That surprised Tom and Sue Klebold—they had not seen Eric in six months. The boys came in after 10:00 P.M. Dylan was nervous—Tom could hear it in his voice. His pitch was a little off; Tom described it later as “tight.” He made a mental note to talk to Dylan about it. He never got to it.

Eric came with a great big duffel bag, stuffed with something. It was oversized and bulky and he was having trouble carrying it. Tom assumed it was a computer. It was a weapons cache, for a final fashion show. They filmed it, of course—the only scene from the Basement Tapes shot at Dylan’s. Eric directed, as usual. Dylan strapped on gear: harness, ammo pouches… when he got to the knives, he joked about a certain sophomore’s head impaled on one. He slung the TEC-9 over his shoulder and slid the shotgun into the cargo pocket on his pants. Then he strapped it in with the webbing to secure it into place.

He needed his backpack. Dylan went digging for it in the closet and ran into his tux, hanging up for prom tomorrow night. Whatever. He turned to the camera to rub it in: “Robyn. I didn’t really want to go to prom. But since I’m going to be dying, I thought I might do something cool.” Plus, he said his parents were paying for it.

Dylan pulled his trench coat on, struck a pose in the mirror. This was his entrance outfit—it was going to be so badass. It looked lumpy. “I’m fat on this side,” he complained.

The whole point was impressing people. Details mattered. Wardrobe, staging, atmospherics, audio, pyrotechnics, action, suspense, timing, irony, foreshadowing—all the cinematic elements were important. And for the local audience, they were adding aroma: sulfur, burning flesh, and fear.

Dylan tried his next pose, and that was a problem, too. His very first move, once the scene got rolling, was to snatch the TEC out of its sling and toss it to his firing hand in a single dramatic motion. His trench coat got in the way. He tried it again. Lame. Faster, Eric said. He was visibly annoyed. He had practiced every move to perfection. Dylan was trying all this shit for the first time.

Eric left around 9:00 A.M., without the duffel bag. The boys may have stayed up all night. Tom and Sue noticed that Dylan’s bed didn’t look slept in.

Saturday was all about prom. Dylan came home at 3:00 A.M., and Sue was up to greet him. How was it? she asked. Dylan showed her a schnapps flask. He told her he’d only drunk a little. The rest of the group was going to breakfast, he said. He was tired. He was done.

He slept it off most of the next day.

Monday morning, around 9 o’clock, Dylan grabbed his spiral notebook and drew the top of a giant numeral 1. He drew the bottom of it at the foot of the page, with a big gap in between for copy: “1. One day. One is the beginning or the end. Hahaha, rescued, yet there. About 26.5 hours from now the judgment will begin. Difficult, but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun.”

It was interesting, he said, knowing he was going to die. Everything had a touch of triviality. Calculus really did turn out to have no practical application in his life.

The last word is hard to read, but it appears to be “Fickt,” German slang for “fucked.”

In his last twenty-four hours, Dylan got active. He drew up full-page sketches of himself in body armor: front and back displays geared up with explosives. One of the last pages included a brief schedule for NBK, now pushed back to Tuesday. It ended like this: “When first bombs go off, attack. have fun!”

Monday night, the boys went out to dinner with friends. They went to Outback Steakhouse, Eric’s favorite restaurant. Dylan had some coupons, so they could economize. His mom asked how it was when he got home. Good, he said. They’d had a nice time. He’d had himself a nice steak.

Eric got the final two boxes of ammo from Mark Manes, and said he might go shooting tomorrow. He didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, if any. He was still awake past 2:00 A.M., three hours before his wake-up call. He had a few reflections to add to his audio memoirs. He spoke into a microcassette recorder, indicating that there were fewer than nine hours to go. “People will die because of me,” Eric said. “It will be a day that will be remembered forever.”

Tuesday morning, the boys rose early. Tom and Sue heard Dylan leave around 5:15. They assumed he was on his way to bowling class. They did not see him.

“Bye,” he called out.

Then they heard the door shut.

Eric left his microcassette on the kitchen counter. It was an old tape, reused, and someone had labeled it “Nixon” somewhere along the line. The meaning of that label perplexed observers for years to come. It meant nothing.

51. Two Hurdles

The fifth-anniversary commemoration drew a smaller audience than expected. The crowds had grown progressively smaller each year, but the school foresaw a bigger bump for this milestone. Nearly everyone was pleased by the light turnout. It meant people had moved on.

Many survivors began to think in terms of how many events were left to slog through. Only two remained now: the ten-year and the dedication of the memorial. Surely they wouldn’t have to come back in twenty.

There were always a lot of the same faces, but Anne Marie Hochhalter showed up for the first time this year.

It had been a rough road there.

After her mother’s suicide, Anne Marie finished out senior year and made a go at community college. She didn’t like it much. She traveled to North Carolina for electrical stimulation therapy. Doctors hoped it might lead her to walk again. It failed.

The commotion over Columbine never seemed to end. Two years out, her dad moved the family way out to the country to get some peace. They went stir-crazy out there.

Anne Marie dropped out of school. She had no job. She was miserable. Doctors kept trying fresh approaches on her spine. Nothing worked. She wallowed in it for a while, then she had enough.

She went back to school—a four-year college, majoring in business. She bought a house with donations and equipped it for her wheelchair. Life began to feel good.

“I wish I could tell you I had an epiphany, but it was gradual,” she said. The turnaround came when she let go of the dream of walking again. “I finally accepted that I was confined to a wheelchair. Once I did that, I was free to move on with my life. It was very liberating.”

Her dad remarried and Anne Marie forgave her mother. She had struggled so long, and mental illness was so debilitating. “In her mind, she thought it was the best thing she could have done,” she said.

Anne Marie let go of her anger at the killers, too. “That’s counterproductive,” she said. “If you don’t forgive, you can’t move on.”

On the fifth anniversary, she returned to Columbine to share her hope.

Funding for the Clement Park memorial met unforeseen resistance. It was budgeted at $2.5 million, less than the library project, which the families had raised in four months. This one looked easy.

But by the time they started fund-raising in 2000, goodwill had been tapped out. They scaled back the project by a million in 2005. Still, they were not even close.

Bill Clinton had taken a personal interest in the massacre as president. He returned to Jeffco in July 2004 to rev up support. He brought in $300,000. That was a big boost, but momentum fizzled again.

Before he retired, Supervisory Special Agent Fuselier requested permission from the head of his branch to share his analysis. His boss agreed. Other experts brought in by the FBI cooperated as well, including Dr. Hare, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and others who spoke off the record. On the fifth anniversary of the massacre, a summary of their analysis was published.

New York Times columnist David Brooks devoted an op-ed piece to the team’s conclusions. Tom Klebold read it. He didn’t like it. He sent David Brooks an e-mail saying so. Brooks was struck by how loyal Tom still felt toward Dylan. After several exchanges, Tom and Sue agreed to sit down with Brooks to discuss their boy and his tragedy—the first and only media interview any of the four parents has ever given.

It turned out that they were kind of angry, too. Sue recounted an incident where she was offered absolution. “I forgive you for what you’ve done,” the person said. That infuriated Sue. “I haven’t done anything for which I need forgiveness,” she told Brooks.

But mostly Tom and Sue were bewildered. They were convinced that jocks and bullying had been behind it, but jocks and bullies are everywhere and few kids are trying to blow up their high school. They were bright people, and they knew they weren’t qualified to offer an explanation for their son’s crimes. “I’m a quantitative person,” Tom said. He was a scientist and a businessman. “We’re not qualified to sort this out,” he said.

They had run it over and over in their heads; they had tried to be objective, and they could honestly say they could rule one cause out. “Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised,” Susan said. They were emphatic about that. “He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised.”

They were aware the public had reached a different verdict: the primary culprits were them. When Brooks met them, Tom had a stack of news stories documenting their poll numbers: 83 percent blamed the two of them and Eric’s parents. In five years, the figure had barely budged. For the Klebolds, judgment was the price of silence. And it stung.

The public condemned them, but those close to the family did not. “Most people have been good-hearted,” Tom said.

He and Sue accepted responsibility for one tragic mistake. Dylan was in agony; they’d thought he would be just fine. “He was hopeless,” Tom said now. “We didn’t realize it until after the end.” They had not induced Dylan’s homicide, they believed, but failed to prevent his suicide. They failed to see it coming. “I think he suffered horribly before he died,” Sue said. “For not seeing that, I will never forgive myself.”

Tom and Sue preferred to talk about Columbine as a suicide. “They acknowledge but do not emphasize the murders their son committed,” Brooks wrote. What they really yearned for was an authoritative study that would explain why Eric and Dylan did it. Yet they had just read the analysis by some of the top experts in North America; they had dismissed it for providing the wrong explanation. They complained that Dr. Fuselier had assessed their son without interviewing them. Fuselier was dying to.

Mostly, the four parents remain a mystery. They have chosen that path. But David Brooks spent enough time with the Klebolds to form a distinct impression, and he has proven himself a good judge of character. He concluded his column with this assessment: Dylan left Tom and Sue to face terrible consequences. “I’d say they are facing them bravely and honorably.”

The Klebolds wanted to understand what happened. They wanted to help other parents like them. They did not feel safe talking to the press, but they talked to a pair of child psychologists, under the condition that they not cite them directly. They were writing a book about teen violence. The problem was that at the time they published, the authors had no access to the crucial evidence.

Patrick Ireland slips his right foot into a hard plastic brace every morning as he gets dressed. He twists open a prescription bottle and swallows a dose of antiseizure meds. He walks with a limp. His mind is sharp, but he hesitates occasionally to find the words. His friends don’t notice. He knows. It’s not quite like before.

Patrick rarely thinks about before. Life is different than he imagined before. Better. Shoes are an issue, because of the brace. And his big toe is crooked inward, scrunches the others over. The little toe on his right foot sticks way out—nobody makes a shoe that wide. The doctors never set his foot right. “My dad’s pretty pissed off,” he said.

He still hangs out with many of his high school buddies. They don’t talk about the massacre much, which is what many of the survivors report. It isn’t emotional anymore, just boring. They’re done.

He is tired of interviews, too. Occasionally he agrees to one. Reporters generally approach the library ordeal gingerly, but Patrick just plunges in, describing it unemotionally, as if recapping a movie. When he did Oprah’s show, she played a clip of him going out the window.

“Whoa!” she said. “So is it difficult for you to see that video?”

“No.”

“It’s not? OK.”

He felt good watching it, actually. He felt a sense of accomplishment.

Patrick got a perplexing voice mail one morning in the spring of 2005. It was an old friend he hadn’t heard from in a while, wishing him well “today,” hoping he was all right. Huh. Now, what could that mean?

That afternoon, Patrick dated a document at work: April 20. Was it anniversary time already again?

Linda Sanders felt every anniversary. Her mood began to sour each April; she got jittery, she could feel it coming.

She tried dating; that was impossible. Dave lingered, and men resented his presence. He was a national hero—who could compete with that?

“It’s, like, Top Dave Sanders,” she said. “It’s not fair to another man to be compared to the man I’ve built. He’s so high on a pedestal he’s in heaven.”

She knew Dave would have wanted her to find someone. She pictured him up there saying, “Linda, I want somebody to hug you.”

“It’s impossible,” Linda said. “There’s nobody coming. I’m destined to be alone because of the way he left.”

Linda withdrew. She stopped answering the door, stopped answering the phone. For two years she hardly spoke at all. She sedated herself with Valium and alcohol. “I was like a vacant person,” she said, “going through the motions of life. I’d go to the store, I was going places, but I was empty.”

Her father worried. What could he do?

“I want my Linda back,” he said.

Linda never went back to work. She walks every day, and she looks after her parents. She does not go near the Columbine Lounge—too many memories, and too close to alcohol. She can’t watch movies with guns in them or read thrillers.

One of those Aprils, years after getting sober, she felt a sudden, desperate need for help. “I ran out the front door and I looked for any neighbor that was home,” she said. “I needed a hug, you know, I needed a hug. So I knocked on my neighbor’s door, she wasn’t home, so I went to my next neighbor, she was home. I walked in and she was reading a book. ‘You’re it,’ I said. And I can’t remember her name. I said I needed a hug. She looked at me and I was crying and she said OK. She gave me a hug.”

Linda still gets letters now and then from strangers who hear Dave’s story or hers and sense immediately how it was for Linda. Most people don’t. Most people see kids and they see parents. Every once in a while, someone gets how it was for the wife. A woman wrote to tell Linda she understood. “That letter came on a real bad day,” Linda said. “And it carried me. I hold that letter every night. That woman has no idea what she did for me.”

Several survivors published memoirs, and Brooks Brown wrote his take on the killers and his ordeal. None garnered a fraction of the attention of Misty Bernall’s book.

In September 2003, the last known layer of the cover-up finally came out. It had unraveled over the course of a full year. It started when someone in the sheriff’s department found some paperwork in a three-ring binder unrelated to the Columbine case. It was a brief police report on Eric Harris. Eight pages from his Web site were attached. They included the “I HATE” rants, boasts about the missions, and descriptions of the first pipe bombs. Eric bragged about detonating one. The report was dated August 7, 1997, more than six months earlier than reports uncovered to date.

The report was brought to the new Jeffco sheriff, Ted Mink. He called a press conference. “This discovery and its implications are upsetting,” he said. “The obvious implication… is that the sheriff’s office had some knowledge of Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebold’s activities in the years prior to the Columbine shootings.” He released the documents and asked Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar to conduct an outside investigation.

Salazar assigned a team, which discovered that more crucial documents were missing. Much of Mike Guerra’s file related to his premassacre investigation had disappeared—both the physical and electronic copies. In February 2004, the attorney general issued a report stating that Jeffco was not negligent, but should have followed through with the warrant and searched Eric’s house more than a year before Columbine. It also said files were still missing.

His team continued investigating. Some people refused to cooperate. The interview report on former sheriff John Stone stated that he was visibly angry and considered the investigation politically motivated. “We were unable to ask Stone any questions or have any meaningful dialogue regarding our investigation due his apparent state of agitation,” it concluded.

The breakthrough came a month later, when investigators went back for a third interview with Guerra. This time, he was more forthcoming. He spilled the one secret Jeffco officials had been good at keeping: the existence of the Open Space meeting. Investigators quietly began confronting other officials who had attended. They got some colorful responses. Former undersheriff John Dunaway said he believed Guerra was upset that “he might be viewed as some kind of blithering idiot. That he, you know, was sitting on top of all of this.”

In August 2004, the Colorado attorney general called a grand jury to flush the file out and consider indictments. The panel swore in eleven witnesses. The file was never recovered, though investigators were able to reconstruct most of it.

The probe turned up other startling discoveries. According to the grand jury report, Division Chief John Kiekbusch’s assistant, Judy Searle, testified that in September 1999, he asked her to find the Guerra file. He told her to search the computer network and the physical files, and to do it in secret. He instructed her specifically not to tell the officers involved. Searle testified under oath that she found that suspicious. She normally would have started her search by talking to those officers. Searle searched, and discovered nothing. She gave Kiekbusch the news: there seemed to be no record anywhere, no sign the file ever existed. She watched his reaction. She testified that he appeared “somewhat relieved.”

According to that same report, in 2000, Kiekbusch instructed her to shred a large pile of Columbine reports. Searle testified that she did not find the request unusual at the time, because Kiekbusch was preparing to leave the office, and Searle assumed he was purging duplicates. She complied.

The grand jury released its report on September 16, 2004. It found that the Guerra file should have been stored in three separate locations, both physical and electronic. All three were destroyed, it concluded—lapparently during the summer of 1999. It described that as “troubling.”

It was also disturbed by attempts to suppress the information—specifically, the Open Space meeting, attended by Stone, Dunaway, Kiekbusch, Thomas, Guerra, and the county attorney, among others. “The topic of the Open Space meeting, the press conference omissions and the actions of Lt. Kiekbusch raise suspicions to the grand jury about the potential that the files were deliberately destroyed,” its report stated.

But every witness denied involvement in the destruction, the report said. Given that, the grand jury could not determine whether the suspicious activity “is tied to a particular person or the result of a particular crime.” Accordingly, it concluded that there was insufficient evidence to indict.

Kiekbusch filed a formal objection. He said the shredding was limited to drafts or copies. His assistant’s perception of his relief was a mystery to him.

He said the grand jury implied that he had attempted to cover up, hide, or destroy documents. He unequivocally denied all of it.

Brian Rohrbough got most of what he sought: nearly all the evidence came out, and the national response protocol changed. But he never felt like he’d won. He gave up on justice. No one would pay; nothing would change.

Most of the top officials left the Jeffco sheriff’s department. Stone survived the recall petition drive, but did not run for reelection. The one county official to come out of Columbine glowing was DA Dave Thomas. Many victims had perceived him as their champion. In 2004, he gave up his position to run for Congress. Polls indicated a toss-up, and the race gained national prominence and funding. The Open Space scandal broke less than two months before Election Day. Thomas’s poll numbers plunged. Money dried up. He lost big. In 2007, he ran for school board. He now helps oversee 150 Jefferson county schools, including Columbine High.

Brian Rohrbough hurled himself into a different passion. He picketed abortion clinics and rose to president of Colorado Right to Life. There, he butted heads with the conservative parent organization, which he considered far too liberal. The last straw came when Rohrbough signed an open letter berating Christian conservative leader James Dobson as soft on abortion. It was published as a full-page newspaper ad. National Right to Life expelled his chapter. Dobson’s organization, Focus on the Family, issued a news release calling it “a rogue and divisive group.”

Later, Brian ran for office. He joined an obscure third party that got itself on the ballot in three states. It nominated Brian for vice president of the United States.

Brian wasn’t always mad. He remarried and adopted two children, who gave him great comfort. At work, he could be surprisingly tranquil. He continued to run his custom audio business, doing most of the labor himself. He loved the precision work: tweaking the acoustic gauges, setting time delays for the front speakers just a fraction of an instant long, so the chords struck the driver’s eardrum at precisely the same moment as the sound waves rolling in from the rear. Exquisite harmony. Brian could get lost for hours in his workshop. When a customer stopped by for a consultation, he was as gentle as Mr. Rogers buttoning up his cardigan.

Then he would think about Danny. Or a stray thought would lead him back to Columbine. The scowl returned.

Brad and Misty Bernall got out of Colorado. They moved to a hamlet called Blowing Rock, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in the heart of the North Carolina mountains. They hated it out there. More isolation than they’d bargained for. Their marriage was shaky sometimes, but they held on. Nearly all the parents of the Thirteen stayed together.

Brad had struggled mightily in the early days, but as time wore on friends said he came to terms with Cassie’s death. Misty smoldered. Nearly a decade later, friends described her as getting angry and frustrated at the mention of the martyr controversy. Misty felt she had been robbed, twice. Eric and Dylan took her daughter; journalists and detectives snatched away the miracle.

Mr. D found new ways to amuse his kids at school. For each homecoming assembly, he impersonated a celebrity. One year, the homecoming theme was Copacabana, and Mr. D strode out dressed as Barry Manilow, in a fluffy blond wig, white leisure suit, and Day-Glo Hawaiian shirt.

“Hey, Mr. D, nice shoes!” a girl yelled. He kicked his leg up to show off his four-inch platform heels. The kids ate it up. The assembly was standard high school: cheers, awards, a hands-free cake-eating contest, and a blindfolded obstacle course. Typical raucous confusion ruled the corridors before and after.

Every now and then, on a nice day, Mr. D wandered outside for serenity. The heavy door swung shut behind him, the bolt caught, and the frenzy of nervous energy ceased. It was so still. Each step, he could hear the grass squish beneath his shoes. A teacher strolled to her car in the distance. Her keys tingled—they could be dangling from his own hand. He made the short hike up Rebel Hill. The crosses were gone, their holes filled, but the grass had not grown back along the path.

At the top of the mesa, the back side of Rebel Hill was deserted. When he stopped there long enough, he would see the prairie dogs. At first there was no sign of them, no movement whatsoever, save the overgrown grasses bending softly to the breeze. After fifteen minutes of silence, they began to scurry about the clumps of mountain aster, foraging for food, socializing, grooming each other, fattening up for the winter. Six months after the tragedy, Mr. D had run into a Japanese film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity—less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs.

The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene.

School shooters faded as a national fear for a while. They worsened in Europe. They returned to the States in an uglier form in the fall of 2006, when a spate of adult killers realized that a school setting would reap attention. There were four shootings in a three-week span, beginning in late August 2006. The shooters used various tactics to resemble the Columbine killers, including trench coats and Web sites mentioning them by name. They appeared to see Eric and Dylan’s legacy as a marketing opportunity. National attention focused on five girls killed in a one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania. But in Denver, the Platte Canyon shooting was particularly tough.

Platte Canyon High School was just one county over, and the police force so small that the Jeffco sheriff commanded the response team. It was a big national story for a few hours; then it was over. In Jeffco, it hit much harder. The Denver TV stations stayed live with the story all afternoon. Everyone was transfixed. This time it was a hostage standoff, and the SWAT team did rush the building. The gunman had only two girls left at that point. When the cops rushed in, he shot one in the head, then took care of himself. He died instantly, but the victim was medevaced out. The city watched her helicopter take off and land on the rooftop of St. Anthony’s; then viewers waited, hoping, for two hours. Doctors held a press conference early in the evening. She’d never had a chance.

The next morning’s Rocky Mountain News was filled with photos eerily like April 20: survivors sobbing, praying, holding on tight.

Bomb scares at Columbine spiked. The school was evacuated a few days later. Moms felt their muscles clench, bracing for the terrifying news. Some had almost forgotten Columbine, but their bodies remembered. In an instant, it was April 20 again. The danger passed in a few hours—it was only a prank. The anxiety lingered.

In the ten years after Columbine, more than eighty school shootings took place in the United States. The principals who survived—many were targeted—invariably found themselves in over their heads. Mr. D made himself available to all of them. Many accepted his offer. He spent hours every semester sharing what he had learned.

Those calls were hard. An e-mail he received that fall was worse. “Dear Principal,” it said. “In a few hours you will probably hear about a school shooting in North Carolina. I am responsible for it. I remember Columbine. It is time the world remembered it. I am sorry. Goodbye.”

It had been sent in the morning, but Mr. D didn’t check e-mail for several hours. He called the cops immediately, and they sent word to the boy’s high school. Too late. The nineteen-year-old had driven past his school and fired eight shots, injuring two superficially. Then police raided his home and found his father dead.

The shooter was apprehended and taken into court. He was asked why he was obsessed with Columbine. He said he didn’t know.

School shooters were starting to feel like a threat again. But the real shocker came the following spring, at Virginia Tech. Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people, plus himself, and injured seventeen. The press proclaimed it a new American record. They shuddered at the idea of turning school shootings into a competition, then awarded Cho the title.

Cho left a manifesto explaining his attack. It cited Eric and Dylan at least twice as inspiration. He’d looked up to them. He did not resemble them. Cho did not appear to enjoy his rampage. He did not expect to. He emptied his guns with a blank expression. He shared none of Eric or Dylan’s bloodlust. The videos Cho left described himself as raped, crucified, impaled, and slashed ear to ear. Cho appears to have been severely mentally ill, fighting a powerful psychosis, possibly schizophrenia. Unlike the Columbine killers, he did not seem to be in touch with reality or comprehend what he was doing. He understood only that Eric and Dylan left an impression.

52. Quiet

The morning of the attack, Eric and Dylan shot a brief farewell video in Eric’s basement. Eric directed. “Say it now,” he said.

“Hey, Mom,” Dylan said. “I gotta go. It’s about a half an hour till Judgment Day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate. Just know I’m going to a better place. I didn’t like life too much, and I know I’ll be happy wherever the fuck I go. So I’m gone. Good-bye. Reb…”

Eric handed him the camera. “Yeah…. Everyone I love, I’m really sorry about all this,” Eric said. “I know my mom and dad will be just like… just fucking shocked beyond belief. I’m sorry, all right. I can’t help it.”

Dylan interrupted him from behind the camera. “It’s what we had to do,” he said.

Eric had one more thought, for the girl from prom night. “Susan, sorry. Under different circumstances it would’ve been a lot different. I want you to have that fly CD.” Dylan got restless and snapped his fingers. Eric flashed an angry look. That shut him up. Eric had something profound to deliver. Dylan couldn’t care less. Eric lost his big moment. “That’s it,” he said. “Sorry. Good-bye.”

Dylan turned the camera to face himself. “Good-bye.”

Eric and Dylan spent just five minutes firing outside. They killed two people and advanced into the school. For five minutes, they fended off deputies, shot Dave Sanders, and roamed the halls looking for targets. They began tossing pipe bombs over the railing, down into the commons, which appeared deserted. It was not. Several students hiding under tables made a run for it and fled out the cafeteria doors. They all made it out safely. Others stayed put.

Along the way, the boys passed the library windows, and ignored all the kids huddled there. Then they circled back. That room offered the highest concentration of fodder they had seen. They found fifty-six people inside. They killed ten, injured twelve. The remaining thirty-four were easy pickings. But Eric and Dylan got bored. They walked out seven and a half minutes later, at 11:36, seventeen minutes into the attack. Aside from themselves and the cops, they would not shoot another human again.

The boys wandered into the science wing. They walked past Science Room 3, where the Eagle Scouts were just getting started on Dave Sanders. They looked through the windowpanes in several classroom doors. Kids were inside most of them. At least two or three hundred kids remained in the school. The killers knew they were there. Many witnesses made eye contact. Eric and Dylan walked by. They chose empty classrooms to open fire.

They roamed aimlessly upstairs. To civilians, it seems odd that they stopped shooting and entered this “quiet period.” It’s actually pretty normal for a psychopath. They enjoy their exploits, but murder gets boring, too. Even serial killers lose interest for a few days. Eric was likely proud and inflated, but tired of it already. Dylan was less predictable, but probably resembled a bipolar experiencing a mixed episode: depressed and manic at once—indifferent to his actions; remorseless but not sadistic. He was ready to die, fused with Eric and following his lead.

Eric had a few thrills left to savor. Killing had turned tedious, but he was still up for an explosion. The biggest explosion of his life. He could still perform his primary feat: blow up the school and burn down the rubble.

He headed down the staircase into the commons at 11:44. Dylan followed closely behind. Eric stopped on the landing halfway down. He knelt and placed his rifle barrel on the railing to improve his accuracy. Backpacks were scattered everywhere, but Eric knew which duffel bag was his. He fired. The boys were easily within the blast area, and they were well aware of that fact. Twenty-five minutes into the massacre, Eric made his second attempt to initiate the main event, and his first attempt at suicide. He failed again.

Eric gave up. He walked directly to the bomb, with Dylan behind him. Dylan tried to fiddle with it. That failed, too. Kids were visible under some of the tables. The killers ignored them. Lots of drinks had been left on the tables, and the killers tipped back a few. “Today the world’s going to come to an end,” one of them said. “Today’s the day we die.”

The surveillance cameras picked up their movements in the commons. Their body language was vastly different than what witnesses in the library described. Their shoulders drooped, and they walked slowly. The excitement had drained out of them; the bravado was gone. Eric had also broken his nose. He was in severe pain.

They left the cafeteria after two and a half minutes. On the way out, Dylan tossed a Molotov cocktail at the big bombs—one last attempt to set them off. Another failure. Several kids felt the blast and ran.

The boys drifted about the school: upstairs and down again. They surveyed the damage in the commons. It was pathetic. The Molotov started a small fire that burned the duffel bag off one of the bombs and ignited some of the fuel strapped to it, but the propane tank was impervious. The fire set off the sprinkler system across the room. The boys had been going for an inferno; they caused a flood.

The killers were apparently out of ideas. They’d expected to be dead by now, but never planned how. The cops were supposed to take care of that. Eric predicted he’d be shot in the head. No one had obliged.

They had two essential choices: suicide or surrender. Eric would sooner die. He idolized Medea for going down in flames, but couldn’t ignite his fire.

A cornered psychopath will often attempt “suicide by cop”: an aggressive provocation to force the police to shoot. Eric and Dylan could have ended it dramatically by charging the perimeter. It would have been glorious. But it would take tremendous courage.

Eric craved self-determination. Dylan just wanted a way out. Alone, he might well have been talked down. He had been promising suicide for two years and never brought himself near it. He never had a partner to guide him out.

At noon, they returned to the library. Why end it there? Act III was about to commence. The car bombs were set to blow. Ambulances had massed around Dylan’s BMW as planned. A triage unit was busy nearby. Limbs would fill the air, just like Eric’s drawings. The library windows were set up like skyboxes. Eric and Dylan most likely chose the library, not just because of the carnage there already, but for a better view.

They found the room quite different than they’d left it twenty-four minutes before. Human decay begins rapidly. The first thing to assault them was probably smell. Blood is rich in iron, so large volumes emit a strong metallic smell. The average body contains five quarts. Several gallons had pooled on the carpet, coagulating into a reddish brown gelatin, with irregular black speckles. Aerosolized droplets dry quickly, so the spatters were black and crusty. Stray globs of brain matter would soon be solid as concrete. They would be scraped off with putty knives and the stubborn chunks melted down with steam-injection machines.

The killers had left the library in turmoil: shots, screams, explosions, and forty-two teens moaning, gasping, and praying. The commotion had ceased, replaced by the piercing fire alarm. The smoke cleared; a warm breeze floated through the blown-out windows. Twelve bodies shared the room with them. Two were breathing: Patrick Ireland and Lisa Kreutz had been fading in and out of consciousness, unable to move. Four staff hid in rooms farther back. Ten corpses had passed through pallor mortis, and livor mortis was setting in. The skin had gone white and purplish splotches were now appearing as the remaining blood settled.

The boys may have been oblivious. Mass murderers often shift into an altered state, dissociated and indifferent to the horror. Some barely notice, others take a clinical curiosity in variations like eyes either bulging or retracting, the whites clouding up or mottling with red clumps. If Eric or Dylan touched their victims, they would have found the bodies cooling noticeably, but still warm and pliable.

They walked on. Eric advanced toward a center window, among the heaviest carnage. He walked past the worst of it to get there. Dylan broke away and chose a spot closer to the entrance, half a dozen window panels down. If he took a direct route, he followed one of the cleanest pathways left.

The boys inspected the army surrounding them outside. Paramedics were just then breaching the perimeter to rescue Sean, Lance, and Anne Marie. Eric opened fire. Dylan did the same. Two deputies shot back, mostly suppressive fire. The medics gave up, the boys quit. This was their only fire on humans during the thirty-two-minute quiet period. It was a classic attempt at suicide by cop: heroically dying in battle, but at a time, place, and manner of their own choosing. That failed, too.

A minute or two later, at 12:06, the first SWAT team finally entered Columbine High School, on the opposite end of the building. Eric and Dylan could not have known. They apparently waited for their cars to explode, weathered a final disappointment, and then called it a day.

Eric turned his back on the mess. He retreated to the southwest corner, one of the few unspoiled areas in the room. Dylan joined him there. It was a cozy spot near the windows, nestled between walls and bookshelves on three sides, with a mountain view. One body lay nearby. It was Patrick Ireland, gently breathing, unconscious. The boys sat down on the floor facing out at the windows. They seemed to be staying low to avoid police fire. That may seem odd given their intentions, but it’s all about control. Eric propped himself against a bookshelf, just a shoulder-width to the right of Dylan and a few feet behind, watching his back.

One of them lit the rag used as a fuse on a Molotov cocktail. He set it on the table right above Patrick. Eric raised the shotgun barrel to his mouth, like the antihero of The Downward Spiral. Dylan pointed the TEC-9 at his left temple. The Molotov rag burned down.

Eric fired through the roof of his mouth, causing “evacuation of the brain.” He collapsed against the books, and his torso slumped to the side. He ended that way, with his arms curled forward, as if hugging an invisible pillow. Dylan’s blast knocked him flat on his back and strewed brain matter across Eric’s left knee. Dylan’s head came to rest just beside it.

A lot of blood spilled, but less than their victims’. Eric and Dylan blew out their medullas, the brain center that controls involuntary functions. Their hearts stopped almost instantly. Medically, “bleeding” ceased. Gravity took over and they leaked. Dylan’s blood soaked into Eric’s pant leg.

The Molotov blew. It started a small fire. It also spilled Eric’s crude napalm over the tabletop and sealed a lump of his brain underneath. That detail would prove the boys died just before the eruption. The alarm system detected the fire and recorded the time as 12:08.

The sprinklers put it out and drenched the boys. Blood drained from their skulls and oxidized like blackened halos.

Three hours later, police found Eric crumpled, Dylan sprawled leisurely. His legs flopped over to the side, one knee atop the other, ankles crossed. One arm draped across his stomach, underlining the word emblazoned on his black T-shirt. His head lay back, mouth open, jaw slack. Blood trickled out the corners, toward his ears. He looked serene. The red letters on his chest screamed wrath.

53. At the Broken Places

It took eight and a half years to erect the permanent memorial. In 2006, the fund hit 70 percent of its reduced budget, permitting construction to begin. An event was planned for the groundbreaking in June—to honor the dead, and to publicize the $300,000 outstanding. Bill Clinton flew in. Two thousand mourners turned out.

Dawn Anna read the thirteen names. “We’re here because we love them,” she said. “We’re here as a family and as a community that’s been through the darkest of days and is coming through to the light.”

Thunderheads rolled in and opened up on the crowd. Scattered umbrellas popped up, but most people were caught unaware. Nobody moved. They didn’t care.

This was Republican country, but Clinton’s introduction drew wild applause. These people were proud to host an American president.

“I am here today because millions of Americans were changed by Columbine,” he said. “It was one of the darkest days Hillary and I had in the White House. We wept, we prayed.”

Right before his appearance, she’d called from the Senate, he said—”Just to remind me of what we did that day. This was a momentous event in the history of the country. And every parent [was] left feeling helpless, even the president.”

He had watched the survivors evolve, Clinton said. He compared them to his colleague, Max Cleland, who’d left both legs and one arm in Vietnam. It was a struggle for Max to dress every morning. He could have resented the thousands who came back unscathed or who’d avoided the draft, like him, Clinton said. What a waste that would be. Cleland ran for the Senate and represented Georgia for six years. He was fond of quoting Ernest Hemingway, and Clinton recited his favorite passage: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

“Every day, from now on, the world will break someone,” Clinton added. “These magnificent families, in memory of their children, and their teacher, can help them always to be strong.”

Patrick Ireland proposed to Kacie, the girl he’d met his first night at CSU. They would never have met, he pointed out, if he had not been shot.

They married on an August afternoon. Six bridesmaids in rose red gowns walked the aisle of an ornate Catholic church.

Mr. D came. He was struck by the sight of Patrick standing at the altar with no physical support. He was also taken aback by the number of classmates involved. It was a familiar pattern. For twenty years, he had watched alumni drift away from their high school buds, but the two thousand survivors stuck close.

Patrick walked out gracefully and composed. Mr. D wiped off a tear. Patrick’s doctor from Craig was there, still incredulous. So was Laura, the girl Patrick had been afraid to ask to prom.

The wedding party took a month of ballroom dance lessons to prepare for the reception. Patrick spun Kacie across the floor. They waltzed and two-stepped and did the fox-trot. They closed out the first dance with a deep dip. Patrick joined his mother for “Because You Loved Me.” Diane Warren wrote the song to her father for encouraging her when no one else believed. Kathy teared up quietly in her son’s arms.

Former agent Dwayne Fuselier was still being asked to address law enforcement groups and teachers’ conventions. They still wanted to know why? Fuselier kept agreeing to speak, insisting each presentation would be the last.

He continues to teach hostage negotiators in the Third World. He finds a lot more time for golf, and his mind wanders occasionally to Eric and Dylan—with no satisfaction, because the ending never changes.

Both his sons graduated from college and launched successful careers.

He still hopes to interview Eric and Dylan’s parents.

Brad and Misty Bernall resettled nearby in New Mexico. They are much happier there.

She Said Yes was reissued in two paperback formats, a library edition, and an audiobook. It has sold over a million copies. The Web is loaded with sites unabashedly recounting the myth. Cassie’s youth pastor was right: the church stuck with the story.

Local churches felt a surge following Columbine. Attendance spiked, fervor was unprecedented. It faded. Pastors reported no long-term impact.

The Harrises and Klebolds remained secluded. The Harrises eventually sold their house, but remained in the area. The Klebolds have not moved. In July of 2006, Dylan’s older brother, Byron, got married.

Kids at Columbine stopped using the word as the name of a massacre. It became just a high school again. Smokers returned to chatting up adult strangers who strolled through Clement Park near their pit. It did not occur to them to be afraid.

When a journalist stopped by to assess the return to normalcy, they were puzzled. Why would anyone be interested in their boring school? They really didn’t know. Their faces lit up when they discovered he was from the city. What were the clubs like? Had he been to Colfax Avenue? Were there really strip clubs and winos and hookers there?

Of course they remembered the tragedy. What an awful day. Their grade schools were locked down, everyone was scared. Several had had older siblings trapped in the high school. Their parents had been upset for months. So what was Denver like?

Mr. D had two grandchildren. His son settled into a career and his daughter got engaged. Frank didn’t let Diane Meyer get away the second time. After his divorce, they reunited in person. She was just as funny as in high school. Same blue eyes, same insightful mind and selflessness. “Someone to lean on,” Frank said. They began dating again. On Christmas Eve 2003, Frank asked her to marry him. She said yes. They remain engaged.

Mr. D informed his students he planned to retire. He will stay through graduation in 2012, or 2013. He will be fifty-seven or fifty-eight. He’s not sure what he’ll do then. Golf, travel, enjoy.

Linda Sanders pulled out of her depression. She still has rough days, but not so often. By 2008, she was dating again.

The memorial felt like the final step. One last controversy marred its completion. In the spring of 2007, as bulldozers carved out the site on the back slope of Rebel Hill, Brian Rohrbough went to battle with the memorial committee. An inner Ring of Remembrance honored the Thirteen in a special way. The larger Ring of Healing that surrounded it would bear quotes from students, teachers, friends, neighbors—everyone touched by the tragedy, whether or not a bullet actually pierced their skin. Each of the thirteen families was allocated a space on the inner ring for a large inscription in the brown marble to remember their child, father, or spouse. They were asked to keep it tasteful and respectful.

Twelve and a half families agreed. Sue Petrone and Brian Rohrbough submitted separate inscriptions for Danny, to be run side by side. Sue described her boy’s blue eyes, engaging smile, and infectious laugh. Brian submitted an angry rant blaming Columbine on a godless school system in a nation that legalized abortion where authorities lied and covered up their crimes. He ended with a biblical quote, declaring, There is no peace for the wicked.

The committee asked Brian to tone it down. He refused. Both sides agreed to keep the wording confidential, but the gist of the dispute leaked. It caused yet another firestorm in Colorado. The public was split. A standoff ensued. Nobody wanted an angry tirade inside the Ring of Remembrance. The committee had the power to stop it. Brian dared them to do it.

It was no contest. Even after eight years, nothing trumped a grieving dad.

The Columbine memorial was dedicated on a sunny afternoon in September 2007. A few thousand visitors filed quietly past the inner wall. There was no ruckus over the angry inscription. It did not draw more onlookers than the other twelve, even out of curiosity. There was no discernible reaction. No one seemed to care.

Patrick Ireland spoke on behalf of the injured. “The shootings were an event that occurred,” he said. “But it did not define me as a person. It did not set the tone for the rest of my life.”

Thirteen doves were released. Seconds later, two hundred more fluttered free—an arbitrary number, to signify everyone else. They scattered up in all directions. For a moment, they seemed to fill the entire sky. Then they found one another and coalesced into a single flock, a massive white cloud weaving from left to right and back again, against the clear blue sky.