Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

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THAT TUESDAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 12, after Steve asks Jessica ‘what finger a woman wears her marriage ring on,’ he talks to his father for about fifteen minutes. He gets a call, also, from the Navy recruiter, Nole Scoville, and puts him off, says he’s too busy to come in to the office. This is remarkable timing, a last chance to go another direction. Does he hesitate at all?

Steve orders Jessica a platinum ArtCarved Montclair six-millimeter ring for $1,435.50 from Amazon. That evening, he talks with Jessica again for eighteen minutes, then again for fourteen minutes, several calls for just a few minutes, and a longer one for twenty-one minutes at midnight. What do they say in these calls? There are limits to what Jessica will tell me. She hides as much as she can.

Steve talks with Mark that evening, too, and it’s a normal conversation. “He was asking me about someone I dated down in Louisiana, and what it was like living out there and a different culture, and we talked about that for about twenty minutes, and about the PS3 [PlayStation3], and that was about it.” Mark doesn’t sense anything wrong with Steve, maybe a bit formal on the final goodbye, is all. Steve talks with Joe Russo, too, for sixteen minutes, and Joe doesn’t think anything is wrong. The conversation ends as usual, with “talk to you later.”

Has Steve gone out at all today, even for food? He has Red Bull and cigarettes, a bottle of lotion on the nightstand.

Kelly sends him an email, asking to get together: “This week was craptastic. The ice on my windshield was completely impermeable to scrapers and ice melt spray this morning, so I was 20 min late to class as well. On a positive note, I didn’t slip and fall once today!:) What day did you say you weren’t doing anything later this week? I forgot already. We should do something. . karaoke, movie, whatever. I just need to get out of here for a bit. Anyway, I hope your day went well and I’ll talk to you soon!”

He answers her the next morning, Wednesday, February 13: “I know what you mean about getting out once in a while, Kelly, lol.” He’s been in the Travelodge now for two days alone, waiting. “The snow and melted ice were a pain to deal with today, but at least you or I didn’t fall! Friday may work, but I’ll have to see what’s going on. karaoke is always fun!” But he’s not trying to get together with her. What about the prostitutes: Megan, Elyse, Katie? They’re all a long drive south, but “Sheri,” a woman with multiple arrests for prostitution, is closer, in Chicago. Does he see her? He has handcuffs on the nightstand beside his bed, which he’s mentioned before with Kelly, for light bondage, so maybe someone does visit. Sheri tells police Steve “seemed weird,” tried to get her to come to DeKalb, and even tried to arrange transportation for her. But she denies ever coming to DeKalb.

Steve goes to the post office and sends Jessica a package with the return address of Robert Paulson, 1074 Stevenson C, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, his old dorm address at NIU. He’s asked Jessica recently whether she remembers who Robert Paulson is, and she remembers he’s the one who dies in the movie Fight Club.

“In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name: his name is Robert Paulson.” Immortality and martyrdom. The protagonist in the movie teaches a victim the value of his life by threatening to kill him. Just like Jigsaw. He self-mutilates, pours lye on his own hand. He builds an army, in which all are “maggots,” with no individual self or even a name allowed, until after they die, starting with Robert Paulson.

The first rule of Project Mayhem is “You do not ask questions,” just like the army Steve served in, with no reference to right or wrong, and though the project seems radical and to the left, it’s actually libertarian and to the right, erasing financial records and eliminating all tracking of the individual by the government or banks.

It’s all about the individual in the end, and in this case, it’s a split individual. The movie begins with a gun in the protagonist’s mouth, held there by his alter ego, Tyler Durden. Tyler explains the genesis of this double self: “You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart and capable and, most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.”

With all his checking behaviors, Steve is fundamentally not free. Tyler Durden’s freedom must look good, and Tyler himself (Brad Pitt) looks good. The entire movie is a meditation on ambivalent male sexuality. Tyler splices bits of porn into family movies during his job as a projectionist, and the final shot is a long one of a nude male body with a prominent penis and dark pubic hair. It’s the final image in Fight Club. Tyler Durden is a hyper-heterosexual male, who fucks like someone who wishes they weren’t gay wishes they could fuck, loud sport sex with women, over and over, in hypervirility. And in order to have this alter ego, the protagonist must make one promise to his darker self, that he will never tell anyone about his darker self. Secret sex, secret shame.

By filling out the return address as Robert Paulson, Steve left a text, a way to be read. This is how I find him most unlikeable, his thoughtful planning of mass murder, including control of how he should be interpreted. He left Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ as another text, and also Orwell’s 1984. He even marked a specific passage for Jessica from 1984, a romantic passage in which the characters, who have given up all other vestiges of individuality, watched over constantly by Big Brother, refuse, finally, to give up love:

O’Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

“You are prepared to give your lives?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to commit murder?”

“Yes.”

“To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?”

“Yes.”

“To betray your country to foreign powers?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”

“Yes.”

“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulfuric acid in a child’s face are you prepared to do that?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock worker?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?”

“No!” broke in Julia.

It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally. “Never see one another again?”

Jessica tries to make sense of it all in her emails afterward to Mark. She tries to put together a narrative that makes all the connections. “He was totally OCD, locking the doors, checking things, making me read a paper six times before I would turn it in. No one but me knew that he was on meds. He was embarrassed about it, which I told him was ridiculous. He used to be a cutter when he was younger. He tried to kill himself like seven or eight times. He was having big problems with his sister. They weren’t speaking, and she said some horrible things to him. He was also avoiding his father. It was really hard for him to let me read his mental health records, but he wanted me to know about his past. I told him a million times his past was his past and I’d never hold anything against him, but he thought it would haunt him forever. He thought that he was a burden to me and he thought I could do better, and he didn’t understand why I loved him, after everything that we went through. He was so intelligent. JT and I have been analyzing 1984, Fight Club, and Nietzsche. It makes a lot of sense.”

Jim Thomas (JT) explains things a bit differently. “I’m not looking for explanation or causes but looking at a story and trying to cast it in some sense-making model.” Jim’s approach is from narrative sociology, and there’s an odd remove to it. He says “I don’t look for value, I look for an account of the outcomes.” But this is similar, I suspect, to the social-scientific remove Steve had in understanding himself through the lenses of Fight Club, Orwell, and Nietzsche, and I suspect is part of why he was able to plan in advance and finally do something so inhuman and cold. In other words, I think we can see something related and close to Steve’s internal thought processes going on now in how his mentor Jim is trying to put together the story. The police, according to Jim, are doing exactly the opposite. “What they’re trying to look for is motive, genesis,” Jim says. “They don’t understand. They’re looking for comfort and predictability.”

Steve’s last call to Jessica is just before midnight on February 13, wishing her Happy Valentine’s Day, promising he’ll see her tomorrow. “Good-bye, Jessica,” he says.

He takes the SIM card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his laptop, and hides them where they will never be found.