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

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I COMMITTED MY CRIMES ALONE partly because, like Steve, I was losing all my friends. Eighth grade was the time of “cut-downs,” competitive insults. After my father’s death, I was weak. Ian VanTuyl, who had been my best friend, began using everything he knew against me. At school, on the blacktop, we’d all stand around in a circle with our hands in our pockets and Ian would say that my front teeth were too big, or I smiled too much, and I would grin weakly and not know what to say. This is how you become a target in junior high. Others in the group were relieved, because this meant they were no longer targets, and they heaped it on. Every day I was made fun of, every day, all day, and so I know some of the rage Steve must have felt, and I know what it means to be an outcast in your social group.

Like Steve, I turned to secret sex. A girl with a terrible reputation, someone from a poorer part of town. At her house after school, her parents never home, we made out on her bed. I put my finger inside her and couldn’t believe how soft she was, but then she said we could have sex, and this scared me too much. I wasn’t ready. I had limits. My friends were just starting to drink, but I refused. It was something about control. My father’s suicide had come as a shock, and perhaps I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t drink and couldn’t have sex because I wasn’t willing to let something happen again that would be beyond my control.

I broke up with this girl, and then a guy named Ryan started having sex with her and telling everyone about it at school, started calling me a pussy. So now my friends had two new ways to make fun of me, about drinking and about sex. I still invited them for sleepovers, and had an agreement with my mother that we could go out toilet-papering people’s houses and such and she’d pretend not to notice. One time she forgot and came out into the hallway when she heard a sound, so then she had to shield her eyes, looking down, pretending she was really sleepy, as she talked to me and we all stood there with TP in our hands. She was a good actress.

Outside, toilet-papering a house, my friends still made fun of me, but I had an edge they didn’t. I’d stick around as they all ran away. I’d walk up into the yard and unscrew the light bulb on the front porch, walk around into the backyard, even. Compared to what I was doing at night on my own, none of this felt like anything.

In the afternoons, I was going into neighbors’ houses. I had their phone numbers, and this was right before answering machines became widespread, so I would simply call their house and let it ring the entire time I was inside. If anyone came home, they would rush for the phone and I would slip out the way I’d come in, which was always through the small sliding bathroom window. Everyone in our neighborhood left that window open. It was difficult to climb in, headfirst, balancing on the toilet and trying not to break anything, but it always worked.

I never stole anything. I think I was just alone, an outcast, with a life that felt empty, so I was looking at all the stuff of other peoples’ lives, trying to see or feel what made them. I also looked for pornography, of course, and guns.

I had fantasies during this time that cast me as the underdog, everyone against me. I would imagine myself out behind the school backstop with the.30-.30 having to defend the honor of some girl as my classmates, all boys, attacked. I held them off, shooting them one by one with the rifle. So it was a fantasy born of reading too many of my father’s westerns, Louis L’Amour and later the adults-only ones by Jake Slocum. It was the fantasy of an outcast becoming a hero, showing everyone. But there I was, imagining a school shooting.