Columbine by Dave Cullen. (2/3)
Title: Columbine.
Author: Dave Cullen.
Genre: Non-fiction, true crime, school shootings, journalism.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2009.
Summary: Columbine shootings became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. The author was one of the first reporters on the scene, and he spent ten years on this book-widely recognized to be the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings. The author paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. (Only PART 2 in this post, refer to PART 1 for the rest of the quotes and PART 3 for Afterword, Epilogue and Appendices).
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ "I will choose to kill," Eric wrote. Why? His explanations didn't add up. Because we were morons? How would that make a kid kill? To most readers, Eric's rants just sounded nuts.
Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric's personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.
Fuselier spent the next twelve weeks contesting his theory. That's how he approached a problem: develop a hypothesis and then search for every scrap of evidence to refute it. Test it against alternate explanations, build the strongest possible case to support them, and see if the hypothesis fails. If it withstands that, it's solid. Psychopathy held.
Diagnosis didn't solve the crime, but it laid the foundation. Ten years afterward, Eric still baffled the public, which insisted on assessing his motives through a "normal" lens. Eric was neither normal nor insane. Psychopathy (si-CO-uh-thee) represents a third category. Psychopathic brains don't function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.
To a psychopath, both motives make sense. "Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling," wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. "They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."
Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. "it's just nature, chemistry, and math," he wrote. "you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay."
Psychopaths have likely plagued mankind since the beginning, but they are still poorly understood. In the 1800s, as the fledgling field of psychology began classifying mental disorders, one group refused to fit. Every known psychosis was marked by a failure of reasoning or a debilitating ailment: paralyzing fear, hallucinations, voices, phobias, and so on. In 1885, the term psychopath was introduced to describe vicious human predators who were not deranged, delusional, or depressed. They just enjoyed being bad.
Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It's the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It's usually a him-more than 80 percent are male.) Don't look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.
In 1941, Dr. Hervey Cleckley revolutionized the understanding of psychopathy with his book. The Mask of Sanity. Egocentrism and failure of empathy were the underlying drivers, but Cleckley chose his title to reflect the element that trumped those. If psychopaths were merely evil, they would not be a major threat. They wreak so much havoc that they should be obvious. Yet the majority have consistently eluded the law.
Cleckley worried about his title metaphor: psychopathy is not a two-dimensional cover that can be lifted off the face like a Halloween mask. It permeates the offender's personality. Joy, grief, anxiety, or amusement-he can mimic any on cue. He knows the facial expressions, the voice modulation, and the body language. He's not just conning you with a scheme, he's conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you.
Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them. Lies become the psychopath's occupation, and when the truth will work, they lie for sport. "I like to con people," one of Hare's objects told a researcher during an extended interview. "I'm conning you right now."
Lying for amusement is so profound in psychopaths, it stands out as their signature characteristic. "Duping delight," psychologist Paul Ekman dubbed it.
Cleckley spent five decades refining his research and publishing four further editions of The Mask of Sanity. It wasn't until the 1970s that Robert Hare isolated twenty characteristics of the condition and created the Psychopathy Checklist, the basis for virtually all contemporary research. He also wrote the definitive book on the malady, Without Conscience.
The terminology got muckier. Sociopath was introduced in the 1930s, initially as a broader term for antisocial behavior. Eventually, psychopath and sociopath became virtually synonymous. (Varying definitions for the latter have led to distinctions by some experts, but these are not uniformly accepted.) The primary reason for the competing terms is that each was adopted in different fields: criminologists and law enforcement personnel prefer psychopath; sociologists tend toward sociopath. Psychologists and psychiatrists are split, but most experts on the condition use psychopath, and the bulk of the research is based on Hare's checklist. A third term, antisocial personality disorder, or APD, was introduced in the 1970s and remains the only diagnosis included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). However, it covers a much broader range of disorders than does psychopath and has been roundly rejected by leading researchers.
So where do psychopaths come from? Researchers are divided, with the majority suggesting a mixed role: nature leading, nurture following. Dr. Hare believes psychopaths are born with a powerful predisposition, which can be exacerbated by abuse or neglect. A correlation exists between psychopaths and unstable homes-and violent upbringings seem to turn fledgling psychopaths more vicious. But current data suggests those conditions do not cause the psychopathy; they only make a bad situation worse. It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad.
..The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel. A psychopath's grasp of fear and suffering is particularly weak.
..Psychopaths feel something; Eric seemed to show sadness when his dog was sick, and he occasionally felt twinges of regret toward humans. But the signals come through dimly.
Cleckley described this as a poverty of emotional range. That's a tricky concept, because psychopaths develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. Three have been identified: anger, frustration, and rage. Psychopaths erupt with ferocious bouts of anger, which can get them labeled "emotional." Look more closely, Cleckley advised: "The conviction dawns on those who observe him carefully that here we deal with a readiness of expression rather than a strength of feeling." No love. No grief. Not even sorrow, really, or hope or despair about his own future. Psychopaths feel nothing deep, complex, or sustained. The psychopath was prone to "vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, absurd and showy poses of indignation."
..Indignation runs strong in the psychopath. It springs from a staggering ego and sense of superriority. Psychopaths do not feel much, but when they lose patience with inferiors, they can really let it rip. It doesn't go any deeper. Even an earthworm will recoil if you poke it with a stick. A squirrel will exhibit frustration if you tease it by offering a peanut, then repeatedly snatching it back. Psychopaths make it that far up the emotional ladder, but they fall far short of the average golden retriever, which will demonstrate affection, joy, compassion, and empathy for a human in pain.
Researchers are still just beginning to understand psychopaths, but they believe psychopaths crave the emotional response they lack. They are nearly always thrill seekers. They love roller coasters and hang gliding, and they seek out high-anxiety occupations, like ER tech, bond trader, or Marine. Crime, danger, impoverishment, death-any sort of risk will help. They chase new sources of excitement because it is so difficult for them to sustain.
They rarely stick with a career; they get bored. Even as career criminals, psychopaths underperform. They "lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing the way typical career criminals do," Cleckley wrote. They make careless mistakes and pass up stunning opportunities, because they lose interest. They perform spectacularly in short bursts-a few weeks, a few months, a yearlong big con-then walk away.
..Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down-no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent.
A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderer, little research has been conducted on them. We know that the partnerships tend to be asymmetrical. An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. "It takes heat and cold to make a tornado," Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn't sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.
..Functional magnetic resonance imaging tests (fMRIs) create a picture of the brain, with light indicating active regions. Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain's emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.
Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths' amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotional instead of experiencing them.
..So what's the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. "Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people," Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. "These programs are like a finishing school," a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare's team. "They teach you how to put the squeeze on people."
..Oddly, a large number of psychopaths spontaneously improve around middle age. The phenomenon has been observed for decades, but not explained. Otherwise, psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.
..Hare believes that these psychopaths might simply be adapting. Fiercely rational, they figured out that prison was not working for them. So Hare proposed using their self-interest to the public advantage. The program he developed accepts that psychopaths will remain egocentric and uncaring for life but will adhere to rules if it's in their own interest. "Convincing them that there are ways they can get what they want without harming others is the key," Hare said. "You say to them, 'Most people think with their hearts, not with their heads, and your problem is you think too much with your head. So let's change the problem into an asset.' They understand that."
♥ On June 2, most of the student body finally reconnected with the physical Columbine. It was an emotional day. Students had two hours to go back inside and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it. Their parents were allowed in as well. It gave everyone a chance to face their fears. Hundreds of kids stumbled out in tears. Useful tears. Most found the experience stressful but cathartic.
They were kicked out again for two months, while construction crews renovated the interior. The students had mixed feelings about anything changing, but they were taking that one on faith. The district had open enrollment, so everyone expected a big drop in Columbine's student body the next fall. Students reacted the opposite way: transfers out were minimal. Fall enrollment actually went up. Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!
♥ In early July, the Healing Fund announced its distribution plan: 40 percent of the $3.8 million would go to direct victims. A clever compromise was reached for that money: the four kids with critical injuries got $150,000 each; $50,000 went to each of the Thirteen. That totaled $650,000 for the dead versus $600,000 for the critically injured, giving the Thirteen the appearance of preeminence. Twenty-one injured students got $10,000 each, a fraction of the medical bills for many. Most of the remainder went to trauma counseling and tolerance programs. Roughly $750,000 was earmarked for contingencies, a compromise to cover unpaid medical bills without appearing to favor the injured over the dead.
♥ In each other's books, they took a real gamble, particularly Dylan. He wrote page after page of specific murder plans. They were at each other's mercy now. Exposure of the yearbooks could end their participation in Diversion and bring them back on felony charges. For the final year, each boy knew his buddy could get him imprisoned at any time, though they would both go down together. Mutually assured destruction.
♥ Despite the press's obsession with bullying and misfits, that's not how the boys presented themselves. Dylan laughed about picking on the new freshmen and "fags." Neither one complained about bullies picking on them-they boasted about doing it themselves.
♥ Psychopaths do not attempt to fool everyone. They save their performances for people with power over them or with something they need. If you saw the ugly side of Eric Harris, you meant nothing to him.
♥ The boys continued diverging philosophically: Eric held mastery over man and nature; Dylan was a slave to fate. And Dylan had a big surprise. He had no intention of inflicting Eric's massacre. He enjoyed the banter, but privately said good-bye. He expected his August 10 entry to be his last. Dylan was planning to kill himselfF long before NBK.
♥ Fuselier compared the dates of the public and private confessions: just two days between them. It was remarkable how often Eric addressed the same ideas in both venues, and how craftily he obscured his true intent.
Months after the attack, following a briefing on the killers, Toneli went to see Fuselier.
"I have to talk to you," he said. Fuselier sat down with him. Toneli was racked with guilt. "What did I miss here?" he asked.
Nothing, Fuselier said. Eric was convincing. He told you exactly what you wanted to hear. He didn't play innocent; he confessed to guilt and pleased for forgiveness. Civilians always believe a good psychopath.
♥ As he continued working, Patrick thought more about the lake. He knew he couldn't get on the water. He could hear the buzz of the boat, smell the water lapping the pier. Eventually, Patrick convinced his father to take him out to watch his sister make some practice runs. He loved waterskiing, John started the boat. As the engine sputtered, Patrick smelled the fumes, closed his eyes, and he was out there riding the surface again. He sat on the deck reliving it all. Then he began to cry. He shook violently. He swore. John rushed over to comfort him. He was inconsolable. He wasn't angry at his parents or himself or Eric and Dylan-he was just angry. He wanted his life back. He was never going to get it. John assured him they would get through this. Then he held on to Patrick and let him cry.
♥ The media had made their lives hell. And reporters could be counted on to appear in record numbers. The rally would include speeches and cheers and rock music and a ribbon cutting, but the heart of the event was a public rebuke of the media and a ceremonial reclaiming of the school-from them. Thousands of parents and neighbors would be recruited to form a human shield to rebuke the press. The shield would function both symbolically and practically. It would prevent reporters from performing their despicable job. They literally would not be able to see what was going on. The rally could have easily been planned for inside-virtually every school rally was. This event would be held outside specifically to stick it to the media. No doors or locks or walls would keep out the media; they would be blocked by a human wall of shame. And the school would dare them to try to cross it.
♥ Mr. D was excited about the rally. But he was also worried about the new kids. It was a principal's thing-the incoming freshmen always commanded his thoughts this time of year. Kids would either assimilate quickly or spend four years struggling to fit in. The first two weeks were crucial.
Mr. D chose to combat the chasm by highlighting it. He met with the academic and sports teams and the student senate over the summer, and he gave every kid and every teacher the same mission: These kids will never understand you. They will never endure your pain, never bridge the gap between social classes that you did. So help them.
By and large, they went for it. Kids thought they were overwhelmed by their own struggle, but what they really needed was someone else to look out for. They had to salve a different sort of pain to comprehend how to heal their own.
Mr. D's team brainstormed up a slew of activities to grease the transition. The wall tile project seemed like an easy one. For three years, kids had been painting four-inch ceramic tiles in art class. Five hundred had been plastered above the lockers to brighten the Columbine corridors. Fifteen hundred new tiles would be added before school resumed, representing the single most noticeable change to the interior. For one morning, kids could express their grief or hope or desires visually and abstractly, without the intervention of words that wouldn't come.
♥ Eric was counting on a slow recovery. He was less concerned about killing hundreds of people on April 20 than about tormenting millions for years. His audience was the target. He wanted everyone to agonize: the student body, residents of Jeffco, the American public, the human race.
Eric amused himself with the idea of coming back as a ghost to haunt survivors. He would make noises to trigger flashbacks, and drive them all insane. Anticipation satiated Eric for months. Then it was time to act.
♥ "I aint going out without a fight."
Eric repeated that last line almost verbatim in an English essay. The assignment was to react to a quote from literature, and Eric had chosen this line from Euripides' tragedy Medea: "No, like some yellow-eyed beast that has killed its hunters let me lie down on the hounds; bodies and the broken spears." Medea was declaring that she would die fighting, Eric wrote. They would never take her without a struggle. He repeated that sentiment seven times in a page and a quarter. He described Medea as brave and courageous, tough and strong and hard as stone. It is one of the most impassioned public essays Eric left behind.
For years after his death, Eric would be seen as a bundle of contradictions. But the threads come together in "I aint going out without a fight." Eric dreamed big but settled for reality. Unfortunately, that passage remained hidden from the public for years. Scattered quotes from his writings would leak out, and viewed as fragments, they could seem contradictory. Was Eric planning a gun battle or a plane crash or a terrorist attack bigger than Oklahoma City? If he was so intent on mass murder, why did he kill only thirteen? Trying to understand Eric from the information available was like reading every fifth page of a novel and concluding that none of it made sense.
Dr. Fuselier had the advantage of reading Eric's journal from start to finish. Without the holes, the thrust was obvious: humans meant nothing; Eric was superior and determined to prove it. Watching us suffer would be enjoyable. Every week he devised colorful new scenarios, including crashing planes into buildings, igniting blocks of skyscrapers, ejecting people into outer space. But the objective never wavered: kill as many as possible, as dramatically as imaginable.
In a perfect world, Eric would extinguish the species. Eric was a practical kid, though. The planet was beyond him; even a block of Denver highrises was out of reach. But he could pull off a high school.
A high school was pragmatic, but the choice was not arbitrary. If jocks had been his target, he could have just hit the gym. He could have killed the few thousand packing the bleachers at a Columbine football game. If he'd been after the social elites, he could have taken out prom just three days before. Eric attacked the symbol of his oppression: the robot factory and the hub of adolescent existence.
For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: "the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives," he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric's ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn't want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting even tor a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school.
Eric didn't have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as "performance violence." Terrorists design events "to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater."
..Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor-generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn't just fail to top Timothy McVeigh's record-he wasn't even recognized fro trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.
♥ The new year began, and it got worse. A young boy was found dead in a Dumpster a few blocks from Columbine High. On Valentine's day, two students were shot dead in a Subway shop two blocks from the school. The star of the basketball team committed suicide.
"Two weeks ago they found the kid in the Dumpster," a friend of the Subway victims told reporters. "Now-I kind of want to move. This is worse than Columbine." Students had grudgingly come to adopt their school's name as the title of a tragedy.
Some events were unrelated to the massacre or even the school. But much of the community had lost the ability to distinguish. Perspective was impossible. A fight with your girlfriend, a car crash, a drought.... it was all "Columbine." It was a curse. Kids were calling it the Columbine Curse.
Appointments at the mental health facility set up for Columbine survivors rose sharply through the fall. "Many come in after they've tried everything they know how to do," a psychologist on the team said. Utilization peaked about nine months after the tragedy and held steady until a year and a half out. At any given time during that period, case managers were following about fifteen kids on suicide watch. Gradually, each one came down from the brink, but another took that kid's place. Substance abuse spiked. The areas experienced a marked increase in traffic accidents and DUIs.
♥ Psychopaths generally turn to murder only when their callousness combines with a powerful sadistic streak. Psychologist Theodore Millon identified ten basic subtypes of the psychopath. Only two are characterized by brutality or murder: the malevolent psychopath and the tyrannical. In these rare subtypes, the psychopath is driven less by a greed for material gain than by desire for his own aggrandizement and the brutal punishment of inferiors.
Eric fit both categories. His sadistic streak permeated the journal, but a late-autumn entry suggests the life Eric might have led had Columbine not ended it. He described tricking girls to come to his room, raping them, and then proceeding to the real fun.
"I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can," he wrote. "I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is god."
♥ As the battle intensified, compassion fatigue set in. Hardly anyone said it out loud.
Chuck Green, a Denver Post columnist and one of Denver's nastier personalities, broke the ice. He stunned the families with a pair of columns, charging them with "milking" the tragedy.
They had gotten millions, he wrote. "It has been an avalanche of anguish never before witnessed, yet the Columbine victims still have their hands out for more."
The Parents Group was caught unaware. They'd had no idea. They were more stunned by the support for Green's ideas. "All of us are sick and tired of the continued whining," a reader responded. Another said those sentiments had been circulating for quite a while-"whispering in small circles, amongst clouds of guilt."
It was out in the open now.
♥ May 2, the governor and attorney general-the state's most prominent Republican and Democrat-put the first two signatures on the petition fro the Colorado ballot initiative. It required 62,438 signatures. They gathered nearly twice than many.
The measure would pass by a two-to-one margin. The gun-show loophole was closed in Colorado.
It was defeated in Congress. No significant national gun-control legislation was enacted in response to Columbine.
♥ On May 20, the second class of survivors graduated. Nine of the injured crossed the stage, two in wheelchairs. Patrick Ireland limped to the podium to give the valedictory address.
It had been a rough year, he said. "The shooting made the country aware of the unexpected level of hate and rage that had been hidden in high schools." But he was convinced the world was inherently good at heart. He had spent the year thinking about what had gotten him across the library floor. At first he assumed hope-not quite; it was trust. "When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me," he said. "That's what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time."
♥ 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, ans 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.
♥ 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 again. 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 theee 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.
..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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
..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 country 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.
♥ 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 he 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.
..[Judge Babcock] 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.
♥ 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 Port Collins, Colorado, middle school procured a similar arsenal: TEC-9, shotgun, rifles and propane bombs.
..But they leaked. Kids nearly always leak. The bigger the plot, the wider the leakage.
..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 of 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 s 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.
..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 attack. 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.
♥ 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.
..This is exactly the sort of 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.
♥ Fuselier understood 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.
♥ 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."
..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.
♥ He sat on his bed, pointing the camera at is 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.
♥ Five days before Judgment Day, 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.
♥ 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.
♥ Monday morning, around nine 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."
♥ Their marriage was shaky sometimes, but they held on. Nearly all the parents of the Thirteen stayed together.
♥ 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 them all. Many accepted his offer.
♥ 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 blood-lust. 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.
♥ 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.
..They roamed aimlessly upstairs. To civilians, it seems odd that they stropped 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 dew days. Eric was likely proud and inflated, but tired of it already. Dylan was less predictable, but probably resembled a bipolar 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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 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 tears, nothing trumped a grieving dad.