Columbine by Dave Cullen. (3/3)
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 Afterword, Epilogue and Appendices in this post, refer to PART 1 and PART 2 for the rest of the quotes).
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ "Did your child die recently?"
"When your child dies, it's always recent," Linda shot back.
Later, she felt guilty. "I overreact sometimes," she admitted. But she resents those people terribly. Complacent people. The insensitive and oblivious, who can't understand the depth of her pain or what's taking so damn long to unload it.
Most of all, Linda hates the timeline. Who devised it? Who decreed when the tears were scheduled to dry? She isn't sure, but there is a "reasonable" grieving period out there and she has grossly exceeded it. Linda sees no end to her grief. Or the subtle put-downs.
♥ Linda Mauser is angry. This is how she sees it:
Linda is angry at the cops, the school, the church she finally abandoned. The cops let her down repeatedly: forming a perimeter, letting Dave Sanders die, and covering up the search warrant. Sheriff Stone, what a bungling buffoon. Mr. D has a lot to answer for, and the superintendent-"I kind of hated Kane Hammond for a while," she says. "Cold and bureaucratic and conveniently out of the country." That is nothing compared to the staff at the middle school who almost let her daughter die. Christie Mauser took her brother's murder hard. Then a group of girls began bullying her. Teachers brushed it off. Christie was borderline suicidal. A bureaucrat refused a tutor request. They totally underestimated the trauma. That's how Linda views it. The memory still sends her into a rage.
Linda is angry at Evangelical Christians who cast Columbine as religious warfare, and two pastors in particular: Rev. Billy Epperhart at Trinity Christian Center and Rev. Franklin Graham. Don't get her started on her own parish, St. Frances Cabrini. From the start, she felt a cold shoulder at St. Frances Cabrini.
..After about six more years, she left.
Linda is angry at Robyn Anderson, Mark Manes, and Phil Duran for acquiring the guns, though she ca no longer recall the boys' names. She is angry at the NRA, and at Congress and the Colorado legislature for appeasing it.
..Linda is angry at conspiracy theorists, Eric- and Dylan-sympathizers who build Web sites honoring the killers, film directors and musicians who glorify violence, and American culture for lapping it up. She is angry at Brian Rohrbough "always stirring the pot," and a couple of other victims for always getting their way. She is angry at many former friends and remaining relatives. She was angry, for years, at God. She reconciled with Him, "But it's not exactly hearts and flowers. I still pray, but I don't expect results." She is angry at herself. Linda is not, however, angry at the killers.
"I was never angry at Eric or Dylan," she says. She was mystified, beyond all reason. "Why would you want to shoot Daniel?"
How could she blame two kids for going astray? "I was angry with the parents."
Meeting Wayne and Kathy Harris helped. A bit. It was a long time coming.
♥ Strangers bring it up unwittingly, in the most unexpected ways. "How do you answer 'How many kids do you have?'" he asks.
Both answers feel dishonest, or disloyal. Both raise practical problems. Sometimes he says two: Then they ask about Steven. Oh, he was murdered. Other times, he says Just a daughter who doesn't talk to me anymore. But later, he'll tell an anecdote about Steven playing soccer, and they'll call him on it.
It always comes back to Columbine.
♥ Bob is so grateful to Patrick Ireland, who crawled right up to Steven's body as he made his way to the library window. Patrick came to see Bob later, and told him he remembered Steven's face. He looked peaceful. That image saved Bob Curnow. Steven is frozen at fourteen for him. Frozen at peace. Bob has been hanging by the thread of that solace for more than a decade. He is grateful to Patrick and so proud of his recovery. But it hurts a bit, too. He turned down Patrick's wedding invitation. Bob told him, "It's hard for me to visualize that Steven's not here, you are."
Bob sees great joy in so many of the survivors. Patrick found the bright side quickly and never let it go. Bob forgave the killers early. Happiness is a little harder to forgive.
♥ The hardest part for Val was forgiving them for killing her close friend Lauren Townsend. It was hard to forgive on someone else's behalf. But today, Val feels no ill will toward Eric and Dylan.
She'd forgiven their parents even earlier. "Very early on, I understood, I sympathized," she said. "They lost a kid. Eric and Dylan were somebody's kids."
♥ Val Schnurr is the girl who actually professed her faith in the library. Cassie's mistaken martyrdom provoked vicious attacks on Val. In the midst of her recovery and her grief over Lauren, she was accused of lying relentlessly. "I was so mad at Craig. His screwup caused a lot of negativity to me. It's hurtful when you're telling the Cassie story. I felt they were part of this contingent that was calling me a liar."
"It was an attack on my character," she said. "That's why it's been harder to get over." Harder than the attack that almost killed her, she means. The dying and the wounding is over, but the liar charge lives on.
~~from Afterword: "Forgiveness."
♥ Years immersed in the psyches of two killers, that's the hazard I guarded against. Unnecessary. Eric was like examining a disease under a microscope. He didn't get inside me. Dylan seeped in surreptitiously. His funeral scene was the second-hardest to write. I cried for his parents, and his brother, and Reverend Don Marxhausen, knowing what that service would cost him. I realized later that I was grieving for Dylan, too. What a sweet, loving kid. Most of his life. That shocked me, but I didn't grasp how it tormented me. Lost boy, we could have saved him. I see now that I always felt that way, even when I hated him-I just didn't know.
♥ I tried again, to imagine the impact on these people, but who were they? Boys? Girls? Teachers? Who were their families, and what would it do to them? I couldn't picture anything, or summon a feeling worthy of it, so my brain settled on numb.
I thought the moms and dads of the dead would most distress me. No. It was the lost kids with the vacant eyes. The sea of survivors who had escaped the gunfire and wondered why. They trudged around the vestibule of Light of the World Church, awaiting the first official meeting the morning after. I recognized kids there. I'd seen them running, shouting, wailing, hugging and squeezing so fervently. Adrenaline off the charts. Overnight, they had changed. Dry eyes, mumbled voices, flat effects, limp hugs. Most unnerving, though, was the collective stillness. All the nervous energy teens radiate-a handful spill into a theater and you can feel the current ricochet off the walls. A thousand teens surrounded me in that chamber, yet I could close my eyes and believe I was totally alone.
The boys, in particular, were barely recognizable. Did they know? Did it scare them? It was terrifying me. I couldn't figure out how to ask. I didn't want to be that jerk telling them how they felt.
Later, in Clement Park, where they resumed plodding in packs, I got an idea. I chatted up a group of boys, cocked my head toward another cluster, and mentioned that they didn't seem to be crying. That was all it took. They couldn't wait to spill their stories: how and when the tears stopped, abruptly, like a switch flicked off. All afternoon, I heard the same story: different times and situations, but no trigger, no warning, no explanation, just boom: all emotion mute. Which terrified them. Some tried to cry; a girl described feeling detached from her personality, like it had escaped her body, floating out there, somewhere-but how to get it back? Yes! her friends cried. That was the feeling.
They were so relieved to confess to an adult. They were hoping I could explain it. Was this normal? How long would it last? Exactly the questions I had. And one more, which they must have been thinking, perhaps too scary to broach: Would they get better? Feeling would return, surely, but the damage-was it permanent? Thank God they didn't ask.
My focus shifted that morning, to the living. I still hadn't internalized what fifteen dead meant-thirteen victims and two perpetrators. I felt awful for them, whoever they were, but too late to save them. Here were two thousand kids, in danger but reachable, hopefully.
I'm often asked what made me spend a decade on Columbine. It was that day and those kids. Eventually, two questions drove me. The second was why. Why drove me nuts. But the question that started and sustained me was what would become of those two thousand kids.
I underestimated the pain I would absorb from them, but also the light. I dedicated this book to the thirteen because of their loss, and Patrick Ireland because he got me through. The good and bad he told, without pretense or whiff of ego. Each time we spoke, over months and then years, he remained unfazed, unflappable. I clung to the resilience he exuded. If he can overcome that, with grace and humility-and joy-I can do this.
♥ April 20, I left home about 11:45 A.M. and drove out to this school I'd never heard of, and spent nine hours in Clement Park. Around sunset, I spotted the first Red Cross volunteers. Two guys carrying cardboard boxes sliced into trays with four-inch sides. One had cold water bottles, the other had bags of chips. They walked by calling out, "Anybody thirsty? Hungry?" That triggered it: God, was I parched! Hungry, too, but no time for that.
"Yes!" I said instinctively, and reached out my hand toward the water guy.
He smiled, and handed one over, but before I got a grip on it, I realized my error and stammered something like, "Oh. For the victims. I'm a reporter. Sorry." I dropped my hand, a little ashamed. Stealing from the collection plate-didn't mean it, I swear.
I remember the exact words that came next.
"Are you thirsty?"
"Yeah."
"Then it's for you."
He reached out the bottle again.
I took it.
I think he foresaw something I didn't. Everyone present was in for a rough ride. Through it all, that tiny act of kindness buttressed my sense of humanity. Somebody cared. More than sixteen years later, I draw solace from the memory.
♥ Spectacle murder is all about TV. The media has two categories for these performances: one-day wonders or breathless, incessant Story of the Week. Within an hour of gunfire, my inbox tells me how they will be slotted: inundated by requests to write and speak, or nothing. I've become a go-to guy on mass murder; that makes me wince. It's unsettling, but gives me something constructive to do. I got muddled in this morass so long ago, but I waded in willingly. When it gets to me, I think of Coni Sanders-how much harder she has it and how gracefully she handles it. She was thrust in brutally, when her dad, Dave, bled to death. She can never escape it. Nor can John and Kathy Ireland, Don Marxhausen, Aaron Hancey, Kiki Leyba, John Savage, Frank Ochberg nor Mary WEllen O'Toole. So many others, so many walks of life. Many of those people I've come to know and admire. Others I still wonder about, and worry about. I have the luxury of stepping away anytime. But I couldn't live with myself-not until we get control of this blight.
..In August 2015, a fired reporter in Roanoke shot two colleagues on live TV. As a backup, he filmed the act with a phone camera and uploaded it to Facebook and Twitter. That night, I couldn't quell my anger. I horrified a CNN anchor by addressing the killers bluntly. If you're planning a spectacle murder, here's what you do, I said: Two routes to that elite club with the star treatment: body count, or creativity. Choose body count, and you've got to break into the top ten. The media loves scorekeeping and will herald your achievement with a banner beneath the victims as they grieve. For creatives, go for originality and horror. Shock us with little kids at Newtown, Amish in Pennsylvania, or a Congresswoman you don't care about. Maximizing the savage nature. Make us fear movie theaters, or churches or temples-and a Joker costume at a Batman movie takes theatrics literally. Live TV was a great twist-only took two victims in Roanoke to get the big-star treatment. Surprise us.
That was flippant and disgusting, which was my point. These are the tactics the killers have turned on us so callously. They cracked the media code. Easily. If this is news to the media, we are the last to know. If we care about ending this, we in the media need to see our role as clearly as the perps have. We did not start this, nor have we pulled any triggers. But the killers have made us reliable partners. We supply the audience, they provide the show.
♥ The limelight. That is the element that boggles most minds. That is the most common, most baffled question I get: What is so alluring about fame?
Fame. Cab we strike that word from the conversation? They are not lusting to pose on a red carpet, or get welcomed to a late-night set by Stephen Colbert. Most are desperate boys yearning to salve a deep wound. Insignificance. Worthlessness. Social invisibility. This boy has dreamed and prayed, for so long, of someone loving him, noticing him, above all respecting him. Not that he deserves it. He sure doesn't respect himself.
When hope runs dry, prayers unanswered, a fraction of these boys kill themselves. That ends the pain but doesn't mend the wound. Suicide confirms their pathetic status. But a thunderstroke, desolation of a community, shock across the country-that rates awe. Respect. He is heralded as a mastermind. Everything he craved.
Baffling from our point of view, logical from his.
That's why the spectacle is so integral. Awe is proportional to grandeur. Eric inspired these boys with apocalyptic dreams.
"The power and glory of the apocalyptic is both performance and the curtain closer," a leading expert on these killers recently told me. I consult with him often, but he prefers anonymity. "Those who are depressed and suicidal find this type of denouement to be very seductive," he said.
O'Toole concurs. "The ideation of annihilation preexists the access to weapons, and starts very early in life," she told me. "It is a copy behavior." O'Toole organized the Leesburg summit, authored the FBI report on school shooters, and is widely regarded as one of the leading thinkers on mass killers.
At the origin of all this, Dylan Klebold foresaw the elation of that glory. His creative writing story presaging the attack ended with his adoring gaze at the murderer he had just imagined: "I not only saw in his face, but also felt eminating [sic] from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness....If I could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man."
We see selfish little monsters. They anticipate emotions of god.
♥ The Columbine aficionados come in many stripes. Some just want to understand the tragedy. But many girls romanticize the killers, with sexually graphic stories and images. Girls gravitate to Dylan: the smoldering, sad lost boy. But nearly all buy into the script of outcasts taking down their oppressors. Most blame the victims.
Aside from the depravity of that script, it's wrong. Dr. Frank Ochberg, first drawn into the case at the FBI's Leesburg summit in 1999, is incredulous at the bogus script. "They did not feel any compassion for the targets of the bullets," he said. "Eric Harris was a psychopath, he was a narcissist, he was a sadist. He wasn't out to bully bullies, he was out to hurt the people he looked down upon." That would be humans, all of us.
Nearly every expert brought onto the case agrees.
And how would the killer these boys aspire to become feel about the script ascribed to him? Well, he told us. "The majority of the audience wont even understand my motives either!" Eric ranted in his journal. "All you fuckers should die. DIE!"
♥ Jeffco should have eradicated the bully myth early by simply releasing the killers' journals. Myths percolated for seven years while Jeffco suppressed them. They were a revelation. Eric and Dylan documented their grievances exhaustively. Bullies were never mentioned.
Amid a year of relentless ridiculing, insulting, and complaining, Eric's journal registers two brief complaints, five days apart, about people making fun of him, not complimenting him enough and failing to ask for his guidance. In the same entries, he admits to making fun of others, loving Nazis, hating nigs and spics, and a vicious, detailed rape fantasy. What a surprise that kids mouthed off at him. That's not bullying, just conflict.
There's another pernicious myth: that Eric and Dylan succeeded. Measured by their own standards, Columbine was a colossal failure. Thirteen dead instead of hundreds. No rubble, no inferno. Pathetic pipe bombs that made a bang and injured no one. They sought to dwarf Oklahoma City, didn't even resemble it. So unrecognizable as terrorism that we ranked them first among school shooters they ridiculed. And what an exit. That must have pissed Eric off. He envisioned a blaze of glory, gleefully describing a cop shooting him in the head. Nope. Back to the commons for a last-ditch stab at apocalypse. They threw everything they had at the bombs: failure. Failure. Suicide by cop from the library windows? Failure. Dylan wouldn't even walk through his own carnage; Eric's face was throbbing from a broken nose. Out of options, they surrendered with their own weapons in their own filth.
Killers keep trying to relive the glory and elation at Columbine. There was none. Double-false script.
♥ ..but for God's sake stop framing mental health that way! That's a complex system with massive problems, and even my eyes glaze over at the phrase. Narrow the focus to teen depression. The Secret Service report stated that 61 percent of shooters "had a documented history of feeling extremely depressed or desperate." A whopping 78 percent exhibited a history of suicide attempts of suicidal thoughts. And current shooters are well aware almost none survive, so virtually 100 percent of them are attempting suicide. Murder-suicides. Seen by us as murder, driven in them as suicide. It's desperation spawning the apocalyptic dreams. No despair, nothing to solve. But "suicide" is freighted with sympathy for its "victim." We recoil at those terms. That is why our response is so unfocused. To fight atrocities, we have to view them through the killers' depressed eyes.
..By pairing "mental health" to "screening for teen depression," we can tackle a key element within reach. It's cheap, simple, and can reach boys early in their death spiral. Supportive schools are crucial, too: teachers, administrators, and students who care. Everyone targeting troubled kids-to help them.
We should not be identifying teen depression just because of school shooters. We should do it to slash school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol addiction, car accidents, and general misery. But if we are primed to act, this is the answer. Teen depression: the great unlearned lesson of Columbine.
♥ The media offers two options, but isn't it missing the obvious? Itself. These are Made for TV movies, by boys desperate to be heard. Why do we keep handing them the mic?
We should not stop reporting these, we should rethink how. Diminish the killer. We must name and show him, but how do we justify the endless repetition? How about once and done? Once per show? Deflect the spotlight, to relegate him to a dim supporting role. Victim focus takes more effort, but Anderson Cooper has been running that experiment successfully since 2012. Each attack, his show does brief updates on the killers, then most of the hour on victim. They avoid naming or showing the killer. It's been remarkably easy, and remains CNN's highest-rated show.
..Scaling back coverage, that will be the tough nut. But it will be the most significant. These are big stories, but 24/7 is exclusively about ratings. Change might dent those a few nights a year. Worth the price?
This is up to the journalism profession to sort out. Disagreement over how to respond is reasonable. Pretending we're not part of it is a fantasy. And deplorable.
♥ Coni responded to Eric and Dylan by earning her PhD in psychology, and working with perpetrators of violence. It requires tremendous empathy for "the enemy." But that's the only way to reach them.
~~from Epilogue: Apocalyptic Dreams.
♥ the Psychopathy Checklist: All characterizations if psychopathy in this book were based on the latest research, founded primarily on the work of Dr. Hervey Cleckley and systematically refined by Dr. Robert Hare. Hare's revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) is used to assess the subject on twenty characteristics, organized into two categories: emotional drivers and antisocial behavior. The twenty are: 1) glib and superficial charm, 2) grandiose estimation of self, 3) need for stimulation, 4) pathological lying, 5) cunning and manipulativeness, 8) callousness and lack of empathy, 9) parasitic lifestyle, 10) poor behavioral controls, 11) sexual promiscuity, 12) early behavior problems, 13) lack of realistic long-term goals, 14) impulsivity, 15) irresponsibility, 16) failure to accept responsibility for own actions, 17) many short-term marital relationships, 18) juvenile delinquency, 19) revocation of conditional release, 20) criminal versatility.
The item titles cannot be scored without reference to the formal criteria contained in the PCL-R Manual. It is issued only to qualified practitioners, who are instructed to combine interviews with case histories and archival data. But in many cases, such as Columbine, the subject is not available for an interview. Studies by outside researchers have concluded that the tool is reliable without the interview in situations where extensive, reliable data is available. Eric left a massive trove, which experts considered far more than enough data to assess him.
Evaluators rate the subject on each trait, assigning a score from 0 to 2: 2 if it clearly applied, 1 if it applies partially or sometimes, 0 if never. The maximum score is 40, and a 30 is required for the designation of "psychopath." There are degrees of psychopathy, but most subjects turn out to be either highly psychopathic or not at all. Average criminals score about 20; they share some behavior with psychopaths but few of the underlying drives.
~~from Notes in Appendices.