Columbine (47 page)

There were three paragraphs about advance warning by the Browns: one paragraph summarizing and two defending. The department claimed it had been unable to access Eric's Web site, despite the fact that officials had printed the pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found. But a year after the murders, Jeffco was still suppressing the file and the search warrants. So the families suspected a lie, but they couldn't prove it.

Jeffco was ridiculed for its report. Officials seemed truly bewildered by the response. Privately, they insisted they were just acting the way they always did: building a case internally, keeping their conclusions to themselves. Communicating the results was the prosecutors' role. It wasn't their job. They still couldn't grasp that this was not any normal case.

____

As the battles 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.

____

The anniversary also offered a window of political opportunity. Tom Mauser had been energized at the NRA protest and devoted himself to the cause. "I am not a natural leader, but speaking out helps me because it carries on Daniel's life," he said. Tom took a one-year leave of absence to serve as chief lobbyist for SAFE Colorado (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic). They supported several bills in the Colorado legislature to limit access to guns for minors and criminals. Prospects looked good, especially for the flagship proposal to close the gun-show loophole. It was narrowly defeated in February. A similar measure bogged down in Congress.

So a week before the anniversary, President Clinton returned to Denver to encourage survivors and support SAFE's new strategy: to pass the same measure in Colorado with a ballot initiative.

Colorado Republican leaders rebuked the president and refused to appear with him. Republican Governor Bill Owens supported the ballot initiative but refused to attend an MSNBC town hall meeting hosted by Tom Brokaw until President Clinton left the stage, midway through the show.

The visit appeared to force a little movement in Washington. Just before the meeting with Brokaw, House leaders announced a bipartisan compromise on gun-show legislation. But it had been a year already, and there was still a long way to go.

Tom Mauser kept fighting. At a rally the same week, SAFE spread 4,223 pairs of shoes across the state capitol steps--one for each minor killed by a gun in 1997. Tom took the sneakers off his feet and held them up to the crowd. They had been Daniel's. Tom took to wearing them to rallies. He needed a tangible link to his son. And they helped the shy man connect Daniel to his audience.

May 2, the governor and attorney general--the state's most prominent Republican and Democrat--put the first two signatures on the petition for the Colorado ballot initiative. It required 62,438 signatures. They gathered nearly twice that 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.

____

The season ended well. 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."

PART V

JUDGMENT DAY

48. An Emotion of God

E
ric 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.