Columbine (34 page)

Eric told Dr. Albert he had anger problems. Depression was an issue. He had contemplated suicide. He apparently did not mention the bombs he took to the park the previous evening. Dr. Albert started him on Zoloft, a prescription antidepressant. Eric continued meeting with him biweekly, and Wayne and Kathy began occasional sessions as well.

At home, the boys received similar punishments. Each was grounded for a month, and forbidden contact with the other. Eric also had his computer access revoked. He went to work on his pipe bombs. He lost one--or perhaps left it as a warning or clue. On February 15, the day before Eric's first appointment with Dr. Albert, someone in the neighborhood stumbled upon his work: a duct-taped PVC pipe in the grass with a red fuse protruding. Kind of an odd sight for a suburban park in Jeffco. The Jeffco cops sent out an investigator from the bomb squad. Sure enough, it was a homemade pipe bomb. Officers didn't find a whole lot of those around here. The investigator defused the bomb and filed a report.

____

Eric and Dylan hid their arrest from friends. They made excuses about their restrictions. Finally they began to come clean. Eric fessed up to a girl at Blackjack, and word traveled to Nate Dykeman. Nate couldn't believe Dylan had been hiding it from him.

"Is this the reason you can't go out?" Nate asked. Dylan turned red.

"He didn't want to talk about it," Nate said later.

After word leaked, Eric told friends it was the most embarrassing moment of his life.

Both boys were humiliated. And Eric was raging mad. Dylan's response was more complex. Three days after his arrest, Dylan pictured himself on the road to happiness with Harriet. He sketched it out in his journal as a two lane highway with a road sign off one shoulder and a dashed stripe down the center. His road led off to a majestic row of mountains, with a giant heart guiding him onward. "Its so great to love," he wrote. He was a felon now, but he was ecstatic. He filled half the page with drawings and exclamations: "I love her, & she loves me."

Anger boiled up with the ecstasy. Dylan was beginning to see it Eric's way: "the real people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies, but we know & love being superior.... either ill commit suicide, or ill get w Harriet & it will be NBK for us. My happiness. her happiness. NOTHING else matters."

Suicide or murder? The pattern solidified: homicidal thoughts occasionally, self-destruction on every page. "If, by love's choice, Harriet didn't love me id slit my wrist & blow up Atlanta strapped to my neck," he wrote. Eric had named one of his pipe bombs Atlanta.

____

Wayne Harris kept working the phones. By early March, he secured an evaluation with Andrea Sanchez, a counselor with the juvenile Diversion program. Sanchez placed calls to Eric and Dylan to prescreen them. They passed. She sent a dozen forms and set up appointments. Each boy would come to her office with a parent and the stack of paperwork. Both intake sessions would take place on March 19.

For two months, Wayne Harris worked to get his son into Diversion, to keep his record clean. Eric was busy, too. He was detonating his first pipe bombs. He boldly posted the breakthrough on his Web site: "Mother fucker blew BIG. Flipping thing was heart-pounding gut-wrenching brain-twitching ground-moving insanely cool! His brothers haven't found a target yet though."

This time, Eric was producing to kill. Contempt had been the undercurrent in his "I HATE" rants; now he made it explicit. Morons had nerve to judge him, he said. To call him crazy just for envisioning mass murder? Empty, vacuous morons standing in judgment? "if you got a problem with my thoughts, come tell me and ill kill you," he posted. "DEAD PEOPLE DON'T ARGUE! God DAMNIT I AM PISSED!!"

____

As Eric embraced murder, Dylan retreated. After the arrest, he had the one brief outburst in his journal, and then he dropped all mention of it for nearly a year. Dylan still fretted about "this toilet earth," but his focus shifted dramatically toward love. Love. It had been prominent from the first page of his journal, but now, a year in, it grew overwhelming. He emblazoned entire pages with ten-inch hearts, surrounded by choirs of smaller, fluttering hearts.

Eric had no use for love. Sex, maybe. He shared none of Dylan's desires for truth, beauty, or ethereal love. Eric's only internal struggle concerned which stupid bastard was more deserving of his wrath.

Eric's dreams changed after his arrest. Human extinction was still his aim, but for the first time he made the leap from observer to enforcer. "I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole fucking area full of you snotty ass rich mother fucking high strung godlike attitude having worthless pieces of shit whores," he wrote. He posted this openly on his Web site. "i dont care if I live or die in the shootout," he wrote. "all I want to do is kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can!"

____

It was too much for Dylan. Kill? Everything? Apparently not. He made a stunning move behind Eric's back. He told. He told the worst possible person: Brooks Brown. Brooks knew about the petty vandalism, and his parents saw Eric as a young criminal, but they had no idea how serious it was.

On the way to class, Dylan handed Brooks a scrap of paper. Just one line was written on it: a Web address.

"I think you should take a look at this tonight," Dylan said.

"OK. Anything special?"

"It's Eric's Web site. You need to see it. And you can't tell Eric I gave it to you."

Brooks pulled up the site that night. Eric was threatening to kill people. He threatened to kill Brooks personally, in three different places.

Dylan leaked the URL to Brooks the day before their admission interviews for the Diversion program. If Brooks told his parents--and Dylan knew he told Judy
everything
--the Browns would go straight to the cops, and Eric would be rejected and imprisoned for a felony. Dylan probably would be, too. He took that chance.

Brooks did tell his mom. Randy and Judy called the cops. Jeffco investigators came out that night. They followed up, they filed reports, but they did not alert the DA's office. Eric and Dylan proceeded into Diversion.

____

Only one parent was required at the Diversion intake meeting. Tom and Sue Klebold both attended. They considered it important. They filled out an eight-page questionnaire about Dylan, he did the same, and then Andrea Sanchez walked them through the results. The Klebolds were in for a few surprises. Dylan copped to five or six drunken bouts, starting at age fifteen. "Was not aware of it at all--until Andrea Sanchez asked the question a few moments ago," his parents wrote. Apparently they were unaware his nickname was VoDKa.

Dylan claimed he had quit drinking. He didn't like the taste and said it "wasn't worth it." He had tried pot, too, and rejected it for the same reasons. His parents were stunned about marijuana, too.

Tom and Sue were candid; it was the only ethical course. "Dylan is introverted and has grown up isolated," they wrote. "He is often angry or sullen, and behaviors seem disrespectful to and intolerant of others." They wrote a line about disrespecting authority figures, crossed it out, and then said that teachers had reported that he didn't listen or take correction well.

Eric was more cautious. He revealed just enough to appear confessional. He said he had tasted alcohol three times, had never gotten drunk, and had given it up for good. Exactly what a parent wanted to hear. It was vintage Eric--more believable than abstinence and reassuring to boot: he had faced the temptation already and the danger had passed. He understood how his parents thought, and in no time he'd read Andrea Sanchez. In their first meeting, he turned an admission into a virtue. He lied about pot, too. He claimed he had no interest. The alcohol admission gave the claim credence.

Wayne and Kathy both attended their session as well. Their surprise came in the mental health section. On a checklist of thirty potential problem areas, they marked three boxes: anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Eric had told them about those three, and he discussed them with Dr. Albert. He was getting help. Everyone agreed the Zoloft was helping, too. It was common for an adolescent to check several boxes. Eric picked fourteen. He marked virtually everything related to distrust or aggression. He checked jealousy, anxiety, suspiciousness, authority figures, temper, racing thoughts, obsessive thoughts, mood swings, and disorganized thoughts. He skipped suicidal thoughts, but he checked homicidal thoughts.

Wayne and Kathy worried about Eric suppressing his anger. They admitted that he would blow up now and then--lashing out verbally or hitting an object. He never tried it in front of his dad, but they'd gotten reports back from work and school. It didn't happen often, but they were concerned. Eric responded well to discipline. They had controlled his behavior, but how could they contain his moods? When he really got mad, Eric said, he would punch a wall. He had thought about suicide, but never seriously, and mostly out of anger. He got angry all the time, he said, at almost anything he didn't like.

Eric was seething as he scrawled out his answers, and he practically told them so on the form. The nerve of these lowlifes judging him. He explained how he hated fools telling him what to do. In the interview, he apparently directed his anger at
other
fools. They fell for it.

Eric would howl about it later. The partial confession was his favorite con of all. He could turn over half his cards and still pull off the bluff.

He posted his actual thoughts about the legal system on his Web site at around this same time: "My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. If you don't like it, you die." He described going to some random downtown area in some big city and blowing up and shooting up everything he could. He assured us he would feel no remorse, no sorrow, no shame. Yet there he sat, submitting. He bent to their will; he filled out their degrading form. Laughing on the inside was insufficient. He would make them pay.

____

Sanchez worried about the boys' failure to accept full responsibility. Eric was sticking to his story that the break-in was Dylan's fault. Dylan thought the whole thing was a little overblown. Sanchez noted her reservations but recommended them for enrollment.

The final decision was up to the court. A week later, on March 25, Eric and Dylan stood before Jeffco Magistrate John DeVita during a joint hearing. Their fathers stood beside them. That impressed DeVita. Most of the juveniles appeared alone, or with just a mom. Dads were a good sign. And these dads appeared to be taking control of the situation. DeVita was also impressed by the punishments they had imposed. "Good for you, Dad," he said. "It sounds to me like you got the circumstances under control."

"This has been a rather traumatic experience," Tom Klebold told him. "I think it's probably good, a good experience, that they got caught the first time."

"He'd tell you if there were any more?"

"Yes, he would actually."

DeVita didn't buy it. "First time out of the box and you get caught?" he asked Eric. "I don't believe it. It's a real rare occurrence when somebody gets caught the first time."

But he was impressed by the way the boys presented themselves: dressed up, well behaved, deferential.
Yes, Your Honor
and
No, Your Honor.
They respected the court, and it showed.

DeVita pegged Dylan as well. The B's and C's on his report card were a joke. "I bet you're an A student," DeVita said. "If you put the brainpower to the paperwork."

DeVita gave them a lecture; then he approved them for Diversion. This pair was going to do just fine, he thought.

Fourteen months later, after the murders, DeVita lamented how convincing the boys had been. "What's mind-boggling is the amount of deception," he said. "The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception."

____

Judy and Randy Brown kept calling the cops. They were sure Brooks was in danger. Their other son was so scared he slept with a baseball bat. After two weeks of their pestering, the case was bumped up to Investigator John Hicks, who met with Judy. On March 31, he sat down with two other investigators, Mike Guerra and Glenn Grove, to discuss it. The situation looked pretty bad--bad enough for Investigator Guerra to type out a two-page affidavit for a search warrant, "duly sworn upon oath."

Guerra did good work. In the affidavit, he dramatically outlined all the crucial elements of the case against this kid. He detailed the specificity of Eric's plans, his methods, and his ordnance. He quoted liberally from Eric's Web site to provide proof. But most important, Guerra drew the connection to physical evidence: a bomb matching those in Eric's descriptions had recently been discovered near his home. The Harris house was to be searched for any literature, notes, or physical material related to the construction of explosives, as well as all e-mail correspondence--presumably to include the Web site.

The affidavit was convincing. It was filed. It was not signed or taken before a judge. It was not acted upon in any way. A plausible explanation for inaction was never provided. Years later, one official said Guerra was drawn away to another case, and when he returned, the affidavit, as written, lacked the timeliness required to take it to a judge.

The Browns said that Investigator Hicks also knew about Eric's arrest for the van break-in. There was no indication that he or anyone from the sheriff's department ever relayed their damning evidence about Eric to the Diversion officers. Magistrate DeVita was provided no indication before he approved them for the program.

Senior officials from the sheriff's department, the DA's office, and the criminal court were unaware of one another's actions concerning Eric. But Eric apparently knew what they were all up to. Eric got wind that the Browns were on to him, so he took his Web site down for a while. There is no indication he ever learned of Dylan's betrayal. There is no sign that he suspected.

Eric was getting serious about his plans now, and he would not risk posting anything about them on the Web again. He pulled out a spiral notebook and began a journal. For the next year, he would record his progress toward the attack and thoroughly explain his motives.