Columbine (37 page)

"I feel like God," Eric announced. "I am higher than almost anyone in the fucking world in terms of universal intelligence." In time, his superiority would be revealed. In the interim, Eric dubbed his journal "The Book of God." The breadth of his hostility was equally melodramatic.

Humans were pathetic fuckheads too dense to perceive their lifeless existence. We frittered our lives away like automatons, following orders rather than realizing our potential: "ever wonder why we go to school?" he asked. "its not to obvious to most of you stupid fucks but for those who think a little more and deeper you should realize it is societies way of turning all the young people into good little robots." Human nature was smothered by society; healthy instincts were smothered by laws. They were training us to be assembly-line robots; that's why they lined the school desks up in rows and trained kids to respond to opening and closing bells. The monotonous human assembly line squelched the life out of individual experience. As Eric put it, "more of your human nature blown out your ass."

Philosophically, the robotic conception was a rare point of agreement between the killers. Dylan referred often to zombies, too. Both boys described their uniqueness as self-awareness. They could see through the human haze. But Dylan saw his distinction as a lonely curse. And he looked on the zombies compassionately; Dylan yearned for the poor little creatures to break out of their boxes.

The problem, as Eric saw it, was natural selection. He had alluded to the concept on his Web site; here he explained--relentlessly. Natural selection had failed. Man had intervened. Medicines, vaccines, and special ed programs had conspired to keep the rejects in the human herd. So Eric was surrounded by inferiors--who would not shut their freaking mouths! How could he tolerate all the miserable chatter?

He had lots of ideas. Nuclear holocaust, biological warfare, imprisoning the species in a giant Ultimate Doom game.

But Eric was also realistic. He couldn't restore the natural order, but he could impose some selection of his own. He would sacrifice himself to accomplish it. "I know I will die soon," he wrote; "so will you and everyone else."

By soon, he meant a year. Eric had a remarkably long time horizon for a seventeen-year-old contemplating his own death.

The lies jumped out at Fuselier. Eric took giddy pleasure in his deceptions. "I lie a lot," he wrote. "Almost constant. and to everybody. just to keep my own ass out of the water. lets see, what are some big lies I have told; 'yeah I stopped smoking' 'for doing it not for getting caught,' 'no I haven't been making more bombs.'"

Eric did not believe in God, but he enjoyed comparing himself to Him. Like Dylan, he did so frequently but not delusionally--they were
like
God: superior in insight, intelligence, and awareness. Like Zeus, Eric created new rules, angered easily, and punished people in unusual ways. Eric had conviction. Eric had a plan. Eric would get the guns and build the explosives and maim and kill and so much more. They would terrify way beyond their gun blasts. The ultimate weapon was TV. Eric saw past the Columbine commons. He might kill hundreds, but the dead and dismembered meant nothing to him. Bit players--who cared? The performance was not
about
them. Eric's one-day-only production was about the audience.

The irony was, his attack was too good for his victims--it would sail right over their heads. "the majority of the audience wont even understand," Eric lamented. Too bad. They would feel the power of his hand: "if we have figured out the art of time bombs before hand, we will set hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations." "it'll be like the LA riots, the oklahoma bombing, WWII, vietnam, duke and doom all mixed together. maybe we will even start a little rebellion or revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. i want to leave a lasting impression on the world."

____

Dr. Fuselier set down the journal. It had taken him about an hour to read, that first time, in the noisy Columbine band room, two or three days after the murders. Now he had a pretty good hunch about what he was dealing with: a psychopath.

PART IV

TAKE BACK THE SCHOOL

40. Psychopath

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-COP-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. "its just all 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 subjects 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 in 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.

Symptoms appear so early, and so often in stable homes with normal siblings, that the condition seems to be inborn. Most parents report having been aware of disturbing signs before the child entered kindergarten. Dr. Hare described a five-year old girl repeatedly attempting to flush her kitten down the toilet. "I caught her just as she was about to try again," the mother said. "She seemed quite unconcerned, maybe a bit angry--about being found out." When the woman told her husband, the girl calmly denied the whole thing. Shame did not register; neither did fear. Psychopaths are not individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start.

Hare created a separate screening device for juveniles and identified hallmarks that appear during the school years: gratuitous lying, indifference to the pain of others, defiance of authority figures, unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment, petty theft, persistent aggression, cutting classes and breaking curfew, cruelty to animals, early experimentation with sex, and vandalism and setting fires. Eric bragged about nine of the ten hallmarks in his journal and on his Web site--for most of them, relentlessly. Only animal cruelty is missing.

At some point--as either a cause or an effect of psychopathy--the psychopath's brain begins processing emotional responses differently. Early in his career, Dr. Hare recognized the anatomical difference. He submitted a paper analyzing the unusual brain waves of psychopaths to a scientific journal, which rejected it with a dismissive letter. "Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people," the editor wrote.