Columbine (40 page)

The Harrises broke their three-month silence to issue a statement disputing "misstatements" on the letters. Their attorney insisted Jeffco had never tried to contact him about them.

The letters were eventually returned.

Sue Klebold also wrote apologies in May. She mailed them directly to the Thirteen. Brad and Misty received this handwritten card:

Dear Bernall family,

It is with great difficulty and humility that we write to express our profound sorrow over the loss of your beautiful daughter, Cassie. She brought joy and love to the world, and she was taken in a moment of madness. We wish we had had the opportunity to know her and be uplifted by her loving spirit.

We will never understand why this tragedy happened, or what we might have done to prevent it. We apologize for the role our son had in your Cassie's death. We never saw anger or hatred in Dylan until the last moments of his life when we watched in helpless horror with the rest of the world. The reality that our son shared in the responsibility for this tragedy is still incredibly difficult for us to comprehend.

May God comfort you and your loved ones. May He bring peace and understanding to all of our wounded hearts.

Sincerely,

Sue and Tom Klebold

Misty was moved--enough to publish the full text in the memoir she was drafting. She generously described the act as courageous. Tom and Sue lost a son in the same disaster, she wrote. At least Cassie had died nobly. What comfort did the Klebolds have? Misty also addressed the charges against the killers' parents. Should they have known? Were they negligent? "How do we know?"

42. Diversion

A
year before the attack, the boys settled on the time and place: April 1999, in the commons. That gave Eric time to plan, build his arsenal, and convince his partner it was for real.

Shortly after starting Diversion, Eric and Dylan received their junior yearbooks. They swapped and filled page after page with drawings, descriptions, and rants. "We, the gods, will have so much fun w NBK!!" Dylan wrote in Eric's. "My wrath for january's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons."

January's incident was their arrest. Eric was pissed about it, too. "Jan 31 sux," he wrote in Dylan's. "I hate white vans!!"

The arrest was a critical moment--the yearbooks confirmed Fuselier's tentative conclusion on that score. Eventually, Fuselier would see it as the single most important event in Eric's progression to murder. The arrest was followed, in rapid succession, by Eric detonating his first pipe bombs, threatening mass murder on his Web site, confiding worse visions to his journal, and settling on the outlines of his attack. But Eric was already headed that way. He did not "snap." Fuselier saw fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than cause.

Eric was an injustice collector. The cops, judge, and Diversion officers were merely the latest additions to a comically comprehensive enemies list, which included Tiger Woods, every girl who had rejected him, all of Western culture, and the human species. What was different about the arrest, in Fuselier's eyes, was that it was the first dramatic rein-in on the boys' ability to control their own lives--"the screws are tightening," as Dylan put it. They were juniors in high school now, a time when personal freedom expanded faster than ever before. They had just gotten their driver's licenses, they had jobs with paychecks and their first rush of disposable income, their curfews were getting later, parental oversight was easing, Eric was dating... their universe of possibilities was expanding. They had suffered setbacks before, but those were mild and short-lived. This time, it was a felony. A felony, for the smallest trifle: some moron's van--so what? All freedom was lost. Eric's twenty-three-year-old was dumping him because he was grounded all the time and could never see her. He kept working Brenda, but it didn't look good.

Eric filled Dylan's yearbook with drawings: swastikas, robokillers, and splattered bodies. The dead outnumbered the living. An illustration in the margin suggested hundreds of tiny corpses piling up to the horizon, until they all blended together in an ocean of human waste.

Eric went through his own book, marking up the faces of kids he didn't like. He labeled them "worthless," said they would die, or just made an X over their pictures. Eric had two thousand photos to deface, and eventually he got to almost all of them.

Eric had it in for a couple of traitorous assholes: "God I cant wait till they die," he wrote in Dylan's book. "I can taste the blood now."

Psychopaths want to enjoy their exploits. That's why the sadistic ones tend to choose serial killing: they enjoy the cruelty as it plays out. Eric went a different route: the big kill, which he would relish in anticipation for a full year. He loved control--he couldn't wait to hold lives in his hand. When his day finally arrived, he took his time in the library and enjoyed every minute of it. He killed some kids on a whim, let others go just as easily.

He also used his Web site to enjoy a certain notoriety in his lifetime. He loved the irony of his online world, where all the other kids were posing but his fantasy was real.

One contradiction to Eric's control fetish is apparent in his willingness to entrust power to Dylan. The yearbook exchange represented a huge leap of faith for each of them. They had been talking about murder for months now, and corresponding catchphrases in both journals suggest they had been riffing on these ideas regularly. Eric had gone semipublic with his threats already, posting them on his Web site, but no one seemed to notice or take it seriously. This time, he scrawled out incriminating evidence of his plot in his own handwriting and turned it over to Dylan.

They hinted about plans in a few friends' yearbooks, but it all sounded like jokes. Dylan said he would like to kill Puff Daddy or Hanson, while Eric went with irony: don't follow your dreams, follow your animal instincts--"if it moves kill it, if it doesn't, burn it. kein mitleid!!!"
Kein mitleid
is German for "no mercy," and a common shorthand for his favorite band, KMFDM. This was just the kind of move that delighted Eric: warn the world, in writing, to show us how stupid we all are.

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.

____

Dr. Fuselier considered the yearbook passages. Both boys fantasized about murder, but Dylan focused on the single attack. Eric had a grander vision. All his writing alluded to a wider slaughter: killing everything, destroying the human race. In a passionate journal entry a month later, he would cite the Nazis' Final Solution: "kill them all. well in case you haven't figured it out yet, I say 'KILL MANKIND.'"

It's unclear whether Eric and Dylan were aware of the discrepancy--neither one addressed it in writing. It's hard to imagine that Eric failed to notice Dylan's focus on a more limited attack. Was he including Dylan in the full dream? Perhaps Dylan just didn't find it plausible. Blowing up the high school, that could actually happen--killing mankind... maybe that just sounded like science fiction to Dylan.

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.

____

The boys changed dramatically after they began Diversion--in reverse directions, once again. Eric launched a new charm offensive. Andrea Sanchez became the second most important person in his life. Snowing her was the best way to appease the first, his dad. It also kept the program from diverting Eric from his goal. Eric had a plan now. He was on a mission and he was revved. His grades dropped briefly after the arrest, but they rebounded to his best ever once he had his attack plan. It was a lot of work, which he complained bitterly about in his journal; but he worked his ass off to excel.

Dylan didn't even try to impress Andrea. He missed appointments, fell behind in community service, and let his grades plummet. He was actually getting two D's.

NBK was nothing but a diversion to Dylan--fantasy chats with his buddy about what they would like to do. Dylan didn't believe it; he didn't plan to go through with it. All he knew was that he was a felon now. His miserable life had grown pathetically worse.

Eric was the star performer in the program, at work and at school. He even earned a raise, and when school let out for his last summer, he got a second job at Tortilla Wraps, where his buddy Nate Dykeman worked. Eric started putting away more money to build his arsenal. His cover story was that he was saving up for a new computer. He worked both jobs, in addition to the forty-five hours of community service the judge had ordered for the summer. That was boring, menial crap, like sweeping and picking up trash at a rec center. He despised it but pasted on a smile. It was all for a good cause.

Dylan did not appear to contribute much to the attack, financially or otherwise. He quit Blackjack and didn't bother with a regular job over the summer; he just did some yard work for a neighbor.

Eric kept both his employers and the rec supervisors satisfied. "He was a real nice kid," his Tortilla boss said. "He would come in every day with nice T-shirts, khaki shorts, sandals. He was kind of quiet but everyone got along with him." Nate liked to wear his trench coat to work, but Eric didn't feel that was professional.

The boys were required to write apology letters to the van owner. Eric's exuded contrition. He acknowledged he was writing partly because he'd been ordered to "but mostly because I strongly feel that I owe you an apology." Eric said he was sorry repeatedly, and outlined his legal and parental punishments so the victim would understand that he was paying a price for his actions.

Eric knew exactly what empathy looked like. His most convincing moment in the letter came when he put himself in the owner's position. If his car had been robbed, he said, the sense of invasion would have haunted him. It would have been hard for him to drive it again. Every time he got in the car, he would have pictured someone rummaging through it. God, he felt violated just imagining it. He was so disappointed in himself. "I realized very soon afterwards what I had done and how utterly stupid it was," Eric wrote. "I let the stupid side of me take over."

"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: 'Isnt America supposed to be the land of the free? how come if im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions. If he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Frifucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot.'"

Eric betrayed no signs of contempt to Andrea Sanchez. In her notes, she remarked on Eric's deep remorse.

Few angry boys can hide their feelings or sling the bullshit so convincingly. Habitual liars hate sucking up like that. Not psychopaths. That was the best part of the performance: Eric's joy came from watching Andrea and the van owner and Wayne Harris and everyone who caught sight of the letter fall for his ridiculous con.

Eric never complained about those lies. He bragged about them.

Eric could be a procrastinator--a common affliction among psychopaths--and Andrea suggested he work on time management. So Eric bought a Rebel Pride day planner, filled a week in, and brought it to his biweekly counseling session to show off. He gushed about what a great idea it was. It was really helping, he said. Andrea was impressed. She praised him for it in his file. Then he quit. He used the book to vent his real feelings. It had come packed with motivational slogans and tips for better living. Eric went through hundreds of pages rewriting selected words and phrases: "A person's mind is always
splattered....
Cut old
people
and other
losers
into rags.... Ninth graders are required to
burn and die.
" He altered the Denver entry on a population chart to show forty-seven inhabitants once he was through.

Andrea Sanchez was delighted with Eric. She worked with the boys directly for a few months and then transitioned them over to a new counselor. In Eric's file, Andrea ended her last entry with "Muy facile hombre"--very easy man.

Dylan got no affectionate sign-off. And why wouldn't Andrea Sanchez like Eric more? Everyone did. He was funny and clever, and that smile, man--he knew just when to flash it, too; just how long to hang back, tease you with it, make you work for it, and then lay it on.

Dylan was a gloom factory. The misery was self-fulfilling: who wanted to hang around under that cloud all day?