Columbine (49 page)

No compromises, he decided; he would follow his dream. He chose to remain principal at Columbine. He loved that job. Some of the families hated him; they were disgusted by his announcement. Others were pleased. His kids were ecstatic.

____

Rohrbough was furious. But he was having success with the cops. His Hail Mary pass had broken the dam: Judge Jackson continued releasing evidence. Eventually, Jeffco was ordered to release almost everything, except the supposedly incendiary items: the killers' journals and the Basement Tapes. The mother lode came in November 2000: 11,000 pages of police reports, including virtually every witness account. Jeffco said that was everything.

It was still hiding more than half. Reporters and families kept chipping away, demanding known items. Jeffco acted comically in its attempts to suppress. It numbered all the pages and
then
eliminated thousands, releasing the documents with numbered gaps. One release indicated nearly 3,000 missing pages.

Jeffco was forced to cough up half a dozen more releases over the next year; in November 2001, officials described a huge stack as "the last batch." More than 5,000 pages more came by the end of 2002, and 10,000 in 2003--in January, February, March, June, and three separate times in October.

Halfway through all that, in April 2001, district attorney Dave Thomas inadvertently mentioned the smoking gun: the affidavit to search Eric's house more than a year before the massacre. Jeffco had vigorously denied its existence for two years. Judge Jackson ordered it released.

The affidavit was more damning than expected. Investigator Guerra had astutely pulled together the threads of Eric's early plotting, and had documented mass murder threats and the bomb production to begin realizing them. The purpose of the cover-up was out in the open. Yet it continued for several more years.

Finally, in June 2003, the search warrant Kate Battan had composed on the afternoon of the massacre came out. It demonstrated conclusively that Jeffco officials had been lying about the Browns all along--that they knew about the warnings from the beginning, and the "missing" Web pages were so accessible they'd found them in the first minutes of the attack.

Anger and contempt kept rising. A federal judge finally had enough. He ruled that Jeffco could not be trusted even to warehouse valuable evidence. He ordered the county to hand over key material such as the Basement Tapes to be secured in the federal courthouse in Denver.

____

Agent Fuselier beat Mr. D to retirement. Six months after the massacre, the investigation was largely complete. Fuselier continued studying the killers, but he transitioned back to his role as head of domestic terrorism for the Colorado-Wyoming region. Few Americans had heard of Osama bin Laden, but a life-sized
WANTED
poster of him greeted visitors to the FBI branch office. Fuselier saw enemy number one's picture every morning as he got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor.

"He's a dangerous man," Fuselier told a visitor. The Bureau was determined to stop him.

Fuselier also resumed training hostage negotiators and went back on call for serious incidents. Two years later, he concluded one of the most notorious prison breaks in recent history. The Texas Seven had escaped a maximum-security facility and embarked on a crime spree. The ringleader was serving eighteen life sentences--he had nothing left to lose. On Christmas Eve 2000, they stole a cache of guns from a sporting goods store and ambushed a police officer. They shot him eleven times and ran him over on the way out, to be sure he was dead. He was. A reward was posted: $500,000.

The gang kept moving. On January 20, 2001, they were spotted in a trailer park near Colorado Springs. A SWAT team captured four of them, and a fifth killed himself to avoid recapture. The two holdouts barricaded themselves in a Holiday Inn. It took Agent Fuselier's team five hours to talk them out. They were fixated on corruption in the penal system, so Fuselier arranged a live interview on a local TV station at 2:30
A.M.
A cameraman came inside the room so the holdouts could see they were actually broadcast live. Both convicts then surrendered and were sentenced to death. All six survivors await lethal injection in Texas.

The stress wore Fuselier down. He would have twenty years at the Bureau that October and be eligible for his pension. He announced his retirement for that date. He would be fifty-four.

On September 11, 2001, the country was attacked. Bin Laden was behind it. Fuselier postponed his retirement and spent most of the next eleven months on the case. By the summer of 2002, the United States had taken over Afghanistan, bin Laden had fled into hiding, and the urgency had abated.

Fuselier's son Brian graduated from Columbine High that May--the last class Mr. D had been waiting for. Brian was leaving for college in July. Dwayne scheduled his retirement for the week afterward, so Brian wouldn't see his dad lazing about jobless.

"I could see a change the next day," Brian told his dad when he returned home for a visit. "You had mellowed out more than I had ever seen."

Fuselier missed the work, though. Within months, he was consulting for the State Department. It sent him to conduct antiterrorism training in Third World countries. He spent a quarter of the year in sketchy sections of Pakistan, Tanzania, Malaysia, Macedonia--anywhere terrorists were active.

Mimi worried. Dwayne didn't think about it much, and Brian didn't hear the tension return to his voice. Fear wasn't the problem at the FBI; it was the responsibility.

"It was getting harder going to work knowing someone's life might depend on me not making any mistakes that day," he said.

____

Shortly before Brian left Columbine, Michael Moore's
Bowling for Columbine
drew raves at Cannes. It became the top-grossing documentary in U.S. history. It wasn't really much about Columbine, and the title featured a minor myth--that Eric and Dylan went bowling on April 20--but it included a dramatic scene where Moore and a victim went to Kmart and asked to return the bullets still inside the guy. The stunt and/or publicity around it shamed Kmart into discontinuing ammunition sales nationwide.

Marilyn Manson was interviewed in the film. Moore asked Manson what he would say to the killers, if he had a chance to talk to them: "I wouldn't say a single word to them," he said. "I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no one did." That was the story the media had told.

The connection to KMFDM, the nihilistic band Eric
did
idolize and quote frequently, was ignored by the major media. Fans got word, however, and the band issued a statement of deep remorse: "We are sick and appalled, as is the rest of the nation, by what took place in Colorado... none of us condone any Nazi beliefs whatsoever."

____

The killers' parents remained silent. They never spoke to the press. Pastor Don Marxhausen stayed close to Tom and Sue Klebold. He was a great comfort. Sue went back to training disabled students at the community college. That helped her cope.

"It's amazing how long it took me to get up and say my name at a meeting, to say, 'I'm Dylan Klebold's mother,'" she said later. "Dylan could have killed any number of the kids of people that I work with."

Shopping could be intimidating--anticipating that moment of recognition as a salesperson examined her credit card. It was a distinctive name. Sometimes they noticed.

"Boy, you're a survivor," one clerk said.

Tom worked from home, so he had a choice about when to go out. He stayed in all the time. Pastor Don worried about him.

Reverend Marxhausen paid for that compassion. Much of his parish loved him for it; others were outraged. The church council split. That was untenable. A year after the massacre, he was forced out.

Marxhausen had been one of the most revered ministers in the Denver area, but now he could not find a job. After a bout of unemployment, he left the state to head up a small parish. He missed Colorado, and eventually moved back. He got a job as a chaplain at a county jail. His primary function was to advise inmates when loved ones had died. He was born for the job, ministering to the desperate. He empathized with each one, and it sucked the life out of him.

____

The lawsuits sputtered on for years. They got messier. A rash of new defendants was added, including school officials, the killers' parents, the manufacturer of Luvox, and anyone who had come in contact with the guns. The suits were consolidated in federal court. Judge Lewis Babcock accepted the county's two major arguments: that it was not responsible for stopping the killers in advance, and that cops should not be punished for decisions under fire. Babcock said the authorities
should
have headed off the massacre months earlier but were not legally bound.

In November 2001, he dismissed most of the charges against the sheriff and the school. The families appealed, and the county settled the next year: $15,000 each--a fraction of their legal fees. The discovery process never brought much to light; it didn't need to. The Rohrboughs' initial offensive had set the legal process in motion, and it continued under its own power.

Judge Babcock refused to dismiss the Sanders case. He balked at the contention that Dave's rescue involved split-second decisions.

"They had time in the third hour!" Babcock boomed.

The cops had hundreds of people to rescue, their attorney responded. They'd had to allocate resources.

More then 750 cops had been on the scene, the judge reminded him. "It's not as though they were a little shorthanded out there that day," he said.

In August 2002, Jeffco paid Angela Sanders $1.5 million. It admitted to no wrongdoing. The last Jeffco case to close was Patrick Ireland's. He got $117,500.

After years of wrangling, most of the fringe cases were dismissed. Luvox was pulled from the market. That left the killers' families. They wanted to settle. They didn't have a lot of money, but they had insurance. It turned out their home owner's policies covered murder by their children. About $1.6 million was divided between thirty-one families. Most of it came from the Klebolds' policy. Similar agreements were reached with Mark Manes, Phillip Duran, and Robyn Anderson, for an estimated total of approximately $1.3 million.

Five families rebuffed the Harrises and Klebolds: no buyout without information. It really wasn't about the money for the Rohrboughs and four others. They were battling for information, and they proved it.

But they were caught in a stalemate: the killers' parents would talk if the victims dropped the lawsuits; the victims would drop the suits if the parents spoke.

For two more years, it continued. Then the judge brokered a deal. The holdouts would dismiss their suits if the killers' parents answered all their questions--privately, but under oath. It was a bitter compromise. The holdouts wanted answers for the public as well as themselves. They settled for themselves.

In July 2003, the four parents were deposed for several days. Media came to photograph them. They had remained so private that few reporters even knew what they looked like. Two weeks after the depositions, an agreement was announced. It appeared to be over.

But Dawn Anna called for the depositions to be made public: understanding the warning signs could prevent the next Columbine. A chorus gathered behind her. A magistrate ruled that the transcripts would be destroyed, per the agreement. That set off a public outcry and a wave of open records requests. Judge Babcock agreed to consider arguments.

It had taken four years to reach this point. They were only halfway there.

In April 2007, Judge Babcock finally ruled. "There is a legitimate public interest in these materials so that similar tragedies may hopefully be prevented," he wrote. "I conclude, however, that the balance of interests still strikes in favor of maintaining strict confidentiality."

He settled on a compromise. The transcripts would be sealed at the national archives for twenty years. The truth would come out in 2027, twenty-eight years after the massacre.

____

Though he was retired, Fuselier hoped to see the depositions, too. Optimally, he would like to question the parents himself. He knew where the boys ended, psychologically, but their origins were a mystery, particularly Eric's. Only two people had an eighteen-year perspective on his path to psychopathy. When did Eric start exhibiting the early hallmarks, and how were they visible? Wayne had adopted a stern parenting style--how had that worked? Eric wrote little about interaction with his mother--what had Kathy's approach been? Were there any successes? Anything that could help the next parent?

Fuselier understood their refusal to talk.

"I have the utmost sympathy for the Harris and Klebold parents," he said. "They have been vilified without information. No one has sufficient objective information to draw any conclusions."

Fuselier said he had raised two sons, and either one could have emerged with traits beyond his comprehension. Eric documented his parents' frustration with his behavior, as well as their attempts to force him to conform. Their tactics might have been all wrong for a budding young psychopath, but how do parents even know what that is?

"I believe they have been unjustifiably criticized for what their sons did," Fuselier said. "They are probably asking themselves the same questions that we in the profession are asking."

____

Patrick Ireland left home for Colorado State in fall 2000. He did fine. He really took to campus life. And he was surprised by how much he enjoyed business school. Letting go of architecture turned out to be easy. He had been forced into something he liked more.

He still fought memory battles, struggled a bit to find words, and would probably remain on antiseizure medication for life. He met a girl his first night. Kacie Lancaster. She was clever, attractive, and a little shy. They clicked immediately and became close friends.

In May 2004, he graduated magna cum laude. Armed with a BS in business administration, he accepted a job as a financial planner at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network. He loved it.