Dave Cullen - Columbine

The team identified eleven likely conspirators. Brooks Brown had the most suspicious story, and Chris Morris had admitted to hearing about bombs. Two others matched the descriptions for third and fourth shooters. Those four perched atop the list, with Dylan’s prom date, Robyn Anderson, close behind.

Bringing them to justice would require a Herculean effort. Detectives planned to question every student and teacher at Columbine and every friend, relative, and associate of the killers, past or present. They had five thousand interviews ahead of them in the next six months. They would snap thousands of photographs and compile more than 30,000 pages of evidence. The level of detail was exacting: every shell casing, bullet fragment, and shotgun pellet was inventoried—55 pages and 998 evidence ID numbers to distinguish every shard.

The Jeffco command team hastily reserved a spot for Fuselier in the Columbine band room. The killers had made a mess of the place without setting foot inside it. Abandoned books, backpacks, sheet music, drum kits, and instruments were strewn among the shrapnel. The door was missing—blown away by the SWAT team searching for gunmen.

Much of the school looked considerably worse. Pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails had burned through stretches of carpeting and set off the sprinkler system. The cafeteria was flooded, the library unspeakable. Veteran cops had staggered out in tears. “There were SWAT team people who were in Vietnam who were weeping over what they saw,” District Attorney Dave Thomas said.

The detective team was moving in. Every scrap of wreckage was evidence. They had 250,000 square feet of crime scene—just on the inside. Footprints, fingerprints, stray hairs, or gun residue could be anywhere. Crucial DNA evidence might be floating through the cafeteria. And live explosives might still be present, too.

Detectives had stripped down Eric and Dylan’s bedrooms, left the furniture, and hauled out much of the rest. The Klebold house yielded little—some yearbooks and a small stack of writings—but Dylan had wiped his hard drive clean. Eric’s house provided a mother lode: journals, more computer rants, an audiotape, videotapes, budgets and diagrams and timelines… Eric had documented everything. He’d wanted us to know.

Adding to the sense of urgency—and conspiracy—was a cryptic message suggesting more possible violence to come. “We went scrambling for days trying to track that down,” Fuselier said. They searched the school for explosives again. They raised the pressure on the probable conspirators.

The detectives conducted five hundred interviews in the first seventytwo hours. It was a great boost, but it got chaotic. Battan was worried about witnesses, who were growing more compromised by the hour from what they read and saw on TV. Investigators prioritized: students who had seen the shooters came first.

Other detectives headed to the suspects’ childhood hometowns.

It didn’t start with a murder plot. Before he devised his massacre, Eric settled into a life of petty crime. Earlier still, even before adolescence, he was exhibiting telltale signs of a particular breed of killer. The symptoms were stark in retrospect, but subtle at the time—invisible to the untrained eye.

Eric wrote about his childhood frequently and fondly. His earliest memories were lost to him. Fireworks, he remembered. He sat down one day to record his first memory in a notebook and discovered he couldn’t do it. “Hard to visualize,” he wrote. “My mind tends to blend memories together. I do remember the 4th of July when I was 12.” Explosions, thunderclaps, the whole sky on fire. “I remember running outside with a lot of other kids,” he wrote. “It felt like an invasion.”

Eric savored the idea—heroic opportunities to obliterate alien hordes. His dreams were riddled with gunfire and explosions. Eric relished the anticipation of the detonator engaging. He was always dazzled by fire. He could whiff the acrid fallout from the fireworks again just contemplating the memory. Later the night of the fireworks display, when he was twelve, Eric walked around and burned stuff.

Fire was beauty. The tiny eruption of a cardboard match igniting. A fuse sputtering down could drive Eric delirious with anticipation. Scaring the shit out of stupidass dickwads—it didn’t get much better than that.

In the beginning, explosions scared Eric even as they exhilarated him. He ran for cover when the fireworks started in his “earliest memory” account. “I hid in a closet,” he wrote. “I hid from everyone when I wanted to be alone.”

Eric was a military brat. His father moved the family across five states in fifteen years. Wayne and Kathy gave birth to Eric David Harris in Wichita, Kansas, on April 9, 1981, eighteen years and eleven days before Eric attempted to blow up his high school. Wichita was the biggest town Eric would live in until junior high. He started school in Beavercreek, Ohio, and did stints in rural air force towns like Oscoda, Michigan, and Plattsburgh, New York. Eric enrolled in and was pulled out of five different schools along the way, often those on the fringes of military bases where friends came and went as fast as he did.

Wayne and Kathy worked hard to smooth over the disruptions. Kathy chose to be a stay-at-home mom to focus on her boys. She also performed her duties as an officer’s wife. Kathy was attractive, but rather plain. She wore her wavy brown hair in a simple style: swept back behind her ears and curling in toward her shoulders in back.

Wayne had a solid build, a receding hairline, and very fair skin. He coached baseball and served as scoutmaster. In the evenings, he would shoot baskets on the driveway with Eric and his older brother, Kevin.

“I just remember they wanted the children to have a normal, off-base relationship in a normal community,” said a minister who lived nearby. “They were just great neighbors—friendly, outgoing, caring.”

Major Harris did not tolerate misbehavior in his home. Punishment was swift and harsh, but all inside the family. Wayne reacted to outside threats in classic military fashion: circle the wagons and protect the unit. He didn’t like snap decisions. He preferred to consider punishment carefully, while the boys reflected on their deeds. After a day or two, Wayne would render his decision, and it would be final. It was typically grounding or loss of privileges—whatever they held dear. As Eric grew older, he would periodically have to relinquish his computer—that stung. Wayne considered a conflict concluded once he’d discussed it with Eric and they’d agreed on the facts and the punishment. Then Eric had to accept responsibility for his actions and complete his punishment.

Detectives discovered gross contradictions to Eric’s insta-profile already cemented in the media. In Plattsburgh, friends described a sports enthusiast hanging out with minorities. Two of Eric’s best friends turned out to be Asian and African American. The Asian boy was a jock to boot. Eric played soccer and Little League. He followed the Rockies even before the family moved to Colorado, frequently sporting their baseball cap. By junior high he had grown obsessed with computers, and eventually with popular video games.

In his childhood photos Eric looks wholesome, clean-cut, and confident—much more poised than Dylan. Both were painfully shy, though. Eric “was the shyest out of everybody,” said a Little League teammate from Plattsburgh. He didn’t talk much, and other kids described him as timid but popular.

At the plate, one of his core personality traits was already on display. “We had to kind of egg him on to swing, to hit the pitch sometimes,” his coach said. “It wasn’t that he was afraid of the ball, just that he didn’t want to miss. He didn’t want to fail.”