Dave Cullen - Columbine

A journal. For the last year of his life, Eric Harris had written down many of his plans in a journal.

Fuselier zipped over and read the opening line: “I hate the fucking world.”

“When I read that first sentence, all the commotion in the band room ended,” he said later. “I just zoned out. Everything else faded.” Suddenly the big bombs began to make a lot more sense. The fucking world . “That’s not Brooks Brown,” Fuselier said. “That’s not the jocks. That is an all-pervasive hate.”

Fuselier read a bit further, then turned to the ATF agent. “Can I have a copy of this?”

The pages had been photocopied from a spiral notebook: sixteen handwritten pages and a dozen more of sketches and charts and diagrams. There were nineteen entries, all dated, running from April 10, 1998, to April 3, 1999, seventeen days before Columbine. They ran a page or two at the beginning, then shortened considerably, with the last five crammed into the last page and a half. They were dark and fuzzy from too many trips through the copier. Eric’s scrawl was hard to decipher at first, but Fuselier was reading again while the pages made another pass through the copy machine. “It was mesmerizing,” he said.

The journal told infinitely more than Eric’s Web site had. The Web site—which predated the journal by at least a year—was mostly vented rage. It told us who he hated, what he wanted to do to the world, and what he had already done. It said very little about why. The journal was angry but deeply reflective. And infinitely more candid about the urges driving Eric to kill.

Fuselier read while the photocopies ran, he read on the walk back to the ATF agent’s desk, and he stood there reading rather than return to his own chair. He didn’t notice his back stiffening up for several minutes, until the pain finally interrupted. Then he took a seat. And kept reading. Holy shit, Fuselier thought. He’s telling us why he did it .

Eric would prove the easier killer to understand. Eric always knew what he was up to. Dylan did not.

Dylan’s mind raced night and day: analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was fifteen, he had tagged along on the missions, he was Eric’s number one go-to guy, and none of that mattered. Dylan’s head was bursting with ideas, sounds, impressions—he could never turn the racket off. That asshole in gym class, his family, the girls he liked, the girls he loved but could never get—why could he never get them?—he was never going to get them. A guy could still dream, right?

Dylan was in pain. Nobody got it. Vodka helped. The Internet did, too. Girls were hard to talk to; Instant Messenging made it easier. Dylan would IM alone in his room for hours at night. Vodka made the words flow but reduced his ability to spell them. When an Internet girl called him on it, he laughed and admitted he was sloshed. It was easy to hide from his parents—they never suspected. It all happened quietly in his room.

IMs were not enough. Too many secrets to hold on to; too many concepts zipping over their heads. Suicide was consuming him—no way Dylan was confessing that. He tried explaining some of the other ideas, but people were too thick to understand.

Shortly after the missions started, in the spring of sophomore year, March 31, 1997, Dylan got drunk, picked up a pen, and began the conversation with the one person who could understand. Himself. He imagined his journal as a stately old tome, with oversized covers extending just past the parchment, and a fine satin ribbon sewn into the binding, like in a Bible. All he had was a plain pad of notebook paper, college-ruled and three-hole punched. So he drew the imaginary cover on the cover. He titled his work “Existences: A Virtual Book.”

There was no hint of murder that first day, not even violence. Only traces of anger seeped out, mostly aimed at himself. Dylan was on a spiritual quest. “I do shit to supposedly ‘cleanse’ myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way,” he wrote. He had tried deleting the Doom files from his computer, tried staying sober, tried to stop making fun of kids—that was a tough one. Kids were so easy to ridicule.

The spiritual purge wasn’t helping. “My existence is shit,” he wrote. He described eternal suffering in infinite directions through infinite realities.

Loneliness was the crux of the problem, but it ran deeper than just finding a friend. Dylan felt cut off from humanity. Humans were trapped in a box of our own construction: mental prisons caging us from a universe of possibilities. God, people were annoying! What were they afraid of? Dylan could see an entire universe opening up in his mind. He was a seeker, he sought to explore it all, across time and space and who knew how many dimensions. The possibilities were breathtaking. Who could fail to behold the wonder of it all? Almost everyone, unfortunately. Humans loved their little boxes, so safe and warm and comfy and boring! They were zombies by choice.

Some of Dylan’s ideas were hard to put into words. He drew squiggles in the margins and labeled them “thought pictures.”

He was a profoundly religious young man. His family was not active in any congregation, yet Dylan’s belief was unwavering. He believed in God without question, but constantly challenged His choices. Dylan would cry out, cursing God for making him a modern Job, demanding an explanation for the divine brutality of His faithful servant.

Dylan believed in morality, ethics, and an afterlife. He wrote intently about the separation of body and soul. The body was meaningless, but his soul would live forever. It would reside either in the peaceful serenity of heaven or in the blistering tortures of hell.

Dylan’s anger would flare, then fizzle quickly into self-disgust. Dylan wasn’t planning to kill anyone, except, God willing, himself. He craved death for at least two years. The first mention comes in the first entry: “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE—me—my soul (existence).”

But suicide posed a problem. Dylan believed in a literal heaven and hell. He would be a believer right up until the end. When he murdered several people, he knew there would be consequences. He would refer to them in his final video message, recorded on the morning he called “Judgment Day.”

Dylan was unique, that much he was sure of. He had been watching the kids at school. Some were good, some bad, but all so utterly different from him. Dylan exceeded even Eric in his belief in his own singularity. But Eric equated “unique” with “superior”—Dylan saw it mostly as bad. Unique meant lonely. What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?

His moods came and went quickly. Dylan turned compassionate, then fatalistic. “I don’t fit in here,” he complained. But the road to the afterlife was just monstrous: “go to school, be scared & nervous, hoping that people can accept me.”

Eric and Dylan both left journals behind. Dr. Fuselier would spend years studying them. At first glance, Dylan’s looked more promising. Fuselier was hungry for data, and Dylan provided an impressive stack. His journal began a year earlier than Eric’s, filled nearly five times as many pages, and remained active right up to the end. But Eric would begin his journal as a killer. He already knew where it would end. Every page pointed in the same direction. His purpose was not self-discovery but self-lionization. Dylan was just trying to grapple with existence. He had no idea where he was headed. His ideas were all over the map.