Dave Cullen - Columbine

Brian took charge of his tragedy that day. He discovered the power of being Danny Rohrbough’s dad. From that day forward, he would not hesitate to wield it.

But this particular battle was just getting under way. The carpenter drove back from Chicago and pulled out the thirteen remaining crosses. Now Brian Rohrbough was really fuming. The cruelest man of the aftermath had returned to tear down the monument to his son. Rohrbough also sensed opportunism. “I question his motives,” he said.

Brian had good instincts. The carpenter had made a family business out of similar stunts. He returned with a new set of crosses, and a pack of media on his heels. The highlight was a joint appearance with Brian on The Today Show . The showman apologized profusely and offered a series of solemn vows: he would never build another cross for the killers, or for any killer, and he would drive around the country removing several he had erected in the past.

He broke every promise. He built fifteen new crosses and took them on a national tour. He milked his celebrity for years. Brian Rohrbough returned to cursing him: “The opportunist, the great [carpenter], the most hateful, despicable person who would come to someone else’s tragedy.”

The world forgot the carpenter. Few had noted his name. Most never knew what a huckster he was, or the lies he told, or the pain he inflicted. But they remember his crosses fondly. They recall the comfort that they found.

Eric was a thief now. He had a set of Rent-a-Fence signs. He liked the feeling, he wanted more. Junior year, the boys got right to work. Eric and Dylan and Zack hacked into the school computer and commandeered a list of locker combinations. They began breaking in. They got sloppy. On October 2, 1997, they got caught. They were sent to the dean, who suspended them for three days.

The Harris and Klebold parents responded the way they always did. Wayne Harris was a pragmatist. He would make Eric regret what he’d done. With outsiders he was focused on containment; Eric’s future was at stake. He called the dean and argued that Eric was a minor. The dean was unmoved. What would show up on Eric’s records? Wayne asked. He jotted down the answer in his journal: “In-house only because police were not involved. Destroyed upon graduation.” Good. Eric had a promising future ahead.

The Klebolds addressed the situation intellectually. Dylan had demonstrated a shocking lapse of ethics, but Tom disagreed with suspensions on philosophical grounds. There were more effective ways to discipline a child. The dean had rarely met such a thoughtful, intelligent parent, but the judgment stood.

Eric and Dylan were each grounded for a month and were forbidden contact with each other or with Zack. Eric also lost his computer privileges. Eric and Dylan weathered the punishment and remained close. Zack began drifting away, particularly from Eric. The tight threesome was over. From that day forward, Eric and Dylan committed their crimes as a pair.

Fuselier considered Eric’s psychological state at this point, a year and a half before the murders. Eric was not a depressive like Dylan, that was for sure. And there were no signs of mental illness. No signs of anything to predict murder. Eric’s Web site was obscenely angry, but anger and young men were practically synonymous. The instincts that would lead to Columbine were surely in place by now, but Eric had yet to reveal them.

Dylan fixated on Harriet. Fifty minutes a day, for one class period, Dylan lolled around in heaven. Harriet was in his class.

Sometimes she would laugh. What a darling little laugh she let out. So innocent, so pure. Innocence—what an angelic quality. Someday Dylan would speak to her.

One day Dylan saw his chance. He had a group project for the class, a report to work on together, and Harriet was on his team. Blessed day. This was it.

He did nothing.

Dylan described his trajectory as a downward spiral. He borrowed the phrase from Nine Inch Nails’s gripping concept album, which documents a fictional man unraveling. It climaxes with him killing himself with a gun to the mouth.

Oliver Stone’s satirical film Natural Born Killers would become the pop culture artifact most associated with the Columbine massacre. That was reasonable, since Eric and Dylan used “NBK” as shorthand for their own event, and the film bears considerable resemblances. It also captured the flavor of Eric’s egotistical, empathy-free attitude, but it bore no relation to Dylan’s psyche. It certainly wasn’t where he saw his life headed, at least not until the final months. For the first eighteen to twenty months of his journal, Dylan identified with two powerful characters to convey his torment: the protagonists of The Downward Spiral and David Lynch’s film Lost Highway .

After the murders, controversies raged about the role of violent films, music, and video games. Some columnists and talk-radio hosts saw an easy cause and effect. That seems simplistic for Eric—who was a gifted critical thinker with a voracious appetite for the classics—and absurd for his partner. Dylan identified with depressives on the brink of suicide. He focused on fictional characters mired in the hopelessness he already felt.

Eric got sloppy. He allowed the worst imaginable person to discover one of his pipe bombs: his dad.

Wayne Harris was beside himself. Firecrackers were one thing, but this was too much. He wasn’t even sure what to do with it. Eric told several friends about the incident, and their accounts of Wayne’s response varied. Zack Heckler said Wayne could not figure out how to defuse the bomb, so he went outside with Eric and detonated it. But Nate Dykeman said Wayne had merely confiscated the bomb. Sometime later, Eric took Nate into his parents’ bedroom closet and showed it to him. Wayne Harris never referred to the incident in his journal on Eric, which was dormant at this time.

Eric swore up and down to his parents that he would never make a bomb again. They apparently believed him. They wanted to. Eric probably shut down production for a while, and he definitely covered his tracks better. Eventually, he got back to business. At some point, he showed Nate two or three of his later products, which he was storing in his own room.

Dylan felt abandoned. He was grounded for the locker scam, home alone, and lonelier than ever. Then his older brother, Byron, was kicked out for drugs. Tom and Sue understood the tough love would cause an upheaval, so they went to family counseling with Dylan. That didn’t change their son’s outlook. He got a new room out of it, and he put his own stamp on the place: two black walls and two red ones, posters of baseball heroes and rock bands: Lou Gehrig, Roger Clemens, and Nine Inch Nails. Also, some street signs and a woman in a leopard bikini.

“I get more depressed with each day,” he complained. Why did friends keep deserting him? They did not, actually, but Dylan perceived it that way. He fretted about Eric dumping him, too. “wanna die,” he repeated. Death equaled freedom now; death offered tranquillity. He began using the words interchangeably.

Then he weighed the other option: He named a friend and said he “will get me a gun, ill go on my killing spree against anyone I want.”

It was Dylan’s second allusion to murder. The first had been ambiguous; this was overt. And now it was a spree.

He changed the subject immediately. That was unusual. As a rule, Dylan hammered ideas relentlessly. He would drill for two straight pages on the “Everlasting Struggle” or his destiny as a seeker. Murder was different. For the second time, he tossed in a single line, at the peak of despair, and promptly returned to his own destruction.