Dave Cullen - Columbine

The idea was germinating, a year and a half out. Dylan appeared to be exploring a spree. With Eric? Probably. But the details of this critical moment are lost. Neither boy ever mentions those conversations in the paper trail they left behind. Eric recorded his actions: he was building bigger bombs. Coincidence? Unlikely. Eric’s thinking had been evolving steadily in one direction since freshman year.

Late in 1997, Eric took notice of school shooters. “Every day news broadcasts stories of students shooting students, or going on killing sprees,” he wrote. He researched the possibilities for an English paper. Guns were cheap and readily available, he discovered. Gun Digest said you could get a Saturday night special for $69. And schools were easy targets. “It is just as easy to bring a loaded handgun to school as it is to bring a calculator,” Eric wrote.

“Ouch!” his teacher responded in the margin. Overall, he rated it “thorough & logical. Nice job.”

The last day of school before Christmas, something extraordinary happened. Dylan’s true love waved at him. Finally! Dylan was ecstatic; then he began to wonder. Had she waved? At him? Maybe not. Probably not. Definitely not. Just delusional, he decided. Again.

He sat down and considered who loved him. He listed their names on a page in his journal. He drew little hearts beside three. Nineteen people. Nineteen failures.

A few weeks later, Eric made it with a real woman. Brenda was almost twenty-three. She had no idea he was sixteen. “He acted a lot older,” she said. When he told her he was in school, she took it to mean college. They met at the mall, and he drove to her house. They started going out: bowling, drag racing, driving into the mountains to get drunk. He taught her about the computer, he told her how great she looked, and she could not have been more charmed. She described it to reporters later as “a friendship but more than a friendship.”

Sometimes Dylan would hang out with them. He was too shy to speak.

Eric and Dylan got cockier. They stole more valuable merchandise and started testing their pipe bombs. Outwardly, they seemed like responsible kids. Teachers trusted them and granted them access to the computer closet. They helped themselves to expensive equipment. At some point, Eric may have started a credit card scam. In his notebook, he listed eight steps to complete the scam, though there’s no evidence that he carried them out. He later claimed he had.

Dylan was no good at deception. He kept getting caught. Eric did not. Tom Klebold noticed Dylan had a new laptop. Eric could have weaseled out of that one without missing a beat— it was a friend’s… he’d checked it out of the computer lab . Dylan just confessed. His dad made him turn himself in. Eric and Dylan both had a penchant for picking on underclassmen, but Dylan got caught. In January 1998, he got sent to the dean for scratching a slur about “fags” onto a freshman’s locker. He got another suspension and paid $70 to get the locker fixed.

The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and man, were those things badass. They bragged to Nate Dykeman and then brought him along for a demo. Eric was in charge where bombs were concerned, so everything went according to plan. They waited until Super Bowl Sunday, when the streets of metro Denver were deserted. The Broncos were underdogs in their fifth shot at the championship, and everyone was watching the game. Eric took advantage of the lull. He brought Nate and Dylan out to a quiet spot near his house, dropped the bomb in a culvert, and let her rip. Whoa! Nate was appropriately impressed.

On January 30, three days after Dylan’s meeting with the dean, a crime of opportunity presented itself. It was a Friday night, and the boys were restless.

Eric and Dylan drove out into the country, pulled onto a gravel strip, and got out to break stuff. There was a van parked there, with lots of electronic gizmos inside. How cool would it be to steal it? The boys had no idea what they might use the stuff for, but they were sure they could get away with it. No witnesses and no fingerprints. Eric had a pair of ski gloves to mask detection.

“Everything seemed so easy,” he wrote later. “No way we would get caught.” Eric took guard duty and gave Dylan the dirty work. Dylan put one ski glove on and tried to punch out a window. They had no idea how solid a car window was. He hit it again and again. Nothing. Eric took over. Just as useless. Dylan went for a rock. He hauled up a boulder, hurled it into the glass, and even that was deflected. It took several blows before the rock crashed through. Dylan put the other glove on, reached in to unlock the door, and started digging through the pile like crazy. Eric again left Dylan to commit the act. He ran back to man the getaway car. Dylan grabbed anything that looked interesting. He flung everything else all over the van. By his count, he nabbed “one briefcase, one black pouch, one flashlight, a yellow thing, and a bucket of stuff.”

Dylan ran armloads of loot back to the Honda. Eric continued to “guard.” Another car approached. Dylan froze; the car passed. Unfazed, Dylan ran back to grab more. Eric had grown wary. “That’s enough!” he ordered. “Let’s go.”

They drove deeper into the country, over the hogback, to Deer Creek Canyon Park, a vast preserve that ran for miles up into the mountains. The park was deserted; it closed an hour after nightfall, and the sun had set four hours ago. They pulled into the parking lot, killed the engine, and checked out the take.

They cranked some tunes to enjoy themselves, then flipped on the dome light to hunt for another CD. Dylan reached back and hauled out his favorite item: a $400 voltmeter, the yellow thing with buttons along the base and black and red probes hanging off it. Dylan poked at the buttons; Eric watched intently. When the meter lit up, the boys went wild. Cool! Dylan pulled out the flashlight and switched it on. “Wow!” Eric howled. “That is really bright!” Then he spotted something cooler: “Hey, we’ve got a Nintendo game pad!”

They rummaged a bit more before Eric realized they had grown sloppy: time to resume precautions. “We better put this stuff in the trunk,” he said. He popped the latch and stepped out.

That’s when Jeffco Sheriff’s Deputy Timothy Walsh decided to make his presence known. He had been standing outside the car for several minutes, watching and listening to the entire exchange. You can see for miles out in the country; a lone vehicle in an empty lot in a closed state park just asked for intervention. The boys had been so immersed, they’d failed to see his car, hear his engine or his footsteps, or notice his tall frame looming right over the rear window.

When Eric stepped out, Deputy Walsh blinded him with a flashlight beam. What were they up to? the deputy asked. Whose property was all this? “Right then I realized what a damn fool I was,” Eric wrote later. He would claim remorse, but he didn’t show any, even then.

Eric thought fast but lied poorly. He was off his game that night. He said they had been messing around in a parking lot near town and had stumbled onto the equipment stacked neatly in the grass. He gave a precise location and described it vividly. Details were the key to a good lie. Good tactics, bad choice: he depicted the actual robbery location.

Walsh was incredulous. He asked to see the property. “Sure,” Eric said. He kept playing it cool. He kept doing the talking. Dylan shut up and went along. Walsh had the boys stack the goods on the trunk and tried again: Where did you find this property? Dylan summoned up his nerve. He parroted Eric’s story. Walsh said it looked suspicious. He would radio another deputy to check on any break-ins.