Dave Cullen - Columbine

Eric was confident. He looked over at his partner. Dylan folded.

Wayne and Kathy Harris were waiting when Eric arrived at the police station. Tom and Sue Klebold were close behind. They couldn’t believe their boys could do something like this. The boys could be charged with three felonies, including a Class V, which carried up to a $100,000 fine and one to three years in prison. Eric and Dylan were questioned separately. With their parents’ consent, they waived their rights. Each boy gave oral and written statements. Eric blamed Dylan. “Dylan suggested that we should steal some of the objects in the white van,” he wrote. “at first I was very uncomfortable and questioning with the thought.” His verbal account was more adamant. He said Dylan looked into the van and asked, “Should we break into it and steal it? It would be nice to steal some stuff in there. Should we do it?” Eric claimed he responded, “Hell no.” He said Dylan kept pestering him and eventually wore him down.

Dylan accepted joint blame. “Almost at the same time, we both got the idea of breaking into this white van,” he said.

The boys were taken to county jail. They were fingerprinted, photographed, and booked. Then they were released into the custody of four furious parents.

After the murders, the detective team sought convictions. It had three possible crimes to uncover: participation in the attack, participation in the planning, or guilty knowledge. At first it looked easy. The killers had been sloppy; they hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. And the primary living suspects were juveniles. Most of the friends had withheld something crucial: Robyn had helped purchase three of the guns, Chris and Nate had seen pipe bombs, and Chris and Zack had heard about napalm. They all broke quickly. They were kids; it was easy. But they broke only so far. They admitted to knowing details, but claimed to be clueless about the plan.

Detectives pushed harder. The suspects didn’t push back; they just threw up their hands. Fuselier had several solid agents on the case. He knew they could sniff out a liar. How are the suspects responding? he asked. Do they seem deceptive? Not at all. His team leader described them as wide-eyed and understandably anxious. Most had begun by hiding something, and it had been painfully obvious. They were awful actors. But once they spilled it, they just seemed relieved. They were calm, peaceful—all the signs of someone coming clean. Most of the suspects agreed to polygraphs. That usually meant they had nothing left to hide.

Two friends, Robert Perry and Joe Stair, had been identified by witnesses as shooters or at least present at the scene. They were both tall and lanky—and therefore matched a common description for Dylan. Both boys produced alibis. Perry’s was shaky: he had been sleeping downstairs until his grandmother woke him with news of the shooting. He said he walked upstairs, stumbled out onto the porch, and cried. Did anyone see him, other than his grandmother? No, he didn’t think so. But Perry had been seen by others—he’d just been too upset to notice them. Within a week, a neighbor who was interviewed described driving up around noon and seeing Perry crying just the way he’d described.

The physical evidence was even less damning. All the friends’ houses were searched. No weapons were found. No ammo, no ordnance, no refuse of any pipe bomb assembly. Zack had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, but there was no sign that he had used it to build anything. Fingerprints at the crime scene were all a bust. There was an extraordinary amount of material: guns, ammo, gear, unused pipe bombs, strips of duct tape, and dozens of components from the big bombs. All of it was covered with the killers’ prints; nobody else’s. The same was true at the killers’ houses: nothing on the journals, videotapes, camcorders, or bomb-assembly gear. No one appeared in the killers’ records. Eric had been a meticulous planner and recorder of dates, locations, and receipts. Detectives searched the stores’ files and credit card records. All signs indicated that the killers had purchased everything.

For months, Sheriff Stone publicly espoused a conspiracy theory. Fuselier could feel the conspiracy slipping away the first week. Within two, he knew it was remote. The most telling evidence came from the killers themselves. In their journals and videos, they cop to everything. They never mention outside involvement, except, derisively, when they talk about hapless dupes. The killers leaked their plans in countless way, but there’s no indication that anyone close to them ever breathed a word. Their friends’ e-mails, IMs, day planners, and journals were searched, along with every paper the investigators could find; there was no sign that any of the friends had known.

Rumors about a third shooter have continued right up to the present day, but publicly, it didn’t take long for investigators to put them to rest. Eric and Dylan were correctly identified by witnesses who knew them. No one else turned up on the surveillance videos or the 911 audio. Witnesses’ accounts were remarkably consistent about a tall shooter and a short one—but there seemed to be two of each: two in T-shirts and two in trench coats. “As soon as I learned Eric’s coat was left outside on the landing, I knew what had happened there,” Fuselier said. Witnesses exchanged stories, and reports of two guys in T-shirts and two in trench coats quickly turned into four shooters. Dylan’s decision to leave his coat on until he reached the library made for more combinations, and the number multiplied over the afternoon. The killers also lobbed pipe bombs in every direction. Their gunfire shattered windows and ricocheted off walls, ductwork, and stairs. Many kids heard crashes or explosions and positively identified the location as the source of activity rather than the destination. Several witnesses insisted that they had spotted a gunman on the roof. What they had seen was a maintenance man adjusting the air-conditioning unit.

So what accounted for all the confusion? “Eyewitness testimony, in general, is not very accurate,” one investigator explained. “Put that together with gunshots going off and just the most terrifying situation in their life, what they remember now may not be anywhere near what really happened.” Human memory can be erratic. We tend to record fragments: gunshots, explosions, trench coats, terror, sirens, screams. Images come back jumbled, but we crave coherence, so we trim them, adjust details, and assemble everything together in a story that makes sense. We record vivid details, like the scraggly ponytail flapping against the dirty blue T-shirt of the boy fleeing just ahead. All the way out of the building, a witness may focus on that swishing hair. Later, she remembers a glimpse of the killer: he was tall and lanky—did he have scraggly hair? It fits together, and she connects it. Soon the killer is wearing the dirty blue T-shirt as well. Moments later, and forever after, she is convinced that’s exactly what she saw.

Investigators identified nearly a dozen common misperceptions among library survivors. Distortion of time was rampant, particularly chronology. Witnesses recalled less once the killers approached them, not more. Terror stops the brain from forming new memories. A staggering number insisted they were the last ones out of the library—once they were out, it was over. Similarly, most of those injured, even superficially, believed they were the last ones hit. Survivors also clung to reassuring concepts: that they were actually hiding by crouching under tables in plain sight.

Memory is notoriously unreliable. It happens even with the best witnesses. Six years later, Principal DeAngelis described the shooting as if he had just experienced it. He retraced his steps through the building, pausing at the exact spot where he first saw Dylan Klebold fire his shotgun. Mr. D pointed out Dylan’s position and described everything Dylan was wearing: white T-shirt, military harness, ball cap turned around backward. But he has two entirely different versions of how he got there.