Dave Cullen - Columbine

As Eric embraced murder, Dylan retreated. After the arrest, he had the one brief outburst in his journal, and then he dropped all mention of it for nearly a year. Dylan still fretted about “this toilet earth,” but his focus shifted dramatically toward love. Love. It had been prominent from the first page of his journal, but now, a year in, it grew overwhelming. He emblazoned entire pages with ten-inch hearts, surrounded by choirs of smaller, fluttering hearts.

Eric had no use for love. Sex, maybe. He shared none of Dylan’s desires for truth, beauty, or ethereal love. Eric’s only internal struggle concerned which stupid bastard was more deserving of his wrath.

Eric’s dreams changed after his arrest. Human extinction was still his aim, but for the first time he made the leap from observer to enforcer. “I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole fucking area full of you snotty ass rich mother fucking high strung godlike attitude having worthless pieces of shit whores,” he wrote. He posted this openly on his Web site. “i dont care if I live or die in the shootout,” he wrote. “all I want to do is kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can!”

It was too much for Dylan. Kill? Everything? Apparently not. He made a stunning move behind Eric’s back. He told. He told the worst possible person: Brooks Brown. Brooks knew about the petty vandalism, and his parents saw Eric as a young criminal, but they had no idea how serious it was.

On the way to class, Dylan handed Brooks a scrap of paper. Just one line was written on it: a Web address.

“I think you should take a look at this tonight,” Dylan said.

“OK. Anything special?”

“It’s Eric’s Web site. You need to see it. And you can’t tell Eric I gave it to you.”

Brooks pulled up the site that night. Eric was threatening to kill people. He threatened to kill Brooks personally, in three different places.

Dylan leaked the URL to Brooks the day before their admission interviews for the Diversion program. If Brooks told his parents—and Dylan knew he told Judy everything —the Browns would go straight to the cops, and Eric would be rejected and imprisoned for a felony. Dylan probably would be, too. He took that chance.

Brooks did tell his mom. Randy and Judy called the cops. Jeffco investigators came out that night. They followed up, they filed reports, but they did not alert the DA’s office. Eric and Dylan proceeded into Diversion.

Only one parent was required at the Diversion intake meeting. Tom and Sue Klebold both attended. They considered it important. They filled out an eight-page questionnaire about Dylan, he did the same, and then Andrea Sanchez walked them through the results. The Klebolds were in for a few surprises. Dylan copped to five or six drunken bouts, starting at age fifteen. “Was not aware of it at all—until Andrea Sanchez asked the question a few moments ago,” his parents wrote. Apparently they were unaware his nickname was VoDKa.

Dylan claimed he had quit drinking. He didn’t like the taste and said it “wasn’t worth it.” He had tried pot, too, and rejected it for the same reasons. His parents were stunned about marijuana, too.

Tom and Sue were candid; it was the only ethical course. “Dylan is introverted and has grown up isolated,” they wrote. “He is often angry or sullen, and behaviors seem disrespectful to and intolerant of others.” They wrote a line about disrespecting authority figures, crossed it out, and then said that teachers had reported that he didn’t listen or take correction well.

Eric was more cautious. He revealed just enough to appear confessional. He said he had tasted alcohol three times, had never gotten drunk, and had given it up for good. Exactly what a parent wanted to hear. It was vintage Eric—more believable than abstinence and reassuring to boot: he had faced the temptation already and the danger had passed. He understood how his parents thought, and in no time he’d read Andrea Sanchez. In their first meeting, he turned an admission into a virtue. He lied about pot, too. He claimed he had no interest. The alcohol admission gave the claim credence.

Wayne and Kathy both attended their session as well. Their surprise came in the mental health section. On a checklist of thirty potential problem areas, they marked three boxes: anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Eric had told them about those three, and he discussed them with Dr. Albert. He was getting help. Everyone agreed the Zoloft was helping, too. It was common for an adolescent to check several boxes. Eric picked fourteen. He marked virtually everything related to distrust or aggression. He checked jealousy, anxiety, suspiciousness, authority figures, temper, racing thoughts, obsessive thoughts, mood swings, and disorganized thoughts. He skipped suicidal thoughts, but he checked homicidal thoughts.

Wayne and Kathy worried about Eric suppressing his anger. They admitted that he would blow up now and then—lashing out verbally or hitting an object. He never tried it in front of his dad, but they’d gotten reports back from work and school. It didn’t happen often, but they were concerned. Eric responded well to discipline. They had controlled his behavior, but how could they contain his moods? When he really got mad, Eric said, he would punch a wall. He had thought about suicide, but never seriously, and mostly out of anger. He got angry all the time, he said, at almost anything he didn’t like.

Eric was seething as he scrawled out his answers, and he practically told them so on the form. The nerve of these lowlifes judging him. He explained how he hated fools telling him what to do. In the interview, he apparently directed his anger at other fools. They fell for it.

Eric would howl about it later. The partial confession was his favorite con of all. He could turn over half his cards and still pull off the bluff.

He posted his actual thoughts about the legal system on his Web site at around this same time: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. If you don’t like it, you die.” He described going to some random downtown area in some big city and blowing up and shooting up everything he could. He assured us he would feel no remorse, no sorrow, no shame. Yet there he sat, submitting. He bent to their will; he filled out their degrading form. Laughing on the inside was insufficient. He would make them pay.

Sanchez worried about the boys’ failure to accept full responsibility. Eric was sticking to his story that the break-in was Dylan’s fault. Dylan thought the whole thing was a little overblown. Sanchez noted her reservations but recommended them for enrollment.

The final decision was up to the court. A week later, on March 25, Eric and Dylan stood before Jeffco Magistrate John DeVita during a joint hearing. Their fathers stood beside them. That impressed DeVita. Most of the juveniles appeared alone, or with just a mom. Dads were a good sign. And these dads appeared to be taking control of the situation. DeVita was also impressed by the punishments they had imposed. “Good for you, Dad,” he said. “It sounds to me like you got the circumstances under control.”

“This has been a rather traumatic experience,” Tom Klebold told him. “I think it’s probably good, a good experience, that they got caught the first time.”

“He’d tell you if there were any more?”

“Yes, he would actually.”

DeVita didn’t buy it. “First time out of the box and you get caught?” he asked Eric. “I don’t believe it. It’s a real rare occurrence when somebody gets caught the first time.”