Dave Cullen - Columbine

But he was impressed by the way the boys presented themselves: dressed up, well behaved, deferential. Yes, Your Honor and No, Your Honor. They respected the court, and it showed.

DeVita pegged Dylan as well. The B’s and C’s on his report card were a joke. “I bet you’re an A student,” DeVita said. “If you put the brainpower to the paperwork.”

DeVita gave them a lecture; then he approved them for Diversion. This pair was going to do just fine, he thought.

Fourteen months later, after the murders, DeVita lamented how convincing the boys had been. “What’s mind-boggling is the amount of deception,” he said. “The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception.”

Judy and Randy Brown kept calling the cops. They were sure Brooks was in danger. Their other son was so scared he slept with a baseball bat. After two weeks of their pestering, the case was bumped up to Investigator John Hicks, who met with Judy. On March 31, he sat down with two other investigators, Mike Guerra and Glenn Grove, to discuss it. The situation looked pretty bad—bad enough for Investigator Guerra to type out a two-page affidavit for a search warrant, “duly sworn upon oath.”

Guerra did good work. In the affidavit, he dramatically outlined all the crucial elements of the case against this kid. He detailed the specificity of Eric’s plans, his methods, and his ordnance. He quoted liberally from Eric’s Web site to provide proof. But most important, Guerra drew the connection to physical evidence: a bomb matching those in Eric’s descriptions had recently been discovered near his home. The Harris house was to be searched for any literature, notes, or physical material related to the construction of explosives, as well as all e-mail correspondence—presumably to include the Web site.

The affidavit was convincing. It was filed. It was not signed or taken before a judge. It was not acted upon in any way. A plausible explanation for inaction was never provided. Years later, one official said Guerra was drawn away to another case, and when he returned, the affidavit, as written, lacked the timeliness required to take it to a judge.

The Browns said that Investigator Hicks also knew about Eric’s arrest for the van break-in. There was no indication that he or anyone from the sheriff’s department ever relayed their damning evidence about Eric to the Diversion officers. Magistrate DeVita was provided no indication before he approved them for the program.

Senior officials from the sheriff’s department, the DA’s office, and the criminal court were unaware of one another’s actions concerning Eric. But Eric apparently knew what they were all up to. Eric got wind that the Browns were on to him, so he took his Web site down for a while. There is no indication he ever learned of Dylan’s betrayal. There is no sign that he suspected.

Eric was getting serious about his plans now, and he would not risk posting anything about them on the Web again. He pulled out a spiral notebook and began a journal. For the next year, he would record his progress toward the attack and thoroughly explain his motives.

She’s in the martyrs’ hall of fame,” Cassie’s pastor proclaimed at her funeral. That was not hyperbole. A noted religious scholar predicted Cassie could become the first officially designated Protestant martyr since the sixteenth century. “This is really quite extraordinary,” he said. “The flames of martyrdom are being fanned by these various preachers, who apparently have embellished the story as they have told it. It takes on a life of its own.”

In the Weekly Standard, J. Bottum compared her to the third-century martyrs Perpetua and Felicity and “the tales of the thousands of early Christians who went joyously to their deaths in the Roman coliseums.” And the response felt like the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, Bottum said. He foresaw a generation of kids rising up to recast our cultural landscape. He later described a national change of heart, “trembling on the cusp of breaking forth…. It’s an ever-widening faith that the whole pornographic, violent, anarchic disaster of popular American culture will soon be swept away.”

It was a great story. It gave Brad and Misty tremendous relief. They were due. The Enemy had taken on their little girl before. And in the first round, The Enemy had won.

It had been possession, pure and simple; that’s how Misty saw it. The Enemy had crept into her house a decade earlier, but remained hidden until the winter of 1996. She discovered his presence just before Christmas. She had just quit her job as a financial analyst at Lockheed Martin in order to be a better, full-time mom. It was a tough transition, and Misty went looking for a Bible for inspiration. She found one in Cassie’s room, and she also discovered a stack of letters. They were disturbing.

The letters documented a vigorous correspondence between Cassie and a close friend. The friend bitched about a teacher and then suggested, “Want to help me murder her?” The pages were filled with hard-core sex talk, occult imagery, and magic spells. They hammered a persistent refrain: “Kill your parents!… Make those scumbags pay for your suffering…. Murder is the answer to all of your problems.”

Misty found only the friend’s letters, but they suggested a receptive audience. Blood cocktails and vampires appeared throughout, in descriptions and illustrations. A teacher was shown stabbed with butcher knives, lying in her own blood. Figures labeled Ma and Pa were hung by their intestines. Bloody daggers were lodged in their chests. A gravestone was inscribed “Pa and Ma Bernall.”

“My guts are hungry for that weird stuff,” one letter said. “I fucking need to kill myself, we need to murder your parents. School is a fucking bitch, kill me with your parents, then kill yourself so you don’t go to jail.”

Misty called Brad, then the sheriff. They waited for Cassie to come home. First, Cassie tried to downplay the letters. Then she got angry. She hated them, she said. She admitted to writing letters in kind. She screamed. She said she would run away. She threatened to kill herself.

Rev. Dave McPherson, the youth pastor at West Bowles, counseled Brad and Misty to get tough. “Cut her phone, lock the door, pull her out of school,” he said. “Don’t let her out of the house without supervision.” That’s what they did. They transferred Cassie to a private school. They let her leave the house only for youth group at the church.

A bitter struggle followed. “She despised us at first,” Reverend McPherson said. She would threaten to run away and launch into wild, graphic screaming fits.

“I’m going to kill myself!” Brad recalled her yelling. “Do you want to watch me? I’ll do it, just watch. I’ll kill myself. I’ll put a knife right here, right through my chest.”

Cassie cut her wrists and bludgeoned her skull. She would lock herself in the bathroom and bash her head against the sink counter. Alone in her bedroom, she beat it against the wall. With her family, she was sullen and spoke in monosyllables.

“There is no hope for that girl,” Reverend McPherson thought. “Not our kind of hope.”

Cassie described the ordeal in a notebook her parents found after her death:

I cannot explain in words how much I hurt. I didn’t know how to deal with this hurt, so I physically hurt myself…. Thoughts of suicide obsessed me for days, but I was too frightened to actually do it, so I “compromised” by scratching my hands and wrists with a sharp metal file until I bled. It only hurt for the first couple minutes, then I went numb. Afterwards, however, it stung very badly, which I thought I deserved anyway.