Dave Cullen - Columbine

Eric spent his young life that way: he should have been a 4.0 student, but collected A’s, B’s, and C’s. He made one yearlong commitment, to NBK, but he had no ambition, zero plans for his life. He was one of the smartest kids in his high school, but apparently never bothered to apply to college. No job prospects either, beyond Blackjack. Despite a childhood of soldier fantasies, a military father, and a stated desire for a career in the Marines, Eric made no attempt to enlist. When a recruiter cold-called him during the last week of his life, he met the guy, but never returned the call to find out whether he had been accepted.

Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down—no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent.

A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderers, little research has been conducted on them. We know that the partnerships tend to be asymmetrical. An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. “It takes heat and cold to make a tornado,” Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn’t sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.

Day after day, for more than a year, Dylan juiced Eric with erratic jolts of excitement. They played the killing out again and again: the cries, the screams, the smell of burning flesh…

Eric savored the anticipation.

Dr. Hare’s EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. After Eric’s death, a colleague advanced our understanding with a new technology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging tests (fMRIs) create a picture of the brain, with light indicating active regions. Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob . Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain’s emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths’ amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotions instead of experiencing them.

“He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words interesting and fascinating, ” Dr. Hare said. For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

So what’s the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. “Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people,” Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. “These programs are like a finishing school,” a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare’s team. “They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.”

Eric was blessed with at least two unintentional coaches: Bob Kriegshauser, in the juvenile Diversion program, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Albert. Eric was a quick study. The notes in his Diversion file document a steady improvement, session by session.

Oddly, a large number of psychopaths spontaneously improve around middle age. The phenomenon has been observed for decades, but not explained. Otherwise, psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.

Dr. Kiehl has a mobile fMRI lab and a research team funded by the University of New Mexico. He mapped about five hundred brains at three prison systems in 2008. Because of the skewed sample pool, about 20 percent met the criteria for psychopathy. He believes that answers about the causes and treatment of psychopathy are coming within reach.

While Eric was devising his attack, Dr. Hare was working on a regimen to address his kind. Hare began by reexamining the data on those spontaneous improvers. From adolescence to their fifties, psychopaths showed virtually no change in emotional characteristics but improved dramatically in antisocial behavior. The inner drives did not change, but their behavior did.

Hare believes that these psychopaths might simply be adapting. Fiercely rational, they figured out that prison was not working for them. So Hare proposed using their self-interest to the public advantage. The program he developed accepts that psychopaths will remain egocentric and uncaring for life but will adhere to rules if it’s in their own interest. “Convincing them that there are ways they can get what they want without harming others” is the key, Hare said. “You say to them, ‘Most people think with their hearts, not with their heads, and your problem is you think too much with your head. So let’s change the problem into an asset.’ They understand that.”

While Eric was in high school, a juvenile treatment center in Wisconsin began a program developed independently but based on that approach. It also addressed the psychopathic drives for instant gratification and control: subjects were rated every night on adherence to rules and rewarded with extended privileges the next day. The program was not designed specifically for fledgling psychopaths, but it produced significant improvements in that population. A four-year study published in 2006 concluded that they were 2.7 times less likely to become violent than kids with similar psychopathy scores in other programs.

For the first time in the history of psychopathy, a treatment appears to have worked. It awaits replication.

Psychopathy experts are cautiously optimistic about coming advances. “I believe that within ten years we will have a much better perspective on psychopathy than we do now,” Dr. Kiehl said. “Ideally we will be able to help effectively manage the condition. I would not say that there is a cure on the horizon, but I do hope that we can implement effective management strategies.”

Fuselier was sure Eric was a psychopath. But the kid had been sixteen when he’d hatched the plot, seventeen for most of the planning, and barely eighteen when he opened fire. There would be resistance to writing Eric off at those ages.

Three months after Columbine, the FBI organized a major summit on school shooters in Leesburg, Virginia. The Bureau assembled some of the world’s leading psychologists, including Dr. Hare. Near the end of the conference, Dr. Fuselier stepped up to the microphone and gave a thorough briefing on the minds of the two killers. “It looks like Eric Harris was a budding young psychopath,” he concluded.

The room stirred. A renowned psychiatrist in the front row moved to speak. Here it comes, Fuselier thought. This guy is going to nitpick the assessment to death.