Dave Cullen - Columbine

The Harrises broke their three-month silence to issue a statement disputing “misstatements” on the letters. Their attorney insisted Jeffco had never tried to contact him about them.

The letters were eventually returned.

Sue Klebold also wrote apologies in May. She mailed them directly to the Thirteen. Brad and Misty received this handwritten card:

Dear Bernall family,

It is with great difficulty and humility that we write to express our profound sorrow over the loss of your beautiful daughter, Cassie. She brought joy and love to the world, and she was taken in a moment of madness. We wish we had had the opportunity to know her and be uplifted by her loving spirit.

We will never understand why this tragedy happened, or what we might have done to prevent it. We apologize for the role our son had in your Cassie’s death. We never saw anger or hatred in Dylan until the last moments of his life when we watched in helpless horror with the rest of the world. The reality that our son shared in the responsibility for this tragedy is still incredibly difficult for us to comprehend.

May God comfort you and your loved ones. May He bring peace and understanding to all of our wounded hearts.

Misty was moved—enough to publish the full text in the memoir she was drafting. She generously described the act as courageous. Tom and Sue lost a son in the same disaster, she wrote. At least Cassie had died nobly. What comfort did the Klebolds have? Misty also addressed the charges against the killers’ parents. Should they have known? Were they negligent? “How do we know?”

Ayear before the attack, the boys settled on the time and place: April 1999, in the commons. That gave Eric time to plan, build his arsenal, and convince his partner it was for real.

Shortly after starting Diversion, Eric and Dylan received their junior yearbooks. They swapped and filled page after page with drawings, descriptions, and rants. “We, the gods, will have so much fun w NBK!!” Dylan wrote in Eric’s. “My wrath for january’s incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons.”

January’s incident was their arrest. Eric was pissed about it, too. “Jan 31 sux,” he wrote in Dylan’s. “I hate white vans!!”

The arrest was a critical moment—the yearbooks confirmed Fuselier’s tentative conclusion on that score. Eventually, Fuselier would see it as the single most important event in Eric’s progression to murder. The arrest was followed, in rapid succession, by Eric detonating his first pipe bombs, threatening mass murder on his Web site, confiding worse visions to his journal, and settling on the outlines of his attack. But Eric was already headed that way. He did not “snap.” Fuselier saw fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than cause.

Eric was an injustice collector. The cops, judge, and Diversion officers were merely the latest additions to a comically comprehensive enemies list, which included Tiger Woods, every girl who had rejected him, all of Western culture, and the human species. What was different about the arrest, in Fuselier’s eyes, was that it was the first dramatic rein-in on the boys’ ability to control their own lives—“the screws are tightening,” as Dylan put it. They were juniors in high school now, a time when personal freedom expanded faster than ever before. They had just gotten their driver’s licenses, they had jobs with paychecks and their first rush of disposable income, their curfews were getting later, parental oversight was easing, Eric was dating… their universe of possibilities was expanding. They had suffered setbacks before, but those were mild and short-lived. This time, it was a felony. A felony, for the smallest trifle: some moron’s van—so what? All freedom was lost. Eric’s twenty-three-year-old was dumping him because he was grounded all the time and could never see her. He kept working Brenda, but it didn’t look good.

Eric filled Dylan’s yearbook with drawings: swastikas, robokillers, and splattered bodies. The dead outnumbered the living. An illustration in the margin suggested hundreds of tiny corpses piling up to the horizon, until they all blended together in an ocean of human waste.

Eric went through his own book, marking up the faces of kids he didn’t like. He labeled them “worthless,” said they would die, or just made an X over their pictures. Eric had two thousand photos to deface, and eventually he got to almost all of them.

Eric had it in for a couple of traitorous assholes: “God I cant wait till they die,” he wrote in Dylan’s book. “I can taste the blood now.”

Psychopaths want to enjoy their exploits. That’s why the sadistic ones tend to choose serial killing: they enjoy the cruelty as it plays out. Eric went a different route: the big kill, which he would relish in anticipation for a full year. He loved control—he couldn’t wait to hold lives in his hand. When his day finally arrived, he took his time in the library and enjoyed every minute of it. He killed some kids on a whim, let others go just as easily.

He also used his Web site to enjoy a certain notoriety in his lifetime. He loved the irony of his online world, where all the other kids were posing but his fantasy was real.

One contradiction to Eric’s control fetish is apparent in his willingness to entrust power to Dylan. The yearbook exchange represented a huge leap of faith for each of them. They had been talking about murder for months now, and corresponding catchphrases in both journals suggest they had been riffing on these ideas regularly. Eric had gone semipublic with his threats already, posting them on his Web site, but no one seemed to notice or take it seriously. This time, he scrawled out incriminating evidence of his plot in his own handwriting and turned it over to Dylan.

They hinted about plans in a few friends’ yearbooks, but it all sounded like jokes. Dylan said he would like to kill Puff Daddy or Hanson, while Eric went with irony: don’t follow your dreams, follow your animal instincts—“if it moves kill it, if it doesn’t, burn it. kein mitleid!!!” Kein mitleid is German for “no mercy,” and a common shorthand for his favorite band, KMFDM. This was just the kind of move that delighted Eric: warn the world, in writing, to show us how stupid we all are.

In each other’s books, they took a real gamble, particularly Dylan. He wrote page after page of specific murder plans. They were at each other’s mercy now. Exposure of the yearbooks could end their participation in Diversion and bring them back on felony charges. For the final year, each boy knew his buddy could get him imprisoned at any time, though they would both go down together. Mutually assured destruction.

Dr. Fuselier considered the yearbook passages. Both boys fantasized about murder, but Dylan focused on the single attack. Eric had a grander vision. All his writing alluded to a wider slaughter: killing everything, destroying the human race. In a passionate journal entry a month later, he would cite the Nazis’ Final Solution: “kill them all. well in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND.’”

It’s unclear whether Eric and Dylan were aware of the discrepancy—neither one addressed it in writing. It’s hard to imagine that Eric failed to notice Dylan’s focus on a more limited attack. Was he including Dylan in the full dream? Perhaps Dylan just didn’t find it plausible. Blowing up the high school, that could actually happen—killing mankind… maybe that just sounded like science fiction to Dylan.

Despite the press’s obsession with bullying and misfits, that’s not how the boys presented themselves. Dylan laughed about picking on the new freshmen and “fags.” Neither one complained about bullies picking on them—they boasted about doing it themselves.