Dave Cullen - Columbine

* Unmotivated to succeed in school.

* We can deal with 1 and 2: TV, phone, computer, lights out, job, social.

* You must deal with 3.

* Prove to us your desire to succeed by succeeding, showing good judgment, giving extra effort, pursuing interests, seeking help, advice.

He put Eric on restriction again: a 10:00 P.M. curfew except for studying, no phone during study time, and possibly another four weeks away from his computer.

The crackdown was the last entry Wayne Harris would record—and nearly the last words the public would get from him. The search warrant exercised on his home a year later was specific to Eric’s writings. Nothing else from Wayne or Kathy or Eric’s brother was confiscated. In the ten years since the attack, they have issued a few brief statements through attorneys, met with police briefly, and with parents of the victims once. They have never spoken to the press. The outlines of Eric’s relationship to his father came through in their journals, and from testimony of outsiders. Kathy Harris is murkier, and a full picture of the family dynamic remains elusive.

With Eric, Dylan paid lip service to NBK. Privately, he was juggling two options: suicide or true love. He wrote Harriet a love letter, confessing all. “You don’t consciously know who I am,” he started, bluntly. “I, who write this, love you beyond infinince.” He thought about her all the time, he said. “Fate put me in need of you, yet this earth blocked that with uncertainties.” He was actually a lot like her: pensive, quiet, an observer. Like him, she seemed uninterested in the physical world. Life, school, it was all meaningless—how wonderful that she understood. Dylan caught a glimpse of sadness in her: she was lonely, just like him.

He wondered if she had a boyfriend. Odd that he’d never checked that out. He hardly saw her anymore. He realized this might be a bit much: “I know what you’re thinking: ‘(some psycho wrote me this harassing letter.)’” But he had to take the chance. He was sure she had noticed him a few times—none of her gazes had gone unnoticed. Dylan confessed his scariest intentions—just like Zack, who had found a soul mate in whom to confide his suicidal desires. At first Dylan was a little coy: “I will go away soon… please don’t feel any guilt about my soon-to-be ‘absence’ of this world.” Finally he conceded that she would hate him if she knew the whole truth, but he confessed it anyway: “I am a criminal, I have done things that almost nobody would even think about condoning.” He had been caught for most of his crimes, he said, and wanted a new existence. He was confident she knew what he meant. “Suicide? I have nothing to live for, & I won’t be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction.” But if she loved him as strongly as he loved her, he would find a way to survive.

If she thought he was crazy, please don’t tell anyone, he pleaded. Please accept his apologies. But if she felt something for him, too, she should leave a note in his locker—No. 837, near the library.

He signed his name. He did not deliver it. Did he ever intend to? Or was it just for him?

Eric, meanwhile, was upset. He lashed out at Brooks Brown by e-mail. “I know you’re an enemy of Eric’s,” it said. “I know where you live and what cars you drive.”

Psychopaths do not attempt to fool everyone. They save their performances for people with power over them or with something they need. If you saw the ugly side of Eric Harris, you meant nothing to him.

Brooks told his mom; Judy called the cops. A deputy wrote up yet another suspicious incident report and added it to the ongoing investigation of Eric. It said the Browns were worried. They’d requested an extra patrol for the night.

The threesome was over. Zack was not included in NBK, and Eric froze him out completely. Eric went cold on him that summer, Zack said—he never figured out why. Open hostilities erupted that fall. Dylan kept clear of it. He stayed close to Zack, away from Eric, chatting away by phone every night.

Randy Brown called the cops again. Somebody had tagged his garage with a paintball gun. He was sure it was that same old little criminal, Eric Harris. A deputy interviewed Randy and wrote up a report. “No suspects—no leads,” he wrote.

“Eric is doing well,” his new counselor, Bob Kriegshauser, wrote in Eric’s file at that time. Eric was exceeding expectations and covering his mistakes. He got into a bit of a procrastination jam on his last four hours of community service. He waited until the last day, and he wasn’t going to get to complete his full forty-five hours. So he sweet-talked the stranger in charge at the rec center that day, who was impressed enough to lie for him. As far as Bob Kriegshauser knew, Eric completed his service on time. Eric used the work for brownie points with a teacher that fall. He boasted about the summer he’d dedicated to the community.

The boys continued diverging philosophically: Eric held mastery over man and nature; Dylan was a slave to fate. And Dylan had a big surprise. He had no intention of inflicting Eric’s massacre. He enjoyed the banter, but privately said good-bye. He expected his August 10 entry to be his last. Dylan was planning to kill himself long before NBK.

Senior year started for the killers. Eric and Dylan began a video production class. That was fun. They got to make movies. The fictional vignettes were mostly variations on a formula: aloof tough guys protecting misfits from hulking jocks. Eric and Dylan outwitted the bullies, but saved the real contempt for their clients. They bled the losers financially, then killed them just because they could. The victims deserved it; they were inferior. The story lines spilled right out of Eric’s journal.

What an opportunity. Eric was guiding his unsteady partner: fantasy to reality, one step at a time. Dylan ate it up. He came alive on camera. His eyes bulged. You could sense true rage smoldering beneath his skin. The boys had riffed on NBK for months, but now they were acting out bits on film. They were celluloid heroes, screening their exploits for classmates and adults. Eric loved that. Hilarious to reveal his plans that way. He was right in the open, and they still couldn’t guess. And he had Dylan out there with him.

Eric was gobbling up literature: Macbeth, King Lear, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He could never get enough Nietzsche or Hobbes. Once a week, he wrote a short essay for English class on one of the stories or sometimes on a random topic. These essays reached Dr. Fuselier weeks after the murders. He found them revealing, particularly for what they omitted.

In September, Eric titled one of his short essays, “Is Murder or Breaking the Law Ever Justified?” Yes, he responded—in extreme situations. He described holding pets and humans hostage, threatening to blow up busloads of people. The irony of masking grisly murder fantasies in moralistic essays amused him. A police sniper could save many by killing one, Eric argued. The law must bend. Eric made the same case in his journal but took it a step further: moral imperatives are situational, absolutes are imaginary; therefore, he could kill anyone he wanted.

It’s revealing that Eric took on a provocative issue and gauged exactly how far he could run with it. Fuselier saw no moral confusion, clearly no mental illness—Eric demonstrated his sanity by his ability to navigate such tricky terrain. He got the satisfaction of warning us in yet another way without giving himself away.

Dylan expected to be dead soon. What was the point of school? He had a light schedule and was still pulling two D’s. He was sleeping in class. He missed the first calculus test and didn’t bother making it up. Those grades are not acceptable, Bob Kriegshauser, his Diversion officer, said. He could get them up ASAP or do his homework at the Diversion office every afternoon. Kriegshauser was thrilled with Eric’s progress. Eric was working on a speech about foreign music and memorizing “Der Erlkyoethe’s darkly operatic poem. He’d taken a road trip to Boulder to catch a University of Colorado football game. He was making a batch of doughnuts for Octoberfest, and soaking up everything he could find on the Nazis. He pored through books such as The Nazi Party,Secrets of the SS, and The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. He cited a dozen scholarly books for his paper “The Nazi Culture.” It was a strong piece of work: vivid, comprehensive, and detailed.