Dave Cullen - Columbine

The paper let Eric indulge in depravity right in the open. It began by asking the reader to imagine a stadium packed with murdered men, women, and children—not just filling the seats but piled high into the air above it. That would still represent just a fraction of the people exterminated by the Nazis, he said. Six million Jews they did away with, and five million others besides. Eleven million—now, there was a body count. Eric fantasized about topping it.

He described Nazi officers lining up prisoners and firing into the first man to see how many rib cages the bullet would penetrate. “Wow,” his teacher responded in the margin. “This is scary…. Incredible.”

Eric photocopied a passage from Heinrich Himmler’s infamous speech to SS group leaders and kept it in his room. “Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany,” Himmler said. “[Germans] will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals.” Here was someone who got it! The Nazis used human animals for labor; Eric only needed his to explode. Five or six hundred dismemberments ought to be enough for one awesome afternoon of TV.

Eric was feeling rambunctious. He started wearing T-shirts with German phrases, he littered his papers with swastikas, and he yelled “Sieg Heil” when he landed a strike at Rock’n’ Bowl. For Eric’s buddy Chris Morris, all the damn Nazi shit was wearing a little thin. Eric was quoting Hitler, spouting off about concentration camps… enough.

In October, Eric faced a setback. A speeding ticket. His parents were strict, and it cost him: they made him pay the fine, attend Defensive Driving, cover any increase in insurance premiums; plus, he was grounded for three weeks.

All the open Nazi lust was beginning to paint Eric into a corner. Four days after turning his paper in, Eric confided to his journal that he was showing too much. “I might need to put on one helluva mask here to fool you all some more,” he wrote. “fuck fuck fuck. it’ll be hard to hold out until April.”

He tried a new tactic: recast what he had already revealed. He wrote a deeply personal essay for government class and turned it in to Mr. Tonelli—they called him T-dog. Eric admitted he was a felon. He had faced the horror of the police station as a criminal. But he was a changed man. He’d spent four hours in custody, and it had been a nightmare. When they put him in a prison-style bathroom, he had broken down. “I cried, I hurt, and I felt like hell,” he wrote.

He was still trying to earn back the respect of his parents, he said. That was the biggest blow. Thank God he and Dylan never drank or did any drugs. In the closing lines, he made a classic psychopathic move: “Personally, I think that whole entire night was enough punishment for me,” he wrote, explaining that it forced him to face a whole new world of experiences. “So all in all,” he concluded, “I guess it was a worth while punishment after all.”

T-dog fell for every move. What chance did he have against a clever young psychopath? Few teachers even know the meaning of the term. Tonelli typed up a response to Eric: “Wow what a way to learn a lesson. I agree that night was enough punishment for you. Still, I am proud of you and the way you have reacted…. You have really learned from this and it has changed the way you think…. I would trust you in a heartbeat. Thanks for letting me read this and for being in my class.”

Fuselier compared the dates of the public and private confessions: just two days between them. It was remarkable how often Eric addressed the same ideas in both venues, and how craftily he obscured his true intent.

Months after the attack, following a briefing on the killers, Tonelli went to see Fuselier.

“I have to talk to you,” he said. Fuselier sat down with him. Tonelli was racked with guilt. “What did I miss here?” he asked.

Nothing, Fuselier said. Eric was convincing. He told you exactly what you wanted to hear. He didn’t play innocent; he confessed to guilt and pleaded for forgiveness. Civilians always believe a good psychopath.

Eric bragged about his performances again in his journal, and then took a turn: “goddammit I would have been a fucking great marine, It would have given me a reason to be good.” That was unusual for Eric. He usually reveled in his “bad” choice, but just for a moment there he toyed with the other road: “and I would never drink and drive, either,” he added. “It will be weird when we actually go on the rampage.”

Dr. Fuselier read the passage with only mild surprise. Even extreme psychopaths show flickers of empathy now and then. Eric was extreme but not absolute. This was the closest he would come to betraying reservations, and it was a logical pass. The plan was becoming real now. Eric finally had the means to kill. He felt the power; he had to make a decision—keep it fantasy or make it real?

Eric’s reflection lasted two lines. The sentences run together as if he was writing rapidly, and the next one envisioned a massive attack. A jumbo ammo cartridge would be great: “just think, 100 rounds without reloading, hell yeah!”

There is a house, outside of Laramie. It’s a rugged Wyoming town on the fringe of the Rockies. That’s where Dave and Linda Sanders were going to retire. A quiet college town, Laramie may appear desolate to most eyes, but it teems with youthful energy and is the intellectual capital of the state. Dave’s Ford Escort could get them there in under three hours, and they made several trips a year.

They were closing in on it now—two years away, maybe three. They were looking forward to it. They called it retirement, but it was a work addict’s version: off with one career, on to the next. Dave would move up to a college position; Linda had her eye on an antiques store. After twenty-five years at Columbine, Dave had qualified for his teaching pension. It was just a matter of an opening. University of Wyoming was a good bet: he had been scouting for them for years and coaching the summer camp, and was great friends with the head basketball coach.

They would watch their retirement home glide by from the highway every time they approached town. It was a gray ranch house with a wide porch running all the way around. They would add rocking chairs, and a porch swing for the grandkids.

Linda Sanders thought about that house in Laramie a lot after Dave died. She thought about how different her struggle was from all the other victims. All the attention was on the students and their parents.

Kathy Ireland had wanted to save her boy. Now she wanted to get her hands on the kids who did this to him. She looked into Patrick’s eyes. Serene. Like hers, before this horror struck. Kathy had breathed tranquillity into her family, but it took all of her effort to stay calm around Patrick.

Kathy stood by Patrick’s bed and asked if he understood who’d done this to him.

It didn’t matter, he said. They were confused. Just forgive them. Please forgive them.

“It took my breath away,” Kathy said later. At first she assumed Patrick was confused. He was not. He had too much work to do. He was going to walk again, and talk again, like a normal person. And he insisted he would still be valedictorian. Anger would eat him up inside. He couldn’t afford that.

OK, Kathy said. She had been praying incessantly that Patrick would come through this with a sense of happiness—that in time he would find a way to let it go. This, she had not expected. She feared that it was more than she could do, but she would try to forgive, too. It would take her years to let go, and she never shook the anger completely, but she kept looking to Patrick leading the way.