David Vann - Last Day on Earth - A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

On the shelf below the mask, a miniature Billy the Puppet, full-bodied, a small doll. Framed above Steve’s bed, a poster featuring the first three SAW films, along with movie facts.

Steve takes the mask down from his bookcase carefully, holds it to his left side, face turned toward him, a piece of himself, his alter ego. He and Jessica aren’t going anywhere tonight. She’s busy with work, and there’s no love after his night away with Heather. They don’t even get any trick or treaters.

Everything has fallen apart this fall, everything. His job in Rockville. Jim Thomas and his NIU friends on WebBoard. Jessica. Susan. The panic attack. Prozac and side effects. Craigslist. This is the beginning of the end. The final sequence, which will become as carefully planned and timed as any of Jigsaw’s tortures.

Steve dresses up, puts the mask on. He’s Jigsaw now, not only Billy the Puppet. He gets Jessica to take photos of him, arms outstretched, coming to get you, or holding a mallet cocked back, ready to swing. He emails the photos to his friends. Look at me. None of them know enough of his history, though. They think he’s just dressing up. One of his classmates, Poppy Ann Graham, thinks it’s “creepy — like there were two sides to Steve,” in the one where he’s looking at the mask.

After the photo shoot, perhaps he sits on his bed in his room, alone. Wears the mask, takes it off, studies it again. Gets up to check that his door is locked. Puts the mask back on. Is it sexual for him? It is for Jigsaw, though never acknowledged, so maybe it is for Steve. Does he jack off wearing the mask? Does he think of Kelly, in a cemetery or an empty church? Or maybe just looking at the mask, old witch, Marilyn Manson, mannequeen? Manson’s body smooth, androgynous, shaven, and plucked. Steve plucks his eyebrows regularly, shaves his pubic hair.

Two days later, November 2, Steve has Jigsaw tattooed over his entire right forearm. He’s not covering up an old tattoo, as he was with the skull and dagger. This is something new that he wants. He pays $700 for it. Jigsaw riding a tricycle through a pool of blood, with bloody cuts across Steve’s forearm as background. He’s a cutter, slit his wrists for three of his eight suicide attempts, and he needs to help himself, needs to learn the value of his life. Has he really learned? Every time he looks down, Jigsaw will be there, reminding him. “See what I see. Feel what I feel.” Learning through sadism, through physical pain, through torture. An individual above moral code, like Nietzsche’s superman, or libertarians like Steve, like Purdy who gunned down schoolchildren in Stockton, California with an AK-47.

Steve goes back to Tony’s Guns and Ammo with Jessica. Just checking things out. She buys some pepper spray.

Steve asks Heather if she wants to go to Florida with him for Thanksgiving, to visit his father. They’ve been emailing five or ten times a day and talk on the phone all the time, usually for several hours after 9:00 p.m. She says no, worries he’s becoming overly attached, tells him she’s getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, so that’s the end of that. Heartbreak, it seems, and he takes it out on Kelly, breaks up with her on November 9 by email, even though everything is going fine. The email is titled “Hey, everything is cool, but we were getting too close”:

“Hey Kelly, I really like you as a person, so don’t take me not answering your calls or emails personally, as you are a wonderful person, but I’m not looking for a repeat with respect to sex; mainly because I’ve been in a lot of terrible relationships over the years and they always begin with sex — even friendly sex — but it always leads to more than I can deal with. Yes, I know it’s dysfunctional, but it’s just the way it is. Relationships and myself never really work out that well, as casual always leads to something else, and since we got along so well, this just compounds the situation. Seriously, I had a great time with you, and I really enjoyed your deviant sense of humor (which is rare in women), as well as the great sex,-). I’m not trying to be a dick, but I don’t know any other way of telling you these things, as I don’t want you to feel bad or used or anything, but at the same time, I respect you and women in general, and don’t want to be a stereotypical guy, which is why I’m emailing you despite the advice of a friend saying not to. I see that you posted on CL [Craigslist] again, (don’t worry, I will never sell you out or anything, but am good at picking up on writing styles and such), and all I want to say is for you to be careful, and I would recommend getting pepper spray, as there are a lot of fucked up people out there. At least meet up in public next time like at a Coffee shop so you can be sure that the guy is not some basket case who just escaped from state custody or something.”

STEVE KEEPS HITTING CRAIGSLIST,looking for sex. Mark writes to him, “Mysteriously disappearing, also known as Craigslist gone bad,” because Steve is going off the radar.

Steve leads, usually, with that line about his saxophone tongue but settles in one case just for long chatty emails about school, life, etc. He spends a lot of time online with “Lisa,” an undergrad at U of I, from November 6 to 7, 2007. They begin with a misunderstanding. Her ad on Craigslist, using the email name “damaged goods,” apparently mentions a threesome, because he responds, “I’ve always wanted to be in a threesome as well and would be willing to participate as long as you are DD free (as I am) and can provide the 3rd person, (I want to be the one giving you oral).”

“I was just voicing my frustrations and fantasies,” she writes back. “What kind of decent girl hooks up with people from craigslist?. . if I were you I would stay away from girls soliciting sex on the internet, they generally fall into the category of ‘whores.’ By which I really mean ‘dirty whores.’”

They work things out, though, and Steve ends up revealing a lot about himself, perhaps because he’s pretty sure he’s never going to meet her in person (though he does try). “I only have 2 friends who are male [Joe Russo and Mark], while the rest of my friends/acquaintances are female since it seems easier for me to click with someone of the opposite gender.” He complains about the limited dating options in his program and says women in his field tend to be preachy. He tells her about being in a “state group-home,” his history at NIU, that he spent all his time studying, resented fraternities and sororities, etc. She reveals that she came to U of I to be with someone she loved, which didn’t work out, tells him about all her plans and hopes now, majoring in biology but considering the Peace Corps or the FBI.

It’s in these emails with Lisa that Steve most clearly reveals his confusion about his career, about what he’ll do with his life, and also how he felt about grad school. He details the shift from computer science to political science to sociology to law school to public administration. None of it has worked out for him. “I worked for a city manager as an intern for a few weeks and disliked it, because I could not tolerate working in a system that was so rigid and inflexible.” He tells her about the cuts in criminology in the sociology department at NIU and says he’s happy to have gotten into the social work master’s program at U of I. “The odd thing is that I would have gone to graduate school at UIUC from the beginning if not for a woman that I was dating (an eccentric art teacher [Kim]) at the time who wanted me to stay in the area so we could live happily ever after, or something like that. Obviously, it didn’t work out, so I kicked myself over that one for a while, but at least I’m here now. Okay, so you want to know the truth about graduate school? At NIU for my first year of graduate school, I was a teaching assistant for statistics, and although I enjoyed my teaching assistant position, I absolutely did not enjoy the graduate program. This was mainly due to the lack of quality students.”