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

“Well, I’ve never really been with a ‘dominant’ woman, although I’ve always fantasized about it!” Steve admits. “That would be something that I would love to do, (I mean, have done to me). I’m totally up for being ordered around, slapped, beat etc. and would definitely be interested in that, if you were serious, of course! I have a very high tolerance for pain, which is probably one of the reasons I’m addicted to tattoos, lol. Being dominated really turns me on for some reason. Typically during sex in the past, I’ve almost always had to be the dominant one, and always wanted to be told what to do and where to do it;-). Hmmm, sorry, but I’m really turned on right now. . too bad it’s 12:31am, and you’re probably at work, lol. . Rehab sounds fascinating. Will you be dealing with hardcore crack-heads and/or nappy headed hoes?” A reference to Don Imus. Steve is also a huge fan of Sean Hannity.

Steve emails Mark the same link about the microwaved baby. “Ding,” he writes. Mark writes back, “I wonder if she used reheat or regular settings.”

“Ordinarily I’d say reheat,” Steve replies. “But then again, you’d have to factor in weight and size, so regular settings might have been preferred.” He includes a link to a drink called “Dead Baby Recipe.” “Do you think she had a drink of this the night before?”

“And I put lol tasteless,” Mark says. “But it’s just an example of our humor. It was nothing harmful, as far as that goes.”

On February 1, Steve writes to Mark about conspiracy theories. “I didn’t tell the detectives about this,” Mark says. “I didn’t know how relevant it would be, but he sent me — one of his conspiracy theories he asked about was Timothy McVeigh and all that whole thing with Oklahoma, and he attached the PDF for the Turner diaries.”

“I recommend it,” Steve writes, “if only to gain a better understanding of McVeigh and what drives the CIM (the Christian Identity Movement)” and then he adds, “haha, Ruby Ridge does refer to the Randy Weaver controversy, which also inspired McVeigh’s actions. I’m just happy because I have it straight about Ruby Ridge.” And then he sends Mark a link about Terry Nichols: “I know Wikipedia sucks, but I wanted to point out the waste of money that the Feds and states spent while pursuing the death penalty.”

“What the Turner diaries are,” Mark explains to me, “it’s about the government taking the guns from people, basically.” Mark reads a description of the book: “The Turner Diaries, by Andrew McDonald: what will you do when they come to take your guns? It’s about Earl Turner and his fellow patriots, who face this question and are forced underground when the US government bans the private possession of firearms and stages the mass gun raids to round up the suspected gun owners.”

As idiotic as it sounds, this is the real basis for the pro-gun lobby in America: right-wing libertarian paranoia that the federal government wants to enslave all its citizens and needs to take their guns away first before enacting the evil plan. I would just laugh and shrug it off, but this is a major force in mainstream American politics. How can that be? Who are we?

“It was one of those things where he sent it to me and said it would be interesting,” Mark says, “and this is our humor, here: I put ‘this is our motivation for our plan on 4/19.’ Back to, I believe 4/19 was Columbine, or 4/20. Something was on 4/19. And then I quoted from Wikipedia, ‘his neighbors reported he was spraying fertilizer on his lawn of his Kansas home on the morning of the explosion.’ I put down: ‘How would someone take notice of such a mundane activity such as lawn care on a seemingly normal day? Lol, media manipulation.’ Because why would neighbors notice that someone was fertilizing a lawn?”

Mark and Steve call each other NIGGA in their emails, and race keeps coming up as an issue: “Steve wrote ‘Nichols has been married twice, first to Lana Padilla,’ and then I put, ‘oh, I smell a dirty bomb conspiracy.’ That ties back to Jose Padilla. Steve goes: ‘lol at Padilla’s dirty bomb reference. See, right-wing extremists and dirty ragheads’—please keep in mind, too, that he wasn’t racist or anything like that—‘are one in the same.’”

“We were equal opportunity offenders,” Mark says. “We offended everyone by just [being] ourselves. Whether it be Americans or Middle Easterns, or blacks or whatever. We just talked about the stereotypical, whether it be whites, the red-necked trailer park people, just how dumb they act, you know what I mean? Not to be offensive, right? Or, even with the blacks. There’s the respectable black professionals, like Obama, the people that are respectable, then there’s people that live in the hood that just want to live off government welfare checks and all that. So those are the people that we took ahold of and just said, these are different issues in society. Like the terrorists in the middle east. He had, not a fascination, but he was interested in Hamas. He was interested in Hamas because they were a group that gives back and helps out.”

Steve was especially angry at affirmative action. “Another thing he didn’t like,” Mark explains, “is that a lot of the minorities that come there [NIU] took it as a joke, right? And not necessarily minorities, but there were a lot of minorities that got on there because of — I forgot what the chance program was called, I don’t know if they have something similar down in Florida, but in Illinois they have it where, it, uh, underprivileged inner city students, there’s a certain percentage that has to be accepted to the university, okay? Steve looked at it that he was in the same place at one point as these inner city students and he accomplished it and he greatly valued his education and he achieved what he wanted, versus the other students who come and they make a joke out of it. They don’t go to classes, they just hang out all day, and he didn’t like that. And I didn’t like that either. You know what I mean? But then if you look at that, then why didn’t he go to a black center and shoot people, right?”

IN HIS EMAILS WITH KELLYon February 1, Steve begins to worry about privacy. According to Mark, this was always a concern for Steve: “Steve was kind of paranoid about things, I don’t know why, but he would delete all the emails, always. But I never erased any.”

“Well, I’ve always wondered if you show these emails to anyone,” Steve writes to Kelly, “because that would be weird, but I don’t really care, lol. Oh, I meant to mention. . when I said I’m up for anything, I mean anything, even a 3 way (male or female) on the back of a train with hobos watching and fighting with home-made shanks over canned soup. It can be an erotic version of Bum-Fights or something. It’s great that you want to be a CADC (not sure of the acronym at the moment), because it’s not a bad profession. Druggies are fun and will provide you with many, many crazy stories to tell. Like that time where I snorted coke off a hooker’s belly while tripping on LSD. j/k, but I’m sure you’d be a great counselor; particularly since you need a totally fucked up sense of humor for a job like that. I’m amazed at times how many of my fellow students, (whom want to be social workers), are so offended by everything and anything that’s not pure, (whatever that means). Some of the people in my program were/are very sheltered. I’m a nick-name type person, so I just usually refer to odd people as nick-names. There’s this one lady who I call Rated-G who is a bible thumper and is offended by curse words, violence, sexual references, etc. She verbally opposed watching a movie for social work, because the characters use words like ‘Damn.’ Seriously. She always talks about how she only lets her kids (and herself) watch G-rated movies and such, and is annoyed by some of my very vocal separation of church and state comments. Jesus freaks piss me off, as do most fundamentalists. But people like rated-G put the FUN in fundamentalist, I guess. All the worlds a stage meant for the entertainment of people with a bizarre sense of morality and humor, I suppose. Oh, To catch a predator is on right now, hence the name Hanson. I really want that show to be done in Illinois somewhere!”