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

Steve leaves the long clips, leaves a lot of the extra ammo, too. He’s not going to have more than a couple minutes. After Virginia Tech, the police will come quickly. They’re not going to fuck up like that again and let someone walk around from place to place for hours.

He makes his bed, crisp, walks out to the kitchen to check again that he’s paid all of their bills ahead of time. He doesn’t want to leave Jessica with any problems. He walks back to his room and gathers everything. Puts the pistols and ammo in a duffel bag.

Does he pause and look at the Billy the Puppet mask again? Or the small doll, or the framed poster above his bed? Does he think about what he’s doing? Or does he just do it, using his OCD to move through the actions, checking everything three times?

He leaves in the afternoon, drives almost three hours to DeKalb, past farmland covered in snow, checks in to the Best Western Hotel at 6:44 p.m. Uses his Chase VISA and goes to his room, 134, then calls the front desk on his cell phone after five minutes and checks out ten minutes later, at 7:00 p.m. He drives to the Travelodge. Maybe the VISA was the problem. He shouldn’t have used a credit card. He could be tracked.

The Travelodge has a big black tarp out front covering the empty pool. Some kind of construction nightmare with chain-link fence all around. The place is a dump. The manager, “Matt,” is a pothead, red eyes, impaired, slow to understand, slow to speak. Steve pays cash for his room. No records.

Perhaps he grabs something to eat, paying cash again. Back in his room, he sends Kelly his email about the Manson concert. She’s written, “For my Black History Month celebration I plan to get a bucket of extra crispy chicken and a 2 liter of strawberry soda and have an In Living Color marathon.” So he starts off his email with “Don’t forget the watermelon! Sorry to hear about your sucky day, but things will get better! Right now I’m watching MSNBC and listening to Coma White.” This is her favorite Marilyn Manson song. He tells her he’s going to close his email account because of spam, asks her to call him later.

He erases everything in his email account and closes it. Jessica tries to email him and it bounces, so she calls him. It’s a short conversation, seven and a half minutes, at 9:56 p.m. “He told me how sorry he was for all the times he had hurt me and made me cry and that I should find someone better,” Jessica tells Mark later. “No matter how many times I told him that I loved him and how great he was, he never thought he was good enough.” Steve also tells her, “I’m sorry things did not turn out differently for us. Thank you for not holding anything against me. I appreciate what you have done for me. I love you.” He never says “I love you,” so she thinks this is odd. She thinks he’s getting depressed.

Steve has a call waiting from Kelly, so he hangs up on Jessica and talks with Kelly for half an hour. He tells her it was a bad idea living with an ex-girlfriend, because Jessica gets jealous when he talks with other women. They talk about the Manson concert, and he wishes she could have been there, but it would have been uncomfortable because of Jessica. He tells her he talked with and visited his godfather. He doesn’t tell her he’s in DeKalb. She asks what he’s doing for Valentine’s Day, and he says he isn’t going to be around. He also says he wishes he’d met her before things “got so fucked up.”

Steve talks with Jessica several more times that night, until midnight, and then he can’t sleep. His usual thing, lying awake from midnight to 3:00 a.m. He gets up and sends Kelly an email at 3:23 a.m., telling her to call if she wants to talk, because he’s cancelling this email account, too.

The next day, Tuesday, February 12, he buys four books for Jessica on Amazon, all to help with her studies. He includes the gift message, “You are the best Jessica! You’ve done so much for me, and I truly do love you. You will make an excellent psychologist or social worker someday! Don’t forget about me! Love, Steve.”

He also buys her a phone and memory sticks for $426, a purse for $302, sterling silver peace earrings for $38, data cables and other accessories, CDs, and he wants to buy her an engagement ring, something she’ll receive after the event. He wants to take care of her. He calls her in the afternoon, but she’s at work.

He tries to reach Joe Russo and also his father. Jessica calls him back at 3:38 and they talk for a little over ten minutes. He asks her what ring size she is and ‘what finger a woman wears her marriage ring on.’ He tells her she’ll be receiving a package in the mail from him. She can’t open it until Valentine’s Day or it won’t make any sense.

Jessica thinks he’s going to propose.

A COUPLE DAYS AFTER MY FATHER SHOT HIMSELFon the phone talking to my stepmother, saying “I love you but I’m not going to live without you,” she received flowers from him. A romantic gift from the grave, the same as Jessica will receive. And how can anyone ever make sense of this kind of gift?

One of my former colleagues at FSU, Thomas Joiner, is an expert on suicide, and he maintains that suicide is not a selfish act. “That’s not the way they’re thinking,” he says. They often believe their suicide will help the people they leave behind. My father, for instance, believed his insurance policies would help us, better than miring us in his financial problems with the IRS. We’d be better off in the end. Thomas Joiner’s father committed suicide, too.

After twenty-eight years of suicide bereavement, I’m moving closer to Joiner’s view. At first, suicide seemed like the most selfish act possible, and I felt rage and shame. Now I’m not so sure. But here’s what my father did to my stepmother, here’s how he was a monster.

Eleven months before my father’s suicide, my stepmother lost her parents to a murder-suicide. Her parents had a big house on top of a hill, overlooking an entire valley in Lakeport, Northern California. A valley with pear orchards and hills all around. They had horses. They were well off from a successful pool and spa business. I spent a lot of time at that house, riding all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes, swimming in the pool, learning to play backgammon, hunting and shooting. My stepmother’s father had a gun collection, pistols and shotguns, in cases. A room with dark wood and velvet. Many of the guns rare.

My stepmother’s mother felt bitter about her husband. He had cheated on her, was thinking of leaving her for another woman. Their years together were not what she had thought they were, her life a kind of lie. I remember her sitting in the kitchen on a stool, her little dog running around clicking its nails on the linoleum. She chain-smoked, had a raspy smoker’s laugh. I was always a little scared of her.

One day she went to the gun collection and picked out a shotgun and a pistol. She shot him at close range with the shotgun, killing him, then killed herself with the pistol.

Killing him had not been the plan, though. She included a letter to him in her suicide notes: “I’m really sorry for your last miserable 15 years. I really didn’t know. I really thought you loved me. . Above all, Rollie, be happy because I’m taking your hell away. I’ve loved you more than you will ever know.”

This was a small town, a small community, and for their five children, the shame was nearly unbearable, but they all stayed. They fought each other bitterly over the will, over the money.

My stepmother had already lost her daughter’s father to a car accident. Then her parents’ murder-suicide. She told my father, right near the end, “Don’t do this to me, Jim.”

But he did it. And he sent her flowers that she’d receive afterward. And to me, those flowers are the greatest cruelty. So although Jessica Baty has lied to me over and over, and should have seen warning signs, and is one of the most psychologically screwed up people I have ever met, buried deep in denial and still not able, really, to acknowledge Steve’s victims, the people he killed and wounded, I will never stop feeling sorry for her. Can you imagine believing a proposal is coming on Valentine’s Day, then finding out instead that he’s a mass murderer?