Columbine — Chapter no 36

36. Conspiracy

After the murders, the detective team sought convictions. It had three possible crimes to uncover: participation in the attack, participation in the planning, or guilty knowledge. At first it looked easy. The killers had been sloppy; they hadn't even tried to cover their tracks. And the primary living suspects were juveniles. Most of the friends had withheld something crucial: Robyn had helped purchase three of the guns, Chris and Nate had seen pipe bombs, and Chris and Zack had heard about napalm. They all broke quickly. They were kids; it was easy. But they broke only so far. They admitted to knowing details, but claimed to be clueless about the plan.

Detectives pushed harder. The suspects didn't push back; they just threw up their hands. Fuselier had several solid agents on the case. He knew they could sniff out a liar. How are the suspects responding? he asked. Do they seem deceptive? Not at all. His team leader described them as wide-eyed and understandably anxious. Most had begun by hiding something, and it had been painfully obvious. They were awful actors. But once they spilled it, they just seemed relieved. They were calm, peaceful–all the signs of someone coming clean. Most of the suspects agreed to polygraphs. That usually meant they had nothing left to hide.

Two friends, Robert Perry and Joe Stair, had been identified by witnesses as shooters or at least present at the scene. They were both tall and lanky– and therefore matched a common description for Dylan. Both boys produced alibis. Perry's was shaky: he had been sleeping downstairs until his grandmother woke him with news of the shooting. He said he walked upstairs, stumbled out onto the porch, and cried. Did anyone see him, other than his grandmother? No, he didn't think so. But Perry had been seen by others–he'd just been too upset to notice them. Within a week, a neighbor who was interviewed described driving up around noon and seeing Perry crying just the way he'd described.

The physical evidence was even less damning. All the friends' houses were searched. No weapons were found. No ammo, no ordnance, no refuse of any pipe bomb assembly. Zack had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, but there was no sign that he had used it to build anything. Fingerprints at the crime scene were all a bust. There was an extraordinary amount of material: guns, ammo, gear, unused pipe bombs, strips of duct tape, and dozens of components from the big bombs. All of it was covered with the killers' prints; nobody else's. The same was true at the killers' houses: nothing on the journals, videotapes, camcorders, or bomb-assembly gear.

No one appeared in the killers' records. Eric had been a meticulous planner and recorder of dates, locations, and receipts. Detectives searched the stores' files and credit card records. All signs indicated that the killers had purchased everything.

For months, Sheriff Stone publicly espoused a conspiracy theory.

Fuselier could feel the conspiracy slipping away the first week. Within two, he knew it was remote. The most telling evidence came from the killers themselves. In their journals and videos, they cop to everything. They never mention outside involvement, except, derisively, when they talk about hapless dupes. The killers leaked their plans in countless way, but there's no indication that anyone close to them ever breathed a word. Their friends' e- mails, IMs, day planners, and journals were searched, along with every paper the investigators could find; there was no sign that any of the friends had known.

Rumors about a third shooter have continued right up to the present day, but publicly, it didn't take long for investigators to put them to rest. Eric and Dylan were correctly identified by witnesses who knew them. No one else turned up on the surveillance videos or the 911 audio. Witnesses' accounts were remarkably consistent about a tall shooter and a short one–but there seemed to be two of each: two in T-shirts and two in trench coats. "As soon as I learned Eric's coat was left outside on the landing, I knew what had happened there," Fuselier said. Witnesses exchanged stories, and reports of two guys in T-shirts and two in trench coats quickly turned into four shooters. Dylan's decision to leave his coat on until he reached the library made for more combinations, and the number multiplied over the afternoon.

The killers also lobbed pipe bombs in every direction. Their gunfire shattered windows and ricocheted off walls, ductwork, and stairs. Many kids heard crashes or explosions and positively identified the location as the

source of activity rather than the destination. Several witnesses insisted that they had spotted a gunman on the roof. What they had seen was a maintenance man adjusting the air-conditioning unit.

So what accounted for all the confusion? "Eyewitness testimony, in general, is not very accurate," one investigator explained. "Put that together with gunshots going off and just the most terrifying situation in their life, what they remember now may not be anywhere near what really happened."

Human memory can be erratic. We tend to record fragments: gunshots, explosions, trench coats, terror, sirens, screams. Images come back jumbled, but we crave coherence, so we trim them, adjust details, and assemble everything together in a story that makes sense. We record vivid details, like the scraggly ponytail flapping against the dirty blue T-shirt of the boy fleeing just ahead. All the way out of the building, a witness may focus on that swishing hair. Later, she remembers a glimpse of the killer: he was tall and lanky–did he have scraggly hair? It fits together, and she connects it.

Soon the killer is wearing the dirty blue T-shirt as well. Moments later, and forever after, she is convinced that's exactly what she saw.

Investigators identified nearly a dozen common misperceptions among library survivors. Distortion of time was rampant, particularly chronology.

Witnesses recalled less once the killers approached them, not more. Terror stops the brain from forming new memories. A staggering number insisted they were the last ones out of the library–once they were out, it was over.

Similarly, most of those injured, even superficially, believed they were the last ones hit. Survivors also clung to reassuring concepts: that they were actually hiding by crouching under tables in plain sight.

Memory is notoriously unreliable. It happens even with the best witnesses. Six years later, Principal DeAngelis described the shooting as if he had just experienced it. He retraced his steps through the building, pausing at the exact spot where he first saw Dylan Klebold fire his shotgun.

Mr. D pointed out Dylan's position and described everything Dylan was wearing: white T-shirt, military harness, ball cap turned around backward.

But he has two entirely different versions of how he got there.

In one version, he learned of the shooting in his office. That was unusual: normally he would have been in the midst of the cafeteria hubbub. But Tuesday he was held up by an appointment. He had a meeting with a young teacher working on a one-year contract. Mr. D had been happy with the teacher's performance and was about to offer him a permanent position.

They had just shaken hands and sat down when Frank's secretary's face slammed into the glass on the top half of his door. She had run to warn him so frantically that she'd failed to turn the knob completely and had hurtled right into the door. A moment later, she burst in shouting.

"Frank! They're shooting!"

"What?"

"Gunshots! Downstairs, there are gunshots!"

He bolted up. They ran out together–into the main foyer, just past the huge hanging trophy case. Dylan fired, and the case shattered behind Frank.

It was two or three years after the fact that Frank's secretary recounted that version for him. He told her she was nuts. He had no memory of that.

"In my version, I'm walking out calmly going to lunch," he said. "We've finished the meeting, I've offered him the job. He's happy."

DeAngelis had planned to offer the job. He liked the teacher and had pictured his joyful acceptance. Mentally, it had already happened. The actual events–gunfire in the hallway, his charge toward the girls' gym class, and the desperation to hide them–wiped out everything in his mental vicinity. His secretary's appearance was unimportant, and it conflicted with his "memory" of offering the job. One memory had to go.

Mr. D checked with the teacher. No job offer–they'd just sat down. Other witnesses had seen him run alongside his secretary. He came to accept that version of the truth, but he can't picture it. His visual brain insists that the false memory is real. Multiply that by nearly two thousand kids and over a hundred teachers and a precisely accurate picture was impossible to render.

____

Investigators went back to interview the killers' closest friends several times. Each new interview and lead would raise more questions about the killers' associates. Sometimes new evidence revealed lies.

An FBI agent interviewed Kristi Epling the day after the murders. Kristi was connected to both killers, particularly Eric. They were close, and she was dating his buddy Nate Dykeman. She didn't seem to know much, though. Her FBI report was brief and unremarkable. She said Nate was in shock, the TCM connection was silly, and Eric had probably been the leader. Kristi did not mention any of his notes in her possession.

Like most of the killers' friends, Kristi was exceptionally smart; she was headed to college on an academic scholarship. She played it cool about the notes during her FBI interview, then mailed them to a friend in St. Louis who was unconnected to Columbine and unlikely to be questioned. Kristi was careful: no return address on the envelope. The friend went to the police. She did not inform Kristi.

The pages included notes passed back and forth between Kristi and Eric in German class–a rambling conversation, conducted in German. They mentioned a hit list. That was old news to investigators–most of the school was on one of Eric's lists. But they had withheld that information from the public. Kristi had been hiding it; maybe she was hiding more. Detectives returned to question her. They asked about German class, and Kristi said she had exchanged notes with Eric but had thrown them away months ago.

She assured them repeatedly that Eric had never made any threats. She would have told a teacher, she insisted. Kristi also said Nate had fled to Florida, to stay with his father and avoid the media hounds. They had talked on the phone that morning.

The detectives asked Kristi what should happen to someone who had helped the killers. "They should go to jail forever," she said. "It was a horrible thing." And what about someone who withheld information after the attack? "I don't know," Kristi said. "It would depend on what it was."

They should probably get counseling, she suggested, but some sort of punishment, too.

They asked again: Did she know anything more? No. Had she destroyed any notes from Eric? No. They kept repeating the questions, assuring her that she could disclose anything now without repercussions. No, there was nothing. They continued questioning her, repeated that offer, and finally she went for it. OK, there were notes, she admitted. And Nate was not in Florida; he was staying with her. He was there in the house right now. She said the notes had been very painful to hold on to but she did not want to destroy them. If she could just get them somewhere far, far away, she hoped to retrieve them someday when everything was more clear.

Once she copped to the truth, Kristi was forthcoming. She agreed to turn over her PC and her e-mail accounts and to take a polygraph. Beyond that, she didn't know anything significant. She told them about some things Nate had confessed to, but detectives knew about them already. Kristi had just

been afraid. She'd thought she had something incriminating, and she'd panicked. No evidence of a conspiracy. Another dead end.

Nevertheless, Dr. Fuselier learned a great deal from the German conversation. It revolved around Kristi's new boyfriend; she'd had a short- lived romance with a sophomore named Dan. Eric couldn't believe she was going out with that little fuck. Why, what was wrong with Dan? she asked.

For one thing, the prettyboy had punched him in the face last year, Eric said. Eric, in a fistfight? That surprised her. He always seemed so rational.

He got mad when kids made fun of his black clothes or all his German crap, but he always kept his cool. He would calmly figure out how to get even.

Kristi worried about Eric getting even. She asked her boyfriend about it, and he said he was afraid Eric might kill him.

Kristi decided to play peace broker. She took it up with Eric in German class again. She told him straight out how scared Dan was. She used the phrase "kill him." That made Eric nervous. He was in the juvenile Diversion program because of the van break-in, and threats like that could get him in trouble. Kristi said she'd be careful about it. But how could Dan make it up to him?

How about if he let me punch him in the face, Eric suggested. Seriously?

Seriously.

Dr. Fuselier was not surprised by the notes. Very cold-blooded. Any kid could get in a fight. Dan had gotten really angry, and in the heat of a fistfight had clocked Eric. Eric was planning his punch. He wanted Dan to stand there defenseless and let him do it. Complete power over the kid.

That's what Eric craved.

____

As the conspiracy theory crumbled, far from the eyes of the public, a new motive emerged. The jock-feud theory was accepted as the underlying driver, but that had supposedly gone on for a year. What made the killers snap? Nine days after the murders, the media found yet another trigger. The Marines. The New York Times and the Washington Post broke the story on April 29. The rest of the media piled on quickly.

They learned that Eric had been talking to a Marine recruiter during the last few weeks of his life. They also discovered he'd been taking the

prescription antidepressant Luvox–something that would typically disqualify him (because it implied depression). A Defense Department spokesman verified that the recruiter had learned about the medication and rejected Eric. The media was off to the races, again.

Luvox added an extra wrinkle, as it functioned as an anger suppressant.

The Times cited unnamed friends of Eric's as saying that "they believe that he may have tried to stop taking the drug, perhaps because of his rejection by the Marines, five days before he and his best friend, Dylan Klebold, stormed onto the Columbine campus with guns and bombs."

The story added a bit of evidence that seemed to confirm it: "the coroner's office said no drugs or alcohol had been found in Mr. Harris's body in an autopsy, but it would not specify whether the body had been screened for Luvox." It was finally coming together: the Marines rejected Eric, he quit the Luvox to fuel his rage, he grabbed a gun and started killing. It all fit.

Fuselier read the stories. He shuddered. All the conclusions were reasonable–and wrong. Eric's body had not initially been screened for Luvox. Later it had: he'd remained on a full dose, right up to his death. And investigators had talked to the Marine recruiter the morning after the murders. He had determined Eric was ineligible. But Eric had never known.

By this time, Fuselier had already read Eric's journal and seen the Basement Tapes. He knew what the media did not. There had been no trigger.

____

April 30, officials met with the Klebolds and several attorneys to discuss ground rules for a series of interviews. Kate Battan was aggravated that she could not question the family directly. So she asked them to tell her about their son. They were still dumbfounded. They described a normal teenage boy: extraordinarily shy but happy. Dylan was coping well with adolescence and developing into a responsible young adult. They entrusted him with major decisions when he could articulate his rationale. Teachers loved him and so did other kids. He was gentle and sensitive until the day he died. Sue could recall seeing Dylan cry only once. He came home from school upset, and went up to his room. He pulled a box of stuffed animals

out of the closet, dumped them out, burrowed under, and fell asleep surrounded. He never did reveal what disturbed him.

His parents granted Dylan a measure of privacy in his own room. The last time Tom recalled being in there was about two weeks before the murders, to turn off the computer Dylan left on. Otherwise, they monitored Dylan's life aggressively, and forbade him from hanging out with bad influences.

Tom said he was extremely close to Dylan. They shared Rockies season tickets with three other families, and on his nights, Tom usually took one of his sons. Tom and Dylan hung out all the time together. They played a lot of sports until Tom developed arthritis in the mid-1990s. Now it was a lot of chess, computers, and working on Dylan's BMW. They built a set of custom speakers together. Dylan didn't like doing repair work with Tom, though, and sometimes he got testy and snapped off one-word responses. That was normal. Tom considered Dylan his best friend.

Dylan had a handful of tight buddies, his parents said: Zack and Nate, and of course Eric, who was definitely closest. Chris Morris seemed like more of an acquaintance. Dylan had fun with Robyn Anderson–a sweet girl–but definitely nothing romantic. He hadn't had a girlfriend yet, but had been kind of group dating. His friends seemed happy. They sure did laugh a lot. They were always polite and seemed laid back–pretty immune to social pressure, they said.

Eric was the quietest of the group. Tom and Sue never felt they knew what was going on in that head. Eric was always respectful, though. They were aware Judy Brown had a different opinion. "Judy doesn't like a lot of people," Sue said.

Tom and Sue didn't perceive Eric to be leading or following their son.

But they did notice that he got angry at Dylan when he "screwed something up."

Before they left, detectives asked the Klebolds if they had any questions.

Yes. They asked to read anything Dylan had written. Anything to understand.

Battan left frustrated. "I didn't get to ask any questions," she said later.

"All I got was a fluff piece on their son." She documented the interview, which remained sealed for eighteen months. The series of interviews never occurred. Lawyers demanded immunity from prosecution before they

would talk. Jeffco officials refused. The Harrises took the same position.

Battan didn't even get a fluff piece from them.

____

While Battan interviewed the Klebolds, the National Rifle Association convened in Denver. It was a ghastly coincidence. Mayor Wellington Webb begged the group to cancel its annual convention, scheduled long before.

Angry barbs had flown back and forth all week. "We don't want you here,"

Mayor Webb finally said.

Other promoters gave in to similar demands. Marilyn Manson had been incorrectly linked to the killers. He canceled his concert at Red Rocks and the remainder of his national tour. The NRA show went on. Four thousand attended. Three thousand protesters met them. They massed on the capitol steps, marched to the convention site, and formed a human chain around the Adam's Mark Hotel. Many waved "Shame on the NRA" signs. One placard was different. Tom Mauser's said "My son Daniel died at Columbine. He'd expect me to be here today."

Tom was a shy, quiet man. It had been a rough week, and friends weren't sure he was up to public confrontation. "He had a tough, tough day yesterday," one coworker said.

But Tom drew a deep breath, let it out, and addressed the crowd.

"Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun so easily and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child's face," he said. He urged them not to let Daniel's death be in vain.

Tom had been struck by another coincidence. In early April, Daniel had taken an interest in gun control and had come to his father with a question: Did Tom know there were loopholes in the Brady Bill? Gun shows were excluded from the mandatory background checks. Two weeks later, Daniel was murdered by a gun acquired at one of those shows.

"Clearly it was a sign to me," Tom explained later.

Critics had already blasted Tom for profiting off his son's murder, or getting duped by gun control activists. "I assure you, I am not being exploited," he told the crowd.

Inside the Adam's Mark, NRA president Charlton Heston opened the show. He went straight at Mayor Webb. The crowd booed. "Get out of our

country, Wellington Webb!" someone yelled. Conventioneers were amused.

Heston charged on. "They say, 'Don't come here,'" he said. "I guess what saddens me most is how it suggests complicity. It implies that you and I and eighty million honest gun owners are somehow to blame, that we don't care as much as they, or that we don't deserve to be as shocked and horrified as every other soul in America mourning for the people of Littleton. 'Don't come here.' That's offensive. It's also absurd."

The group observed a moment of silence for the Columbine victims. It then proceeded with the welcome ceremony. Traditionally, the oldest and youngest attendees are officially recognized at that time. The youngest is typically a child. "Given the unusual circumstances," Heston announced that the tradition would be suspended this year.

____

When the conspiracy evaporated, it left a dangerous vacuum. Dr. Fuselier saw the danger early on. "Once we understood there was no third shooter, I realized that for everyone, it was going to be difficult to get closure," he said. The final act of the killers was among their cruelest: they deprived the survivors of a living perpetrator. They deprived the families of a focus for their anger, and their blame. There would be no cathartic trial for the victims. There was no killer to rebuke in a courtroom, no judge to implore to impose the maximum penalty. South Jeffco was seething with anger, and it would be deprived of a reasonable target. Displaced anger would riddle the community for years.

The crumbling conspiracy eliminated the primary mission of the task force. The all-star team was left to sort out logistical issues: exactly what had happened, and how. Those were massive investigations, easy to get lost inside. Investigators wanted to retrace every step, reconstruct each moment, place every witness and every buckshot fragment in place and time and context. It was a Herculean effort, and it drew the team's attention from the real objective: Why? The families wanted to know how their children died, of course, but that was nothing compared to the underlying question.

Early on, officials began to say the report would steer clear of conclusions. "We deal with facts," Division Chief Kiekbusch said. "We'll

make a diligent effort not to include a bunch of conclusions. Here are the facts: You read it and make your own conclusions."

The families were incredulous. So was the press. Make our own conclusions? How many civilians felt qualified to diagnose mass murderers? Isn't that what homicide detectives were for? The public was under the impression that a hundred of them had been paid for months to perform that service.

Of course homicide teams draw conclusions. What Kiekbusch meant was that they avoid discussing those conclusions externally. That's the DA's role. The cops develop the case, but the DA presents it to the jury–and to the public, as necessary. But aside from the gun providers, there was no one to try for the Columbine killings.

____

Sheriff Stone kept talking up the conspiracy theory with the press. He was driving his team nuts. They had all but ruled it out. Every few days, Jeffco spokesmen corrected another misstatement by the sheriff. Several corrections were extreme: arrests were not imminent, deputies had not blocked the killers from escaping the school, and Stone's descriptions of the cafeteria videos had been pure conjecture–the tapes had not even been analyzed yet. They did not try to correct some of his mischaracterizations, like when he quoted Eric's journal out of context to give the impression that the killers had been planning to hijack a plane when they'd started their attack. He was quickly becoming a laughingstock, yet he was the ultimate ranking authority on the case.

His staff begged him to stop speaking to the press. But how would it look if subordinates spoke about the case while the head man was muzzled? A tacit understanding developed on the team: if Stone kept his mouth shut, they would, too. (Though they continued background interviews with the Rocky.) For the next five months, until an impromptu interview by lead investigator Kate Battan in September, law enforcement officers would divulge virtually nothing more publicly about their discoveries or conclusions. After that, it would be a slow trickle, and a fight for every scrap of information. Nine days after the shootings, the Jeffco blackout began.

____

Columbine coverage ended abruptly, too. A string of deadly tornadoes hit Oklahoma, and the national press corps left town in a single afternoon. The school would return periodically to national headlines over the years, but the narrative of what had happened was set.