Columbine — Chapter no 48

48. An Emotion of God

Eric had work to do. Napalm was hard. It's an inherently unstable substance. Eric found lots of recipes online, but they never seemed to produce what the instructions predicted. The first batch was awful. He tried again. Just as bad. He kept varying the ingredients and the heating process, but it was one failure after another. Multiple batches were no easy feat, either. Eric didn't specify how or when he conducted his experiments; presumably he carried them out in the same place he did everything else: his house, when his parents were out. Each batch was a chore, time- consuming and risky. It involved mixing gasoline with other substances and then heating it on the stove, trying to make it congeal into a slushy syrup that would ignite with just a spark but burn continuously for some time when shot with force through a projectile tube.

Eric had to construct the flamethrowers, too. He drew out detailed sketches of his weaponry in the back of his journal notebook; some were quite practical, others pure fantasy. Dylan seemed to be no help with any of it. Each killer left hundreds of pages of writings and drawings and schedules in their day planners, and Eric's are riddled with plans, logs, and results of experiments; Dylan shows virtually no effort. Eric acquired the guns, the ammo, and apparently the material for the bombs, and did the planning and construction.

Figuring out how to sneak the huge bombs into the crowded cafeteria was another big problem. Each contraption would bulge out of a three-foot duffel bag and weigh about fifty pounds. They couldn't just trot them into the middle of the lunchroom, plop them down in front of six hundred people, and walk out without notice. Or could they? At some point, the boys gave up scheming. They decided to just walk right in with the bombs.

It was a bold move, but textbook psychopath. Perpetrators of complex attacks tend to focus on weak links and minimize risk. Psychopaths are

reckless. They have supreme confidence in their work. Eric planned meticulously for a year, only to open with a blunder that neutralized 95 percent of the attack. He showed no hint that he had even considered the gaping flaw.

Now he had to concentrate on getting Dylan a second gun. And Eric had a whole lot of production work. If only he had a little more cash, he could move the experiments along. Oh well. You could fund only so many bombs at a pizza factory. And he needed his brakes checked, and he'd just had to buy winter wiper blades, and he had a whole bunch of new CDs to pick up.

____

They also had Diversion to put behind them. Eric was a star in the program.

His sterling performance earned him a rare early release–something only 5 percent of kids achieve. Kriegshauser decided to let Dylan out with him, despite Dylan's failure to raise his D in calculus. Kriegshauser advised Dylan to be careful about his future choices. His exit report said Dylan struggled with motivation in school, but the summary was all rosy: "Prognosis: Good. Dylan is a bright young man who has a great deal of potential. If he is able to tap his potential and become self-motivated he should do well in life…. Recommendations: Successful Termination. Dylan has earned the right for an early termination. He needs to strive to self- motivate himself so he can remain on a positive path. He is intelligent enough to make any dream a reality, but he needs to understand hard work is part of it."

Dylan responded with a bleak "Existences" entry. This was the meeting that drove him back to the journal. He wrote the same day, but failed to mention the good news. He insisted life was getting worse. In one sense it was. Release from Diversion was a painful sign. Dylan had not planned on leaving the program alive.

Eric earned a glowing report, start to finish: "Prognosis: Good. Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life. He is intelligent enough to achieve lofty goals as long as he stays on task and remains motivated…. Recommendations: Successful Termination. Eric should seek out more education at higher levels. He impressed me as being very

articulate and intelligent. These are skills that he should grow and use as frequently as possible."

____

Both boys arrived at murder gradually, but one event pushed each of them over the hump. Eric's occurred January 30, 1998, when Deputy Walsh shackled his wrists. From that night on, the boy was set on murder. Dylan's turn came a full year later and was more gradual, but the turning point seems clear. It was February 1999. They had agreed on April a year in advance, and it was almost here. Eric was serious. He was really going through with it. Dylan was conflicted, as always, still leaning against, heavily against. Dylan wanted to be a good boy. He had three choices: give in, back out, or perform a hasty suicide.

Those three choices had been hanging there for a year or more. He could not decide.

Then Dylan wrote a short story. It revolved around an angry man in black methodically gunning down a dozen "preps." The man did it for vengeance and amusement, and to demonstrate he could.

Dylan lifted most of the details right out of the NBK plan. He armed and outfitted his killer the way they planned to dress themselves. The story included a duffel bag, the diversion bombs, and reconnoitering the victims' habits. The smallest details match. The killer is a blend. His height matches Dylan's, but he behaves exactly like Eric: callous and methodical, viciously angry yet detached.

It was easy to imagine how Eric would react to pulling the trigger on April 20, but Dylan seemed baffled about his own response. He set Eric in motion on paper, with himself as narrator to observe. How would murder feel?

It felt wonderful. "If I could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man," he wrote. "I not only saw in his face, but also felt eminating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness. The man smiled, and in that instant, thru no endeavor of my own, I understood his actions."

The story ended there: not with the murders but with the impact on the man behind them.

Nobody observed Dylan typing the story, but he appears to have spilled it all onto the screen in one great rush. He didn't stop to spell-check or fix errors or hit Return. It's all run together in a single paragraph that would have filled five pages in a normal font.

Dylan turned the story in as a creative writing assignment on February 7.

His instructor, Judy Kelly, read it and shuddered. It was an astounding piece of writing for a seventeen-year-old, but she was deeply disturbed. Dylan wasn't the first kid to write a violent story–Eric had been writing combat scenes about heroic Marines all semester. Eric was obsessed with warfare; he mimed machine-gun fire in class all the time. But war stories were different; Dylan's protagonist was killing civilians, ruthlessly, and enjoying it. Kelly wrote a note at the bottom instructing Dylan to come see her. She wanted to talk to him before assigning a grade. "You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one," she wrote.

Dylan came to see her. The story was grossly violent and offensive, she said–unacceptable.

Submitting the story was probably an intentional leak. Dylan chickened out. "It's just a story," he said. This was creative writing class. He had been creative.

Creative was fine, Kelly said, but where was all this cruelty coming from? Just reading the thing was unnerving.

Dylan maintained it was just a story.

Kelly didn't buy it. She called Tom and Sue Klebold and discussed it with them at length. They did not seem too worried, she told police later. They made a comment about how understanding kids could be a real challenge.

Even after the murders, one of Dylan's classmates agreed. "It's a creative- writing class," she told the Rocky Mountain News. "You write about what you want. Shakespeare wrote all about death." The girl was not a friend of the killers'.

But Kelly knew she had picked up on something different. She had seen boys captivated by violence. She had read innumerable accounts of murder.

She had never been confronted with a story this sadistic. It was not just a question of the events in the story but the attitude of the author conveying them. Dylan had a gift for bringing a scene to life: he conveyed action, thought, and feeling. A creepy, merciless feeling. Kelly described the story as "literary and ghastly–the most vicious story I ever read."

Kelly brought it to Dylan's school counselor, Brad Butts. He talked to Dylan, who downplayed it again. Good enough.

Kelly had done the right thing: she'd contacted the three people most likely to have other information about Dylan: his guidance counselor and his parents. If the counselor or parents knew Dylan had been setting off pipe bombs and showing them around at Blackjack Pizza, they could have connected fantasy with reality and NBK might have come to an end. They did not. Jeffco investigators had most of the pieces. Most of the adults close to the killers were in the dark.

____

In his journal, Dylan returned to his love obsession. He wanted to get to godliness, but he had been seeking for two horrible years now and none of his dreams had come true. Eric offered hope. Eric offered the very feelings Dylan was searching for. Eric offered reality, of all things.

Maybe seeking was a sham.

Dylan wasn't quite ready to embrace murder. He would fight it almost until the end. But from here on, he was close.

He would take the short story with him on April 20. It was found in Dylan's car, alongside the failed explosives, to be torn to bits in his final act.

The car was slated for destruction, so Dylan didn't bring the story for our benefit. Perhaps he needed a little courage that day. Perhaps he wanted to read it one last time.

____

It was time for target practice. They picked a beautiful spot. The place was called Rampart Range: a winding network of unpaved roads through rugged national forest in the Rockies, not too far from Dylan's house. For their first extended gunplay, they picked an area set aside for dirt bikers and joyriding on ATVs. An off-roading Web site urged readers to experience the vistas slowly: "let your imagination run wild as the boulders take on ever- changing faces."

Three friends went with them on March 6: Mark Manes and Phil Duran, who had teamed up to get Dylan the TEC-9, and Mark's girlfriend, Jessica.

They brought the guns acquired for the attack, and their friends had a couple more. They packed bowling pins stolen from Belleview Lanes to use as targets. And they took a camcorder. It was important to document historic events.

It was cold up there, still plenty of snow on the ground. They dressed sensibly, in layers. Eric and Dylan started with their trench coats on, but worked up a sweat and shed them. They had ear protection and eye gear.

Some of the time they wore it.

They shot a bowling pin full of lead, and then Eric had another idea. He aimed his shotgun at an imposing pine five feet away. He missed. And it hurt. The gun had a vicious recoil, which his arm had to absorb. Every inch you cut a shotgun back magnifies the kick. Eric and Dylan had cut theirs back ridiculously short, almost to the chamber, and now they were going to pay.

He directed Dylan to follow. "Try to hit a tree," he said. "I want to see what a slug does to the tree."

Dylan punched a two-inch wide hole in the trunk. They rushed forward to inspect the damage. Eric dug his finger around and produced a pellet.

"That's a fucking slug!" Dylan squealed.

Eric's voice was subdued. "Imagine that in someone's fucking brain."

"It hurt my wrist, the son of a bitch!" Dylan said.

"I bet so."

Dylan was laughing now. "Look at that! I've got blood now!" He loved it.

Eric kept working the human metaphor. He picked up a bowling pin with a small hole drilled through the front and a crater out the back. He showed off each side to the camera: "Entry wound, exit wound." His buddy laughed, but he didn't understand. He got the little joke, missed the big one.

The battle was already under way around him. Eric loved foreshadowing.

Everyone there was implicated. Only two could see.

Most of the time they worked methodically to improve their skills. One kid would fire while another stood beside him, calling out results to make real-time adjustments: "High to the right… low to the left… left again…"

Single-barrel shotguns require a reload every round, and that would seriously impact the body count. Eric prepared by drilling himself in a rapid shoot-and-load technique. Every shot was punishing. The blast would tear

the barrel out of his left hand and whip his gun arm back like a rubber band.

But he learned quickly. Soon he was riding out the recoil to catch the barrel- stub as it swung around, snap it open, feed a shell, lock it down, squeeze a round, and repeat the process in one fluid, continuous motion. He pounded out four shots in five seconds. He was pleased.

It had all been theoretical up to that point: How much damage could they really do with that gun? They had their answer now. Eric was a killing machine.

Eric and Dylan approached the camera to show off their war wounds: large patches of skin scraped off between thumb and forefinger, where they needed to work on tightening their grip.

"When high school kids use guns," somebody said. Everybody laughed.

Manes tried Eric's gun, and winced at that handgrip. "You should round that out," he advised.

"Yeah," Eric said. "I'm gonna work on that."

They fired more and showed the wounds again: bloodier, more severe.

"Guns are bad," Manes said. "When you saw them off and make them illegal, bad things happen to you." That got lots more laughs. "Just say no to sawed-off shotguns."

They were on a roll now. Eric grabbed hold of his gun barrel and mugged for the camera. He spanked the firing assembly several times. "Bad!"

Dylan waved his index finger at it. "No! No! No!"

Dr. Fuselier watched the Rampart video a few days after the massacre. It showed the final progression from fantasy to fact. It had been a two-year evolution from frivolous prankster missions to a series of esclating thefts.

Eric was turning into a professional criminal. He had crossed the mental hurdle from imagining crimes to committing them. This was how it would feel.

____

The boys continued training. They made three target-practice trips with Manes.

Dylan leaked again. He had been excited about his weapons, and sometime in February, he told Zack he had gotten something "really cool."

Like what?

Something in Desperado, Dylan said–a violent film they thought Quentin Tarantino directed.

Zack confronted him: It was a gun, wasn't it?

Yeah, a double-barreled shotgun, Dylan said, just like the piece in Desperado. Eric had gotten one, too. And they had fired them. Freaking wild!

They never spoke about it again, Zack told the FBI later.