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The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast
Each week, The Murder Book will present unsolved cases, missing persons, notorious crimes, controversial cases, and serial killers, exploring details of the crime scenes and the murderer's childhood. Some episodes are translated into Spanish as well. The podcast is produced and hosted by Kiara Coyle.
The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast
Unraveling the Columbine Tragedy Part VIII: Unraveling Missed Warnings and Psychological Insights into the Columbine Tragedy
Could the devastating Columbine massacre have been prevented? By examining the early signs of Eric Harris's troubling behavior, we uncover a series of missed opportunities that might have altered the course of history. This episode of "Unraveling the Columbine Tragedy" takes a hard look at the red flags that went unnoticed, from Eric's vandalism sprees with Dylan Klebold and their friend Zack, to the damaging altercation with Brooks Brown. The tense relationship between the Harris and Brown families unfolds, revealing the overlooked warning signals that hinted at a much darker path ahead.
Amidst a backdrop of law enforcement oversight and secrecy, a chilling narrative emerges. Thirteen months before the massacre, crucial evidence of Eric Harris building pipe bombs was discovered but left unaddressed. We bring you the gripping details of secret meetings among officials who concealed this knowledge, leading to years of public deception. As detectives worked tirelessly to connect the dots, key figures such as Chris Morris, Phil Duran, and Mark Maines played pivotal roles in shedding light on the weapon procurement network, unraveling a complex web of hidden truths and investigative challenges.
Alongside FBI Agent Dr. Fusilier, we explore the intricate psychological profiles of Harris and Klebold, delving into their journals and basement tapes to understand their motives. Eric's writings reveal a calculated hatred, while Dylan's entries paint a picture of internal turmoil and depression. Through this lens, we ponder the rare circumstances where anger and depression explode into violence. This episode promises an insightful journey into the minds of the Columbine killers, offering a deeper understanding of the tragic events and what might drive seemingly ordinary individuals to commit such heinous acts.
Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, kiara, and this is part six of Unraveling the Columbine Tragedy. Let's begin. Two years before he carried the bombs into the Columbine cafeteria, eric took a crucial step. He had always maintained an active fantasy life. His extension fantasies progressed steadily, but reality held firm and was completely separate from his fantasy life. Then, one day, midway through sophomore year, eric began to take action. He was an angry, cruel or particularly hateful. His campaign against the inferiors was comically banal, but it was real.
Speaker 1:The mischief started as a threesome. Dylan and Zack were called conspirators and squad mates. In his written accounts, eric referred to the two by their code names, vodka and Kibbitz. They launched the escapades in January 1997, second semester of their sophomore year. They would meet at Eric's house, mostly sneak out after midnight and vandalize houses of kids he didn't like. Eric chose the targets. Of course they have to be careful speaking out. They couldn't wake his parents. Lots of rocks to navigate in Eric's backyard and a pesky neighbor's dog kept barking his head off, according to Eric, and then they plunged into a field of tall grass that he compared to Jurassic Park's Lost World. To Eric it was one hell of an adventure. He had been role-playing marine heroes on military maneuvers since grade school. Finally he was in the field conducting them. Eric dubbed his pranks the missions.
Speaker 1:Eric sometimes attacked the houses of his peers to retaliate for perceived slights, but most often for the offense of inferiority. Between missions the boys got into unscripted trouble. Eric got mad at Brooks Brown and stopped talking to him. Then he escalated a snowball fight by breaking a chunk of ice off a drainpipe and he hurled it at the car of a friend of Brooks and dented the trunk. He grabbed another hunk and cracked the windshield at Brooks' Mercedes and of course Brooks got mad and insulted him you know, used foul language and told him you're going to pay for this, which of course Eric said that he wasn't going to pay.
Speaker 1:So brooks drove home and told his mom and then he headed to eric's. He was furious, but his mother, kathy harris, remained calm. She invited brooks in and gave him a seat in the living room. Brooks knew lots of Eric's secrets and he spilled them all and he told her your son's been sneaking out at night. He's going around vandalizing things. And Kathy seemed incredulous. She tried to calm the kid down, but Brooks kept ranting and he said he got liquor in his room. You need to search for it. He got spray paint cans, search it. She wanted him to talk but he felt that she was acting like a school counselor. He was out of there and he said he was getting out before Eric got back.
Speaker 1:So Brooks went home and discovered his friend had grabbed Eric's backpack, taking it hostage, more or less. Brooke's mom, judy, took control of the situation. She ordered everyone into the car and brought them to see Eric, and Judy said to lock the doors because she was still enjoying the stop-mall fight. So she rolled her window down a crack and yelled over to. Eric said to lock the doors because he was still enjoying the stop-mall fight. So she rolled her window down a crack and yelled over to Eric and she said I got your backpack and I'm taking it to your mom's. Meet us over there. So Eric grabbed hold of the car and screamed ferociously and when she pulled away he hung on wailing harder. So Eric reminded her of an escaped animal attacking a car, like in one of those wildlife theme parks. So brooke's friend shifted to the, to the other side of of of the back uh seat and judy at this moment she was terrified because they have never seen this side of Eric. They were used to Dylan's charades, but he was so show. Eric looked like he meant it. So Judy got up enough speed and Eric let go and at his house Eric's mom greeted them in the driveway and Judy handed her the backpack and unloaded the story. Kathy began to cry and Judy felt bad because Kathy has always been so sweet.
Speaker 1:So now Wayne came home and he threw the fear of God into Eric. He interrogated him about the alcohol, but Eric had it hidden and played innocent convincingly. He wasn't taking any chances. As soon as he got a chance he destroyed the stash and he wrote in his diary I had to ditch every bottle I had and lie like an effing salesman to my parents. And that night he went with the confessional approach. He admitted a weakness to his dad. The truth was that he was afraid of Mrs Brown and Wayne thought well, that explains a lot. Kathy wanted to hear more from the Browns. Wayne bitterly resented interference. Who was this hysterical woman or her conniving little Brad Brooks? Wayne was hard enough on the boys without outsiders telling him how to raise his sons.
Speaker 1:Kathy called Judy that night. Judy felt she really wanted to listen, but Wayne was negative and dismissive in the background. It was kid stuff. He insisted it was all blown, way out of proportion. He got on the line and told Judy that Eric had copped to the truth that bottom line that he was afraid of her. And Judy told him. And Judy told him your son isn't afraid of me because he came after me and my car. Wayne jotted notes about the exchange on a green notepad and he outlined Eric's misdeeds, including getting into and Judy Brown's face and being a little bully. At the bottom of the page he summarized he found Eric guilty of aggression, disrespect, property damage and idle threats of physical harm. But he did not look kindly on the Browns. He concluded overreaction to minor incident and he dated that piece of paper February 28th 1997 and he kept it in that green notepad.
Speaker 1:At school the next day Brooks heard Eric was making threats about him and he told his parents that night. So they called the cops. A deputy came by to question them and then they went to see the Harris's. Wayne called a few minutes later. He was bringing Eric over to apologize. Judy told Brooks and his brother Aaron to hide. He said I want you both in the back bedroom and don't come out. Wayne waited in his car. In the car and he refused to supply moral support. Eric had to walk up to the door and face Mr and Mrs Brown alone. Eric had regained his normal composure. He was exceptionally contrite. Mrs Brown, I didn't mean any harm, he said, and you know I would never do anything to hurt Brooks. So of course Mrs Brown said you can pull the wool over your dad's eyes, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes. And Eric, you know, took offense to that statement and he asked her are you calling me a liar? And she said yes, I am. And if you ever come up our streets or if you ever do anything to Brooks again, I'm calling the police. So Eric left in a huff. He went home and plotted revenge. He was worried now, but he wouldn't back down.
Speaker 1:The next mission target was the Browns' house. The team also hid random houses. Mostly they would set up fireworks, toilet paper. The places trigger a house alarm. They also stuck silly putty to Brooks' Mercedes. Eric had been bragging about the missions on his website and at this point he posted Brooks' name, address and phone number and he encouraged readers to harass. What he said is A-hole. Brooks had betrayed Eric. Brooks had to be punished, but he was never significant. Eric had bigger ideas and he was experimenting with timers. Now, and those offered new opportunities. Eric wired a dozen firecrackers together and attached a long fuse. He was fastidiously analytical but he had no way to assess his data because he fled as soon as he lit the fuses.
Speaker 1:Judy Brown viewed Eric as a criminal in bloom. She and Randy, her husband, spoke to Eric's dad repeatedly and they kept calling the cops. Wayne did not appreciate that and he would do anything to protect his son's futures. Discipline was a no-brainer, but the boy's reputations were out of his control. One black mark could wipe out a lifetime of opportunities. Wayne scrutinized Eric for a while but ultimately he bought into his son's version. Eric was smart enough to cop to some bad behavior and his calm contrition made the Browns look hysterical.
Speaker 1:Three days after the ice incident, wayne was grappling with more parents and a Columbine dean. Wayne pulled out the six by nine inch pad and labeled the cover Eric. He filled three more notebook pages over two days. Brooks knew about the missions and had gone to see Nadine. Nadine was concerned about alcohol consumption and damage to school property. He would get the police involved if necessary. Eric played dumb. The word denial appears in large letters on two consecutive pages of Wayne's journal. Both times the word is circled by the first entry scribbled out.
Speaker 1:Wayne concluded that the issue was over and done. Don't discuss with friends. He repeatedly stressed that silence was key. Talk to Eric basically finish. He wrote. And then he also wrote leave each other alone, don't talk about it, agree, all discussion is over with. Wayne.
Speaker 1:Harris apparently breathed easier for a while. He didn't write in his journal for a month and a half. Then come four rapid entries documenting a slew of phone calls. First Wayne talked to Zach's mom and another parent. The next day, two years and one day before the massacre, a deputy from the Defco Sheriff's Department called Wayne and put his guard up and he said we feel victimizedized too. We don't want to be accused every time something happens. That it's you know. Eric learned his lesson, so he crossed out the last phrase and wrote it's not at fault.
Speaker 1:The real problem was Brooks, according to Wayne, and he wrote Brooks Brown is out to get Eric. Brooks had problems with other boys, manipulative and con artists. If the problem continued it might be time to hire a mediator or a lawyer. Wayne's last entry on the feud occurred a week later, on April 27, after a call with Judy Brown, and he wrote Eric has not broken promise to Mr Place the dean after leaving each other alone. And at the bottom of the page he repeated his earlier sentiment. We feel victimized too. Manipulative con artist.
Speaker 1:Eric totally rocked on the missions. Dylan enjoyed them too and he liked the camaraderie, especially because he fit in there. He had a role to play, he belonged. But the missions were brief diversions. They were not making him happy. In fact Dylan was miserable. Now Jeff Go had a problem.
Speaker 1:Before Eric and Dylan shot themselves, officers had discovered files on the boys. The cops had 12 pages from Eric's website spewing hate and threatening to kill. For detectives a written confession discovered before the killers were captured was a big break. It certainly simplified the search warrant. But for commanders a public confession which they set on since 1997, that could be a PR disaster. The webpages had come from Randy and Judy Brown. They had warned the Sheriff's Department repeatedly about Eric for more than a year and a half. Sometime around noon April 20th the file was shuttled to the command center in a trailer set up in Clement Park. Jeffco officials quoted Eric's site extensively in the search warrants executed that afternoon but then denied ever seeing it. Denied ever seeing it. They would spend several years repeating those denials. They suppress the damning warrants as well. Then Sheriff Stone fingered Brooks as a suspect on the Today Show.
Speaker 1:It was a rough time for the Brown family. The public got two conflicted stories. Family the public got two conflicted stories. Randy and Judy Brown had either labored to prevent Columbine or raised one of his conspirators, or both. To the Browns it looked like retribution. Yes, their son had been close to the killers, close enough to see it coming. The Browns had blown the whistle on Eric Harris over a year earlier and the cops had done nothing. The Browns were fingered as accomplices instead of heroes. They couldn't believe it. They told the New York Times they had contacted the Sheriff's Department about Eric 15 times. Jeffco officials would insist for years that the Browns never met with an investigator, despite holding a report indicating they had. The officers knew they had a problem and it was much worse than the Browns realized.
Speaker 1:13 months before the massacre, sheriff's, 13 months before the massacre, sheriff's investigators John Hicks and Mike Guerra had investigated one of the Browns' complaints. They had discovered substantial evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs. Guerra had considered it serious enough to draft an affidavit for a search warrant against the Harris home. For some reason, the warrant was never taken before a judge. Guerra's affidavit was convincing. It spelled out all the key components motive, means and opportunity.
Speaker 1:A few days after the massacre, about a dozen local officials slipped away from the feds and gathered clandestinely in an innocuous office in the county open space department building. It would come to be known as the open space meeting. The purpose was to discuss the affidavit for a search warrant. How bad was it? What should they tell the public? The purpose was to discuss the affidavit for a search warrant. How bad was it? What should they tell the public? Guerra was driven to the meeting and told never to discuss it outside the group. So he complied. The meeting was kept secret too. That held for five years. March 22, 2004. Guerra would finally confess it happened to investigators from the Colorado Attorney General. He described it as one of those cover your ass meetings. District Attorney Dave Thomas attended the meeting. He told the group he found no probable cause for the investigators to have executed the draft warrant, finding ridicule once it was released. He was formally contradicted by the Colorado attorney in 2004. At a notorious press conference 10 days after the murders.
Speaker 1:Jeffco officials suppressed the affidavit and boldly lied about what they have known. They said they could not find Eric's webpages. They found no evidence of pipe bombs matching Eric's descriptions and had no record of the Browns meeting with Hicks. Giver's affidavit plainly contradicted all three claims. Officials had just spent days reviewing it. They would repeat the lies for years. Several days after the meeting, investigator Gavris' file on his investigation of Eric disappeared for the first time.
Speaker 1:The cover your ass meeting was a strictly Jeffco affair limited mostly to senior officials, most of the detectives on the case, including the feds and cops from local jurisdictions. They were unaware of the cover up. They were trying to crack the case. Police detectives continued fanning out across Littleton. They had two thousand students to interview, not telling where the truth might be tucked away. They all reported back to the leadership team in the Columbine band room. It was chaos. Guys were coming in with notes on scraps of paper and matchbook covers.
Speaker 1:At the end of the week Kate Baton took control of the situation. She called everyone into the band room for a massive four-hour debriefing and information exchange. At the end of the meeting three crucial questions remained. How had the killers gotten all the guns? How had they gotten the bombs into the school? Who had conspired to help them? Batan and her team had a good idea where the conspiracy lay. They had nearly a dozen chief suspects. They pitted two against each other. Chris Morris claimed he was innocent and they told him prove it, help us smoke out Duran.
Speaker 1:Chris agreed to a wiretap and on Saturday afternoon he called Phil Duran from FBI headquarters in Denver. While federal agents listened in. They commiserated about how rough it had gotten and phil said it's pretty crazy man. And um, chris said yeah, the media's going psycho. Chris went for the kill too soon and he had heard that duran had gone out shooting with the killers and someone videotaped it and he mentioned the tape. But Duran brushed it off. For 14 minutes they spoke. Chris kept circling back to it and Duran deflected as many times. Yes, I had no clue, dude, he said. Finally, chris got an admission that Durant had been out shooting with Eric and Dylan and he got a name. The place was called Rampart Ranch. It didn't sound like much but it was leverage.
Speaker 1:On Sunday an ATF agent paid Duran a visit. Duran told him everything. Eric and Dylan had approached him about a gun he had put them in touch with Mark Maines who had sold them the Tech-9. Duran admitted to relaying some of the money but said he had earned nothing on the deal and every bit of that was was true. So five days later detectives hauled means into ATF headquarters in downtown Denver with attorneys for defense and prosecution. Mains made a full confession. Duran had introduced him to Eric and Dylan on January 23rd at the Tanner gun show, the same place the killers had bought the three other guns. Duran identified Eric as the buyer and he did the talking. Mains agreed to sell the gun on credit and he did the talking. Mainz agreed to sell the gun on credit. Eric would pay $300 now $200 more when he could raise it. It was Dylan who showed up at Mainz's house that night and he handed over the down payment and picked up the gun. Duran delivered the $200. A couple of weeks later Detectives asked Maines repeatedly about the killer's ages. Eventually he admitted that he had assumed they were under 18. Maines had bought the Tech-9 at the same show about six months earlier. He had used his debit card. Later he produced a bank statement showing he had paid $491. He had made $9 on the deal. It could cost him 18 years.
Speaker 1:In the meantime, the FBI agent Dr Fusilier didn't think much about motive. The first few days, every minute evidence could be vanishing, alibis arranged, cover stories coordinated. But curiosity soon intruded and refused to be dented. His mind kept returning to the critical question of why, with nearly 100 detectives working the case, that central question largely fell to no one. So it began as a small part of Agent Fusilier's job.
Speaker 1:He was primarily concerned with leading the FBI's team. He met daily with his team leaders. They briefed him. He asked questions, shot holes in their theories, suggested new questions and challenged them to probe harder. On Saturdays he drove into Denver to sort through his inbox at FBI headquarters. He had to get up to speed on the federal cases he had handed off and offer insight and suggestions where he could. But he began to carve out a little time out every evening to assess the killers.
Speaker 1:He had teams of people to assemble the data but no one else was qualified to analyze it. He was the only psychologist on the team. He had studied this very sort of killer for years for the FBI and he knew what he was against. It pissed him off watching them brag on video about the people they would maim and he would hear himself said you little damn, you damn little jerks. But sometimes he felt a little sorry for them. Their point of view was indefensible but he had to embrace it temporarily and empathize with them. If he refused to see the world through their lens, how would he ever understand how they could do it? They were high school kids. How did they get this way? Dylan in particular. What a waste.
Speaker 1:Fusilier's peers and subordinates had a lot of questions about the killers and they needed someone to turn to, one person who deeply understands the perps. Fusilier quickly became known internally as the expert on the two boys. Kate Batan was leading the day-to-day investigation and everyone deferred to her logistical questions. The investigation and everyone deferred to her logistical questions, like who had been running down a particular hallway at a certain moment during the attack. But Fusilier understood the perpetrators. He returned to Eric's journal over and over and then Dylan's, poring over every line, pouring over every line.
Speaker 1:About a week after the murders Fusilier was introduced to the basement tapes and earlier footage Eric and Dylan had shot of themselves. So he took the tapes home. He watched them repeatedly. He hit the pause button frequently, advancing frame by frame, going back over revealing moments to dissect nuance. On the surface, much of the material was tedious and banal, little snippets of daily life, like the boys making dumb high school jokes with Chris Morris in the car bickering over the drive-thru order at Wendy's. Nothing even tangentially related to the murders appear on most of the tapes, but Fusilier soaked up ordinary impressions of his murderers. Dr Fusilier watched or read every word from the killers dozens of times.
Speaker 1:His big break came just a few days after the murders. Before he saw the basement tapes, fusilier heard an ATF agent quoting a ghastly phrase Eric Harris had written. And Fusilier asked what you got there? And it was the journal. For the last year of his life, eric Harris had written down many of his plans in a journal. Fusilier zipped over and read the opening line that says, quote I hate the effing world.
Speaker 1:Suddenly, the big bombs began to make a lot more sense. Suddenly the big bombs began to make a lot more sense. Fusilier read a bit further and then turned to the ATF agent and he said Can I have a copy of this? And the pages had been photocopied from a spiral notebook 16 handwritten pages and a dozen more of sketches and charts and diagrams. There were 19 entries, all dated, running from April 10, 1998 to April 3, 1999, 17 days before Columbine. They ran a page or two at the beginning, then shortened considerably, with the last five crammed into the last page and a half. They were dark and fussy from too many trips through the copier and every scroll was hard to decipher sometimes. But Fusilier was reading again while the pages made another pass through the copy machine and he said this is mesmerizing.
Speaker 1:The journal told infinitely more than Eric's website had. The website which predated the journal by at least a year was mostly vented rage. It told us who he hated, what he wanted to do to the world, what he had already done. It said very little about why the journal was angry. So Fusilier started reading the photocopies and he read on the walk back to the ATF agent's desk and he stood there reading rather than return to his own chair. He didn't notice his back stiffening up for several minutes until the pain finally interrupted and so he finally sat down and he kept reading and then suddenly he said to himself you know, there's a point that he said oh, holy moly, he's telling us why he did it. Eric would prove the easier killer to understand. Eric always knew what he was up to. Dylan did not. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Dylan's mind raced night and day analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was 15, and he had tagged along on the missions. He was Eric's number one go-to guy and none of that mattered. Dylan's head was bursting with ideas, sounds, impressions. He could never turn the racket off. Dylan was in pain. Nobody got it. Vodka helped. The internet did too. Girls were hard to talk to. Instant messaging made it easier. Dylan would IM alone in his room for hours at night. Vodka make the words flow but reduce his ability to spell them. When an internet girl called him on it, he laughed and admitted he was sloshed. It was easy to hide from his parents. They never suspected. It all happened quietly in his room. Ims were not enough. Too many secrets to hold on. Too many concepts sipping over their heads. Suicide was consuming him. No way. Dylan was confessing that he tried explaining some of the other ideas, but people were too thick to understand.
Speaker 1:In the spring of the sophomore year, shortly after this, the missions started. March 31st 1997, dylan got drunk, picked up a pen and began the conversation with the one person who could understand himself. He imagined his journal as a stately old tome with oversized covers extending just past the parchment and a fine satin ribbon sewn into the binding, like in a Bible. All he had was a plain pad of notebook paper, college ruled and three-hole punched. So he drew the imaginary cover on the cover and he titled his work Existences, a Virtual Book.
Speaker 1:He had tried deleting the Doom files from his computer, tried staying sober, tried to stop making fun of kids. That was a tough one. Kids were so easy to ridicule. The spiritual purge wasn't helping. So he wrote my existence is shit. He described eternal suffering in infinite directions though infinite realities. Loneliness was the crux of the problem. Dylan felt cut off from humanity. Some of Dylan's ideas were hard to put into words. He drew squiggles in the margins and labeled them thought pictures.
Speaker 1:He was a profoundly religious young man. His family was not active in any congregation, yet Dylan's belief was unwavering. He believed in God, without question, but constantly challenged his choices. Dylan would cry out cursing God for making him a modern job, demanding an explanation for the divine brutality of his faithful servant. Dylan believed in morality, ethics and an afterlife. He wrote intently about the separation of body and soul. The body was meaningless, but his soul would live forever. It would reside either in the peaceful serenity of heaven or in the blistering tortures of hell. Dylan's anger would flare, then fizzle quickly into self-disgust.
Speaker 1:Dylan wasn't planning to kill anyone except, god willing, himself. He craved death for at least two years. The first mention comes in the first entry he wrote quote Thinking of suicide gives me hope that I will be in my place wherever I go after this life. In my place wherever I go after this life, that I'll finally not be at war with myself, the world, the universe, my mind, body, everywhere, everything at peace, me, my soul, my existence", end quote. But suicide posed a problem. Dylan believed in a literal heaven and hell. He would be a believer right up until the end. When he murdered several people he knew there would be consequences. He would refer to them in his final video message, recorded on the morning he called Judgment Day.
Speaker 1:Dylan was unique, that much he was sure of he had been watching the kids at school. Some were good, some bad, but also utterly different from him. Dylan exceeded even Eric in his belief in his own singularity. But Eric equated unique with superior. Dylan saw it mostly as bad. His moods came and went quickly. Dylan turned compassionate, then fatalistic.
Speaker 1:Eric and Dylan both left journals behind. Dr Fusilier would spend years studying them. At first glance, dylan's look more promising. Fusilier was hungry for data and Dylan provided an impressive stack. His journal began a year earlier than Eric's, filled nearly five times as many pages and remained active right up to the end. But Eric would begin his journal as a killer. He already knew where it would end. Every page pointed in the same direction. His purpose was not self-discovery but self-lionization. Dylan was just trying to grapple with existence. He had no idea where he was headed. His ideas were all over the map. Dean liked order.
Speaker 1:Each journal entry began with a three-line heading in the right margin name, date and title, all written out in half-sized letters. He then repeated the title or sometimes adapted it in double-sized characters centered above the main text. Most of the copy was printed, but occasionally he would veer into script. He wrote one entry a month, nearly every month, but hardly every twice a month. He would fill two complete pages and then stop. If he ran out of ideas or interest he would fill out the second page with huge lettering or sketches. The battle between good and bad never ends, he wrote. Dylan would repeat this idea endlessly for the next two years. Good and evil, love and hate, always wrestling, never resolving. Pick your side, it's up to you, but you better pray it picks you back. Why would love never choose him?
Speaker 1:Sunday morning, april 25th, the Columbine churches were packed. Afterward the crowds trekked down to the Bowes Crossing shopping center across from Clement Park. Organizers had planned for up to 30,000 mourners in the sprawling parking lot. 70,000 show up. Vice President Al Gore was in the platform, along with the governor, most of Colorado's congressional delegation and a whole lot of clergy. The TV networks broadcast the ceremony live. Reverend Graham dominated the ceremony with a long, impassioned appeal for returning prayer to public schools. He invoked the name of his personal Savior seven times in a single 45-second flurry. He called upon God and Jesus nearly 50 times. In the course of the speech, christian pop star Amy Grant sang twice, a drum and bugle corps performed a staring rendition of Amazing Grace and a succession of 13 white doves were released as Governor Bill Owens recited the names of the victims. Toward the end it began to rain A slow, steady shower. Nobody moved. Thousands of umbrellas went up, but tens of thousands of mourners just got wet.
Speaker 1:For many, cassie Bernal was the heroine of Columbine. Word spread quickly that her killer had held her at gunpoint and asked if she believed in God, and she said yes, she would profess her face and had promptly been shot in the head. Vice President Gore recounted her story to the crowd and the cameras and he quoted liberally from scripture throughout his speech. The country was transfixed. In the first 10 days, news magazines on the four main broadcast networks devoted 43 pieces to the attack. The shows dominated the ratings that week. Cnn and Fox News charted the highest ratings in their history. A week afterward, usa Today was still running 10 separate Columbine stories in a single edition. It would be nearly two weeks before the New York Times would print an issue without Columbine on page one. We'll be right back Two years before Cassie's murder.
Speaker 1:Dylan laid out his case for God. He enumerated the pros and cons of his existence Good, a nice family, a beautiful house. He enumerated the pros and cons of his existence no other friends, nobody accepting him, doing badly in sports, looking ugly and acting shy, getting bad grades, having no ambition in life. Dylan understood what God had chosen for him. Dylan was to be a seeker, one man in search of answers, never finding them, yet in hopelessness, understands things and he seeks knowledge of the unthinkable, of the undefinable, of the unknown. He explores the everything using his mind, the most powerful tool known to him.
Speaker 1:Dylan took to referring to humans as zombies. But pitiful as we zombies were, dylan didn't want to harm us. He found us interesting, like new toys, and he wrote I am God compared to some of these unexistable, brainless zombies. End quote. That was Dylan's first brush with blasphemy. He immediately qualified he wasn't claiming godhood, just that he was like God compared to humans. It would be months before he would try it again. Each time he would push the idea further, but he never quite seemed to believe. As spring 1997 progressed, he filled page after page with aborted attempts. Eric had more practical concerns. Two months of heat from his dad taught Eric to cover his tracks better.
Speaker 1:The vandalism missions continued through spring and early summer, with no record of further detection. By mission five the boys were drinking again. Wayne appeared to have watched Eric closely for a while, then resumed trusting him. According to Eric, only one outing went alcohol-free. The emphasis on larger explosives continued. Some of the timing devices began to work. Eric discovered that he could light the tip of a cigarette and let it burn down toward the fuse. For an added delay. The boys survived a few close calls, including near detection by a police officer in a squad car. On the sixth outing they brought along Dylan's Solov BB gun and fired randomly into houses and fire randomly into houses and Eric wrote we probably didn't do any damage, but we weren't sure. That same night they stole some rent fence signs from a construction site and Eric didn't make much of the swipe. But this appears to be the moment where they cross the hazy boundary between petty vandalism and petty theft. The missions had been satisfied for a couple of months, but Suffolk, new York, was over. Eric was hungry for more. In the summer of 1997, zach Heckler went to Pennsylvania for two weeks. When he got back Eric and Dylan had built a pipe bomb. Dylan was involved, but it was Eric's baby.
Speaker 1:Eric would not begin his journal until the spring of 1998, but he was active with his website the previous year. By the summer of 1997, he had posted his hate list and it says you know what I hate? Country music. You know what I hate R-rated movies on cable. My dog can do a better editing job than those tarts. You know what I really hate? The WB Network. Oh Jesus, mary, mother of God, almighty, I hate that channel with all my heart and soul. And the list went on for pages. 50 odd entries about hating fitness People, phony martial art experts, people who mispronounce espresso.
Speaker 1:At first this target seemed preposterously random, but then Fusilier divined the underlying theme Stupid witless inferiors. The underlying theme Stupid witless inferiors it wasn't just the WB network. Eric hated hard and so it was all the morons watching it. Eric's briefer, loveless, backed Fusilier's analysis. Eric loved making fun of stupid people doing stupid things. It's great. If love was natural selection he would say God damn, it's the best thing that ever happened to the earth, getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms. I wish the government would just take off every warning label, so then all the the dumbs would either severely hurt themselves or die. So what the boy was really expressing was contempt.
Speaker 1:Eric's ideas began to fuse. He loved explosions, actively hated inferiors, passively hoped for human extinction. He built his first bombs. He started small, nothing that would kill anyone, just enough to injure people or the property. He went searching for instructions and found them readily available on the web. During the summer of 1997, he built several explosives and began setting them off. Then he bragged about it on his website. It says, quote if you haven't make a co2 bomb today, I suggest you do so. Me and Vodka detonated one yesterday and it was like an effing dynamite stick. Just watch out for shrapnel. End quote. That was an exaggeration. They have taken small carbon dioxide cartridges, which kids often call whippets, and what they did is that they punctured them and then they shoved gunpowder inside. Eric called them crickets and they were closer to a large firecracker than a bomb. Eric had also built pipe bombs which were more powerful, and he was still searching for a spot safe for detonation.
Speaker 1:Eric continued with all these things on his website until he realized that his web audience would doubt him. So he backed his claims with specifications and an ingredient list. He wanted to make sure his readers understood that he was serious. Someone sensed a danger and on August 7th 1997, a concerned citizen, apparently Randy Brown, read Eric's website and called the Sheriff's Department. On that day, one year, eight months and 13 days before Columbine the killers named permanently into the law enforcement system, deputy Mark Burgess printed out Eric's pages. He read through them and wrote up a report and says, quote this webpage refers to missions where possible criminal mischiefs have occurred. End quote. Curiously, berger's made no mention of the pipe bombs, which seemed far more serious. Berger sent his report to a superior investigator, john Hicks, with eight websites pages attached. They were filed.
Speaker 1:Eric and Zach and Dylan were working age now, so they all got jobs at a place called Blackjack and they made dry ass, dry-ass eruptions out back in the parking lot. Watch how high they could get a construction cone to sail. It was great. And then Zach met a girl and Dylan took it hard. Devon was her name and she totally ripped the team apart. Zach was with her all the time now and she squeezed his buddies out of the picture.
Speaker 1:Eric and Dylan were nobodies. The mission were suddenly over. Eric didn't seem to mind it too much, but Dylan was a mess. They had done everything together drinking cigars, sabotaging houses. Since seventh grade. He had felt so lonely. Zach had changed all that, but Seth had found a girlfriend and moved on. And Dylan wrote I felt so lonely without a friend.
Speaker 1:Dylan did not yet consider Eric his best friend. Dylan belabored the point that no one besides Zach had ever understood him. No one else appreciated him. That would include Eric. Dylan was lonelier than ever. Conveniently, he stumbled into a solution my first love question mark. And in his next entry he wrote oh my God, I'm almost sure I am in love with Harriet Such a strange name like mine. He loved everything about her, from her good body to her almost perfect face, her charm, her wit and cunning, and not being popular. He just hoped she liked him as much as he loved her. That was the wrinkle. Dylan had not actually spoken to Harriet, but he couldn't let that stop him. He thought of her every second of every day and he even wrote If soulmates exist, then I think I have found mine. I hope she likes techno. That was the other hurdle. He had not yet established whether she liked techno. That was the other hurdle. He had not yet established whether she liked techno.
Speaker 1:Dylan felt happiness. Sometimes he got excited about his driver's license. But he couldn't stay happy. Shortly after falling for Harriet he returned to his journal to complain Such a desolate, lonely, unsavageable life, not fair, and he wanted to die. Zach and Devin looked at him like he was a stranger. But Harris had played the meanest trick. Dylan had fallen for fake love. Dylan had fallen for fake love. She in reality doesn't give a good F about me, he said. She didn't even know him. He admitted he had no happiness, no ambitions, no friends, no love.
Speaker 1:Dylan wanted a gun. He had spoken to a friend about getting one. He planned to turn the weapon on himself. That was a big step in the long suicide process from writing about it to action. At this point, nearly two years before Columbine, dylan saw the gun as his last resort. He continued his spiritual quest. Love was the most common word in Dylan's journal. Eric was filling his website with hate.
Speaker 1:So when Fusilier examined a crime, one of the primary tactics was to begin ruling out motives. Dylan seemed like a classic depressive, but Fusilier had to be sure. With both Columbine killers an obvious question loomed Were they insane? Most mass murderers act deliberately. They just want to hurt people, but some truly cannot help themselves. Fusilier would describe those killers as psychotic.
Speaker 1:A broad term psychotic covers a spectrum of severe mental illness, including paranoia and schizophrenia. Psychotic can grow deeply disoriented and delusional, hearing voices and hallucinations. In severe cases they lose all contact with reality. They sometimes act out of imaginary yet terrifying fear for their own safety or according to instructions from imaginary beings. Fusiliers are no indication of any of that here. Another possibility was psychopathy. The term denotes a specific mental condition.
Speaker 1:Psychopaths appear charming and likable, but it's an act. They are cold-hearted manipulators who would do anything for their own. Again, the vast majority are non-violent. They want your money, not your life. But the ones who turn sadistic can be monstrous. If murder amuses them they will kill again and again. Ted Bundy, gary Gilmore and Jeffrey Dammer were all psychopaths. Typically murderous psychopaths are serial killers, but occasionally one will go on a spree. Are serial killers, but occasionally one will go on a spree.
Speaker 1:The Columbine massacre could have been the work of a psychopath, but Dylan showed none of the signs. Fusilier continued ruling out profiles. None of the usual theories fit. Everything about Dylan screamed depressive An extreme case, self-medicating with alcohol. The problem was how that had led to murder. Dillon's journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide. Fusilier had seen murder arise from depression, but it rarely looked like this. There is usually a continuum of depressive reactions ranging from lethargy to mass murder. Dillon seemed muddled on the languorous side.
Speaker 1:Depressives are inherently angry. Though they rarely appear that way. They are angry at themselves. In other words, anger turned inwards equals depression. Depression leads to murder when the anger is severe enough and then turns outward.
Speaker 1:Depressive outbursts tend to erupt after a debilitating loss, getting fired, dumped by a girlfriend, even a bad grade, if the depressive sees that as significant. Most of us get angry. Kick a trash, can drink a beer or two, get over it. For 99.9% of the population that's the end of it, but for a few the anger festers. Some depressives withdraw from friends, families, schoolmates. Most of them get help or just get over it. A few spiral downward towards suicide, but for a tiny percentage their own death is not enough. They perform a vengeful suicide.
Speaker 1:A common example is the angry husband who shoots himself in front of his wedding photo. He deliberately splatters his remains on the symbol of the marriage. The offense is directly straight at his conception. On the symbol of the marriage. The offense is directly straight at his conception of the guilty party. A tiny number of angry depressives decide to make the tormentor pay. Typically that's a wife, a girlfriend, boss or parent, someone close enough to matter.
Speaker 1:It's a rare depressive who resorts to murder, but when one does it nearly always ends with a single person. A few lash out in a wider circle the wife and her friend who badmouth him, the boss and some co-workers. Their targets are specific. They want to lash out randomly and show us all, hurt us back and make sure we feel it. This is the gunman who opens fire on a random crowd. Fusilier had seen each of those types several times over the course of his career. Dylan didn't look like a candidate. Murder, or even suicide, takes willpower as well as anger. Dylan fantasized about suicide for years without making an attempt. He had never spoken to the girls he dreamed of. Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was. Thank you for listening to the Murder Book. Have a great week.
