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?
Guerra was driven to the meeting, and told never to discuss it outside that group. 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--a finding ridiculed once it was released. He was formally contradicted by the Colorado attorney general in 2004.
At a notorious press conference ten days after the murders, Jeffco officials suppressed the affidavit and boldly lied about what they had known. They said they could not find Eric's Web pages, they found no evidence of pipe bombs matching Eric's descriptions, and had no record of the Browns meeting with Hicks. Guerra'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 Guerra's file on his investigation of Eric disappeared for the first time.
____
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--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--no 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.
At the end of the week, Kate Battan 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?
Battan 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. Prove it, they said. Help us smoke out Duran.
Chris agreed to a wiretap. 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. "It's pretty crazy, man," Phil said.
"Yeah. The media's going psycho."
Chris went for the kill too soon. He had heard Duran had gone out shooting with the killers, and someone videotaped it. He mentioned the tape, but Duran brushed it off. For fourteen minutes, they spoke. Chris kept circling back to it; Duran deflected as many times. "I have no clue, dude," he said.
Finally, Chris got an admission that Duran had been out shooting with Eric and Dylan. He got a name: the place was called Rampart Range.
It didn't sound like much. It was leverage.
____
On Sunday, an ATF agent paid Duran a visit. Duran told him everything. Eric and Dylan had approached him about a gun. He'd put them in touch with Mark Manes, who'd sold them the TEC-9. Duran admitted to relaying some of the money but said he'd earned nothing on the deal. Every bit of that was true.
Five days later, detectives hauled Manes into ATF headquarters in downtown Denver, with attorneys for defense and prosecution. Manes made a full confession. Duran had introduced him to Eric and Dylan on January 23 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. Manes 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 Manes's house that night. He handed over the down payment and picked up the gun. Duran delivered the $200 a couple of weeks later.
Detectives asked Manes repeatedly about the killers' ages. Eventually, he admitted that he'd assumed they were under eighteen.
Manes had bought the TEC-9 at the same show, about six months earlier. He'd used his debit card. Later, he produced a bank statement, showing he'd paid $491. He'd made nine dollars on the deal. It could cost him eighteen years.
____
Dr. Fuselier didn't think much about motive the first few days. It was kind of a moot point, and they had a conspiracy to rope in. 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 a hundred detectives working the case, that central question largely fell to one. It began as a small part of Agent Fuselier's job. He was primarily concerned with leading the FBI 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. He spent eight to ten hours a day leading that effort, and on Saturdays he drove into Denver to sort through his in-box 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 every evening to assess the killers. 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 up against. Even if it meant a few hours of extra work each night, he was going to understand these boys. It pissed him off, watching them brag on video about the people they would maim. "You damn little jerks," he would hear himself mutter. 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.
Fuselier's peers and subordinates were glad someone had taken on the informal role of chief psychologist. They had a lot of questions about the killers, and they needed someone to turn to: one person who deeply understood the perps. Fuselier quickly became known internally as the expert on the two boys. Kate Battan was leading the day-to-day investigation, and everyone deferred to her on logistical questions, like who'd been running down a particular hallway at a certain moment during the attack. But Fuselier understood the perpetrators. He returned to Eric's journal over and over, and then Dylan's, pouring over every line.
About a week after the murders, Fuselier was introduced to the Basement Tapes and earlier footage Eric and Dylan had shot of themselves. He took the tapes home and 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, and bickering over the drive-thru order at Wendy's. Nothing even tangentially related to the murders appeared on most of the tapes, but Fuselier soaked up ordinary impressions of his murderers.
Fuselier watched or read every word from the killers dozens of times. His big break came just a few days after the murders, before he saw the Basement Tapes. Fuselier heard an ATF agent quoting a ghastly phrase Eric Harris had written.
"What you got there?" Fuselier asked.
A journal. For the last year of his life, Eric Harris had written down many of his plans in a journal.
Fuselier zipped over and read the opening line: "I hate the fucking world."
"When I read that first sentence, all the commotion in the band room ended," he said later. "I just zon
ed out. Everything else faded." Suddenly the big bombs began to make a lot more sense. The fucking world. "That's not Brooks Brown," Fuselier said. "That's not the jocks. That is an all-pervasive hate."
Fuselier read a bit further, then turned to the ATF agent. "Can I have a copy of this?"
The pages had been photocopied from a spiral notebook: sixteen handwritten pages and a dozen more of sketches and charts and diagrams. There were nineteen entries, all dated, running from April 10, 1998, to April 3, 1999, seventeen 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 fuzzy from too many trips through the copier. Eric's scrawl was hard to decipher at first, but Fuselier was reading again while the pages made another pass through the copy machine. "It was mesmerizing," he said.
The journal told infinitely more than Eric's Web site had. The Web site--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, and what he had already done. It said very little about why. The journal was angry but deeply reflective. And infinitely more candid about the urges driving Eric to kill.
Fuselier read while the photocopies ran, 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. Then he took a seat. And kept reading. Holy shit, Fuselier thought. 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.
PART III
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
31. The Seeker
Dylan's mind raced night and day: analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was fifteen, 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. That asshole in gym class, his family, the girls he liked, the girls he loved but could never get--why could he never get them?--he was never going to get them. A guy could still dream, right?
Dylan was in pain. Nobody got it. Vodka helped. The Internet did, too. Girls were hard to talk to; Instant Messenging made it easier. Dylan would IM alone in his room for hours at night. Vodka made the words flow but reduced 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 to; too many concepts zipping 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.
Shortly after the missions started, in the spring of sophomore year, March 31, 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. He titled his work "Existences: A Virtual Book."
There was no hint of murder that first day, not even violence. Only traces of anger seeped out, mostly aimed at himself. Dylan was on a spiritual quest. "I do shit to supposedly 'cleanse' myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way," he wrote. 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. "My existence is shit," he wrote. He described eternal suffering in infinite directions through infinite realities.
Loneliness was the crux of the problem, but it ran deeper than just finding a friend. Dylan felt cut off from humanity. Humans were trapped in a box of our own construction: mental prisons caging us from a universe of possibilities. God, people were annoying! What were they afraid of? Dylan could see an entire universe opening up in his mind. He was a seeker, he sought to explore it all, across time and space and who knew how many dimensions. The possibilities were breathtaking. Who could fail to behold the wonder of it all? Almost everyone, unfortunately. Humans loved their little boxes, so safe and warm and comfy and boring! They were zombies by choice.
Some of Dylan's ideas were hard to put into words. He drew squiggles in the margins and labeled them "thought pictures."
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. 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: "Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i'll be in my place wherever i go after this life--that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe--my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE--me--my soul (existence)."
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."
Dylan was unique, that much he was sure of. He had been watching the kids at school. Some were good, some bad, but all so 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. Unique meant lonely. What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?
His moods came and went quickly. Dylan turned compassionate, then fatalistic. "I don't fit in here," he complained. But the road to the afterlife was just monstrous: "go to school, be scared & nervous, hoping that people can accept me."
____
Eric and Dylan both left journals behind. Dr. Fuselier would spend years studying them. At first glance, Dylan's looked more promising. Fuselier 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.
Dylan liked order. 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 ever 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.
His second entry came early: just two weeks after the first. His ideas were beginning to cohere. "The battle between good & 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?
"I dont know what i do wrong with people," he wrote, "it's like they are set out to hate & (insult) me, i never know what to say
or do." He had tried. He had brought in Chips Ahoy cookies to win them over. What exactly would it take?
"My life is still fucked," he wrote, "in case you care." He had just lost $45, and before that it was his Zippo lighter and his knife. True, he had gotten the first two back, but still. "Why the fuck is he being such an ASSHOLE??? (god i guess, whoever is the being which controls shit.) He's fucking me over big time & it pisses me off. Good god i HATE my life, i want to die really bad right now."
32. Jesus Jesus Jesus
Sunday morning, April 25, the Columbine churches were packed. Afterward, the crowds trekked down to the Bowles Crossing Shopping Center, across from Clement Park. Organizers had planned for up to thirty thousand mourners in the sprawling parking lot. Seventy thousand showed up. Vice President Al Gore was on 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.
"Put your faith and trust in the living son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ," Reverend Billy Graham's son Franklin instructed the crowd. "We must be willing to receive His son Jesus Christ."
"Genuine lasting comfort comes only through Jesus Christ," local pastor Jerry Nelson proclaimed. "We, your pastors, urge you: Seek Jesus!"
Jesus Jesus Jesus. There was a whole lot of Him that day. 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 forty-five-second flurry. "Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked. He called upon God and Jesus nearly fifty times in course of the speech. Cassie had been ready, he said. She'd stood before a gunman who'd transported her immediately into the presence of Almighty God. "Are you ready?" he asked.