Eric was the star performer in the program, at work and at school. He even earned a raise, and when school let out for his last summer, he got a second job at Tortilla Wraps, where his buddy Nate Dykeman worked. Eric started putting away more money to build his arsenal. His cover story was that he was saving up for a new computer. He worked both jobs, in addition to the forty-five hours of community service the judge had ordered for the summer. That was boring, menial crap, like sweeping and picking up trash at a rec center. He despised it but pasted on a smile. It was all for a good cause.
Dylan did not appear to contribute much to the attack, financially or otherwise. He quit Blackjack and didn't bother with a regular job over the summer; he just did some yard work for a neighbor.
Eric kept both his employers and the rec supervisors satisfied. "He was a real nice kid," his Tortilla boss said. "He would come in every day with nice T-shirts, khaki shorts, sandals. He was kind of quiet but everyone got along with him." Nate liked to wear his trench coat to work, but Eric didn't feel that was professional.
The boys were required to write apology letters to the van owner. Eric's exuded contrition. He acknowledged he was writing partly because he'd been ordered to "but mostly because I strongly feel that I owe you an apology." Eric said he was sorry repeatedly, and outlined his legal and parental punishments so the victim would understand that he was paying a price for his actions.
Eric knew exactly what empathy looked like. His most convincing moment in the letter came when he put himself in the owner's position. If his car had been robbed, he said, the sense of invasion would have haunted him. It would have been hard for him to drive it again. Every time he got in the car, he would have pictured someone rummaging through it. God, he felt violated just imagining it. He was so disappointed in himself. "I realized very soon afterwards what I had done and how utterly stupid it was," Eric wrote. "I let the stupid side of me take over."
"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: 'Isnt America supposed to be the land of the free? how come if im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions. If he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Frifucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot.'"
Eric betrayed no signs of contempt to Andrea Sanchez. In her notes, she remarked on Eric's deep remorse.
Few angry boys can hide their feelings or sling the bullshit so convincingly. Habitual liars hate sucking up like that. Not psychopaths. That was the best part of the performance: Eric's joy came from watching Andrea and the van owner and Wayne Harris and everyone who caught sight of the letter fall for his ridiculous con.
Eric never complained about those lies. He bragged about them.
Eric could be a procrastinator--a common affliction among psychopaths--and Andrea suggested he work on time management. So Eric bought a Rebel Pride day planner, filled a week in, and brought it to his biweekly counseling session to show off. He gushed about what a great idea it was. It was really helping, he said. Andrea was impressed. She praised him for it in his file. Then he quit. He used the book to vent his real feelings. It had come packed with motivational slogans and tips for better living. Eric went through hundreds of pages rewriting selected words and phrases: "A person's mind is always splattered.... Cut old people and other losers into rags.... Ninth graders are required to burn and die." He altered the Denver entry on a population chart to show forty-seven inhabitants once he was through.
Andrea Sanchez was delighted with Eric. She worked with the boys directly for a few months and then transitioned them over to a new counselor. In Eric's file, Andrea ended her last entry with "Muy facile hombre"--very easy man.
Dylan got no affectionate sign-off. And why wouldn't Andrea Sanchez like Eric more? Everyone did. He was funny and clever, and that smile, man--he knew just when to flash it, too; just how long to hang back, tease you with it, make you work for it, and then lay it on.
Dylan was a gloom factory. The misery was self-fulfilling: who wanted to hang around under that cloud all day?
Inside, he was a dynamo of wild energy, hurtling in eight directions at once, jamming music in his head, thinking clever thoughts, bursting with joy and sadness and regret and hope and excitement... but he was scared to show it. Dylan kept it behind a veneer--you could see him silently simmering sometimes, but he mostly came across as sheepish and embarrassed. Anger was the one thing that would boil over sometimes. The loving part, that stuff could be singing inside from the highest mountain, only he wasn't about to let it show. The anger would just erupt. That would freak people out. You never would have expected it out of that kid.
____
Eric complained about his medication. Before he transitioned from Andrea Sanchez, he told her the Zoloft wasn't doing enough. He felt restless and couldn't concentrate. Dr. Albert switched him to Luvox. The change required two weeks unmedicated, to metabolize the Zoloft out of his system. Eric told Andrea he was worried about going without. He told a different story in his journal. Dr. Albert wanted to medicate him to eradicate bad thoughts and quell his anger, he wrote. That was craziness. He would not accept the human assembly line. "NO, NO NO God Fucking damit NO!" he wrote. "I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts. but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit."
It's not clear exactly what Eric was up to with Dr. Albert. He might have actually complained about the Zoloft because it was too effective. Every patient reacts differently. The maneuver definitely solidified the facade of Eric working to control his anger.
"I would be very surprised if Eric was being honest and straightforward with his doctor," Fuselier said. "Psychopaths attempt to, and often succeed, in manipulating mental health professionals, too."
____
Wayne Harris was the hardest person for Eric to fool. He had seen Eric's boy scout act. It never lasted. Wayne made one undated entry in his journal sometime after the orientation meeting for Diversion in April. He was frustrated. He listed bulleted points for a lecture for Eric:
* Unwilling to control sleep habits.
* Unwilling to control study habits.
* Unmotivated to succeed in school.
* We can deal with 1 and 2: TV, phone, computer, lights out, job, social.
* You must deal with 3.
* Prove to us your desire to succeed by succeeding, showing good judgment, giving extra effort, pursuing interests, seeking help, advice.
He put Eric on restriction again: a 10:00 P.M. curfew except for studying, no phone during study time, and possibly another four weeks away from his computer.
The crackdown was the last entry Wayne Harris would record--and nearly the last words the public would get from him. The search warrant exercised on his home a year later was specific to Eric's writings. Nothing else from Wayne or Kathy or Eric's brother was confiscated. In the ten years since the attack, they have issued a few brief statements through attorneys, met with police briefly, and with parents of the victims once. They have never spoken to the press. The outlines of Eric's relationship to his father came through in their journals, and from testimony of outsiders. Kathy Harris is murkier, and a full picture of the family dynamic remains elusive.
____
With Eric, Dylan paid lip service to NBK. Privately, he was juggling two options: suicide or true love. He wrote Harriet a love letter, confessing all. "You don't consciously know who I am," he started, bluntly. "I, who write this, love you beyond infinince." He thought about her all the time, he said. "Fate put me in need of you, yet this earth blocked that with uncertainties." He was actually a lot like her: pensive, quiet, an observer. Like him, she seemed uninterested in the physical world. Life, school, it was all meaningless--how wonderful that she understood. Dylan caught a glimpse of sadness in her: she was lonely, just like him.
He wondered if
she had a boyfriend. Odd that he'd never checked that out. He hardly saw her anymore. He realized this might be a bit much: "I know what you're thinking: '(some psycho wrote me this harassing letter.)'" But he had to take the chance. He was sure she had noticed him a few times--none of her gazes had gone unnoticed. Dylan confessed his scariest intentions--just like Zack, who had found a soul mate in whom to confide his suicidal desires. At first Dylan was a little coy: "I will go away soon... please don't feel any guilt about my soon-to-be 'absence' of this world." Finally he conceded that she would hate him if she knew the whole truth, but he confessed it anyway: "I am a criminal, I have done things that almost nobody would even think about condoning." He had been caught for most of his crimes, he said, and wanted a new existence. He was confident she knew what he meant. "Suicide? I have nothing to live for, & I won't be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction." But if she loved him as strongly as he loved her, he would find a way to survive.
If she thought he was crazy, please don't tell anyone, he pleaded. Please accept his apologies. But if she felt something for him, too, she should leave a note in his locker--No. 837, near the library.
He signed his name. He did not deliver it. Did he ever intend to? Or was it just for him?
Eric, meanwhile, was upset. He lashed out at Brooks Brown by e-mail. "I know you're an enemy of Eric's," it said. "I know where you live and what cars you drive."
Psychopaths do not attempt to fool everyone. They save their performances for people with power over them or with something they need. If you saw the ugly side of Eric Harris, you meant nothing to him.
Brooks told his mom; Judy called the cops. A deputy wrote up yet another suspicious incident report and added it to the ongoing investigation of Eric. It said the Browns were worried. They'd requested an extra patrol for the night.
____
The threesome was over. Zack was not included in NBK, and Eric froze him out completely. Eric went cold on him that summer, Zack said--he never figured out why. Open hostilities erupted that fall. Dylan kept clear of it. He stayed close to Zack, away from Eric, chatting away by phone every night.
Randy Brown called the cops again. Somebody had tagged his garage with a paintball gun. He was sure it was that same old little criminal, Eric Harris. A deputy interviewed Randy and wrote up a report. "No suspects--no leads," he wrote.
"Eric is doing well," his new counselor, Bob Kriegshauser, wrote in Eric's file at that time. Eric was exceeding expectations and covering his mistakes. He got into a bit of a procrastination jam on his last four hours of community service. He waited until the last day, and he wasn't going to get to complete his full forty-five hours. So he sweet-talked the stranger in charge at the rec center that day, who was impressed enough to lie for him. As far as Bob Kriegshauser knew, Eric completed his service on time. Eric used the work for brownie points with a teacher that fall. He boasted about the summer he'd dedicated to the community.
The boys continued diverging philosophically: Eric held mastery over man and nature; Dylan was a slave to fate. And Dylan had a big surprise. He had no intention of inflicting Eric's massacre. He enjoyed the banter, but privately said good-bye. He expected his August 10 entry to be his last. Dylan was planning to kill himself long before NBK.
____
Senior year started for the killers. Eric and Dylan began a video production class. That was fun. They got to make movies. The fictional vignettes were mostly variations on a formula: aloof tough guys protecting misfits from hulking jocks. Eric and Dylan outwitted the bullies, but saved the real contempt for their clients. They bled the losers financially, then killed them just because they could. The victims deserved it; they were inferior. The story lines spilled right out of Eric's journal.
What an opportunity. Eric was guiding his unsteady partner: fantasy to reality, one step at a time. Dylan ate it up. He came alive on camera. His eyes bulged. You could sense true rage smoldering beneath his skin. The boys had riffed on NBK for months, but now they were acting out bits on film. They were celluloid heroes, screening their exploits for classmates and adults. Eric loved that. Hilarious to reveal his plans that way. He was right in the open, and they still couldn't guess. And he had Dylan out there with him.
____
Eric was gobbling up literature: Macbeth, King Lear, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. He could never get enough Nietzsche or Hobbes. Once a week, he wrote a short essay for English class on one of the stories or sometimes on a random topic. These essays reached Dr. Fuselier weeks after the murders. He found them revealing, particularly for what they omitted.
In September, Eric titled one of his short essays, "Is Murder or Breaking the Law Ever Justified?" Yes, he responded--in extreme situations. He described holding pets and humans hostage, threatening to blow up busloads of people. The irony of masking grisly murder fantasies in moralistic essays amused him. A police sniper could save many by killing one, Eric argued. The law must bend. Eric made the same case in his journal but took it a step further: moral imperatives are situational, absolutes are imaginary; therefore, he could kill anyone he wanted.
It's revealing that Eric took on a provocative issue and gauged exactly how far he could run with it. Fuselier saw no moral confusion, clearly no mental illness--Eric demonstrated his sanity by his ability to navigate such tricky terrain. He got the satisfaction of warning us in yet another way without giving himself away.
____
Dylan expected to be dead soon. What was the point of school? He had a light schedule and was still pulling two D's. He was sleeping in class. He missed the first calculus test and didn't bother making it up. Those grades are not acceptable, Bob Kriegshauser, his Diversion officer, said. He could get them up ASAP or do his homework at the Diversion office every afternoon. Kriegshauser was thrilled with Eric's progress. Eric was working on a speech about foreign music and memorizing "Der Erlkyoethe's darkly operatic poem. He'd taken a road trip to Boulder to catch a University of Colorado football game. He was making a batch of doughnuts for Octoberfest, and soaking up everything he could find on the Nazis. He pored through books such as The Nazi Party,Secrets of the SS, and The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. He cited a dozen scholarly books for his paper "The Nazi Culture." It was a strong piece of work: vivid, comprehensive, and detailed.
The paper let Eric indulge in depravity right in the open. It began by asking the reader to imagine a stadium packed with murdered men, women, and children--not just filling the seats but piled high into the air above it. That would still represent just a fraction of the people exterminated by the Nazis, he said. Six million Jews they did away with, and five million others besides. Eleven million--now, there was a body count. Eric fantasized about topping it.
He described Nazi officers lining up prisoners and firing into the first man to see how many rib cages the bullet would penetrate. "Wow," his teacher responded in the margin. "This is scary.... Incredible."
Eric photocopied a passage from Heinrich Himmler's infamous speech to SS group leaders and kept it in his room. "Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany," Himmler said. "[Germans] will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals." Here was someone who got it! The Nazis used human animals for labor; Eric only needed his to explode. Five or six hundred dismemberments ought to be enough for one awesome afternoon of TV.
Eric was feeling rambunctious. He started wearing T-shirts with German phrases, he littered his papers with swastikas, and he yelled "Sieg Heil" when he landed a strike at Rock'n' Bowl. For Eric's buddy Chris Morris, all the damn Nazi shit was wearing a little thin. Eric was quoting Hitler, spouting off about concentration camps... enough.
In October, Eric faced a setback. A speeding ticket. His parents were strict, and it cost him: they made him pay the fine, attend Defensive Driving, cover any in
crease in insurance premiums; plus, he was grounded for three weeks.
All the open Nazi lust was beginning to paint Eric into a corner. Four days after turning his paper in, Eric confided to his journal that he was showing too much. "I might need to put on one helluva mask here to fool you all some more," he wrote. "fuck fuck fuck. it'll be hard to hold out until April."
He tried a new tactic: recast what he had already revealed. He wrote a deeply personal essay for government class and turned it in to Mr. Tonelli--they called him T-dog. Eric admitted he was a felon. He had faced the horror of the police station as a criminal. But he was a changed man. He'd spent four hours in custody, and it had been a nightmare. When they put him in a prison-style bathroom, he had broken down. "I cried, I hurt, and I felt like hell," he wrote.
He was still trying to earn back the respect of his parents, he said. That was the biggest blow. Thank God he and Dylan never drank or did any drugs. In the closing lines, he made a classic psychopathic move: "Personally, I think that whole entire night was enough punishment for me," he wrote, explaining that it forced him to face a whole new world of experiences. "So all in all," he concluded, "I guess it was a worth while punishment after all."
T-dog fell for every move. What chance did he have against a clever young psychopath? Few teachers even know the meaning of the term. Tonelli typed up a response to Eric: "Wow what a way to learn a lesson. I agree that night was enough punishment for you. Still, I am proud of you and the way you have reacted.... You have really learned from this and it has changed the way you think.... I would trust you in a heartbeat. Thanks for letting me read this and for being in my class."
Fuselier compared the dates of the public and private confessions: just two days between them. It was remarkable how often Eric addressed the same ideas in both venues, and how craftily he obscured his true intent.