COLUMBINE- Dave Cullen

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The bombs failed, but the unpreprecedented attack unleashed a new era of violence in schools, branding every future shooting another Columbine. When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Code Mafia, Cassie Bernew Mistaken Columbine Martyr, and Patrick Ireland, the boy in the window, the whole world watching his

gutsy escape. Now, in a gripping work of journalism, a full decade in the making, comes a story we never knew in this revelatory book, Dave Cullen debunks the myths and produces a profile of teen killers that burrows to

the core of psycho pathology. He reveals two radically different killers, Eric Harris, the callously brutal mastermind, and Delan Claybold, the quivering depressive who journaled obsessively about love and attended the Columbine from three days before opening his opening fire, Columbine unfolds seamlessly in an unforgettable tale of two honor students with a healthy circle of friends, secretly stockpiling a cache

of weapons in the basement. They recorded their vituol on film while manipulating every adult who could have stopped them. Described by Cullen with a sharp investigative eye and psychological acumen.

Calling from testimony a pardon, calling from hundreds of interviews, thousands of police files, testimony from world class psychologists brought in by the FBI, and the boys videos and journals, he delivers the first comprehensive account of the tragic Columbine School shooting, a riveting tale of murder, redemption, police cover up, and a town torn apart. The haunting cautionary tale for

our age Columbine with my special guest Dave Collin. Welcome to the program, and thanks you to agree to this interview. Dave Colin, Hi, thanks for having me. Dan, thank you very much. First off, if you could tell us a little bit about why and how you became involved in why you decided to write Columbine, your book about this tragedy.

But I decided to go out there just in case. And I didn't know where it was. I'd never heard of Columbine out in the far western suburbs, out near the Rockies, and so I got my car and drove in the general direction. And as I was driving them the highway out there, I saw out the window to my south an arc of helicopters circling around like vultures, and it was a terrible I'm in a sign of like six or eight of them, and I couldn't believe it,

and I realized, Wow, that must be it. And that was the first moment where my heart sank and I realized it was much worse than I thought. I had no idea how bad, and I still didn't really think anybody had been killed, but I thought it was something bad, and so I literally just drove toward the helicopters and I drove till I hit a police barricade, and then I got out and ran on foot, and you know, of course, it turned out to be what it was.

And I wrote a story for a website web magazine Salon dot com that day, and then they wanted me to keep covering it, so I stayed out up there and worked it every day, and then I worked on a longer piece that took nearly a month, where I reported on the evangelical Christians, and I decided to sort of immerse myself in that world. I enrolled at Bible study at Cassie Burnell's church and various things, and then

after the first month, I thought I was done. I remember telling people, I thank goodness, you know, I never want to cover another murder again. And you know, that was a It was a rough experience, and I really thought I was done, but I kept getting drawn back because I felt like we hadn't really understood it and we didn't know why these boys had done it. So I kept coming back and coming back, and I did a long investigative peace and broke some news and just

that that didn't satisfy me. Then I had to eventually get to the psychologist, and that took a couple of years because the FBI wasn't allowed to talk to people, and it took me a couple of years to get permission to talk to them, sort of hounding them, and gradually, over time I realized that there was an incredible story here, was much bigger than people understood, and that it would make an interesting book, and that I wanted to devote.

I fought a couple of years to it, and I had no idea it would stretch out and take ten years to do. I don't think I have afforded. I don't think I would have done it if I had known going in that it would take ten years. If somebody had said that this would take ten years to do, I would have tried something else. But yes, of course not,

it just worked out. Now, Yes, can you take us back to the community where this occurred for those people that don't know Jefferson County here will tell us where this is located in the US, and take us back and sort of describe the community for those people that don't know. Yeah, well, it's just outside of Denver. It's you know, in Denver. We refer to it as the Metroplex, and it's on the very edge of suburban sprawl, on the western edge, and it's about probably forty minutes from downtown.

And it's sort of an interesting area that was mostly populated in the seventies, sort of flight from the cities. And until that time when Combine was actually built, Oh no, I'm forgetting in the seventies, I believe, and it was. It was built on a dirt road surrounded by horse ranches, and so it was sort of a very Old West character. And this is when Denver really hadn't reached that far.

But suddenly the people were coming. So suddenly all these subdivisions went up in rapid order, and you know, it became quite a large, densely relatively densely populated area, I mean dense suburban, but they never incorporated what you And that's one of the things of understanding this area is is there were a couple different referenda over time about incorporation, but the people didn't want to. The sort of anti government there. Uh so there's no town. It's just out

in the in the country. So there's no police department. They use the fire department from the neighboring county, and there's a school district county wide, and then you know, there's no police force, so they just used the county sheriff's patrols and there's a small investigative unit and so forth. So that's why those people ended up being having jurisdiction just sort of this weird sort of country suburbani ish

area with with no downtown. So in some ways there's a lot of like a lot of other suburbs, but I called it New Combine an old Columbine. There's still a lot of flavor of the people who've been here there for one hundred years or more in their families and sort of very west and then it's got the suburban character with most people who didn't even come from Colorado who you know, from all over the US immigrants, So there's sort of a mix of different kinds of people.

It's it's relatively affluent, i'd say upper middle class, barely upper middle to upper middle.

romantic poets. Uh. Dylan was named after Dylan Thomas, and so that that gives you a sense of who they were. They were very idealistic, anti gun they didn't never have guns in the house. And Tom actually eventually got a major in uh I believe it was geophysics, and and started in the oil business and did well there, and then they had some rental operating on the side, and that was successful enough that he started managing them full

time as his job several years before Columbine. And then his wife Sue, as a very outgoing person, and she worked in the local community college system and worked with some special needs students.

There's a little pass, and then behind them there's this beautiful valley and people are probably seeing Red Rocks Amphitheater on television, HBO specials or wherever they're you know, lots of major acts do concerts and fill them there because

it's just extraordinary beautiful. That's just a few miles from there, and and the valley they live in looks like sort of a mini Red Rocks and so it's sort of an idyllic place where dealing with sometimes go out with their friends with the Browns and go out, you know, fishing and you know, just doing sort of like HWK Sawyer come or excuse me, Huck Finn Tom Sawyer sort

of things. Out in the in the wood. So it was sort of a it was more of a country area at that time when he was a boy, until the people started coming well, just as he was growing up the suburban area sort of reached out there to almost meet them.

and sort of cheerful. Judy Brown, who was a neighbor at that time, described how, uh you know, she she would take the boys out a lot, you know, doing sort of fun boy stuff. She was sort of the uh uh, tomboyish mom in the neighborhood would take them out, and Judy said that, you know, Dylan would see her and would come run up and smile and run up and hurl himself into her lap and hug and it was very affectionate with people that he knew, but really

really standoffish and afraid around new people. And that really wasn't such an issue when he was small because the gifted program was a really small, selective program, so he was with the same kids year after year, with you know, occasional kids would be added to the program over time or would move into the area, but for the most part, he was like a school within a school within a relatively small grammar school, and so it was a very

small group and he felt very comfortable there. But when he went to middle school in sixth grade, that's a much bigger school and sort of several grammar schools fed into that middle school, and he really had trouble fitting in. So not only did the school I think tripled in size, but then they didn't have the gifted program, so he went out into the mainstream and so it was his circle of peers of classmates was you know, many times larger,

and he never really adjusted to that. His parents felt that they knew that he was going to have trouble that he because he was shy, but they thought that he would get over it, but he never really did. And then when he went to high school it continued and he remained that way all the way until the end. And you know, particularly with girls, he was shy and

would be afraid to speak around strange girls. And so that was sort of the nagging thing that his parents worried about, and they figured that he would grow out of it, you know, hopefully when he went to college. I mean they were hoping first of all over high school.

Then maybe when he went to college. A lot of people sort of come into their own later on, and they didn't realize it also during high school that he was terribly depressed because he was quiet and morose around other people, but they weren't around him, and he was really close, especially with his father Tom, and so they

didn't realize how badly that he was hurting inside. And we know now how badly he was hurting because he kept a journal for the last two years of his life and he gave the entry, so we know when they were taking place, and the very first entry he mentions suicide. And you know, it's a safe bet that that wasn't the first time he thought about it, because he's he's he's very open about It's clear from his

writing that he's already thought about this. So no telling how much further earlier he was contemplating it, We just have no record. But so he's, yeah, he was contemplating suicide for two years through high school and really in a journal talking about how depressing his life was, how miserable, sometimes lashing out at God quite frequently for you know, giving him this horrible life, Why did you do this to me? He sort of presents himself almost as a job figure a lot of the time in the journal.

So he's really really struggling. And his parents knew that he was struggling, but they didn't They had no idea that it was that bad. And to Cleebold, just a few years ago wrote a really amazing piece for Oprah's old magazine talking about that and saying in that retrospect and and and seeing reading his journals, she can see that, but she had no idea at the time, and trying to alert other moms really of the danger that if you see a kid, you see some of these warning

signs to get them help. So in retrospect that makes sense. But but but other than that, you know, I think the most outsiders. He looked like a you know, a typical teenage boy who's sulking.

He was in for twenty years. He eventually he retired as a a major and he was a test pilot so they moved every few years and now five or six different UH cities. He liked, Well, the city's towns. They're mostly you know, small army towns in places like I was mis pronounces Ocella, Michigan and sort of northern uh northeast Michigan, uh Plattsburgh, New York. Really you know, small army and air force towns. I shouldn't say armory town's. I was in the herring, so I think of them

as army towns, but it was air force. And so they were moving around a lot. Uh. Eric had one older brother. Both Eric and Dylan each had one brother who was about two years older than them. And you know, they did a lot of Eric did a lot of you know, playing army games with his brother and some other friends when they were kids. And we know this because Eric wrote about it in some of his school papers.

UH just sort of describing his childhood in a lot of different places and and talk about that sort of fantasizing about it being a marine. When he grew up, they met, Eric and Dylan met uh oh and Kathy for the most part worked inside the home. She had some part time UH work, but you know, she was moving every few years as an officer's wife, and so you know, she'd have to be changing jobs every couple of years and took care of the boys for the most part, and and you know, people in the in

the Air Force unit. So Eric, Eric's dad, Wayne was was very strict. He was, you know, a typical military man. And Eric seems like a pretty normal kid as far as we can tell. He was fairly shy as a kid, not not nearly as much as Eric, but he sort of came into his own around junior high. High school, he started coming out of his shell. And Eric and

Dylan met in junior high the Harris Is. After Wayne retired from the Air Force, they relocated to outside of Denver, to jeff Coo and so Eric Diller went to the same middle school and that's where they met. And nobody actually remembers. There's very conflicting reports of exactly when they met, but it was probably seventh grade and they started hanging around somewhat. They become became closer in high school and

kind of a circle of a few different friends. They were really close with Zach Heckler, another kid named Zach Heckler early on, and that was sort of the threesome did allow things together in the early years in high school, and there were like four or five or six of them that that tended to hang out a lot. But they said sort of a tight circle of friends. And Eric was getting more and more confident and aggressive, and he would walk right up to girls and introduce himself,

chat them up. And actually both of the boys got jobbed at Black Tech Pizza, which is a chain sort of like Domino's step.

That's what most of his fantasies that he writes about centered on So I think with a lot of killers, readers or people in the public assume he sort of somebody would like Eric would work his way up to like, oh, I want to kill one person, No, I'll kill ten, No I'll kill fifty or whatever, and sort of working their way up to what they would do it in their fantasies. It was really the opposite of Eric. It was scaling down his fantasies to what he could realistically do.

And he started keeping a notebook. It wasn't a journal in the classic sins of a journal. It was more of a notebook to leave a record of the mass murder that he was planning. So it was specifically about the murder plan and documenting it, rather than Eric is like a kid pouring out his thoughts and feelings about everything under the sun. Eric started his journal a year before Columbine, so that's when we have a really good record of his thinking. And he also dated his entries

conveniently for us and a year ahead of time. A year before Columbine he started it, and he's already planning mass murder and the first phrase of the journals, I hate the effing world where he's spelled it out and he really hated everyone. And a few months after that, in one of the entries, he's talking about how he wants to destroy all of Denver and how beautiful this scene he's imagining with all of downtown Denver in flames, the skyscrapers burning to the ground, and he's done it all.

And in the middle of that sort of fantasy about what he'd liked to do, he starts complaining and he says, you know how hard about bombs are? He I titled one of the chapters bombs are Hard because of actual quote from Eric, and he says, you know how hard it is to produce just one bomb or to blow up one building. It takes a lot of work, and you know, it takes all his resources and I can't do all that. And so he realizes he's realistic. He's

not delusional. He's not somebody like Joe from Virginia Tech who's deeply mentally ill. Eric knows exactly what he's doing. He's very rational and realizes, you know, he can't gather enough explosives to to blow up downtown Denver, And he finally realizes, okay, I can. I can do his one building, I can do his school. And he can't get truckloads of fertilizer like Tim McVeigh. But he can build propane bombs like you've seen on the internet or from the well.

He downloaded the anarchist cookbook and learned how to do these. Luckily, he did them incorrectly, but he realized he would do a series of I think there were seven big propane bombs, and that was sort of the backbone of the plan, is to blow up the school and kill most of the people in it.

cheeping or toilet papering people's yards. They would crazy glue mailboxes together and and and uh screw up their alarm systems and uh but and then they were throwing you know, throwing off firecrackers and building and putting fire crackers together for larger explosions. And so it was a sort of coordinated, nasty, little uh uh series of vandalism. And that's the first recorded sort of petty crime uh that we have of Eric that he documents himself. So definitely was a sophomore

You know, lots of kids do that. You know, it wasn't anything terrible, but what we do see it as an early step so late in that one of the things they do is they steal some signs, and not just from somebody's house but from a business. And that's where we see his first sort of petty theft. So he's moved on to theft. Then one semester they started

stealing computer supplies from the school. So Eric and Delan were both right, and they were they volunteered in different activities and they were uh in the computer club, and so they had access to some computer equipment and they started stealing it and and that went down to the course of at least a semester. They got caught in one of those and had to return some of the things. I'm trying to well. Eric also claimed there's no evidence that he actually did this, but he claimed that he was,

that he had a scammer. He was stealing visa information and then you know, using it. But there's there's no record of him getting any of the money. That was probably know him bragging about something that he was planning and wanting to do and hadn't figured out how to do yet. But you can definitely see this this progression.

And then they started stealing more and more things, and just a little more than a year before the murders, in January of nineteen ninety eight, they were out one night on I think it was a Friday night, and they were kind of bored and they drove out into the country and pulled over to this little strip on the side of the road, to sort of gravel strip, and it just we're breaking things and then we're like.

It was a place where sometimes people would pull over and drink beers, high school kids or college kids and drink beer and leave their empty bottles out there, and Eric and Dylan were picking up the bottles and smashing them, uh, you know, just for fun. And some high school brats

can dooo sometimes, so they were doing that. They got bored with that, and they're looking around for something else, and there was just one there was a van parked out there and just left there out sort of in the middle of the nowhere, which seemed kind of odd. And they went over and looked inside and it was all kinds of interesting looking stuff inside, electronic gizmos that looked like and so they decided they wanted to break

in and steal it. And they took a couple of different rocks, tried smashing the windows, and they were really surprised that, you know, Carl Winders didn't smash as easily as I thought they would. So they were going for bigger rocks.

they didn't even know what this stuff was. In fact, in the police record of it, you know, Dylan, they had to say what they had, you know, admit to what they had stolen, and Dylan gave a list of things. You know. It was sort of like a yellow thing with wires sticking out of it, and and so they didn't even know what this stuff was or really care. It was more, you know, about the thrill of stealing.

So they did that, and this was at night, and they piled them in their car, and then they got the heck out of there and they drove toward Dylan's house on the other side of the hog back into the state park and pulled over in a state in the parking lot of the state park to look at all the stuff, and they turned a little dome light

out in the car to look at it. I didn't really think about the fact that the parking lot was deserted because the park closes at sunset, so you weren't supposed to be in there, and they're going through all this stuff and didn't realize that, you know, they're just like with a light on. They're just like a beacon to anybody driving around in the area. And it's you know, it's mountainous. There's lots of high ground around and and they, uh, well, I forget now whether there was a state trooper or

a county trooper, you know, patrolling the area. Seizes right on in the in the state park, which is supposed to be closed. So he drives down there, pulls out. The boys are so oblivious and so excited about what they're doing and discussing and going through all their loot and seeing what it all is, that they don't even notice this cop pull up behind them, get out of his car, stand there in his watch and listen and the cop is just listening and recording what they're saying

and can hear them. And they get out of the car, you know, and then they'sadly like, oh, we better take care of this before somebody catches us. And I mean, I mean it's a sort of comical now because there were just goofball kids about it. So they get out of the car to go put it in the trunk, and that's when the cop shines the flash light in

their head and they're they're totally busted. So he takes them in and amongst they're charged with three felonies for this because it was it was more than a thousand dollars worth of equipment. And you know, Dylan immediately confesses and said, yes, we did it, and blah blah blah tells the whole story because they were taking the separate rooms, of course and interrogated separately. So Dylan confesses to everything.

Eric blames Dylan, which is just like him that you know, it was mostly his idea, but of course he points the finger at Dylan immediately just whatever to get himself out of trouble. And so their parents were called, I mean, they were arrested, they were fingerprinted, put through the whole process.

Their parents had to come and bail them out, and then they were charged with three phonies, which is you know serious, They could do, you know, time in prison for us, and of course they were they're grounded there. Their parents were both just furious but also agast and you know, couldn't believe that there, you know, very kid sort of uh brilliant boys have been charged with felonies. So Eric's parents, in particular, well Wayne, decided they had

to get him to see a shrink. And and Wayne kept a notebook of his own wait and see the stuff documented called all sorts of different psychiatrists and psychologists interviewing them to see who was who would be the best fit. So you can see how seriously he's taken this. He didn't just say, oh, send the boy to a shrink and you know, call somebody. He took an active role, so you can see the kind of hands on parenting that he's actually doing to get him to see somebody.

And and and actually put him on an antidepressive. They put him on zoloft and for several weeks and then that wasn't it didn't seem effective, and so they switched him to lubax. So you know, they were very hands on about this. But Eric was even much more furious about this.

And it's really typical for a psychopath to have that kind of reaction because there's so much about power and control everything that they're incredible control freaks and so if you can imagine somebody who's a control freak, where you take complete control of his life, where now Eric's dad is just watching his every move and he's grounded, he

can't leave the house. They're onto him. And then the kids applied for and were allowed into this program called Diversion where most kids have this where the kids have to for juveniles if you get into trouble, if it's your first defense, and basically it's a year long program where you have to do several things, you know, make restitution to the victim, apologize, go through anger management, and lots of different classes, see a counselor every couple of weeks.

You have to do urine test periodical randomly, to do drug screen and alcohol screen, so you have to you know, abstain from from doing any of that. And then if you completed successfully, Oh and you have to do community service. And then if you've complete that successfully and I believe a year and then your record is cleaned for another year afterwards, then it's expunged from your record. And so they were in that program and heavily monitored. But Eric,

Eric str didn't like it. I mean, you know, Dylan wasn't thrilled with having to do all this stuff. But for him it wasn't it wasn't like an emotional thing like with Eric, it was how dare these people do this? And who is this judge to sentence me to this program? Who who is this you know, bleeping social worker or counselor that I have to go report to every two weeks?

So he would he really snowed the counselor, because we have the record of the councilor made notes every session every two weeks, and and Eric is going in there and snowing first heard than him.

him all the more. So, you're right, if there was it was a very gradual progression in Eric's fantasizing, in his road from sort of petty criminal to mass murderer. But there was that one moment that ramped things up, and that was probably it where you know, he had so much of his control taken away from him, and that is just infuriating to a psychopath. And you know, that's when his blood was boiling and he was ready to strike back at the world. And you know, Columbine

was and in his mind, was a terrorist act. It was a way to attack the entire world, to terrorize all of us, to scare the hell out of all of us, and on television, it was a made for TV event. He talks about his audience, he actually uses the word my audience in his journal of how we were all nationally going to respond, nationally and internationally going to respond to this thing. So it was his way of getting back us.

in duffel bags. And these were made of those just standard propane tanks that you know anybody has in their backyard, the standard barbecue things that you know you can get at the local grocery store and then you refill them there. So they were that side sort of like about high high or knee high, and so that wasn't sort of

the core of it. Then they rigged each one up with a can of gasoline, all sorts of different things they used for shrap mails to drive up injure more people, and then wired up with those old fashioned alarm clocks with the bells on top as the timers and detonating devices.

And they really thought these were going to work. So they had one each in a big duffel bag, and the plan was to carry them into the cafeteria right at the start of a lunch period when there was six hundred people pile into the into the cafeteria for eight lunches the most popular lunch and there is mass confusion. I've been in there many, many times, and this is like a beehive, you know, or ant calling, you know, people swirling everywhere. And Eric actually knew that this was

the prime moment because he had spent time. This is how cold bloody that he was. He had spent time where he sat down in the cafeteria in the period before the start of a lunch and invictory how many people were in the cafeteria before the bell rang, and then after every two minutes or so he logged, you know, it was just just fifty people in here. Now there's a hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred,

five hundred up to six hundred. And he had, you know, almost minute by minute when it peaked and then and then it dropped because so many people comments and open campus. So a lot of the kids, especially the juniors and seniors who have cars of the driver's license, leave campus and go to you know, when these are McDonald's or somewhere whatever for lunch and come back. But they use

the cafeteria typically as a rendezvous point. So Webb piles into the cafeteria, they meet up with their friends, then they go out to their cars and get out of there. So it swallows up to about six hundred for a minute or two and then drops very quickly as a lot of the people leave. So Eric had logged all this and knew that at eleven seventeen was the maximum human density of any of the number of people anywhere in at school, anytime during the day. So that's when

the bombs were set to go off. So uh they were going to carry those in with the detonators to go up just a few minutes afterwards. There was just a short time there, so nobody would discover the bombs in the interim, hopefully, and they had practices where they would they would set the the bombs down near two pillars, would hope, which hopefully would also bring the ceiling down upon them.

they'd practice so they could do it more quickly. So they got on their bandoliers about their body, their their military web gear they strapped on, so all these explosive us strapped their body. They had, you know, things so specific like they had flint mass strikers down their forearms so they could strike the the molotov cocktails or the pipe bombs more quickly and set them off more quickly. And then each of them loaded up with a gun. They each had one set off shot gun and then

a different gun. Eric had a carbine rifle, and Eric had and Dylan had a Tech nine which is sort of like a glock or a poor man's oozier block a nine millimeter very powerful sort of well submachine sub submachine gun automatic, semi automatic. So they each had two powerful weapons and all these pipe bombs, and then they were supposed to wait just a minute or two for

the bombs to go off. And then when the bombs went off, that was Act one, and then the school would blow up and be burning down and whoever survived it and within the cafeteria, but then people from the rest of the school would presumably flee the school, and from their vantage points, they had two of the three major excents of the school covered, and Eric was right near one of them and Dylan was near the other.

Eric was right get on with the most important one, the main student entrance, right near the cafeteria where most people would presumably come out, and that entrance they could both hit it. They could triangulate their fire on that, and then Dylan could get one of the other exits, and then they just had to give up on the one that was the well on the opposite side of the school they couldn't cover, So that's when they would

mow down people fleeing the building. And that's when they wrote that phase two is that when they got to have fun, and they wrote that several different places have fun, So that's when they would you kill people. And they didn't never write down whether they plan to advance on

the school or just keep their positions. That isn't completely clear what they plan to do, and I'm not sure they were sure what they would do with I think they were perhaps planning to just play it by ear and enjoy it and see what happens there.

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will happened to me. A cop will probably shoot me in the head. So you know, that's how I imagine it going down, and not knowing how long they would laugh, but that you know, the cops would come and there would be some gloriou shootout and that would be the end of them. Dylan really wanted to die in the act, and he was much more suicidal, and I think the

suicide was the primary, the driving motive for him. And then you know, an angry way of killing a bunch of people on the way out was sort of gravy for him, Dylan was Eric was very much different than that. He had no desire to die. He just accepted it as an inevitable result, and he paid it himself as a martyr. He said, you know, I will, I'll give up my life for my cause of showing you people how pathetic and you know, disgust that you all are. So that was the second act, is doing lots of

killing the with the weapons. Then the third phase they presumably thought it was gonna happen after they died, and that was another series of bombs, and they each had their cars filled with more propane based bombs and then

huge jugs of gas lane. So that around noon, which is a little more than forty minutes into the attack, there were timers set to go off to blow the cars up, and the cars were sort of doing double duty as the starting point for each of the two would be the attack, but they would also be dispersed to the parking lot and very close to the entrances, so where presumably the first responders would set up would

be performing their work. And in fact, there was a triout of station right nearby, and there was all sorts of activity of people being loaded up in the ambulances and if those things had blown up at noon, they would have killed many more survivors and the people treating them, and presumably by that time would have been captured, possibly

on television live too. And that's a standard I Ray tactic that the Irish Republican Army used on the British Army for decades, that there would be a secondary attack, so that when the British soldiers came to you know, administer to the wounded and to deal with the situation, then then they would be blown blown up in a second attack. So you know, Eric did his homework and knew how that worked, and that was to be the glorious uh end of the whole thing. And okay, the

school's destroyed and burning down. But oh and I did. Oh, so do you want me to jump in and tell you what did happen?

Dylan had had cut class that morning to prepare. They had a whole schedule for the morning of how to get the propane bombs filled in the gasoline and so forth. And we know too that they did this because they were there at the seven eleven in the places where they want. There was the surveillance video footage of them. And I'm sorry it was in the seven eleven, but it was something like that, like a stop and go.

So Eric getting out of the car and brook sees him and and things like why did he cut class? We had a test today? And storms up to sort of you know, lay to Eric like what are you doing? You missed a test? You idiot, and Eric just says, get out of here. I like you now, get out of here, Brooks and so Books just doesn't know what to make of that and wanders off. And Eric picks up his bag, which is the propane bomb, you know, it's seals of Books can't see that, and carries it

into the school. So this at the bombs and they're running behind time and their plan that kind of get really really close. They set the bombs down, and with just a minute or two to go, they get out of there and get to their cars and and nothing happens. We don't have any record of exactly of them going out to their cars. Nobody noticed them, you know this you have of activity and nobody's paying attention to o

their kids. But what we do know is they only hit about two minutes to gear up, to realize the bombs didn't go off, and then to make their way across the parking lot instead of going to the obvious place, which is where Eric was, because he gave himself the prime location by the main entrance, the main student entrance.

Instead they went across the parking lot over to where Dylan was, which I believe probably makes sense that Eric was wondering whether Dylan was still going to go through the plot with a plan, and wanted to make sure when the bombs failed that Dylan was still on board with this. So I think he went over probably to go check on Dylan and make sure, you know, stick

close with them to make sure this really happened. They didn't seem to have any plan B for if something went wrong, so they apparently just winged it from there.

They went to the What they did that what we do know is that he went up to that second other entrance, which is on the second floor, because Columbine's built on a hill, so there's some of the entrances on the first floor and somewhere on the second and they went up the outside stairs up to that entrance, the west entrance, and at that point one of them, probably Eric, yelled, go go and they started shooting it. Literally anything that moved out there, anybody who had moved in.

It was a beautiful day, kids, some kids were still leaving the school, the lunchroom. Someonere coming out there for you know, sort of little picnic, just to eat their eat their lunch in the grass, and the two boys just started firing on everyone mainly Eric did Dim only shot five times outside and I forget the execut number. Eric, I believe it was in the sixties or seventy shot and pretty soon he ran out of targets, but literally kids running across the soccer field fleeing. He shot out,

and he shot in every direction. That went on for just a few minutes. And then the school resource officer, who's a cop employed by the county in the school. He was actually outside on the other side of the school in his car, having launched, just watching the smoking pits on the opposite side of the school, and he got a radio call from someone in the school saying that there was there was gunfire or something horrible going on.

So he sped around the school and he showed up just about four or five minutes into the shooting, and he opened fire on Eric and exchanged gunfire, and he was outgunned by Eric. Dylan didn't shoot it and them Dylan did nothing, but Eric shot and they exchanged several rounds,

and then Eric and Dylan retreated into the school. They were right by the door, so they retreated into the school, and this is into the second floor because they were at the top of the outside stairs by that door on the second floor, and you know, when you go into the building, it is very obvious when you go in those doors. The first major hallway you can turn to,

which is a much bigger halloway they turned down. And then the first big group of people you come to is the library, where they're glass windows and you can see in all sorts of people congregated. And there there were fifty two people I think, I think fifty two kids in the library, so it was the largest gathering of people. They saw them, they went right in and that's where most of the killing took place. Well, actually

they shot Dave Sanders, the teacher, in the hallway. Before they got to the library, they'd killed and I'm sorry, they had killed two people previously outside Dave in the hallway, and then they killed ten more and injured quite a

few more people in the library. They just sort of went around indiscriminately, taunting people and shooting them, letting them go when they chose to let them go, and shooting some kids in the head without even looking, just pointing the gun under the room of the table and firing without even knowing who they were shooting at. That went on for just about seven minutes, and then they apparently got bored with it, where Eric probably did the psychond

paths tend to do. And then they left the library and they didn't kill again. And in fact, they wanted the school for about half an hour and did not. There were hundreds of people in the school, and they saw all kinds of them behind doors. They had a glass pane in the door, and they wandered down to the cafeteria. Kids were running their tables, ran right past them, and Eric Dilton didn't shoot at anybody in the whole

thirty minutes. The only human beings that Eric or Dylan would ever shoot at, well, Eric would shoot at, would be comps, just almost before their suicides. So they wanted the building. They went down to the cafeteria and they tried again to set off those bombs. That's what they really wanted to do. Eric fired his rifle at the bombs, Dilan through a miletop cocktail, which started a small fire,

but didn't do anything. They gave up went back up to the library, perhaps to watch their cars explode, because they went up to the library just just a few minutes before the cars were supposed to erupt. For Act three, and the library was a perfect vantage point to watch that that didn't happen. They fired out the windows, or Eric fired out the window at cops, possibly in what the cops referred to as suicide by cop helping the

cops will fire back. That didn't work, and so they retreated just a few steps back, found a spot and each shot themselves in the head. Eric put his gun into his mouth and blew his brains out. Dylan put his to the temple and they fired at approximately the same moment. Then that was the end of them.

the police force later in a scandal? And tell us or tell us a little bit more about Dave Sanders and the brave Two of these guys were Eagle Scouts and Aaron Hainsey and another gentleman. Let me see Kevin starkly explained their role and what they tried to do for their teacher.

Nobody knew what was going on. Is there just paint ball guns or fireworks or something, But pretty quickly they figured out that something serious was going on outside, something very wrong. So he ran into the cafeteria to warn kids. And the first thing he did was rush out there and start yelling to get down, get down, and told the kids to get under the tables. And you can see there's actually surveillance footage of him doing this. So he's getting the kids down very quickly. He's thinking as

he's doing this, and he realizes, no, that's a mistake. Actually, you know, I need to get him out of here, you know, they're gonna be sitting ducks. If they just hide into the tables, that's not going to save them. So he changes horses and he starts saying, nobody up, get out, get out, get out, And he and some other custodians start helping them, sort of rounding up the

kids and scrambling them. And what they decided to do was there's a big staircase on the opposite a really wide staircase on the opposite end of the cafeteria, away from the windows, so the killers are outside, so that seems the safest place to get get hurt. Everybody across the room to the staircase. So you can see dave'st running across the cafeteria and motioning with his arms to follow. Most of the kids do. There's a big wave of

kids that follow. He runs up the stairs, sort of leaves them up the stairs, and he stops at the top of the stairs and directs them all and stops there and plays sort of traffic cop, directing them out to the to the next exit down the hallway furthest away from where the shooting is taking place. So he stays in the building to do that. Meanwhile, you know, most people. Their reaction is to get the heck out of there, out of the building, but his reaction is

to stay and look after kids. And when the whole massive kids then are up the staircase, everybody's out except for the few who have been a few afraid, and they're they're under the tables downstairs, so there's nobody else coming.

Then he directs his attention to other kids upstairs and seeing you know who we can warn to get out of there, because, believe it or not, at least half the school didn't realize anything was going on, and they were further away and they were just in class, and you know, people were taking tests, they weren't doing whatever. And some and some, depending how close he were, some classes could hear some commotion. Some people went to the

windows and the teachers told him to sit down. And so a lot of people didn't nothing was going on, so they had to be warned. So Dave starts running down the hallway warning kids to get out of it, get out of here, and run that way. He goes around the corner and as soon as he turns the corner that the same that's just moments after Eric and Dylan have stopped exchanging gunfire with the officer outside and

enter the building and come down the hallway. So Dave turns a corner and starts walking down the hallway, the same hallway that Eric and Dylan are entering, on the opposite side, so they're facing each other, going towards each other, and Eric and Dylan are entering shooting. So Dave, as soon as he gets around the corner and and you know, hears and sees gunfire, realizes that's a mistake, and he turns the high tail and get back around that corner,

almost makes it. They shoot at him. He goes down on the ground and then crawls around that corner, and a couple of their teachers who are also helping round up kids and get them out of there, come to his aid, put him over the shoulders and sort of him down to the nearest classroom they can get to, which just signs room three. And in that room there are a lot of people who have who've sort of taken refuge. I mean there's there's sort of two taxics and some people ran for it and some people trying

to take cover. So there's dozens of people in that room. There are kids and teachers who have taken refuge in that room. And it's a larger and it's sort of a double room. It's got one of those expandable walls in between, and so that they've opened that wall and people from both rooms are sort of huddled together. They get Dave down and ask who knows first daid, and you know, nobody really knows what they're doing, and so they send a kid out to go see if they

can find somebody who does. And so this kid's terrify this. You know, there's smoke and gunfire out in the hallway. This kid runs across the hall to another room, asking if anybody knows first date, and discovers there's two kids in there who say, yeah, we're Eagle Scouts, you know, we've been trained in all this kind of stuff. And so he said, come with me. So the two Eagles Stouts go back across the hallway signs from three where Dave is, and and they start working on him, and

they tear up their own shirts. They take their shirts off and tear them up to use them as as a bandages and to h to sponse the bleeding, and uh, you know, that overwhelms them pretty quickly, and so they start getting the other boys that take their shirts off

and tear them up. They go through quite a few different shirts, and they're pumping his chest and keeping him uh coherent, and you know, other people are calling nine one one and and you know, talking to one up note one operators who are saying, okay, we know you're there coming to get you. Just stay put, stay where you are. And so they do, and they think, Okay, somebody's coming to help us. But this goes on and on, and Dave is going in and out of consciousness or

around the brink of consciousness, and the two ways. The Eagle Scouts continue to treat him, and they you know, figure out things to do, like they take his wallet out and they look for pictures. They find pictures of his wife and his daughters, and they ask him to tell him who they are and you know, describe them and to tell memories about them, just trying to you know,

give him a reason to fight on. And you know, say, you know what your wife's name, and you know Linda is thinking about you, and you know she's gonna be so happy, and just hang in there, and that kind of thing that goes on and on. Meanwhile, people French. We talked near to the non Wollner operators who are not communicating very well and saying, you know, the SWAT team will be there. It will be just a few minutes. But there's all sorts of trouble with the SWAT teams

on the outside of the building. The biggest problem is the sheriff, who's sort of in way over his head, is taking command of the situation, and and it's decided to not send a SWAT teams in to set up a defensive perimeter, which was the protocol at the time, that is how they were trained to do it. And he didn't realize really essentially that he needed to break protocol and do something different. This was something different than the protocol had foreseen. So they didn't send to these

SWAT teams in for quite a long time. And then there was confusion of how the school was laid out because Columbine had been had been expanded and part of it Redone just a few years earlier. So the leader of the SWAT leader had been in Columbine and thought he knew it was all laid out, and he thought he knew exactly where the cafeteria and library were where

so many reports had been of the worst carnage. But unfortunately, I believe four years earlier there had been addition to the school where they had built the new cafeteria and library on the opposite side of it building and converted the area which was originally the labrary in cafeteria. So the SWAT leader, I think he'd been in the school and knew where it was, didn't realize they had remodeled

and was on the opposites und of the building. And so then they made their way to the building room by room, clearing each room one room at a time, very methodically a swat teams are trying to do and that that took three hours. And by the time they got to Dave, swat team got there and he was still alive. By the time they got a medic in there, he pronounced him dead.

There were hundreds of kids. There were kids on suicide watch for a couple of years, where then the post traumatic stress disorder went way beyond that. And there were four there were four people the injuries that were really serious, either brain or spinal cord injuries. At least two of those never walked again, I mean never, It could take a few steps, but our wheelchair bound for life.

in the early day. So I was sort of reconstructing and went back through the news service to see how how many days or weeks it took to develop these myths, and I was astounded that, you know, it really wasn't in days, it was in hours, and almost all the major myths were in place within the first two days, most of them by the first day. And I was

really amazed. And I got the transcript of the first four hours of CNN coverage, and they were coming back and forth between for local stations, so it gave you a good cross section of what was being reported locally and nationally on the national feed, and over the first four hours you could see most of the major myths

take hold. And it was truly extraordinary. Where there's this mistaken idea that there's there's a profile of school shooters and that most shooters are loaners, outcasts, rejects, and so forth,

that turns out not to be true. The Secret Service did a really in depth study of every single shooting like this over more than a twenty five year period and determined, and the FBI did a separate study, and they both determined emphatically that there is no single profile or and most kids are not Most shooters are not loaners, they're not outcasts. Something like thirty percent of them are, so a sizeable minority, but most aren't. Two thirds are not. So this is just a this is a myth, but

right account might happened. We already had this myth. So reporters went into it assuming they're probably outcasts and start asking kids and you can see them. You can see the progression over just the first couple hours as they start asking kids things like, so, were they loners? Were

they outcasts? Because of course, you know, leading the classic, leading the witness, and kids start saying yeah, and kids who don't even know them, because this is a school of two thousand students, so most students don't know them, and especially they were seniors. So you know, picture of your high school, most freshmen, no, hardly any seniors, if any, the most sophomores don't even so you know the majority of the kids in the school have never even met

these kids and don't even know who they are. So most people who we were asking as witnesses don't even you know, don't even know their names. So kids, and we're not we're not bothering to ask them, you know, and to you that is like, you know, we're the kids loners. So this kid, who probably never met them and doesn't know, you know, also has heard this myth of these outcasts and says yes. And then within like the first hour or two, the questions start changing from

were they loaners and outcasts? To we're hearing there were loaners and outcasts? Is that true? And now everybody, now you're really leading the witness So all the students, almost all of them, are saying yes, yes, and now and kids are hearing they're watching TV and they're all wired up by cell phones. Is the early days of cell phones that there were a very large number of people in that community who had them, and so we're just traveling like wild from the TV through cell phones. So

everybody's getting worded. It's like, oh, yeah, we're wearing their owners and outcasts. So now two three hours into it, kids have already heard the via TV that they're outcasts, and then when they're asked by a reporter they say, oh, yeah, they were, they were outcasts. And so it's just this this this loop where we're running around where you know, we're telling the kids via TV, then the kids are telling us back and corroborating it, and so we're also

sort of sure of it. So by nightfall, you know, as far as the media's and the kids in the school now are are are concerned. They were outcasts. They were part of the same thing as going out with the Trench Cote mafia. And then this idea takes hold that they were targeting the jocks because one girl comes out and and they made some comment about jocks in

the in the cafeteria or in the library. Probably all jocks stand up, but they were they were dissing every conceivable group, one of which was jocks, and some kid got it into their head, Oh, they were targeting jocks, so started spreading that word. So that went like wildfire. So by nightfall, we in the press had assumed we were understanding these killers, why they were doing it, what was going on, and we just went with that, and there was this great need to understand why. So by

the end of the week. One of the papers USA Today was the leader in this had determined that there had been this big feud going on the previous year between this group called the trench Cope Mafia and with some of the jobs, which was true. What wasn't true. They failed to understand is that Eric and Dylan were really never part of the Trench Cope Mafia, and that the whole thing had said a lot and didn't really

exist anymore. So this whole feud with the jocks was something that had happened but had nothing what's whatever to do with Eric and Dylan or with the murders. But we just sort of pieced these little bits together and sort of jumped to conclusions and assumed, ah, huge with the jocks and the trench Coat Mafia and these kids we'd already mistakenly put them in the trench Cup mafia.

So that was the reason. So by Friday of the week, you know, it was given as a fact that these kids were outcasts who had a feud with the trench Coat Mafia, who were doing the whole thing as revenge for this feud. None of that had anything to do with what had happened, But we'd sort of gone from speculating to ironclad conclusions about what had caused this in

a matter of two to three days. And once we had these ideas, we were just sticking with them, and there was no real evidence backing up any of this. And the cops, meanwhile, and the FBI, this huge team had been brought in, didn't have access to the killers records, had nearly a thousand pages of writings they had left behind, they had their journals, had videotapes they had created explain themselves.

And we're watching these things and realized that none of this stuff being reported had anything to do with reality. And you know, the FBI agent Dwayne Fuselli became a major source for the book. You know, I was telling me years later that each night they would go home after you know, the investigative team working at it during the day, and we're starting the motives and what was going on, what the killers were all about, was starting

to shake take place. They would go home and turn on the television or pick up a newspaper and it was like the media describing a completely different massacre. And we could just without intending to, we just we'd taken these little scraps of information and pieced together this whole sort of plot and this idea of what was going on which was completely wrong, and we just ran with it, and we convinced ourselves collectively that was the answer and

told the public, and the public believed it. It seemed plausible, and so there was this sort of rush to judgment about what had caused it, And in response to this desire to want to know, the public really wanted to know why. So we figured out some why and told

it to them. It just didn't turn out to be, you know, the correct why, and calumin was a huge story for several weeks, and then, you know, as these national stories happened, then you know, just with a thud, then they're gone and the media goes on too something else, and really never went back and investigated and figured out and reported that, oh we got that whole thing completely wrong.

And there were reports, I mean there were most of the major papers did run a story six months or a year later of the myths of saying, oh, we got all these things wrong, But by then the public really wasn't paying attention, and we didn't really ever go back and shake the public and say, wait a minute, the whole story that you'd heard that we reported. We got a completely wrong. You know, it wasn't like leading to today's show or you know, anything like that. So

the public really never got wind of it. That reporters on the story knew, oh, we completely screw that up, but the public never really got wind of that.

cork battle. The Denver Post, to their credit, followed the Freedom of Information Act and took it all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court and won an unanimous decision forcing those to be Really, but that was over seven years later. So in the early versions of the book, which I had done in the first couple of years, we were still years away from even getting that at material released. And those journals are just shocking in what

they just closed. So the police had access to the investigators had access to that, but we in the media didn't for many years. So that drastically changed the nature of the book of Understanding until that point. I got. By that point, I'd gotten access to the investigators and talked could talk to them about it, and you know, they could explain the killers, but I didn't have the first hand. You know, I hadn't been able to read

it all myself. I'd been leaked most of earics journal by then, but I hadn't read Dyllains at all, and I hadn't had a chance to sit down and study them. So I really really understood the killers much late, much better later in the process. And the other thing is that this book is sort of the chronicle of the killers but also the survivors. It's two stories where I go back and between them in time, and the survivor's

story stories really hadn't happened yet. They hadn't they hadn't been completed until you know, they go on and definitely, of course the stories go on and on, but really they settled down. Oddly enough, I've found for a lot of people after five to eight years, a lot of the people sort of the victims got to sort of a to a stable place. A lot of the people like like Welschner, somebody who I wrote about in the Afterward that I did a year later for the paperback edition.

She said, the five year anniversary, all these news organizations were coming back for anniversary stories were you know again it was national news for a day or two, and they were all trying to write the happy story, like you know, about how survivors got over it and it was okay now. And she said, you know, that made a very uncomfortab She was sort of avoiding them because she was still a complete mess. Five years afterwards, she

had her life was completely off track. She had been shot several times, it almost died through it and psychologically completely messed her up. And it was about seven to eight years afterwards where she got her life together. She went back to grad school, decided she wanted to be a social worker. She went back to school, figured that out, and now well, now twelve years old, she's very happy, she's loving her job, feeling very fulfilled, she's engaged. Now,

life is great. But her story really wasn't complete till about seven eight years out, and there were quite a few people in that in that boat. So it really turned out ten years was a good was a good time because you know, it took me years to write all this and to and also to edit and to shape it into a compelling story the way I wanted. So I really needed seven or eight years of the survivors to live their survival to you know, to have that story. I think, you know, twenty years out there

would be a little more to their stories. But I don't. I don't think the second ten years will change significantly. The first seven to eight years their stories changed drastically.

we have lots of glimpses of the killers. But the specific tapes is called the basement tapes because they were largely made in Eric's basement because he had a room in his bedroom in the basement and a little area outside of it where they set up these in a talk show format to discuss the killings that they were planning, and they did this over several sessions a little more than a month before the attack. Those tapes have never

been released. There was one well. They showed them Time magazine first exclusively in Time of this big cover story several months after Columbine in December, and then the Rocky Mountain News demanded to see them. They showed them to Rocky and then then they had to show them the rest of the press, so they had one showing of them for everyone else locally in the press one afternoon.

I was not included because the oh, the guy in charge of the press was furious with me because I had leased the first passages from Eric's journal a few months before and and di all some of the things that he was very mad at me about. So I was excluded. They said they were going to have other showings, and they kept saying that, then they never did, and then then they decided that the well, for various reasons, that they were going to withhold the tapes from the public.

And they had all sorts of different reasons, but the biggest one was that they were afraid that the reason was some legitimacy, that they were afraid that the tapes might inspire other copycats, might make the killers look heroic in the eyes of some teenagers with a problem, so they wanted to withhold them. So the contents are known because that group of six or eight reporters saw them

and wrote about them. And then also a police evidence person wrote up it's about I think it's eight pages, single space, a report really detailing you know, each tape and whatside with huge numbers of direct quotes. I mean that and that matches with what the local press saw it saw, so we have a good record of what's on them, so we know what they contain, but as far as everyone being able to see them know, that's

been withheld. The Denver Post also was demanding release of them in that same lawsuit with the with the killer's writings. And I simplify that story a little bit when I

told you earlier. With the Supreme Court actually decided is that all this information that was demanded by the Denver Post was a public record, and Colorado laws says that any public records have to be freely disseminated to the media or to the public, except in cases I forget the exact wording, but it's something like when local authorities feel that it's in the public interest or that there

may be a danger to the public. And so the Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court had decided that yes, in fact, these were public records and sent it back to the sheriff, who could then still say, on the technicality, well, that it's in the public interest or it's a danger to the public. And it was assumed and widely reported that if the sheriff did rule that way, it would go back to the Supreme Court would likely decide, no, it isn't in the public interest, have to release it.

But that's how the courts tend to go. They answered the question before them, and so at that point the sheriff decided, Okay, I'm willing to release all the written records to kill there's journals in the other thousand pages, but I'm still holding back the videos on this technicality that it's in the public interest. So at that point the Denver Post decided not to appeal it and to drop it, and so all the documents, the final documents,

were released, but not the videotapes. And the way it stands, there have been a couple more sheriffs since then that sheriff was voted out. Well, actually, we're already on a later sheriff by the time this one to the Supreme Court. But we're a couple of sheriffs later, and they've still continued to say, you know, they don't want these released, But any future sheriff of Jefferson County at any time can release them. So presumably someone will be elected at

some point who will say they should be released. Most of the public, almost all the families involved, the victims want them released, and it's really odd to me that they still haven't. But we're still waiting. You know, there's no surprises on there because we already know what's on. But I think it will be useful, especially for scholars, for you know, people who study these kinds of killers psychiatry, to see them.

different countries. There was a big defense contractor plant nearby because it was lockey than Lucky Martin nearby building. Uh, I can't even mother it was bombs or guidance systems or military stuff, and that, you know, that impacted the local people. That's just the silliest I ever heard, you know, And I don't know, I just don't really consider it that relevant. There were a couple of really good films,

fictional films about column. There's one called God It's Either Zero Hour or Zero Day, which is sort of a fictional depiction of killers like that, which was really really on the mark. I thought really did a really good job.

And then there was one much later, just around the time my book came out called April Showers, which is from the point of view of survivors, and I thought told that story really well, including survivors, including the killer's friends, and how difficult it was for them where they were seen as pariahs and sort of the community kind of turned on them. And it was actually made. The film was made by one of the survivors of Columbine who is now a filmmaker and did a really good job.

But I thought that if your sort of like the killer's point of view or the survivor's point of view, there's one really good film for each of those.

go into incredible detail. We didn't get into half of what really talks about, but a lot of the survivor's stories are very fascinating and some of the journal entries are just amazing, and it really is a real example of psychopathology with the sort of dissent and that year of reading what these guys were planning, and especially Eric Harris. So I want to thank you very much for coming on the program and for a great interview. Thank you very much.