Godlike emotions
Eric and Dylan were just kids. Something or someone must have led them astray.
The parents, the Harrises and Klebolds, were the chief suspects.
Virtually all the early news stories were infested with erroneous assumptions and comically wrong conclusions.
All sorts of culprits contributing to the tragedy sprang to life incredibly fast: violent movies, video games, Goth culture, bullies, satan, a gay conspiracy, racism, Christians, Hitler’s birthday, Marilyn Manson. Stories were circulating that the killers had targeted Evangelicals as well as jocks and minorities. It grew more bizarre by the minute.
Most of the public believes Columbine was an act of retribution for unspeakable jock-abuse and remembers the shooters as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Maffia snapping and tearing through the school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud.
The Trench Coat Maffia was mythologized because it was colorful, memorable and fit the existing myth of the school shooter as outcast loner. All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive; those were known threats. Most of those elements existed at Columbine, which is what gave them such currency. Media filtered every new development through that lens. They just had nothing to do with the murders.
Few people knowledgeable about the case believe those myths anymore.
Police detectives let go of the targeting theory immediately. Nearly all witnesses described the killing as random. For investigators, the big bombs changed everything : the scale, the method and the motive of the attack. Above all, it had been indiscriminate. Everyone was supposed to die. Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed.
The shooters were already in the system. Eric and Dylan had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They had entered a twelve-month Juvenile Diversion Program, performing community service and attending counselling. They had completed the program just three months before the massacre.
Dylan had been caught scratching obscenities about “fags” into a freshman’s locker. Eric impersonated a special ed kid struggling to talk. They both had a penchant for picking on younger kids.
Two years before the killing, Eric, Dylan and another friend would sneak out after midnight and vandalise houses of ‘the inferiors’ – targets chosen by Eric, kids he didn’t like or to retaliate for perceived insults. They hacked into the school computer and stole a list of locker combinations. They began breaking in. They had access to the computer closet and helped themselves to expensive equipment. Eric may even have started a credit card scam.
More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by the Browns, the parents of the shooters’ friend Brooks Brown. Eric had made death threats toward Brooks. Twelve pages of murderous rants and hate spewing printed from his website had been compiled. Eric described going to some random downtown area in some big city and blowing up and shooting up everything he could. ”i don’t care if I live or die in the shootout, all I want to do is kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can!”, Eric wrote openly on his Website.
The officers discovered substantial evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs. One investigator considered it serious enough to draft an affidavit for a search warrant against Eric’s home. But for some reason, the warrant was never taken before a judge. It was not acted upon in any way.
In his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh (the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing). Judgment Day, they called it. Eric and Dylan had been considering a killing spree for at least a year and a half. They had settled on the approximate time and location a year out: April, in the commons. A series of videos were specifically designed to explain the attack: the Basement Tapes. They were so disturbing that the sheriff’s department would choose to hide them from the public.
Eric had documented everything. He’d wanted us to know.
Dylan had wiped his hard drive clean. They both left handwritten journals behind.
Mass murderers tend to work alone, but when they pair up, they rarely choose their mirror image.
Eric and Dylan had remarkably different interior lives. Dylan always saw himself as unloved. The anger and the loathing traveled inward. When he got frustrated with himself, he would go crazy. It didn’t take much to trip his fragile ego. Some minor transgression would humiliate him and then the pain would boil over. Trip his anger and he erupted. When the Dean called him down, Dylan went ballistic.
Dylan was pure emotion, logic was irrelevant. He was depressive and suicidal. ”My existence is shit”, he wrote in his journal.
Eric was a psychopath. He could talk his way out with apologies, evasions, or claims of innocence, whatever the subject was susceptible to. He read people quickly and tailored his responses. ”I lie a lot. Almost constant. And to everybody.” he wrote. Eric was curiously unemotional. Extinction fantasies cropped up regularly and would obsess Eric in his final years. Happiness for Eric was eliminating the likes of us. “All you fuckers should die! DIE!” Eric ranted in his journal with the opening line ”I hate the fucking world”.
Complete power over defenceless kids, that’s what Eric craved. “Zeus and I also get angry easily and punish people in unusual ways”, Eric wrote in a freshman paper titled “Similarities between Zeus and I”. And like Zeus, he was creative and had lots of ideas. Nuclear holocaust, biological warfare, imprisoning the species in a giant Ultimate Doom game. He always knew what he was up to. Dylan did not.
Dylan took to referring to humans as zombies. Compared to humans, he was like God. ”I am GOD compared to some of these un-existable brainless zombies”, he wrote. Dylan was beginning to see it Eric’s way : ”the real people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies, but we know & love being superior…”
That was a rare similarity to Eric; they both strongly believed in their own singularity and felt nothing but contempt for others. Both boys described their own uniqueness as self-awareness and enjoyed comparing themselves to God.
“I feel like God. I am higher than almost anyone in the fucking world in terms of universal intelligence”, Eric wrote in his journal, which he dubbed “The Book of God”.
”We, the gods, will have so much fun w NBK(Natural Born Killers)!! My wrath will be godlike.” Dylan wrote in Eric’s yearbook.
Eric offered hope for Dylan to get to godliness. In a short story written for a creative writing assignment, which was found in Dylan’s car, alongside the failed explosives, to be torn to bits in his final act, Dylan imagined how murder would feel. The story revolved around an angry man, gunning down a dozen kids. ”If I could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man. I not only saw in his face, but also feel eliminating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness. The man smiled, and in an instant, thru no endeavor of my own, I understood his actions.”
The story ended not with the murders, but with the godlike impact on the man behind them.
- Goodreads rating – 4.28
- REVIEW – Greta G