Dave Cullen was one of the first journalists on the scene of the Columbine high-school massacre, but it has taken nearly 10 years for him to cut through myth and rumour and get to the truth of what happened that day
ON THE DAY of the Columbine shootings – April 20th, 1999 – Dave Cullen arrived at the scene about an hour after the first shots were fired. He talked to relatives of the pupils, some survivors, the authorities. And he reported what everyone else reported. That the killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, had been outsiders, members of a gang called the Trenchcoat Mafia; that they hated the school’s jocks and wanted to get their revenge; that they targeted Christian pupils.
It all turned out to be untrue and within months, his attempt to understand the story involved challenging the myths that had quickly taken root. The boys had actually been popular and, on the surface, relatively normal suburbanites. They had worn trenchcoats during the spree only because these disguised their weaponry. He clarified the story that one victim, Cassie Bernall, had been asked if she believed in God, and when she answered in the affirmative was shot dead. In fact, another girl was asked the question and subsequently spared. (Nevertheless, Bernall has become a martyr of sorts among evangelical Christians.)
Despite this, many of those myths remain prevalent a decade on from the killings. Cullen has spent that time studying the killers, the aftermath and the media frenzy, and in his book Columbine he tells the story in a meticulous and vivid way. But he understands the attraction of the myths of the reality.
“All the rumours had a scrap of truth to them, so they made some sense. They wore trench coats and there had been a Trenchcoat Mafia the year before. Like every school there were jocks, and they were, like in every school, dicks. There was no shock there,” Cullen says. “The idea of these killers being strange or freaks and misfits was deeply comforting.
“It allowed us to say, ‘these people are not in our school, so it’s somebody else’s problem’. Even the idea that they were targeting jocks somehow seemed comforting, because it meant they could say that if we just stop bullying, these things won’t happen again. It was something to latch on to.”
Cullen’s obsession with the story began the day after the attack. In the local church, watching as adult after adult attempted to put some context on the terrible events, he realised that the young people in pews were blank-eyed. “It was as if they had been lobotomised, and that scared the crap out of me. I wondered: would they be messed up for all of their lives? Would they get better? From then on I wanted to find that out. What happened to the dead was tragic, but they couldn’t be brought back. But something could still be done for the survivors. Someone had to figure out how to get through to them, but no one knew what to say.”
The killers’ motives also kept bringing him back. The uncomfortable irony of the event is that Klebold and Harris would have been disgusted to have realised that they would be responsible for the country’s worst “school shooting”. They had far bigger plans. First, they intended to bomb the school, and, having positioned themselves across from the exit, they were to mow down fleeing students. Then, in the ensuing chaos, they had intended to plough into the assembled emergency crews and media. They hoped to kill 2,000 people. Thirteen deaths would have been seen as a failure.
Over the course of the summer of 1999, the lack of answers frustrated Cullen. It was only when he started talking to psychologists that he soon realised that Eric Harris had been a typical psychopath. Detached, lacking utterly in empathy, his behaviour before and during the killings suggests that he was always destined to do something terrible. “The more I read, the more Eric fitted the profile of the psychopath perfectly. You could have used him in a text book.”
Dylan Klebold was more mysterious. It is only three years since his journals were finally released and they were surprising in how much they talked constantly of love – Harris’s were about hate – but they still gave clues. “I hadn’t been able to understand why Dylan did what he did, but with the journals it suddenly made sense. He showed a classic progression from angry depressive to murder, but I couldn’t see that journey from A to B until the journals came out.” As he had done with his research of Harris, Cullen spent four-and-a-half months reading Klebold’s journals, listening to Nine Inch Nails, watching the movies he watched, in an effort to understand him on a level that merely watching his home movies could not do. “I wanted to turn the camera around, to be inside his head looking out.”
It taught the US some lessons. Other attacks have been prevented thanks to how sensitive teenagers, adults and teachers are to possible warning signs, although it’s been helped by teenagers’ natural inability to keep a secret. “They tend to be reckless” says Cullen. “They’re adolescents and they act like adolescents.” But the studies of Columbine also revealed some grim truths. That Klebold and Harris did not conform to the caricatures portrayed in the media helped the authorities realise that shooters were not easily identified as loners or outsiders. In fact, it became obvious that those adolescents had enough problems without being assumed to be potential killers. “Dylan was a typical, bright teenager,” Cullen observes. “He was a depressed and morose teenager, but you have those in any high school.”
Columbine is published by Old Street Publishing, £9.99
