Speaker 1: The Coca Cola Company, cure of Doctor Pepper and Pepsi
Speaker 1: co are bringing consumers more choices with less sugar than
Speaker 1: ever before, from sparkling, flavored and bottled waters to zero
Speaker 1: sugar sports drinks, teas and sodas. Consumers are taking advantage
Speaker 1: of these choices. In fact, nearly sixty percent of beverages
Speaker 1: sold contains zero sugar. To learn more of visit balanceus
Speaker 1: dot org.
Speaker 2: It is Ryan here and I have a question for you.
Speaker 2: What do you do when you win?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Are you a fist pumper, a wooo, a handclapper, a
Speaker 2: high fiver? I kind of like the high five. But
Speaker 2: if you want to hone in on those winning moves,
Speaker 2: check out Chumbuck Casino. At chumbacasino dot com, choose from
Speaker 2: hundreds of social casino style games for your chance to
Speaker 2: redeem serious cash prizes. There are new game releases weekly,
Speaker 2: plus free daily bonuses, so don't wait start having the
Speaker 2: most fun ever at Chumbuck Casino dot com. Noeb just
Speaker 2: necessary daily REVOI wherever if I lost the terms conditions
Speaker 2: eighteen plus love.
Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week,
Speaker 4: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 5: Good Evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 5: program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime
Speaker 5: history and the authors that are written about them. On
Speaker 5: April twentieth, nineteen ninety nine, Eric Harris and Dylan Claybold
Speaker 5: left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their plan
Speaker 5: was staggering to blow up their school, surpass Oklahoma City
Speaker 5: in horror, and leave a lasting impression on the world.
Speaker 5: The bombs failed, but the unpreprecedented attack unleashed a new
Speaker 5: era of violence in schools, branding every future shooting another Columbine.
Speaker 5: When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench
Speaker 5: Code Mafia, Cassie Bernew Mistaken Columbine Martyr, and Patrick Ireland,
Speaker 5: the boy in the window, the whole world watching his
Speaker 5: gutsy escape. Now, in a gripping work of journalism, a
Speaker 5: full decade in the making, comes a story we never
Speaker 5: knew in this revelatory book, Dave Cullen debunks the myths
Speaker 5: and produces a profile of teen killers that burrows to
Speaker 5: the core of psycho pathology. He reveals two radically different killers,
Speaker 5: Eric Harris, the callously brutal mastermind, and Delan Claybold, the
Speaker 5: quivering depressive who journaled obsessively about love and attended the
Speaker 5: Columbine from three days before opening his opening fire, Columbine
Speaker 5: unfolds seamlessly in an unforgettable tale of two honor students
Speaker 5: with a healthy circle of friends, secretly stockpiling a cache
Speaker 5: of weapons in the basement. They recorded their vituol on
Speaker 5: film while manipulating every adult who could have stopped them.
Speaker 5: Described by Cullen with a sharp investigative eye and psychological acumen.
Speaker 5: Calling from testimony a pardon, calling from hundreds of interviews,
Speaker 5: thousands of police files, testimony from world class psychologists brought
Speaker 5: in by the FBI, and the boys videos and journals,
Speaker 5: he delivers the first comprehensive account of the tragic Columbine
Speaker 5: School shooting, a riveting tale of murder, redemption, police cover up,
Speaker 5: and a town torn apart. The haunting cautionary tale for
Speaker 5: our age Columbine with my special guest Dave Collin. Welcome
Speaker 5: to the program, and thanks you to agree to this interview.
Speaker 5: Dave Colin, Hi, thanks for having me. Dan, thank you
Speaker 5: very much. First off, if you could tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about why and how you became involved in
Speaker 5: why you decided to write Columbine, your book about this tragedy.
Speaker 6: Sure, well, it was a very slow evolutionary process. I
Speaker 6: never really set out to write a book initially. I
Speaker 6: was a journalist and writer living in Denver, and I
Speaker 6: was a freelance journalist then and I just happened to
Speaker 6: turn on the TV just as it was getting started,
Speaker 6: as the first local news reports were coming on, and
Speaker 6: I thought it would probably be nothing severe. There were
Speaker 6: no reports of injuries, and I figured, you know, I
Speaker 6: was kind of optimistic. I assumed that nobody was hurt.
Speaker 6: But I decided to go out there just in case.
Speaker 6: And I didn't know where it was. I'd never heard
Speaker 6: of Columbine out in the far western suburbs, out near
Speaker 6: the Rockies, and so I got my car and drove
Speaker 6: in the general direction. And as I was driving them
Speaker 6: the highway out there, I saw out the window to
Speaker 6: my south an arc of helicopters circling around like vultures,
Speaker 6: and it was a terrible I'm in a sign of
Speaker 6: like six or eight of them, and I couldn't believe it,
Speaker 6: and I realized, Wow, that must be it. And that
Speaker 6: was the first moment where my heart sank and I
Speaker 6: realized it was much worse than I thought. I had
Speaker 6: no idea how bad, and I still didn't really think
Speaker 6: anybody had been killed, but I thought it was something bad,
Speaker 6: and so I literally just drove toward the helicopters and
Speaker 6: I drove till I hit a police barricade, and then
Speaker 6: I got out and ran on foot, and you know,
Speaker 6: of course, it turned out to be what it was.
Speaker 6: And I wrote a story for a website web magazine
Speaker 6: Salon dot com that day, and then they wanted me
Speaker 6: to keep covering it, so I stayed out up there
Speaker 6: and worked it every day, and then I worked on
Speaker 6: a longer piece that took nearly a month, where I
Speaker 6: reported on the evangelical Christians, and I decided to sort
Speaker 6: of immerse myself in that world. I enrolled at Bible
Speaker 6: study at Cassie Burnell's church and various things, and then
Speaker 6: after the first month, I thought I was done. I
Speaker 6: remember telling people, I thank goodness, you know, I never
Speaker 6: want to cover another murder again. And you know, that
Speaker 6: was a It was a rough experience, and I really
Speaker 6: thought I was done, but I kept getting drawn back
Speaker 6: because I felt like we hadn't really understood it and
Speaker 6: we didn't know why these boys had done it. So
Speaker 6: I kept coming back and coming back, and I did
Speaker 6: a long investigative peace and broke some news and just
Speaker 6: that that didn't satisfy me. Then I had to eventually
Speaker 6: get to the psychologist, and that took a couple of
Speaker 6: years because the FBI wasn't allowed to talk to people,
Speaker 6: and it took me a couple of years to get
Speaker 6: permission to talk to them, sort of hounding them, and gradually,
Speaker 6: over time I realized that there was an incredible story here,
Speaker 6: was much bigger than people understood, and that it would
Speaker 6: make an interesting book, and that I wanted to devote.
Speaker 6: I fought a couple of years to it, and I
Speaker 6: had no idea it would stretch out and take ten
Speaker 6: years to do. I don't think I have afforded. I
Speaker 6: don't think I would have done it if I had
Speaker 6: known going in that it would take ten years. If
Speaker 6: somebody had said that this would take ten years to do,
Speaker 6: I would have tried something else. But yes, of course not,
Speaker 6: it just worked out. Now, Yes, can you take us
Speaker 6: back to the community where this occurred for those people
Speaker 6: that don't know Jefferson County here will tell us where
Speaker 6: this is located in the US, and take us back
Speaker 6: and sort of describe the community for those people that
Speaker 6: don't know. Yeah, well, it's just outside of Denver. It's
Speaker 6: you know, in Denver. We refer to it as the Metroplex,
Speaker 6: and it's on the very edge of suburban sprawl, on
Speaker 6: the western edge, and it's about probably forty minutes from downtown.
Speaker 6: And it's sort of an interesting area that was mostly
Speaker 6: populated in the seventies, sort of flight from the cities.
Speaker 6: And until that time when Combine was actually built, Oh no,
Speaker 6: I'm forgetting in the seventies, I believe, and it was.
Speaker 6: It was built on a dirt road surrounded by horse ranches,
Speaker 6: and so it was sort of a very Old West character.
Speaker 6: And this is when Denver really hadn't reached that far.
Speaker 6: But suddenly the people were coming. So suddenly all these
Speaker 6: subdivisions went up in rapid order, and you know, it
Speaker 6: became quite a large, densely relatively densely populated area, I
Speaker 6: mean dense suburban, but they never incorporated what you And
Speaker 6: that's one of the things of understanding this area is
Speaker 6: is there were a couple different referenda over time about incorporation,
Speaker 6: but the people didn't want to. The sort of anti
Speaker 6: government there. Uh so there's no town. It's just out
Speaker 6: in the in the country. So there's no police department.
Speaker 6: They use the fire department from the neighboring county, and
Speaker 6: there's a school district county wide, and then you know,
Speaker 6: there's no police force, so they just used the county
Speaker 6: sheriff's patrols and there's a small investigative unit and so forth.
Speaker 6: So that's why those people ended up being having jurisdiction
Speaker 6: just sort of this weird sort of country suburbani ish
Speaker 6: area with with no downtown. So in some ways there's
Speaker 6: a lot of like a lot of other suburbs, but
Speaker 6: I called it New Combine an old Columbine. There's still
Speaker 6: a lot of flavor of the people who've been here
Speaker 6: there for one hundred years or more in their families
Speaker 6: and sort of very west and then it's got the
Speaker 6: suburban character with most people who didn't even come from
Speaker 6: Colorado who you know, from all over the US immigrants,
Speaker 6: So there's sort of a mix of different kinds of people.
Speaker 6: It's it's relatively affluent, i'd say upper middle class, barely
Speaker 6: upper middle to upper middle.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So I well, I'll think give you a bit of
Speaker 6: an eye of an idea nice school, nice uh you know, clean,
Speaker 6: very low crime wide streets and couldest acts and that
Speaker 6: sort of thing.
Speaker 5: Right now, tell us a little bit about Dylan Claibold's
Speaker 5: early life growing up and where he was, where he
Speaker 5: originated from, and tell us about his parents and just
Speaker 5: generally how his life really was growing up.
Speaker 6: Well, Dylan grew up in the area and his parents
Speaker 6: were both well they were both art majors in college.
Speaker 6: They med at Ohio State University, and they were who
Speaker 6: they definitely weren't hippies. They were sort of artsy, intellectual, uh,
Speaker 6: kind of altruistic and uh optimistic people and sort of romantic.
Speaker 6: I think really the key to understanding them is that
Speaker 6: they had two boys, and they named them both after
Speaker 6: romantic poets. Uh. Dylan was named after Dylan Thomas, and
Speaker 6: so that that gives you a sense of who they were.
Speaker 6: They were very idealistic, anti gun they didn't never have
Speaker 6: guns in the house. And Tom actually eventually got a
Speaker 6: major in uh I believe it was geophysics, and and
Speaker 6: started in the oil business and did well there, and
Speaker 6: then they had some rental operating on the side, and
Speaker 6: that was successful enough that he started managing them full
Speaker 6: time as his job several years before Columbine. And then
Speaker 6: his wife Sue, as a very outgoing person, and she
Speaker 6: worked in the local community college system and worked with
Speaker 6: some special needs students.
Speaker 7: And with Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just
Speaker 7: about anywhere.
Speaker 3: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today.
Speaker 4: Has anyone seen the bride and groom?
Speaker 8: Maury?
Speaker 6: Sorry we're here.
Speaker 3: We were getting lucky in the limo and we lost
Speaker 3: track of time.
Speaker 2: No Lucky Land casino with cash prizes that add up
Speaker 2: quicker than a guess registering.
Speaker 8: In that case, I pronounce you Lucky Hiks.
Speaker 7: For free Lucky Landslots dot com. Daily bonuses are waiting.
Speaker 7: No purchase necessary board. We're prohibited by lock eight team
Speaker 7: plus terms and conditions applag see website for details.
Speaker 6: And Dylan and they got a property God it's hard
Speaker 6: for to describe to people who don't live there. It's
Speaker 6: out what's called out has the hog Back, which is
Speaker 6: like a row of you know, we call them foothills there,
Speaker 6: but they're higher than any point in the whole Appalachian Range,
Speaker 6: so they're about the Hogback is maybe five six seven
Speaker 6: hundred feet high, and like Cleveland's had a property just
Speaker 6: beyond that, so it's really kind of secluded. There's a
Speaker 6: path that you go through in what looks like mountains.
Speaker 6: There's a little pass, and then behind them there's this
Speaker 6: beautiful valley and people are probably seeing Red Rocks Amphitheater
Speaker 6: on television, HBO specials or wherever they're you know, lots
Speaker 6: of major acts do concerts and fill them there because
Speaker 6: it's just extraordinary beautiful. That's just a few miles from there,
Speaker 6: and and the valley they live in looks like sort
Speaker 6: of a mini Red Rocks and so it's sort of
Speaker 6: an idyllic place where dealing with sometimes go out with
Speaker 6: their friends with the Browns and go out, you know,
Speaker 6: fishing and you know, just doing sort of like HWK
Speaker 6: Sawyer come or excuse me, Huck Finn Tom Sawyer sort
Speaker 6: of things. Out in the in the wood. So it
Speaker 6: was sort of a it was more of a country
Speaker 6: area at that time when he was a boy, until
Speaker 6: the people started coming well, just as he was growing
Speaker 6: up the suburban area sort of reached out there to
Speaker 6: almost meet them.
Speaker 5: What was his character like as as a young boy,
Speaker 5: and were there and what were if there were any?
Speaker 5: Were there any noticeable problems? Uh noticed that school, we'll say,
Speaker 5: for example, or any run ins with the law at
Speaker 5: a young age. We save, we saved before high school.
Speaker 6: No, there were definitely no run ins uh until really
Speaker 6: the year before Columbine. Uh. He was he did very well,
Speaker 6: but he was extraordinarily shy. He was put in he
Speaker 6: was very bright, and he was put into a gifted
Speaker 6: program I believe in second grade, uh called CHIPS I
Speaker 6: think the acronym was for but it was a special
Speaker 6: program for gifted pro kids. It was very very bright,
Speaker 6: and but he was he was peefully shy with strangers,
Speaker 6: but then with people he knew, he was really warm
Speaker 6: and sort of cheerful. Judy Brown, who was a neighbor
Speaker 6: at that time, described how, uh you know, she she
Speaker 6: would take the boys out a lot, you know, doing
Speaker 6: sort of fun boy stuff. She was sort of the
Speaker 6: uh uh, tomboyish mom in the neighborhood would take them out,
Speaker 6: and Judy said that, you know, Dylan would see her
Speaker 6: and would come run up and smile and run up
Speaker 6: and hurl himself into her lap and hug and it
Speaker 6: was very affectionate with people that he knew, but really
Speaker 6: really standoffish and afraid around new people. And that really
Speaker 6: wasn't such an issue when he was small because the
Speaker 6: gifted program was a really small, selective program, so he
Speaker 6: was with the same kids year after year, with you know,
Speaker 6: occasional kids would be added to the program over time
Speaker 6: or would move into the area, but for the most part,
Speaker 6: he was like a school within a school within a
Speaker 6: relatively small grammar school, and so it was a very
Speaker 6: small group and he felt very comfortable there. But when
Speaker 6: he went to middle school in sixth grade, that's a
Speaker 6: much bigger school and sort of several grammar schools fed
Speaker 6: into that middle school, and he really had trouble fitting in.
Speaker 6: So not only did the school I think tripled in size,
Speaker 6: but then they didn't have the gifted program, so he
Speaker 6: went out into the mainstream and so it was his
Speaker 6: circle of peers of classmates was you know, many times larger,
Speaker 6: and he never really adjusted to that. His parents felt
Speaker 6: that they knew that he was going to have trouble
Speaker 6: that he because he was shy, but they thought that
Speaker 6: he would get over it, but he never really did.
Speaker 6: And then when he went to high school it continued
Speaker 6: and he remained that way all the way until the end.
Speaker 6: And you know, particularly with girls, he was shy and
Speaker 6: would be afraid to speak around strange girls. And so
Speaker 6: that was sort of the nagging thing that his parents
Speaker 6: worried about, and they figured that he would grow out
Speaker 6: of it, you know, hopefully when he went to college.
Speaker 6: I mean they were hoping first of all over high school.
Speaker 6: Then maybe when he went to college. A lot of
Speaker 6: people sort of come into their own later on, and
Speaker 6: they didn't realize it also during high school that he
Speaker 6: was terribly depressed because he was quiet and morose around
Speaker 6: other people, but they weren't around him, and he was
Speaker 6: really close, especially with his father Tom, and so they
Speaker 6: didn't realize how badly that he was hurting inside. And
Speaker 6: we know now how badly he was hurting because he
Speaker 6: kept a journal for the last two years of his
Speaker 6: life and he gave the entry, so we know when
Speaker 6: they were taking place, and the very first entry he
Speaker 6: mentions suicide. And you know, it's a safe bet that
Speaker 6: that wasn't the first time he thought about it, because
Speaker 6: he's he's he's very open about It's clear from his
Speaker 6: writing that he's already thought about this. So no telling
Speaker 6: how much further earlier he was contemplating it, We just
Speaker 6: have no record. But so he's, yeah, he was contemplating
Speaker 6: suicide for two years through high school and really in
Speaker 6: a journal talking about how depressing his life was, how miserable,
Speaker 6: sometimes lashing out at God quite frequently for you know,
Speaker 6: giving him this horrible life, Why did you do this
Speaker 6: to me? He sort of presents himself almost as a
Speaker 6: job figure a lot of the time in the journal.
Speaker 6: So he's really really struggling. And his parents knew that
Speaker 6: he was struggling, but they didn't They had no idea
Speaker 6: that it was that bad. And to Cleebold, just a
Speaker 6: few years ago wrote a really amazing piece for Oprah's
Speaker 6: old magazine talking about that and saying in that retrospect
Speaker 6: and and and seeing reading his journals, she can see that,
Speaker 6: but she had no idea at the time, and trying
Speaker 6: to alert other moms really of the danger that if
Speaker 6: you see a kid, you see some of these warning
Speaker 6: signs to get them help. So in retrospect that makes sense.
Speaker 6: But but but other than that, you know, I think
Speaker 6: the most outsiders. He looked like a you know, a
Speaker 6: typical teenage boy who's sulking.
Speaker 5: A lot right now. Tell us about Eric Harris, his
Speaker 5: father Wayne and Kathy, and his wife has part of me?
Speaker 5: His mother Kathy, and if he had any siblings, and
Speaker 5: when did the the two of them Dylan and Eric
Speaker 5: actually first meet.
Speaker 6: Well, Eric is a polar opposite of Dylan. I mean
Speaker 6: he's almost you know, the flip side in a lot
Speaker 6: of respects. They have some similarities. They are both very bright,
Speaker 6: and they had some of the same interests that liked
Speaker 6: video games and enjoyed bowling and some of their activities.
Speaker 6: As far as their personalities, they were like night and day.
Speaker 6: And I'll back up a little bit. Dylan or Eric
Speaker 6: was a military brat, as they refer to themselves. His
Speaker 6: dad was a an officer in the US Air Force.
Speaker 6: He was in for twenty years. He eventually he retired
Speaker 6: as a a major and he was a test pilot
Speaker 6: so they moved every few years and now five or
Speaker 6: six different UH cities. He liked, Well, the city's towns.
Speaker 6: They're mostly you know, small army towns in places like
Speaker 6: I was mis pronounces Ocella, Michigan and sort of northern
Speaker 6: uh northeast Michigan, uh Plattsburgh, New York. Really you know,
Speaker 6: small army and air force towns. I shouldn't say armory town's.
Speaker 6: I was in the herring, so I think of them
Speaker 6: as army towns, but it was air force. And so
Speaker 6: they were moving around a lot. Uh. Eric had one
Speaker 6: older brother. Both Eric and Dylan each had one brother
Speaker 6: who was about two years older than them. And you know,
Speaker 6: they did a lot of Eric did a lot of
Speaker 6: you know, playing army games with his brother and some
Speaker 6: other friends when they were kids. And we know this
Speaker 6: because Eric wrote about it in some of his school papers.
Speaker 6: UH just sort of describing his childhood in a lot
Speaker 6: of different places and and talk about that sort of
Speaker 6: fantasizing about it being a marine. When he grew up,
Speaker 6: they met, Eric and Dylan met uh oh and Kathy
Speaker 6: for the most part worked inside the home. She had
Speaker 6: some part time UH work, but you know, she was
Speaker 6: moving every few years as an officer's wife, and so
Speaker 6: you know, she'd have to be changing jobs every couple
Speaker 6: of years and took care of the boys for the
Speaker 6: most part, and and you know, people in the in
Speaker 6: the Air Force unit. So Eric, Eric's dad, Wayne was
Speaker 6: was very strict. He was, you know, a typical military man.
Speaker 6: And Eric seems like a pretty normal kid as far
Speaker 6: as we can tell. He was fairly shy as a kid,
Speaker 6: not not nearly as much as Eric, but he sort
Speaker 6: of came into his own around junior high. High school,
Speaker 6: he started coming out of his shell. And Eric and
Speaker 6: Dylan met in junior high the Harris Is. After Wayne
Speaker 6: retired from the Air Force, they relocated to outside of Denver,
Speaker 6: to jeff Coo and so Eric Diller went to the
Speaker 6: same middle school and that's where they met. And nobody
Speaker 6: actually remembers. There's very conflicting reports of exactly when they met,
Speaker 6: but it was probably seventh grade and they started hanging
Speaker 6: around somewhat. They become became closer in high school and
Speaker 6: kind of a circle of a few different friends. They
Speaker 6: were really close with Zach Heckler, another kid named Zach
Speaker 6: Heckler early on, and that was sort of the threesome
Speaker 6: did allow things together in the early years in high school,
Speaker 6: and there were like four or five or six of
Speaker 6: them that that tended to hang out a lot. But
Speaker 6: they said sort of a tight circle of friends. And
Speaker 6: Eric was getting more and more confident and aggressive, and
Speaker 6: he would walk right up to girls and introduce himself,
Speaker 6: chat them up. And actually both of the boys got
Speaker 6: jobbed at Black Tech Pizza, which is a chain sort
Speaker 6: of like Domino's step.
Speaker 3: Into the world of power, loyalty and luck. I'm going
Speaker 3: to make him an offer he can't refuse. With family
Speaker 3: canoli's and spins mean everything. Now you want to get
Speaker 3: mixed up in the family business. Introducing the Godfather at
Speaker 3: Champa Casino dot com. Test your luck in the shadowy
Speaker 3: world at the Godfather Slodge.
Speaker 8: Someday I will call upon you to do a service
Speaker 8: for me.
Speaker 3: Play the Godfather now at Champacasino dot com.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Family vdW group. No purchase necessary.
Speaker 3: I believe were primitted by loss.
Speaker 5: He terms and conditions.
Speaker 7: Eighteen plus Lucky.
Speaker 8: Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten.
Speaker 7: Lucky Lucky in line of the Delhi, I guess ah
Speaker 7: my dent this office more than once.
Speaker 6: Actually, do I have to say?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 2: You do in the car before my kid's PTA meeting?
Speaker 8: Really?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: Excuse me?
Speaker 8: What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Speaker 6: I never win?
Speaker 3: And tell well, there you have it.
Speaker 2: You could get lucky anywhere playing at lucky landslots dot
Speaker 2: com play for free right now?
Speaker 8: Are you feeling lucky?
Speaker 2: We're just necessary avoid my long eighteen plus terms conditions
Speaker 2: plus what's every degails?
Speaker 6: And you know, Eric would sometimes they'd meet girls of
Speaker 6: the mall and Eric would say, you know, coming in
Speaker 6: black jack and I'll slip your free pizza pizza. Sometimes
Speaker 6: the girls would and you know, he would sort of
Speaker 6: use that as a technique. And nothing was too out
Speaker 6: of the ordinary. You're seem too out of the ordinary,
Speaker 6: he said.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 6: Air was very charming, good with people, sort of schmoozer
Speaker 6: a schmoozer, which is typical for a psychopath. And eventually
Speaker 6: he started having more and more grandiose ideas and fantasies
Speaker 6: about killing lots of people. And his fantasies really revolved
Speaker 6: around annihilating the entire planet, of killing the human race.
Speaker 6: That's what most of his fantasies that he writes about
Speaker 6: centered on So I think with a lot of killers,
Speaker 6: readers or people in the public assume he sort of
Speaker 6: somebody would like Eric would work his way up to like, oh,
Speaker 6: I want to kill one person, No, I'll kill ten,
Speaker 6: No I'll kill fifty or whatever, and sort of working
Speaker 6: their way up to what they would do it in
Speaker 6: their fantasies. It was really the opposite of Eric. It
Speaker 6: was scaling down his fantasies to what he could realistically do.
Speaker 6: And he started keeping a notebook. It wasn't a journal
Speaker 6: in the classic sins of a journal. It was more
Speaker 6: of a notebook to leave a record of the mass
Speaker 6: murder that he was planning. So it was specifically about
Speaker 6: the murder plan and documenting it, rather than Eric is
Speaker 6: like a kid pouring out his thoughts and feelings about
Speaker 6: everything under the sun. Eric started his journal a year
Speaker 6: before Columbine, so that's when we have a really good
Speaker 6: record of his thinking. And he also dated his entries
Speaker 6: conveniently for us and a year ahead of time. A
Speaker 6: year before Columbine he started it, and he's already planning
Speaker 6: mass murder and the first phrase of the journals, I
Speaker 6: hate the effing world where he's spelled it out and
Speaker 6: he really hated everyone. And a few months after that,
Speaker 6: in one of the entries, he's talking about how he
Speaker 6: wants to destroy all of Denver and how beautiful this
Speaker 6: scene he's imagining with all of downtown Denver in flames,
Speaker 6: the skyscrapers burning to the ground, and he's done it all.
Speaker 6: And in the middle of that sort of fantasy about
Speaker 6: what he'd liked to do, he starts complaining and he says,
Speaker 6: you know how hard about bombs are? He I titled
Speaker 6: one of the chapters bombs are Hard because of actual
Speaker 6: quote from Eric, and he says, you know how hard
Speaker 6: it is to produce just one bomb or to blow
Speaker 6: up one building. It takes a lot of work, and
Speaker 6: you know, it takes all his resources and I can't
Speaker 6: do all that. And so he realizes he's realistic. He's
Speaker 6: not delusional. He's not somebody like Joe from Virginia Tech
Speaker 6: who's deeply mentally ill. Eric knows exactly what he's doing.
Speaker 6: He's very rational and realizes, you know, he can't gather
Speaker 6: enough explosives to to blow up downtown Denver, And he
Speaker 6: finally realizes, okay, I can. I can do his one building,
Speaker 6: I can do his school. And he can't get truckloads
Speaker 6: of fertilizer like Tim McVeigh. But he can build propane
Speaker 6: bombs like you've seen on the internet or from the well.
Speaker 6: He downloaded the anarchist cookbook and learned how to do these. Luckily,
Speaker 6: he did them incorrectly, but he realized he would do
Speaker 6: a series of I think there were seven big propane bombs,
Speaker 6: and that was sort of the backbone of the plan,
Speaker 6: is to blow up the school and kill most of
Speaker 6: the people in it.
Speaker 5: Okay, just before we go into the entire plan, which
Speaker 5: also included after that of killing rescue workers.
Speaker 6: As well, and three acts.
Speaker 5: Let's just go back to what it seems like, if
Speaker 5: not that I put too much stake in this as
Speaker 5: a real catalyst. But this did occur, and then these
Speaker 5: journals started after that, tell us about the van break
Speaker 5: in and Dylan and Eric being caught for their crimes,
Speaker 5: the result and what happened after that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, okay, well let me back up just lately. Even
Speaker 6: before that, is that Eric had had a gradual progression
Speaker 6: in his sort of criminal career, if you want to
Speaker 6: call it that, which which definitely was leaning toward a
Speaker 6: life of crime. There's sophomore year, they had these series
Speaker 6: of just vandalism things which Eric sort of grandiosely referred
Speaker 6: to as the missions. Actually in his website we have
Speaker 6: documented then uh he would write about them, which were
Speaker 6: it was a little worse than just uh, you know,
Speaker 6: cheeping or toilet papering people's yards. They would crazy glue
Speaker 6: mailboxes together and and and uh screw up their alarm
Speaker 6: systems and uh but and then they were throwing you know,
Speaker 6: throwing off firecrackers and building and putting fire crackers together
Speaker 6: for larger explosions. And so it was a sort of coordinated, nasty,
Speaker 6: little uh uh series of vandalism. And that's the first
Speaker 6: recorded sort of petty crime uh that we have of
Speaker 6: Eric that he documents himself. So definitely was a sophomore
Speaker 6: You know, lots of kids do that. You know, it
Speaker 6: wasn't anything terrible, but what we do see it as
Speaker 6: an early step so late in that one of the
Speaker 6: things they do is they steal some signs, and not
Speaker 6: just from somebody's house but from a business. And that's
Speaker 6: where we see his first sort of petty theft. So
Speaker 6: he's moved on to theft. Then one semester they started
Speaker 6: stealing computer supplies from the school. So Eric and Delan
Speaker 6: were both right, and they were they volunteered in different
Speaker 6: activities and they were uh in the computer club, and
Speaker 6: so they had access to some computer equipment and they
Speaker 6: started stealing it and and that went down to the
Speaker 6: course of at least a semester. They got caught in
Speaker 6: one of those and had to return some of the things.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to well. Eric also claimed there's no evidence
Speaker 6: that he actually did this, but he claimed that he was,
Speaker 6: that he had a scammer. He was stealing visa information
Speaker 6: and then you know, using it. But there's there's no
Speaker 6: record of him getting any of the money. That was
Speaker 6: probably know him bragging about something that he was planning
Speaker 6: and wanting to do and hadn't figured out how to
Speaker 6: do yet. But you can definitely see this this progression.
Speaker 6: And then they started stealing more and more things, and
Speaker 6: just a little more than a year before the murders,
Speaker 6: in January of nineteen ninety eight, they were out one
Speaker 6: night on I think it was a Friday night, and
Speaker 6: they were kind of bored and they drove out into
Speaker 6: the country and pulled over to this little strip on
Speaker 6: the side of the road, to sort of gravel strip,
Speaker 6: and it just we're breaking things and then we're like.
Speaker 6: It was a place where sometimes people would pull over
Speaker 6: and drink beers, high school kids or college kids and
Speaker 6: drink beer and leave their empty bottles out there, and
Speaker 6: Eric and Dylan were picking up the bottles and smashing them, uh,
Speaker 6: you know, just for fun. And some high school brats
Speaker 6: can dooo sometimes, so they were doing that. They got
Speaker 6: bored with that, and they're looking around for something else,
Speaker 6: and there was just one there was a van parked
Speaker 6: out there and just left there out sort of in
Speaker 6: the middle of the nowhere, which seemed kind of odd.
Speaker 6: And they went over and looked inside and it was
Speaker 6: all kinds of interesting looking stuff inside, electronic gizmos that
Speaker 6: looked like and so they decided they wanted to break
Speaker 6: in and steal it. And they took a couple of
Speaker 6: different rocks, tried smashing the windows, and they were really
Speaker 6: surprised that, you know, Carl Winders didn't smash as easily
Speaker 6: as I thought they would. So they were going for
Speaker 6: bigger rocks.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: They were new to this sort of thing until they
Speaker 6: finally found a big enough rock and smashed through the window,
Speaker 6: and then they started just pulling all this stuff out,
Speaker 6: houlding all this stuff out of there and piling it
Speaker 6: into their car, and you know, they were just delirious
Speaker 6: with joy of just like getting away. It was something
Speaker 6: they didn't even know what this stuff was. In fact,
Speaker 6: in the police record of it, you know, Dylan, they
Speaker 6: had to say what they had, you know, admit to
Speaker 6: what they had stolen, and Dylan gave a list of things.
Speaker 6: You know. It was sort of like a yellow thing
Speaker 6: with wires sticking out of it, and and so they
Speaker 6: didn't even know what this stuff was or really care.
Speaker 6: It was more, you know, about the thrill of stealing.
Speaker 6: So they did that, and this was at night, and
Speaker 6: they piled them in their car, and then they got
Speaker 6: the heck out of there and they drove toward Dylan's
Speaker 6: house on the other side of the hog back into
Speaker 6: the state park and pulled over in a state in
Speaker 6: the parking lot of the state park to look at
Speaker 6: all the stuff, and they turned a little dome light
Speaker 6: out in the car to look at it. I didn't
Speaker 6: really think about the fact that the parking lot was
Speaker 6: deserted because the park closes at sunset, so you weren't
Speaker 6: supposed to be in there, and they're going through all
Speaker 6: this stuff and didn't realize that, you know, they're just
Speaker 6: like with a light on. They're just like a beacon
Speaker 6: to anybody driving around in the area. And it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's mountainous. There's lots of high ground around and and they, uh, well,
Speaker 6: I forget now whether there was a state trooper or
Speaker 6: a county trooper, you know, patrolling the area. Seizes right
Speaker 6: on in the in the state park, which is supposed
Speaker 6: to be closed. So he drives down there, pulls out.
Speaker 6: The boys are so oblivious and so excited about what
Speaker 6: they're doing and discussing and going through all their loot
Speaker 6: and seeing what it all is, that they don't even
Speaker 6: notice this cop pull up behind them, get out of
Speaker 6: his car, stand there in his watch and listen and
Speaker 6: the cop is just listening and recording what they're saying
Speaker 6: and can hear them. And they get out of the car,
Speaker 6: you know, and then they'sadly like, oh, we better take
Speaker 6: care of this before somebody catches us. And I mean,
Speaker 6: I mean it's a sort of comical now because there
Speaker 6: were just goofball kids about it. So they get out
Speaker 6: of the car to go put it in the trunk,
Speaker 6: and that's when the cop shines the flash light in
Speaker 6: their head and they're they're totally busted. So he takes
Speaker 6: them in and amongst they're charged with three felonies for
Speaker 6: this because it was it was more than a thousand
Speaker 6: dollars worth of equipment. And you know, Dylan immediately confesses
Speaker 6: and said, yes, we did it, and blah blah blah
Speaker 6: tells the whole story because they were taking the separate rooms,
Speaker 6: of course and interrogated separately. So Dylan confesses to everything.
Speaker 6: Eric blames Dylan, which is just like him that you know,
Speaker 6: it was mostly his idea, but of course he points
Speaker 6: the finger at Dylan immediately just whatever to get himself
Speaker 6: out of trouble. And so their parents were called, I mean,
Speaker 6: they were arrested, they were fingerprinted, put through the whole process.
Speaker 6: Their parents had to come and bail them out, and
Speaker 6: then they were charged with three phonies, which is you
Speaker 6: know serious, They could do, you know, time in prison
Speaker 6: for us, and of course they were they're grounded there.
Speaker 6: Their parents were both just furious but also agast and
Speaker 6: you know, couldn't believe that there, you know, very kid
Speaker 6: sort of uh brilliant boys have been charged with felonies.
Speaker 6: So Eric's parents, in particular, well Wayne, decided they had
Speaker 6: to get him to see a shrink. And and Wayne
Speaker 6: kept a notebook of his own wait and see the
Speaker 6: stuff documented called all sorts of different psychiatrists and psychologists
Speaker 6: interviewing them to see who was who would be the
Speaker 6: best fit. So you can see how seriously he's taken this.
Speaker 6: He didn't just say, oh, send the boy to a
Speaker 6: shrink and you know, call somebody. He took an active role,
Speaker 6: so you can see the kind of hands on parenting
Speaker 6: that he's actually doing to get him to see somebody.
Speaker 6: And and and actually put him on an antidepressive. They put
Speaker 6: him on zoloft and for several weeks and then that
Speaker 6: wasn't it didn't seem effective, and so they switched him
Speaker 6: to lubax. So you know, they were very hands on
Speaker 6: about this. But Eric was even much more furious about this.
Speaker 6: And it's really typical for a psychopath to have that
Speaker 6: kind of reaction because there's so much about power and
Speaker 6: control everything that they're incredible control freaks and so if
Speaker 6: you can imagine somebody who's a control freak, where you
Speaker 6: take complete control of his life, where now Eric's dad
Speaker 6: is just watching his every move and he's grounded, he
Speaker 6: can't leave the house. They're onto him. And then the
Speaker 6: kids applied for and were allowed into this program called
Speaker 6: Diversion where most kids have this where the kids have
Speaker 6: to for juveniles if you get into trouble, if it's
Speaker 6: your first defense, and basically it's a year long program
Speaker 6: where you have to do several things, you know, make
Speaker 6: restitution to the victim, apologize, go through anger management, and
Speaker 6: lots of different classes, see a counselor every couple of weeks.
Speaker 6: You have to do urine test periodical randomly, to do
Speaker 6: drug screen and alcohol screen, so you have to you know,
Speaker 6: abstain from from doing any of that. And then if
Speaker 6: you completed successfully, Oh and you have to do community service.
Speaker 6: And then if you've complete that successfully and I believe
Speaker 6: a year and then your record is cleaned for another
Speaker 6: year afterwards, then it's expunged from your record. And so
Speaker 6: they were in that program and heavily monitored. But Eric,
Speaker 6: Eric str didn't like it. I mean, you know, Dylan
Speaker 6: wasn't thrilled with having to do all this stuff. But
Speaker 6: for him it wasn't it wasn't like an emotional thing
Speaker 6: like with Eric, it was how dare these people do this?
Speaker 6: And who is this judge to sentence me to this program?
Speaker 6: Who who is this you know, bleeping social worker or
Speaker 6: counselor that I have to go report to every two weeks?
Speaker 6: So he would he really snowed the counselor, because we
Speaker 6: have the record of the councilor made notes every session
Speaker 6: every two weeks, and and Eric is going in there
Speaker 6: and snowing first heard than him.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 6: It was two different counselors over time, but he was
Speaker 6: just snowing them and making them think that he was
Speaker 6: just this wonderful, lovable kid. Meanwhile, he would go home
Speaker 6: after the sessions and write, you know how much he
Speaker 6: hated them and how dare they you know, they were
Speaker 6: inferior beings. He was the you know, he should be
Speaker 6: in charge of the whole system, and it just infuriated
Speaker 6: him all the more. So, you're right, if there was
Speaker 6: it was a very gradual progression in Eric's fantasizing, in
Speaker 6: his road from sort of petty criminal to mass murderer.
Speaker 6: But there was that one moment that ramped things up,
Speaker 6: and that was probably it where you know, he had
Speaker 6: so much of his control taken away from him, and
Speaker 6: that is just infuriating to a psychopath. And you know,
Speaker 6: that's when his blood was boiling and he was ready
Speaker 6: to strike back at the world. And you know, Columbine
Speaker 6: was and in his mind, was a terrorist act. It
Speaker 6: was a way to attack the entire world, to terrorize
Speaker 6: all of us, to scare the hell out of all
Speaker 6: of us, and on television, it was a made for
Speaker 6: TV event. He talks about his audience, he actually uses
Speaker 6: the word my audience in his journal of how we
Speaker 6: were all nationally going to respond, nationally and internationally going
Speaker 6: to respond to this thing. So it was his way
Speaker 6: of getting back us.
Speaker 5: Okay, now, in preparation for this massacre here that they
Speaker 5: just tell us just a little bit about the plans,
Speaker 5: the complete plans of what they had originally intended to do.
Speaker 5: Then lead us into what they actually did. That they
Speaker 5: again take us back to that whole event, take us
Speaker 5: to that event.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Well, they they structured it in three phases, just
Speaker 6: three acts, like a movie. And they were big into
Speaker 6: movie making, and so they may have planned it that way,
Speaker 6: but there were definitely three phases to the attack. The
Speaker 6: first phase, the most important one, was the big bombs,
Speaker 6: And they had two big propane based bombs that they
Speaker 6: were taking into that they carried in the cafeteria, hidden
Speaker 6: in duffel bags. And these were made of those just
Speaker 6: standard propane tanks that you know anybody has in their backyard,
Speaker 6: the standard barbecue things that you know you can get
Speaker 6: at the local grocery store and then you refill them there.
Speaker 6: So they were that side sort of like about high
Speaker 6: high or knee high, and so that wasn't sort of
Speaker 6: the core of it. Then they rigged each one up
Speaker 6: with a can of gasoline, all sorts of different things
Speaker 6: they used for shrap mails to drive up injure more people,
Speaker 6: and then wired up with those old fashioned alarm clocks
Speaker 6: with the bells on top as the timers and detonating devices.
Speaker 6: And they really thought these were going to work. So
Speaker 6: they had one each in a big duffel bag, and
Speaker 6: the plan was to carry them into the cafeteria right
Speaker 6: at the start of a lunch period when there was
Speaker 6: six hundred people pile into the into the cafeteria for
Speaker 6: eight lunches the most popular lunch and there is mass confusion.
Speaker 6: I've been in there many, many times, and this is
Speaker 6: like a beehive, you know, or ant calling, you know,
Speaker 6: people swirling everywhere. And Eric actually knew that this was
Speaker 6: the prime moment because he had spent time. This is
Speaker 6: how cold bloody that he was. He had spent time
Speaker 6: where he sat down in the cafeteria in the period
Speaker 6: before the start of a lunch and invictory how many
Speaker 6: people were in the cafeteria before the bell rang, and
Speaker 6: then after every two minutes or so he logged, you know,
Speaker 6: it was just just fifty people in here. Now there's
Speaker 6: a hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred,
Speaker 6: five hundred up to six hundred. And he had, you know,
Speaker 6: almost minute by minute when it peaked and then and
Speaker 6: then it dropped because so many people comments and open campus.
Speaker 6: So a lot of the kids, especially the juniors and
Speaker 6: seniors who have cars of the driver's license, leave campus
Speaker 6: and go to you know, when these are McDonald's or
Speaker 6: somewhere whatever for lunch and come back. But they use
Speaker 6: the cafeteria typically as a rendezvous point. So Webb piles
Speaker 6: into the cafeteria, they meet up with their friends, then
Speaker 6: they go out to their cars and get out of there.
Speaker 6: So it swallows up to about six hundred for a
Speaker 6: minute or two and then drops very quickly as a
Speaker 6: lot of the people leave. So Eric had logged all
Speaker 6: this and knew that at eleven seventeen was the maximum
Speaker 6: human density of any of the number of people anywhere
Speaker 6: in at school, anytime during the day. So that's when
Speaker 6: the bombs were set to go off. So uh they
Speaker 6: were going to carry those in with the detonators to
Speaker 6: go up just a few minutes afterwards. There was just
Speaker 6: a short time there, so nobody would discover the bombs
Speaker 6: in the interim, hopefully, and they had practices where they
Speaker 6: would they would set the the bombs down near two pillars,
Speaker 6: would hope, which hopefully would also bring the ceiling down
Speaker 6: upon them.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 6: So they set the bombs down, then quickly exited the
Speaker 6: cafeteria and went out across the parking lot out in
Speaker 6: a v formation toward where they had parked their cars
Speaker 6: and specifically designated places they had practiced and from each
Speaker 6: of their cars, and they would get go to their
Speaker 6: individual cars and pull out another backpack with all sorts
Speaker 6: of ammunition for their for their guns, and also about
Speaker 6: one hundred different pipe bombs, and they would gear up,
Speaker 6: they'd practice so they could do it more quickly. So
Speaker 6: they got on their bandoliers about their body, their their
Speaker 6: military web gear they strapped on, so all these explosive
Speaker 6: us strapped their body. They had, you know, things so
Speaker 6: specific like they had flint mass strikers down their forearms
Speaker 6: so they could strike the the molotov cocktails or the
Speaker 6: pipe bombs more quickly and set them off more quickly.
Speaker 6: And then each of them loaded up with a gun.
Speaker 6: They each had one set off shot gun and then
Speaker 6: a different gun. Eric had a carbine rifle, and Eric
Speaker 6: had and Dylan had a Tech nine which is sort
Speaker 6: of like a glock or a poor man's oozier block
Speaker 6: a nine millimeter very powerful sort of well submachine sub
Speaker 6: submachine gun automatic, semi automatic. So they each had two
Speaker 6: powerful weapons and all these pipe bombs, and then they
Speaker 6: were supposed to wait just a minute or two for
Speaker 6: the bombs to go off. And then when the bombs
Speaker 6: went off, that was Act one, and then the school
Speaker 6: would blow up and be burning down and whoever survived
Speaker 6: it and within the cafeteria, but then people from the
Speaker 6: rest of the school would presumably flee the school, and
Speaker 6: from their vantage points, they had two of the three
Speaker 6: major excents of the school covered, and Eric was right
Speaker 6: near one of them and Dylan was near the other.
Speaker 6: Eric was right get on with the most important one,
Speaker 6: the main student entrance, right near the cafeteria where most
Speaker 6: people would presumably come out, and that entrance they could
Speaker 6: both hit it. They could triangulate their fire on that,
Speaker 6: and then Dylan could get one of the other exits,
Speaker 6: and then they just had to give up on the
Speaker 6: one that was the well on the opposite side of
Speaker 6: the school they couldn't cover, So that's when they would
Speaker 6: mow down people fleeing the building. And that's when they
Speaker 6: wrote that phase two is that when they got to
Speaker 6: have fun, and they wrote that several different places have fun,
Speaker 6: So that's when they would you kill people. And they
Speaker 6: didn't never write down whether they plan to advance on
Speaker 6: the school or just keep their positions. That isn't completely
Speaker 6: clear what they plan to do, and I'm not sure
Speaker 6: they were sure what they would do with I think
Speaker 6: they were perhaps planning to just play it by ear
Speaker 6: and enjoy it and see what happens there.
Speaker 2: Then Hello, it is Ryan and we could all use
Speaker 2: an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we just
Speaker 2: to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing
Speaker 2: the dishes, counting or steps, you know, all the mundane stuff.
Speaker 2: That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino.
Speaker 2: Chumpbuck Casino has all your favorite social casino style games
Speaker 2: you can play for free anytime anywhere with daily bonuses.
Speaker 2: That's your brighten your day, lowe actually a lot, so
Speaker 2: sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck
Speaker 2: Casino dot com.
Speaker 7: You'll be necessary d wherever be lost in terms conditions
Speaker 7: eighteen plus. With the Lucky Lands, you can get lucky
Speaker 7: just about anywhere.
Speaker 8: It's your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the
Speaker 8: weather's fine, but we're just gonna circle up here a
Speaker 8: while and get lucky. Oh no, nothing like that. It's
Speaker 8: just these cash prizes that had up quick. So I
Speaker 8: suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right,
Speaker 8: and start getting lucky.
Speaker 7: Play for free at Lucky landslides dot com. Are you
Speaker 7: feeling lucky? No purchase necessary void We're prohibited by law
Speaker 7: eighteen plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details.
Speaker 6: During that shootout, obviously they knew that the cops would
Speaker 6: descend on them and there would be an army of cops,
Speaker 6: and they expect to be killed by cops during the
Speaker 6: shootout in sort of a blaze of glory. And they
Speaker 6: talked many times in the journals and in the videotapes
Speaker 6: they made explain themselves that they expected that to happen.
Speaker 6: They weren't sure how it would happen. Eric was talking
Speaker 6: about shooting some kid in the head and one of
Speaker 6: the videotapes and then he said, Oh, that's probably what
Speaker 6: will happened to me. A cop will probably shoot me
Speaker 6: in the head. So you know, that's how I imagine
Speaker 6: it going down, and not knowing how long they would laugh,
Speaker 6: but that you know, the cops would come and there
Speaker 6: would be some gloriou shootout and that would be the
Speaker 6: end of them. Dylan really wanted to die in the act,
Speaker 6: and he was much more suicidal, and I think the
Speaker 6: suicide was the primary, the driving motive for him. And
Speaker 6: then you know, an angry way of killing a bunch
Speaker 6: of people on the way out was sort of gravy
Speaker 6: for him, Dylan was Eric was very much different than that.
Speaker 6: He had no desire to die. He just accepted it
Speaker 6: as an inevitable result, and he paid it himself as
Speaker 6: a martyr. He said, you know, I will, I'll give
Speaker 6: up my life for my cause of showing you people
Speaker 6: how pathetic and you know, disgust that you all are.
Speaker 6: So that was the second act, is doing lots of
Speaker 6: killing the with the weapons. Then the third phase they
Speaker 6: presumably thought it was gonna happen after they died, and
Speaker 6: that was another series of bombs, and they each had
Speaker 6: their cars filled with more propane based bombs and then
Speaker 6: huge jugs of gas lane. So that around noon, which
Speaker 6: is a little more than forty minutes into the attack,
Speaker 6: there were timers set to go off to blow the
Speaker 6: cars up, and the cars were sort of doing double
Speaker 6: duty as the starting point for each of the two
Speaker 6: would be the attack, but they would also be dispersed
Speaker 6: to the parking lot and very close to the entrances,
Speaker 6: so where presumably the first responders would set up would
Speaker 6: be performing their work. And in fact, there was a
Speaker 6: triout of station right nearby, and there was all sorts
Speaker 6: of activity of people being loaded up in the ambulances
Speaker 6: and if those things had blown up at noon, they
Speaker 6: would have killed many more survivors and the people treating them,
Speaker 6: and presumably by that time would have been captured, possibly
Speaker 6: on television live too. And that's a standard I Ray
Speaker 6: tactic that the Irish Republican Army used on the British
Speaker 6: Army for decades, that there would be a secondary attack,
Speaker 6: so that when the British soldiers came to you know,
Speaker 6: administer to the wounded and to deal with the situation,
Speaker 6: then then they would be blown blown up in a
Speaker 6: second attack. So you know, Eric did his homework and
Speaker 6: knew how that worked, and that was to be the
Speaker 6: glorious uh end of the whole thing. And okay, the
Speaker 6: school's destroyed and burning down. But oh and I did. Oh,
Speaker 6: so do you want me to jump in and tell
Speaker 6: you what did happen?
Speaker 2: Or yeah?
Speaker 5: Sorry, yeah, no, tell us tell us what did actually happen?
Speaker 5: He said, he did his homework. Well, then yes, you know,
Speaker 5: why didn't that happen? But tell us what actually did happen?
Speaker 5: And uh, and there and their first encounter with the
Speaker 5: first person that they encountered, uh in the school. Uh,
Speaker 5: it's a it's a famous right right, encountered immediately, so
Speaker 5: tell us about that as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So they pulled in the parking lot and pulled
Speaker 6: their respective spot, and Brooks Brown, who had been friends
Speaker 6: with Dylan since second grade and I believe second grade
Speaker 6: and and then on off friends and enemies with Derek,
Speaker 6: but they had reconciled and we're friends again. He saw
Speaker 6: Eric getting out of the car. Brooks saw Eric getting
Speaker 6: out of his car just as just aftor Eric arrived
Speaker 6: to bring the bombs into the school. And Eric and
Speaker 6: Dylan had had cut class that morning to prepare. They
Speaker 6: had a whole schedule for the morning of how to
Speaker 6: get the propane bombs filled in the gasoline and so forth.
Speaker 6: And we know too that they did this because they
Speaker 6: were there at the seven eleven in the places where
Speaker 6: they want. There was the surveillance video footage of them.
Speaker 6: And I'm sorry it was in the seven eleven, but
Speaker 6: it was something like that, like a stop and go.
Speaker 6: So Eric getting out of the car and brook sees
Speaker 6: him and and things like why did he cut class?
Speaker 6: We had a test today? And storms up to sort
Speaker 6: of you know, lay to Eric like what are you doing?
Speaker 6: You missed a test? You idiot, and Eric just says,
Speaker 6: get out of here. I like you now, get out
Speaker 6: of here, Brooks and so Books just doesn't know what
Speaker 6: to make of that and wanders off. And Eric picks
Speaker 6: up his bag, which is the propane bomb, you know,
Speaker 6: it's seals of Books can't see that, and carries it
Speaker 6: into the school. So this at the bombs and they're
Speaker 6: running behind time and their plan that kind of get
Speaker 6: really really close. They set the bombs down, and with
Speaker 6: just a minute or two to go, they get out
Speaker 6: of there and get to their cars and and nothing happens.
Speaker 6: We don't have any record of exactly of them going
Speaker 6: out to their cars. Nobody noticed them, you know this
Speaker 6: you have of activity and nobody's paying attention to o
Speaker 6: their kids. But what we do know is they only
Speaker 6: hit about two minutes to gear up, to realize the
Speaker 6: bombs didn't go off, and then to make their way
Speaker 6: across the parking lot instead of going to the obvious place,
Speaker 6: which is where Eric was, because he gave himself the
Speaker 6: prime location by the main entrance, the main student entrance.
Speaker 6: Instead they went across the parking lot over to where
Speaker 6: Dylan was, which I believe probably makes sense that Eric
Speaker 6: was wondering whether Dylan was still going to go through
Speaker 6: the plot with a plan, and wanted to make sure
Speaker 6: when the bombs failed that Dylan was still on board
Speaker 6: with this. So I think he went over probably to
Speaker 6: go check on Dylan and make sure, you know, stick
Speaker 6: close with them to make sure this really happened. They
Speaker 6: didn't seem to have any plan B for if something
Speaker 6: went wrong, so they apparently just winged it from there.
Speaker 6: They went to the What they did that what we
Speaker 6: do know is that he went up to that second
Speaker 6: other entrance, which is on the second floor, because Columbine's
Speaker 6: built on a hill, so there's some of the entrances
Speaker 6: on the first floor and somewhere on the second and
Speaker 6: they went up the outside stairs up to that entrance,
Speaker 6: the west entrance, and at that point one of them,
Speaker 6: probably Eric, yelled, go go and they started shooting it.
Speaker 6: Literally anything that moved out there, anybody who had moved in.
Speaker 6: It was a beautiful day, kids, some kids were still
Speaker 6: leaving the school, the lunchroom. Someonere coming out there for
Speaker 6: you know, sort of little picnic, just to eat their
Speaker 6: eat their lunch in the grass, and the two boys
Speaker 6: just started firing on everyone mainly Eric did Dim only
Speaker 6: shot five times outside and I forget the execut number. Eric,
Speaker 6: I believe it was in the sixties or seventy shot
Speaker 6: and pretty soon he ran out of targets, but literally
Speaker 6: kids running across the soccer field fleeing. He shot out,
Speaker 6: and he shot in every direction. That went on for
Speaker 6: just a few minutes. And then the school resource officer,
Speaker 6: who's a cop employed by the county in the school.
Speaker 6: He was actually outside on the other side of the
Speaker 6: school in his car, having launched, just watching the smoking
Speaker 6: pits on the opposite side of the school, and he
Speaker 6: got a radio call from someone in the school saying
Speaker 6: that there was there was gunfire or something horrible going on.
Speaker 6: So he sped around the school and he showed up
Speaker 6: just about four or five minutes into the shooting, and
Speaker 6: he opened fire on Eric and exchanged gunfire, and he
Speaker 6: was outgunned by Eric. Dylan didn't shoot it and them
Speaker 6: Dylan did nothing, but Eric shot and they exchanged several rounds,
Speaker 6: and then Eric and Dylan retreated into the school. They
Speaker 6: were right by the door, so they retreated into the school,
Speaker 6: and this is into the second floor because they were
Speaker 6: at the top of the outside stairs by that door
Speaker 6: on the second floor, and you know, when you go
Speaker 6: into the building, it is very obvious when you go
Speaker 6: in those doors. The first major hallway you can turn to,
Speaker 6: which is a much bigger halloway they turned down. And
Speaker 6: then the first big group of people you come to
Speaker 6: is the library, where they're glass windows and you can
Speaker 6: see in all sorts of people congregated. And there there
Speaker 6: were fifty two people I think, I think fifty two
Speaker 6: kids in the library, so it was the largest gathering
Speaker 6: of people. They saw them, they went right in and
Speaker 6: that's where most of the killing took place. Well, actually
Speaker 6: they shot Dave Sanders, the teacher, in the hallway. Before
Speaker 6: they got to the library, they'd killed and I'm sorry,
Speaker 6: they had killed two people previously outside Dave in the hallway,
Speaker 6: and then they killed ten more and injured quite a
Speaker 6: few more people in the library. They just sort of
Speaker 6: went around indiscriminately, taunting people and shooting them, letting them
Speaker 6: go when they chose to let them go, and shooting
Speaker 6: some kids in the head without even looking, just pointing
Speaker 6: the gun under the room of the table and firing
Speaker 6: without even knowing who they were shooting at. That went
Speaker 6: on for just about seven minutes, and then they apparently
Speaker 6: got bored with it, where Eric probably did the psychond
Speaker 6: paths tend to do. And then they left the library
Speaker 6: and they didn't kill again. And in fact, they wanted
Speaker 6: the school for about half an hour and did not.
Speaker 6: There were hundreds of people in the school, and they
Speaker 6: saw all kinds of them behind doors. They had a
Speaker 6: glass pane in the door, and they wandered down to
Speaker 6: the cafeteria. Kids were running their tables, ran right past them,
Speaker 6: and Eric Dilton didn't shoot at anybody in the whole
Speaker 6: thirty minutes. The only human beings that Eric or Dylan
Speaker 6: would ever shoot at, well, Eric would shoot at, would
Speaker 6: be comps, just almost before their suicides. So they wanted
Speaker 6: the building. They went down to the cafeteria and they
Speaker 6: tried again to set off those bombs. That's what they
Speaker 6: really wanted to do. Eric fired his rifle at the bombs,
Speaker 6: Dilan through a miletop cocktail, which started a small fire,
Speaker 6: but didn't do anything. They gave up went back up
Speaker 6: to the library, perhaps to watch their cars explode, because
Speaker 6: they went up to the library just just a few
Speaker 6: minutes before the cars were supposed to erupt. For Act three,
Speaker 6: and the library was a perfect vantage point to watch
Speaker 6: that that didn't happen. They fired out the windows, or
Speaker 6: Eric fired out the window at cops, possibly in what
Speaker 6: the cops referred to as suicide by cop helping the
Speaker 6: cops will fire back. That didn't work, and so they
Speaker 6: retreated just a few steps back, found a spot and
Speaker 6: each shot themselves in the head. Eric put his gun
Speaker 6: into his mouth and blew his brains out. Dylan put
Speaker 6: his to the temple and they fired at approximately the
Speaker 6: same moment. Then that was the end of them.
Speaker 5: Now part of the story, too is a you chronicle
Speaker 5: the experiences of the survivor and the survivors at the time.
Speaker 5: Tell us about Dave Sanders. He was the teacher that
Speaker 5: you mentioned that had been shot. And when they called police,
Speaker 5: they said that that you know, paramedics were on their way.
Speaker 5: Would they be there in about ten minutes and it
Speaker 5: was over three hours? Did that create some problem with
Speaker 5: the police force later in a scandal? And tell us
Speaker 5: or tell us a little bit more about Dave Sanders
Speaker 5: and the brave Two of these guys were Eagle Scouts
Speaker 5: and Aaron Hainsey and another gentleman. Let me see Kevin
Speaker 5: starkly explained their role and what they tried to do
Speaker 5: for their teacher.
Speaker 6: Okay, well, Dave Sanders was a coach of a lot
Speaker 6: of event sports at that time. It was the girls
Speaker 6: basketball coach and a business teacher, and he was in
Speaker 6: the teacher's lounge, which is just outside the cafeteria and
Speaker 6: it's a long the same ex external wall, so the
Speaker 6: teacher's line is very close to the outside with windows
Speaker 6: to the outside where Eric and Dylan were beginning firing outside,
Speaker 6: so da've heard shots. So first it was his commotion.
Speaker 6: Nobody knew what was going on. Is there just paint
Speaker 6: ball guns or fireworks or something, But pretty quickly they
Speaker 6: figured out that something serious was going on outside, something
Speaker 6: very wrong. So he ran into the cafeteria to warn kids.
Speaker 6: And the first thing he did was rush out there
Speaker 6: and start yelling to get down, get down, and told
Speaker 6: the kids to get under the tables. And you can
Speaker 6: see there's actually surveillance footage of him doing this. So
Speaker 6: he's getting the kids down very quickly. He's thinking as
Speaker 6: he's doing this, and he realizes, no, that's a mistake. Actually,
Speaker 6: you know, I need to get him out of here,
Speaker 6: you know, they're gonna be sitting ducks. If they just
Speaker 6: hide into the tables, that's not going to save them.
Speaker 6: So he changes horses and he starts saying, nobody up,
Speaker 6: get out, get out, get out, And he and some
Speaker 6: other custodians start helping them, sort of rounding up the
Speaker 6: kids and scrambling them. And what they decided to do
Speaker 6: was there's a big staircase on the opposite a really
Speaker 6: wide staircase on the opposite end of the cafeteria, away
Speaker 6: from the windows, so the killers are outside, so that
Speaker 6: seems the safest place to get get hurt. Everybody across
Speaker 6: the room to the staircase. So you can see dave'st
Speaker 6: running across the cafeteria and motioning with his arms to follow.
Speaker 6: Most of the kids do. There's a big wave of
Speaker 6: kids that follow. He runs up the stairs, sort of
Speaker 6: leaves them up the stairs, and he stops at the
Speaker 6: top of the stairs and directs them all and stops
Speaker 6: there and plays sort of traffic cop, directing them out
Speaker 6: to the to the next exit down the hallway furthest
Speaker 6: away from where the shooting is taking place. So he
Speaker 6: stays in the building to do that. Meanwhile, you know,
Speaker 6: most people. Their reaction is to get the heck out
Speaker 6: of there, out of the building, but his reaction is
Speaker 6: to stay and look after kids. And when the whole
Speaker 6: massive kids then are up the staircase, everybody's out except
Speaker 6: for the few who have been a few afraid, and
Speaker 6: they're they're under the tables downstairs, so there's nobody else coming.
Speaker 6: Then he directs his attention to other kids upstairs and
Speaker 6: seeing you know who we can warn to get out
Speaker 6: of there, because, believe it or not, at least half
Speaker 6: the school didn't realize anything was going on, and they
Speaker 6: were further away and they were just in class, and
Speaker 6: you know, people were taking tests, they weren't doing whatever.
Speaker 6: And some and some, depending how close he were, some
Speaker 6: classes could hear some commotion. Some people went to the
Speaker 6: windows and the teachers told him to sit down. And
Speaker 6: so a lot of people didn't nothing was going on,
Speaker 6: so they had to be warned. So Dave starts running
Speaker 6: down the hallway warning kids to get out of it,
Speaker 6: get out of here, and run that way. He goes
Speaker 6: around the corner and as soon as he turns the
Speaker 6: corner that the same that's just moments after Eric and
Speaker 6: Dylan have stopped exchanging gunfire with the officer outside and
Speaker 6: enter the building and come down the hallway. So Dave
Speaker 6: turns a corner and starts walking down the hallway, the
Speaker 6: same hallway that Eric and Dylan are entering, on the
Speaker 6: opposite side, so they're facing each other, going towards each other,
Speaker 6: and Eric and Dylan are entering shooting. So Dave, as
Speaker 6: soon as he gets around the corner and and you know,
Speaker 6: hears and sees gunfire, realizes that's a mistake, and he
Speaker 6: turns the high tail and get back around that corner,
Speaker 6: almost makes it. They shoot at him. He goes down
Speaker 6: on the ground and then crawls around that corner, and
Speaker 6: a couple of their teachers who are also helping round
Speaker 6: up kids and get them out of there, come to
Speaker 6: his aid, put him over the shoulders and sort of
Speaker 6: him down to the nearest classroom they can get to,
Speaker 6: which just signs room three. And in that room there
Speaker 6: are a lot of people who have who've sort of
Speaker 6: taken refuge. I mean there's there's sort of two taxics
Speaker 6: and some people ran for it and some people trying
Speaker 6: to take cover. So there's dozens of people in that room.
Speaker 6: There are kids and teachers who have taken refuge in
Speaker 6: that room. And it's a larger and it's sort of
Speaker 6: a double room. It's got one of those expandable walls
Speaker 6: in between, and so that they've opened that wall and
Speaker 6: people from both rooms are sort of huddled together. They
Speaker 6: get Dave down and ask who knows first daid, and
Speaker 6: you know, nobody really knows what they're doing, and so
Speaker 6: they send a kid out to go see if they
Speaker 6: can find somebody who does. And so this kid's terrify this.
Speaker 6: You know, there's smoke and gunfire out in the hallway.
Speaker 6: This kid runs across the hall to another room, asking
Speaker 6: if anybody knows first date, and discovers there's two kids
Speaker 6: in there who say, yeah, we're Eagle Scouts, you know,
Speaker 6: we've been trained in all this kind of stuff. And
Speaker 6: so he said, come with me. So the two Eagles
Speaker 6: Stouts go back across the hallway signs from three where
Speaker 6: Dave is, and and they start working on him, and
Speaker 6: they tear up their own shirts. They take their shirts
Speaker 6: off and tear them up to use them as as
Speaker 6: a bandages and to h to sponse the bleeding, and uh,
Speaker 6: you know, that overwhelms them pretty quickly, and so they
Speaker 6: start getting the other boys that take their shirts off
Speaker 6: and tear them up. They go through quite a few
Speaker 6: different shirts, and they're pumping his chest and keeping him
Speaker 6: uh coherent, and you know, other people are calling nine
Speaker 6: one one and and you know, talking to one up
Speaker 6: note one operators who are saying, okay, we know you're
Speaker 6: there coming to get you. Just stay put, stay where
Speaker 6: you are. And so they do, and they think, Okay,
Speaker 6: somebody's coming to help us. But this goes on and on,
Speaker 6: and Dave is going in and out of consciousness or
Speaker 6: around the brink of consciousness, and the two ways. The
Speaker 6: Eagle Scouts continue to treat him, and they you know,
Speaker 6: figure out things to do, like they take his wallet
Speaker 6: out and they look for pictures. They find pictures of
Speaker 6: his wife and his daughters, and they ask him to
Speaker 6: tell him who they are and you know, describe them
Speaker 6: and to tell memories about them, just trying to you know,
Speaker 6: give him a reason to fight on. And you know, say,
Speaker 6: you know what your wife's name, and you know Linda
Speaker 6: is thinking about you, and you know she's gonna be
Speaker 6: so happy, and just hang in there, and that kind
Speaker 6: of thing that goes on and on. Meanwhile, people French.
Speaker 6: We talked near to the non Wollner operators who are
Speaker 6: not communicating very well and saying, you know, the SWAT
Speaker 6: team will be there. It will be just a few minutes.
Speaker 6: But there's all sorts of trouble with the SWAT teams
Speaker 6: on the outside of the building. The biggest problem is
Speaker 6: the sheriff, who's sort of in way over his head,
Speaker 6: is taking command of the situation, and and it's decided
Speaker 6: to not send a SWAT teams in to set up
Speaker 6: a defensive perimeter, which was the protocol at the time,
Speaker 6: that is how they were trained to do it. And
Speaker 6: he didn't realize really essentially that he needed to break
Speaker 6: protocol and do something different. This was something different than
Speaker 6: the protocol had foreseen. So they didn't send to these
Speaker 6: SWAT teams in for quite a long time. And then
Speaker 6: there was confusion of how the school was laid out
Speaker 6: because Columbine had been had been expanded and part of
Speaker 6: it Redone just a few years earlier. So the leader
Speaker 6: of the SWAT leader had been in Columbine and thought
Speaker 6: he knew it was all laid out, and he thought
Speaker 6: he knew exactly where the cafeteria and library were where
Speaker 6: so many reports had been of the worst carnage. But unfortunately,
Speaker 6: I believe four years earlier there had been addition to
Speaker 6: the school where they had built the new cafeteria and
Speaker 6: library on the opposite side of it building and converted
Speaker 6: the area which was originally the labrary in cafeteria. So
Speaker 6: the SWAT leader, I think he'd been in the school
Speaker 6: and knew where it was, didn't realize they had remodeled
Speaker 6: and was on the opposites und of the building. And
Speaker 6: so then they made their way to the building room
Speaker 6: by room, clearing each room one room at a time,
Speaker 6: very methodically a swat teams are trying to do and
Speaker 6: that that took three hours. And by the time they
Speaker 6: got to Dave, swat team got there and he was
Speaker 6: still alive. By the time they got a medic in there,
Speaker 6: he pronounced him dead.
Speaker 5: How many other people, sorry, how many other people died
Speaker 5: in the in the in the massacre, and how many
Speaker 5: were wounded? You know?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 6: Well, a total of fifteen people, including the killers, uh
Speaker 6: died there were they killed twelve other students, one teacher
Speaker 6: and them themselves. And the number of injured physically injured
Speaker 6: is ranges from twenty one to twenty three, depending how
Speaker 6: you want to count them. There were a couple of
Speaker 6: people that adminor injuries or debatable whether they should be counted,
Speaker 6: but a little more than twenty depending how you count
Speaker 6: the injured. And then of course the thing is psychologically damaged.
Speaker 6: There were hundreds of kids. There were kids on suicide
Speaker 6: watch for a couple of years, where then the post
Speaker 6: traumatic stress disorder went way beyond that. And there were
Speaker 6: four there were four people the injuries that were really serious,
Speaker 6: either brain or spinal cord injuries. At least two of
Speaker 6: those never walked again, I mean never, It could take
Speaker 6: a few steps, but our wheelchair bound for life.
Speaker 5: Right now, we just have a few minutes actually gone
Speaker 5: over time, but we've got this fascinating subject that we
Speaker 5: could go on for probably another hour for sure. Certainly,
Speaker 5: the the media didn't do much, didn't go very deep
Speaker 5: into the analysis of the reasons for the murders, for
Speaker 5: the massacre itself, tell us briefly what the the outcome
Speaker 5: was in terms of the media, what they're with, their
Speaker 5: idea was, what they thought of the story.
Speaker 6: Well, the problem with the media really was sort of
Speaker 6: they did too much too soon, too much analyzing and
Speaker 6: then didn't come back and sort of clean up the
Speaker 6: mask in the early days. I was astounded when I
Speaker 6: went back to research, and I realized in my research
Speaker 6: that the media, including me, got the story completely wrong
Speaker 6: in the early day. So I was sort of reconstructing
Speaker 6: and went back through the news service to see how
Speaker 6: how many days or weeks it took to develop these myths,
Speaker 6: and I was astounded that, you know, it really wasn't
Speaker 6: in days, it was in hours, and almost all the
Speaker 6: major myths were in place within the first two days,
Speaker 6: most of them by the first day. And I was
Speaker 6: really amazed. And I got the transcript of the first
Speaker 6: four hours of CNN coverage, and they were coming back
Speaker 6: and forth between for local stations, so it gave you
Speaker 6: a good cross section of what was being reported locally
Speaker 6: and nationally on the national feed, and over the first
Speaker 6: four hours you could see most of the major myths
Speaker 6: take hold. And it was truly extraordinary. Where there's this
Speaker 6: mistaken idea that there's there's a profile of school shooters
Speaker 6: and that most shooters are loaners, outcasts, rejects, and so forth,
Speaker 6: that turns out not to be true. The Secret Service
Speaker 6: did a really in depth study of every single shooting
Speaker 6: like this over more than a twenty five year period
Speaker 6: and determined, and the FBI did a separate study, and
Speaker 6: they both determined emphatically that there is no single profile
Speaker 6: or and most kids are not Most shooters are not loaners,
Speaker 6: they're not outcasts. Something like thirty percent of them are,
Speaker 6: so a sizeable minority, but most aren't. Two thirds are not.
Speaker 6: So this is just a this is a myth, but
Speaker 6: right account might happened. We already had this myth. So
Speaker 6: reporters went into it assuming they're probably outcasts and start
Speaker 6: asking kids and you can see them. You can see
Speaker 6: the progression over just the first couple hours as they
Speaker 6: start asking kids things like, so, were they loners? Were
Speaker 6: they outcasts? Because of course, you know, leading the classic,
Speaker 6: leading the witness, and kids start saying yeah, and kids
Speaker 6: who don't even know them, because this is a school
Speaker 6: of two thousand students, so most students don't know them,
Speaker 6: and especially they were seniors. So you know, picture of
Speaker 6: your high school, most freshmen, no, hardly any seniors, if any,
Speaker 6: the most sophomores don't even so you know the majority
Speaker 6: of the kids in the school have never even met
Speaker 6: these kids and don't even know who they are. So
Speaker 6: most people who we were asking as witnesses don't even
Speaker 6: you know, don't even know their names. So kids, and
Speaker 6: we're not we're not bothering to ask them, you know,
Speaker 6: and to you that is like, you know, we're the
Speaker 6: kids loners. So this kid, who probably never met them
Speaker 6: and doesn't know, you know, also has heard this myth
Speaker 6: of these outcasts and says yes. And then within like
Speaker 6: the first hour or two, the questions start changing from
Speaker 6: were they loaners and outcasts? To we're hearing there were
Speaker 6: loaners and outcasts? Is that true? And now everybody, now
Speaker 6: you're really leading the witness So all the students, almost
Speaker 6: all of them, are saying yes, yes, and now and
Speaker 6: kids are hearing they're watching TV and they're all wired
Speaker 6: up by cell phones. Is the early days of cell
Speaker 6: phones that there were a very large number of people
Speaker 6: in that community who had them, and so we're just
Speaker 6: traveling like wild from the TV through cell phones. So
Speaker 6: everybody's getting worded. It's like, oh, yeah, we're wearing their
Speaker 6: owners and outcasts. So now two three hours into it,
Speaker 6: kids have already heard the via TV that they're outcasts,
Speaker 6: and then when they're asked by a reporter they say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: they were, they were outcasts. And so it's just this
Speaker 6: this this loop where we're running around where you know,
Speaker 6: we're telling the kids via TV, then the kids are
Speaker 6: telling us back and corroborating it, and so we're also
Speaker 6: sort of sure of it. So by nightfall, you know,
Speaker 6: as far as the media's and the kids in the
Speaker 6: school now are are are concerned. They were outcasts. They
Speaker 6: were part of the same thing as going out with
Speaker 6: the Trench Cote mafia. And then this idea takes hold
Speaker 6: that they were targeting the jocks because one girl comes
Speaker 6: out and and they made some comment about jocks in
Speaker 6: the in the cafeteria or in the library. Probably all
Speaker 6: jocks stand up, but they were they were dissing every
Speaker 6: conceivable group, one of which was jocks, and some kid
Speaker 6: got it into their head, Oh, they were targeting jocks,
Speaker 6: so started spreading that word. So that went like wildfire.
Speaker 6: So by nightfall, we in the press had assumed we
Speaker 6: were understanding these killers, why they were doing it, what
Speaker 6: was going on, and we just went with that, and
Speaker 6: there was this great need to understand why. So by
Speaker 6: the end of the week. One of the papers USA
Speaker 6: Today was the leader in this had determined that there
Speaker 6: had been this big feud going on the previous year
Speaker 6: between this group called the trench Cope Mafia and with
Speaker 6: some of the jobs, which was true. What wasn't true.
Speaker 6: They failed to understand is that Eric and Dylan were
Speaker 6: really never part of the Trench Cope Mafia, and that
Speaker 6: the whole thing had said a lot and didn't really
Speaker 6: exist anymore. So this whole feud with the jocks was
Speaker 6: something that had happened but had nothing what's whatever to
Speaker 6: do with Eric and Dylan or with the murders. But
Speaker 6: we just sort of pieced these little bits together and
Speaker 6: sort of jumped to conclusions and assumed, ah, huge with
Speaker 6: the jocks and the trench Coat Mafia and these kids
Speaker 6: we'd already mistakenly put them in the trench Cup mafia.
Speaker 6: So that was the reason. So by Friday of the week,
Speaker 6: you know, it was given as a fact that these
Speaker 6: kids were outcasts who had a feud with the trench
Speaker 6: Coat Mafia, who were doing the whole thing as revenge
Speaker 6: for this feud. None of that had anything to do
Speaker 6: with what had happened, But we'd sort of gone from
Speaker 6: speculating to ironclad conclusions about what had caused this in
Speaker 6: a matter of two to three days. And once we
Speaker 6: had these ideas, we were just sticking with them, and
Speaker 6: there was no real evidence backing up any of this.
Speaker 6: And the cops, meanwhile, and the FBI, this huge team
Speaker 6: had been brought in, didn't have access to the killers records,
Speaker 6: had nearly a thousand pages of writings they had left behind,
Speaker 6: they had their journals, had videotapes they had created explain themselves.
Speaker 6: And we're watching these things and realized that none of
Speaker 6: this stuff being reported had anything to do with reality.
Speaker 6: And you know, the FBI agent Dwayne Fuselli became a
Speaker 6: major source for the book. You know, I was telling
Speaker 6: me years later that each night they would go home
Speaker 6: after you know, the investigative team working at it during
Speaker 6: the day, and we're starting the motives and what was
Speaker 6: going on, what the killers were all about, was starting
Speaker 6: to shake take place. They would go home and turn
Speaker 6: on the television or pick up a newspaper and it
Speaker 6: was like the media describing a completely different massacre. And
Speaker 6: we could just without intending to, we just we'd taken
Speaker 6: these little scraps of information and pieced together this whole
Speaker 6: sort of plot and this idea of what was going
Speaker 6: on which was completely wrong, and we just ran with it,
Speaker 6: and we convinced ourselves collectively that was the answer and
Speaker 6: told the public, and the public believed it. It seemed plausible,
Speaker 6: and so there was this sort of rush to judgment
Speaker 6: about what had caused it, And in response to this
Speaker 6: desire to want to know, the public really wanted to
Speaker 6: know why. So we figured out some why and told
Speaker 6: it to them. It just didn't turn out to be,
Speaker 6: you know, the correct why, and calumin was a huge
Speaker 6: story for several weeks, and then, you know, as these
Speaker 6: national stories happened, then you know, just with a thud,
Speaker 6: then they're gone and the media goes on too something else,
Speaker 6: and really never went back and investigated and figured out
Speaker 6: and reported that, oh we got that whole thing completely wrong.
Speaker 6: And there were reports, I mean there were most of
Speaker 6: the major papers did run a story six months or
Speaker 6: a year later of the myths of saying, oh, we
Speaker 6: got all these things wrong, But by then the public
Speaker 6: really wasn't paying attention, and we didn't really ever go
Speaker 6: back and shake the public and say, wait a minute,
Speaker 6: the whole story that you'd heard that we reported. We
Speaker 6: got a completely wrong. You know, it wasn't like leading
Speaker 6: to today's show or you know, anything like that. So
Speaker 6: the public really never got wind of it. That reporters
Speaker 6: on the story knew, oh, we completely screw that up,
Speaker 6: but the public never really got wind of that.
Speaker 5: So it took you ten years of research and writing
Speaker 5: to create this definitive book about the Columbine High School massacre.
Speaker 5: What do you think you learned that you wouldn't have
Speaker 5: learned if you wouldn't have spent that, specifically that ten
Speaker 5: years of research on this book. What did you learn
Speaker 5: in that ten years that you just couldn't have learned
Speaker 5: in two years.
Speaker 6: Well, a lot of things. I mean, the most important
Speaker 6: evidence in the case, which is the killers excuse me,
Speaker 6: the killers journals, and actually that whole one thousand pages,
Speaker 6: nearly a thousand pages of their writing that wasn't released
Speaker 6: until seven and a half years afterwards, there was a
Speaker 6: cork battle. The Denver Post, to their credit, followed the
Speaker 6: Freedom of Information Act and took it all the way
Speaker 6: to the Colorado Supreme Court and won an unanimous decision
Speaker 6: forcing those to be Really, but that was over seven
Speaker 6: years later. So in the early versions of the book,
Speaker 6: which I had done in the first couple of years,
Speaker 6: we were still years away from even getting that at
Speaker 6: material released. And those journals are just shocking in what
Speaker 6: they just closed. So the police had access to the
Speaker 6: investigators had access to that, but we in the media
Speaker 6: didn't for many years. So that drastically changed the nature
Speaker 6: of the book of Understanding until that point. I got.
Speaker 6: By that point, I'd gotten access to the investigators and
Speaker 6: talked could talk to them about it, and you know,
Speaker 6: they could explain the killers, but I didn't have the
Speaker 6: first hand. You know, I hadn't been able to read
Speaker 6: it all myself. I'd been leaked most of earics journal
Speaker 6: by then, but I hadn't read Dyllains at all, and
Speaker 6: I hadn't had a chance to sit down and study them.
Speaker 6: So I really really understood the killers much late, much
Speaker 6: better later in the process. And the other thing is
Speaker 6: that this book is sort of the chronicle of the
Speaker 6: killers but also the survivors. It's two stories where I
Speaker 6: go back and between them in time, and the survivor's
Speaker 6: story stories really hadn't happened yet. They hadn't they hadn't
Speaker 6: been completed until you know, they go on and definitely,
Speaker 6: of course the stories go on and on, but really
Speaker 6: they settled down. Oddly enough, I've found for a lot
Speaker 6: of people after five to eight years, a lot of
Speaker 6: the people sort of the victims got to sort of
Speaker 6: a to a stable place. A lot of the people
Speaker 6: like like Welschner, somebody who I wrote about in the
Speaker 6: Afterward that I did a year later for the paperback edition.
Speaker 6: She said, the five year anniversary, all these news organizations
Speaker 6: were coming back for anniversary stories were you know again
Speaker 6: it was national news for a day or two, and
Speaker 6: they were all trying to write the happy story, like
Speaker 6: you know, about how survivors got over it and it
Speaker 6: was okay now. And she said, you know, that made
Speaker 6: a very uncomfortab She was sort of avoiding them because
Speaker 6: she was still a complete mess. Five years afterwards, she
Speaker 6: had her life was completely off track. She had been
Speaker 6: shot several times, it almost died through it and psychologically
Speaker 6: completely messed her up. And it was about seven to
Speaker 6: eight years afterwards where she got her life together. She
Speaker 6: went back to grad school, decided she wanted to be
Speaker 6: a social worker. She went back to school, figured that out,
Speaker 6: and now well, now twelve years old, she's very happy,
Speaker 6: she's loving her job, feeling very fulfilled, she's engaged. Now,
Speaker 6: life is great. But her story really wasn't complete till
Speaker 6: about seven eight years out, and there were quite a
Speaker 6: few people in that in that boat. So it really
Speaker 6: turned out ten years was a good was a good
Speaker 6: time because you know, it took me years to write
Speaker 6: all this and to and also to edit and to
Speaker 6: shape it into a compelling story the way I wanted.
Speaker 6: So I really needed seven or eight years of the
Speaker 6: survivors to live their survival to you know, to have
Speaker 6: that story. I think, you know, twenty years out there
Speaker 6: would be a little more to their stories. But I don't.
Speaker 6: I don't think the second ten years will change significantly.
Speaker 6: The first seven to eight years their stories changed drastically.
Speaker 5: Now, you know. Thankfully, the book received renewed interest when
Speaker 5: it was released. And I also wanted to ask you this.
Speaker 5: This I'm very curious about, was the the what was
Speaker 5: coined the basement tapes, the home recorded videos. These have
Speaker 5: been withheld from the public by the police. Why is
Speaker 5: that and what is their content? And did you get
Speaker 5: to see them or know of their contents?
Speaker 6: You know, the basebook tapes are the tapes that referred
Speaker 6: to earlier, the videotapes of the killers made explaining themselves,
Speaker 6: and there are other tapes that have been released of
Speaker 6: their target practice at Rampart range, various videotape the killers
Speaker 6: made for school and just sort of documenting their lives,
Speaker 6: driving through the Wendy's drive through for breakfast and so
Speaker 6: we have lots of glimpses of the killers. But the
Speaker 6: specific tapes is called the basement tapes because they were
Speaker 6: largely made in Eric's basement because he had a room
Speaker 6: in his bedroom in the basement and a little area
Speaker 6: outside of it where they set up these in a
Speaker 6: talk show format to discuss the killings that they were planning,
Speaker 6: and they did this over several sessions a little more
Speaker 6: than a month before the attack. Those tapes have never
Speaker 6: been released. There was one well. They showed them Time
Speaker 6: magazine first exclusively in Time of this big cover story
Speaker 6: several months after Columbine in December, and then the Rocky
Speaker 6: Mountain News demanded to see them. They showed them to
Speaker 6: Rocky and then then they had to show them the
Speaker 6: rest of the press, so they had one showing of
Speaker 6: them for everyone else locally in the press one afternoon.
Speaker 6: I was not included because the oh, the guy in
Speaker 6: charge of the press was furious with me because I
Speaker 6: had leased the first passages from Eric's journal a few
Speaker 6: months before and and di all some of the things
Speaker 6: that he was very mad at me about. So I
Speaker 6: was excluded. They said they were going to have other showings,
Speaker 6: and they kept saying that, then they never did, and
Speaker 6: then then they decided that the well, for various reasons,
Speaker 6: that they were going to withhold the tapes from the public.
Speaker 6: And they had all sorts of different reasons, but the
Speaker 6: biggest one was that they were afraid that the reason
Speaker 6: was some legitimacy, that they were afraid that the tapes
Speaker 6: might inspire other copycats, might make the killers look heroic
Speaker 6: in the eyes of some teenagers with a problem, so
Speaker 6: they wanted to withhold them. So the contents are known
Speaker 6: because that group of six or eight reporters saw them
Speaker 6: and wrote about them. And then also a police evidence
Speaker 6: person wrote up it's about I think it's eight pages,
Speaker 6: single space, a report really detailing you know, each tape
Speaker 6: and whatside with huge numbers of direct quotes. I mean
Speaker 6: that and that matches with what the local press saw
Speaker 6: it saw, so we have a good record of what's
Speaker 6: on them, so we know what they contain, but as
Speaker 6: far as everyone being able to see them know, that's
Speaker 6: been withheld. The Denver Post also was demanding release of
Speaker 6: them in that same lawsuit with the with the killer's writings.
Speaker 6: And I simplify that story a little bit when I
Speaker 6: told you earlier. With the Supreme Court actually decided is
Speaker 6: that all this information that was demanded by the Denver
Speaker 6: Post was a public record, and Colorado laws says that
Speaker 6: any public records have to be freely disseminated to the
Speaker 6: media or to the public, except in cases I forget
Speaker 6: the exact wording, but it's something like when local authorities
Speaker 6: feel that it's in the public interest or that there
Speaker 6: may be a danger to the public. And so the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court had decided that yes,
Speaker 6: in fact, these were public records and sent it back
Speaker 6: to the sheriff, who could then still say, on the technicality, well,
Speaker 6: that it's in the public interest or it's a danger
Speaker 6: to the public. And it was assumed and widely reported
Speaker 6: that if the sheriff did rule that way, it would
Speaker 6: go back to the Supreme Court would likely decide, no,
Speaker 6: it isn't in the public interest, have to release it.
Speaker 6: But that's how the courts tend to go. They answered
Speaker 6: the question before them, and so at that point the
Speaker 6: sheriff decided, Okay, I'm willing to release all the written
Speaker 6: records to kill there's journals in the other thousand pages,
Speaker 6: but I'm still holding back the videos on this technicality
Speaker 6: that it's in the public interest. So at that point
Speaker 6: the Denver Post decided not to appeal it and to
Speaker 6: drop it, and so all the documents, the final documents,
Speaker 6: were released, but not the videotapes. And the way it stands,
Speaker 6: there have been a couple more sheriffs since then that
Speaker 6: sheriff was voted out. Well, actually, we're already on a
Speaker 6: later sheriff by the time this one to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 6: But we're a couple of sheriffs later, and they've still
Speaker 6: continued to say, you know, they don't want these released,
Speaker 6: But any future sheriff of Jefferson County at any time
Speaker 6: can release them. So presumably someone will be elected at
Speaker 6: some point who will say they should be released. Most
Speaker 6: of the public, almost all the families involved, the victims
Speaker 6: want them released, and it's really odd to me that
Speaker 6: they still haven't. But we're still waiting. You know, there's
Speaker 6: no surprises on there because we already know what's on.
Speaker 6: But I think it will be useful, especially for scholars,
Speaker 6: for you know, people who study these kinds of killers psychiatry,
Speaker 6: to see them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've got only a couple of minutes left, and
Speaker 5: I wanted to ask you one question that I think
Speaker 5: a few people might might ask. In light of Michael
Speaker 5: Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine. Could you tell us what
Speaker 5: you thought of Michael Moore's depiction of the issues raised
Speaker 5: in your book and also just with the case itself,
Speaker 5: and just briefly tell us what you thought of Mike
Speaker 5: Moore's take on the Columbine and his documentary Bowling for Columbine.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I don't think it was a really serious take. I mean,
Speaker 6: I see what he does is more entertainment. There were
Speaker 6: some interesting things in the movie, but it wasn't really
Speaker 6: about Columbine very much, and it was more about guns
Speaker 6: and gun control, and I thought there was some interesting
Speaker 6: things in there. His idea there were some really sort
Speaker 6: of ridiculous ideas in there too, like that. There was
Speaker 6: a Martin Marietta plant, well they merged with a couple
Speaker 6: different countries. There was a big defense contractor plant nearby
Speaker 6: because it was lockey than Lucky Martin nearby building. Uh,
Speaker 6: I can't even mother it was bombs or guidance systems
Speaker 6: or military stuff, and that, you know, that impacted the
Speaker 6: local people. That's just the silliest I ever heard, you know,
Speaker 6: And I don't know, I just don't really consider it
Speaker 6: that relevant. There were a couple of really good films,
Speaker 6: fictional films about column. There's one called God It's Either
Speaker 6: Zero Hour or Zero Day, which is sort of a
Speaker 6: fictional depiction of killers like that, which was really really
Speaker 6: on the mark. I thought really did a really good job.
Speaker 6: And then there was one much later, just around the
Speaker 6: time my book came out called April Showers, which is
Speaker 6: from the point of view of survivors, and I thought
Speaker 6: told that story really well, including survivors, including the killer's friends,
Speaker 6: and how difficult it was for them where they were
Speaker 6: seen as pariahs and sort of the community kind of
Speaker 6: turned on them. And it was actually made. The film
Speaker 6: was made by one of the survivors of Columbine who
Speaker 6: is now a filmmaker and did a really good job.
Speaker 6: But I thought that if your sort of like the
Speaker 6: killer's point of view or the survivor's point of view,
Speaker 6: there's one really good film for each of those.
Speaker 4: Great.
Speaker 5: Well, I want to thank you Dave for coming on
Speaker 5: and very informative and fascinating subject and book that you
Speaker 5: have Columbine about the Columbine High School massacre, and you
Speaker 5: go into incredible detail. We didn't get into half of
Speaker 5: what really talks about, but a lot of the survivor's
Speaker 5: stories are very fascinating and some of the journal entries
Speaker 5: are just amazing, and it really is a real example
Speaker 5: of psychopathology with the sort of dissent and that year
Speaker 5: of reading what these guys were planning, and especially Eric Harris.
Speaker 5: So I want to thank you very much for coming
Speaker 5: on the program and for a great interview. Thank you
Speaker 5: very much.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me Dan, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you very much, and you have a good evening,
Speaker 5: you do, okay, Foye night, Dave by bye even listened
Speaker 5: to the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in
Speaker 5: true crime history and the authors that are written about them.
Speaker 5: Her host Dans Opaski, good evening,