Jeff Kass - Columbine: A True Crime Story

CONUNDRUM PRESS A Division of Samizdat Publishing Group
PO Box 1279, Golden, Colorado 80402

A Division of Samizdat Publishing Group, LLC.

Columbine: A True Crime Story
A Victim, the Killers and the Nations Search for Answers

Copyright 2014 by Jeff Kass

Second Edition.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

ISBN (Trade pbk.) 978-1-938633-26-3

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Case study/profile of Sandra excerpted from Your Inner Conflicts-How to Solve Them (Simon and Schuster, 1974) Written by Hugh Missildine and Lawrence Galton. Used with the generous permission of Dan Missildine and Jeremy Galton. All Rights Reserved.

Columbine photos used with the generous permission of the Rocky Mountain News.

Drawings and notebook pages of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold obtained from the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office.

Cover illustration: Ralph Steadman

To George and Judi Kass:
My superlative editors, advisers, supporters, and of course, loving mom and dad

Preface to the New Edition

As this book first went to print in 2009, I sadly noted some breaking news: My main home as a reporter for ten years, the Rocky Mountain News had been put up for sale. Today, the update is even more sad. The 150-year-old paper was not sold, but shuttered. Without the Rockys reporting on Columbineand any other number of events in the life of the statethere would be a hole in our history.

As this book is re-released near the fifteenth anniversary of Columbine, I must note another round of breaking newsactually, the past five years of breaking news that continues to horrify us unabated: public shootings from the targeting of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona to the mass killings of moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado and schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut.

I am careful to use the word public shooting because the conventional term mass shooting which is officially defined as at least four dead, not including the killerdoes not begin to describe what appears to be a new phenomenon where gunmen bear down on dozens, if not hundreds, of potential targets in public places. Luck, civilian heroes, police officers, good medical care, and a shooters idiosyncrasies may work alone or together to reduce what would otherwise be massive death tolls in each instance. One, twelve, or none may die, but the shooters bear the same sentiment no matter how many are left dead: extracting their own twisted version of revenge. The wrongs these shooters list may be unseen, or nonsensical, to outsiders. But they are real to the shooters.

The persistence ofand increase inthese shootings that I detail in the new afterword underscores the threat they pose, not just to our physical safety but to our sense of well-being. Each shooting makes it that much harder for people to have a daily life free of fear.

I could not have anticipated that fifteen years after Columbine I would still be asked to give several media interviews a month regarding public shootings. Or garner the distinction of being one of the first reporters on the ground at two mass shootings only some twenty miles apart: Columbine and Aurora. I have moved from focusing on shootings at schools to shootings in almost every realm of public life.

If there is a silver lining, at least one solution still stands out: catching the warning signs. And there is almost always some type of sign. Unearthing signs in the days, weeks, months or years before an actual shooting is no easy task. If it were, we would have been able to act many times over. But examining the spectrum of public shootings is our best chance. And as the afterword recounts, it is exactly what four junior high school girls did after Columbine.

Jeff Kass
November, 2013

FOREWORD

Jefferson County, Colorado entered our collective consciousness in a horrific way back in April 1999. A couple Holden Caulfields run amok stormed into Columbine High School and killed twelve classmates and a teacher and injured twenty-four others.

Suddenly the names of murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold became synonymous with derangement. Grotesquely, these two mass murderers had videotaped their plot to raid the school brandishing two shotguns, a rifle, and a semi-automatic pistol. A huge public debate erupted over everything from gun control to Goth culture, violence in films to the use of anti-depressants for young people. Columbine became a one-word banner for American dysfunctionalism.
Perhaps because Columbine was so disgusting to contemplate, few reporters probed deeply into the meaning of the debacle. After all, America had previously experienced two even more deadly school killings than Columbine.

The Bath School bombings in 1927 left forty-five, including the bomber, dead. The University of Texas shooter in 1966 killed fourteen. An even worse shooting spree occurred at Virginia Tech in 2007, but that is getting ahead of our story.