The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (22 page)

Dylan Bennet Klebold, a native of Colorado, was born in Lakewood on 11 September 1981, 20 years to the day before the events of 9/11. His mother was an employment counsellor and his father had a small, home-based real estate business.

Harris and Klebold met as boys while attending middle school. They had much in common. In 1996, Harris set up a website devoted to Doom, a violent computer game in which players must kill demons and zombies to reach higher levels of play. Also posted on the site were jokes and brief entries concerning his parents, friends and school. It wasn’t long before Harris began to add instructions on how to make explosives, and records of the trouble he and Klebold were causing. The site had few visitors and attracted little attention until late 1997 when the parents of Harris’ former friend, Brooks Brown, discovered that it contained death threats aimed against their son. Further investigation by the sheriff’s office revealed other threats directed at the students and teachers of Columbine High School, where Harris and Klebold were students. Harris had posted remarks concerning his hatred of society and the desire he had to kill.

A few months into the investigation of the website, in January 1998, Harris and Klebold were caught in the act of stealing computer equipment from a van. They attended a joint court hearing, where it was decided that they both needed psychiatric help. The pair avoided prosecution by participating in a programme that involved three months of counselling and community service. Although both expressed regret publicly, in his journal Harris wrote of his cleverness in deceiving the judge.

Not long after the court hearing, Harris removed the section of his website in which he’d posted his thoughts and threats. However, as the date of the massacre drew near, he added a new section in which he kept a record of his gun collection and bomb-making activities. Also included was a ‘hit list’ of those he wished to target. The sheriff’s office wrote a draft affidavit for a search warrant of the Harris house, but this was never filed.

Exactly when Harris and Klebold began planning their massacre has been a matter of some debate. However, what can be said with certainty is that their actions were not the result of a whim. Over the course of several months, Harris and Klebold had built their bombs and gathered their ammunition. Well aware that they would be made famous by their actions, Harris left behind a collection of videos in which the two discuss their motivations. Harris recalled that as a member of a military family he had had to move from town to town, always having to start afresh. He also expressed resentment of his brother Byron, who was extremely popular and an accomplished athlete. Parents excepted, Klebold spoke about the grievances he had with his family, who he felt always treated him as their inferior.

The pair relished the place they would stake in history through their actions. Hollywood, they were certain, would fight over the rights to their story. The two discussed who might make the better film – Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino?

They were so dedicated to the documentation of their designs that they made a tape just prior to their departure for the high school. Klebold, the first to speak, announces, ‘It’s a half-hour before our Judgement Day.’ After saying goodbye to his parents, he adds, ‘I don’t like life very much... Just know I’m going to a much better place than here.’

Harris’ farewell is much more rushed. ‘I know my mom and dad will be in shock and disbelief,’ he says. ‘I can’t help it.’

‘It’s what we had to do,’ Klebold adds. They spend some time creating something of a video will, listing various belongings that they want to go to friends. When Klebold determines that it is time to go, Harris concludes, ‘That’s it. Sorry. Goodbye.’

What followed did not go according to plan. Everything had been mapped in such great detail, and yet the events that took place on that sunny Tuesday in April were largely the result of improvisation.

Harris and Klebold planned the massacre to begin in the late morning of 20 April 1999. Their first step was planting a firebomb in a field not far from the school. Set to explode just prior to the start of their assault on the school, it is assumed to have been placed as a diversion for emergency personnel.

The bomb did detonate, though only partially. The small fire it caused was easily extinguished by the local fire department.

The pair arrived at the school in separate cars and parked in different parking areas. Klebold walked over to where Harris had parked. There they armed two 9 kg propane bombs, enough to destroy the cafeteria and bring down the library above as well. With five minutes to detonation, they carried duffel bags containing the bombs into the cafeteria, left them on the floor, and returned to their respective cars. En route to his car, Harris encountered Brooks Brown, and warned him: ‘Brooks, I like you. Now get out of here. Go home.’

Harris and Klebold’s plan was to wait and fire upon students fleeing the explosion. However, when both bombs failed to detonate, Klebold went back to Harris’ car. Carrying duffel bags containing a 9 mm semi-automatic rifle, a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, two sawn-off 12-gauge shotguns and a number of explosive devices, they walked together towards the cafeteria entrance, and stopped on the outdoor steps.

At 11:19, the pair pulled out their shotguns and began firing at the students. Their first shots were directed at two students eating lunch on the lawn. One of the two, a girl, became the first fatality. Although Klebold entered the cafeteria briefly, presumably to determine why the bombs had not detonated, the pair focused for the first minutes on the outside of the high school. While shooting, they began to throw pipe bombs on the lawn, the roof and into the car park. Like the cafeteria bombs, these all proved to be duds.

Five minutes after the first shot was fired, a sheriff’s deputy who happened to be at the campus began exchanging fire with the gunmen. While this was happening Dave Sanders, a teacher, managed to evacuate the cafeteria through a staircase leading up to the second floor.

Harris and Klebold ran into the school and proceeded down two corridors, shooting and throwing pipe bombs. They eventually entered the library, where they shot out the windows and began to fire at the police officers outside. The gunmen then turned around and set their sights on students who had been hiding under tables. In the next 7 minutes, Harris and Klebold killed 10 people and injured 12 others.

When the gunmen left the library, they proceeded to the science area, firing indiscriminately. Coming across locked classroom doors, they would peer inside at the students, but make no attempt to gain entry.

The gunmen returned to the cafeteria, where Harris attempted without success to detonate one of the failed propane bombs.

The gunmen drank from cups students had left behind on the tables and looked out of the windows, watching as emergency vehicles arrived. They then left and wandered around the school’s main corridors. Again, they looked at students through the windows of locked classroom doors, but never attempted to enter the rooms. They paused outside a washroom entrance, taunting the students inside by saying that they were about to enter and kill whomever they found. However, the pair did not go in; rather they continued to wander, seemingly without aim.

At 12:05, nearly half an hour after they’d left, Harris and Klebold re-entered the library to find it nearly empty. All but two survivors had managed to get away – one pretended to be dead and the other, Patrick Ireland, was unconscious. The gunmen attempted to shoot at police officers through the windows, without success. After setting a Molotov cocktail alight, Klebold watched as Harris killed himself; seconds later he took his own life.

Two and a half hours later, Ireland regained consciousness. He crawled out through the window, where he was picked up by SWAT team members. It would be nearly another hour before the police officers finally entered the library. By this time, Harris and Klebold had been dead for just under three and a half hours. It was estimated that nearly 800 police officers circled the school that day – but not one of them entered the building while the two gunmen were still alive.

Harris and Klebold’s shooting spree lasted approximately 49 minutes; all those killed or injured were shot during the first 16 minutes. Witnesses report that after they’d killed their final victim both gunmen remarked that the thrill had gone out of shooting people.

JEFF WEISE

Although he committed suicide at the early age of 16, Jeff Weise left behind more writing than any other spree killer in history. His numerous contributions to websites like nazi.org provide glimpses into a truly troubled mind. Six months before committing mass murder, Weise posted on the internet an animated short film he had created. Lasting just 30 seconds, the work features a gunman who kills four people and blows up a police car. The animation ends with the gunman taking his own life. In posting the clip, Weise used the alias ‘Regret’.

Jeffrey James Weise began his short unhappy life on 8 August 1988, the son of Daryl Lussier Jr and Joanne Weise. He lived most of his first ten years with his mother in a mobile home outside a Minneapolis pickle factory. On occasion, he would be sent five hours north to see his father on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. These visits ended when his father committed suicide following a day-long stand-off with members of the Red Lake Police Department. One of the officers on the scene was Weise’s grandfather, Daryl Lussier Sr, who despite his best efforts was unable to save his son. Jeff Weise was 8 years old. Even before the death of his father, the boy was at the mercy of Joanne Weise, a physically abusive alcoholic. In 1999, she sustained brain damage in an automobile accident, and was confined to a Minneapolis nursing home.

Weise, an Ojibwa, was sent to live with his grandfather on the reservation, 390 kilometres away from his former home. He expressed a great deal of frustration in attempting to adapt to his new surroundings. His troubles continued after he entered Red Lake High School, located on the reservation. Eventually, he was pulled out of the school and put on a home schooling programme.

On one of his internet profiles, Weise wrote that he was being given anti-depressants and was seeing a therapist. In fact, he had been prescribed Prozac after twice trying to kill himself. The first attempt took place in the spring of 2004. He later posted an account of the incident on the internet: ‘I had went through a lot of things in my life that had driven me to a darker path than most choose to take. I split the flesh on my wrist with a box opener, painting the floor of my bedroom with blood I shouldn’t have spilt. After sitting there for what seemed like hours (which apparently was only minutes), I had the revelation that this was not the path.’

With the use of a belt pulled taut around his neck, Weise made his second failed attempt a few months later.

Increasingly, Weise found a forum for expression through the internet. He participated in a number of websites by posting messages and Flash animations. At a site devoted to zombie fiction, he contributed a number of short stories. Weise also visited chatrooms and discussion groups. Under the usernames NativeNazi and todesengel (German for ‘angel of death’), he posted frequently on the website of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, an organization incorporating elements of Nazi ideology, libertarianism and the environmental movement.

Weise wrote of his admiration for Adolf Hitler and expressed despair over what he saw as interracial mixing among Native Americans. He wrote that he had been unjustly suspected of planning to shoot people at his old high school on 20 April 2004, the 115th anniversary of Hitler’s birth. The idea, he added, was that of someone else. In fact, on 19 April, Red Lake High School had received an anonymous warning that a drive-by shooting would take place the next day. The fifth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School also happened to fall on the same day.

On the morning of 21 March 2005, as part of his home schooling programme, Weise was visited for an hour by his teacher, and later by a relative. In the mid-afternoon he shot and killed his grandfather while the 58-year-old man was sleeping. When Lussier’s girlfriend, a fellow police officer named Michelle Sigana, arrived at the house, she too was killed.

Weise took his grandfather’s police-issue 12-gauge shotgun, 9mm Glock 17, utility belt and bullet-proof vest. He then drove his grandfather’s marked patrol vehicle the five-minute-long route to Red Lake High School.

Shortly before three o’clock Weise, now wearing his grandfather’s bullet-proof vest, walked through the school’s main entrance. He was confronted by Derrick Brun, an unarmed security guard who was manning the school’s metal detectors. Weise killed Brun and then turned his guns on a teacher and students, firing as he walked down the corridor. When they fled into a classroom, the gunman followed, killing the teacher and several students. Weise returned to the corridor, running and shooting at random. He attempted to enter a classroom, but a quick-thinking teacher had locked the door.

Less than 10 minutes after the shooting began, four members of the Red Lake Police Department arrived at the school. On entering, they became targets for Weise. In the exchange of gunfire, Weise was hit in the hip and leg. He retreated to a classroom where he took his own life with a shotgun blast to the head.

Weise’s rampage at the school lasted 10 minutes. In addition to Brun, he killed one teacher and five students; 14 other students were wounded.

After Weise’s death it was noted by relatives that he was being prescribed Prozac in increasing dosages. The news further inflamed the debate among doctors and scientists regarding the effects of antidepressants on children.

Weise submitted a number of different user profiles on the internet. Each provides a snapshot of a troubled youth. In one he lists Elephant and Zero Day, both inspired by the Columbine massacre, at the top of the list of his favourite films. His Yahoo! profile features the words of Hitler as his favourite quote. But of all these, it is Weise’s MSN profile that is the most interesting and the most revealing. Instead of posting his own photograph, he provides a still from Elephant in which the two characters modelled on Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, dressed in army fatigues, are entering the school where their massacre will take place.