Columbine (20 page)

Detectives asked her about the prom, the Trench Coat Mafia, the killers' personalities, and then returned to the guns. It was a private dealer, she said. The boys paid cash. They didn't try to bargain, they just paid the asking price--somewhere around $250 to $300 apiece. No one signed anything, and she never showed an ID. The shotguns had very long barrels, but the dealer said they could cut them down.

The detectives began to press her harder: Dylan and Eric didn't really seem like hunters, did they?
Dylan lived in the mountains, there were deer all over the place. And her dad owned a gun--he never used it, but he had one. Lots of people have gun collections. Eric and Dylan were into that kind of stuff--why wouldn't they want one?
She'd actually asked the boys if they were going to do something stupid with the guns, she said. They'd assured her they would never hurt anyone.

Did Eric and Dylan tell you to keep the guns secret? the detectives asked.
Yes.
And that didn't raise your suspicions?
They were underage. It was illegal. They had to hide it from their parents.
And where did they hide them?
She didn't know about Eric. Dylan dropped him off first, and Eric put his guns in the trunk of his Honda. She assumed he stashed them in the house later. Dylan tried to hide his in his bottom dresser drawer, but it was too big. He stuck it in the closet, but he told her later that he cut the barrel down and made it fit in the drawer
.

And that didn't arouse her suspicions?
No, because the gun dealer had already suggested it
.

Robyn said she never saw the guns again. The detectives moved on. They asked about a wide range of subjects; eventually, they got to the explosives. Had she seen any, had she helped make any, had any of Eric and Dylan's friends assisted them?
No, no, and... maybe Zack Heckler
. Zack? Why Zack?
Zack had told her he knew more of what was going on
. She told them about the call with Zack, about his admission that he knew about the pipe bombs.

How strange, the detectives said--Eric and Dylan went bowling with her every week, Dylan called her every other night, they confided in her about the guns, and yet they never said a word about the pipe bombs.
They must not have wanted me to know
. Come on! the detectives said. You're lying! Over and over, they mocked her about the disparity--the boys told Zack about the pipe bombs, but they never told her?
No, no, never. That's what they were like. When they wanted you to know something, you knew. When they wanted you in the dark, you stayed there. They could get very secluded about it, very isolated.

They kept on her.
The guns were an isolated incident,
she said.
And Zack--he didn't know much either. He knew they were making bombs, but he had no idea what they were up to.

The interrogation went on for four hours. Robyn held her ground.

____

Bomb squads had been through the school several times and found nearly a hundred bombs of varying sizes and composition--most exploded, some not. Most were pipe bombs or crickets, but one in the cafeteria stood out: a big white propane tank, standing upright, nearly two feet tall. It was wedged against a one-gallon gasoline can. The most ominous part was the alarm clock. There were remnants of an orange duffel bag, too, mostly burned away. The car bombs were also discovered, with more faulty wiring. The diversionary bomb in the field was disturbing for another reason. It had blown shortly after being moved, suggesting booby traps. Trip wires could be anywhere.

The FBI provided a group of crime scene specialists to assist in the massive effort of documenting the evidence. At 8:15 on Thursday morning, the team slogged through the cafeteria debris. Hundreds of backpacks, lunch trays, and half-eaten meals had been abandoned, many of them knocked over, singed by fire, or scattered by explosions, and everything had been soaked by the sprinkler system, which had run for hours. Muted pagers buried inside the backpacks beeped methodically, alerting the kids to phone home.

As they walked, an agent spotted a blue duffel bag ten feet from the burned-out orange bag with the big bomb. It was bulging and sized to fit the same contraption. They walked over. One of the agents pressed down slowly on the top. Hard. Probably another tank. They called help over: a couple of deputies and an FBI bomb technician. One of the officers was Mike Guerra, the same man who had investigated Eric Harris a year earlier. He sliced open the bag. They could see the end of a propane tank and an alarm clock that matched the other. There were still active bombs in here. How many more? They closed off the area immediately.

Had the propane bombs detonated, they would have incinerated most or all of the inhabitants of the commons. They would have killed five hundred people in the first few seconds. Four times the toll in Oklahoma City. More than the ten worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history combined.

For investigators, the big bombs changed everything: the scale, the method, and the motive of the attack. Above all, it had been indiscriminate. Everyone was supposed to die. Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings. It had not really been intended as a shooting at all. Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed.

That same day, officials announced the discovery of the big bombs, and their destructive power. It instigated a new media shock wave. But, curiously, journalists failed to grasp the implications. Detectives let go of the targeting theory immediately. It had been sketchy to begin with, and now it was completely disproved. The media never shook it off. They saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks. They filtered every new development through that lens.

23. Gifted Boy

D
ylan Bennet Klebold was born brilliant. He started school a year early, and by third grade was enrolled in the CHIPS program: Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students. Even among the brains, Dylan stood out as a math prodigy. The early start didn't impede him intellectually, but strained his shyness further.

The idealistic Klebolds named their two boys after Dylan Thomas and Lord Byron. Tom and Sue met at Ohio State University, studying art, Tom in sculpture. They moved to Wisconsin and earned more practical master's: Tom in geophysics, Sue in education, as a reading specialist. Tom took an oil job and moved the family to Jeffco, before the Denver metroplex stretched out to reach them.

Dylan was born there, five months after Eric, September 11, 1981. Both grew up as small-town boys. Dylan earned merit badges in the Cub Scouts and won a Pinewood Derby contest. Sports were always big. He was a driven competitor, hated to lose. When he pitched in Little League he liked to whiff hitters so badly they tossed their bats. He would idolize major leaguers until the day he died.

The Klebold house was orderly and intellectual. Sue Klebold was a stickler for cleanliness, but Dylan enjoyed getting dirty. A neighbor--the woman who would struggle so hard to stop Eric before the massacre--fed Dylan's early Huck Finn appetite. Judy Brown was the neighborhood mom, serving up treats, hosting sleepovers, and rounding up the boys for little adventures. Dylan met her son Brooks in the gifted program. Brooks had a long, egg-shaped face, like Dylan's, narrowing at the jaw. But where Dylan's eyes were animated, Brooks's drooped, leaving a perpetual weary, worried expression. Both boys grew faster than their classmates--Brooks would eventually reach six-five. They would hang out all afternoon at the Browns' house, munching Oreos on the sofa, asking Judy politely for another. Dylan was painfully shy with strangers, but he would run right up, plop down in her lap, and snuggle in there. He couldn't be more adorable, until you tripped his fragile ego. It didn't take much.

Judy first saw him blow when he was eight or nine. They had driven down to a creek bed for a typical adventure. Sue Klebold had come along--horrified by all the mud, but bearing it to bond with her boy. Officially, it was a crawdad hunt, but they were always on the lookout for frogs or tadpoles or anything that might slither by. Sue fretted about bacteria, hectoring the boys to behave and keep clean.

They'd brought a big bucket to haul the crawdads home, but came back up the hillside with nothing to show. Then one of the boys slogged out of the creek with a leech attached to his leg. The kids all went delirious. They plopped the leech into the frog jar--a mayonnaise bottle with holes punched in the lid--and watched it incessantly. They had a picnic lunch and then ran back for more fun in the creek. The water was only a foot deep, but too murky for them to see the bottom. Dylan's tennis shoes squished down into the glop. All the boys were slipping around, but Dylan took a nastier slide. He wheeled his arms wildly to catch himself, lost the battle, and smacked down on his butt. His shorts were soaked instantly; dank black water splashed his clean T-shirt. Brooks and his brother, Aaron, howled; Dylan went ballistic.

"Stop!" he screamed. "Stop laughing at me! Stop!
Stoooooooooooooooooooooooop!
"

The laughing ended abruptly. Brooks and Aaron were a little alarmed. They had never seen a kid freak out like that. Judy rushed over to comfort Dylan, but he was inconsolable. Everybody was silent now, but Dylan kept screaming for them to stop.

Sue grabbed him by the wrist and whisked him away. It took her several minutes to calm him down.

Sue Klebold had come to expect the outbursts. Over time, Judy did, too.

"I would see Dylan get frustrated with himself and go crazy," she said. He would be docile for days or months, then the pain would boil over and some minor transgression would humiliate him. Judy figured he would grow out of it, but he never did.

Detectives assembled portraits of the killers that felt maddeningly similar and vanilla: youngest sons of comfortable, two-parent, two-child, quiet small-town families. The Klebolds had more money; the Harrises were more mobile. Each boy grew up in the shadow of a single older sibling: a bigger, taller, stronger brother. Eric and Dylan would eventually share the same hobbies, classes, job, friends, clothing choices, and clubs. But they had remarkably different interior lives. Dylan always saw himself as inferior. The anger and the loathing traveled inward. "He was taking it out on himself," Judy Brown said.

____

Dylan's mother was Jewish. Sue Klebold had been born Sue Yassenoff, part of a prominent Jewish family in Columbus. Her paternal grandfather, Leo Yassenoff, was a philanthropist and a bit of a local tycoon. The city's Leo Yassenoff Jewish Community Center was established by the foundation he funded. Classmates said Dylan never shared Eric's fascination with Hitler, Nazis, or Germany, and some suggested it bothered him. Tom was Lutheran, and the family practiced some of each religion. They celebrated Easter and Passover, with a traditional Seder. Most of the year they remained quietly spiritual, without much organized religion.

In the mid-1990s, they took a stab at a traditional church. They joined the parish of St. Philip Lutheran Church; the boys went to services along with their parents. Their pastor, Reverend Don Marxhausen, described them as "hardworking, very intelligent, sixties kind of people. They don't believe in violence or guns or racism and certainly aren't anti-Semitic." They liked Marxhausen, but formal church service just wasn't a good fit for them. They attended for a brief time and then dropped away.

Sue spent her career in higher education. She began as a tutor, then a lab assistant, and finally worked with disabled students. In 1997, she left a local community college for a position with the Colorado Community College System. She coordinated a program there to help vocational/rehab students get jobs and training.

Tom did reasonably well in the oil business, but better at renovating and renting out apartments. He was great with repairs and remodeling. A hobby became a business. Tom and Sue formed Fountain Real Estate Management to buy and administer the properties. Tom continued consulting to independent oil companies part-time.

The Klebolds were rising financially, but worried about spoiling their kids. Ethics were central in their household, and the boys needed to learn restraint. Tom and Sue settled on appropriate figures to spend on the boys and stuck to them. One Christmas, Dylan wanted an expensive baseball card that would have consumed his entire gift budget. Sue was torn. One tiny present in addition to the card for her boy? Maybe she could spend a little extra. Nope. Austerity was a gift, too, and Dylan got what he'd asked for and no more.

In 1990, as metro Denver encroached into Jeffco, the Klebolds retreated beyond the hogback, the first strip of foothills hundreds of feet high, which from the air looked like the bumps along a hog's back. The hogback functions like Denver's coastline--it feels like civilization ends there. Roads are scarce; homes are distant and highly exclusive. Shops and commerce and activity are almost nonexistent. The family moved into a run-down glass and-cedar house on Deer Creek Mesa, inside a panoramic rock formation, a smaller version of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a few miles away. Tom gradually brought the house back into stunning shape. Dylan officially lived in the backcountry now--part-time country boy, riding over to the populated side every morning for school in suburbia.