Murderous Minds (3 page)

They sit in their cars now, waiting for the explosions. They expect the twin blasts to bring part of the second floor crashing down into the cafeteria, killing hundreds. When the propane tanks explode, the blasts alone could directly kill many of the estimated 500 students in the dining area. When the survivors flee from the cafeteria, Eric and Dylan plan on gunning them down. This is the goal, and it makes sense only to them.

Fortunately, they are incompetent bomb makers. Neither knows how to wire these compound bombs or set their fuses properly.
²²
The duffel bags lie, unexploded and unnoticed, among hundreds of other backpacks and bags belonging to students filling the cafeteria.

With no explosion in the cafeteria, Eric and Dylan’s master plan has begun to falter. They continue with the next stage of their attack by setting the timers on two additional bombs in their cars. The car bombs are timed to go off after the police cars, fire trucks, ambulances and journalists arrive. They are meant to boost the body count.

Just before 11:20 a.m., road crew workers toss aside the bags which Eric left as a diversion miles from the school. Some pipe bombs and an aerosol container explode. But like those now in the cafeteria and in their cars, these devices are poorly constructed; the propane tanks included to make the explosion really noticeable remain intact. Some grass catches fire. Appropriately, the local Littleton Fire Department and the Sheriff ’s office are alerted, but there is no mass response by area police racing to the grass fire.

Now the two young men are on the move. They claim the campus’s high ground. They stand atop the west stairs outside the school. They are armed with sawed-off shotguns, a 9-mm rifle, and a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun. This weapon is a civilian version of a military submachine gun. It is sometimes referred to as the cheap man’s Uzi, a submachine gun once used by Israel’s military.

Realizing their big bombs have fizzled, their supplementary shooting

plan becomes their only option for creating mayhem. As journalist Dave Cullen writes in his excellent account of the attack,
Columbine
, for Eric and Dylan “There was no Plan B.”
²³

The two are wearing long black coats called dusters,
²⁴
which are often associated with cowboys and horseback riding. On this and subsequent days, the coats are frequently misidentified as trench coats. Both are good for hiding long-barreled rifles and shotguns. Trench coats, once associated with spies, private eyes, and investigative journalists, soon will become linked to murderous, socially outcast students who kill to avenge the ill treatment they receive from their peers. But as Cullen points out in his account of the massacre, and as forensic psychiatrists and psychologists later conclude after studying the writings and videotapes left behind by Eric, this motivation does not apply to, or explain, the actions of these two murderous friends, as we will discover.

“Go! Go!” one of the soon-to-be killers shouts.
²⁵
It is probably Eric, the dominant member of the lethal team.

Eric and Dylan pull out their shotguns and 9-mm weapons and begin by firing at students who are seated on the grass, eating lunch. They wound Richard Castaldo and shoot Rachel Scott in the head and chest, killing her.

Three more students are moving up the stairs toward them. Eric fires his carbine again and again, killing Danny Rohrbough instantly and wounding Lance Kirkland in four places from his chest down to his foot. Sean Graves runs but falls wounded before he can get away from the shooters.

From time to time throughout the massacre, the attackers pause to light pipe bombs, the most reliable of their homemade explosives. Now they are throwing them high onto the roof and down onto the lawn. Later they will throw them, to their amusement, throughout the school.

More students run across the grass, trying to get away. One, Mark Taylor, falls seriously wounded. Although shot, Michael Johnson manages to reach a storage shed and joins several others already using it for cover.
²⁶

The gunmen are moving again. One reaches Lance, who lies wounded on the ground. Lance, weak and disoriented from his wounds, grabs a pant leg of the figure standing over him and asks for help.

“
Sure, I’ll help,” the owner of the pant leg says, and shoots Lance in the

face.
²⁷
Lance, despite multiple wounds, survives.

Eric, the leader and by far the more murderous of the two killers, climbs the stairs. He laughs. From his elevated vantage point, he sees Anne Marie Hochhalter running. He fires. She falls, shot multiple times.

It’s been less than five minutes since the carnage began.

“This is what we always wanted to do. This is awesome!” one of the killers yells.
²⁸

Seeing hall monitor Patti Nielson and student Brian Anderson inside the school behind a westward-facing exit, one of the shooters fires. The bullets drive metal and glass shrapnel into Patti’s arm, shoulder and knee, and into Brian’s chest.

Eric looks toward the south parking lot. He easily spots Sheriff ’s Deputy Neil Gardner. The deputy is wearing a hard-to-miss bright yellow School Community Service Officer’s shirt. Deputy Gardner is getting out of his patrol car about 180 feet away. Eric shoots at him repeatedly. Bullets fly into parked cars behind Deputy Gardner. None of the ten or so shots he manages to get off hits the deputy. Then Eric’s rifle jams.

As Eric tries to clear his weapon, Gardner fires four shots at him, but misses. Eric clears his jammed weapon. He fires and misses the deputy again before he retreats into the school through the shattered west doors.

It’s now around 11:26 a.m. From inside the entrance, Eric exchanges more fire with Gardner and another deputy, who has joined the shootout. The gunmen disappear into the school. The deputies, following orders, do not go after the gunmen.

Together, Eric and Dylan walk back and forth along the library hallway, throwing pipe bombs, shooting at nothing in particular, and laughing.

A couple of minutes later, they enter the library where 56 classmates hide or cower. Immediately, Eric points his shotgun at the top of the front counter and pulls the trigger. Wood splinters fly into the air and into a student crouched behind a copying machine at the end of the counter. As they move across the room toward the library windows, the coldblooded pair nonchalantly shoot and kill another student. Windows shatter as they fire outside at students fleeing the killing field Eric and Dylan have created
out of the once-familiar campus. Police and deputies fire back through the windows at the killers.

Before retreating across the library, away from the windows, the killers shoot eight more students. Four of them die.

They walk back toward the library entrance, where Dylan blasts a display case. Then they shoot eight more kids. Three of them die.

Surrounded by dead, dying, wounded, and cowering victims—one of the killers shouts “Yahoo!”

Eric and Dylan move to the center of the large room. It’s approximately

11:34 a.m. They reload their weapons and turn them on nearby students. Four are hit. Two of them die. In just seven minutes and thirty seconds, Eric and Dylan execute ten people and wound half a dozen others in the library.

A few minutes later, they leave the library and walk through the halls near the science classrooms and laboratories. They look through the windows of locked classroom doors. They see students hiding inside, but they pass by. Like medieval figures of Death, carrying firearms instead of scythes, they randomly and opportunistically choose their victims. They shoot up the school, even firing into empty rooms. And they throw some more pipe bombs, creating several explosions.

About twelve minutes before noon, they wander down to the cafeteria. Eric kneels on the stairs. He raises his carbine and fires repeatedly at one of the duffel bags containing one of the homemade, 20-pound propane bombs he and Dylan had left there before the shooting began. The gas tank does not explode.

Eric and Dylan look at the abandoned lunch tables. They grab a couple of abandoned bottles of water, raise them to their lips, and drink.

“Today,” one of them announces grandly at some point during this visit to the cafeteria, “the world’s going to come to an end. Today is the day we die.”
²⁹

The pair succeeds in setting off an explosion in the cafeteria that ignites a container of flammable liquid. The fire sprinklers in the ceiling spray water. The large propane bombs never explode.

Eric and Dylan go back to wandering the hallways, briefly visiting the office area and the kitchen before ending up back in the library on the second floor.

Now they have killed all they are going to kill: thirteen students and one teacher. Twenty-one others are wounded. It is far fewer than they had hoped to slaughter; they wanted to kill hundreds. Had either of them known how to connect a fuse, had either understood bomb construction, their homemade propane bombs could have killed most of the 500 students eating lunch on this day.

Eric and Dylan walk back to the library for the last time. Around 12:08 p.m., they take some final shots at paramedics and law-enforcement officers from the windows on the library’s second floor. They move toward the end bookshelves in the southwest corner of the library. One of them lights a cloth stuck into a glass bottle filled with flammable liquid and sets it on a library table. This becomes their next-to-last violent act.

Their final violent act is suicide. They shoot themselves. Each dies from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The Molotov cocktail starts a small fire on the tabletop. The fire alarm is screaming so loudly, it drowns out speech.

“Not Used Technically”

Despite the similarities of the atrocities Jared and Eric committed, the brains of these two particular killers most certainly malfunctioned in very different ways. Their murderous intentions differed, as did their mental states before and during their crimes.

One had lost touch with reality. The other had no delusions and clearly understood the difference between right and wrong. One suffers from a mental illness; the other has what the American Psychiatric Association calls a “personality disorder.” Most neuroscientists and research psychologists call it psychopathy.

Eric left behind very convincing evidence that he had highly psychopathic traits. Although he understood the difference between right and wrong, he appeared to lack a conscience. Combined with a disdain for nearly everyone, a lack of conscience can be a very dangerous thing, as we have seen. Jared was legally insane when he killed. Eric was legally sane when he committed the same acts.

But sane and insane are legal, not scientific or medical, definitions. As neuroscientists find more indications that the brains of killers differ
from those of non-killers, some scientists are joining defense attorneys in claiming that the violence committed by legally sane killers, like psychopaths, can be traced to their abnormal brain structure and function.

In fact, the editors of the magazine
Scientific American Mind
prefaced a 2010 article titled “Inside the Mind of a Psychopath” with the teaser “Neuroscientists are discovering that some of the most coldblooded killers aren’t
bad
”
³⁰
[emphasis added].

Aren’t bad?

“They suffer,” the preview continues, “from a brain abnormality that sets them adrift in an emotionless world.”

“Poor babies,” some cynics might comment on reading this.

Skeptics might wonder if this means we will see descriptions of the not-bad serial killer Ted Bundy, the not-bad serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the not-bad killer Richard Kuklinski, and the not-bad mass murderer Eric Harris—all of whom displayed traits strongly indicative of psychopathy—in future accounts of their crimes.

The provocative lead-in to Kent A. Kiehl’s and Joshua W. Buckholtz’s article
Inside the Mind of a Psychopath
succeeds in drawing the reader’s attention with what many would consider an outrageous statement. But in their defense, scientists are reporting more and more evidence that points to links between brain abnormalities and violent behavior. But does it make them evil? And what is the correlation between such abnormalities and violent behavior? Do certain brain abnormalities guarantee violent behavior? Can understanding what is going on in the brains of psychopaths and coldblooded killers really justify a claim that they are “not bad?” Goodness and badness are moral judgments with sometimes tenuous links to the law. The debate about whether or not someone is bad or evil is not a scientific one. But the scientific findings, if they hold up, have serious legal implications.

Some people might shake their heads and dismiss murderous behavior as incomprehensible. And they may be content to look no further for explanations or for greater understanding. Others, when they hear about Jared, Eric, Sandy Hook Elementary School gunman Adam Lanza, and other mass murderers, quickly dismiss them as “psychos” or, more descriptively, “psycho killers.”

A “psycho” is a person “who behaves in a frightening or violent way,”

according to the primary definition offered by the Macmillan Dictionary. That could be a useful definition if it were limited to that meaning. In the minds of many, however, it merges with the second definition: “an offensive word for someone who has a mental illness.”

For readers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a psycho is “a deranged or psychopathic person—not used technically.” With a popular diagnosis like this brought out every time there is a mass shooting or other despicable act of violence, it’s not surprising the media asks over and over again in the wake of violent attacks: “How and why does this happen?” “Who’s responsible?” And it’s no wonder many people have little or no understanding of what motivates or drives the killers. The senselessness of such acts is so great, and so defies the logic of most people, that clumping them all together and dismissing them as the acts of “psychos” seems to make sense. In an easy way, it helps the public to make some sense of seemingly senseless crimes.