Columbine high school in 1999. Host dave cullen, who are eric and dylan . Guest eric and dylan were the two killers at columbine. And eric was a psychopath, and dylan was not. They were completely different can people. And, you know, as i spent ten years on this book, and the question i get asked the most often is why did they do it. And it took me about a year to figure out thats really the wrong question, at least in the wrong direction, because theres eric and why he did it, and theres dylan, and theyre completely different people. So you want to talk about each one of them . So eric was a psychocopath, classic. Host eric harris. Guest yes. And he was the mastermind of the plot. And he spent a couple years trying to figure out how he could destroy the entire world. That was his real fantasy, as a 16yearold boy. Wipe out humanity, always to leave three or four or five people because to a psychopath, the power of life as well as death makes him all the more powerful. A god can give life as well as take it away. Theyre not delusional where they think theyre god, but theyre as important as god. So the key thing with a psychopath is no compassion, no empathy, no regard for the welfare of others for anything. If specifically with nonviolation, because its meeting their own needs. Crooked politicians, ponzi schemes, you might be able to think of a few recent ones that come to mind. Thats a classic psychopath, someone who would destroy other peoples lives, destroy a state or a country for material gain on their own part. Thats a psychopath. Typically nonviolent. But when the person has a sadistic streak too, then you typically get a ted bundy, a Jeffrey Dahmer or an eric harris. So thats the mold he comes from. Then do you want to talk about dylan . Dylan is completely different. Host Dylan Klebold. Guest yes. Polar opposite personality. Dylan went along with the plan, but he was not driving it. And when you look at their journals, erics journal is filled with hate, hate, hate all the way through. It starts out ill clean up one word, but the opening line is i hate the fing world. And its on every page. He started out wanting to kill, and he ended up killing over the course of the year. But with dylan, hes completely different. He spent two years, dylan spent two years doing his, writing his journal, and the most common word in his journal is love. Its completely unexpected. To me, dylan was the revelation in this case. He was a loving, sensitive boy with a whole lot of anger, but his anger was mostly directed inward. It was all angry at himself for being such a loser, such an outcast. He wasnt. It was objectively untrue, but thats how he saw it. Dylan tried so hard loving the world and felt that the world wasnt loving him back. In gradually he takes a really slow evolution. He was depressive. He was diagnosed as a classic, but that doesnt really tell you enough. The interesting thing is watching for two years how this kid, who looks like he would never kill, under the influence of eric harris gradual wily turns that anger thats turned inward out at the rest of the world. And ine stead of blaming me, its blaming all the rest of you people did this to me, and im going to take a lot of you with me and show you on the way out. So dylan still committed suicide but took a lot of people with him. Host in your book, columbine, you write dylans mind raced night and day analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was 15, he had tagged along on the missions. He was erics number one goto guy and none of that mattered. What were the missions . Guest well, the missions were, there were really early symptom of something going awry. Their sophomore year eric and dylan started just doing they were just pranks, but eric called them missions because he was grandiose about everything. He saw them as this big thing where were showing people, you know, how bright we were. They were just setting up firecrackers, then they got nastier like supergluing mailboxes shut and so forth. Whats interesting to me about the mission is that you see a progression with eric going from petty vandal to petty thief, to felony theft, to murder. He didnt just start out a mass murderer. He had his own gradual criminal progression where if he hadnt done Something Like columbine, its pretty clear he would have become a career criminal of some sort. Theres the sadistic streak, so he wanted to kill people for very simple reasons, for his own aggrandizement and because he enjoyed it. He wanted to have fun and he wanted to show us. You know, i would say its understanding a psychopath, it doesnt take a whole lot to understand what one is. Its a very simple its hard to believe that its true, that somebody will kill someone. He wanted to kill hundreds of people, but for the most petty gains. For himself, that was enough. Host april 20, 1999, was the date of columbine, the massacre at the high school there. But eric started planning this in 997. Guest yes. Host how did you discover that . Guest well, they kept lots of records. Eventually, after a sevenyear legal battle, Jefferson County released nearly a thousand pages of writings that the killers left. They each left a journal. They left school assignments, also eric wrote on his web site about all he wanted to do, and then they made videotapes explaining themselves. In the last month, they decided that wasnt enough. So the fbi agent on the case is a major character. Hes sort of unwinding the detective story. He said host what was his name . Guest supervisory special agent duane [inaudible] very famous hostage negotiator, brilliant psychologist, you know . Took over the case. But he said in his entire fbi career, hed never seen a killer who died leaving this much material explaining themself. So we have an extraordinary amount of information together, and i spent the last several years sort of digging through all this information and talking with various psychiatrists and psychologists that the fbi brought in on the case to understand them. Its very clear cut once youve dug the through the information. Its hard to make out their handwriting, it took quite a while to sort of be able to decipher what they were doing. But once you understand that psychological condition, its a lot easier to understand them too. You really have to understand what a psychopath is and how they tick to really understand how to interpret eric so it doesnt just sound like the ravings he follows a very classic pattern. Host did wayne and kathy harris recognize that eric was in trouble . Guest that he was troubled and that he got in trouble. They had no idea the extent of trouble. And almost nobody recognizes a psychopath. If you think about somebody like hannibal elector, you have to elector, you have to throw up a hollywood version. Youd be the last person in the world to know theyre a psychopath. The first classic book that was published in the 1930s, the book was titled the mask of sanity because there are two clusters of characteristics of a psychopath. One is their total lack of empathy, their lack of compassion for everybody, for anyone. But he decided the even more important characteristic was the ability to disguise that lack of empathy as if wearing a mask. Psychopaths are nearly always charming. Their the people theyre the people we turn to to trust. Theyre the person, the person you turn to for help. That is most likely the psychopath. Thats how good they are. So parents never recognize they have a psychopath in the house, and the harris parents knew that eric was acting out, that hed gotten in trouble sometimes. They were having him see a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist put him on zoloft. That wasnt strong enough. They disciplined him strongly. They knew they had a kid acting out, but they had no idea why. And i want to throw out one other idea for people to consider. Eric was gobbling up shakespeare, writing papers on king lear and macbeth, your pip d. C euripides. And he would write the most amazing apologies. So youve got a kid, he acts up, sometimes he gets in trouble, and when he explains himself, he shows deep, utter remorse. He quotes shakespeare when hes talking to you and how in king lear he learned a similar thing there. You will give a kid like that a lot of latitude. Youve got a brilliant kid who seem to be doing really well. Sometimes he gets in trouble, he acts out. They knew they had a problem child, but what kind of parent thinks, god, he acts out sometimes, i wonder if hes considering mass murder . Host did sue and tom klebold recognize anything in dylan . Guest they recognized depression. They knew he was depressed. They had no idea how bad it was, that it was that extreme. They didnt know he was suicidal. He talked for two years in his journal about suicide. They also knew that they had a really shy kid and he had been painfully shy since he was a little kid. And when he went to high school, he felt like a fish out of water. Hed been in the Gifted Program in grade school, really enjoyed it there. It was a small cluster of kids where it was cool to be a brain, but he went to high school, and he felt awkward there. He didnt talk the people right away until he got to know them. They knew he was struggling, but they had no idea it was that bad. Hes like a lot of teenage kids. I think thats kind of the scary thing about columbine is that Dylan Klebold was such a Typical High School kid. And a kid like that gets involved with an eric harris, that could happen in any high school in america. Host but you write in your book that eric harris was very, well, typical, i guess. He had a lot of girlfriends, he was smart, he had friends. Guest eric was, he led a typical life. But psychopaths really lead a double life. Whats going on on the inside, whether theyre planning to rip you off or planning to kill you, they lead a life as their cover. Its what they need to do to, you know, think of a ted bundy. He was working on the crisis hotline, you know, helping suicide people, and its all just this cover. Like, he wasnt interested in helping other people, but thats what they do. So eric was feigning a normal life and building it as a cover. Meanwhile, very Different Things going on inside. Host who is kathy bernal . Guest we believe she was the Christian Martyr who said she believed in god. It became one of the biggest stories, one of the biggest redemption stories. There are a lot, and i try to go through a lot of them, some great, uplifting things. That particular one didnt happen, and it was a misunderstanding. The story went that kathy was hiding underneath a table, and the killer came up, asked her if she believed in god at gunpoint, she said yes and then was killed. Worldwide there was sort of a following of her. Turned out there were two girls in the library involved. What happened with kathy is she was hiding underneath a table, praying for her life. Eric walked up to table, what canned it with hi whacked it wiz hand, put the nose of the shotgun under the lip of the table and shot her in the head. She died instantly, never had a chance to say anything. Terribly tragically. Meanwhile, in another part of the library there was a second girl, val, who dylan shot with a shotgun, and she was hit with a lot of the blast. She had pellets up and down her body. She was bleeding, crawling away. Dylan came across her and started taunting her. Asked her if she believed in god, she said yes. Actually had an exchange. He didnt care who lived or died, he just let her go. So she lived to tell. And shes fine which is also an uplifting story, actually, a girl thats asked if she believes in god professes her faith and lives. But there was another boy under one of the tables who overheard this, didnt know either of them, and somehow mistakenly thought that it was kathy who had said it. He started telling people, completely honester mistake. The story spread, the worth went, and we reporters never really did our job of checking in and asking grieving victims, how do you know it was kathy . How well did you know her . Do you recognize her voice . Those kinds of tough questions. We ran with the story and allowed it to become one of the biggest myths of columbine. Host speaking of myths, there was a headline in the denver post a day after or two days after, and this is the actual denver post from that day. Healing begins. April 22, 1999. Why is this a myth, in your view . Guest well, i think that was an unfortunate thing that they regretted, and everyone involved with columbine regrets because if i could give one piece of advice to future communities who go through these tragedies, dont rush the healing. And when you talk to any Mental Health workers or even any pastors who have done funerals or work with grieving people, it takes months and years for people to deal with their grief, and we sort of tried rushing them into it. Okay, its been a day and a half. Heal now. You know, youve got a couple weeks and then back on this. Many of the people really didnt start understanding their own grief until a year or more out. The crisis group that was brought into the high school to deal with students with posttraumatic stress disto order and so forth, they didnt even start to reach their peak utilization until six months out and stayed at that peak level for a year and a half. So trying to take a grieving person a day and a half after and say, okay, start Getting Better now, theyre not ready to get better yet, and we really need to back off and give them space because they felt terribly rushed into it. And they felt resentful for years because of that. Host dave cullen, how did you approach the writing of this book . Guest the writing, well, it took me several tries. My first took a stab at a book about a year out, a year after columbine. It was going to be a small ebook, and i approached it that way at that time just based on the killers and also unraveling the myths. There were so many myths, most of what we think we know about columbine is wrong. The basic things about them. So i was trying to unravel those myths, and i actually wrote the first draft as myself a protagonist and kind of a detective story of what really happened at chum bind. Meanwhile, i was columbine. Meanwhile, i was trying to understand the killers better and really understand what happened to them. That took me a couple years, and the story just wasnt ready. It was really at the fiveyear point where i published a piece in slate called the depressive and the psychopath where we have the fbi team for the first time diagnose the killers, and i started over at that point and said i wanted the before story and the after story. The before story the of the killers, how they involved into killers because this was such a gradual process, and its so interesting to see how they developed. And then i wanted to do the after story, the victims and survivors, what these killers did to them. And so i, you get both stories simultaneously, but i wrote them separately. I wrote all of the eric story at one point over five months, then all the dylan story after nearly five months, and when i was working on eric, all i did every day was read his journal, listen to music he listened to, watch the films he liked, immerse myself in his world, then write about him, talk with the psychiatrist about him trying to work out puzzles that i didnt understand about him, just complete eric immersion for five months. And the same thing with dylan. And i actually got depressed unexpectedly writing the dylan story. I ended up kind of channeling some of his personality. I didnt i wasnt able to, i think, convey dylans depression and his loneliness until i got that way myself. And what i tried to do was not sit here if i was describing you, not sit here and say youre in a chair, youre wearing a white shirt, i tried to turn the camera around and be inside you and project what the world looked like to you, what you were seeing, thinking, and present each of the killers and the characters in this book as if from the inside. Thats what i intended to do. Host when you say you got depressed about dylan, how serious . Guest well, not serious, that wasnt actually the word the more serious was writing about the victims, actually. I had secondary posttraumatic stress disorder which is what emt workers, medical workers, sometimes cops get dealing with tragedies. I had that in the first year, and i thought i was fine with it. I got a relapse seven and a half years in when i wrote two of the most difficult chapters. I wrote the chapter about [inaudible] for over three hours. Host hope sanders. Guest the heroic teacher who died saving children. And then bled to death, tragically. Hes one of the main characters in the book. Theres a lot of uplifting stuff about him in the book. But that was the hardest to write. And then unexpectedly, the chapter about dylans funeral can and his parents and their grief hit me. And shortly after that, there was a wave of copycat shootings. There were four in ten days. There wases the amish shooting in pennsylvania and there was one very close to columbine in colorado. And i sort of, i couldnt take that, and for about a month i couldnt work and was pretty bad shape. But it helped to have studied posttraumatic stress disorder for the book and understand it. I was still naively slow to understand my own situation and that i needed to get help. But at least once i did, i was like, oh, you know, im suffering from what ive been writing about, you know . Do the same things as these people, get help. And it helped that i had spent time with some of the worlds foremost authorities like a doctor whos in the book who id spent a lot of time with was on the committee who created the diagnosis about 30 years ago, one of the worlds leading authorities on it. And i almost never do this with a source, but i had gotten to know him, i actually called him x he talked me through it for about an hour on the phone. Id been going to a psychologist myself, but frank really helped me. He understood. He was an expert on columbine, had been through it, so he understood me and that got me through it. So there were a couple dark days, but i also loved writing the book, i love writing, so, you know, i dont want to complain about my job. I love doing what i do. But there were some tough periods during this book. Host well, talk to us a little bit about some of the survivors and victims families. Guest okay. Yeah, the survivors and victims, theyre all across the map. And one of them i also wanted to dispel the myth of the idea of the universal victim or the universal response. One of the things that bothers me, with all due respect to victims, whenever i see when theres a plane crash or some other tragedy that gets a lot of news coverage, when theyre interviewing victims, very frequently theyll slip into the second person, and theyll start saying when you first hear the thud, you panic. And i think a lot of us, weve internalized this idea that theres this universal response. And now that ive been through this i think, you know, i wouldnt say this to a person on the plane, but i start thinking i bet theres somebody behind you who didnt panic at all, i bet theres somebody on that plane that got exhilarated and thought, wow, this is kin