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Uncovering Columbine

Chris Azzopardi

We thought we knew what happened: Two teens terrorized their Colorado high school in 1999, killing 13 people. Right. Then we speculated. The killers, part of the "Trench Coat Mafia," were bullied. They were goth. Maybe they were gay. One student was shot to death after proclaiming her faith in God. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong.
In "Columbine," Dave Cullen, an out journalist and author who lived in Southfield 20 years ago while working for EDS (of which he remembers, "bleak winters where the sun never comes out"), debunks myths of the massacre that shook America. It's a chilling, shocking, meticulously researched cautionary tale that's been heralded by critics – drawing comparisons to Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" – since it came out early last month.
We find out who the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, really were. What actually drove them to murder. And more about the lives – and the community – they killed. From his home in Denver, Cullen spoke with Between The Lines about what surprised him about Columbine, why he developed secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, and how he's ready to move on … to something gay.

A decade is a lot of time to spend on anything. Why were you so dedicated to Columbine?
I didn't know it was going to be 10 years, but I just had to get it right. And I got a couple of one-year extensions on my book contract, which made my editor and my agent nervous. It made my agent more than nervous. But I just told her, 'It's not ready. I need to do this with a pace that's right.' And there was so much material here, too. It was such a complex story. The first draft was 875 pages when I finished the whole thing (the final edit is about half of that), and there was still some missing parts here and there, so I had to write a whole lot more and get down – I don't know if I want to say the complete story, but a fuller story. I only had one shot on this material – and to these people, I felt a responsibility.

The book reveals a lot that we weren't aware of, debunking a lot of media speculation and rumors. What did you find most alarming while researching?
(Sigh) God. Early on, the 'Trench Coat Mafia' that had nothing to do with them was quite shocking and that it was primarly a bombing – that was just really shocking. They were trying to kill so many more people. That was early on. Late in the game, well, all those major rumors – that it wasn't about targeting jocks, that we had it so fundamentally wrong – our concept of these kids were as completely different people. Reading Dylan's journal, he just completely surprised me. I could not believe that there's all that stuff on love in there. The hearts (drawn) everywhere, and talking about being on a spiritual quest. All this stuff about good and evil and trying to be good and do the right thing. I was really shocked at who Dylan turned out to be. And what a sensitive, caring boy he turned out to be – with a long history of anger issues, obviously. But that wasn't the whole sum of who he was, and finding out that he was also a loving boy – god, that was scary. It was scarier that someone like that can end up murdering people. And it's also tragic that that didn't have to happen.

'Columbine' particularly shook me because when the shooting took place, I was still a high school student.
I'm definitely getting the strongest reactions from people in your age group. And yeah, some people who are in school now – although that kind of scares me (laughs). I've had 13- and 14-year-old kids come to the readings with their parents. I don't want to ask them how old they are, so I say, 'How old were you when this happened?' And they'll say, '3.' (I'm thinking), 'I'm not sure you should be reading this.'

While writing the book, because it's so detailed and it includes their entire failed plan, did you ever think that this could inspire more school shootings?
I didn't worry. I thought more about whether they would see Eric and Dylan as (people) to emulate psychologically. I didn't worry so much about the logistics, because there are so many places you can go online where it will tell you how to do that kind of thing. I was more concerned with just killers in general – and I still am. Although I also feel like, god, I'm not going to make Columbine anymore famous than it already is. It doesn't end well, even from their point of view. They seem to realize they had failed.

If they were gay, how would that have affected the gay community?
All I could see was the bad news of it undermining – making people even more fearful of them, thinking, 'These people are freaks; there's something wrong with them.'

I can only imagine what was going through your head during the 10 years you were working on this. How did writing this book affect you personally?
Learning about the killers, for the most part, turned out to be the easy part psychologically. Intellectually, that was the hard part – figuring out Eric and Dylan. But emotionally it wasn't so bad, especially doing Eric: It was just like studying a bug under a microscope. I didn't feel anything that I expected to. But covering the victims, especially the survivors – well, the survivors and Dave Sanders (the teacher killed in the shooting) – that was really the hard part. I was obsessed. Not obsessed, but I was consumed by the people dead, and that seemed the tragedy to me.
But the next morning, after I started spending time with those kids, the dead were obviously still the greatest tragedy, but there was nothing we could do about them. You can't bring back the dead. There was nothing we could do but grieve and say goodbye. But those kids? There were 2,000 kids left, and I didn't know what was going to happen to them, and I was really worried about them. From then on, my personal focus really shifted to them – and how and if they were going to get through this and who was going to help them. It really shook me up because I didn't know, and I had secondary post-traumatic stress disorder during that first year. I had a relapse two and a half years ago, after I wrote the Dave Sanders chapter, '1 Bleeding to Death,' which was really hard – and, oddly enough, the chapter on Dylan's funeral. Then there were four copycats in 10 days, and that whole period really did a number on me. I had another relapse where I couldn't really work for a month. I was depressed and just kind of a mess.

Was that part of the reason it took so long to write?
That's some of the reason. Things moved slowly. First of all, there were lots of things that weren't ready. We didn't have the killers' journals. The survivors hadn't finished living their story. We didn't resolve things – like the lawsuits were still pending, and also I think I just didn't have enough perspective on it. At the five-year point, I scrapped what I had been doing earlier and started with a whole new plan, a whole new concept for a whole different outline for the book, which I still ended up changing. Then I just needed five years to do all the work, to do all the research and I ditched – I started over on page one.

I know you've tackled gays in the military ('Don't ask, don't tell, don't fall in love,' Salon.com, 2000) before, and you won a GLAAD Media Award for your coverage. Do you plan on tackling more gay issues down the line?
I want to do some more on gays in the military, actually, and I've always thought of doing a follow-up on those guys. One of them is out now. (Laughs) I mean, out of the military. The Marine, he got out – god, time slips by – maybe three years ago. The other two are still in. They're lieutenant colonels. I've done some work on some other pieces. I was working on a profile of James Dobson that never got published. I won't use the name, but I was contracted to do it for a very left-wing publication, and my profile of him was far too kind. They did not like it. I was fascinated by what I had learned and their (Evangelicals) views on gays, and it's really interesting to me that once you develop a relationship with someone in that community – interviewing them, getting to know them, like some of the ones from Columbine – it's very hard for them to attack gays with the same fervor after that. A lot of them don't know any gays.

What's next for you?
I've started a few different things. I wanted to know before I finished this book – before it came out – that I had a couple of things in progress that I could come back to. It gives me a sense of security as a writer to not have that, 'Oh, no! What am I gonna do next?' feeling. I'm kind of itching to work again. I definitely don't want to spend my life on Columbine. Ten years was enough.

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