Portrait Of A Deadly Bond

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
REMEMBERING: The father of a victim destroyed the memorials for the two killers last weekend

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What Harris and Klebold shared, says Terra Oglesbee, who was in their creative-writing class too, was a poetic sensibility, "dark and sad. Their poems were always about plants dying and the sun burning out. Whenever I heard them, I would just plug my ears because I can't stand stuff like that." Dylan rarely read his work aloud, she says, but Eric "was very talkative. He was a really good writer. He would help me cheat sometimes, pass me answers in tests and stuff." Though she is African American, she never sensed the racism that spilled out against Isaiah Shoels during the massacre. Maybe that day they were role playing again.

Though Columbine students tagged Harris' group the Trench Coat Mafia, a name that suggests some level of organization when there was none, every high school has its intellectual outsiders. There are those who stand proudly (if at times longingly) apart from the pep rallies and the dating rituals of the cool kids, and those who are just hanging on until college delivers them from the tyranny of the good-looking and athletically gifted.

At Columbine, which has won 32 statewide sports championships in this decade, athletes and cheerleaders don't bother hiding that they are the elite. "It's the greatest school with the greatest kids," says golden-boy track and football star Scott Schulte. "We are perfect, and the atmosphere is perfect." Those who are imperfect tend to disagree. Columbine athletes, many of the non-athletes say, receive favorable treatment from school officials and often harass those on whom they look down. A number of Columbine students, who don't want to be named because they fear reprisals, described athletes routinely shoving, cursing and throwing rocks and bottles at Harris, Klebold and others. The school denies playing favorites, and jocks deny harassing anybody. The press, says Schulte, "believe anything these kids say. They tell you that the jocks picked on them, and you print it. It's ridiculous." Seven months ago, the sheriff's department warned the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners about growing violence in the Columbine area, including fighting by ganglike groups of athletes. School officials at the time called the report exaggerated.

Double standards and badgering, a number of Harris and Klebold friends say, helped drive them to bombs and bullets. No one is suggesting that getting picked on is an excuse for committing mass murder, but they call it the context for Harris and Klebold's rage. "Did they snap? I think they snapped a bunch of times," says Brooks Brown. "Every time someone slammed them against a locker and threw a bottle at them, I think they'd go back to Eric or Dylan's house and plot a little more--at first as a goof, but more and more seriously over time. It's a theory, but it makes sense to everyone who knew them."

The plotting seems to have begun in April 1998, but no one has yet been able to pinpoint what set it off. It was a tense time at Columbine, with fights brewing between jocks and skateboarders, jocks and Goths, and nearly everyone picking on the guys in the trench coats. Whatever the catalyst, the spring of that year marked a last turning point for Harris. The rage he had displayed on his website didn't abate, but it did go underground, as he honed his ability to fool authority figures, especially parents. "I'd say his parents were in denial, but the truth is, this kid was good," says Randy Brown. "He had a strong, manipulative personality. He could convince his dad of anything." After Harris cracked Brooks' car windshield with that ice ball last winter, for instance, Harris told his father that he thought he was throwing a harmless snowball. His dad believed him, but Judy Brown didn't. "You can pull the wool over your father's eyes," she told Eric, "but you can't pull it over mine." He pretended to be offended. "You calling me a liar?" he demanded. "Yes, I suppose I am," she said. Harris stomped away.

In March, according to Harris' website, he and Klebold were busy making their first pipe bombs. But they gave few clues to the people around them. Appearing before Jefferson County magistrate John DeVita on March 25, after being arrested for breaking into a car and stealing electronics equipment, Harris and Klebold made like latter-day Eddie Haskells: "Yes, Your Honor...No, Your Honor." That persuaded DeVita (who knew nothing of Harris' website) to agree to put them in a juvenile diversion program, and charges were dropped in return for their performing community service and enrolling in "anger management" classes.

A week after Harris yanked his venomous website offline, he had replaced it with an equally venomous secret diary--the one in which, authorities say, he plotted his campaign to take out Columbine High. The diary hasn't been made public. But in the months of late 1998 and early 1999, there were many preparations: guns to acquire, bombs to make, locations to scout, timing to perfect. In the fall of 1998, Klebold and Harris made a video for a class project--a video in which they dress in trench coats, carry guns and blow away jocks, a murderous fantasy stoking a murderous reality. For Klebold, the planning and prep may have taken on an abstract quality: something he and Harris talked about only to each other, something that fueled their relationship, something they would plan forever but that would never actually happen. Until it did happen.