The killers were quickly cast as outcasts and “fags.”
“They’re freaks,” said an angry sophomore from the soccer team. “Nobody really liked them, just’cause they—” He paused, then plunged ahead. “The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them.”
Several jocks reported having seen the killers and friends “touching” in the hallways, groping each other or holding hands. A football player captivated reporters with tales of group showering.
The gay rumor was almost invisible in the media, but rampant in Clement Park. The stories were vague. Everything was thirdhand. None of the storytellers even knew the killers. Everyone in Clement Park heard the rumors; most of the students saw through them. They were disgusted at the jocks for defaming the killers the same way in death as they had in life. Clearly, “gay” was one of the worst epithets one kid could hurl against another in Jeffco.
Eric and Dylan’s friends generally shrugged off the stories. One of them was outraged. “The media’s taken my friends and made them to be gay and neo-Nazis and all these hater stuff,” he said. “They’re portraying my friends as idiots.” The angry boy was a brawny six-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants. He ranted for several hours, and he was soon all over the national press—sometimes looking a bit ridiculous. He stopped talking. His father began screening media calls.
A few papers mentioned the gay rumors in passing. Reverend Jerry Falwell described the killers as gay on Rivera Live. A notorious picketer of gay funerals issued a media alert saying, “Two filthy fags slaughtered 13 people at Columbine High.” Most significantly, the Drudge Report quoted Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks. But most major media carefully sidestepped the gay rumor.
The press failed to show similar deference to Goths. Some of the most withering attacks were reserved for that group: a morose-acting subculture best known for powder-white face paint and black clothes, black lips, and black fingernails, accented by heavy, dripping mascara. They were mistakenly associated with the killers on Tuesday by students unfamiliar with the Goth concept. Equally clueless reporters amplified the rumor. One of the most egregious reports was an extended 20/20 segment ABC aired, just one night after the attack. Diane Sawyer introduced it by noting that unnamed police said “the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before.” It was true, Goths had killed before—as had members of every conceivable background and subculture.
Correspondent Brian Ross described a double murder committed by Goths and two ghastly attempts in graphic detail. He presented them as evidence of a pattern: a Goth crime wave poised to sweep through suburbia and threaten us all. “The so-called Gothic movement has helped fuel a new kind of teenage gang—white suburban gangs built around a fascination with the grotesque and with death,” he said. He played other examples, as well as a horrifying 911 tape of a victim calling for help with a knife still protruding from his chest. “Hurry,” he pleaded. “I’m not going to last too much longer.” Ross described the killers in that case as “proud, self-proclaimed members of the Gothic movement, and like the students involved in yesterday’s shootings, focused on white extremism and hate.”
The only real problems with Ross’s report were that Goths tended to be meek and pacifist; they had never been associated with violence, much less murder; and, aside from long black coats, they had almost nothing in common with Eric and Dylan.
Where it avoided snap conclusions, much of the reporting was first rate. The Rocky passed on most of the myths, and it, the Post, and the Times ran excellent bios on the killers. On TV, several correspondents helped survivors convey their stories with empathy, dignity, and insight. Katie Couric was a particular standout. And several papers tried to rein in the Goth scare. “Whatever the two young men in Colorado might have imagined themselves to be, they weren’t Goths,” a USA Today story began. “The morose community, much too diffuse to be called a movement, is at its heart quiet, introverted and pacifistic… Goths tend to be outcasts, not because they are violent or aggressive, but the opposite.”
Thursday, a young Goth from a nearby school showed up in Clement Park. Andrew Mitchell was a striking sight, standing alone in a foot of snow. Black on black on white on white. Jet-black hair cut long on top, shaved on the sides, bare skin above his ears. A silver-and-blue support ribbon pinned to his black lapel. The densely packed crowd parted. A ten-foot perimeter opened up around him. Reporters rushed in.
“Why are you here!” one demanded.
“To pay my respects,” Mitchell said. Then he offered a plea: “Picture these kids, for years being thrown around, treated horribly. After a while you can’t stand it anymore. They were completely wrong. But there are reasons for why they did it.”
Mitchell was wildly mistaken about the killers’ lives and their intentions. But it was already the pervasive assumption. The massacre brought widespread tales of alienation out into the open. Salon published a fascinating piece called “Misfits Who Don’t Kill.” It consisted of first-person accounts from rational adults who had shared similar fantasies but lived to avoid them. “I remember sitting in biology class trying to figure out how much plastic explosive it might take to reduce the schoolhouse—my biggest source of fear and anxiety—to rubble,” one man wrote. “I scowled at those who teased me, and I had fantasies of them begging me for mercy, maybe even with a gun in their mouths. Was I a sick person? I don’t think so. I’m sure there were thousands of other students who had the same fantasies I did. We just never acted on them.”
The more animosity reporters sensed, the deeper they probed. What was it like to be an outcast at Columbine? Pretty hard, most of the kids admitted. High school was rough. Most of the students in Clement Park were still speaking confessionally, and everyone had a brutal experience to share. The “bullying” idea began to pepper motive stories. The concept touched a national nerve, and soon the anti-bullying movement took on a force of its own. Everyone who had been to high school understood what a horrible problem it could be. Many believed that addressing it might be the one good thing to come out of the tragedy.
All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. “Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school’s athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week’s deadly violence,” it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.
There’s no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High. After the tragedy, Mr. D took a lot of flak for bullying, particularly since he insisted he was unaware it had gone on.
“I’m telling you, as long as I’ve been an administrator here, if I’m aware of a situation, then I deal with that situation,” he said. “And I believe our teachers, and I believe our coaches. I turned my own son in. I believe that strongly in rules.”
That may have been part of his downfall. Mr. D did believe that strongly in the rules. He held his staff to the same standard, and seemed to believe they would meet it. His unusual rapport with the kids also created a blind spot. It was all smiles when Mr. D strode down the corridor. They sincerely warmed at the sight of him, and sought to please him as well. Sometimes he mistook that joy for pervasive bliss in his high school.