Even after the murders, one of Dylan’s classmates agreed. “It’s a creative-writing class,” she told the Rocky Mountain News. “You write about what you want. Shakespeare wrote all about death.” The girl was not a friend of the killers’.
But Kelly knew she had picked up on something different. She had seen boys captivated by violence. She had read innumerable accounts of murder. She had never been confronted with a story this sadistic. It was not just a question of the events in the story but the attitude of the author conveying them. Dylan had a gift for bringing a scene to life: he conveyed action, thought, and feeling. A creepy, merciless feeling. Kelly described the story as “literary and ghastly—the most vicious story I ever read.”
Kelly brought it to Dylan’s school counselor, Brad Butts. He talked to Dylan, who downplayed it again. Good enough.
Kelly had done the right thing: she’d contacted the three people most likely to have other information about Dylan: his guidance counselor and his parents. If the counselor or parents knew Dylan had been setting off pipe bombs and showing them around at Blackjack Pizza, they could have connected fantasy with reality and NBK might have come to an end. They did not. Jeffco investigators had most of the pieces. Most of the adults close to the killers were in the dark.
In his journal, Dylan returned to his love obsession. He wanted to get to godliness, but he had been seeking for two horrible years now and none of his dreams had come true. Eric offered hope. Eric offered the very feelings Dylan was searching for. Eric offered reality, of all things.
Maybe seeking was a sham.
Dylan wasn’t quite ready to embrace murder. He would fight it almost until the end. But from here on, he was close.
He would take the short story with him on April 20. It was found in Dylan’s car, alongside the failed explosives, to be torn to bits in his final act. The car was slated for destruction, so Dylan didn’t bring the story for our benefit. Perhaps he needed a little courage that day. Perhaps he wanted to read it one last time.
It was time for target practice. They picked a beautiful spot. The place was called Rampart Range: a winding network of unpaved roads through rugged national forest in the Rockies, not too far from Dylan’s house. For their first extended gunplay, they picked an area set aside for dirt bikers and joyriding on ATVs. An off-roading Web site urged readers to experience the vistas slowly: “let your imagination run wild as the boulders take on ever-changing faces.”
Three friends went with them on March 6: Mark Manes and Phil Duran, who had teamed up to get Dylan the TEC-9, and Mark’s girlfriend, Jessica. They brought the guns acquired for the attack, and their friends had a couple more. They packed bowling pins stolen from Belleview Lanes to use as targets. And they took a camcorder. It was important to document historic events.
It was cold up there, still plenty of snow on the ground. They dressed sensibly, in layers. Eric and Dylan started with their trench coats on, but worked up a sweat and shed them. They had ear protection and eye gear. Some of the time they wore it.
They shot a bowling pin full of lead, and then Eric had another idea. He aimed his shotgun at an imposing pine five feet away. He missed. And it hurt. The gun had a vicious recoil, which his arm had to absorb. Every inch you cut a shotgun back magnifies the kick. Eric and Dylan had cut theirs back ridiculously short, almost to the chamber, and now they were going to pay.
He directed Dylan to follow. “Try to hit a tree,” he said. “I want to see what a slug does to the tree.”
Dylan punched a two-inch wide hole in the trunk. They rushed forward to inspect the damage. Eric dug his finger around and produced a pellet.
“That’s a fucking slug!” Dylan squealed.
Eric’s voice was subdued. “Imagine that in someone’s fucking brain.”
“It hurt my wrist, the son of a bitch!” Dylan said.
“I bet so.”
Dylan was laughing now. “Look at that! I’ve got blood now!” He loved it.
Eric kept working the human metaphor. He picked up a bowling pin with a small hole drilled through the front and a crater out the back. He showed off each side to the camera: “Entry wound, exit wound.” His buddy laughed, but he didn’t understand. He got the little joke, missed the big one. The battle was already under way around him. Eric loved foreshadowing. Everyone there was implicated. Only two could see.
Most of the time they worked methodically to improve their skills. One kid would fire while another stood beside him, calling out results to make real-time adjustments: “High to the right… low to the left… left again…”
Single-barrel shotguns require a reload every round, and that would seriously impact the body count. Eric prepared by drilling himself in a rapid shoot-and-load technique. Every shot was punishing. The blast would tear the barrel out of his left hand and whip his gun arm back like a rubber band. But he learned quickly. Soon he was riding out the recoil to catch the barrel-stub as it swung around, snap it open, feed a shell, lock it down, squeeze a round, and repeat the process in one fluid, continuous motion. He pounded out four shots in five seconds. He was pleased.
It had all been theoretical up to that point: How much damage could they really do with that gun? They had their answer now. Eric was a killing machine.
Eric and Dylan approached the camera to show off their war wounds: large patches of skin scraped off between thumb and forefinger, where they needed to work on tightening their grip.
“When high school kids use guns,” somebody said. Everybody laughed.
Manes tried Eric’s gun, and winced at that handgrip. “You should round that out,” he advised.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “I’m gonna work on that.”
They fired more and showed the wounds again: bloodier, more severe. “Guns are bad,” Manes said. “When you saw them off and make them illegal, bad things happen to you.” That got lots more laughs. “Just say no to sawed-off shotguns.”
They were on a roll now. Eric grabbed hold of his gun barrel and mugged for the camera. He spanked the firing assembly several times. “Bad!”
Dylan waved his index finger at it. “No! No! No!”
Dr. Fuselier watched the Rampart video a few days after the massacre. It showed the final progression from fantasy to fact. It had been a two-year evolution from frivolous prankster missions to a series of esclating thefts. Eric was turning into a professional criminal. He had crossed the mental hurdle from imagining crimes to committing them. This was how it would feel.
The boys continued training. They made three target-practice trips with Manes.
Dylan leaked again. He had been excited about his weapons, and sometime in February, he told Zack he had gotten something “really cool.”
Like what?
Something in Desperado, Dylan said—a violent film they thought Quentin Tarantino directed.
Zack confronted him: It was a gun, wasn’t it?
Yeah, a double-barreled shotgun, Dylan said, just like the piece in Desperado. Eric had gotten one, too. And they had fired them. Freaking wild!
They never spoke about it again, Zack told the FBI later.
49. Ready to Be Done
Mr. D knew the date his mission would wrap: May 18, 2002. He had one objective after the massacre: to shepherd nearly two thousand kids to emotional high ground. The last class of freshmen would graduate that May.