Steve has written a paper this semester titled “(NO) Crazies with Guns!”: “I have only five words for you: From my cold, dead hands. Those words spoken by Charlton Heston, and immortalized by the popular press, have come to symbolize the pro-gun lobby’s arguably firm and unshakeable ideology with respect to their opposition to anti-gun (whether real of perceived) legislation. With that being said, what if those so-called cold, dead hands happen to not only contain a firearm, but also a half-filled bottle of anti-psychotic drugs?” Steve thinks it’s outrageous he’s able to buy a gun.
In December, Steve is excited about AK-47s, which are more plentiful now in the United States. He seems reluctant, though, to buy a firearm illegally. The AK-47 was Purdy’s choice for the schoolchildren in Stockton, California, on January 17, 1989, the day Ted Bundy was going to be electrocuted. A media stunt, stealing Bundy’s fire. Nearly four hundred children were on the playground when Purdy bent his knees, braced the gun against his hip, and started sweeping back and forth with 7.62-millimeter bullets from a seventy-five-round drum magazine. He killed six-year-olds, eight-year-olds. The bullets had enough velocity to blast clear through the walls of the main school building. “They’re just very cool guns,” Steve tells Jessica. He knows about Purdy, and they have some similarities, including a similar racism and libertarianism, fueled by anger at the federal government. They’re both poor, both obsessive-compulsive, violent in the past, run-ins with police, mental health problems, interested in Hezbollah, in horror movies. The similarities go on and on, actually. Mass murderers study each other, learn tips and tricks, help push each other over the edge. Virginia Tech helped prepare Steve, and then there will be another event, an execution-style murder of five in Chicago, that will provide the final turning point for Steve’s shooting at NIU.
Steve and Jessica buy RockBand as an early apartment Christmas gift. They stay up for five hours one night playing it. Good fun.
Christmas 2007. Steve and Jessica drive to Susan’s house. Cold out, and Steve wants to see his father, who is visiting from Florida, but he’s vowed he’ll never see Susan again. So Jessica walks to the door alone.
They take his father to a restaurant and this goes fine. They talk about school and how they’ve liked moving to Champaign. Then Steve wants to talk about how Susan has been pressuring his dad to sell his house and move back to Illinois. He tells his dad it’s okay to stay in Lakeland. He shouldn’t be pressured. Steve wants him to be happy. Susan shouldn’t be trying to control his life.
The discussion is a bit tense. They switch the subject to Vegas, maybe going there in August. Then they go to Steve and Jessica’s apartment, exchange gifts. They give his dad the first season of The Sopranos, watch a couple episodes together. It seems like it all goes well, but afterward, they need to drop his father off at Susan’s.
Steve doesn’t go to the door, but he sends along his present for Susan. It’s a box of coal. Jessica laughed when he first told her, but she doesn’t think it’s funny now. He actually has a box of coal for Susan, wrapped in Christmas paper. After the shootings, Susan will tell police she’s surprised he didn’t come to kill her.
Two days after Christmas, Steve goes to Tony’s Guns and Ammo, buys a Hi-Point.380, which he’ll take to Cole Hall, and a 12-gauge shotgun. It’s possible this is when he decides to do the shootings, though I believe the decision comes later, on February 3. But by Christmas, he’s estranged from his family, and he isolates himself from his friends. Joe Russo tries to contact him around New Year’s and doesn’t hear back until February 12, two days before the shooting. Mark can’t reach him for a couple weeks but receives a response on January 10: “Long time no chat,” Steve writes. “Lot’s been going on. Suppose I owe you an explanation for my disappearance. I had some family issues to deal with over the last few weeks, but I have distanced myself from the drama recently. Family, as you know, is a complex thing, and I’ve never had any kind of healthy relationship with mine. So why bother resolving 20-year issues when I’m out on my own? Not worth it.”
“I never understood the extent of the issues,” Mark says now, “because I didn’t want to pry into his life.”
~ ~ ~
ON JANUARY 7, 2008, Steve pays $395 for a tattoo of a pentagram, upside down star, sign of the devil. Jessica will tell police later that it’s not that, it’s just “antiestablishment.” And what does that really mean? Is wanting to topple a real government less dangerous than wanting to align with a fictive being?
On January 11, Steve’s back in touch with Kelly by email. She took the breaking up well in November, said it was a good thing, even:
“It’s basically like we are both standing in a road and there’s. . oh let’s say. . a Greyhound bus barreling towards us. You’re the one who looks at the bus coming closer and says ‘Hmm. . I have been hit by a bus before, and it sucked. I should move.’ Unfortunately, I am the one who ends up standing in the road alone, staring at the bus and saying ‘Well, I have been hit by a bus before, and I don’t want to go through that again. However, maybe this time it won’t hurt so much. . I’m not sure if I want to take the chance or not.’ So. . what I’m saying is that in this situation, you had to be the one to shove me out of the road! It’s really better for both of us in the end. .
“As for CL [Craigslist], I haven’t met anyone since and don’t plan to anymore. . I’m giving up on all that and have decided to actually let my vagina grow shut, as mentioned in my original rant.:) Too many weirdos. I know you worry about me, as I do also worry about you too (especially when I don’t hear from you in days).”
In his email on January 11, Steve apologizes to Kelly: “Please don’t take any offense that I didn’t email you, as I had some family issues that needed to be sorted out, which is why I haven’t responded or been in touch. I’ve always been good at disappearing like that, and I apologize. Also, I got too attached to you initially for a supposed CE [Casual Encounter, a section on Craigslist], but hopefully you understand. What can I say? You were fantastic.”
Kelly responds positively, as usual, and they keep exchanging emails. “Thanks for not holding a grudge against me,” he writes. “Really, I’m a nice guy but can be a little odd at times. Stay macabre.”
Steve sends Kelly a link for a joke song on YouTube, titled “I wanna be like Osama,” that has a few odd echoes for the coming fame of his own mass murders only three weeks away now: “I know people will abhor me, but my God they won’t ignore me.” He tells her about “a religious right nutcase campaign to protest military funerals; their intent being to tie military deaths in Iraq to acts of god due to the United States (and their military, by proxy) supporting (or at least not opposing) homosexuality.” He’s gay and was in the military, but Kelly doesn’t know. She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t, and this is the case for everyone else in his life, too, except maybe Jessica, who is in such deep denial she might as well not know.