A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(62)
In one study, he looked at almost two hundred rampage shooters involved in events from 1966 to 2010. Almost half of them died by suicide as part of their attacks. Others may have intended to die, but were restrained or taken into custody before they had the chance. Truly suicidal or not, rampage shooters have less than a 1 percent chance of escaping the consequences of their actions. To plan an event with such a disastrously low chance of escape or survival implies what Lankford calls “life indifference.”
According to threat assessment experts, mass shooters almost always follow a discernible path to the shootings they commit. Recognizing the signposts on that path is the key to preventing these events. The pathway often begins with the desire to die.
For a long time, murder-suicide was viewed as a subset of murder, not of suicide. Some murder-suicides do correspond to the murder model, where suicide is a “plan B” turned to only when other escape options have failed. But a shifting understanding of suicide and a closer look at the data have revealed that many murder-suicides, if not the vast majority, have their genesis in suicidal thoughts. In other words, as Dr. Joiner writes, “If it can be shown that suicide is fundamental in murder-suicide, then suicide prevention is also murder-suicide prevention.”
In the case of Columbine, at least, I believe that is true. For years I searched for the missing integer, the piece of Dylan’s character that allowed him to do what he did. From what I’ve learned, I now believe the third segment of Dr. Joiner’s Venn diagram—the capability to die by suicide—provides part of the answer.
In his writings, Dylan takes comfort from the idea of death. But he does not seem to have the capability for suicide by himself.
As Dr. Joiner points out, people have to become desensitized to the violence and the fear of pain in order to be able to harm themselves. (He posits that this is why suicide rates are higher in populations routinely exposed to—and therefore inured to—pain and horror, such as doctors, soldiers, and people with anorexia.) Our natural instinct for survival is hardwired, and most people have to work themselves up to ignoring it over time.
Dylan couldn’t—by himself. He talks about suicide, but he does not by himself come up with a plan to do it. His writing about it, as it is about most things, is abstract. That paralysis is reflected throughout the journals. He wants a job working with computers, but he can’t get one or keep the one he gets. He talks over and over about the girl he has a crush on, but there is no evidence he made any advances toward her. He agonizes over the letter he writes to her, but doesn’t deliver it. In fact, there’s no evidence they ever spoke.
The same thing appears to be true for suicide, and he turns to Eric for help: “Soon….either ill commit suicide, or I’ll get w. [redacted girl’s name] & it will be NBK for us.” Dylan appears to have “needed” Eric’s homicidal plan in order to be able to do what he most wanted to do: die by suicide. Dr. Joiner suggested to me that planning with Eric for the rampage may have been part of the way Dylan rehearsed his own death. The preparations helped him to desensitize himself.
For years after the attack, I resisted blaming Eric for Dylan’s participation. I believed, as I still do at some level, that whatever hold Eric might have had over him, Dylan was still accountable for the choices he made. At one point, at least, he was separate enough and objective enough to tell me Eric was “crazy,” and ambivalent enough to try to get help to distance himself from the relationship.
Given what I have learned about psychopathy, I now feel differently. I find the violence and hatred seething off the page in Eric’s journals almost unreadably dark, but his writing is clear, whereas Dylan’s was not. As Dr. Langman puts it, “Dylan’s writing is jumbled, disorganized, and full of tangled syntax and misused words. Eric’s thoughts are disturbing; Dylan’s thought process is disturbed. The difference is in what Eric thinks and how Dylan thinks.”
We know Eric was overwhelmingly persuasive. His Diversion counselor, dismissing him early from the program, said at the end of her final report, “muy facile [sic] hombre,” which my Spanish-speaking friends translate as an affectionate characterization along the lines of “super-easy guy.” Eric’s perceived halo may have extended to Dylan, whose own grades weren’t good enough to justify his early dismissal from Diversion. A number of the psychologists I have spoken to have told me how scarily charismatic and charming psychopaths can be—how quick they are to find the wedge, and how masterfully they work the lever. I am not sure that Dylan, especially in an impaired state, was in a position to extricate himself from that relationship.
Dr. Randazzo has interviewed a number of would-be school shooters, intercepted before they could execute their terrible plans. She describes both their ambivalence and their tunnel vision. “When they reach that point of desperation, they’re looking for a way out. They can’t see any other options. They just don’t care.” Knowing this does not for a moment lessen Dylan’s culpability, but it may get us closer to an explanation of how he came to be there. Dr. Dwayne Fuselier, a clinical psychologist and the supervisor in charge of the FBI team during the Columbine investigation, told me, “I believe Eric went to the school to kill people and didn’t care if he died, while Dylan wanted to die and didn’t care if others died as well.”
CHAPTER 13