Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  Questioned about her family, Sandra told me that her father had been a sensitive, sweet person who enjoyed doing things for her and whom she adored. He had died suddenly just before she had graduated from high school. Her mother?

  “A saint—a real saint,” Sandra said. “She is kind, patient, never critical. When I was at home, my mother always enjoyed doing things for me and giving me things.”

  Here, then, is a young woman who came from a loving home, who is in love and is loved in return, who is bright, is intelligent, is attractive, has a deep interest in music and yet is an emotional cripple. Why should she suffer so much from, and devote so much of her attention to, an almost overpowering fear of death?

  We had to examine closely her childhood, the parental attitudes to which she was exposed and the child of the past she carries with her now. She grew up in a good family with wonderful parents who made the mistake of catering to her. When she had fears as a youngster, her mother cuddled her and did everything possible to shield her from the fears. But, as Sandra could recall after we had talked at some length, her mother would be exasperated with her when she was fearful.

  What it really came down to was that Sandra had been subjected to three principal practices as a child: overindulgence, including coddling of her fears; oversubmission to her fearful whims; and overt belittling on the part of her mother—and sister as well—shown through exasperation and resentment toward her fears.

  Now, as an adult, Sandra had continued to treat herself with the same attitudes and practices. She coddled her fears, which only tended to strengthen them. She belittled herself resentfully. Her long-term pattern of being indulged, both by herself and by her mother, stood in the way of developing self-discipline. Her lack of self-discipline made it virtually impossible for her to control herself, particularly when she was fearful.

  She had to face the fact that as long as she continued to treat herself indulgently, she would have fears; they and indulgence had always gone hand in hand.

  There was nothing really mysterious about her phobia about death. It had grown out of her past conditioning and was being continued because she had continued to follow the conditioning. She would have to develop discipline. She would have to let the fears come, understand their origin, make sure she didn’t belittle herself about them and then continue to do what she was going to do, whether she had fears or not. As an adult, she couldn’t let the child inside force her to make activity decisions based on fears.

  Not long afterward, Sandra decided to do what her fiancé had long urged: get married. She became so busy with the wedding plans that, she told me in some surprise, she was thinking less and less about her fears. That was a good indication that when her adult of the present took over from the child of the past, she could dispel the fears.

  She is now much better. She is not driven by fears as she was before she started to treat herself with methods other than the old home methods of childhood. She still tends to slip back occasionally into old, indulgent, self-critical ways and to become a little fearful, but she can quickly abort the relapses.

  ∞

  Missildine, in his signature way, traces Susan’s “death phobia” to her childhood (although, it seems odd not to mention the fact that her father died when she was eighteen). Her fears had been “coddled” and allowed to fester. As an adult, she needed to squash them. It would come through understanding and discipline. Missildine says she was successful, although the diversion of her marriage also seemed to help.

  Death phobia, according to other experts, is generated because people fear death as painful, or fear the unknown—such as the mysterious quantity of the afterlife. Officially called thanatophobia, it is “one of the most universal fears, and may be the basis for many phobias,” according to the Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears, and Anxieties. Fear of flying, darkness, and enclosed places, for example, are death phobias via other routes.

  Dylan also had a fascination with death. And he too became crestfallen no matter how large or small his failures. Both Susan and Dylan seem plagued by an overly sensitive nature. Missildine mentions depression for Susan, and Dylan’s writings make clear that he was depressed. But in contrast with his mother, Dylan welcomed death as an escape from what he often saw as a miserable life.

  ∞

  1969, the same time Missildine’s death phobia counseling took place, was the year Susan entered Ohio State.

  Charles Huelsman III’s father married Charlotte after Milton’s death, and Charles III got to know the Yassenoff clan. He recalls Susan making a remark about Vietnam around this time: “Why do we have to have this stupid war anyway?” But he is not sure whether it is part of the generalized, anti-war sentiment, or a much stronger conviction.

  Susan was seen as a goody two shoes, and she also painted. At least one dark oil painting sticks in Huelsman’s mind. A woman sits in a chair, melting, in dark reds, dark yellows, and “black type blues.” Melting the way a candle stuck in a bottle leaves wax dripping down the glass, he says. Huelsman believes the painting expressed a normal, but intense mood swing. “I would view the painting as more of an emotional outlet and a way to get around depression rather than a sign of harboring feelings of depression,” he says.

  Huelsman doesn’t think Susan liked the painting, and she may have destroyed it. “I remember Susan’s mother saying that she wanted to keep the picture,” he says. “It’s like a signpost of emotional growth. She was trying to give praise and encouragement to her daughter. Susan wouldn’t have anything of it.”

  ∞

  Some 145 miles away in the working class city of Toledo, William H. Klebold had two sons. One would end up raising the other. The other became the parent of Dylan Klebold.

  A native of Pearl, Texas, William served as a captain in the army, stationed in Europe during World War I. He moved to the Toledo, Ohio area in 1919 and died as the proprietor of Klebold’s Suburban Hardware. His obituary photo shows him in a coat and tie, a stern look on his slightly pudgy face, and a bald head.

  William’s first son was Donald. His two daughters were Katherine Ann and Mary Lou. William later married Lillian Grace Rae. William was fifty-two and Lillian was thirty-nine when Tom Klebold was born on April 15, 1947. Lillian died six years later. William died six years after Lillian, at age sixty-four. Tom was twelve.

  Donald, known as “Sam,” was named executor. He and Tom were to split the remaining assets from William’s will at about $10,500 each. And Sam, who turned twenty-nine the day after William died, took to raising Tom.

  Tom, by all accounts, was in good company with Sam and his wife Janet, who eventually had five children of their own, according to neighbors. Tom, the oldest, was a surrogate six. Neighbors describe the family as intact, close, loving, and darned nice. They attended Lutheran church regularly but did not flaunt their religion.

  “Nothing fantastic,” said longtime neighbor Janet Oltmans. “Just average people.”

  Their home at 3244 Waldmar Road was ample, but neither grand nor fashionable. It is solid middle class America. The wood siding has white trim, and the roof is peaked. The curtains are white and drawn. A pinwheel adds a flourish to the backyard.

  Two months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, small American flags adorn many a window and front door in the neighborhood, including the one on the Klebold home. Fall leaves trickle down to the lawns; a man and boy rake a nearby yard.

  Sam Klebold walks out to his car. “We don’t want to talk to you,” he yells. “And that goes for my sons.” He continues, “We talked to the media once. They double-crossed us. We got two thousand calls.”

  As he speaks he is so wound up a red lozenge shoots out of his mouth. He is wearing a tan windbreaker and white, button-down shirt. He jumps into an older model American car and drives away.

  The calling card for Sam’s carpentry business was the older model, white Ford van still in his dri
veway. He plied his trade for local doctors, attorneys, and his church, Advent Lutheran, where he put in a ten-foot-high, solid walnut cross with a brass strip down the middle that hangs above the altar.

  Sam did not attend college, according to family pastor Dennis Lauman: “You think of [him] as someone who’s worked from the day he graduated high school.”

  ∞

  Tom Klebold attended Sylvania High School and, like other boys, wore a jacket and thin tie for his 1965 senior photo. His hair is short, but still longer than the flattops sported by some. His smile appears contented, with a touch of shyness. Tom is remembered in the yearbook as a “dextrous woodworker, go-kart racing fan.” The yearbook also lists Tom on the track team, and in the team photo, he stands in the upper right corner, a blank look on his face. He is difficult to see, but if you look hard enough, he is recognizable by his full cheeks. Tom also seems to have been in the chess club.

  After high school, Tom attended Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At Wittenberg Tom shows up, with a slight smile and standing tall, in the cross-country team photo. He is wearing a tank top with the number thirty-four on the chest. He is on the university’s alumni website as the class of 1969, but Tom transferred to Ohio State before graduating, where he met Susan Klebold.

  ∞

  Tom and Sue married in Franklin County, Ohio on July 1, 1971 in the city of Columbus. She was twenty-two; Tom, twenty-four. Both listed their occupations as “student,” and recorded different home addresses. Both had lost their fathers, and in Tom’s case, his mother too.

  They were married by Rabbi Jerome D. Folkman. Two months later, Susan’s grandfather, Leo Yassenoff, died. Folkman was set to officiate at the funeral.

  Susan graduated in 1972 with a bachelor of science in art education and a minor in psychology. Tom majored in sculpting.

  The Klebolds quickly moved to Milwaukee, and Susan showed an interest in helping the troubled. She worked for six months at the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital as an art therapy intern for adults. She then became a psychiatric art therapist at St. Michael Hospital, also in Milwaukee, working with adults and adolescents.

  But in 1975, Susan switched career tracks. She enrolled in Milwaukee’s Cardinal Stritch College for a master’s degree in reading. The title of her research paper was, “Selecting High Interest-Low Difficulty Books for the Poor Reader in Junior High School.”

  Susan worked while she was in graduate school, often in elementary schools. Her jobs included special education teacher’s aide and reading specialist. For about a year, she worked on a government program to help disadvantaged youths at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. An idealistic zeitgeist ran through the program, recalls Mark Warhus, Susan’s supervisor. Students in high school and older attended a jobs program in areas including physical therapy, nursing, and other health profession occupations while teachers like Susan polished their English and math skills. They were low-income, mostly inner-city kids. Most were black, with a few Latinos and whites.

  Tom and Susan didn’t live in gritty Milwaukee, but in the Whitefish Bay Townhouses, named after the pleasant suburb about ten minutes outside the city. Along the top of her resume at that time, Susan typed: Personal: Married and Health: Excellent. She didn’t stand out much, although Warhus recalls that the then-twenty-nine-year-old was attractive. “She had short hair, tall, thin, good-looking,” he says. “Dressed maybe a little bit like a schoolteacher, sort of coordinated outfit type thing. I guess you call it women’s sportswear.”

  Warhus remembers the call Susan made the day her first son, Byron, was born on October 23, 1978. “I’m calling you before I even called my mother to let you know that I can’t, I won’t be in today,” Susan said, according to Warhus. “Or something like that. I remember it was fun, we were making a joke about it.”

  ∞

  In 1979 Tom submitted his thesis at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee for a master of science in geological sciences: “The Paleomagnetic Characteristics of Sediments from the Cedarburg Bog, Ozaukee County, Wisconsin.” The fifty-eight page paper, with various charts, is about as dense as the title suggests. The acknowledgments page reads: “Finally, and most importantly, I wish to thank my wife, Susan, for her extreme patience and support both before this study was conceived and while it was being undertaken. Without her help, this research would not have been accomplished.”

  Next, it was on to Bartlesville, Oklahoma for Tom’s work. The private school girl had come a long way, and Warhus remembers Susan joking about the move with a little trepidation.

  “I think it was just sort of like, ‘What’s in Oklahoma?’” says Warhus. “More of the sort of reputation Oklahoma has being a kind of backwater, nothing place was sort of maybe what her concern was, you know, ‘What are we going to do in Oklahoma?’ But I know she was real excited for her husband, to get started with his career and everything.”

  Tom worked as a geophysicist for Phillips Petroleum for slightly under a year, from August 27, 1979 to June 21, 1980, according to the company. Then it was on to Colorado, where the oil industry was booming.

  Growing Up (Young Guns)

  Dylan Klebold was born in the Denver suburb of Lakewood on the now-infamous date of September 11th in the year 1981. He was a high-strung youngster, the type who would go to pieces if he lost at Candyland. But Dylan’s parents saw him as a “healthy, happy child, who grew to be very bright.”

  At least that was what Tom and Sue Klebold, accompanied by two attorneys, said on April 30, 1999, ten days after Columbine. The Klebolds spoke with three sheriff deputies and a representative of the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office in one of the most extensive interviews with them ever published. They provided a congenial portrait of Dylan. He was shy, good at math, and “well-loved by his teachers” and peers. Quiet, tolerant, and even-tempered, he never talked back. The parents never had any problems with Dylan. They said he was gentle until the day he helped kill thirteen people.

  Dylan attended Normandy Elementary School in Littleton for first and second grades and joined the Cub Scouts in second grade. And just as Tom was remembered in his own high school yearbook as a “go-kart racing fan,” his parents remembered Dylan for winning a Pinewood Derby. Dylan and his friend Brooks Brown immersed themselves in Legos and chasing frogs and crawdads. “I couldn’t have asked for a better pal in grade school,” Brooks wrote in his book, No Easy Answers. In the same book, Brooks’ father, Randy Brown, called Dylan “the sweetest, cutest kid you’d ever meet. He was really shy, though, and it would take him fifteen or twenty minutes to warm up to us every time he came over.”

  Dylan spent grades three through six in an accelerated program at Governor’s Ranch Elementary, also in Littleton. The Klebolds felt the school provided a sheltering atmosphere, and Tom Klebold fought to keep Dylan enrolled when he was threatened with being pushed out in the name of gender balance. But kids from the other side of the intellectual tracks would “sneer” at those in the accelerated program, according to Brooks. Brooks and Dylan even got into a fight between themselves—the first time Brooks saw Dylan’s temper—because of the tension at school.

  “As Dylan got older, he never told his parents he was teased,” according to Judy Brown. “Never. He kept it all inside.”

  Dylan was caring, Judy added, but “worried a lot about what other people thought—perhaps too much for his own good.”

  During elementary school, Dylan’s sports included soccer, T-ball, and baseball. His parents describe him at this time as competitive, yet sensitive and well-adjusted. As a young boy, Dylan had a hunting knife and throwing knives. Around age ten he had a BB gun, and the family kept another one around for nabbing woodpeckers. Dylan took three years of French at Columbine and studied German in the fifth grade, although the Klebolds were unaware of any fascination with that language. An elementary s
chool photo shows Dylan in a tan Members Only jacket and black T-shirt. He has thick, brown hair and a pudgy face. His mouth is slightly open, as if he is unsure of himself.

  As a teen, Dylan was deeply depressed. But Sue Klebold says she only saw him cry once. The incident seems to have occurred in elementary school, although the time is not specified in the police interview summary. Sue says Dylan came home from school, went to his room, and “took a box of stuffed toys from the closet and buried himself and fell asleep underneath the stuffed toys.” Dylan did not give a reason for the episode.

  ∞

  Eric Harris’ father, Wayne N. Harris, was born October 7, 1948 and grew up in the south Denver suburb of Englewood with parents Walter E. and Thelma J. He had an older sister, Sandra.

  Walter Harris worked as a valet at the Brown Palace hotel, a downtown Denver landmark where, fifty years after Wayne’s birth, the family of slain Columbine student Isaiah Shoels would hold a press conference to announce their lawsuit against the Klebolds and Harrises.

  Wayne Harris graduated from Englewood High School in 1966, and classmates summarized the blond boy with freckles as shy, smart, studious, and quiet with not a lot of friends, according to the Rocky Mountain News. He was neither leader nor troublemaker. He went to the University of Colorado from 1966 to 1969 as a business major, transferred to Metropolitan State College in Denver, and graduated with a degree in aviation maintenance management.

  Eric Harris’ mother grew up in Denver. Her father, Richard K. Pool, was in the U.S. Army during World War II and earned a Philippine Liberation Ribbon with two bronze stars. From 1972 to 1976 he was in the Air Force Reserve. He ran a Denver hardware store and later worked for the Colorado Department of Transportation as a warehouse supply officer.