by Jeff Kass
Aubrey Immelman, a professor of psychology at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University in Minnesota, comes from outside the ranks of law enforcement. He specializes in political psychology and criminal profiling, and has thoroughly reviewed the files on the Columbine killers. He generally agrees with the premise that Eric was a psychopath.
Immelman adds that psychopaths try to reroute the blame and Eric shows that when he tries to put the onus on Dylan for the van break-in, or when his apology letter doesn’t take full responsibility for the van break-in. “I let the stupid side of me take over,” Eric writes. Immelman adds, “[Psychopaths] will blame their infirm grandmother for their vandalism if they have to.”
Diversion may have even inflamed Eric and Dylan, another sign of psychopathy. “Here’s a hypothesis for you,” says Immelman. “Had they not been put on diversion, Columbine wouldn’t have happened.” That theory goes especially for Eric. “The thing he hates most is people telling him what to do,” Immelman says. “He must have built up so much anger going through the anger training and having to deal with law enforcement, having to give the urinalysis.”
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To be sure, Eric’s diagnosis of psychopathy is not one hundred percent. Psychopaths do not tend to be suicidal, or seek fame. They usually come from the ranks of “low socioeconomic status and urban settings,” according to the DSM. Psychopaths must also show certain patterns of behavior as juveniles that include animal abuse. Eric, in all his writings, never mentions that, nor is there any evidence of such behavior. His extreme violence is not a trademark of psychopaths. And Eric does show emotion and feeling: He laments the loss of his childhood friends, he wishes he had more friends at Columbine, and he worries what will happen to his parents after the shootings. (Although Fuselier points out that if Eric really did care about his parents, he wouldn’t have undertaken the shootings.)
Their pell-mell behavior makes psychopaths poor employees, yet Eric was a model worker. Lying for the sake of lying, or duper’s delight, is another sign of psychopathy, and Eric told multiple lies. Although he himself also indicates he lies for a specific purpose, or as he says in his diary, “just to keep my own ass out of water.” In other words, Eric needs to lie to stay out of trouble. It doesn’t appear to be for fun.
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Immelman’s more specific diagnosis of Eric as a “malevolent psychopath” may reconcile some of these differences. The term psychopath would not seem to need a qualifier terming it malevolent, or “especially vindictive and hostile.” But that could explain Harris’ uncharacteristic—for a psychopath—violence. Such psychopaths have a “cold-blooded ruthlessness, an intense desire to gain revenge for the real or imagined mistreatment to which they were subjected in childhood,” according to psychologist Theodore Millon. They do not want to be seen as weak, have a “chip on the shoulder attitude,” and “rigidly maintain an image of hard-boiled strength.”
Immelman also believes Eric had streaks of narcissism and sadism; the sadism because he didn’t just kill but teased, taunted, and tormented his victims at Columbine. Before the shootings, he wrote of killing Brooks Brown but also torturing and urinating on him. Immelman contrasts that with the actions of the Washington D.C. area snipers, who stealthily killed ten people during a 2002 shooting spree. “You hide, you try to get a clean kill,” Immelman says of the snipers. “You don’t want to make the person suffer, you’re just interested in the effect that you’re going to have on the public, on the community. Over here [at Columbine] they wanted their victims to suffer personally. For sadists, it’s always the humiliation, and the dominance.” Immelman also points to the sadism in Eric’s rape fantasy in his November 17, 1998 diary entry:
who can I trick into my room first? I can sweep someone off their feet, tell them what they want to hear, be all nice and sweet, and then ‘fuck em like an animal, feel them from the inside’ as [Nine Inch Nails lead singer Trent] Reznor said . . . I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to the heart, and yank the fucking blade out of their rib cage! I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. show them who is god. strangle them, squish their head, bite their temples into the skull, rip off their jaw. Rip off their colar bones, break their arms in half and twist them around, the lovely sounds of bones cracking and flesh ripping, ahh so much to do and so little chances.
As for the narcissism, psychopaths do not typically seek the limelight. “They want credit for their crime,” Immelman says, but adds, “Psychopaths aren’t interested in making it into the history books. Psychopaths want to take for themselves what they believe the world owes them.”
Eric, however, does want to go down in history. He writes in his journal, “Don’t blame anyone else besides me and V for this.”
Eric wants power, but grandiose schemes often bring down narcissists. “Which is often why they are self-destructive, because they bite off more than they can chew,” Immelman says. “With Hitler, really to take over the whole world, to create a master race, things that really cannot be done in the real world. Sometimes it’s just referred to as megalomania.”
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Eric also told us why he did it, but I would argue he seems to give two different reasons in two different places. In the web writings, Eric’s violence is often propelled by a sense of superiority over the dumb, the ignorant, and those who cannot play Doom. The web writings, it could be expected, were also more targeted for public consumption.
But the diary entries tell another story. And because they were not necessarily meant to be public, they may be seen as more truthful. In two of the most telling views into Eric’s mind, he is just like Dylan Klebold: sad, lonely, depressive. If Eric truly felt superior, it came from a sense of inferiority:
In late 1998, Eric writes,
Everyone is always making fun of me because of how I look, how fucking weak I am and shit, well I will get you all back: ultimate fucking revenge here. you people could have shown more respect, treated me better, asked for knowledge or guidence more, treated me more like senior and maybe I wouldn’t have been as ready to tear your fucking heads off. Then again, I have always hated how I looked, I make fun of people who look like me, sometimes without even thinking sometimes just because I want to rip on myself. Thats where a lot of my hate grows from. The fact that I have practically no selfesteem, especially concerning girls and looks and such. therefore people make fun of me . . . constantly . . . therefore I get no respect and therefore I get fucking PISSED as of this date I have enough explosives to kill about 100 people, and then if I get a couple of bayonets, swords, axes, whatever I’ll be able to kill at least 10 more and that just isnt enough! GUNS! I need guns! Give me some fucking firearms!
This diary entry apparently comes in April 1999 (the first Friday of the last month, Eric indicates):
Why the fuck can’t I get any? I mean, I’m nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo. I think I try to hard, but I kinda need to considering NBK is closing in. The amount of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is fucking amazing. Everything I see and hear, I incorporate into NBK somehow. Either bombs, clocks, guns, napalm, killing people, any and everything finds some tie to it. Feels like a Goddamn movie sometimes. I wanna try to put some mines and trip bombs around this town too maybe. Get a few extra frags on the scoreboard. I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no, don’t fucking say, ‘Well that’s your fault’ because it isn’t, you people had my phone#, and I asked and all, but no no no no don’t let the weird looking Eric KID come along, ooh fucking nooo.
For Fuselier, the passages still support the psychopath diagnosis because “both seem to serve the purpose for Eric to shift the responsibility for his actions to others. E.g., since I get no respect from you guys, I don’t have
any self esteem, and therefore get pissed, and so it is your fault if I want to kill you.”
Immelman says the passages are consistent with Eric’s narcissism and quotes the DSM: “Vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder very sensitive to ‘injury’ from criticism or defeat. Although they may not show it outwardly, criticism may haunt these individuals and may leave them feeling humiliated, degraded, hollow, and empty. They may react with disdain, rage, or defiant counterattack. Such experiences often lead to social withdrawal or an appearance of humility that may mask and protect the grandiosity.”
In Without Conscience, Hare reviews a number of possible causes behind psychopathy. He concludes it is “a complex—and poorly understood—interplay between biological factors and social forces.” Hare adds, “This doesn’t mean that psychopaths are destined to develop along a fixed track, born to play a socially deviant role in life. But it does mean that their biological endowment . . . provides a poor basis for socialization and conscience formation.”
Eric’s extreme violence makes his psychopathy appear inherent, and predestined. Yet the environmental firing pins that set him off—Columbine, maybe diversion—are easier to identify.
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Eric’s violence is more eye-catching. But he’s the outlier. When it comes to other school shooters, they look more like Dylan Klebold. And while it is said that Eric was the deceiver-in-chief, Dylan was the one who fooled everyone. From the first minutes of Columbine, and through the many years of revelations, people express little surprise it was Eric. Dylan is the one who confounds people, yet he is the type to watch for.
Dylan’s writings sum up his diagnosis: depressed. As Fuselier puts it, he showed “fairly dramatic emotional swings, e.g., from ‘I’ve found my soulmate, and the love of my life, to (paraphrasing now) ‘she doesn’t know who I am, therefore my life is worthless, so I’ll kill myself.’” Immelman sees the same depression in Dylan: sensitive to humiliation, dying a thousand deaths each day. Immelman also calls Dylan “avoidant personality disorder,” or basically, shy. He wants to be part of the group, but cannot.
For Immelman, a secondary characteristic of Dylan is passive-aggressive personality disorder, or what is technically termed “negativistic.” Such persons show a negative attitude and “passive resistance” to work and social demands, according to the DSM. They procrastinate and forget to do things. They may be “sullen, irritable, impatient, argumentative, cynical, skeptical, and contrary” and feel “cheated, unappreciated, and misunderstood and chronically complain to others.” They especially hate authority figures and anyone who the authorities favor (in Dylan’s case, quite possibly the jocks). When authorities tell a negativist what to do, they become stubborn and inefficient. They blame their failures on others, or will apologize and promise “to perform better in the future,” according to the DSM.
For Immelman, Dylan shows passive-aggressiveness in the diversion program with his time-management essay that uses an oversized, odd font and is bothersome to read. This is someone trying to sabotage authority. At school, he procrastinates. Dylan is suspended for scratching the locker of someone who has angered him. “Does he go and confront the student? No,” says Immelman. “He goes behind the student’s back and he scratches his locker. That’s exactly what passive-aggressive is. By its very definition.”
Dylan also shows passive-aggressiveness in the greeting cards he writes to friend Devon Adams. He shows affection, but also teases her (calling her a “voodoo priestess”). “It seems like when he [Dylan] helps a person, he’s hurting a person,” Immelman says. “In other words, he undermines or sabotages helpful acts at one level with passive-aggressive behavior on another level.”
Dylan’s essay of a man in a black trench coat who not only shoots jocks, but first toys with them shows sadism, as does his taunting people the day of Columbine, but Immelman and Fuselier agree Eric’s sadism was more pronounced. For Dylan, it was not a guiding light.
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If Dylan was a depressive who wanted to kill himself, why did he kill others? Like other school shooters, his depression manifested itself as anger. He hated himself, but also others, and blamed them for his problems.
Fuselier says Eric portrayed a mass shooting as a solution to Dylan’s depression: “It’s ‘their’ fault, they are the ‘zombies,’ ‘we’ are superior to them . . . so let’s show how superior we are.”
If Dylan had gone on to college, Fuselier believes, it is less likely he would have carried out a shooting. “If, for some reason, Harris had pulled out, I think it much less likely that Dylan would have done this alone,” Fuselier adds. “If, for some reason, Dylan had pulled out, I think it more likely that Eric would have committed this act alone, or might have done something else like it.”
Depression is attributed to both biological and environmental factors. And as with Eric, Dylan’s biological factors are harder to pinpoint. The environmental ones are easier to see.
Depressives are more likely to commit suicide. Psychopaths are not. But suicide made sense to Eric and Dylan for any number of reasons. It was the ultimate way to control their own destiny and the only antidote to an uncontrollable rage—despite their school rampage, which lasted maybe forty-five minutes, they were still not satisfied. They may also have seen it as the warrior’s way out, nobler than being captured alive.
And for Eric and Dylan, suicide was not a leap: Life on earth was already hell because smart kids like themselves were among the least popular. They expected more, but got less. Their fall down the social ladder was steeper because they had higher expectations.
Dylan wrote in his diary: “The framework of society stands above & below me. The hardest thing to destroy, yet the weakest thing that exists.” Death would set him free. Eric and Dylan, in part, were right. High school is unfair, just as life is unfair. Although their own shortcomings also sent them spiraling—people picked up on Eric’s odd and violent vibrations and backed off, while Dylan’s shyness and underdeveloped social skills doomed him from the start.
In one sense, Eric and Dylan weren’t that bright either. They were positioned to be masters of the universe in the coming computer age if they could just stick it out another month until high school ended. Success in the real world could have been their revenge. But their violent, juvenile minds couldn’t see ahead. They wanted immediate retaliation against the social hierarchy they felt had wronged them.
Probably virgins upon death and maybe the biggest losers at Columbine High, Eric and Dylan still had friends, but it didn’t make a difference. Their buddies were on the same lowly rung of the social ladder. And they didn’t even recognize the friends they had. Mental illness warps reality. Eric was blinded by his rage, and Dylan by his depression.
Dylan was probably the smarter of the two and appears to be the first to specifically mention the idea of Columbine. But Eric sharpened it into reality and carried the ball down the field because his energy was more focused on violence.
They both wanted the deadliest school massacre ever and belittled shooters who killed and maimed only a few. And they did in fact ramp up the concept of the school massacre, adding bombs to the mix and reaching, for the moment, unprecedented levels of planning and death. But they were followers even in Columbine, using the script of other school shooters who showed them the art of the possible.
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On December 30, 1974 Anthony Barbaro of Olean, New York brought a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 rifle with a telescopic site, and homemade bombs to his high school over Christmas break. The eighteen-year-old honors student killed three: a janitor who was at the school, Neal Pilon as he walked along the street, and Carmen Wright as she drove past the school in her car. Barbaro started a small blaze in the hallway, which set off the fire alarm, and he wounded eight firemen who responded. State troopers and city police officers stormed the school under the cover of tear gas and gunfir
e and captured him at 5:30 p.m. Barbaro, wearing a white sweatshirt, threw his guns out one of the shattered windows and surrendered without a struggle. Or, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, SWAT found him asleep, with headphones playing “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Accounts vary dramatically in the New York Times, but according to one story, Barbaro hanged himself “with a knotted bedsheet in the county jail.”
“I guess I just wanted to kill the person I hate most—myself,” he wrote in a note. “I just didn’t have the courage. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it, so I had to get someone to do it for me. It didn’t work out.”
If Barbaro, Harris, Klebold, and other school shooters were to pose for a class picture, their faces and backgrounds would be strikingly similar. They are typically white, middle class boys near the bottom of the social ladder who—in a characteristically passive-aggressive manner—blame other students for making them losers. Angry at the whole world, their shooting sprees are random killings.
These terrorists may have food, money, and good shelter, but not acceptance. Even the semi-popular are not immune. In Fort Collins, Colorado, three junior high boys were charged in 2001 for plotting to carry out a school shooting near the two-year anniversary of Columbine. They were not the most popular in school, but were well-known and well-liked. Yet it was not enough to quell their anger toward the most popular “preppies.”
School shooters commit their crimes not for drugs or money, but a generalized revenge against the social order. Some are on psychiatric drugs, although many mental health experts do not believe the drugs cause the shootings. Similarities among school shooters were plotted in a study titled “The Classroom Avenger,” which examined sixteen shootings, including Columbine, and followed the shooters from cradle to grave. Some aspects match Columbine. Some don’t. Sometimes, there is not enough information.