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Columbine high school in 1999. Host dave cullen, who are eric and dylan . Guest eric and dylan were the two killers at columbine. And eric was a psychopath, and dylan was not. They were completely different can people. And, you know, as i spent ten years on this book, and the question i get asked the most often is why did they do it. And it took me about a year to figure out thats really the wrong question, at least in the wrong direction, because theres eric and why he did it, and theres dylan, and theyre completely different people. So you want to talk about each one of them . So eric was a psychocopath, classic. Host eric harris. Guest yes. And he was the mastermind of the plot. And he spent a couple years trying to figure out how he could destroy the entire world. That was his real fantasy, as a 16yearold boy. Wipe out humanity, always to leave three or four or five people because to a psychopath, the power of life as well as death makes him all the more powerful. A god can give life as well as take it away. Theyre not delusional where they think theyre god, but theyre as important as god. So the key thing with a psychopath is no compassion, no empathy, no regard for the welfare of others for anything. If specifically with nonviolation, because its meeting their own needs. Crooked politicians, ponzi schemes, you might be able to think of a few recent ones that come to mind. Thats a classic psychopath, someone who would destroy other peoples lives, destroy a state or a country for material gain on their own part. Thats a psychopath. Typically nonviolent. But when the person has a sadistic streak too, then you typically get a ted bundy, a Jeffrey Dahmer or an eric harris. So thats the mold he comes from. Then do you want to talk about dylan . Dylan is completely different. Host Dylan Klebold. Guest yes. Polar opposite personality. Dylan went along with the plan, but he was not driving it. And when you look at their journals, erics journal is filled with hate, hate, hate all the way through. It starts out ill clean up one word, but the opening line is i hate the fing world. And its on every page. He started out wanting to kill, and he ended up killing over the course of the year. But with dylan, hes completely different. He spent two years, dylan spent two years doing his, writing his journal, and the most common word in his journal is love. Its completely unexpected. To me, dylan was the revelation in this case. He was a loving, sensitive boy with a whole lot of anger, but his anger was mostly directed inward. It was all angry at himself for being such a loser, such an outcast. He wasnt. It was objectively untrue, but thats how he saw it. Dylan tried so hard loving the world and felt that the world wasnt loving him back. In gradually he takes a really slow evolution. He was depressive. He was diagnosed as a classic, but that doesnt really tell you enough. The interesting thing is watching for two years how this kid, who looks like he would never kill, under the influence of eric harris gradual wily turns that anger thats turned inward out at the rest of the world. And ine stead of blaming me, its blaming all the rest of you people did this to me, and im going to take a lot of you with me and show you on the way out. So dylan still committed suicide but took a lot of people with him. Host in your book, columbine, you write dylans mind raced night and day analyzing, inventing, deconstructing. He was 15, he had tagged along on the missions. He was erics number one goto guy and none of that mattered. What were the missions . Guest well, the missions were, there were really early symptom of something going awry. Their sophomore year eric and dylan started just doing they were just pranks, but eric called them missions because he was grandiose about everything. He saw them as this big thing where were showing people, you know, how bright we were. They were just setting up firecrackers, then they got nastier like supergluing mailboxes shut and so forth. Whats interesting to me about the mission is that you see a progression with eric going from petty vandal to petty thief, to felony theft, to murder. He didnt just start out a mass murderer. He had his own gradual criminal progression where if he hadnt done Something Like columbine, its pretty clear he would have become a career criminal of some sort. Theres the sadistic streak, so he wanted to kill people for very simple reasons, for his own aggrandizement and because he enjoyed it. He wanted to have fun and he wanted to show us. You know, i would say its understanding a psychopath, it doesnt take a whole lot to understand what one is. Its a very simple its hard to believe that its true, that somebody will kill someone. He wanted to kill hundreds of people, but for the most petty gains. For himself, that was enough. Host april 20, 1999, was the date of columbine, the massacre at the high school there. But eric started planning this in 997. Guest yes. Host how did you discover that . Guest well, they kept lots of records. Eventually, after a sevenyear legal battle, Jefferson County released nearly a thousand pages of writings that the killers left. They each left a journal. They left school assignments, also eric wrote on his web site about all he wanted to do, and then they made videotapes explaining themselves. In the last month, they decided that wasnt enough. So the fbi agent on the case is a major character. Hes sort of unwinding the detective story. He said host what was his name . Guest supervisory special agent duane [inaudible] very famous hostage negotiator, brilliant psychologist, you know . Took over the case. But he said in his entire fbi career, hed never seen a killer who died leaving this much material explaining themself. So we have an extraordinary amount of information together, and i spent the last several years sort of digging through all this information and talking with various psychiatrists and psychologists that the fbi brought in on the case to understand them. Its very clear cut once youve dug the through the information. Its hard to make out their handwriting, it took quite a while to sort of be able to decipher what they were doing. But once you understand that psychological condition, its a lot easier to understand them too. You really have to understand what a psychopath is and how they tick to really understand how to interpret eric so it doesnt just sound like the ravings he follows a very classic pattern. Host did wayne and kathy harris recognize that eric was in trouble . Guest that he was troubled and that he got in trouble. They had no idea the extent of trouble. And almost nobody recognizes a psychopath. If you think about somebody like hannibal elector, you have to elector, you have to throw up a hollywood version. Youd be the last person in the world to know theyre a psychopath. The first classic book that was published in the 1930s, the book was titled the mask of sanity because there are two clusters of characteristics of a psychopath. One is their total lack of empathy, their lack of compassion for everybody, for anyone. But he decided the even more important characteristic was the ability to disguise that lack of empathy as if wearing a mask. Psychopaths are nearly always charming. Their the people theyre the people we turn to to trust. Theyre the person, the person you turn to for help. That is most likely the psychopath. Thats how good they are. So parents never recognize they have a psychopath in the house, and the harris parents knew that eric was acting out, that hed gotten in trouble sometimes. They were having him see a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist put him on zoloft. That wasnt strong enough. They disciplined him strongly. They knew they had a kid acting out, but they had no idea why. And i want to throw out one other idea for people to consider. Eric was gobbling up shakespeare, writing papers on king lear and macbeth, your pip d. C euripides. And he would write the most amazing apologies. So youve got a kid, he acts up, sometimes he gets in trouble, and when he explains himself, he shows deep, utter remorse. He quotes shakespeare when hes talking to you and how in king lear he learned a similar thing there. You will give a kid like that a lot of latitude. Youve got a brilliant kid who seem to be doing really well. Sometimes he gets in trouble, he acts out. They knew they had a problem child, but what kind of parent thinks, god, he acts out sometimes, i wonder if hes considering mass murder . Host did sue and tom klebold recognize anything in dylan . Guest they recognized depression. They knew he was depressed. They had no idea how bad it was, that it was that extreme. They didnt know he was suicidal. He talked for two years in his journal about suicide. They also knew that they had a really shy kid and he had been painfully shy since he was a little kid. And when he went to high school, he felt like a fish out of water. Hed been in the Gifted Program in grade school, really enjoyed it there. It was a small cluster of kids where it was cool to be a brain, but he went to high school, and he felt awkward there. He didnt talk the people right away until he got to know them. They knew he was struggling, but they had no idea it was that bad. Hes like a lot of teenage kids. I think thats kind of the scary thing about columbine is that Dylan Klebold was such a Typical High School kid. And a kid like that gets involved with an eric harris, that could happen in any high school in america. Host but you write in your book that eric harris was very, well, typical, i guess. He had a lot of girlfriends, he was smart, he had friends. Guest eric was, he led a typical life. But psychopaths really lead a double life. Whats going on on the inside, whether theyre planning to rip you off or planning to kill you, they lead a life as their cover. Its what they need to do to, you know, think of a ted bundy. He was working on the crisis hotline, you know, helping suicide people, and its all just this cover. Like, he wasnt interested in helping other people, but thats what they do. So eric was feigning a normal life and building it as a cover. Meanwhile, very Different Things going on inside. Host who is kathy bernal . Guest we believe she was the Christian Martyr who said she believed in god. It became one of the biggest stories, one of the biggest redemption stories. There are a lot, and i try to go through a lot of them, some great, uplifting things. That particular one didnt happen, and it was a misunderstanding. The story went that kathy was hiding underneath a table, and the killer came up, asked her if she believed in god at gunpoint, she said yes and then was killed. Worldwide there was sort of a following of her. Turned out there were two girls in the library involved. What happened with kathy is she was hiding underneath a table, praying for her life. Eric walked up to table, what canned it with hi whacked it wiz hand, put the nose of the shotgun under the lip of the table and shot her in the head. She died instantly, never had a chance to say anything. Terribly tragically. Meanwhile, in another part of the library there was a second girl, val, who dylan shot with a shotgun, and she was hit with a lot of the blast. She had pellets up and down her body. She was bleeding, crawling away. Dylan came across her and started taunting her. Asked her if she believed in god, she said yes. Actually had an exchange. He didnt care who lived or died, he just let her go. So she lived to tell. And shes fine which is also an uplifting story, actually, a girl thats asked if she believes in god professes her faith and lives. But there was another boy under one of the tables who overheard this, didnt know either of them, and somehow mistakenly thought that it was kathy who had said it. He started telling people, completely honester mistake. The story spread, the worth went, and we reporters never really did our job of checking in and asking grieving victims, how do you know it was kathy . How well did you know her . Do you recognize her voice . Those kinds of tough questions. We ran with the story and allowed it to become one of the biggest myths of columbine. Host speaking of myths, there was a headline in the denver post a day after or two days after, and this is the actual denver post from that day. Healing begins. April 22, 1999. Why is this a myth, in your view . Guest well, i think that was an unfortunate thing that they regretted, and everyone involved with columbine regrets because if i could give one piece of advice to future communities who go through these tragedies, dont rush the healing. And when you talk to any Mental Health workers or even any pastors who have done funerals or work with grieving people, it takes months and years for people to deal with their grief, and we sort of tried rushing them into it. Okay, its been a day and a half. Heal now. You know, youve got a couple weeks and then back on this. Many of the people really didnt start understanding their own grief until a year or more out. The crisis group that was brought into the high school to deal with students with posttraumatic stress disto order and so forth, they didnt even start to reach their peak utilization until six months out and stayed at that peak level for a year and a half. So trying to take a grieving person a day and a half after and say, okay, start Getting Better now, theyre not ready to get better yet, and we really need to back off and give them space because they felt terribly rushed into it. And they felt resentful for years because of that. Host dave cullen, how did you approach the writing of this book . Guest the writing, well, it took me several tries. My first took a stab at a book about a year out, a year after columbine. It was going to be a small ebook, and i approached it that way at that time just based on the killers and also unraveling the myths. There were so many myths, most of what we think we know about columbine is wrong. The basic things about them. So i was trying to unravel those myths, and i actually wrote the first draft as myself a protagonist and kind of a detective story of what really happened at chum bind. Meanwhile, i was columbine. Meanwhile, i was trying to understand the killers better and really understand what happened to them. That took me a couple years, and the story just wasnt ready. It was really at the fiveyear point where i published a piece in slate called the depressive and the psychopath where we have the fbi team for the first time diagnose the killers, and i started over at that point and said i wanted the before story and the after story. The before story the of the killers, how they involved into killers because this was such a gradual process, and its so interesting to see how they developed. And then i wanted to do the after story, the victims and survivors, what these killers did to them. And so i, you get both stories simultaneously, but i wrote them separately. I wrote all of the eric story at one point over five months, then all the dylan story after nearly five months, and when i was working on eric, all i did every day was read his journal, listen to music he listened to, watch the films he liked, immerse myself in his world, then write about him, talk with the psychiatrist about him trying to work out puzzles that i didnt understand about him, just complete eric immersion for five months. And the same thing with dylan. And i actually got depressed unexpectedly writing the dylan story. I ended up kind of channeling some of his personality. I didnt i wasnt able to, i think, convey dylans depression and his loneliness until i got that way myself. And what i tried to do was not sit here if i was describing you, not sit here and say youre in a chair, youre wearing a white shirt, i tried to turn the camera around and be inside you and project what the world looked like to you, what you were seeing, thinking, and present each of the killers and the characters in this book as if from the inside. Thats what i intended to do. Host when you say you got depressed about dylan, how serious . Guest well, not serious, that wasnt actually the word the more serious was writing about the victims, actually. I had secondary posttraumatic stress disorder which is what emt workers, medical workers, sometimes cops get dealing with tragedies. I had that in the first year, and i thought i was fine with it. I got a relapse seven and a half years in when i wrote two of the most difficult chapters. I wrote the chapter about [inaudible] for over three hours. Host hope sanders. Guest the heroic teacher who died saving children. And then bled to death, tragically. Hes one of the main characters in the book. Theres a lot of uplifting stuff about him in the book. But that was the hardest to write. And then unexpectedly, the chapter about dylans funeral can and his parents and their grief hit me. And shortly after that, there was a wave of copycat shootings. There were four in ten days. There wases the amish shooting in pennsylvania and there was one very close to columbine in colorado. And i sort of, i couldnt take that, and for about a month i couldnt work and was pretty bad shape. But it helped to have studied posttraumatic stress disorder for the book and understand it. I was still naively slow to understand my own situation and that i needed to get help. But at least once i did, i was like, oh, you know, im suffering from what ive been writing about, you know . Do the same things as these people, get help. And it helped that i had spent time with some of the worlds foremost authorities like a doctor whos in the book who id spent a lot of time with was on the committee who created the diagnosis about 30 years ago, one of the worlds leading authorities on it. And i almost never do this with a source, but i had gotten to know him, i actually called him x he talked me through it for about an hour on the phone. Id been going to a psychologist myself, but frank really helped me. He understood. He was an expert on columbine, had been through it, so he understood me and that got me through it. So there were a couple dark days, but i also loved writing the book, i love writing, so, you know, i dont want to complain about my job. I love doing what i do. But there were some tough periods during this book. Host well, talk to us a little bit about some of the survivors and victims families. Guest okay. Yeah, the survivors and victims, theyre all across the map. And one of them i also wanted to dispel the myth of the idea of the universal victim or the universal response. One of the things that bothers me, with all due respect to victims, whenever i see when theres a plane crash or some other tragedy that gets a lot of news coverage, when theyre interviewing victims, very frequently theyll slip into the second person, and theyll start saying when you first hear the thud, you panic. And i think a lot of us, weve internalized this idea that theres this universal response. And now that ive been through this i think, you know, i wouldnt say this to a person on the plane, but i start thinking i bet theres somebody behind you who didnt panic at all, i bet theres somebody on that plane that got exhilarated and thought, wow, this is kind of exciting. Everybody deals with things completely differently. And with a tragedy like this, columbine, responses were all over the map. So i chose ten major characters to follow through this, and i tried, you know, to get a boy and a girl, an adult, people who were injured, people who died and people with different kinds of responses. There was brian, he got very angry. Linda sanders was the widow of dave sanders who really fell apart. Dave sanders was her rock, and she was put in a horrible situation and then without the person who supported her. Kathy bernal, who was this amazing, uplifting experience of having a daughter who they thought was a martyr, of writing a book about it, feeling better about it and then having that pulled out from under them. Then i talk about patrick ireland, the boy in the window who he went out the window on live tv. Millions of people saw him tumble out of the second story window and have a s. W. A. T. Team catch him just in time, all bloodied. Most people didnt know he had a buck shot pellet in his brain, it traveled 6 inches into his brain, he was half paralyzed, he dragged himself to that window over a threehour period, was never expected to walk or talk again and made an amazing recovery. And forgave the killers in the first week or two. Extraordinary. So these people are all over the map in how they dealt with their grief, how painful it was or or. The principal who really led the kid out of this, mr. D. , frank deangelis. Theyre all very different. I wanted to show you this person is like this, this one here and give you many different facets of this. And also each one of these people had a really interesting personality and had a fascinating story. So i also wanted, you know, to make it interesting for the reader. I didnt want the to be a book that you had to read about columbine to learn something that would be like eating your vegetables. I wanted it to be an engrossing tale and, luckily for me as a journalist and as a writer, thousands of people were involved in this story. There were 2,000 kids in that school, and many thousands of people were involved in different ways. So i snatched out ten of the most interesting people who had fascinating experiences and were very different from one another to try to give you as well as possible sort of the whole story of columbine in one place. Host did the victims and the survives, did the victims families and the survivors willingly talk with you while you were writing columbinecolu . Guest most of them did. And, again, i had met nearly all of them at different points along the way for different reasons. Were resistant to talking to press and some were more open about talking to press. But with over time nearly all of them needed to talk to the press for their own reasons. For example, there was a huge controversy over the library where most of the killing took place. And the families of the 13 dead wanted that library torn dead so no one would ever step foot in it again. So they did it through the press conferences and other meetings with the press where we got to meet them. And over time a lot of them wanted to tell their stories. I had gotten to meet them through various means along the way, and once i selected the different people i was going to focus on, all of them except for the bernal family, kathys parents, agreed to participate. And i had otherwise her mom had written a memoir, so there was a great deal of information there. One journalist who had been very close to them actually gave me her field notes, which really helped, where she spent hours with the family. You know, i talked to friends. The few characters who werent willing to participate, there was a great deal of material to draw from. But for the most part, i spent a lot of time with them personally. Host are most of the families still in the littleton, colorado, area . Guest most of them are. Host same homes . Guest im not actually sure if theyve stayed in the same homes because ive kept closer with the families that i dealt with closer. Most of those are. I know that the bernals left, and i really wanted to come back to area, but a couple different families i probably shouldnt use some of the names. A couple of them left early on because they felt the need to get out of the pressure cooker, and some of them regretted it, they came a back because they felt their friends, their support base was there. That was their home, and thats where they felt comfortable, so some of them ended up coming back. A lot of kids went to college too, patrick irelands back. Host what about the harriss and the klebolds . Guest the yes bodle are still in the same house they lived in. The harriss stayed for many years in that house and then sold it, and truthfully, im not sure where they are. Theyve kept an extremely low profile, have never spoken to a journalist, and ive heard theyre still in the area, but im not sure about that. By all accounts, those families had difficult times. I, frankly, have spoken to many people who are much closer to klebolds host but you did not speak to them. Guest no, they would only talk to david brooks one time five years out and never again to any other journalist. The harriss have spoken to no one. But ive talked to people who are close to klebolds. They had a really rough time, but they lost a son too. And they also had a mass murderer in their house and, of course, thats terrible for them. And they were taken by surprise. So they were sort of grieving two different ways. Their pastor referred to them early on as the two loneliest people in the world because, you know, unless you think of the parents of Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer or someone like that, they dont have anyone who understands what theyre going through. Theyre in uncharted territory. But they had a lot of great friends. Their pastor, whos also in the book, is a wonderful man. Host mark housen . Guest wonderful. Everyone in the area has looked up to him. He lost his job, essentially, because he supported the klebolds and did their, did dylans funeral. Host tell us about dylans funeral. Guest okay, dylans funeral. First of all, it was very private. It was less than a week after columbine, and the family was afraid to have a funeral. Or who might go. They did it in secrecy. They had not been going to a church regularly, but they had attended st. Phillips Lutheran Church at one time x a friend got word to pastor that the klebolds needed somebody. They didnt have a pastor, and they needed somebody to bury their son. So he agreed to do it. And there were only fewer than a dozen people there. And he prepared something, but then when he got there, he realized they needed to throw that out and just talk. And so e had everybody in the group just Close Friends of the family, dylans parents and his brother talked about dylan, and the brother particularly was, he was just distraught. He didnt know what to make of it or what to do about it. And so then the pastor quoted, selected a passage from scripture which was just perfect, and forgive me, i should know how to pronounce the name, from the Old Testament, king davids son who at one point has tried to overthrow king david as the king of israel or judea, i dont know my Old Testament as well as i should. But he was trying he led a revolt to overthrow david. And david had to put it down. But gave explicit instructions to save his son, not allow his son to be killed. And word came back to him that theyd won the battle, theyd saved the kingdom, but that his son had died. So david knelt down and cried out, i cant remember the exact quote, it was Something Like, o lord, o lord, why have you taken my son . I mean, don realized that in the entire bible that was a passage that most, the tom and sue could most empathize with and could understand, like, to have him taken away. And they knew their son had done a horrible thing, but he was also still their son, and they wished they could have their son back. Yeah, i mean, and thats what kind of a guy don is, too, to understand people and to have that compassion. Finish and to him, yes, dylan was a mass murderer, hed done a horrible thing, but he was a pastor to his parents and had to help them, and that was the best way he could help them. And, you know, it didnt matter, they were still human beings who needed help. Host dave cullen, have the victims families and the survives moved on or are some holding on to this . Whats the status now . Guest well, again, theyre all over the map, but i think most of them have moved on. I just went to tenyear commemoration on the tenth an verse arely, and it was actually really surprising to me anniversary. It was a little different than the other events. There have been so many different gatherings over time. A lot of them based on crises, Different Things that have come up and evidence release and then some on anniversaries, is one, two, five and ten years, and the memorial, the Ground Breaking where bill clinton came and spoke eloquently and also when it was opened. Over all these things, all these different events where everyone sort of came back together, early on we never knew how many more of these there would be. There could be five more of these, ten more, nobody knew. But by the time we got to opening of the memorial which was, i believe, eight years out, everybody knew we were just about done and all the crises had passed, and that one was different. And that one, everybody had this feeling that were almost done here as a group memorializing this. And the speeches were really interesting that day. You had prepared speakers, and so many of them spoke about closure and sort of angry at the concept of closure and angry, frustrated with people trying to impose because they hear closure as are you still complaining about that . Wrap this thing up, guys. You know, quit youve had eight years to grieve about this, move on with your lives. There was this pushback of quit telling us to quit grieving, essentially, that was really the main theme that day. And everybody sort of knew it was the second to last one. There was one more, and we wouldnt be seeing each other anymore. Interestingly enough, i think they got sort of over the hump at that one, most of them, because the one this month was a tenyear anniversary, it was much more fran quill. It was much tranquil. There was no talk about closure. There was no pushback. They didnt feel they needed to push back op anything. Most of the people were at peace now, were moving on. Val, the girl who really did say she believed in god, she spoke on behalf of the victims, an amazing girl. She quoted robert frost. Hopefully, i can get this right, because i havent written this down. She quoted him saying that all i need to know about the rest of my life can be summarized in three words, it goes on. And thats how she feels. She also told me on facebook, actually, that i bear no ill will toward eric and dylan anymore. She had to move on with her life, you know . Carrying that anger, pain or grief around was just holding her down, and shes happier without it. And not everybodys at that place, and they dont need to be, but a lot of them are. And this month it was really different. It was more tranquil, and i think most of the people are at a pretty good place. Host well, mr. Deangelis is still the principal at chum bind in 2009. Has columbine. Has the school changed . New procedures at all . Guest there are new procedures. Typically, its not much different host did the library get torn down . Guest it did, the families won that battle. The library sat right above the cafeteria where the big bombs were poland, where the killers plan were planned. Theres a wide of open twofloor atrium. Beautiful. You can see the Rocky Mountains from there. And they built an addition that the parent raised more than 3 million to do that. Thats different. The place where danny and rachel were killed outside, thats been reconfigured a little bit, the hillside and the eternal stairs. But for most, they did cosmetic changes. It was very important for the kids, the survivors to feel they hadnt lost their school. And theres a really important psychological concept that kids cant feel its taken away from them. They dont want to feel that the killers won. So they had to make subtle changes so it would feel and sound slightly different, carpeting versus tile so the shoe on the floor sounds a little different. Subconsciously kids know somethings different here, but they cant put their finger on it. New paint and that sort of thing. They changed it up and mostly its the same, and kids now, nothing ever happened here. Host dave cullen, there had to be lawsuits and money exchanged. Who paid, who got sued, whats the standing . This. Guest there were a tremendous number of lawsuits. Everyone that you can imagine got sued starting with the kill ors parents. Killers parents. But then the School District, mr. D. Himself, the principal, all the sheriffs departments, the maker of the drug that eric harris was on. Anyone involved in the gun transactions, a huge list of people. Most of those were eventually thrown out. The lawsuits then were, some were settled out of court where the killers families agreed to settlements. Most of the money, oddly enough, was paid by the killers parents Homeowners Insurance policies. Host not the School District. Guest the School District and sheriffs department, they a made minor minor payouts. The bulk of the money came from the killers parents, from their insurance policy. Apparently if your son kills someone, thats part of your home insurance. That was stunning to me. There was a, there was a fair amount of money distributed to them. There were five holdout families, six initially but then five, who true to their word, they said all along that it was not about money, they wanted information. And when they offered the money, they said were not taking this money, we want information. And finally, a deal was brokered where those five families and their lawyers sat down in a courtroom with the four parents of the killers and were allowed to ask any questions they wanted, got complete answers. That was the agreement, the participants were to answer every parents were to answer every single question. It went on for about a week of depositions. The deal was those five families could get all the answers they wanted, but the rest of the world would not. The parents would be free to talk as freely as they wanted, and the records of those depositions would be destroyed. And as this happened, then the transcripts were set by a magistrate to be destroyed, as per the agreement. And enough pride arose over that, a federal judge got involved in deciding whether these should be made public even though thered been an agreement that they would not. And after several more years and just two years ago, just a few days before virginia tech, he made the decision that those records would be released in 20 more years. So in 2027 we will find out what the parents had to say about their kids. Right now i believe theyre in the National Archives under seal, and in 18 more years well find out what the parents had to say. Hopefully, the parents will speak sometime before that. Thats sort of the one remaining element, is what the parents can tell us, and hopefully they will. Host are you done with columbine . [laughter] guest am i done with columbine. I laugh because i think so, but ive said that before. Yeah, after maybe a year or less after columbine the new york timeses asked me to do a piece on the National Convention in denver, and i spent four days doing that, and i was so thrilled to do something so lightheartedded, so just just fun, interesting people having fun. And i said at that time i am never doing another story on murder as long as i live. It was a huge emotional relief. This was something about bah by collectors barbie collectors, you know . But then i kept coming back. I think im almost done with columbine. My editors also talk to me about perhaps the paperback edition, perhaps i might have a brief afterword or something. Im doing a u. K. Tour in a week, but i think im just about done. Id like to be done. I felt a huge relief after i turned in the final pages that i didnt even notice right away. In the next month, friends started asking me, you know, youre whats going on . You seem happier, you know, are you dating someone . Really, you know, is something going nonno, i guess i turned that book n. Because it was finally off my chest. It was, for better or worse, i was marking those pages up, i got in trouble for that for doing too much. Because i wanted everything just right. Man, once i sent those things off, for better or worse, you know, it was out there, and i couldnt, i couldnt change it. So i felt done. And somewhere in here i knew in a different way that i was done, and im a much happier person. Host davecullen. Com, in case you would like to see some of this. This is the book, columbine. Published by twelve. Here are some of the journals of Dylan Klebold, copies of, obviously, copies of dylan and everything harris journals eric harris journals that you can also find online. And heres the denver post from two days later. Dave cullen, thank you. Guest thank you very much, peter, i really enjoyed it. Booktvs block of archival author programs on Mass Shootings continues. Now pulitzer prizewinning journalist Jennifer Hawes on the 2015 shooting at emmanuel ame church in charleston, south carolina. [inaudible conversations] well, i want to thank all of you for coming tonight. Im so happy to see you. I want to thank barnes noble for having me here, of course, and especially for choosing this book as one of its Great New Writers Program titles, which is a tremendous honor to be in the company of some fabulous authors. So thank you. Its exthe that nice because i see some ra

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