Teens' journals show hatred that exploded in Columbine killings

By Lisa Ryckman
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

''Good wombs have born bad sons.''

— Eric Harris' academic planner, on the page for Mother's Day, 1999.

They were partners in hate and hell-bent on death.

Dylan Klebold hid a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and a 12-gauge double-barrel sawed-off shotgun beneath his black trench coat. He wore a black T-shirt imprinted with the word Wrath.

Eric Harris hid a 9mm carbine beneath his black trench coat and carried a 12-gauge pump sawed-off shotgun in a bag. He wore a white T-shirt imprinted with the words Natural Selection.

They wore utility belts with pouches stuffed with shotgun shells. They stashed bombs and clips of 9mm bullets in their cargo pants. They taped match strikers to their forearms to light their bombs. They carried knives, but never used them.

Klebold wore a black glove on his left hand. Harris wore the matching black glove from the same pair on his right. They were two sides of the same rage-filled teen-ager, fueling each other's anger like gasoline on a house fire.

Their plan for destruction began taking shape in April 1998, the same time Harris began keeping a journal.

Someone was bound to ask, "What were they thinking?" Harris wrote six months before the murders. But his answer only raises more questions.

"I want to burn the world, I want to kill everyone except about 5 people. ... If we get busted any time, we start killing then and there. ... I ain't going out without a fight."

It was his choice to kill, Harris wrote, anticipating the blame to come. "It's my fault! Not my parents, not my brothers (sic), not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the media, it's mine."

He made only one journal entry in 1999, which outlined the preparations he and Klebold had made for their rampage. "I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things," Harris wrote.

Klebold's journal, which he started in 1997, reflects the dark world of a depressed mind, of a teen-ager who felt like an outcast and contemplated suicide two years before he actually did it.

"The lonely man strikes with absolute rage," he wrote in his academic day planner for 1997-98.

Klebold talks of "a weird time, weird life, weird existence" and of unrequited first love. He mentions a number of girls he loves, but there's no indication they ever returned his affection, or even knew about it, investigators found.

Harris believed that he and Klebold possessed a self-awareness that eluded others and made them superior. He reveled in his anger. "I am full of hate and I love it," Harris wrote.

In his own 1998 yearbook, he scrawled the words worthless or die or beat across the photos of nearly all the other students, or marked them out with an X.

In Klebold's yearbook in 1998, Harris wrote, "God I can't wait till they die. I can taste the blood now," and signed it NBK, for "Natural Born Killer."

"You know what I hate? ... MANKIND!!! ... kill everything ... kill everything ..." He wrote, and drew a gunman surrounded by corpses with the caption, "The only reason your (sic) still alive is because someone has decided to let you live."

Klebold echoed those thoughts in his entries in Harris' yearbook. He refers to the "holy April morning of NBK," and talks of "killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops!!"

They never revealed why they chose April 20, the investigators wrote. There were hints that they had planned the shootings for April 19.

"I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts," Harris wrote in his journal in 1998, "but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit ...."

In Klebold's notebook, alongside his math homework, were eight pages of writings and drawings apparently written the day before the killings.

"About 26.5 hours from now the judgement (sic) will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun. What fun is life without a little death?"

They make casual mention that some of their friends might die in the attack, and that families would be devastated. "War is war," they said.

Both of their final entries were timetables for death.

''Walk in, set bombs at 11:09, for 11:17," Klebold wrote.

Leave

Drive to Clemente (sic) Park. Gear Up.

Park cars. Set car bombs for 11:18.

Get out, go to outside hill, wait.

When first bombs go off, attack.

Have fun!''

Harris was more precise.

11: go to school

11:10 set up duffel bags

11:12 wait near cars, gear up

11:16 HAHAHA

They started killing at 11:19 a.m. and stopped at 11:35. In those 16 minutes, they fired their guns 186 times.

Then they fired twice more.

Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold were dead at 12:08 p.m.

Contact Lisa Ryckman at (303) 892-2736 or ryckmanl@RockyMountainNews.com.