Go To home page for THE COLUMBINE GUIDE: An insider's guide through the web of myths, legitimate evidence, and contradictory media coverage surrounding Columbine. It features a wealth of evidence about the killers, Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold, and what they intended with Columbine. It includes Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's journals and some videos (not The Basement Tapes), 911 tapes, thousands of pages of police reports, the Jeffco Sheriff's report, the FBI report, and information on other school shooters.
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An insider's guide through the web of myths, legitimate evidence, and contradictory media coverage surrounding Columbine.


SUMMARY PAGE
WHAT YOU KNOW IS WRONG

As I wrote about Columbine for Slate, Salon and the New York Times, I discovered that much of what had been published was wrong. I have spent much of the past eight years covering the story, and writing a book to be published in 2008 by Dutton (Penguin). I share much of what I learned through that research here. A quick overview:

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to blow up the Columbine High cafeteria at the peak of lunch hour, gun down the fleeing survivors, and then blow up rescue workers attending to the wounded. Fortunately, they were exceptionally poor bomb-makers, and most of the plan failed.

They apparently had no Plan B, so when the explosives failed, Harris & Klebold winged it and began randomly opening fire: first outside, and then in the school, primarily in the library. They killed twelve students and one teacher, injured many more, roamed the school for several minutes and then returned to the grisly library to shoot themselves.
Chaos followed, and much of the early reporting was wrong. Nearly everything reported about what the killers were trying to do and why was wrong. Most of the truth finally came out, but all the myths remain in print. The biggest challenge in researching Columbine is knowing which sources to trust. This guide is designed to help you navigate the good from the bad.

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Columbine was a horrible and traumatic experience that terrified the country. For months afterward, the public hungered for an answer to one question: why?

Unfortunately, the media tried to answer that question too quickly—before any reliable information materialized.

The biggest problem is that the media constantly asked why "they" did it, when there were two different killers with polar opposite personalities. We also failed to grasp that Columbine was primarily an attempted bombing, and most of the media refused to correct that basic misunderstanding once they did comprehend. They characterized it instead as a school shooting and worked exceptionally hard to fit it into the model of previous school shootings, regardless of how poorly it fit.

Any journalist who has worked long on the story can and will tell you without hesitation that Columbine had nothing to do with jocks, Goths or the Trenchcoat Mafiaor any of a dozen other myths.

Most major news outlets got around to publishing a "myths" story six months to a year after the tragedy, but that was hopelessly inadequate to reverse an avalanche of coverage which had solidified the misconceptions. And some of the myths were harder to unravel. It took years to understand that the media pretty much had it right the first time in portraying Eric Harris as the mastermind, and Dylan Klebold as a follower.

We will never know everything about Columbine, and we still lack a few key pieces, such as testimony from the parents. But there is a tremendous amount of data available. This Columbine Guide is dedicated to helping you sort through it all and come to some truths of your own about this tragedy.



This guide is organized into several pages. The nav bar up top will zip you to any page.
This summary is the only page not dedicated to links to specific material. For a fuller overview of the case, see my fifth-anniversary Slate story: The Depressive & The Psychopath (At Last We Know Why The Columbine Killers Did It).

Return to Home Page of The Columbine Guide.




Written and compiled by Dave Cullen. Copyright 2003-2007.
Columbine collage photos from the Rocky Mountain News. Dave Cullen logo by Jimmy/Gnash. Columbine Guide logo by Dave Cullen.

This site was formerly called the Columbine Navigator and Almanac.

Contact: dave@davecullen.com
Email me to be notified when my book is published, and/or receive my periodic newsletter.