Columbine: Chapter 36 Summary & Analysis

The investigative team behind Columbine seeks convictions. There are three separate crimes to uncover: participation in the attack itself, participation in the planning of the attack, and guilty knowledge of the attack. All of Dylan and Eric’s friends who’ve been interviewed have copped to knowing small details, but were “clueless” about the master plan. Searches of the killers’ friends house turn nothing up. None of them appear in the killers’ journals. Though Sheriff Stone will “publicly espouse a conspiracy theory” for months, Fuselier feels that theory slipping away within the first two weeks of investigations.

While witnesses claimed to have seen multiple shooters, experts and investigators state that eyewitness testimony—due to the brain’s inability to form new memories during moments of terror or trauma—is not particularly accurate, and memory is “notoriously unreliable.”

Desperate for “whys,” the media locks onto a new angle of motive behind the attacks: the Marines. Eric had been talking to a Marine recruiter during the last few weeks before the attack. Eric was also taking an antidepressant. The story of Eric, rejected by the Marines, going off his medication and flying into a killing rampage gains traction, but Fuselier knows it is wrong. Eric had remained on a full dose of medication up until his death, and Eric had never been rejected from the Marines. Fuselier knows “what the media [does not.] There had been no trigger.”

Lead investigator Kate Battan interviews the Klebolds, but is disappointed to find that the interview only yields “a fluff piece on their son” in which they describe him as quiet and sensitive. The Harrises demand immunity from prosecution before they talk to investigators. Jeffco officials refuse, and Battan does not even get “fluff” from them. 

Sheriff John Stone continues spewing his theory that Columbine had been a conspiracy engineered by several students to the members of the press, and Jeffco spokesmen must constantly correct their sheriff’s misstatements. Stone’s staff begs him to stop speaking to the press, but are worried about the optics of “muzzl[ing]” their sheriff. Nine days after the shootings, there is a “blackout” of information, and nothing new about the shootings will come out of Jeffco for five months. Columbine press coverage, too, abruptly ends—the narrative, Cullen writes, is set.