The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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It took hours to catalog the carnage. "There were SWAT team people who were in Vietnam," said district attorney Dave Thomas, "who were crying and weeping over what they saw." But only on Thursday did officials truly appreciate the level of mayhem the killers had in mind. In the school kitchen, in a duffel bag, they found the sinister parcel containing a propane tank, gasoline can and nails and BBs and glass that would have taken dozens of lives in the busy cafeteria. The killers, Sheriff John Stone said, "were going to destroy the school."

Before they fired their last two shots into their own heads, the killers fired off an estimated 900 rounds, using two sawed-off shotguns, a 9-mm semiautomatic carbine and a TEC-DC 9 semiautomatic handgun. And as the smoke cleared, police discovered more than 30 bombs in all: several pipe bombs in the school and others outside in cars in the parking lot, an arsenal so large that suspicions immediately arose about whether Harris and Klebold could possibly have acted alone.

The hardest thing about the search for an explanation was the growing fear there might not be one. There would be lots of talk about the venomous culture that these boys soaked in--but many kids drink those waters without turning into mass murderers. There would be talk of deep family dysfunction, something in their past or their present, but nothing in the first days of archaeology turned up anything tidy that explained something so massively wrong. These were parents who came to all the Little League and soccer games. They even came to practices.

Dylan Klebold was said to be the weaker spirit of the two: quiet, reserved, looking for a leader, which he found in Eric Harris when the Harrises moved to Littleton from Plattsburgh, N.Y. Klebold's father Thomas is a former geophysicist who launched a mortgage-management business from his home. His mother Susan worked with blind and disabled kids at the local community college. They lived in a modern wood-and-glass home tucked under a stunning outcropping of red rocks in an area called Deer Creek Canyon. On the day before the shooting, neighbors of the Harrises saw Klebold's black BMW parked outside Eric's house. Harris' father Wayne was a decorated Air Force pilot. One neighbor heard one of them ask the other if he had a metal baseball bat. From the garage came sounds of hammering and breaking glass. "He was always in there with the door closed," said a fifth-grader who lived nearby. Police say it would be possible to build 30 bombs in a single afternoon, with less than $200 worth of materials, all easily found at hardware and sporting-goods stores.

As for the recipes, those are even easier to find for a kid with that much cyberskill. Harris' personal website, since taken down by AOL, detailed advice on building pipe bombs. "I will rig up explosives all over town," he wrote. "I don't care if I live or die." Elsewhere on the website he writes that a pipe bomb is "the easiest and deadliest way to kill a group of people," and he offers advice on shrapnel: "You can use screws, BBs, nails of all kinds..." According to an internal information memo in the possession of district attorney Thomas, Harris had spoken to a psychiatrist sometime before the shooting, and the doctor recommended that he begin taking antidepressants. The doctor said Harris had expressed anger about the world.