Author became immersed in Columbine attack

By Connie Ogle | McClatchy Newspapers • Published April 19, 2009

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Dave Cullen intimately understands the emotional rollercoaster onto which he lures readers of his comprehensive history of the Columbine shootings. He knows because he's been riding it ever since he started covering the attack on April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at their suburban Colorado high school, killed 13 and injured 24, and then committed suicide.

Ten years is a long time to work on the same story, especially one so grueling, but the freelance journalist found himself unable to walk away.

"I thought I was done," Cullen says from his home in Denver. "I was like, 'No more dead children, ever. I'm going to write about happy things for awhile.' But things kept sucking me back in. I wanted to know why the killers did it. I got more and more frustrated. 'Why don't we know?' I'd think. The answers we had were ridiculous: A feud with the Trench Coat Mafia or the story that the boys were loners and outcasts. I was always a little skeptical that someone had bombs to kill 500 people because of that. It just didn't ring true."

In "Columbine" (Twelve, $26.99), Cullen, who has written for Salon.com, Slate.com and The New York Times, addresses the rumors and outright untruths that surfaced in the wake of the shootings and presents a fascinating portrait of the victims, the killers and a community. Though he was one of the reporters who regularly broke the stories — he was first to report that the repeated rumor that Cassie Bernall had testified to her faith before dying was untrue — he maintains a third-person narrative for clarity's sake.

"I was so impressed by the depth of his reporting and his commitment to getting the story right," says Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp, who asked Cullen to write "a short book" about the shootings almost 10 years ago. "I also don't think I've ever read a more compelling account of a descent into madness and malevolence. His ability to recreate the mindset of these two killers in the year leading up to the massacre is truly remarkable. ... He sacrificed in terms of psychic cost, too, for getting inside the heads of people most of us would not want in our lives."

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