Those of us who covered the shootings repeated at least some of these stories. We had no reason not to. They were confirmed, if not amplified, by the Jefferson County officials who gave news briefings several times a day. How were we to know that John Stone, the county sheriff, was winging it, telling us, for example, that the boys had fully automatic weapons and at least one accomplice, when these were no more than his own wrongheaded assumptions?
Much of what we reported, though, was simply wrong, as attested by tens of thousands of official documents and other evidence that has at last seen the light of day after years of suppression by the local authorities. As the Colorado-based journalist Dave Cullen tells in his gripping and authoritative new book Columbine, Harris and Klebold had plenty of friends, did pretty well in school, were not members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, did not listen to Manson, were not bullied, harboured no specific grudges against any one group, and did not "snap" because of some last-straw traumatic event. All those stories were the product of hysteria, ignorance and flailing guesswork in the first few hours and days.
It was Valeen Schnurr, who was asked, by Klebold, if she believed in God, and answered yes. She was then spared.
Likewise, if they hated jocks, they didn't make any special effort to target them. At one point they joked about killing anyone in a white hat; one boy cowering beneath a desk quickly pulled a white cap off his head, and lived.
But the fact that the attack took place on Hitler's birthday was a coincidence. The boys had decided on 19 April - the anniversary of the botched government siege at Waco, Texas, in which 76 people perished by fire in 1993, and also the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. As it was, the plan was pushed back 24 hours because the local drug dealer who had promised to provide the boys with their ammunition did not come through on time.
The influence of the media on real-life acts of violence is hotly debated and far from proven, but here is one statistic. Just about every recorded instance of mass murder given saturation coverage on US television is followed by another mass murder, somewhere around the country, within two weeks.
