What is it like to come face to face with evil? To confront your worst nightmare? When a killer comes calling, there's often no escape. A man who can kill is evil beyond belief.
To truly encounter evil is a rarity most will never experience. I believe in evil and I've experienced people that are evil. But for those unfortunate few who do and survive to tell the tale, the mental scars often never heal. I couldn't breathe, my eyes felt bulging, all I could see was his face on my face and he was just staring into my eyes.
We meet the men and women whose lives have been forever altered by their brush with the beasts who live among us. This is Encounters With Evil. In tonight's program, spree killers. Spree killer, technically, is someone who kills three or more individuals.
within one single fatalistic action. They are about, I am being ignored and I want to be taken seriously. They want to make their name for themselves.
They want to get revenge on the world. Coming up, Adam Lanza, a young man who killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Adam Lanza actually wanted to place himself in the annals of serial killers, spree killers, mass killers. The horror of the Dunblane Massacre. A slaughter of innocents committed by Thomas Hamilton.
Thomas Hamilton walked in with a clear intention of killing children. And the spree shooting that rocked America. At Columbine High School. Both boys were absolutely obsessed with the whole dark culture.
You know, bombs, guns, killings. But first, a story that took the UK by horrific surprise. On the 19th of August 1987, the town of Hungerford in Berkshire was turned upside down by one of its residents. He burned down the family home and began killing neighbours and strangers, even his own mother. This lone gunman left 14 injured and 16 dead.
This became one of the largest mass killings in British history. Who was the monster responsible for this shocking shooting spree? The Hungerford Massacre was a spree killing undertaken by a local person, Michael Ryan.
Michael Ryan lived with his mum in Hungerford. He was an unemployed man in his 20s. He didn't have much on the horizon. Michael Ryan was an only child and as such, of course, tended to be doted on by his parents. However, his mother seemed to know no limits.
Essentially, his mum got him whatever he wanted. He lived with his mum, he didn't need to work, and anything he needed, his mum would provide. A mummy's boy, Ryan, did not make a lot of friends growing up. He'd never seen him with a girl, he'd never seen him with any of his mates or nothing, sort of just been here with his dog. He'd never gone out with his mum, never seen him down the street with his mum or nothing.
Sort of always been on his own, just wandering around. The fascinating thing is we know very little about Ryan. We know that he may have had some schizophrenic tendencies.
We know that he may have been a bit of a mother's boy. We know that he found it difficult to hold down a job. We know that he wasn't very bright. Ryan was known in the community as a fantasist, who was prone to lying. He would tell people that he was ex-special services.
He would tell people that he had a girlfriend who was a supermodel. He would tell people that his mum was going out with a former... SAS captain who was giving him flying lessons. Although Ryan was never a soldier, he did have a fascination with the military and firearms. He dressed in combat gear a lot of the time and they know he had an interest in shooting at the local gun club, the Tunnel Rifle Club.
He became someone who collected guns. He had a licence to own these weapons. Far more weapons. than would be healthy for anyone. Ryan's appetite for weaponry, casting himself as some kind of military figure, may have been inspired by, and there was references to it, Rambo.
And perhaps he did see himself to some extent as some kind of cinematic hero. Ryan also had another disturbing hobby. He used to enjoy stalking people. in the local forests and woods around Berkshire. He would wear his combat gear and he would hide and spy on people as they were walking past or couples or children or people walking their dogs.
And it was in the woods where Ryan began his trail of carnage. Ryan had been in Savanaik Forest and it's possible that he'd been stalking individuals and following them as he was often wont to do. But on that day, the body of a young mother, Susan Godfrey, had been found. He shot her 15 times in the back. This was overkill.
Her two small children who were with her had been left in the back of her car. I don't think there was any evidence of sexual assault on Miss Godfrey, but Ryan had killed her and fled the scene. The next stop on Ryan's trail of terror was a petrol station on the road into Hungerford. He filled the tank of his Astra and he also filled a petrol canister. He had no money to pay, both he and his mother were overdrawn at the time and he had no access to cash, so he raised his assault rifle and fired a single shot across the petrol forecourt towards the cashier.
It was only when he attacked the garage that a report went through. This was taken to be an armed robbery. Not quite the danger.
that actually Ryan did present. Ryan got back into his car and headed for Hungerford. He drove back home, parked the car on the driveway of his mother's house, and he went inside. At that point, it's thought, he began splashing the petrol around and lit a fire. He then killed the family dog and went back outside to flee.
Ryan also shot and killed his mother. At this point, his car wouldn't start. He tried and tried again, but for some reason his car was not going to work. He got out of the vehicle, he aimed his assault rifle at his car, and he shot the radiator.
I think this, for Ryan, was the final straw. Enraged, Ryan shot at his neighbours. He then embarked on foot, armed with his AK-47 assault rifle and two pistols. What we essentially had was Michael Ryan moving on foot with assault rifles, enough ammunition and in camouflage gear, moving down the alleys and streets, parks and towpaths of the immediate area around his mum's home. He was shooting everything, anything that was moving.
Animals, children. Anything. I see his mother gun down outside the house. There was bodies everywhere. You see it in the movies, but you don't actually see...
I think it's going to happen to your own street. Ryan moved from road to road and house to house, firing indiscriminately. Ryan went on what we call a set-and-run spree.
He would find a vantage position, open fire, and then move on quickly to another position where he'd have a tactical advantage. Local residents were in complete shock at Ryan's violent actions. He shot through people's windows, he would shoot people on the other side of the street if they turned a corner. There was a policeman killed.
There was Mrs Ryan. His mother? His mother.
He killed her out here? Yeah, just outside their house. And then there was Mr Clements right at the top.
There were some strange moments in his shooting. He allowed an old age pensioner who he bumped into to carry on. About his business? His eyes was terrible.
He didn't look like himself at all. I said, is that you kicking up all this rumpus? I said, you're frightening everybody to death. And as he walked by me, he would be about there, and I would stand here. I said, you silly bugger.
Tragically, the local police were not prepared for such an unprecedented incident. They weren't necessarily armed and equipped to deal with a single gunman who was marauding and had the advantage on them. Ryan was able to move very quickly through hedges, fences, back gardens and alleyways and he was always ahead of the police.
One problem the police had was that they were trying to close down the neighbourhood to stop people going into harm's way, but on some occasions they would send traffic down one road only to find that Ryan was waiting at the bottom of that road and was opening fire on the motorists. Witnesses who got close enough to Michael Ryan's face described his expression. as his victims fled or fell to the ground. One saw him smirk and grin down at the rifle he'd just used.
In the confusion, Ryan was able to avoid capture. As Ryan slaughtered someone, by the time it was reported, of course, Ryan had moved on considerably, so no-one at the police end knew exactly where he was. Over the course of an hour... Ryan had killed 16 and injured 14 Hungerford residents. Eventually he found his way to John O'Gorn Technology College, where he'd previously been a pupil.
Moved to the first floor, went into the old maths department, and there was a siege. There was a stand-off there with police officers for a number of hours and they were able to communicate with him through a loud hailer. He took a few shots at the officers.
He claimed he had a grenade. The officers were not certain. The officers did not actually want to shoot him dead.
With the police surrounding him, Ryan was showing no signs of surrender. But he did communicate with them. Perhaps the most bizarre thing Ryan said during the siege was when he exclaimed to officers, I wish I'd never got out of bed today and that none of this would have happened if only my car had started. And I think that gives a very big clue that Ryan wasn't planning on committing a shooting spree, but after the killing of Susan Godfrey, he panicked when he couldn't get away in the car and went on a spree. It wasn't until he said about the fact that he'd got one round of ammunition left, I said, why have you kept that one?
He said, it's obvious. Eventually, after firing 119 rounds of ammunition, Ryan used his last bullet on himself. The police, on entering the building, were cautious.
They even pulled his body a little bit with a rope because they weren't certain if he had actually booby-trapped himself with this so-called grenade. Ryan was dead and the horror was over, but the country was reeling in shock. The Hungerfed Massacre was really the first large-scale shooting spree we'd seen in this country in modern times.
The country was absolutely shocked and stunned and couldn't believe that this would happen in a quiet, leafy Berkshire town on a Saturday afternoon. Ryan's legacy is an extreme tragedy that will never be forgotten. Like most of the spree killings and spree killers I investigate, there's always tragedy in there because we know that spree killers are made that way, they're not born, and it would be really helpful to understand what it was in Ryan's background that led him down this path and what it was in his life that pushed him over the edge on the day that he decided to kill.
He was someone who had a grudge against the world and he was someone who was going to let them. vent to that vengeance on everybody that surrounded him. On the 14th of December 2012, police speed towards Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
A 20-year-old man named Adam Lanza has stormed into the school, armed to the teeth. at our school and I just wanted to make sure someone was on their way. He shot dead 20 children and six adults before turning his gun on himself.
What could have driven Lanza to come? It's such a horrific crime. Born in 1992, Adam Lanza started to exhibit certain behaviors early in life.
Adam Lanza's childhood and his background was relatively privileged. Although his mother and father had divorced, he had an older brother and his mother was catered for in the alimony settlement. Because she didn't need to work, she did, however, tend to focus a lot of her attention on Adam.
And he became much more needy and codependent than his older brother. He was OCD, he had developmental delays, he had poor social skills per se. Adam's issues extended beyond that of a merely shy and awkward child.
He was classified as having Asperger's syndrome. Possibly autistic as well, but he certainly started to develop problems when it came to socialising and mixing in. He refused to eat food unless it was provided and prepared in a certain way, so very early on we see this obsessive kind of quality about his beliefs. He hated being touched, he didn't like social contact, he avoided having conversations and communication with children his age. There was one activity that Adam seemed to thrive at.
Adam and his brother were introduced to guns by their mother at a relatively early age. It wasn't something that was seen as being a problem by his mother or his father at the time. He was very comfortable around guns, he became quite a competent shot. Adam had a fascination with guns very early on, but part of this was his relationship with his mother. One of the fundamental connectors that Adam had in his world.
was with his mother and their shared interest in guns. Outside of this hobby, Adam's relationship with his mother was fraught. I'm sure that Lanza's mother had the best intentions for him. I'm sure she was genuinely looking for a solution to make her son better and to make her son healthy and happy. The problem is there was nothing wrong with Lanza in that...
particular sense he had what we would say is a developmental disorder. The problem was that whenever Adam had issues his mother didn't want to acknowledge them but also would avoid taking the advice of the professionals who were giving her the information that really she needed to help Adam with this huge array of problems. But Adam's mom Nancy found it difficult to come to terms with Adam's problems.
Adam was struggling to connect at school with his peers. Academically, he wasn't succeeding. He chooses not to go to school, but she's not making him. She's not doing anything to get him to go back into education.
And actually, he starts to then withdraw not only from the world around him, but from his mother, from the one connecting relationship that he has. By now, Adam was becoming more and more isolated. As he's going into adolescence...
He's stopping having any contact with his father. Again, another possible option for him to have some kind of outside communication is broken. So essentially, we have a child living in a dark world with only access through a screen. Adam was now spending almost all of his time in his bedroom, focused on his unhealthy interests in spree killing and firearms. Using the internet to access the world.
He became more and more interested in atrocities. He read more about mass killings, not just political mass killings and bombings, but also more mass killings that were close to home. Lanza becomes so obsessed with guns and gun crime that we see him searching for lots of information about school shootings, to the degree where he's ingesting it, he's checking it, he's even correcting it. on Wikipedia when he sees that the facts aren't quite correct. And that has to be because something is growing within him that's making him associate more and more with this type of behaviour.
There is something to be said about poor mothering, about cold-blooded mothering leading to problems in children, but there is also something to be said about over-mothering, about giving in to a child too much and allowing that child's... Perhaps darker fantasies to actually grow and become something in the real world. Adam was now completely isolated.
This is an individual who wasn't getting out much. He was learning how to conduct a spree by watching films such as Class, by watching... ...documentaries about spree killings and learning what he should do. Where Lanza is concerned you just feel an absolute sense of tragedy.
You know, a young man who has got so many huge problems, who hasn't had any kind of help, any kind of intervention, all the red flags have been missed. He has no friends, he doesn't fit in, he doesn't like the way that he looks. We know he has anorexia, for example.
He despises. The community he belongs to, he despises the community who he feels has rejected him. He's bitter, he's hostile, he's angry. At some point in 2012, Adam's mother Nancy announced that it was time for a change, a move to another state.
We do know that shortly before the spree occurred, his mother had been discussing the idea of setting up another town and moving herself and Adam away. The idea of moving away from everything that he was able to cope with, his secure bedroom, that could have filled him with so much dread and tension and stress that that could have been the triggering agent that tipped him over the edge. And on the morning of the 14th of December, Adam finally snapped.
When Adam Lanza decides that he's going to carry out the massacre, the first thing that he does is he kills his mother. We then know that he armed himself with a Bushmaster X-15, two sidearms and another shotgun. He dressed himself predominantly in black with a Bushranger hat with foam earplugs with gloves.
He stepped into what was really part video game and partly a retribution for all the ills that had been put on him, the bullying, the ridicule. At this point... Adam had nothing left to lose. Lanza then drove his mother's car to Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sandy Hook had an electronic gate system which locked at 9.30, but when he got there, just after 9.30, he shot his way through a glass pane next door to the gates and forced his way into the school.
Then essentially he goes from classroom to classroom. Hi, I'm calling from Sandy Hook School. There's something going on at our school and...
I just wanted to make sure someone was on their way....Hook School. Is that almost... Anybody? Anybody?
Are you going to sit on your top chair? He proceeded to walk through the halls, and when he could get into a classroom, he did, and he was able to... shoot children and teachers as they cowered for their own safety. And he annihilates 20 children and six members of staff.
He didn't say much, he didn't engage in conversation with many of the victims according to witnesses but he would say things such as look at them over there or look at me but predominantly he was shooting his victims with the semi-automatic Bushmaster. Lanza then turned the gun on himself. He killed himself just after the police had arrived and he would have heard them arriving on the scene.
First it was the local police, then the state police. But he killed himself before a shot was fired by law enforcement and before even a siege or a stand-off could ensue. The tragedy rocked America and left everybody asking the question, why?
It's my view that Adam Lanza actually wanted to place himself in the annals of serial killers, spree killers, mass killers. Newtown is a place where even the Christmas trees have been turned into shrines, and where the usual sounds of the season have been replaced by the silence of almost unspeakable grief. He was very narcissistic. He saw himself as being more precious and special than other people. Whatever was troubling him...
He felt it was his justification to kill other people to prove his point. I think he was a lonely, broken, psychologically disordered, personality affected individual who had been let down systematically by his mother and to a degree by a system that should have protected him. Spree killings always shock. The random nature of the violence, the callous indiscriminate use of powerful firearms, and they make us question the nature of the violence.
...nature of the individuals capable of such murderous shooting rampages. What we do tend to find time and time again in spree killers is a high amount of narcissism, almost to the point that they have some form of personality disorder, where they see themselves as so important and precious, and other people in the world as meaningless and unimportant. They're not manipulative. They are not about sex. They are not about envy.
They are not about money. They are about, I am being ignored and I want to be taken seriously. I will not allow the world to forget me. We often find with spree killers that they're killing for a very limited number of reasons. In some cases they want revenge upon a community or a town or a college or a workplace.
In other spree killings they're just isolated loners who want some kind of notoriety and some kind of infamy. But it's almost always the case that they're killing for a reason. always to my mind about no one understands me, I want the world to notice me, and I want to make my point.
I want my 15 minutes of fame, if you like. These traits were certainly present in the lone gunman Thomas Hamilton. On the morning of 13th March 1996, he entered the primary school gymnasium in the sleepy town of Dunblane, Scotland. Thomas Watt Hamilton leaves home carrying... Two Browning 9mm and two.357 Magnums and 743 cartridges.
He goes into the school, goes into the gym with a clear intention of killing children. The shooting spree that ensued would take the lives of one teacher and 16 children. Hamilton displayed many of the signature characteristics of a spree shooter.
Born in 1952, Thomas Hamilton lived on his own in Dunblane, Scotland. He's a classic isolated individual who had a chip on his shoulder about the way life was treating him. He also had the unfortunate characteristics that time and time again we see make up spree killers. So firstly he was a narcissist.
By that I mean he had an extreme belief in his own importance. He was someone who had learned to never take responsibility for his actions. Never blamed himself for what went wrong. He always blamed other people. During the 1980s, he worked with the Scouts.
He'd been quite difficult as a Scout leader. He often fell out with other people in the organisation. On one occasion, he took some children camping in a completely unprepared fashion. Some of them got hypothermia and nearly died. But following a number of other disagreements, he finally was kicked out of the Scouting Association.
He began to set up his own boys'clubs. His motivation, in his own words, was to prevent boys becoming thugs and tearaways. And he wanted to create athletes in young boys and instil discipline in them. For less than ten pence a day, a child could spend a day with him doing gymnastics or swimming or some sport activities with other children. Sometimes he would insist that children did it in their underpants, and sometimes they would take part without their shirts.
There were many rumours about Hamilton having an unhealthy interest in the young boys. There's been a suggestion of paedophile behaviour, but there's no evidence that he ever interfered with any young boys or anything like that. The complaints always seem to be that he was a bit too heavy on the discipline. and very kind of militaristic rather than sexual.
He would have pictures all over his walls of semi-naked boys and this was in plain sight for his neighbours to see. They all commented on it. He would take videos of young boys. Hamilton also had another unwholesome obsession.
Hamilton was a pistol shootist. He would shoot... at a local gun range. He wasn't a particularly proficient marksman and he didn't have many friends at the gun club. I think at the time of the murders, he had something like 5,000 rounds of ammunition in his home.
He had all these guns completely legally. The police were well aware that he owned this arsenal, I would have called it. What turned this loner and gun fanatic into a deadly child killer?
Hamilton was facing a time where it was all starting to unravel for him. He was in financial difficulty, his businesses failed. Parents had begun to talk about him. I thought there was something strange about him.
He was a bit of an oddball. Some parents had mentioned that he'd sometimes brandished his gun when talking about the clubs to try and perhaps scare them or intimidate them. On other occasions, he'd actually allowed local children to come to his house to hold his gun and to look at his guns.
There was a campaign to stop his boys'clubs completely, so we didn't have that any more. The accusations leveled against him of suspicious behavior towards boys could have been one of the contributory factors to the break that led him to Dunblane. He'd run out of access to children. When all of those things start going wrong for a narcissist who can't accept blame, that's when they suffer what I call the triggering event.
On the 13th of March 1996, Hamilton's psychological trigger. was finally pulled. On the morning of the spree, he packed his ammunition, guns, balaclava and ear defenders into his vehicle and he drove off towards the primary school.
He went in with four guns, more rounds of ammunition than he will ever need, and he went in there simply to kill. At about 9.30 that morning... He walks into the school and into the gymnasium where there is a class and a teacher and two assistants. The PE teacher responsible for this particular group asks him what on earth he's doing and he promptly kills her. He then opens fire, literally, randomly, across the children, killing in the process 16. In an act of unimaginable cruelty and despicable brutality.
It sounded very fast, sounded like somebody hammering with a sledgehammer. Yes, only it wasn't constantly firing. It had a lot of space between the shots.
I saw him firing at us. After about 15 to 18 minutes of shooting, he turned the gun on himself and killed himself. He was an individual who didn't want to get involved in a shootout with the police and he didn't want to be taken alive.
He took the coward's way out and killed himself, which I can imagine for some families was a relief that he was dead, but also anger that he didn't face punishment for what he did. A community numbed by the horror at their local school. A community asking why.
Above all, a community asking why here. Dunblane, a peaceful cathedral city, suddenly having to face up to an unspeakable tragedy. The terrible and selfish actions of one man had laid devastation to Dunblane.
This was world news. World's media turned its attention to Dunblane and initially Dunblane did find it very, very difficult. But they were also able to show great elements of unity and community. It's only 20 years ago this happened, so it's in our living memory.
And a lot of the children then are only what, in their mid-20s now, and they're going to have that memory with them for the rest of their lives. Survivor Amy Adam remembers her ordeal on that fateful day. I don't actually remember him walking in or, like, sort of opening fire or anything.
It was all just sort of... happened and then I don't know, I must have just sort of realised that there wasn't something quite right. I kind of felt a bit strange, a bit weird and it was quite smoky in the room.
My PE teacher was actually beside me and she noticed that we had been wounded and there was a big gym hall which kept all the equipment in so she said to crawl into there to save ourselves. The single most horrifying element of Dunblane for me was the utter randomness. At that point I had two small children, both of them were in primary school, and the thought that I could have delivered them to school that morning at half past eight, and within an hour a madman had arrived and killed them for no reason at all. How the parents of Dunblane have survived and coped with that is an extraordinary act of bravery, in my view. This one shocking and terrible morning created a deep scar on the psyche of Scotland.
The only person that really knows why he did that, why Dunblane, why primary school children, why on that day... The only person who knows that is Hamilton. Someone likeable.
Yes. Got on with. Yes.
Happy to have in the house. Aye. Nice man.
Very nice, I thought. He clearly planned his murders. He was very thorough in the way he went about it. Hamilton wasn't mentally ill.
He had a personality defect, a very serious personality defect. And we have to remember that spree killers are made, they're not born. And through his personality and his interactions with the world and the choices he made, he became an angry, isolated man who thought it was acceptable to kill children.
In my opinion, Hamilton is one of the worst types of killers there are. He was weak. He was a coward.
He annihilated the most innocent people in society. that did absolutely nothing to him. On an April morning in 1999, two students of Columbine High School in Colorado arrived on campus with a deadly purpose in mind.
The two killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Claybolt, started shooting and setting off explosives, first in the school parking lot, onto the cafeteria, then to the library. They were going to bomb. their own school and the people within it, and shoot a few of the stray individuals who escaped the bomb.
The massacre that ensued would injure 24 and claim the lives of 13. What drove two students to unleash such hell? The Columbine massacre was basically Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold forming a strange kind of pact. To try and wreak vengeance on a world that didn't deserve them, who bullied them and ridiculed them.
Harris and Klebold were very different personalities. Harris was undoubtedly a manipulator, somebody who was born, in my opinion, a psychopath. Klebold was a very different individual.
He was a depressive, he talked about suicide. The childhoods were within the range of normality. Harris was kind of rather explosive. Klebold was somebody who was a little bit more receptive, an easy companion for Harris to manipulate.
As with any school, Harris and Klebold held a particular position within the social hierarchy. They were kind of outsiders. They were loners. There would often be a point of ridicule with homophobic remarks, with general bullying.
Harris and Cleveport had an absolute mutual loathing for their school peers. This loathing manifested itself in Harris'online posts and blogs. He was somebody who spent a huge amount of time writing about how dissatisfied he was about society, about how pathetic he found other human beings. He was constantly provoking arguments online, really interested in Hitler and Nazi propaganda.
When you read his post... They're full of these seeds which are saying, watch out for me. You might not see me coming, but I'm here. The boys began to nurture dark interests. Both boys were absolutely obsessed with, to be honest, a whole dark culture.
You know, bombs, guns, killings. They really, really liked, for example, looking at past shootings and spree killings. It was something that was quite fixated for both of them.
Their response to this was to create a fantasy world where the two of them were all powerful, where they actually gravitated towards mass killings and learned from these. It wasn't long before fantasy started to become reality. They became fairly proficient in the use of weapons. They acquired weapons legally and... Illegally, Harris and to some extent, Klebold became quite adept at producing pipe bombs.
So they had pretty much an arsenal and definitely something in the region of a bomb factory when it came to supplies. We know that Klebold and Harris were obsessed with bomb making and their friends talked a year earlier about the fact that they were making their own pipe bombs. In fact...... The boys had hatched a plan to exact revenge on the school that they loathed.
Eric Harris was pretty prolific when it came to actually sharing all the information that he had about his intentions. He actually would produce photographs online about the weapons he had and what he would do with them, even perhaps suggesting he would kill his fellow pupils. Essentially, they were getting equipment that meant that they could blow up a school and practicing their skills. They were homing their skills for at least 12 months prior to carrying out the Columbine attack.
Imagine that in someone's brain. It hurt my wrist like a son of a bitch. I bet so. They've been planning it for a long time. You know, there has to be a day.
You can't talk about it forever. On the morning of the 20th of April, 1999, Harris and Klebold packed up their explosives and weapons and headed for Columbine High School. On the day of the attack, both the boys arrive at the school and they plant the bomb.
They plant the bomb in the canteen with one intent, that that's going to cause a huge explosion and people are going to start wanting to escape from that and at that point they can pick their victims off. That's the plan. But the plan didn't unfold as the boys had hoped. The bombs that they had planned to actually initiate the assault all failed to go off.
So they make a decision that they're going to carry on with their plan, and they take the guns into school, and they start their spree killing. Finally for them, they're in control. They own the high school, they're now at the top of the pyramid, and they're enjoying it.
They're absolutely enjoying what they do. One of the most terrifying things about this spree killing is the fact that they were laughing. Witnesses saw them laughing, smiling, joking, even dancing around. They were having an absolute hoot as Columbine High School panicked.
Both boys were really excited and doing exactly what they wanted. When they were shooting in the library, we heard them screaming. After they chewed up something, they'd go, just a pleasure for them, that's all it is.
Klebold and Harris moved through the school, picking their targets at will. They could see that there were fellow pupils hiding underneath desks and ducking behind cupboards and cabinets, and they would calmly and silently creep around the library, surprising the individuals as they found them cowering, and on some occasions they asked them questions. If the victims gave the right answer, they would let them go.
If they gave them the wrong answer, they would shoot them dead there and then. I was under a table and people were getting shot all around me. Most pre-killers are killing their victims from a distance.
Here we've got Harrison Klebold literally getting into the face of their victims, toying with them like a cat and a mouse. Two guys were around and they were shooting people left and right. As the authorities arrived at the high school, the boys commenced with the final part of their plan.
After they've carried out their main spree, Patty Nielsen, who's a staff member at the school, hears them. She's actually locked in a break room trying to hide, and she hears them shout, one, two, three, and in unison they shoot themselves. Before their suicide, Harrison Klebold managed to kill 13 people and injure 24. The fact that two young individuals would want to wreak this kind of havoc, death and horror on a school when they could perhaps have had ambitions to be something in the world, to do something great, is a horrific thing.
One of the things that came out of the reports that were taken from the actions of Harrison Klebold was that Klebold was an individual who was internally hurting and in pain. And Harris was somebody who just wanted to cause hurt and pain. And together, they synergised as the perfect storm.