The Columbine Killers is a documentary special which investigates the tragic murders of 12 high school students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999, by teenage killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
The special aired in South Africa for the first time on DStv's Crime & Investigation Network on Wednesday 4 June 2008, at 20h30. It is an hour long.
Repeats
Thursday 5 June: 02h30, 14h30
Sunday 8 June: 22h20
Monday 9 June: 04h20, 16h20
Synopsis
On 20th April 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, two high-school seniors, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, launched an assault on Columbine High School. Armed with guns, knives and bombs, the pair hoped to murder hundreds of students.
In a 49-minute rampage, they killed 12 students and one teacher, before committing suicide. It was the worst school shooting in American history.
We know today, based on documents such as diaries, drawings and school projects, which the police found in their bedrooms, that the two teenagers were obsessed with fire-arms and bombs, and liked to draw swastikas and pictures of heavily-armed men.
We have learned that the two youngsters had intended to kill hundreds of students with Napalm bombs, having carefully studied the technical details.
In the United States today, there are hundreds of websites devoted to the young killers, and thousands of young Americans see them as veritable cult figures.
On 8th July 2006, the Colorado police published previously unseen documents and an exclusive report on the massacre.
This documentary, like a police investigation, follows the adolescent murderers’ suicide mission week by week, examining the most crucial and alarming events of the months preceding the drama, and to which no-one paid any attention.
The case will be revisited through the unique and exclusive testimony of the killer’s parents, their friends and teachers, and the victims’ families.
How did they end up at that bleak and tragic point in their lives? Could it have been foreseen? What conclusions have been drawn by the psychiatrists and police officers who have investigated the case and studied Harris and Klebold’s private writings?
Everything we knew about this affair is false but the truth could be even more chilling than the myth.