The mind of a teenage killer-in-training is a very dark place.
"I have a goal to destroy as much as possible, and I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy or any of that," Eric Harris wrote in a journal entry almost exactly six months before he and his friend Dylan Klebold took their bombs and guns to Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
Another entry is even more to the point: "It's cool to hate."
But as the nearly 1,000 pages of documents released here on Thursday by the Jefferson County sheriff also reveal, evil was hatched amid the utterly ordinary things of teenage life. Immature rants against the world, declarations of invincible superiority and depressed mopes about the love for a girl who did not love back are interspersed with to-do lists that, in retrospect, are the stuff of bleakest horror.
On one undated page, Harris, who was 18 when he and Klebold, 17, killed 13 people and then themselves, wrote down a neatly enumerated list of things still to be done. Get nails. Get gas cans. Fill clips. Finish fuses.
At the top of the page was a chipper printed reminder about the virtues of optimism: "Your outlook determines your ability to overcome any challenge."
The documents, most of which were seized by the police from the Klebold and Harris homes and vehicles, were released by the sheriff as a result of an order by the Colorado Supreme Court, which said last year that the sheriff must review the retained evidence -- including videotapes made by the killers -- and decide what materials, if any, were in the public interest.
The sheriff, Ted Mink, said in a letter posted on the county Web site that after extensive review, and discussions with the family members of the victims and with violent-crime behavior analysts, he had decided that the videotapes should not be released because he feared they could inspire copycat crimes. But the documents passed the court's test.
"No one item has held the key," Mink wrote.
What the new trove of documents offers, over and over, is the mixed sense of inevitability -- two young men surging toward disaster -- and just as often the glimpse of another future that might have unfolded, in which all the detailed plans for mayhem and killing stayed in a drawer, a fantasy only.
In a school paper written by Klebold, two months before the killings, according to the handwritten date at the top, he described an intensely violent scene in which a man carrying duffle bags pulled out weapons and began a mass killing. The gore is described in vivid detail: blood spatters under the streetlights, metal objects are thrust though skulls.
The teacher appeared somewhat taken aback.
"I'd like to talk to you about your story before I give you a grade," the unnamed teacher wrote. "You are an excellent writer/storyteller, but I have some problems with this one."
The documents also give nuance and texture to some of the myths and caricatures that have grown up around the killers: that they were bullied losers pushed to the edge or angry teenagers fueled by emptiness and techno music.
Klebold, for example, rhapsodized for many pages, including some decorated with florid, hand-drawn red hearts, about a girl. Whatever else happened to him in the months and weeks leading up the killings, he loved once, like any other teenager, if only from afar.
The girl's name was redacted in the documents.
"I hear the sound of her laugh, I picture her face," he wrote. "I just hope she likes me."
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