The Guardian: The cult of Columbine: how an obsession with school shooters led to a murder plot

I am not alone in my appetite for dark stories. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men. Most murder victims are also male. Homicide detectives and criminal investigators: predominantly male. Attorneys in criminal cases are also mostly men. Put simply, the world of violent crime is masculine, at least statistically. But the consumers of crime stories are decidedly female. Women make up the majority of the readers of true-crime books and the listeners of true-crime podcasts. Women are not just passively consuming these stories; they are also finding ways to participate in them. Start reading through one of the many online sleuthing forums where amateurs speculate about unsolved crimes – and sometimes solve them – and you will find that most of the posters are women. More than seven in 10 students of forensic science, one of the fastest-growing college majors, are women. A few years ago, two undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh founded a cold case club so they could spend their extracurricular hours investigating murders; the group is, unsurprisingly, dominated by women. [...]

Before the late 1990s, plenty of kids were furious and suicidal, but few of them dealt with their feelings by taking a gun to school. In 1977, Stephen King (writing under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) published a novel called Rage, which told the story of an angry young man who shot his algebra teacher and took his classmates hostage. Throughout the 1980s and into the 90s, a handful of school shootings roughly followed this formula – violence directed at teachers and classrooms taken hostage by teenagers, who were later discovered to be fans of the novel. After a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky (whose perpetrator had a copy of Rage in his locker), King asked his publisher “to take the damn thing out of print”. [...]

A few weeks after my return home to Texas, I was still obsessing about Lindsay’s punishment. Court proceedings are supposed to provide some sense of closure, but this situation felt unfinished. I kept getting stuck on this one thing: how in imposing the strictest sentence possible, one usually reserved for the most violent criminals, the judge was validating Lindsay’s virtual self, giving too much credence to the part of her that loudly proclaimed how frightening she was, how unlike other people. She had never touched a gun; her flimsy plan had collapsed almost as soon as it was put in motion. A Canadian firearms expert publicly claimed that the massacre she had helped mastermind was virtually impossible, given her and James’s weaponry and lack of experience. I was told that, in prison, she seemed to be retreating even further into her internal world.

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