Updated: Columbine Mother Sue Klebold’s First TV Interview Was a Startling Look at the Parent of a Mass Shooter

The mother of Dylan Klebold, who along with Eric Harris killed 13 people and themselves at their Colorado high school in 1999, talked about her life before and after the massacre on camera for the first time on Friday night. The interview helped further fill in a complicated family portrait, writes Dave Cullen, author of the definitive history Columbine.

On April 20, 1999, Sue Klebold’s initial reaction to the mass shooting at Columbine was like so many other parents of children at the Colorado high school.

“My first thought was Dylan may be in danger,” she told Diane Sawyer on 20/20 on Friday night as part of her first television interview in the nearly 17 years since the shooting. “Who are these people that are hurting people?”

But then the news came. It was Dylan, her son, and his friend Eric Harris wielding the guns. She began hyperventilating, she said, trying to talk herself down.

“The police were there, and the helicopters were going over, and I remember thinking, ‘If this is true, if Dylan is really hurting people, somehow, he has to be stopped,’” she told Sawyer. “At that moment, I prayed that he would die. That God, stop this! Just make it stop—don’t let him hurt anybody.”

Her eyes welled up. She bit her lip on the last line, and stared ahead, silent, quivering. That admission, the most breath-taking of the hour, wasn't actually new. Sue Klebold had previously confessed that ghastly prayer to Andrew Solomon, in slightly different words, in an interview for his remarkable 2012 book, Far From the Tree. I recall my incredulity when I first read it then: Hard to believe a mom could even think that way. Did I believe her? Yes. So disarmingly candid—but it was a struggle. Hard as I tried, I couldn't picture her actually saying it. I could not picture Sue at all. I accepted it as an act of faith.

On Friday night, watching Klebold try to hold it together, grasping for the Kleenex box at moments, doubt never even nudged me. I saw a complete mom. All the peculiar fragments of Sue Klebold fit now. That’s the power of TV.

Despite covering the shootings for nearly 17 years on and off, and spending several hours on the phone with her last February when she interviewed me for her own book, I now had a solid image of her. Previously, I had only caught sight of her a few times in the media. A scared, ashen-faced shot of her in 2003, when all four Harris and Klebold parents met in a downtown Denver courthouse to be privately deposed in the case. (We will read their answers in 2027—a judge ordered them sealed until that date.) At the time, a prominent Denver journalist described the crush of paparazzi there to snatch photos of the parents—only to discover no one seemed to know what they looked like.

The blind fascination was understandable. They occupied a new, if tragically growing, rank in the American consciousness—School Shooter’s Parents. Sue Klebold and Kathy Harris were two of the earliest, and most notorious members. A prominent poll showed 83 percent of Americans placed blame partly on the women and their husbands for Columbine. Rev. Don Marxhausen, who performed Dylan‘s secret funeral, famously described Tom and Sue Klebold as “the loneliest people on the planet.”

Sue has actually come to us in startling glimpses in text three times before Friday night: a David Brooks column in the New York Times in 2004, her own O Magazine essay in 2009, and a chapter in Solomon's book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Finally now, she is telling her whole story, in her book A Mother's Reckoning, to be published by Crown on Tuesday, thus the 20/20 interview.

Sue Klebold had no big bombshells left to drop about who Dylan was, or what drove him. Most of what we’re likely to ever know has already been told. But in the Sawyer interview, she offered an onslaught of shocking details and stirring insights, and in the process provided one thing we have been waiting for all these years: a gripping portrait of what it was like to witness a slow, fitful descent to murder, and the parallel vision of what she thought she was witnessing at the time.

We saw the agony of a mom living with those two visions of her boy, struggling to reconcile them even now, too late to stop him. All the evidence points to the charming but sadistic Eric Harris as the driving force behind the attack. Dylan was the shy follower, descending into debilitating depression. Both of them hid those qualities, from Sue and nearly every adult that mattered.

After the murders, Sue and Tom fled their home briefly, she said, and she thought about moving and changing her name. “I can’t run from this,” she decided, and several weeks after the tragedy she returned to work helping disabled community college students. “I would turn on a radio and people would be talking about me and calling me a disgusting person,” she said.

She confided to a journal that she worried she was losing her link to sanity. Later, she wrote, “All I want to do is die.” The biggest impact to her family, Sue delivered off-camera. Sawyer conveyed it halfway through the show. After nearly 30 years of marriage, Sue and Tom divorced: “driven in different directions, by grief,” Sawyer said. A marriage so private, we were unaware it no longer existed. That privacy likely changed for Sue Klebold last night. She could walk anonymously through Safeway or sit quietly undisturbed inside the Columbine Memorial, as she has so many times. Never again.

Sue also revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years after the murders, and it was that fight that helped her put the despair behind her and regain the will to live. “I can’t, I can’t stay with this level of intensity,” she said. "I have to let some of it rest and say, ‘I didn’t kill these people! Dylan did—it wasn’t me!” It was a rare flash of anger. She clenched her fist as she spit out his name, and then wilted, dabbing a crumbled tissue under her nose.

It’s the same idea, essentially, that she tried to convey to David Brooks 12 years ago, that got her in so much trouble with some of the survivors. Brooks flew out to interview Tom and Sue in 2004, and summarized a wide range of responses in an 800-word column. It was clearly sympathetic, and Brooks told me privately at the time that he was impressed by couple. The column included this paragraph:

The most infuriating incident, Susan said, came when somebody said, “I forgive you for what you've done.” Susan insists, “I haven't done anything for which I need forgiveness.”

That quote rankled some of the families. It didn’t seem very humble. And it was still bothering a few when I checked in throughout the last week. Overall, their anxiety was high, but most were supportive, even gushingly so. Again, her assertion that she hadn’t killed anyone wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but on Friday, but she showed us how she got there. Completely different effect. And she showed us she got angry at Dylan too. That probably helped.

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Though she spent most of the interview discussing Dylan, it was Sue who finally came into focus last night. But she filled in a few blanks on Dylan, too—gradations of the portrait previously undisclosed. I was shocked to hear how unrepentant he was about his felony arrest for breaking into a van a year before the murders. Based on the prior evidence, including the lengthy police file, I had pictured Dylan cowed. But Sue said he acted like he had done nothing wrong. She lectured him, tried reason, even the Ten Commandments, but he was unmoved. She revoked privileges. Sue did not elaborate on the punishment last night, but I previously reported that both boys were grounded for a month, and forbidden contact with each other for awhile. (Eric also had computer access revoked.)

ABC played video of Dylan shot the same day as the break-in in January 1998, which I’d never seen before. (The broadcast did not say who provided the tape.) It is startling how ordinary Dylan appears in it, smiling and joking around. It struck me that in all the footage I've seen of Dylan, this was the first where he seemed so blissful and unaffected. Much of the video released by authorities came from short fictional films where the boys were acting, but even in the real-life moments they captured driving around, they were very aware of the camera. (If this is more representative of Dylan, and there is more video like that, release it, please.)

Retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole provided expert guidance throughout the broadcast. O’Toole authored the Bureau’s school shooter report and is widely regarded as one of the smartest people alive on such perpetrators. I spoke to both her and Jefferson County's lead investigator Kate Battan by email Saturday morning, and neither recalled seeing that video before. O’Toole was as stunned as I was by how different Dylan appeared: relaxed and casual and comfortable on camera. He also looked older and more mature to both of us—despite actually being a bit younger. Was that the real Dylan? She's going to watch it again.

I was also surprised hearing Sue Klebold, who appeared so gentle now, describe a fit of anger she unleashed on Dylan a few months after the arrest. He was withdrawn, skipping out on his chores and she decided he needed some discipline, so she pushed him up against the refrigerator and yelled: “‘You’ve got to stop being so selfish!’ I gave him the old mom lecture, and then I said, ‘And by the way, today’s Mother’s Day, and you forgot it!’” She choked up on Mother's Day, and fought to compose herself, whimpering into her hand.

It was a somewhat confusing story, with edits, but the gist seemed to be that Dylan pleaded with her not to push him too hard, and she wondered if she had. Then he got her a little gift of African Violets. “I thought everything was fine—because he was so . . .” She sobbed and smashed her fist against her forehead. “He was so sweet!”

Dylan's sweetness is unmistakable in the journal he kept periodically for the last two years of his life. All that is well known. The journal was released in 2006. (I've scanned a few dozen pages from it here.) We know how well Dylan hid this from his friends. Most were forthcoming in their police reports, also released years ago. Last night we discovered how well he had hidden it from his family, too. One of the most interesting elements of the Sawyer interview, was the tale of two journals. Sue, as noted, had been keeping one as well.

Sue, after Dylan's sophomore year: “Things have been really happy this summer. Dylan is yukking it up and having a great time with friends.”

Dylan had been contemplating suicide for months in his journal and wrote in July, “i feel so lonely, w/o a friend."

Sue also answered a question I get asked relentlessly about her by other moms: Why wasn't she searching through his room? She said she had looked through his things most of his life, but senior year, she decided to respect his privacy. She said she regrets that now, desperately, though I’m not sure what she would have found, particularly if Dylan knew she were snooping. All the evidence suggests that Eric Harris had collected the equipment, assembled the pipe bombs and tested out various napalm recipes and so forth, and seems to have done most or all of it at his house.