Killer Kids: The New Paradigm by Lisa Black

 LUCY BURDETTE: Please welcome Lisa Black to Jungle Red Writers today. She has a new thriller out, SUFFER THE CHILDREN, and she's written a difficult but important essay about the research behind the new book...

LISA BLACK: In my recent release, Suffer the Children, my protagonists investigate a series of deaths at a juvenile detention facility for violent or traumatized children. As I don’t have children of my own this particular book required a great deal of research, all of which fascinated me.

        

    These days, school shootings have become de rigueur. Children in school today now have ‘active shooter’ drills the way kids in the fifties used to duck and cover. They never remember a time when school shootings weren’t a thing, and truthfully, neither do most of us—not since Charles Whitman climbed the tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Up until then, school shootings would more likely be called workplace killings, the results of arguments, estrangements, or revenge. Beefs were personal. Whitman was the first to kill complete strangers for no apparent reason. (Fifty years later, there is still no standard profile of a school shooter, except for two things: they plan their attacks [they don’t ‘snap’] and they are always boys.)

    

        Fast forward to 1999 and the one that forever remains as horrific as it is confusing: Littleton, Colorado, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one. Then, as now, we have one question: why? And then, as now, not even the hint of an answer presents itself.

            Eric Harris was the son of an Air Force transport pilot. Dylan Klebold’s father was a geophysicist. Each kid had a stay-at-home mom and a brother with whom they got along fine. They lived in nice neighborhoods in quite comfortable homes. These were teenage boys and yet had nothing but good things to say about their families, even in private to each other (in their ‘basement tapes’ and diaries). Obviously the source of their angst was not a miserable home life.

At school, they got good grades. Teachers liked them. They were bullied by the jocks the way nerdy kids are always bullied by the jocks, but apparently it didn’t rise above the standard hallway shoving and derisive comments—nothing like the suicide-inducing, pervasive social media campaigns waged by kids today. And Eric and Dylan had other nerdy kids as friends who understood, friends they hung out with, made amateur movies with, went to the prom with. They had a general list of people at school who, on the day of the shooting, they did not want to harm. They were not isolated.

Basically these were kids who didn’t have a single damn thing to complain about. But in private, that’s all they did. In private, the world was a horrible place, determined to crush them under its asinine rule.

They had one relatively minor run-in with the police, and impressed the officers so much that their probation was cut short. Their written apologies were sincerely eloquent, and complete lies. In private, they weren’t remotely sorry.

So while we might criticize parents who provided a son in (temporary) court-ordered anger management classes and already on antidepressants with a supply of firearms, we can perhaps believe that they were simply fooled by him in the way that the teachers, the cops, the therapists were. Eric and Dylan fooled everyone. They were very good at it.

They planned the massacre for some time and in great detail. People believe Eric was the ringleader, the one with the military background, the gun nut, the one who had no roots in the community, and Dylan the follower. But I believe Dylan was the loonier of the two. He seemed to be clinically depressed and viewed the world as hellish. Both of them veered between feeling like scum and feeling like ‘gods.’

So, why? I have no idea. But I think if they had never met each other then maybe, maybe, they would have gotten through life without actually killing anyone. Their personalities entwined in all the wrong ways and encouraged all the worst parts of each, until they spiraled into a well of violence from which no one could escape.

In the nearly 20 years since this tragedy, do you think schoolkids are better prepared to stay safe in the event of a school shooting?

(And a follow-up question from Lucy: How can we better tackle this horrific problem as a concerned society?)

About Suffer the Children: Maggie Gardiner, forensics expert for the Cleveland police department, and Jack Renner, a homicide detective with a killer secret, return in bestselling author Lisa Black’s new thriller as they confront the darkest threat yet to their careers—and their lives.

The body of fifteen-year-old Rachael Donahue—abandoned by society, raised in foster homes, and violently unapproachable—has been discovered at the bottom of a stairwell at Firebird, the secure facility for juvenile offenders in Cleveland. 

But Rachael’s not the only resident at the center to come to a dead end. Firebird’s ten-year-old “wild child” has overdosed in the infirmary—back-to-back tragedies that appear to be terrible accidents. As a forensic investigator, Maggie knows appearances can be deceiving. And Jack knows all about deceit. That’s why they both suspect a cold-blooded murderer is carrying out a deadly agenda.

As Maggie’s ex-husband gets nearer to uncovering the secrets that Maggie and Jack must hide, it becomes increasingly harder for them to protect a new and vulnerable victim from a killer with unfathomable demons.

   

     Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office she analyzed many forms of trace evidence as well as crime scenes. Now she’s a certified latent print examiner and CSI in Florida and is the author of thirteen traditionally published novels. Some of which have been translated into six other languages, one has been optioned for film and one reached the NYT bestseller’s list. The latest is Suffer the Children, which involves forensic scientist Maggie Gardiner and homicide detective Jack Renner in a series of deaths inside a center for violent children.