Last Day on Earth (17 page)

Steve buys the Glock 19 for $554.60. This is the gun that will kill his five victims and himself. It’s an Austrian military gun, light, perfectly engineered to kill people, its only function. He then asks Tony about shotguns, says he wants to shoot skeet.

So Tony shows him some skeet guns, tells police later that Steve buys a Sportsman Model 48. This is what Tony puts on all the forms, and he says he has to show Steve how to load the gun, tells police “it did not seem like Steven was knowledgeable about guns.” But like other gun dealers, Tony is hiding things. Steve has traded in his old guns, for instance, and Tony doesn’t report this to police. He will end up having to voluntarily shut down his business before the police make him shut it down. I think it’s possible he lies about the model of the
shotgun, too, falsely records it as a Sportsman model. The first ATF reports, and all the witness reports, are consistent with a pump shotgun, the Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun that Steve was trained on at Rockville. He even took a written test detailing how to load it, and in Cole Hall he will be very fast at reloading. The Sportsman 48 isn’t a pump. Later, the ATF will change their story to say it was the Sportsman. Is this to avoid having to talk about how all the gun forms could go through with the wrong model listed?

Whichever model of Remington 12-gauge shotgun it is, this will be the one he uses first in Cole Hall, for shock and awe, for theatrical effect, to create confusion and chaos. He knows he’s going back to NIU. He makes a reservation for a Best Western Hotel in DeKalb. He takes a cash advance against his Bank of America VISA for $5,000. He buys a Gator GC Dread hard shell guitar case for the shotgun, requests next day delivery. He needs to plan everything carefully. No screw-ups like at Columbine. No bombs that don’t go off.

He wants to have sex, but for some reason not with Kelly. He checks Craigslist, the Erotic Services section, for prostitutes, and he posts his own ad there, too.

Just before midnight, Wednesday, February 6, “Katie” responds. She responded to his ad back in September, too, but they never hooked up. She’s the one with 44Ds and “cushin for the pushin,” ten years older than him and looks “more like the woman next door.” He’s not letting her get away this time, so he tells her, “I don’t mind donating or what not.” He offers to drive out immediately, with hot coffee and roses. He can be there by 1:00 a.m.

She can’t do it right now, though. Her ten-year-old son is at her house. He’ll be with daddy for the weekend, so Friday night would work.

“I’m just really horny right now,” Steve emails. He could drive over right now and they could cruise around the block. He’d offer something extra tonight.

“So you want me to blow you in the car? :)” she asks. “If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think would be ‘worth my while’?”

“I don’t know the going rate,” he writes back. He’s careful not to actually break the law in writing, and he’s frustrated, because he can’t quite
get this to happen for some reason. Why won’t she just meet? They talk on the phone, but this is frustrating. She has a sexy voice, but she keeps putting him off.

He’s tired for class the next day, Thursday February 7. He argues with Sandra Thompson, one of his classmates. He finds her annoying, and he tries to put her in her place for a few minutes, but the others take her side and tell him to shut up. He’s not really focused, anyway. He feels paranoid again. They really are telling him to shut up, but he also has this sense of them all ganging up against him, and this is probably the paranoia. At his next class, in the evening, Sandra’s there again, but this time he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t participate at all. Why is he even here? None of it’s going to matter after next week, after Valentine’s Day. He’s just going through the motions so that no one will suspect anything unusual.

He’s pissed off and frustrated that he can’t see Katie yet, so he finds “Megan,” also in the Erotic Services section of Craigslist. They meet that night at the corner of Prospect and Bloomington in Champaign, just off the highway, the same crack and ho neighborhood where he met Heather in the fall. He hates places like this because they remind him of all the shitty places he lived in Chicago with Thresholds, but at least Megan shows up. She’s with her friend “Elyse,” who doesn’t look bad, either. He’ll have to give her a call afterward. Megan gets into his car, a white Honda, and they drive around for a while, then park behind a building near the Econo Lodge where he had sex with Heather. He and Megan have sex in the car, with Steve on top. She’s nasty, but that’s fine, and they’re parked for about half an hour, then he drives her back to where Elyse is waiting.

The next day, Friday, February 8, he writes a check to himself for cash: $4,600, then changes that to $4,601. It might not track that way. He buys stamps for the packages he’s planning. He talks with Katie and finally gets her address in Seymour, Illinois. He arrives that night wearing his dark stocking cap. She’s lit candles. He’s brought cash. He doesn’t feel like talking. They have sex, and afterward, he tells her he’s going out of town.

He calls Elyse afterward, after midnight, calls Megan at 2:48 a.m. Does he meet both of them for sex? Has he been with three women that night? Has he also been with Jessica?

On Sunday, February 10, four days before the shooting, Steve talks with his father on the phone. He talks with his godfather, also, makes plans for the next weekend. He’ll visit. They’ll play chess. But this is just a cover, a lie. He needs an alibi. He tells Jessica he’s leaving tomorrow, Monday, to visit his godfather for the week, because his godfather’s health is poor.

He meets again with Megan that night at Walgreen’s. He drives behind a hotel and they do it in the car again. They’re back and forth eighteen times on the phone that night, dirty talk, and Steve also calls Elyse, which Megan doesn’t know about. Something about the secrecy is exciting. No one knows what he’s up to. He’s free to do whatever he wants, like Nietzsche’s superman. Except that he feels like shit, hates himself, is ashamed, has diarrhea, has to check five times that the car door is locked. He wants to die. He can’t sleep. Sends an email to Kelly, jokes “Hey, isn’t it black history month, and shouldn’t you be out celebrating? ;-) For my celebration, I’m watching Beverly Hills Cop 2 on Spike TV while I doze off.”

In the morning, about 10:00 a.m., he tells Jessica not to go to work. “Just stay. Just hang out with me today.”

“I have to go to work,” she says. She doesn’t know, and he can’t tell her. If she knew this was the last time they’d be together, she’d stay.

“You can write a book about me someday,” he says.

“Why would I want to write a book about you?” she asks.

“I can be your case study,” he says.

And then she’s gone. He’ll never see her again. Does he cry? She was his confessor. At Thanksgiving, he showed her all his mental health records before destroying them, insisted she read them. He told her about Craigslist. There was a time when he wanted her to know everything, but not now.

In their apartment, he saws off the barrel of the shotgun with a hacksaw. The guitar case, the hacksaw, the two new pistols, the extra
magazines and holsters—he’s hidden these things from her. He duct-tapes half of the inside of the guitar case, black tape—a riddle the police will never figure out. He puts the Remington 12-gauge inside, loaded. Picks up the case and it’s not too heavy. It’s strong. It’ll work fine. He leaves his old shotgun in the closet. It’s for skeet or birds, not designed for killing people, not a pump.

He’s bought longer ammo clips for the pistols. They hold thirty-three rounds each. He won’t have to reload. But the problem is they’re so long, he’ll have to carry the pistols in his hands. He won’t be able to use the holsters and hide everything under his coat. And he wants to use the shotgun first, to create confusion. And for theatrical effect. That’s Mark’s theory from their discussions about Columbine. “Personally, myself, I was very infatuated with Columbine,” Mark says, “just because of the whole process of how people did it, how they pulled it off, all that stuff. It’s more of a curiosity for me. Me and Steve have talked about it.” The word “infatuated” is interesting in relation to a mass murder. Is killing people sexy? Do we fall in love with mass murderers?

Steve leaves the long clips, leaves a lot of the extra ammo, too. He’s not going to have more than a couple minutes. After Virginia Tech, the police will come quickly. They’re not going to fuck up like that again and let someone walk around from place to place for hours.

He makes his bed, crisp, walks out to the kitchen to check again that he’s paid all of their bills ahead of time. He doesn’t want to leave Jessica with any problems. He walks back to his room and gathers everything. Puts the pistols and ammo in a duffel bag.

Does he pause and look at the Billy the Puppet mask again? Or the small doll, or the framed poster above his bed? Does he think about what he’s doing? Or does he just do it, using his OCD to move through the actions, checking everything three times?

He leaves in the afternoon, drives almost three hours to DeKalb, past farmland covered in snow, checks in to the Best Western Hotel at 6:44 p.m. Uses his Chase VISA and goes to his room, 134, then calls the front desk on his cell phone after five minutes and checks out ten minutes later, at 7:00 p.m. He drives to the Travelodge. Maybe the VISA was the problem. He shouldn’t have used a credit card. He could be tracked.

The Travelodge has a big black tarp out front covering the empty pool. Some kind of construction nightmare with chain-link fence all around. The place is a dump. The manager, “Matt,” is a pothead, red eyes, impaired, slow to understand, slow to speak. Steve pays cash for his room. No records.

Perhaps he grabs something to eat, paying cash again. Back in his room, he sends Kelly his email about the Manson concert. She’s written, “For my Black History Month celebration I plan to get a bucket of extra crispy chicken and a 2 liter of strawberry soda and have an In Living Color marathon.” So he starts off his email with “Don’t forget the watermelon! Sorry to hear about your sucky day, but things will get better! Right now I’m watching MSNBC and listening to Coma White.” This is her favorite Marilyn Manson song. He tells her he’s going to close his email account because of spam, asks her to call him later.

He erases everything in his email account and closes it. Jessica tries to email him and it bounces, so she calls him. It’s a short conversation, seven and a half minutes, at 9:56 p.m. “He told me how sorry he was for all the times he had hurt me and made me cry and that I should find someone better,” Jessica tells Mark later. “No matter how many times I told him that I loved him and how great he was, he never thought he was good enough.” Steve also tells her, “I’m sorry things did not turn out differently for us. Thank you for not holding anything against me. I appreciate what you have done for me. I love you.” He never says “I love you,” so she thinks this is odd. She thinks he’s getting depressed.

Steve has a call waiting from Kelly, so he hangs up on Jessica and talks with Kelly for half an hour. He tells her it was a bad idea living with an ex-girlfriend, because Jessica gets jealous when he talks with other women. They talk about the Manson concert, and he wishes she could have been there, but it would have been uncomfortable because of Jessica. He tells her he talked with and visited his godfather. He doesn’t tell her he’s in DeKalb. She asks what he’s doing for Valentine’s Day, and he says he isn’t going to be around. He also says he wishes he’d met her before things “got so fucked up.”

Steve talks with Jessica several more times that night, until midnight, and then he can’t sleep. His usual thing, lying awake from midnight to
3:00 a.m. He gets up and sends Kelly an email at 3:23 a.m., telling her to call if she wants to talk, because he’s cancelling this email account, too.

The next day, Tuesday, February 12, he buys four books for Jessica on Amazon, all to help with her studies. He includes the gift message, “You are the best Jessica! You’ve done so much for me, and I truly do love you. You will make an excellent psychologist or social worker someday! Don’t forget about me! Love, Steve.”

He also buys her a phone and memory sticks for $426, a purse for $302, sterling silver peace earrings for $38, data cables and other accessories, CDs, and he wants to buy her an engagement ring, something she’ll receive after the event. He wants to take care of her. He calls her in the afternoon, but she’s at work.

He tries to reach Joe Russo and also his father. Jessica calls him back at 3:38 and they talk for a little over ten minutes. He asks her what ring size she is and ‘what finger a woman wears her marriage ring on.’ He tells her she’ll be receiving a package in the mail from him. She can’t open it until Valentine’s Day or it won’t make any sense.

Jessica thinks he’s going to propose.

A COUPLE DAYS AFTER MY FATHER SHOT HIMSELF
on the phone talking to my stepmother, saying “I love you but I’m not going to live without you,” she received flowers from him. A romantic gift from the grave, the same as Jessica will receive. And how can anyone ever make sense of this kind of gift?

One of my former colleagues at FSU, Thomas Joiner, is an expert on suicide, and he maintains that suicide is not a selfish act. “That’s not the way they’re thinking,” he says. They often believe their suicide will help the people they leave behind. My father, for instance, believed his insurance policies would help us, better than miring us in his financial problems with the IRS. We’d be better off in the end. Thomas Joiner’s father committed suicide, too.

After twenty-eight years of suicide bereavement, I’m moving closer to Joiner’s view. At first, suicide seemed like the most selfish act possible, and I felt rage and shame. Now I’m not so sure. But here’s what my father did to my stepmother, here’s how he was a monster.

Eleven months before my father’s suicide, my stepmother lost her parents to a murder-suicide. Her parents had a big house on top of a hill, overlooking an entire valley in Lakeport, Northern California. A valley with pear orchards and hills all around. They had horses. They were well off from a successful pool and spa business. I spent a lot of time at that house, riding all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes, swimming in the pool, learning to play backgammon, hunting and shooting. My stepmother’s father had a gun collection, pistols and shotguns, in cases. A room with dark wood and velvet. Many of the guns rare.