38. Martyr
She’s in the martyrs’ hall of fame,” Cassie’s pastor proclaimed at her funeral. That was not hyperbole. A noted religious scholar predicted Cassie could become the first officially designated Protestant martyr since the sixteenth century. “This is really quite extraordinary,” he said. “The flames of martyrdom are being fanned by these various preachers, who apparently have embellished the story as they have told it. It takes on a life of its own.”
In the Weekly Standard, J. Bottum compared her to the third-century martyrs Perpetua and Felicity and “the tales of the thousands of early Christians who went joyously to their deaths in the Roman coliseums.” And the response felt like the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, Bottum said. He foresaw a generation of kids rising up to recast our cultural landscape. He later described a national change of heart, “trembling on the cusp of breaking forth.… It’s an ever-widening faith that the whole pornographic, violent, anarchic disaster of popular American culture will soon be swept away.”
It was a great story. It gave Brad and Misty tremendous relief. They were due. The Enemy had taken on their little girl before. And in the first round, The Enemy had won.
It had been possession, pure and simple; that’s how Misty saw it. The Enemy had crept into her house a decade earlier, but remained hidden until the winter of 1996. She discovered his presence just before Christmas. She had just quit her job as a financial analyst at Lockheed Martin in order to be a better, full-time mom. It was a tough transition, and Misty went looking for a Bible for inspiration. She found one in Cassie’s room, and she also discovered a stack of letters. They were disturbing.
The letters documented a vigorous correspondence between Cassie and a close friend. The friend bitched about a teacher and then suggested, “Want to help me murder her?” The pages were filled with hard-core sex talk, occult imagery, and magic spells. They hammered a persistent refrain: “Kill your parents!… Make those scumbags pay for your suffering.… Murder is the answer to all of your problems.”
Misty found only the friend’s letters, but they suggested a receptive audience. Blood cocktails and vampires appeared throughout, in descriptions and illustrations. A teacher was shown stabbed with butcher knives, lying in her own blood. Figures labeled Ma and Pa were hung by their intestines. Bloody daggers were lodged in their chests. A gravestone was inscribed “Pa and Ma Bernall.”
“My guts are hungry for that weird stuff,” one letter said. “I fucking need to kill myself, we need to murder your parents. School is a fucking bitch, kill me with your parents, then kill yourself so you don’t go to jail.”
Misty called Brad, then the sheriff. They waited for Cassie to come home. First, Cassie tried to downplay the letters. Then she got angry. She hated them, she said. She admitted to writing letters in kind. She screamed. She said she would run away. She threatened to kill herself.
Rev. Dave McPherson, the youth pastor at West Bowles, counseled Brad and Misty to get tough. “Cut her phone, lock the door, pull her out of school,” he said. “Don’t let her out of the house without supervision.” That’s what they did. They transferred Cassie to a private school. They let her leave the house only for youth group at the church.
A bitter struggle followed. “She despised us at first,” Reverend McPherson said. She would threaten to run away and launch into wild, graphic screaming fits.
“I’m going to kill myself!” Brad recalled her yelling. “Do you want to watch me? I’ll do it, just watch. I’ll kill myself. I’ll put a knife right here, right through my chest.”
Cassie cut her wrists and bludgeoned her skull. She would lock herself in the bathroom and bash her head against the sink counter. Alone in her bedroom, she beat it against the wall. With her family, she was sullen and spoke in monosyllables.
“There is no hope for that girl,” Reverend McPherson thought. “Not our kind of hope.”
Cassie described the ordeal in a notebook her parents found after her death:
I cannot explain in words how much I hurt. I didn’t know how to deal with this hurt, so I physically hurt myself.… Thoughts of suicide obsessed me for days, but I was too frightened to actually do it, so I “compromised” by scratching my hands and wrists with a sharp metal file until I bled. It only hurt for the first couple minutes, then I went numb. Afterwards, however, it stung very badly, which I thought I deserved anyway.
Suddenly, one night three months later, Cassie shook The Enemy free. It was after sunset, at a youth group praise and worship service in the Rocky Mountains. Cassie got caught up in the music and suddenly broke down crying. She blubbered hysterically to a friend, who couldn’t make out half of what she said. When Misty picked her up from the retreat, Cassie rushed up, hugged her, and said, “Mom, I’ve changed. I’ve totally changed.”
Brad and Misty were skeptical, but the change took. “She left an angry, vengeful, bitter young girl and came back brand-new,” Reverend Kirsten said.
After the conversion, Cassie attended youth ministry enthusiastically, sported a WWJD bracelet, and volunteered for a program that helped ex-convicts in Denver. The following fall, Brad and Misty allowed her to transfer to Columbine High. But she struggled with social pressures right up to her last days. She did not attend prom that last weekend. She did not believe that kids liked her. The day before Cassie was killed, the leaders of her youth group gathered for a staff meeting. One of the items on the agenda was “How do we get Cassie to fit in better?”
Brad and Misty Bernall were forthcoming about Cassie’s history. A few weeks after the massacre, it was widely reported in the media. By then, two other martyr stories had surfaced. Valeen Schnurr’s account was remarkably similar to Cassie’s, except for the chronology and the outcome. Val was shot before her exchange about God. Dylan pointed his shotgun under her table and fired several rapid bursts, killing Lauren Townsend and injuring Val and another girl. Val was riddled with shotgun pellets up and down her arms and torso. Dylan walked away.
Val dropped to her knees, then her hands. Blood was streaming out of thirty-four separate wounds. “Oh my God, oh my God, don’t let me die,” she prayed.
Dylan turned around. This was too rich. “God? Do you believe in God?”
She wavered. Maybe she should keep her mouth shut. No. She would rather say it. “Yes. I believe in God.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe. And my parents brought me up that way.”
Dylan reloaded, but something distracted him. He walked off. Val crawled for shelter.
Once she made it out, Val was loaded into an ambulance, transported to St. Anthony’s, and rushed into surgery. Her parents, Mark and Shari, were waiting for her when she came to. Val started blurting out what had happened almost immediately. She made a full recovery, and her story never varied. Numerous witnesses corroborated her account.
Val’s story emerged at the same time as Cassie’s—the afternoon of the attack. It took a week longer to reach the media. It never caused much of a ripple there.
If the timing had been different, Val might have been an Evangelical hero: the brave girl who felt the brunt of a shotgun blast and still stood up for her Redeemer. She proclaimed her faith, and He saved her. What a message of hope that would have been. And the hero would have been alive to spread the good news.
It didn’t work out that way. Val was seen more often as a usurper. “People thought I was a copycat,” she said. “They thought I was just following the bandwagon. A lot of people just didn’t believe my story.”
The bigger Cassie’s fame grew, the more Val was rejected. An Evangelical youth rally was particularly disturbing. She told her story to a crowd gathered to honor Cassie and Rachel Scott. She got a very cold reception. “No one really comes out and says that never happened,” she said. “They just skirt around the issue. Like they ask, ‘Are you sure that’s how it happened?’ Or, ‘Could your faith really be that strong?’”
Val’s parents were supportive, but it wore on her. “You know, it gets frustrating,” she said. “Because you know in your heart where you were and what you said, and then people doubt you. And that’s what bothers me the most.”
Cassie’s fame grew. Reverend Kirsten embarked on a national speaking tour to spread the good news. “Pack as many onto the ark as possible,” he said. By summer’s end, the local youth group Revival Generation had blossomed from a few local chapters to an organization with offices in all fifty states. The organizer put on national touring shows with Columbine High survivors. Cassie’s name sent teenage girls storming to the stage.
Fame could be intoxicating. Brad and Misty were already celebrities in their world—blessed parents of the martyr. They resisted the temptation and carried on as humbly as before. For some time, Brad Bernall had been a greeter at Sunday worship services at West Bowles. He returned to the volunteer role almost immediately after Cassie’s funeral. He offered a smile with each handshake. The smiles looked sincere, but his pain bled through.
In early May, the church brought in a grief expert and conducted a group counseling session open to anyone in the struggling community.
Misty arrived first. Brad would be a little late, she said—he was having a really bad day. He had not gone into Cassie’s room since she’d died, but tonight, he was going in there alone. Brad showed up, shaken. He downplayed his trouble and offered to help. Misty did the same.
Emily Wyant watched in disbelief as the story mushroomed. “Why are they saying that?” she asked her mother. Emily had been under the table with Cassie. They were facing each other. Emily was looking into Cassie’s eyes when Eric fired his shotgun. Emily knew exactly what had happened.
Emily was supposed to be in science class when the shooting happened. But they had a test scheduled, and because she had missed class the day before, she wasn’t ready. Her teacher sent her down to the library to look over her notes. She pulled up a seat by the window, at a table with just one girl—Cassie Bernall, who was studying Macbeth. They heard some commotion outside, and some kids came to the window to check it out, but it dissipated. Emily stood up for a look, saw a kid running across the soccer field, and sat down, returning to her notes.
A few minutes later, Patti Nielson ran in screaming and ordered everyone to get down. Cassie and Emily got under the table and tried to barricade themselves in by pulling some chairs around their tiny perimeter. That made them feel a little safer. Cassie crouched by the window side of the table, looking in toward the room, and Emily got down at the other end, facing Cassie two feet away. They could keep in contact with each other that way and collectively maintain a view of the whole room. The chairs created a lot of blind spots, but the girls were not about to move them. That was the only protection they had.
Emily heard shots coming from down the hallway—one at a time, not in bursts. They were getting closer. The doors opened; she heard them come in. They were shooting, talking back and forth, and shouting stuff like “Who wants to be killed next?” Emily looked over her shoulder to watch. She saw a kid near the counter jump or go down. The killers walked around a lot, taunting and shooting, and Emily got a good look at them. She had never noticed them before—she was a sophomore—but was sure she could pick them out again if she ever saw them again.
The girls whispered back and forth. “Dear God, dear God, why is this happening?” Cassie asked. “I just want to go home.”
“I know,” Emily answered. “We all want to get out of here.”
Between exchanges, Cassie prayed very quietly. Eric and Dylan passed by several times, but Emily never expected one of them to “come under the table” and shoot.
Eric stopped at their table, at Cassie’s end. Emily could see his legs and his boots, pointing directly at the right side of Cassie’s face. Cassie didn’t turn. Emily didn’t have to—she was facing perpendicular to Eric’s stance, so she could look straight at Cassie and see Eric just to her left at the same time. Eric slammed his hand on table, then squatted halfway down for a look. “Peekaboo,” he said.
Eric poked his shotgun under the table rim as he came down. He didn’t pause long, or even stoop down far enough for Emily to see his face. She saw the sawed-off gun barrel. The opening was huge. She looked into Cassie’s brown eyes. Cassie was still praying. There was no time for words between them. Eric shot Cassie in the head.
Everything was muffled then. The blast was so loud, it temporarily blew out most of Emily’s hearing. The fire alarm had been unbearably loud, but now she could barely hear it. She could see the light flashing out in the hallway. Eric’s legs turned.
Bree Pasquale was sitting there, right out in the open a few steps away, beside the next table over. It had been jammed with kids when she got there—she couldn’t fit, so she sat down next to it on the floor.
Bree was a bit farther from Cassie than Emily—the next closest person—but she had a wider view. She had also seen Eric walk up with the shotgun in his right hand, slap Cassie’s tabletop twice with his left, and say, “Peekaboo.” He squatted down, balancing on the balls of his feet, still holding on to the tabletop with his free hand. Cassie looked desperate, holding her hands up against the sides of her face. Eric poked the shotgun under and fired. Not a word.
Eric was sloppy with that shot: a one-hander, in an awkward half squat. The shotgun kicked back, and the butt nailed him in the face. He broke his nose sometime during the attack, and that’s the moment investigators believe it happened. Eric had his back to Bree, so she couldn’t see the gun hit his nose. But she watched him yank back on the pump handle and eject a red shell casing. It dropped to the floor. She looked under the table. Cassie was down, blood soaking into the shoulder of her light green shirt. Emily appeared unhurt.
Bree was exposed, just a few feet from Eric, but she couldn’t take it anymore. She lay down and asked the boy beside her, who was just barely under the table, to hold her hand. He did. Bree was terrified. She did not take her eyes off Eric. He stood up after ejecting the round and turned to face her. He took a step or two toward her, squatted down again, and laid the shotgun across his thighs. Blood was pouring out of his nostrils. “I hit myself in the face!” he yelled. He was looking at her but calling out to Dylan.
Eric took hold of the gun again and pointed it in Bree’s direction. He waved it back and forth in a sweeping motion—he could shoot anyone he wanted—and it came to rest on her.
That’s when Dylan’s gun went off. Bree heard him laugh and make a joke about what he had done. When she looked back at Eric, he was staring her straight in the face.
“Do you want to die?” Eric asked.
“No.”
He asked once more.
“No no no no no.” She pleaded for him to spare her, and Eric seemed to enjoy that: The exchange went on and on. He kept the gun right to her head the whole time.
“Don’t shoot me,” she said. “I don’t want to die.”
Finally, Eric let out a big laugh. “Everyone is going to die,” he told her.
“Shoot her!” Dylan yelled.
“No,” Eric replied. “We’re going to blow up the school anyway.”
Then something distracted him. He walked away and continued killing.
Bree looked back at Cassie’s table. The other girl, Emily, was on her knees now, still facing Cassie’s crumpled body, blood everywhere. She looked scared as hell.
How could she tell? an investigator asked Bree later.
The girl was biting her hands, she said.
Bree kept an eye on that girl. When the explosions moved out into the hallway, Bree figured the killers had gone, and she called out to the girl to come join her group. Emily couldn’t hear much, so Bree started waving her hands. Emily saw her, finally, and crawled over. She was not about to stand up. She sat next to Bree and leaned against some bookshelves. Time got blurry for Emily then. Later, she couldn’t recall how long she’d sat there.
Emily and Bree knew Cassie never got a chance to speak. They gave detailed accounts to investigators. Bree’s ran fifteen pages, single-spaced, but their police reports would remain sealed for a year and a half. The 911 tape proved conclusively that they were correct. Audio of the murders was played for families, but withheld from the public as too gruesome.
Emily and Bree waited for the truth to come out.
Emily Wyant was sad. She went to counseling every day. April 20 had been horrible, and now she was saddled with a moral dilemma. She did not want to hurt the Bernalls; nor did she want to embarrass herself by shattering Cassie’s myth. The whole thing had gotten so big so fast. But by keeping quiet, Emily felt she was contributing to a lie.
“She was in a tough position,” her mother, Cindie, said later. Emily had told the cops, but they were not sharing much with the media anymore. Definitely not that bombshell.
Emily wanted to go public. Her parents were afraid. The martyrdom had turned into a religious movement—taking that on could be risky. “She didn’t know the ramifications that could come afterwards,” Cindie said. “She was just thinking about ‘I want to tell the truth.’”
Her parents were torn, too. They wanted the truth to come out, but not at the expense of their daughter. Emily had already faced more than any child should. This might be too much. Don’t do anything drastic, her parents advised. “It’s a wonderful memory for [Cassie’s] family,” Cindie told her. “Let’s not aggravate anything.”
In early May, the phone rang. It was the Rocky Mountain News. Dan Luzadder was one of the best investigative reporters in the city, and he was sorting out exactly what happened in the library. They were tracking down all the library survivors, and most were cooperating. Emily’s parents were wary. Her situation was different.
The reporters showed the Wyants some of the maps and timelines they were building. The family was impressed. The team seemed conscientious, and their work was thorough and detailed. The family agreed to talk. Emily would tell her story, and the Rocky could quote her but not identify her by name. “We didn’t want her to be some national scoundrel,” Cindie said.
After the interview, Emily was glad she had participated. What a relief to get that off her chest. She waited for the story.
The Rocky editors felt they needed more. This could get ugly. They wanted somebody on the record.
Emily kept waiting. Her frustration grew.
The Rocky Mountain News was waiting, too. They had conducted their investigation and had an incredible story to tell. Much of the public perception about Columbine was wrong. They had the truth. They were going to debunk all myths, including jocks, Goths, the TCM, and Cassie’s murder. All they needed was a “news peg.” The story would travel much farther if they timed it right.
They were waiting for Jeffco to finish its final report. A week or two before the release, the Rocky planned to stun the public with surprising revelations. It was a good strategy.
Misty Bernall had been hit hard. Telling Cassie’s story made it more bearable. Someone suggested a book. Reverend McPherson introduced her to an editor at the tiny Christian publisher Plough. Plough had published the book Cassie had been reading before she died, and Misty liked what she had seen of the company.
Misty was apprehensive at first. Profiting off Cassie was the last thing on her mind. But she had two terrific stories to tell: Cassie’s long fight for spiritual survival would be the primary focus, and her gunpoint proclamation would provide the hook.
A deal was struck in late May. It would be called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall.
The family had no idea the Rocky had discovered that title was untrue. Misty, who had gone back to work at Lockheed Martin as a statistician, would take a leave of absence to write the story. To reduce expenses, Misty agreed to forgo an advance in lieu of a higher royalty rate. Plough also agreed to set up a charity in Cassie’s name for some of its proceeds.
Plough Publishing foresaw its first bestseller. It planned a first printing of 100,000 copies, more than seven times larger than its previous record.
On May 25, something unexpected happened. Police opened the school up so families of the library victims could walk through the scene. This served two functions: victims could face the crime scene with their loved ones, and revisiting the room might jar loose memories or clarify confusion. Three senior investigators stood by to answer questions and observe. Craig Scott, who had initiated the Cassie story, came through with several family members. He stopped where he had hidden, and retold his story to his dad. A senior detective listened. Craig had sat extremely close to Cassie, just one table away, facing hers. But when he described her murder, he pointed in the opposite direction. It happened at one of the two tables near the interior, he said—which was exactly where Val had been. When a detective said Cassie had not been in that area, Craig insisted. He pointed to the closest tables to Val’s and said, “Well, she was up there then!” No, the detective said. Craig got agitated. “She was somewhere over there,” he said. He pointed again toward Val’s table. “I know that for a fact.”
Detectives explained the mistake. Craig got sick. The detective walked him out and Craig sat down in the empty corridor to collect himself. He apologized for getting ill. He was OK now, but he would wait for his family out there. He was not going back into that library.
Friends of the Bernalls said Brad was struggling much more than his wife. It was visible in the way he carried himself into worship on Sunday mornings. Brad looked broken. Misty took great solace in the book she was writing. It gave her purpose. It gave meaning to Cassie’s death. Misty had put herself in God’s hands, and He had handed her a mission. She would bring His message to a whole new audience. Her book would glorify her daughter and her God.
Investigators heard about the book deal. They decided that they owed it to Misty to alert her to the truth. In June, lead investigator Kate Battan and another detective went to see her. Misty described the meeting this way: “They said, ‘Don’t stop doing the book. We just wanted to let you know that there are differing accounts coming out of the library.’”
Battan said she encouraged Misty to continue with the book, but without the martyr incident. Cassie’s transformational story sounded wonderful. Battan said she made the details of Cassie’s murder clear, and later played the 911 tape for Brad and Misty.
Misty and her Plough editor, Chris Zimmerman, were concerned. They went back to their witnesses. Three witnesses stuck by the story that it was Cassie. Good enough. The martyr scene was going to be a small part of the book anyway. Misty wanted to focus on Cassie overcoming her own demons. “We wanted people to know Cassie was an average teenager who struggled with her weight and worried about boys and wasn’t ever a living saint,” she said.
Misty lived up to her word. That was the book she wrote. She described Cassie as selfish and stubborn on occasion, known to behave “like a spoiled two-year old.” Misty also agreed to run a disclaimer opposite the table of contents. It referred to “varying recollections” and stated that “the precise chronology… including the exact details of Cassie’s death… may never be known.”
Emily Wyant was getting more apprehensive. Her parents continued urging caution.
They had a dinner with the Bernalls. Brad and Misty asked Emily if she’d heard the exchange. Emily was a bit sheepish about answering, but she said no. Cindie Wyant felt that Emily had made herself clear, but afterward the Bernalls recalled no revelation. Cindie later surmised that they’d taken Emily’s response to mean she didn’t remember anything.
Val Schnurr’s family was uneasy, too. Investigators had briefed them on the evidence and told them about Craig Scott’s discovery in the library. Val and her parents wondered which was worse: hurting the Bernalls or keeping quiet. They also went to dinner with the Bernalls. Everyone felt better after that. Brad and Misty seemed sincere, and utterly distraught with pain. “So much sadness,” Mark Schnurr said. Clearly, the book was Misty’s way of healing.
The Schnurrs were less understanding with the publisher. The editor attended the dinner, and Shari asked him to slow down. Her husband followed up with an e-mail. “If you go ahead and publish the book, just be careful,” he wrote. “There’s a lot of conflicting information out there.” He suggested that Plough delay publication until the authorities issued their report. Plough declined.
In July, the Wall Street Journal ran a prominent story titled “Marketing a Columbine Martyr.” The publishing house was obscure, but Zimmerman had called in a team of heavy hitters. For public relations, the firm hired the New York team that had handled Monica Lewinsky’s book. Publication was two months away, and Misty had already been booked for The Today Show and 20/20. The William Morris Agency was shopping the film rights around. (A movie was never made.) An agent there had sold book club rights to a unit of Random House. He said he was marketing “virtually everything you can exploit—and I mean that in a positive way.”