Two 14-year-old boys planned to kill pupils and teachers at their North Yorkshire school after developing an obsessive interest in the Columbine massacre, a court has heard.
A jury at Leeds crown court was told the teenagers hero-worshipped the Columbine high school killers and planned a “re-enactment” in the quiet market town of Northallerton.
Paul Greaney QC, prosecuting, told jurors: “They intended to shoot and kill other pupils and teachers against whom they held a grievance. They also, like their heroes, intended to deploy explosives, and researched bomb-making techniques to that end.”
The boys, who are now 15 and cannot be named because of their age, sat beside their mothers and court security officers as their trial began on Thursday. They both deny conspiracy to murder.
Jurors were told that the two schoolfriends researched bomb-making techniques and began building a stockpile of weapons before counter-terrorism police swooped in October last year.
The older of the boys, allegedly the ringleader, wrote in his diary about planning “one of the worst atrocities in British history” and said: “Fuck, I hate my school. I will obliterate it. I will kill everyone.”
Beside drawings of a swastika and a heavily-armed man, the boy confessed his love for Charles Manson and the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and described his own life as a “miserable existence, full of torment and macabre themes”.
He wrote that he had a “strange fixation with terrible people i.e. murderers” and referenced Harris on his Instagram profile, the court heard. He even dressed like Harris, Greaney said, wearing a trench coat as he sought to emulate the Columbine killer’s self-styled “trench coat mafia” persona.
In his diary the boy wrote in October that he had been planning the mass killing for over a year but it developed when he met his girlfriend that summer. The girl, also 14, told police she initially liked the boy but that he quickly became controlling and scared her.
He is accused of unlawfully wounding the girl by carving his first name into her lower back with a penknife at his hideout in nearby Catterick garrison, where police later discovered flammable fluids and screws, allegedly for a nail bomb.
When the girl’s parents stopped contact between the pair because of his “malign influence”, the boy made diary entries about torturing them to death, stealing her father’s legally held shotguns and making explosives to “begin our assault on that fucking school”. He wrote: “They’re keeping us apart because they think I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m in love.”
Later that month, the teenager was arrested on suspicion of making threats to kill his girlfriend’s parents’ after trespassing into her bedroom at midnight, dressed as his mass killer “idol” Harris and carrying a large kitchen knife with “love” written on it.
Greaney told jurors the boy had “almost certainly expected to be able to attack [them] as they slept” but fled when he was confronted by his girlfriend’s mother.
The school attack plot grew more serious, the prosecutor said, when the boys downloaded a bomb-making manual and began researching ways to buy firearms on the dark web.
Looking up the Columbine killers was a regular part of the older boy’s life, Greaney said. In the space of 14 hours last October he made more than 30 internet searches about the 1999 attack, and about building nail bombs, making a sawn-off shotgun and buying ammunition.
The younger boy, who wore glasses and a school uniform in court, drew up a hitlist of pupils and teachers they would kill, the court heard. In one text exchange between the pair, the boy told his co-accused: “I can’t be bothered any more.” The older boy replied: “Why not take some others out as well? If you’re gonna kill yourself, shoot up the school.”
The alleged plot began to unravel in late September when the younger boy told classmates what they were planning, the jury heard. One schoolfriend alerted her teacher to a text the boy had sent saying he was serious about the plan, but that “no one innocent will die, we promise”.
The boy quickly confessed to the school’s deputy headteacher and police later the same day, the court heard, admitting that they had planned to kill fellow pupils who were bullying them. The older boy, however, denied everything and the pair were not arrested.
A month later, after the incident at the older boy’s girlfriend’s house, detectives seized his diary and found a rucksack in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a bottle of liquid.
He told police he had kept the items so he could run away with his girlfriend, and he denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and teachers at his school.
The younger boy handed himself in two days later, telling police he had been manipulated and was only going along with the conversation as a joke without intending to harm anyone.
Greaney told jurors they would have to consider whether it was just fantasy or a genuine plot to kill. The prosecution’s case is that there was “plainly a plan to kill, to which both defendants were signed up. This was not fantasy. It was real.”
The trial continues.
