Farnsworth: So you had some understanding of the kind of anger that Klebold and Harris had.

Glore: I do. Because it rips people up differently … Something had to be
going on there that really, really pushed the right buttons, you know, to
get them to do this, because you don’t just one morning wake up and say,
hey, I’m going to go shoot my classmates; I’m going to go pipe-bomb up the
school. You don’t just wake up one morning and figure that out. Something
has to develop over years and years and years. That leads up to something
like that.

For Kyra Glore, the slow accumulation of hatred from childhood
cruelties was responsible. But she was only one of millions of experts, family members,
pundits and ordinary people who were trying to figure out how such an
explosion of human ugliness could erupt in so seemingly benign a setting.
The national obsession with the hows and whys of juvenile crime quickly
morphed into a litany of blame: Guns. Hollywood. The Internet. Parents.
Goth. Doom. In the two months since the shootings, we have trotted out all the same
arguments that our culture has been debating — with little progress –
for decades. Does technology desensitize us? Are
parents abdicating their responsibilities? Have children grown crueler as
our media tastes have become increasingly gruesome? Has the availability of
guns made it too easy for children’s violent fantasies to become a
reality?

Roger Masters, a retired professor of government
at Dartmouth, has a more concrete theory. Masters, a maverick researcher with no formal scientific training who has been studying the link between pollution and
violent crime, argues that metal toxins in the brain can lead to murders, rapes and robberies — including the one at Littleton.

“Nobody makes the connection between metals, brain chemistry, behavior and
crime,” Masters says. “There’s the broader issue of how chemicals are affecting the brain
and the things we do. It goes beyond the idea that watching
television causes crime.”

Study of the dangers of heavy
metals and their effects on the brain has been going on for some time.
The effects of lead exposure, suspected since antiquity,
are probably the best known of all metal poisoning; the first study linking lead poisoning and violent behavior appeared in 1943. In 1979 Herbert Needleman, then a
Harvard Medical School professor, did a groundbreaking study showing that
kids with higher lead residues in their teeth performed worse on IQ tests
and had poorer attention spans and less-developed language skills. His article helped lead to the banning of
leaded gasoline. Since then, studies have shown that exposure to toxins like
mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can play a role in developmental disabilities such as intellectual retardation, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism.

In 1997 Masters found that counties with releases of lead and manganese and
high rates of alcoholism-related deaths had three times more violent crime
than areas with no releases and few deaths from alcoholism. (His study controlled for factors like poverty and family disintegration so that he could more accurately test the effects of environmental poisons.) Masters argues that the interaction of pollution with brain chemistry, poverty, family disintegration and poor diet can put some people at risk for “sub-clinical toxicity” — a condition that can interfere with impulse control, lowering the mental barrier between thinking about killing someone and actually doing it.

Suggesting that toxins can affect the brain and, therefore, behavior is one thing, but it would seem to be a stretch to apply the thesis to
an assault so calculated and specific and one so
statistically rare. But Masters, who has an unusually avid appetite for conjecture, cites neurological data and little-known facts
about southwest suburban Denver to speculate that Harris and Klebold were affected by long-term neurotoxicity.

As farfetched as the Columbine-as-neurotoxic-minefield theory might seem, there are some intriguing elements to it — starting with the toxic environments that
spawned Harris, an Air Force brat, and Klebold, a longtime Littleton resident.

The media blitz after the shootings painted Littleton as a bucolic, charmed community. “It was once a small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog,” a Time magazine reporter wrote after the tragedy. “Now it’s a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don’t lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses.”

The newsweekly failed to mention that a few miles from Columbine High School lies a U.S. Air Force
base identified as a national toxic waste site, under EPA orders to undergo a massive cleanup. Just surrounding the base is
a 4,700-acre tract of land owned by Lockheed Martin, within biking
distance of the high school campus. An April 1999 EPA fact sheet reports
that hazardous cleaning solvents, rocket fuels, PCBs and metals used to
develop Department of Defense missiles and spacecraft leaked into the
groundwater and soils. Chromium-filled sludge was dumped on the ground, then leached into nearby Brush Creek, which flows directly from an Air Force plant to a popular swimming reservoir. Because Brush Creek flowed directly through Kassler Water Treatment Plant’s infiltration gallery, the waterway was also polluting the area’s drinking water, which had been contaminated as early as 1957. By the mid-1980s, Kassler
Water Treatment Plant was distributing dirty water to more than a million
customers in Denver’s southwest suburbs. Records show that the EPA had been warned more than 10 years earlier that Brush Creek could contaminate the Kassler Plant, but it took decades and the activism of some worried parents to make the pollution public knowledge.

The Denver water board closed the plant in 1985. At the time, Dylan Klebold and his classmates at nearby elementary schools in unincorporated Jefferson County, an area which had been receiving water from the Kassler plant, were about 5 years old.

But the story didn’t end then. The month of the Littleton
shootings, Lockheed Martin tried to limit the federal health assessment of
the Air Force site. Given the strength of the defense industry lobby, it doesn’t look like the there will be a full-scale investigation into the industry’s environmental impact on the neighborhood anytime soon.

But even if there were an investigation, would we really have a clearer
understanding of what happened at Columbine? Perhaps Dylan Klebold splashed around open-mouthed in a polluted swimming hole and guzzled poisoned drinking water during the formative years of his childhood. Exposure to the contaminated water may have given other children brain damage — as mothers of a local community contended in the early 1980s, when they claimed that the Kassler drinking water was causing rampant birth defects and cancer among their children. But there are no statistics on violence among the Kassler kids, since no agency has carried out a study on the behavioral effects of Kassler contamination.

Masters argues that neurotoxicology is such an embryonic field, it’s all about opening questions in hopes that other researchers will follow. As for Harris, who didn’t grow up on Kassler water but followed his father’s military assignments from state to state, Masters says that while he can’t diagnose him from a newspaper article,
he does hazard a speculation. “The kinds of things Eric was writing in his
diary indicate that there were deficits in the way his brain was
functioning,” he says. He adds that another clue to Harris’s brain chemistry
is his medication, Luvox, a drug usually prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Masters’ claim that Harris’ destructive urges might be evidence of prefrontal cortex
deficits is highly questionable: If that were the case, every third
teenage boy in America would at some point be diagnosed with brain
dysfunction. But Masters’ approach isn’t so different from the way most researchers begin to approach a problem: Take a carefully explored subject, see what’s missing in the
analysis, flag it, look for other clues, do some more research and present
a previously unexamined hypothesis. Even with the case of Eric Harris, what
initially seems nutty may not, in the end, be so outlandish.

Throughout Harris’ life, his father worked on Air Force bases. Before moving to Michigan, New York and finally Colorado, the Harrises lived in Beaver Creek, Ohio, when Eric was 2 years old.
According to the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
(ATSDR), lead and chromium, area soil contaminants, are two of 67 chemicals
released in Beaver Creek from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and
Lammars Barrel Factory. (In comparison, the ATSDR lists 203 toxic discharges
in Littleton’s county.) According to Adrienne Anderson, an environmental studies instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “The Harris family has a history of living on or near Air Force facilities that are national toxic contamination sites.”

None of this proves that Harris was exposed to toxins — or that, even
if he was, that it had any effect on his brain. Eric
Harris’ brother, Kevin, a former high school football
player who now attends the University of Colorado at Boulder, appears perfectly normal. Masters suggests the difference may be tied to other factors, such as metal intake during pregnancy, which can cause severe fetal brain damage and differences in personality. Moreover, he points out that changes in the brain occur throughout life and may not emerge until later.

For an emeritus professor of government who is unschooled in neuroscience, Masters is quick to offer theories about a tragedy which has confounded
everyone who has studied it. But Masters has never been afraid to flirt with controversial ideas. As a political scientist (he edited the collected writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau) he acted as a political psychology expert for news reporters, speculating about “why Reagan’s smile was able to turn people on and why Nixon’s couldn’t.”

Masters’ first forays into science began when he received a Guggenheim grant in 1968 to study biology and human behavior. Then, in the 1980s, after being asked by a state of Vermont corrections officer to study crime, he went to a Florida conference on juvenile delinquency. That’s where he met Red Hodges, an oilman from California who had researched the link between violent crime and manganese in head hair — an unreliable measure of the metal’s presence in the blood or brain.

“I thought the idea that heavy metal would cause crime was so stupid. I
came into this partly because I thought it was wrong,” says Masters. He ended up taking Hodges’ findings a step further, carrying out his own research
correlating manganese pollution and crime.

In his fledgling second career as an amateur neurotoxicolist, Masters has also challenged conventional wisdom about another subject: fluoridated water. Last month he and a colleague, chemical engineer Myron Coplan, presented an extensive survey on the effect of silicofluoride-treated water to a New York Academy of Medicine conference exploring environmental influences on children’s brains, development and behavior.

Researchers and environmental activists have been sounding alarm bells
about the dangers of fluoride in all forms. But, while fluoridation was first tested for safety before World War II, Coplan maintains that studies assessing the toxicity of silicofluoride on would-be water drinkers have neither been published nor conducted in the United States. (A Medline search of “silicofluoride” resulted in several journal articles in Russian, German, and Hungarian on silicofluoride poisoning, but no studies authorized by the FDA.)

Since June of last year, when Masters and Coplan landed a $50,000 grant
from the EPA, this unlikely duo has been analyzing data on children’s blood lead levels from counties in rural Georgia, Wisconsin and other states. Their results show that silicofluoridated water, which accounts for 85 percent of fluoride-treated water and supplies about 116 million Americans, is correlated not only with higher levels of lead in kids, but also greater incidence of violent crime.

The question of whether toxins can cause criminal behavior
falls through the cracks of academia. It requires “an interdisciplinary link between medicine and criminology, and few individuals are willing to look at those two areas together,” says Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno, whose studies found that lead intoxication in males was the only consistent predictor for aggressive behavior in school or a criminal arrest record.

Toxicologists study chemicals, but not behavior. Criminologists study
sociological factors like broken homes and sometimes biological influences,
but rarely look at pollution. Medicine has investigated the neurology of
murderers and connects lead with delinquency and PCBs with lowered
intellectual capacity. When all this research is seen as a whole, it’s easy
to see how environmental contamination might be connected to criminality.
But establishing proof, in a field where there are so many variables, is a daunting task.

Not surprisingly, most academics
remain skeptical of Masters’ claims, maintaining that his research merely
points out a direction, rather than any proof. About the only thing all the researchers in the field — including Masters — seem able to agree on is that violence is probably a matter of multiple influences.

Science and criminology can be dangerous bedfellows, as the eugenics movement of the early 20th century shows. But scientists interested in the biology of crime say their field is gaining respectability. At least in the courts, that seems to be true. Lawsuits against landlords for lead paint poisoning are becoming increasingly common, and as more and more kids with lead poisoning wind up in jail, an increasing number of lawyers are beginning to specialize in lawsuits claiming that lead paint contributed to criminality. Maryland and Rhode Island are considering filing suits against lead manufacturers modeled after those targeting tobacco companies.

It may be that Masters’ explanation of Littleton in terms of neurotoxicity is just
another manifestation of the human compulsion to come up with answers, any answers, to inexplicable events. But whatever the case, it now appears that we’ll never know if he might have been on to something. Checking Harris and Klebold’s body chemistry for toxins is the only way to know whether neurotoxicity might have been a factor in the Columbine shootings. But at the end of May, at the request of the victims’ families, Jefferson County District Court Judge Henry Nieto sealed the autopsy reports of the kids killed in the Littleton shootings. When it comes to this tragedy, the neurotoxicity thesis may never be tested.

“Wait, here’s a nice older male who wrote to the [Boston] Globe,”
Daly offers, reading aloud from the newspaper. “Thank you. How can I help support your cause?”

Heekin and her roommate, Megan Niziol, are wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Where’s Mary Daly?!” in white type.

“When we picked them up,” says Heekin, referring to the shirts, “the guy
working behind the desk said, ‘Oh, just so you know, the dean of student
development called us about these shirts to see if you guys are going to
protest or something, so you might get a call. It’s just a warning.’”

The T-shirts are a problem?

“Everything’s a problem. You know, feminism. Period.”

At the cusp of the millennium, Boston College theology professor Mary Daly,
a world-renowned feminist academic, finds herself at the age of 70 in a
’90s style fight: trying to preserve female-only classes in the face of opposition from a right-wing group and her own college.

In early December, on the last day of class for the fall semester, Daly
received a telephone call from Boston College Theology Department Chairman
Donald Dietrich. He told Daly that senior Duane Naquin was registered for
one of her spring courses, “Introduction to Feminist Ethics,” even though
Naquin had never taken a women’s studies course, a prerequisite for the
class.

Daly didn’t flinch. She had told Naquin in September what she’s been
telling male students for the last 30 years: that she would teach him
separately. Daly had been through similar flare-ups before, most recently
in 1989, when she opted for a semester’s leave rather than teach two male
students. The flames eventually died down.

But this time Daly wasn’t merely engaged in a tête-à-tête with her employer,
Boston College. Dietrich informed Daly that this time she had no choice but to accept the male student. Daly also says it was during this call that she first learned that this student was being represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm in Washington. In an Oct. 16 letter sent to Boston College President William P. Leahy, the center threatened to sue the Jesuit college for violating Title IX, the federal
statute banning discrimination in higher education on the basis of sex. Boston College ordered Daly to accept Naquin into her class.

“You can’t just see Boston College here in isolation. It’s what’s motivating
them,” says Daly, who has since taken a leave of absence. “It’s the CIR which
is against radical feminism and particularly against women. Boston College
is getting rid of the CIR by getting rid of me.”

In the month following Dietrich’s telephone call, Daly sought the advice of some of her colleagues and decided to take a leave of absence to think things over, effective in January. After fruitless meetings with Boston College, she learned that the school had offered her a retirement package — a nice way of easing her out of a job. She rejected the offer and in February hired attorney Gretchen Van Ness.

“Professor Daly is deserving of respect and support by this university and
they have failed to provide that,” Van Ness says, noting that her client
has overlapping rights to fair treatment under state and federal statutes,
anti-discrimination laws and university policy. “She is unique and a
treasure and she has not received the treatment that her stature deserves.”

A prolific writer, Daly holds three doctorates and has authored seven
books, most recently “Quintessence … Realizing the Archaic Future: A
Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto.” She’s been called the first modern
feminist philosopher and counts among her friends anti-pornography
“spinster” Andrea Dworkin and actress Roseanne. She has also indulged in a brand of academic wordplay that has made her notorious even among less radical feminist circles, coining such phrases as “stag/nation” and “the/rapist,” not to mention the title of her cross-cultural survey of brutality against women’s bodies: “Gyn/ecology.”

As a stalwart icon of more fiery feminist days, Daly is an ideal target for the Center for Individual Rights, a group that has made eradicating what CIR calls “the feminist worldview” part of its mission.

In a Nov. 24 fund-raising letter, Michael S. Greve, the center’s
executive director, set out the goals for 1999. Under a section titled
“Against Radical Feminism,” Greve explains that the center’s “most important cases
are attacks on two of feminism’s sacred cows — the Violence Against Women
Act of 1994 and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.”

“We are attacking extreme views of what the law requires that are being
promoted by feminist groups,” offers CIR senior counsel Terry Pell. “We are
attacking what we believe is an overextension of Congress’ power.”

Yet when asked about the Boston College case, Pell does an about-face. “We support Title IX,” he says. “We are arguing that it ought to be enforced. If there was a case that was attacking Title IX, this wouldn’t be it.”

In fact, CIR is fighting such a case: Neal vs. Cal State Bakersfield. In August 1997, Cal State’s wrestling team was dropped after the National Organization for Women sued the school for illegally favoring male students, which NOW said was a violation of Title IX’s proportionality rule.

In the suit, CIR, which represents wrestler Stephen Neal, argues that the
provision conflicts with Title IX’s broader aim of banning sex
discrimination in higher education because it excludes male wrestlers on the basis
of sex. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Coyle barred Cal
State from capping the number of males allowed to participate on its
wrestling team.

Boston College maintains that CIR’s agenda is irrelevant.

“It’s an issue to Mary Daly but it’s not an issue to us. They haven’t sued
us,” said Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn, adding that Daly is on the
wrong side of the law. “We insist that she stop discriminating against
students, that she abide by federal policy and by the same rules as
everyone else.”

For a woman who begrudges the “monoculture” of the patriarchy and laments the “horrible deadening of spirit” sweeping through American universities, abiding by “federal policy” and “the same rules as everyone else” is not easy.

“I hear words like ‘separate’ and ‘equal.’ I don’t care about those words,”
she says. “I want there to be women’s space, where there can be explosions
of thought.”

“That’s what Mary Daly’s classes offer. A place and a time to make
the connections with each other, to generate the strength and the
willingness to go out and reach out to other people,” says senior Christine
Safriet. “We don’t have a lot of places to do that for women.”

Yet not all feminists agree with Daly’s pedagogical approach. Radcliffe’s Wendy Kaminer doesn’t see the logic in setting aside all-woman classes at a coed college.

“When I went to law school in 1972, it was common for the men to tell the
women that having us there was too much of a distraction. It’s hypocritical
for women to be making those arguments,” she said.

Kaminer continues: “A classroom is not group therapy. There’s nothing wrong
with having your own community but don’t expect a college classroom to do
that for you. It’s governed by public policy on discrimination.” Kaminer
adds that while “B.C. may have a lot of work to do to make itself an
egalitarian place for men and women,” the remedy isn’t to set up an
all-women class.

Indeed, Boston College isn’t known for being particularly woman-friendly. Aside from a couple of sports clubs, the cheerleaders and the Academy for Women in Management, there’s only one women’s group on B.C.’s list of 174 student clubs and organizations: the Women’s Resource Center. The masthead of the Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, is top-heavy with names like Tim, Nicholas and Michael.

“In our last student government elections, there were 12 candidates in
the initial running and they were all men. It’s sort of an indication of
who’s supported here,” says Safriet, a geophysics major.

There was a time during Daly’s early days at Boston College when she taught
male-only classes. That was in 1969, the year before the College of Arts
and Sciences admitted women. In fact, it was a group of men, 1,500 of them,
who fought for Daly, convincing the university to grant her tenure.

Daly says that soon after she started teaching gender-mixed classes, she
saw her female students falling behind, losing luster and being wiped out
creatively.

“Very frankly, we’re held back in our discussion,” Daly told Emily Rooney,
the host of “Greater Boston,” a local public television news program. “Some
women will always try to please the men and they don’t even mean to do it
consciously.”

This is what led to Daly’s decision to conduct female-only classes. It
didn’t cross her mind that a federal law designed to ensure better
educational opportunities for women would haunt her nearly 30 years
later.

Passed as part of the 1972 Education Amendments, Title IX says, “No
person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from
participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to
discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal
financial assistance.”

According to the American Association of University Women, in 1972, many
universities were not yet coed. Medical and law schools often limited the
number of women admitted to 15. Women applicants were often required to
have higher test scores and better grades than their male counterparts.

“It’s worse than some of the things in ’1984.’ It’s an example of
doublethink,” Daly says about being accused of violating Title IX. “What’s
most disturbing is that many people don’t use their brains and don’t see
that it’s bizarre. It’s frightening.”

Harvey Silverglate, a partner with the Boston law firm Silverglate &
Good and author of “The Shadow University: The Portrayal of Liberty on
America’s Campuses,” says that using Title IX to prevent Daly from
conducting female-only classes is overkill.

“At a private school I think it’s OK if the faculty member can convince
the school that there’s a practical pedagogical purpose, especially in Mary
Daly’s case because she has been willing to teach men separately,” says
Silverglate. “This is an example of Title IX gone crazy.”

According to National Woman’s Law Center Co-president Marcia Greenberger,
Title IX is not a knee-jerk statute.

“B.C. can’t stand behind Title IX if there’s a compelling reason for keeping
the classes the way they’ve been,” she says. “But they have to have a compelling reason for those classes to continue also.”

With the Center for Individual Rights looming in the foreground, it’s not surprising that Boston College would have chosen to avoid a court battle on behalf of Mary Daly. Instead, it seems, it opted for a court battle against her.

Back at Daly’s apartment, Megan Niziol continues reading Daly’s mail, a
letter of support here, a profane diatribe there.

“When you talk about deadening, you really see how it works, how it
functions, [how people are] focused on nothing; consumed every day with
petty little things. No one really gets the big picture,” says Niziol.

Adds Heekin: “Where do you go for this inspiration, for this spark?”

At Boston College, if you’re a woman, you once could enroll in a class with Mary Daly. But all that may be herstory.