The coverage’s focus on them posthumously granted Harris and Klebold the macabre celebrity they had hoped for—if not quite in the way they’d imagined. They had envisioned themselves going down in history alongside the likes of Attila the Hun or the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, as the ruthless killers of hundreds of innocents. With their choice of venue—their suburban high school—and the failure of core pieces of their plan, they inadvertently gave rise to a different narrative and a different kind of terror: that of the disaffected teenage shooter taking revenge.

Within a day of the shooting, this narrative was more or less set. By most accounts, the killers were outcasts, goths, loners, targets of bullying by more popular students, and members of, as described in a New York Times article, “a group of misfits who called themselves the Trench Coat Mafia.” They were said to listen to “satanic music” and be obsessed with Nazi Germany. Reports held that they had planned their attack for Hitler’s birthday, with targets in mind among the student body: athletes, students of color, Christians—groups that had ostracized them, or that they saw as inferior. A Denver Post article published three days after the attack opened by likening it to other recent shootings: “Pearl, Miss. West Paducah, Ky. Springfield, Ore. And now Jefferson County, Colo. One common denominator in all these schoolyard shootings: bullies and misfits.”

This account was widely recounted throughout the spring of 1999 and lingers as a common perception of the attack 20 years later, but later reporting showed it to be rife with inaccuracies.