Tapes from Columbine probe released Recordings show detectives skeptical of some answers STORY TOOLS Email this story | Print RELATED LINKS Special section: Columbine By Kevin Vaughan and Jeff Kass, Rocky Mountain News September 29, 2004 State investigators working to unravel mysteries surrounding key Columbine documents - including a long-secret draft search warrant for killer Eric Harris' home written a year before the tragedy - faced contradictory statements and differing recollections from current and former Jefferson County sheriff's officials. But tape recordings of dozens of hours of their interviews made public Wednesday also showed that the detectives were clearly skeptical of some answers. And the recordings illustrated their numerous attempts to shed light on the whereabouts of some missing documents and the handling of others. One exchange came in an interview with former sheriff's Lt. John Kiekbusch as the two investigators for the attorney general's office searched for information about a detective's file on Eric Harris that disappeared a few months after the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack and daily log sheets that had also turned up missing. "Personally," Investigator Michael Jones said, "I've been around long enough I don't really believe in coincidence. The fact those two things are missing, that bothers me a little bit. "You just don't accidentally lose a couple of very important things like that. Do you have any idea where we could go to try to find those?" Kiekbusch, after a long pause, suggested that the investigative file may have been destroyed in a routine housecleaning. And he said simply, "I don't know," when asked about the whereabouts of the logs, known as "daily activity field reports." In the end, it turned out that the daily logs were probably destroyed as part of the normal practice of purging records after the passing of a couple of years. But the investigative file? It remains missing, and a statewide grand jury that took on the investigation raised the specter that it and other documents were intentionally destroyed in the months after the tragedy, calling their unknown fate "troubling" in the face of a meeting held a few days after the Columbine tragedy that focused on the documents. Although the grand jury issued no indictment, it was critical of Kiekbusch's conduct. One of the lingering controversies surrounding Columbine remains the conduct of sheriff's investigators and administrators when they were told in 1998 that Harris had posted violent writings on the Internet and that he and Klebold were building pipe bombs - and the ways those officials portrayed that work after the school shootings. Although sheriff's officials were forced to acknowledge that 1998 investigation a few days after Columbine, for two years they hid from the public the fact that an investigator had drafted an affidavit for a warrant to search Harris' home. That draft warrant was never shown to a judge for consideration, and Harris' home was never searched. Attorney General Ken Salazar launched a new investigation in October 2003 after a previously unheard-of 1997 report about Harris' and Klebold's criminal activity was discovered in a notebook at the sheriff's office. That investigation led to the grand jury inquiry, and it uncovered for the first time that top Jefferson County officials, including law officers and prosecutors, had huddled in a "private meeting" a few days after the Columbine tragedy to discuss how to handle the affidavit. Kiekbusch acknowledged the existence of that meeting in his interview with investigators Jones and Michael McIntosh. But he was also evasive when the investigators tried to pin him down on the discussion at that "private meeting," which was held in a conference room at the Jefferson County Open Space Department. At one point, Kiekbusch was asked if there was talk at the meeting about whether the affidavit should be released to the public. "I think the answer was that - let me back up, my position certainly was that if it's public record, it should be released," Kiekbusch said. The investigators repeatedly went at Kiekbusch about the draft affidavit. They noted its potential to embarrass the department. Jones even said that if he were looking into the background of someone who had committed a horrific crime and "I came across a copy of a search warrant for the guy's house, that would be kind of like an 'Oh s - - -' moment for me." But Kiekbusch denied repeatedly that he had anything to do with the missing documents. And he scoffed at the notion that anyone covered anything up. Kiekbusch also said he believed there was nothing nefarious about the way the 1998 investigation was handled. "I don't think there was any sort of conspiracy or anything malicious on the part of any of these people certainly pre-Columbine to cover any of this up, to manipulate it in any way," he said. How about after Columbine, he was asked. "A cover-up?" Kiekbusch asked. "Yeah," one of the investigators answered. "What's to cover up at that point?" Kiekbusch responded. The statements were contained in more than 17 hours of audiotaped interviews that were released Wednesday by the attorney general's office under state open records laws. The office released recordings of everyone who consented to a taped interview. Among those who were interviewed, but for whom no tape recording was made, was former Sheriff John Stone. The cache of tapes is likely to stir some new controversies. For example, sheriff's officials insisted repeatedly after Columbine that a computer check had failed to turn up a January 1998 van break-in involving Harris and Klebold. But in their interviews with the state investigators, sheriff's Deputy Mike Guerra, who drew up the draft affidavit, and former Deputy John Hicks, who left the department in 2000, both said that a computer check had turned up the arrests. Guerra told investigators that he recalled finding a criminal record on Harris during the course of his 1998 investigation but that he dismissed it as a routine arrest. "I want to say there was some stuff on that," Guerra says of the van break-in, "but it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. A criminal trespass in south Jefferson County is really kind of routine." Hicks also told the investigators that he remembered looking at the file on Harris that Guerra compiled in 1998, and that in it was an "NCIC printout." Arrest information is tracked by law officers using the National Crime Information Computer. The interviews also do little to shed light on another lingering question: Why was that 1998 investigation ended? Sheriff's officials contended in the months after Columbine that they took the case as far as they could but that they didn't have enough evidence to justify a visit to Harris' home. And they have insisted that the draft affidavit was too weak to have ever been approved by a judge. Hicks, however, said he was stunned when he was shown the draft affidavit after the Columbine shootings. "I was shocked, good and bad," he told the investigators. Good, he said, that Guerra had gone further than he'd ever known with the case. Bad that it hadn't been taken to a point where Harris' home had been searched. But sheriff's Sgt. Randy West also acknowledged that he was confused after Columbine about why the case wasn't taken further. "I'm not sure if something else came up . . . but you can tell by the way that (draft affidavit) reads, he got to a point and man it just . . .," West said. "But again, could he have went and knocked on a door? Pretty simple. I'm not blaming Mike (Guerra), I mean at all, but we failed miserably, looking at everything that went on." Interview highlights • Excerpts from interviews during a state attorney general's investigation into the handling of documents in the Columbine case, including a report a year before the school shooting that Eric Harris had posted violent writings on the Internet and that he and Dylan Klebold were building pipe bombs. • Former Lt. John Kiekbusch on whether investigator John Hicks ever met with Columbine parents Randy and Judy Brown, who made the 1998 report: "The fact of the matter is when this issue was raised - did the Browns meet with Hicks? - my consistent reply was, 'I don't know.' I wasn't there. I don't know of a meeting. I have never seen any evidence that would indicate that there was or wasn't a meeting. I was kind of perplexed because the Browns are adamant that there was a meeting, Hicks is adamant that there wasn't." • Kiekbusch, on the draft warrant: "As I look at this now, I think that, you know, you've got in a sense a mistake of a young investigator in trying to put his notes and what should have been in a report on a search warrant affidavit. And the thing got, I think, blown out of proportion when this affidavit was publicized in the sense that, you know you got a warrant, why didn't you serve it? These are little more than investigative notes. Certainly not a formal warrant. Had Mike (Guerra) been a seasoned investigator, (he) probably would not have put those notes on a search warrant form. But it's the difference in a piece of paper." • Hicks, when asked if he remembered meeting with the Browns in 1998: "Oh yeah." • Hicks, on how seriously he viewed the 1998 report: "After I had sat down with it probably for 45 minutes, and I was trying to answer one question, is this a computer crime? . . . I read all this, and I looked at all this and I said, 'No it's not a computer crime, but there's something bigger here.' We had bombs going off down in the south area (of Jefferson County)." • Investigator Mike Guerra, on what he was told about the draft affidavit at a "private meeting" held a few days after Columbine: "I think they said, 'Do not discuss this with anybody outside the county attorney's office . . ..' " He was told the hush hush was for "liability purposes." vaughank@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5019. Staff writer Karen Abbott contributed to this story.