James and Lindsay, or, "In the Room Downstairs, She Sat and Stared"

here in Halifax, the truth will set you free

“This longwinded clarification brought to you by grief over the weird kids who didn’t make it out of their teenage years and unvanquishable hope for the ones who’re presently feeling the pressure.”
-John Darnielle, on teen werewolves

One day in mid-February 2015, I loaded up Tumblr. I wish I could tell you where I was, in the crystal clarity some people remember the JFK assassination, or 9/11, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was at home, on my laptop, but that could describe a thousand times and places. My parents had announced their divorce just weeks before, and life was Liminal Spaces Hell between the collapse of two different living arrangements. I was busy unwillingly exploring the borderlands of my mental state, smart enough to mask, rearranging negative symptoms into a more approachable presentation of severe depression — but I seized up when touched and walked home from school in the middle of the road. I was sixteen years old.

My real internet home was chaos. It was often chaos, but it was chaos now in a way I’d never seen. “James is dead,” leaked the news, drops at a time from a tap I couldn’t turn on until it spurted uncontrollably. James is dead — he killed himself, didn’t he? On priors, it must’ve been. Keep scrolling. James is dead — he killed himself. James is dead — he killed himself because the cops found his mass shooting plans.

James was shallow-existences, one of my mutuals. We met from a post he made asking to find other guys in the Columbiner community, a ragtag bunch of teenagers who would be too neurodivergent to be cool in 2023, let alone 2014. It was as John Darnielle talked of teen werewolves, misfits in agony and ecstasy searching for a face to wear in society and optimizing for the least approachable face possible — “you think your pain hurts, my pain is so great it can only be expressed through the glorification of violence”. Heavy overlaps with hybristophilia and the base rates of true crime interest being what they are, the community leaned female, and the men trended even angrier and edgier. It wasn’t my real scene — I wore a lot of internet faces — but it was a scene I knew and overlapped with and met people in I felt deep connections to.

There were nightmares just around the corner, but I avoided them, when I could. I intermittently found myself unfollowing people posting sexual fantasies about Adolf Hitler. I’ve always wondered if the people who used ‘Tumblr’ as a shorthand for a kind of politics ever had much idea of what that site was actually like. I never took James for a Nazi, but hell, sometimes you think you know a guy. I did take him for a fun mutual, a bright and funny guy with a deep well of knowledge on his hobbies, a person not all too different to those of us who made it out. I definitely knew him longer than Lindsay did. That’s flings for you.

—

this is my favourite headline of all time

According to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia’s Agreed Statement of Facts, James Gamble and Lindsay Souvannarath met in December 2014. I have never had a timeline straight in my life — I couldn’t tell you if I was eight or nine when I tried to kill myself, even though I know the year — but I know I knew him longer. December to February, an erotomanic timeline if I’ve ever seen one.

Lindsay is writer-bait like no writer-bait ever was, a hapa white supremacist, a female serial killer aspirant, a beautiful young woman who locked herself in her room and drank until she wasn’t beautiful anymore. I have written too many female protagonists who are her. She is the only person in the whole situation anyone knows, a memetic “femcel murderer”. There’s more to everything, of course. There always is.

James and Lindsay only spoke for a few weeks before they hatched their plot. It was wildly unrealistic, closer to Columbine fanfiction than anything that could have really happened, but all mass shootings are Columbine fanfiction. They planned to kneel facing one another and simultaneously shoot each other in the heart — a great way to get killed by the cops when you’re setting the scene up. They spent the whole prelude posting memes about mass shootings, because OF COURSE THEY DID. For years, there lived a rumour that James had sent in the ‘anonymous tip’ telling the cops about the shooting plan himself — that he saw God at the last moment and turned away from Hell. I wonder how I ever managed to convince myself it was true.

The whole thing was astoundingly ill-planned. Lindsay flew to Canada on a one-way ticket, her luggage nothing but swastika beanies and true crime books. Like all internet couples, she knew everything about James but his actual address. The border agent thought she was a drug smuggler, her skin so acne-scarred he took it for meth picking. She told her whole plot to an undercover cop in a police car, talking about how she would be Eric to James’ Dylan.

Let’s pause. Let’s look at that, because there’s a deep implication there that’s only obvious if you’re steeped in something no normal person is steeped in. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are metonyms for a lot of things, but in mainstream society they’re usually talked about as a pair, not as individuals. As individuals they made up two very different people, friends of high school coincidence, weird for different reasons, and “the Eric to my Dylan” or vice versa is an implication about how two people relate to each other.

—

“You've said that while every other mother in Littleton was praying that her child was safe, you had to pray that your son would die before he hurt anyone else. And you write, I gave the hardest prayer I ever made - that he would kill himself because then, at least, I would know that he wanted to die.”
-Terry Gross, interviewing Sue Klebold for NPR

“Eric wanted to kill; Dylan wanted to die.” This is not exactly accurate, but nothing anyone’s ever written on Columbine is accurate, and we may as well pick out lesser untruths. People knowledgable about Columbine agree on very little, but one subject of relative agreement is that Eric was much more aggressive, much more homicidally motivated. Depending on your interpretation of Dylan, he was anything from a tag-along who barely wanted to kill at all, to someone whose genuine motive to murder was nonetheless overshadowed by suicidality.

For people with interests in Columbine — sociologic or aesthetic or hybristophilic — two people being each other’s Eric and Dylan is a statement about their relationship. The “Eric” is the prime mover, the aggressor, the one who hatches the plot. The “Dylan” is a sadboi whose philosophy is more instrumental than terminal. When Lindsay calls herself the Eric to James’ Dylan, she’s saying “this is my fault”. She’s saying that she is the ringleader, the one who wants to kill, the murderer with an accomplice. In other words: the opposite of the expectation for male/female murderer teams.

“Okay, it’s a femdom thing. So what?” I can’t fit my Discord bonk emoji in a Substack post, so the imaginary interlocutor gets off scot-free there. But what this is is a confession of exceptionalism. The shooting plot being masterminded by Lindsay gets brushed over a little in discussion of it, by people who haven’t done their research. It makes this, though, very nearly unique. There are remarkably few male/female murderer teams in general, and they virtually always cut the other way; women ringleaders are an exception so rare you can hardly name them.

—

There were three people at Halifax, say the cops. Randall Shepherd got out two years ago, but he’s still banned from the internet (at some point they’re going to have to outlaw that as a war crime).

The trouble with what the cops say is that Randy did very little. He was a suicidal kid with a suicidal friend who got some bad ideas, and turned down those ideas every time they were offered. That’s not to claim his total innocence; he was, as they call it, an “accomplice”. But “accomplice” is one of those problem-concepts. If he had flatly refused to abet James and Lindsay at all, they would have still done it. She would’ve gotten a cab from the airport, they would’ve gone to the mall with fewer Molotov cocktails. Nothing would have changed.

Accessory charges are strange concepts, more borne of the revenge desire in everyone’s soul than any clear sense of justice. Sending a guy to prison for years because he promised to pick his friend’s girlfriend up from the airport doesn’t seem particularly like it solves any problems. It isn’t even especially good deterrence; Randy planned to kill himself, and say what you want about prison, but most inmates pick it over death. The next kid who plans to kill himself after picking his friend’s girlfriend up from the airport isn’t going to stop because Randy went to prison, because he doesn’t think he’s going to live to make it there.

Lindsay, meanwhile, is doing life. She’s living, but we don’t know much. She’s sending letters to neo-Nazis, perhaps. She’s being covered by true crime podcasts. I don’t podcast; my auditory processing disorder is severe enough that I occasionally flirt with identifying as Hard of Hearing, because I can’t tell what the hell you’re saying anyway. But I’ve considered trying, just to wonder what the hell those people have come up with. I can’t imagine sitting through two True-Crime-Podcast-Register types talking about James and Lindsay. I can’t imagine what they’ll come up with. How do you listen to other people talk about something you already know?

And James.

Every year I want to remember the anniversary of James’ death, and every year I forget.

Sometimes, you have to forget about anniversaries and just write.