ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — A photocopy of a magazine cover about the Columbine school shooting was found among the belongings of Australian twin sisters who shot themselves in a suicide pact at a Colorado shooting range, authorities said yesterday.
However, it remained unclear why Kristin and Candice Hermeler, both 29, had the cover of Time headlined “The Monsters Next Door/What Made Them Do It?’’ and why the sisters made the plan to kill themselves, authorities said. One of the women survived.
Columbine High School is about 20 miles from the shooting range. The May 3, 1999, magazine cover featured photographs of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and their 13 victims. Harris and Klebold committed suicide simultaneously, just as police said the twins attempted to do.
The magazine cover was found among stuffed animals, cellphones, and jewelry the twins left behind at the nearby hotel where they had been staying. No suicide note was found.
Candice Hermeler remained hospitalized in serious condition with a head wound as her parents, Ernest and Kelsay Hermeler, arrived in Colorado yesterday. Investigators hoped to talk to the parents later, Arapahoe County sheriff’s Captain Louie Perea said.
Perea said the presence of the Time cover showed the twins had some interest in the Columbine shooting, but added that Candice has been interviewed by investigators, and told them she didn’t care about the attack and that it had happened a long time ago.
She also told authorities the twins were trying to carry out the suicide plan Monday at Family Shooting Center in Cherry Creek State Park, where investigators said they rented handguns and shot themselves in the head. There was nothing to indicate the sisters planned to hurt anyone else, Perea said.
The sisters, who are from Australia’s Victoria state, had been in the Denver area for about five weeks.
One had gun training two weeks before the shooting, and both showed up at the range about a week later for additional training, Perea said.
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