Making of a Massacre

Back in his room and in his car, Cho filmed the 30 minutes of video and the 43 photos he would later mail to NBC. In the videos, he poses with guns drawn, his face grimly snarled. In one photo, he holds a hammer. Movie buffs immediately connected the dots to a particularly gruesome Korean gore flick called "Oldboy," about a man who wreaks his vengeance with a hammer and other utensils after he has been kidnapped and held for 20 years for no particular reason. Film aficionados also detected the work of director John Woo ("Face/Off") and the movie "Taxi Driver." It's not known if Cho had seen any of those films.

Cho began to spend time at a local target range. He reportedly began bulking up at the gym, and shaved his head military style. Actually, he rode the stationary bike "like a 70-year-old woman," says Koch. Still, he was sleeping even less, rising earlier, getting ready to make his dark fantasy a reality.

At 5:30 a.m. last Monday, Cho's suitemate Karan Grewal was just finishing an all-nighter studying when he crossed paths with Cho in the bathroom. Cho looked away, the same blank expression on his face. Grewal recalls that Cho brushed his teeth and applied acne cream to his skin. That was the last Grewal saw of him.

It's not clear why Cho picked Emily Hilscher as his first victim. They shared no classes, and her room was in a different dorm, tucked away behind the elevator, hard to find unless you were looking for it. But Hilscher was a very pretty girl with bright blue eyes, and Cho may have seen her saying goodbye to her boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, when he dropped her off at the West Ambler Johnston dorm at about 7:05. Cho may have followed Hilscher back to her room and shot her, then shot the resident adviser, Ryan Clark, who lived next door and may have tried to intervene. Cho vanished, leaving only some bloody footprints.

When Hilscher's friend Heather Haugh, 18, returned to her dorm room at West A.J. from her boyfriend's at around 8 a.m., she was questioned by detectives. She mentioned that Hilscher's boyfriend, Thornhill, owned guns and that he'd recently taken Hilscher and Haugh to the shooting range. The detective seemed to seize on these facts. "They assumed it was something domestic, that he was after her," Haugh tells NEWSWEEK. Haugh protested that her friend and Thornhill had "an amazing relationship" and that he "wasn't violent," but the police seemed "convinced" that Thornhill was the prime suspect, says Haugh. The police were soon questioning Thornhill and searching his home for the murder weapon. The manhunt would prove to be a catastrophic diversion. (In homicides, the first suspect is usually the boyfriend or spouse. Police have said that they were doing the best they could with the information they had at the time.)

Virginia Tech's president, Charles Steger, had been through campus emergencies before. Early last fall, a prison convict had escaped near the university's sprawling, 2,600-acre campus in rural Virginia, and gunned down a hospital guard and a sheriff's deputy. Steger had ordered some students to evacuate their classroom building. But as he discussed what to do this time around with other top university officials, he recalled having some second thoughts about that earlier decision. What if an evacuation meant sending the students right into the cross hairs of the shooter? Maybe it was better to keep them where they were and not arouse panic.