The ex-girlfriend of a teenager accused of plotting to kill his teachers and fellow pupils told police that life with him became a “living hell” as he became obsessed with the Columbine massacre and killing her parents, a court heard.

The girl, who cannot be identified, told officers how the 14-year-old boy wanted them to emulate Mickey and Mallory Knox, the lead characters of the 1994 film Natural Born Killers, by murdering her parents and running away together.

The boy sobbed when footage of the girl being cross-examined was played to his trial at Leeds crown court on Friday.



In the footage she tearfully described how she had lost the person she loved “in the most horrible way”.

The girl ended about 50 minutes of questioning by saying: “I just want to say that I love [him], I really, really did and it hurts me so much to have somebody you care about a great deal because I was so attached to him.

“It kills me not being able to see him and talk to him and hold his hand and go to Costa, but I lost that in the most horrible way.”

The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, then called for a break as the boy was visibly distressed at the back of the courtroom, next to his mother and a court officer. He held his head in his hands and sobbed as the jury was led out.

The boy and his best friend, both now 15, are on trial accused of conspiracy to murder over an alleged Columbine-inspired plot to slaughter teachers and fellow pupils at their school in Northallerton, North Yorkshire.

As she was cross-examined in the video, the girl became upset as she described how they became inseparable and spent nearly every day of the summer holidays together after being introduced through a mutual friend last June.

She told Richard Pratt QC, representing the boy, that neither of the couple enjoyed their time at school. She said she did not have many friends and that he was bullied by fellow pupils.

In the interview with police, recorded on 28 October 2017, the girl said she became dependent on him and that he was the first person to make her “feel worth something”.

But the girl also said: “Teenage boys having their wet dreams – his was probably shooting up a school.”

She told the officer he was interested in “scarification” and that she reluctantly let him carve his name into her lower back with a penknife just to keep him happy and that she was scared he would harm her or others if she said no.



The girl told police that he “worshipped” Eric Harris, the ringleader of the Columbine high school shooting which killed 12 people in 1999, and he wanted her to be “his Dylan Klebold”.



She said: “I hate to say it, but he was interested in Eric Harris. He wanted to be Eric Harris, and he was looking for his Dylan Klebold.

“He was this guy, who would talk to me about how we were going to shoot up a school and what I would wear and what he would wear, and how we would run away and get married and commit suicide together.”

She said he wore the same clothes as Harris – a black trenchcoat, baseball cap and white shirt and was “proud of it” – and downloaded the same video game the Columbine killers played before the massacre.

In one text, she said he told her after a bad day at school: “You know what, I really wish I was Eric Harris.” She said he added that he would “love to see these fuckers die, they’ve caused me and you so much pain”.

She said he asked her to join him on a killing spree using her father’s legally owned shotguns and that he suggested they go “full NBK”, referring to the film Natural Born Killers. She said he texted her: “If you were willing to do it with me I would do it. We could take your dad’s guns.”

Wearing a brightly coloured jacket and leaning forward as she spoke to a female police officer, the girl said her friends and other students joked about him being a “school shooter” because he posted pictures of aborted babies and videos of live suicides on Facebook and Instagram.

“He would tell me, ‘I love that people are scared of me, I love that a lot,’” she told the police. “He almost gets off to the idea of people being scared of him and people being fearful of him and people then being fearful of me.”

The boy was arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill the girl’s parents after he climbed into her bedroom “dressed like Eric Harris” with a large kitchen knife and a T-shirt with a German slogan meaning “the family will die”, jurors heard.

He ran away after being startled by the girl’s mother, the prosecutor, Paul Greaney QC, told jurors on Thursday, but he “almost certainly expected to be able to attack them as they slept”.

The trial continues.