Two teenagers plotted to blow up a shopping centre and school — then shoot dead teachers and pupils — to mark the anniversary of a US school massacre, a court was told yesterday.
Matthew Swift, now 18, and Ross McKnight, 16, were disaffected and said to idolise those behind the Columbine massacre, in which 12 students and one teacher were murdered and 21 injured in Colorado in 1999.
Mr Swift, who saw himself as a new Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, and Ross McKnight sought to copy the lifestyles, nicknames and methods of their idols, it was alleged.
The pair, who grew up on the same street in Denton, Greater Manchester, kept diaries detailing their hatred of society. In these they were said to have charted the progress of “Project Rainbow” — their plan to detonate a diversionary bomb at the Crown Point North shopping centre in Denton, then blow up Audenshaw High School and slaughter the survivors.
The court was told that in the diary of Ross McKnight, who referred to himself as “72”, there was a drawing of a bomb with a fuse and the words: “Project Rainbow has started now”, and “72 + Swifty = God and s***loads of dead people”. He also allegedly wrote: “We will walk into the school and at the end of it no one will walk out alive . . . after we have finished in Audenshaw we will have to kill oursleves there and then.”
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Mr Swift allegedly wrote in his diary: “Audenshaw High will be no more because unlike Columbine my pipe bombs will actually f***ing explode and I will walk from classroom to classroom filling the f*** out of everybody.”
The plan was exposed on March 14 when Ross McKnight, a weightlifter, boasted about it in a drunken phone call to a girl, Manchester Crown Court was told. He told her that he could not wait until April 20, the anniversary of Columbine, because he “and Swifty” had been inspired by the shootings and other attacks.
When the girl pressed him about their plans, he told her they had been studying how to make bombs and had been keeping journals. They were planning to plant a bomb in a shopping centre, injuring thousands. Then they would drive to the school. They would block the entrance and “go in shooting as many people as possible before killing themselves”. Ross McKnight is said to have told the girl: “I just want to do it. I hate them all.”
When the two were arrested, officers found material including mobile phone images of pipebombs and Molotov cocktails being detonated, floorplans of the school, drawings of bombs with fuses and clothing like that worn by the Columbine killers — including contact lenses that would “white out” their eyes. At Mr Swift’s home they allegedly found The Anarchist’s Cookbook and a safe containing details of how to make a chemical detonator.
Both deny conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions.
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Peter Wright, QC, opening for the prosecution, told the jury: “The events paint a very disturbing picture of two young men, like-minded souls, who together hatched this plot.”
Mr Swift, who was older and lived with his grandparents, had dropped out of the lower sixth form at Audenshaw High School and was working at Ikea in Ashton-under-Lyne. He styled himself “Reb” after his hero, Harris, and was said to be a prolific writer who liked to record his thoughts for posterity.
“It is the Crown’s case that these documents were to be his epitaph,” Mr Wright said.
Mr Swift was said to have been a “bad influence” over the younger man, who had a history of depression. But each, the prosecution said, was aware of the terrible act they were preparing. Planning for the atrocity started as early as November 2007, when they were both pupils at the school.
Mr Wright told the jury the young men were impressionable schoolboys fascinated by the Columbine massacre and similar acts of mass murder around the globe. They were said to be fascinated by Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a US government building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people in 1995.
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Mr Wright told the jury that they did not have to rule on whether the plot was likely to have succeeded — only that the two conspired to carry out murder with weapons.
Ross McKnight was awarded a C grade for a story of a massacre at Audenshaw High School in which characters called Swifty and McKnight were among the ten who died.Mr Wright detailed a diary entry made by the youth, where he had discovered that the girl he loved favoured another boy. He came to terms with rejection in Project Rainbow, the prosecution said.
The trial continues.