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Cho's family home in Centreville: Seung-Hui Cho's anti-social behavior on the Virginia Tech campus has been described in chilling detail by his classmates and roommates. However, Cho's withdrawal likely started when he was quite young, growing up in this town house in Centreville. Some neighbors say they never saw him, and a student who shared a high school Spanish class with him says she never heard his voice.

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Mysteries aplenty linger about the events of April 16.

One example: Where are they -- the hard drive and the cellphone?

Karan Grewal shared a compact suite with Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech's Harper Hall. "He hung in the [suite's] common area a lot, working on his laptop or sitting in the rocking chair staring out the window," Grewal said.

Investigators quickly located Cho's computer. Grewal said his suite mate's laptop was a Compaq Presario. Its hard drive was missing, as was Cho's cellphone. Searches of the campus' Duck Pond yielded nothing.

Police had rummaged through trash cans and Dumpsters soon after the shootings at Norris Hall. Investigators did not dig through the local landfill because the on-campus hunt was considered thorough, said Corinne Geller, a Virginia State Police spokeswoman.

The hard drive and cellphone search continues.

Today, more than four months after Cho murdered 32 people and wounded 23 at Virginia Tech before killing himself, investigators say they remain mystified about what motivated the killing spree. During the week ahead, a review panel commissioned by Gov. Tim Kaine is expected to release its report.

The panel's findings surely will add important details about April 16 and Cho. But it seems likely that no one panel will ever comprehend fully what happened before and during the day that Seung-Hui Cho, as his family said, "made the world weep."

Still, investigators labor to piece together small details that might collectively provide a more complete picture. Their task is akin to reassembling an expansive mirror smashed into slivers and bits.

Among the shards -- Is it Cho's bicycle?

On April 16, police seized a bicycle left on a rack between Burruss and Norris halls.

The bike fit a description of Cho's, but authorities were unable to lift fingerprints and have not linked the bicycle definitively to Cho, said Geller.

Investigators don't know whether Cho used a bicycle April 16 to travel the campus and visit the post office before moving to Norris Hall.

"That's something the investigation would love to confirm -- how did he make it from one place to another?" Geller said.

Did Cho have a stash?

Grewal said neither he nor Cho's roommate Joe Aust saw any evidence that Cho had guns, ammunition or chains in the suite or the small room Cho shared with Aust.

"Maybe he never kept them in the suite," Grewal said.

Or maybe Cho stored the gear above ceiling tiles, said Grewal, who once found full beer bottles above tiles in his own room.

Perhaps Cho kept his killing gear somewhere else.

"That's part of the ongoing investigation," Geller said.

Where has Cho's family been?

Seung-Hui Cho's immediate family, whisked away by authorities on April 16 and seemingly sequestered ever since, has recently returned, occasionally, to the family's town house in Centreville, according to three neighbors.

It does not appear, however, that the Chos -- sister Sun-Kyung Cho, mother Hyang-Ai Cho and father Sung-Tae Cho -- have returned to their town house permanently.

"I believe they're back," said Jennifer Hardwick, who lives directly across the narrow street of attached town houses. "But I haven't seen anyone there lately."

'Load up on guns'

On April 16, Cho skipped his morning Bible class at Tech.

Tara Marciniak-McGuire, also enrolled in the Bible as Literature course at Virginia Tech, had met Cho in 2005 in Nikki Giovanni's poetry class. Marciniak-McGuire had dropped that course, she said, in large part because of behaviors that ultimately got Cho expelled from it.

Evidence suggests Cho visibly unraveled during the fall semester of 2005. His behaviors then -- stalking women, talk of an imaginary girlfriend and brother, calling himself "Question Mark," unnerving students and professors in classes -- finally attracted official attention to a young man long lost in shadow.

In December 2005, Cho expressed suicidal thoughts to Andy Koch, a student in his dorm suite. An evaluation concluded Cho was a danger to himself or others and he was involuntarily committed, briefly, to a mental health hospital.

Koch and John Eide, Cho's roommate that year, had already concluded Cho might be dangerous. Cho had scrawled on suite walls lyrics from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The song's first line is "Load up on guns."

Eide and Koch rummaged one day in 2005 through Cho's belongings. They found a folding knife with a blade about 3 to 4 inches long. They found prescription bottles, but did not read the labels. In July, Koch told The Roanoke Times about a recently surfaced memory.

"On the back of our suite door it looked like someone had taken a knife and stabbed a big circle in the door," he said. "It kept going around and around and around. I always thought it was him [who made the circle]. It really couldn't have been anyone else."

After hospitalization, Cho appeared to improve. "There weren't any more incidents," said Koch. "Maybe he was just more careful."

During a recent news conference, state police suggested Cho made at least a few contacts with mental health professionals after his hospitalization. Special Justice Paul Barnett had ordered Cho to attend outpatient treatment and had released him from Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health. Cho had an appointment at Tech's Cook Counseling Center. The center's records, which might indicate if Cho kept the appointment or received other treatment, have so far been cloaked by privacy laws.

To Marciniak-McGuire, Cho had seemed less troubled during the spring semester 2007 Bible class than in Giovanni's 2005 class.

"There were several times I saw him when he looked more like a normal college student. He actually looked quite content in there," she said.

Mental health professionals know that clients who exhibit a sudden, inexplicable improvement in mood after prolonged despair might have crafted and committed themselves to a specific plan to kill themselves -- an outcome the patient believes promises imminent relief, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.

Life in the shadows

Cho began to disappear long before he came to Virginia Tech.

During the April media swarm journalists interviewed Cho's South Korean kin. Relatives' descriptions of Cho as a boy fit those of Cho as a man: silent and hard to reach. A great-aunt said Cho's unresponsiveness worried his mother.

But with every interview and article, it became increasingly obvious that much about Cho remained unknown -- and might remain so.

Sue Heinrich's town house in Centreville is about 16 strides from what has been the Cho family's home, on a small, narrow street in teeming Northern Virginia.

Heinrich purchased her town house in January 2001, when Cho would have been nearly 17 years old. She described his parents as good people, nice people.

Heinrich, an amiable woman who enjoys tending her small yard, said she never saw Seung-Hui Cho. Not once.

Bronte Green's family lives across the street. Green, a student at Westfield High School, Cho's former school, could not recall seeing him. Neither could longtime neighbor Marshall Main.

Anonymity breeds easily in Northern Virginia. Gridlock traps commuters alone in cars. Metro riders rely on iPods and newspapers to repel conversation. Urban sprawl, cookie-cutter town houses, and cities imperceptibly blending one into the other sequester people and diminish a sense of community.

Many Fairfax County schools teach students in the thousands. Inevitably, troubled students sometimes escape notice.

"A principal once told me, 'We don't need metal detectors at the schools; we need mental detectors,' " said Paul Regnier, a school system spokesman.

In middle school, Cho played trombone for the symphonic band. In high school, he was a member of the science club, and his advanced placement classes included calculus.

A recent report by The Wall Street Journal suggested Cho received some treatment after being diagnosed with "selective mutism," an anxiety-related disorder that might explain his renowned silence.

At Tech, Cho was 23 years old and a senior majoring in English.

Comments by college roommates suggest Cho was smart and studious. He rarely participated in classes.

Cho enrolled last fall in a Contemporary Horror class taught by English instructor Brent Stevens. Stevens said Cho turned in assignments and "did an adequate job in my class." One paper "showed a propensity for plot summary and a lack of originality," Stevens said.

Regan Wilder, a Virginia Tech student, shared classes with Cho in elementary school and at Westfield. Donna Wilder, Regan's mother, said her daughter told her that high school classmates in an AP Spanish class clamored to listen to Cho's assigned audiotape because they had never heard his voice.

There is no class photograph of Cho in the Westfield annual for 2003, the year he graduated. The yearbook includes no mention of him, either.

"I have no idea why," said Regnier.

Donna Wilder said Regan recently told her, "Mom, we tried to reach out to him, but some people are just very good at making themselves invisible."

Cho's isolation seemed nearly absolute, even during an era when many youths idle in bedrooms -- cruising the Web, instant messaging, losing themselves in computer games.

That uncanny invisibility ended April 16.

'Demon spirits'

After the shootings, excerpts from videos Cho had created jarred millions. Among them was the Rev. Dong Cheol Lee, pastor of One Mind Church in Woodbridge.

Lee had once tried to engage Cho in emotional and spiritual counseling. The Cho family did not attend One Mind Church, but a nearby neighbor and church member asked Lee to reach out.

After visiting the church member, who also had a child with behavioral problems, Lee initiated contact with Cho.

"I just stopped by and saw [Cho] and I try to say something to him and he didn't want to say anything. I think he really needed emotional healing, like that, and spiritual healing together."

Lee hoped to visit Cho again, but did not before Cho's return to school at the end of spring break 2006.

Roughly a year later, Lee saw the videos. In them, Cho, known for monkish silence or barely audible mutterings, rails at length, articulating, without stumbling, words like "cognac" and "debaucheries." He compares himself to Jesus and talks about being crucified.

Lee said the young man he saw "speaking very well," describing wickedness and twisting holy things into ugliness, appeared radically different from the person he'd met and heard so many others describe before and after April 16.

Lee believes now that Cho's "broken-heartedness" -- from childhood scars, from struggling to fit in at school and adapt to a "dysfunctional society" -- created an abnormal personality vulnerable to demonic forces. Lee suspects "devil powers" afflicted Cho in the weeks before April 16 and on the day itself.

"There was something evil aiding him, because the act that he committed could not have been committed alone," Lee wrote in an e-mail to The Roanoke Times.

During the fall semester 2005, Cho's writings and behaviors were unnerving students in Giovanni's poetry class.

Marciniak-McGuire was one. Although Cho rarely spoke in any setting, he read poems in class, hiding behind dark glasses, she said.

"His poems weren't poems so much as ranting and raving about how horrible life was," recalled Marciniak-McGuire. "It just seems like he had never been accepted by anyone."

Cho's poems frequently focused on women who were beautiful but aloof and shallow, she said. Although Giovanni had told investigators that Cho read only one poem over and over -- a poem about women's panties -- Marciniak-McGuire's memories of the class reminded Giovanni in late July of others.

During one session, Giovanni described having once eaten turtle soup. Students shared experiences of consuming other unusual animal fare. Cho's poem the next week lashed Giovanni and the class.

"He told us we were going to hell," said Marciniak-McGuire.

During Cho's short, tortured life, he knew that territory well.

Staff writers Ray Reed, Mike Gangloff and Christina Rogers and research librarian Belinda Harris contributed to this report.