A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  Early in the notebook, in a section titled “Insights into the Mind of Madness,” Holmes used stick-figure drawings and vague words and phrases to allude to the value of human lives. The drawings indicate that, to him, each living person had a value of “one.” That value goes to zero when he or she dies. Some also seem to suggest that the value of life may be infinity (“ultimate good”) or negative infinity (“ultimate evil”). He writes about the value of a “murderer,” which on that page seems, ironically, to be zero.

  When I spoke with him in 2014, Holmes still held to his philosophy of “human capital” and that one can acquire another person’s value—“one”—by killing him or her (see Chapter 4). The added human capital carries no particular advantage, no extra strength or longevity or special powers; it’s just a score, an extra notch on life’s belt. There are a couple of rules, he said. The killing has to be intentional; accidents don’t count. And if more than one person does the killing, only one gets the macabre credit.

  In spite of great temptation to interpret each page and symbol in the notebook, one should remember that much of it is simply a confusing, sometimes disconnected flow of expressions at particular points in time, points at which no one knows whether Holmes was being sophomorically philosophical, writing a stream-of-consciousness journal, contemplating mission plans, communicating to Dr. Fenton, or something else. The available information suggests that he functioned adequately (although with violent intent) during much, perhaps all, of the six weeks in which he wrote in the notebook, and some sections seem quite rational, but we don’t know his state of mind when he wrote any specific page (and his comments years after the shootings don’t help very much). The notebook is thus an interesting source of speculation, but not of irrefutable information.

  Although the sentences and drawings should not always be construed as reflecting some coherent ideology, there is a frequent focus on death or fear of death. Violence appears early in Holmes’s notebook, with phrases and sentences such as “Life’s fallback solution to all problems—Death” and “When mankind can’t find truth, untruth is converted to truth via violence,” intermingled with a few figures and apparently meaningless “equations.”

  Several pages are dedicated to Holmes’s concerns about his mental and physical health and to either cataloguing the diagnoses he thought he might have or describing them for the reader. His list of possibilities for “Self Diagnosis of [his] Broken Mind” was long, diverse, obsessive, and largely derived from searching for answers online and superficially interpreting clinical websites: “Dysphoric mania; generalized anxiety disorder/social anxiety disorder/OCD/PTSD (chronic); Asperger syndrome/autism; ADHD; schizophrenia; body dysmorphic disorder; borderline, narcissistic, anxious, avoidant and obsessive compulsive personality disorder; chronic insomnia; psychosis; trichotillomania [a hair-pulling disorder]; adjustment disorder; pain disorder, restless leg syndrome.”

  The most important meaning of Holmes’s list is that it indicates his great concern about his mind as he wrote it, and perhaps his wish to communicate those concerns to Dr. Fenton via the notebook. There’s little indication that Holmes actually deserved most of those diagnoses and syndromes. There is evidence of a few symptoms and signs consistent with some, but not with others.

  On June 13, Holmes spent almost $1,200 on ammunition for his weapons, ten extra thirty-round magazines for his M&P15 rifle, a special high-capacity (100-round) drum magazine, and a Beamshot laser sight. The Beamshot GB800M is a green-dot laser sighting system, useful in low light, that can be mounted under the barrel of a rifle or handgun. Holmes installed it on one of his pistols.

  The handgun ammunition was “jacketed hollow-point,” a bullet type designed to expand upon impact, substantially increasing its stopping and killing power. The rifle cartridges, 820 rounds in this early purchase, had “full metal jacket” bullets. Full metal jacket bullets don’t expand on impact like hollow-points or soft-core ones, but they have a higher muzzle velocity and greater ability to penetrate shielding or cover such as theater seats. The 250 shotgun rounds he bought that day contained single slugs rather than the scattershot used for most bird hunting. Over the next week or so, he bought more human-silhouette targets, ten magazines for his Glock .40 caliber handguns, another laser sight, and a holster.

  On June 25, Holmes applied for membership to the Lead Valley Range, a comprehensive shooting facility about thirty miles east of Denver. His application says that he heard about the range from a friend, perhaps Tim Tapscott. He was turned down for some reason. He applied for California unemployment benefits around the same time.

  Holmes ordered “spirit lenses” (he called them “possession lenses”) from 9mmsfx.com, a theatrical supply store. Spirit lenses are cosmetic contact lenses designed to make one’s eyes look different; these were opaque black with a pinhole in the middle. The holes are too small for seeing except in bright light, but he would take selfies with them and some of his weapons just before the shootings. They made him look devilishly evil.

  On June 28, Holmes ordered another 2,500 rounds of .40 caliber handgun ammunition, 2,500 rounds of rifle ammunition, and fifty rounds of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot for his shotgun, all from an online bulk ammunition dealer. Then he paid over $335 for a MICH Level IIIA advanced combat ballistic helmet. The next day, he took cell phone photos of the interior of the Century 16 cinema.

  July 1 routine surveillance video at Gander Mountain sporting goods, as Holmes was purchasing a Vortex Strikefire Red-Dot sight for his rifle, shows that he had recently dyed his hair bright orange-red. A witness in the store noticed both his hair and that Holmes’s eyes seemed “wide open.” The Vortex Strikefire sighting system is designed for close quarters, low-light combat. He made some routine purchases that day, too; another video shows him shopping for groceries at King Sooper.

  One day later, Holmes was back online buying more weapons and materiel. MilitaryGear.com sold him a Blackhawk “urban assault vest,” an Omega Elite triple pistol magazine, and an Omega Elite M16 magazine pouch (all in black), as well as a Blackhawk “Be-Warned” tactical folding knife. He also ordered black ballistic (bullet-resistant) pants and chaps from bluedefense.com and a neck protector and Kevlar groin protector from an Arizona store, Bullet Proof Body Armor.

  Sometime on July 2, Officer Donald Ransom of the Fraser/Winter Park, Colorado, police department stopped Holmes for speeding near Hot Sulphur Springs. The officer noticed a rifle case in the back seat of his Hyundai. Holmes said he was on his way to the Byers Canyon shooting range; he was released with a warning. A man and his child saw Holmes shooting at the range later that afternoon. On July 3, he picked up a very heavy package at a FedEx center near his apartment. It was 170 pounds of ammunition.

  That day, he placed a new kind of online order, this time from cannonfuse.com: ignitable and electronic fuse materials, hollow plastic balls with fuse holes, and a Miscue launch control receiver. He inquired about a remote control fireworks firing system and some “clip igniters” and ordered expedited shipping.

  He was planning something incendiary, but he didn’t know anything about incendiary devices. On July 4, with no apparent sense of irony about Independence Day, he searched the Internet for information about gunpowder and napalm. He asked in forums, “What’s your fav bomb? … How do you make it?” He looked for “flash powder” and inquired about black powder.

  That evening, July 4, Holmes’s mother, Arlene, called from San Diego. It was the last time she would talk with him before the shootings.

  Arlene and Bob were worried about James. They knew he had dropped out of graduate school, and they sent him money just after Dr. Fenton spoke with Arlene. Bob gently suggested counseling at the time, not wanting to let James know that Fenton had called. Arlene shared that a psychiatric referral had helped her when she was at Berkeley. They told him they loved him and would be happy to provide whatever money and support he needed.

  On July 5, Holmes’s California unemployment benefits were
denied. He still had money in the bank, though, and a credit card. His parents had transferred $5,000, left over from his undergraduate college fund, to his checking account and offered to send the remaining $3,000 of his college account. That would be plenty for the additional purchases he would make during the next couple of weeks; dollars earmarked for college would finance his mission.

  Firearms and explosives took up lots of Holmes’s time, but they weren’t his only interests. When he wasn’t planning the shootings, he played online video games for hours, and he seems to have thought a lot about women.

  Early in July, he registered (as “classicjimbo”) for an “X-rated” (his term) Internet dating service, AdultFriendFinder.com, and updated his Match.com profile (“Classic_Jim”). His profile on Adult Friend Finder said that he sought women for short-term relationships: “Looking for a fling or casual sex gal. Am a nice guy. Well, as nice enough of a guy who does these sort of shenanigans.” He checked the websites often for replies, but none came.

  On July 11, he posted a narrative profile on Match.com. His new “self summary” was simply “Look Down. Look Up.” He told female readers, “Prefer listening to yuh, talking not so much. So if you need an ear, I am here.” He mentioned his “soul penetrating eyes. Woah that’s deep.” He said his favorite book was Where’s Waldo? (“guy never changes his outfit, should probably find a better disguise”). He told prospective readers that he spent a lot of time “thinking about the future, mind = blown.” The end of the profile read, “Message me if you’re interested, obviously. Or lookin’ for sexy times, very nice!” His new, foreboding “dating headline” was “Will you visit me in prison?”

  Then he bought another Glock .40 caliber pistol.

  Holmes sometimes thought about how others would view him after the shootings, about his reputation, his legacy. He looked into submitting material to the Denver Post and the New York Times, although he never sent them anything. He took “selfies” with future viewers in mind. One, taken July 5, showed him in his ballistic vest with his M&P15 rifle attached to the front. He looked rough and formidable, unshaven, with tousled bright orange-red hair, staring down at the camera with dark, seemingly threatening eyes. Two others, taken just before the shootings, showed him in close-up, looking almost comically diabolical, grinning into the camera from behind, respectively, a pistol barrel and a black spherical “Boris-and-Natasha” “bomb” with a fuse sticking out of its top. If he posted the photos on the Times website, Holmes thought, people would repost them.

  I asked him how people who saw the photos might interpret them. He said, “It looks a little devilish…. It kind of portrayed the dangerous quality to it.”

  “Tell me about being remembered as dangerous,” I said, “particularly as you might have thought about it a couple years ago [in the selfies].”

  “Just that this isn’t someone you want to mess with.”

  “What kind of person ‘doesn’t get messed with’?”

  “A tough guy,” he said. “[The selfies] were kind of frightening pictures.”

  “How did that fit with you, Jimmy Holmes, at the time?”

  “It’s unusual, ’cause I’m not normally a tough guy.”

  Maybe “a tough guy” was something he wanted to be. The person he was trying to portray—the strong, frightening man in the photos—wouldn’t worry much about having a broken brain.

  There are two complementary aspects to Holmes’s wanting others to see him through his weapon photos. One was to be viewed as competent, strong, anything but broken. The other was to be remembered that way. They were mere wishes; neither represented what he really felt about himself. Nevertheless, he would wear those wishes like he wore his body armor and punctuate them with the bullets he spewed a couple of weeks later.

  Holmes didn’t live his life as confident or strong. Underneath the mildly arrogant, sarcastic exterior he showed to close friends, he was cautious with those around him. He was reticent. He wasn’t even assertive enough to stick up for himself at the pill-coating factory when a coworker called him names. He shrank from conflict and kept out of the smallest fray. He’d never been in a fight in his life, except in fantasy, and given the effort required to keep his mental problems from spilling over into his studies and relationships, he separated fantasy from reality pretty well. Until mid-2012, Holmes had isolated his fantasies and his video game persona from his real-world self.

  I asked him again about being remembered.

  He answered, “Well that’s just what the photographs were for is to be remembered. It’s not so much a for or how reason; it’s just this is a photograph of me and that is what will be remembered. I just wanted to be remembered, ah, visually by, like, my picture … any of the ones that were on my phone.”

  I showed Holmes several of his selfie photos from July of 2012, wearing body armor, the tactical vest, and spirit contact lenses, and holding various guns and devices, and asked what viewers might think of them. He picked one of him holding a Glock pistol in front of his face and said, “[T]hey would remember the picture and that was James Holmes.”

  “And what would they think about the person in that picture?” I pressed.

  He answered, “… that I’m familiar in the ways of weaponry and body armor … that I’m a killer, I guess.”

  I asked what other inferences viewers might make.

  “This is a guy who’s familiar with these things, and this is a killer,” he said. He told me that he thought at the time, days before the shootings, “This is what a killer looks like.” He didn’t feel any strong emotion as he took them “except that I would be remembered by those pictures.”

  The Holmes who was amassing weapons, firing thousands of rounds at Byers Canyon, and reconnoitering the Century 16 theater for a massacre was, at least in part, a twisted embodiment of his successful but less violent video gaming avatar, “SherlockBond.” Walter Mitty, James Thurber’s mild-mannered fictional character of the 1930s story and Ben Stiller’s 2013 movie remake, dreamed of being confident and powerful. Holmes tried to be, or at least to feel, confident and powerful, free of the fear and self-doubt that kept him locked in personal inadequacy, finding social success only in the four corners of his video screen.

  I asked, “Do you view yourself as a ‘Sherlock’ sometimes?”

  “Aw, yeah.”

  “Do you view yourself as a ‘James Bond’ sometimes?”

  “Yeah, a man of action.”

  “Are there any similarities, or differences, between you and James Bond?”

  “[My actions] are real; his are an actor’s portrayal.”

  By July 7, Holmes had decided several things about how he would kill people and documented his reasoning in the notebook. His targets would be random. He wrote on one page, “The cruel twists of fate are unkind to the misfortunate.”

  He ruled out bombing (“too regulated & suspicious,” the notebook reads). He ruled out biological methods (“too impatient. Requires extensive knowledge, chemicals and equipment”). He ruled out serial murders (“too personal, too much evidence, easily caught, few kills”). He chose “mass murder/spree” because it would have “maximum casualties, easily performed w/firearms although primitive in nature. No fear of consequences, being caught 99% certain.”

  Holmes vacillated between airport and movie theater venues for the shooting. An airport would have “substantial security” and “[t]oo much of a terrorist history. Terrorism isn’t the message. The message here is there is no message. Most fools will misinterpret correlation for causation, namely relationship and work failure as causes. Both were expediting catalysts [but] not the reason. The causation being my state of mind for the past fifteen years.” The Century 16 movie theater, which he called the “Cinemark 16,” would be “Isolated,” “Proximal,” and “Large.” “What better place to case than that of an inconspicuous entertainment facility.”

  Once that decision was made, Holmes did case the Century 16 very carefully, visiting and photographing it seve
ral times. Drawings in his notebook describe the building layout and various auditoriums, with notes for each such as “best side of approach,” “too many exits,” “wrong spatial location,” “excellent spatial approach,” and “visibility marginal.” He used underlining and asterisks to rank them for his mission. He plotted potential exit paths that moviegoers might use, planning ways to limit victims’ escape and increase the number of kills. He located the Aurora Police Department and calculated their response time to the theater.

  Then Holmes chose the movie he thought would attract the most viewers to a vulnerable auditorium, the midnight premiere of the 2012 Batman sequel, The Dark Knight Rises. He began to buy tickets online in an effort to get a seat in the correct auditorium. Auditorium assignments were random; he tried several times and still didn’t get the one he really wanted.

  The detailed drawings and comments in his notebook reflect Holmes’s actual planning and reveal his obsession with the process. Horrible as it was, the shooting was a relatively simple event. It didn’t require the extreme detail that nevertheless occupied Holmes for weeks. Some of that detail may have been written in for future readers, but it also uncovers more about his mental condition.

  One reason Holmes gave for the shootings was his very unusual belief, both before and after the shootings, that killing people would somehow alleviate his depression and prevent him from committing suicide. His drive to kill (and all his planning and preparation) was quite conscious, something that felt logical and necessary to him at the time, but the pressure he felt in that preparation, the hours spent on intricate planning that wasn’t always focused on the most important subjects—such as truly mastering his weapons rather than simply firing thousands of rounds indiscriminately at the Byers Canyon range—came from hidden emotional roots, not practical or even conscious factors.