A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  He didn’t answer after that. Later that day, after keeping his appointment with Drs. Fenton and Feinstein, James started the process of officially withdrawing from the university.

  ____________

  Aurora, Colorado, July 20, 2012, just after midnight:

  Psychological counselor Alexander Teves and his girlfriend, Amanda Lindgren, were sitting in row eighteen, near the back of the theater. Just after The Dark Knight Rises began, they saw smoke and the bright light of something being thrown across the front of the auditorium. Then they heard popping noises. Alex dived onto Amanda to protect her. Suddenly there was blood on her, on a nearby friend, everywhere, and Alex wasn’t moving. She couldn’t wake him up.

  James Holmes had shot Alex in the head, demolishing much of his brain. A few weeks after he died, Amanda changed her last name to Teves.

  Aurora Police Department “mug shot,” probably taken less than two hours after the shootings. Holmes’s hair was dyed an orange-red.

  A photo taken much later, but before the trial. Holmes’s hair has grown out to its natural color. Some pundits erroneously interpret his expression as a “smirk” or evidence of some particular attitude or mental state. Note that his pupils appear normal in both photos, rather than markedly enlarged as they were during his interviews with most or all of the psychiatric experts. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Emergency responders and media among evacuated patrons outside the Century 16 theater during the early hours of July 20, 2012. courts.state.co.us

  Holmes’s M&P15 rifle, Smith & Wesson’s version of the semiautomatic, civilian-available carbine-style AR-15 (itself copied from the military M4), with Vortex Strikefire sight system, where he dropped it on the blood-spattered pavement outside Auditorium 9. The flipflops were left by an escaping survivor before Holmes exited the theater. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Dowels placed in bullet holes inside Auditorium 9 by crime scene investigators. The “full metal jacket” rifle bullets easily penetrated the seat backs.

  Computer model by investigators of the bullet paths revealed by the scores of dowels. The lines illustrate Holmes’s movement from the front of the auditorium up the aisle to his left as he continued to shoot. Aurora Police Department

  Photo from a remotely controlled robot deployed by the Adams County Sheriff’s Department Hazardous Devices Unit, taken just inside the door of Holmes’s apartment. The devices and materials are as he arranged them just before he left for the Century 16 late on July 19, except that a container of glycerine that was balanced above the skillet of potassium permanganate (lower right) has been moved by the robot to prevent it from spilling into the pan and igniting a conflagration. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  View from the kitchen-dining area. The black spheres, used in commercial fireworks displays, were filled with gunpowder; the green bottles contained gasoline; the large wide-mouthed jars were filled with a blend of gasoline, homemade “thermite,” and rifle and handgun cartridges. The wires were connected to various detonation devices which might or might not have worked if someone had used the controller Holmes left for that purpose beside a remote control toy outside the building. Other flammable materials were connected to fuses and magnesium wire which were intended to set them off once either the detonators were activated or the tripwire beside the front door was disturbed. The blinds and broken glass on the floor at upper left are from the team’s efforts to examine the apartment without opening the door. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  A selfie of Holmes in his apartment wearing his dark “spirit lenses” and holding one of the fireworks spheres. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Selfie holding one of his Glock handguns. These photos, in which Holmes described himself as looking “devilish” and “dangerous,” were taken a short time before the shootings. He considered sending them to the New York Times or the Denver Post in the hope that they would be reposted. He never sent them, but they have indeed been posted a great many times and seen by countless people. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Holmes wanted to be remembered as “familiar in the ways of weaponry and body armor … that I’m a killer, I guess.” This is his photo of much of the equipment he later took to the Century 16. Clockwise from top: M&P15 rifle and Vortex Strikefire sight system, Remington 12-gauge tactical shotgun, bag with various items, part of his ballistic (bullet-resistant) clothing, rifle and handgun magazines in weapon vest, gas mask, Glock handgun, ballistic arm or leg protectors, gas mask filter, more ballistic clothing, and Kevlar helmet, all on a red satin sheet. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Part of a wall of Holmes’s medical unit cell at the Arapahoe County Detention Facility. The photos, just a few of scores, perhaps hundreds, sent by women all over the country, surround a drawing of his “Ultraception” symbol. Everything he placed on his walls had to fit inside two blue rectangles (see below). (Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office)

  The opposite wall of Holmes’s cell at ACDF. When this was taken, he had chosen only two non-“fan” photos, perhaps sent by his mother. Neither is of his family. Note the combination toilet, basin, and water fountain at left and his bunk, from which he let himself fall backward a few months after his arrest. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  Holmes received hundreds of supportive letters between his arrest and his trial. Most came from women; others came from people of faith concerned for his soul or from jail and prison inmates. Many of the women sent money, sometimes $50 or more, which was credited to his ACDF commissary account. He received thousands of dollars by the time he went to trial. Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office

  HOLMES

  6. Juggernaut

  “The cruel twists of fate are unkind to the misfortunate.”

  (James Holmes’s “notebook,” July 2012)

  Holmes may have told someone on June 11, the day he resigned from graduate school, that since he couldn’t make his mark on the world in science, he would “blow up people” and become famous. All references to that statement are thirdhand, however. The report apparently originated with Officer Lynn Whitten of the CU campus police, who attributed it to Professor Vijayaraghavan. Dr. Vijayaraghavan denied hearing anything of the kind from Holmes and attributed it to Dr. Fenton, who had spoken with him a few days after Holmes’s resignation. Dr. Fenton’s detailed notes, which one would expect to be reliable, don’t contain any such quote, nor did she relate such a statement to me during our interview or in her testimony. Whether he said it or not, the next few weeks moved relentlessly toward catastrophe.

  ____________

  Less than three hours after his June 11 final meeting with Professor Vijayaraghavan and his e-mailed resignation from graduate school, James kept his four o’clock appointment with Drs. Fenton and Feinstein. He had been on time for every session.

  He seemed to be functioning well and talking logically at first. He responded appropriately to the doctors’ questions about his leaving school, where he would live, finances, getting a job, what he would tell his parents, and the like. He seemed relieved, not troubled, to be leaving the program. Later in the session, he voiced a number of odd thoughts.

  When I interviewed him after the shootings, Holmes revealed some paranoia about the psychiatrists. For example, in a prior treatment visit on May 31, Dr. Feinstein had worn a sling on an injured arm. At the time, he recalled, he thought the sling might have been a fake, to test his “empathy.” He also suspected there was a knife hidden in the sling, “so that he [Feinstein] could control the session.” Holmes thought the doctors misunderstood him, that they were afraid of him.

  “I don’t think I made it clear enough that I was mentally ill,” he told me. “I’d already started getting weapons. And then I started thinking they were going to be frightened of me after I got the weapons.” He never actually told Fenton or Feinstein any details or that he had begun acquiring weapons
. A part of him believed, and a part of him hoped, that they somehow knew his thoughts and his plans without his revealing them.

  Fenton and Feinstein tried to keep Holmes in treatment. They assured him that even though he had just dropped out of school, he could continue to see them through the summer at little or no cost. James declined. About twenty minutes into the fifty-minute session, he looked at his watch, said he had to meet with his advisor, and walked out without so much as a good-bye. He had left abruptly before, but never before his session was over.

  Drs. Fenton and Feinstein had no information about Holmes except what he’d chosen to tell them. During that last appointment, as in others, the doctors asked his permission to talk with his parents, friends, or the school. He always refused. They had no way of knowing whether or not the information he chose to share was accurate, whether or not it was complete, or what might lie behind his statements about killing.

  Dr. Fenton decided on a final diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder but left room to consider Asperger’s disorder and schizophreniform disorder. Schizoid personality is described in an earlier chapter. Asperger’s, an older term now largely subsumed under autism spectrum disorders, is a lifelong condition, beginning in childhood, characterized by marked impairment of social interaction and relationships as well as stereotypic preoccupations, rituals, and/or movements. It is not associated with frank psychosis but may coexist with it. Schizophreniform disorder involves psychotic episodes (breaks with reality) identical to those in acute schizophrenia and becomes a textbook diagnosis of schizophrenia once the symptoms have been present for six months.

  Fenton documented her and Dr. Feinstein’s concerns at the end of the final session, concerns present for months but never acted upon by the psychiatrists up to that point (except for Dr. Fenton’s bringing in Dr. Feinstein, a very appropriate measure) outside James’s treatment sessions:

  • “His long-standing fantasies of killing as many people as possible.

  • His caginess in discussing any details regarding methods, targets, timing.

  • His refusal to give us permission to contact any one [sic] who could give collateral info or speak on his behalf.

  • The unclear timeline of his mental health status and past history. Has he always been this odd and angry or is this new, suggesting a psychotic break, substance-related psychosis, or medical illness.”

  This time, Dr. Fenton did take action. In addition to offering James further treatment, she decided to override the usual conventions of doctor-patient confidentiality and activate something called the CU Denver BETA (threat assessment) team. The team was supposed to investigate and find a way to deal with any significant danger to others.

  Fenton contacted two of James’s senior professors that day. What she told them is unclear, but neither reported any knowledge of threats (although they noted his awkward social interactions and odd comments). She learned that others had found James to be very anxious and often disinterested in his laboratory work. The BETA team told her that James had no criminal record or weapon permits. They didn’t know—no one knew—that he had bought three firearms, ammunition, and tear gas grenades over the previous three weeks. The investigation stalled and was dropped once Holmes had left the campus.

  Dr. Fenton also telephoned James’s mother, Arlene, in San Diego. Fenton asked about violence, but she didn’t mention Holmes’s thoughts about killing people. Arlene was concerned but not entirely surprised. She told Fenton that James “has always been like this [odd, awkward around people],” especially since the family move from Salinas/Oak Hills to San Diego when he was a young child. “I’ve worried about him pretty much every day of my life.” Arlene echoed others’ impressions of James as having trouble in social situations and then added a new twist, previously unknown to anyone else: James had been very angry at her (Arlene) a few months after he graduated from UC Riverside. He was “furious at her,” but never violent, for threatening to evict him if he didn’t get a job.

  Fenton considered all the new information and concluded in a June 11 chart note,

  [James appears to be] intermittently functioning at a psychotic level…. He may be shifting insidiously into a frank psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, though does not have the more rapid worsening of function typical of most psychotic breaks. His fear/hatred of humans has markedly impaired him.

  She also documented her thoughts about hospitalizing James against his will:

  Does not currently meet criteria for a mental health hold. He is not gravely disabled and has no evidence of suicidal ideation. Longstanding homicidal ideation but denies any specific targets and there is no current evidence that that he is angry at the grad school (or anyone else) for his failure. He has made many hostile remarks to myself and Dr. Feinstein, but no threats…. No evidence of past violent acts….

  To those who don’t understand why Fenton or Feinstein didn’t simply put Holmes into a hospital whether he wanted to go or not: it just doesn’t work that way. Protection from unjustified confinement is a very important civil right in the United States. Commitment to a mental hospital, even for a brief evaluation, is an abridgement of rights that must be balanced by strong evidence (not mere nuance) that the patient meets strict legal criteria. Might Dr. Fenton or Dr. Feinstein have made other decisions? Sure, but there is every indication that they made reasonable judgments with the information they had at the time.

  All three of the CU clinicians who saw James Holmes before the shootings considered the level of danger he might represent. They were guided by well-known, but often confusing, laws and clinical axioms and by their interpretations of those axioms and laws in the context of what they knew, or thought they knew, about him. The rules for psychiatrists contacting others (including law enforcement) without a patient’s permission, or attempting involuntary hospitalization, require things like imminent danger, a specific plan to hurt someone, and/or an identifiable victim. That having been said, even if they had called Holmes’s family, friends, or teachers, no one could have added very much to what the clinicians already knew. They simply didn’t have the evidence while Holmes was their patient.

  Holmes had been isolated from his former classmates and friends since before his preliminary exam in early June. The friends say that he withdrew from them (in spite of Ben Garcia’s effort to reach out). Holmes remembers the relationships at that time in two different ways. He felt abandoned; they had stopped inviting him to things, perhaps (he speculated) because Gargi didn’t want to see him anymore. On the other hand, he admitted that he ignored and dismissed them as well, deleting their names from his phone.

  He felt badly about that. “They’d been my friends for months, so I was sad to see them go,” he told me, but he did nothing to prevent it. Being alone was more comfortable most of the time and maybe more important to his mission. He would later say that he didn’t want them to be associated with a murderer.

  Holmes began something new in early June, just before his preliminary exams. He started writing and drawing in what would later come to be called his “notebook.” The notebook was at various times a personal journal, a record of his work, and a communication to future readers (specifically Dr. Fenton, according to Holmes). It is a valuable, firsthand record of some of his thoughts and behaviors during the weeks just before the shootings although, as we’ll see, it doesn’t reveal the entire “truth” about his motivations and mind-set. It is a window into the mind of James Holmes at the time, but only one window, and one with lots of distortions.

  The notebook itself is a loop-wire-bound “computation book,” the kind often used for class or laboratory notes. The cover has a place for the writer’s name (“James Holmes”) and the course (Holmes wrote “of Life”). The first twenty-five pages are missing, apparently used earlier for something else (perhaps earlier drafts of the current contents), leaving some thirty pages of writing and illustrations. Everything is handwritten or hand drawn, apparently chronologically from early June until
a day or two before the shootings. There’s a sort of title page:

  The symbol at the bottom, which fills about a quarter of the page, is Holmes’s “logo,” representing what he calls the “Ultraception,” a circle enclosing an infinity symbol (called a lemniscate) that touches both sides, with a seriffed numeral “1” through the middle. The Ultraception was his own creation, not copied from any other source.

  The next page is a dedication to his family inside a wavy, hand-drawn circle. “Goober” was a longstanding pet name for his mother, and “Bobbo” for his father.

  There are no entry dates in the notebook, Holmes says he started it around June 1 and stopped making entries just before the shootings. In spite of the dedication to his family, Holmes often told me that the notebook was intended to be a communication to his psychiatrist, Dr. Fenton. He mailed it to her on July 19, just hours before the shootings.

  I asked if he remembered why he created the notebook. Holmes said, “To educate the psychiatrist Fenton so something like this wouldn’t happen again…. and Feinstein maybe.” And if he had died in the theater, “it would have kind of told my story.”

  Some of the notebook entries seem consistent with those purposes, but many are disjointed and confused. Still others, such as his documenting the detailed planning and steps for his “mission,” have a more practical feel, writing and drawing the thoughts and processes that would lead to killing as many people as he could.

  It was also a kind of diary, “’cause I have trouble communicating very clearly, so I kind of wrote it down as a way to get it out … they might have been surprised that there was all this stuff I didn’t mention, that I did mention in the notebook…. The whole human capital kind of explanation of it.”