A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  The auditorium next door is empty. People fled quickly, leaving drinks and popcorn and candy all over that floor, too, but there are no bodies. It’s a relief to see a mess without bodies, one that can be cleaned up. There are bullet holes in the wall from Auditorium 9.

  Back to the hallway, to the foyer, to the light.

  Later photos show a more sterile view of Auditorium 9, after the victims have been removed. The seats look pretty normal until crime scene technicians put long wooden dowels into all the bullet holes. Then there’s a horizontal forest of thin sticks, like arrows going into, and through, the seat backs. Each represents a path of terror; scores of paths of destruction and pain, dozens of paths of death.

  Within hours of Holmes’s arrest, the Adams County Sheriff’s Department Hazardous Devices Unit and other emergency responders staged in a strip center parking lot near Holmes’s 1690 Paris Street apartment building. The perimeter was secured, and most surrounding structures were quickly evacuated. At about 6:15 a.m. on July 20, over a dozen Aurora SWAT officers arrived to relieve their colleagues and begin search, clear, and disarm procedures.

  Some responders worked in heavily armored suits complete with sealed visors and self-contained breathing apparatus. Police snipers were posted nearby to protect the responding officers, firefighters, and technicians from possible additional perpetrators, and more buildings were evacuated. Officer Tim King and an FBI bomb technician climbed into a shielded platform boom on Aurora Fire Department ladder truck number six. As a bomb technician and a bomb-sniffing dog were clearing cars in the parking lot, King and the FBI technician peered through the windows of apartment 10 and reported that it appeared safe enough to break the windows and look inside with a “pole camera.”

  The lieutenant in charge had ordered a “slow-clear” of the entire building to be sure no one was hiding inside or had failed to evacuate. The SWAT slow-clear team, a remote control robot, the FBI bomb tech, and a bomb-sniffing dog started on the ground floor.

  Suddenly, everything stopped. Some outside source had said that there were military-grade explosives (“C-4”) on the roof. The robot, controlled by a remote operator and carrying several cameras and a versatile manipulating arm, continued without the team. The C-4 warning was an error, maybe a hoax.

  About 6:30 a.m., the robot opened the unlocked door of apartment 10 and carefully pushed a few inches into the dimly lit apartment. The operator slowly scanned the room with its cameras. Lights from the robot illuminated zigzag lines of white powder on the carpet near the door and a tripwire of fishing line going from a pushpin in the wall beside the door to an open plastic jug, later determined to contain glycerin, tilted precariously over a skillet of potassium permanganate. Anyone moving more than a couple of feet into the room would have spilled the glycerin into the skillet, setting off a violently sparking and splashing fire in a room full of gasoline fumes and other highly flammable items.

  In the video, the cameras pan and zoom around the room, showing technical equipment that looks like TV-show bomb detonators. One with several flashing LEDs is labeled “Launch Kontrol pyrotechnic system”; one or two others seem to have no purpose. Holmes had turned on two dim lamps in the living room, one with a red bulb and one with blue, maybe his version of romantic lighting from a few months before. The computer that played loud music to attract people to the apartment is on a table, still working. Video from the robot shows a little light outside the vertical blinds on the living room windows; the sun has barely come up.

  Then the camera zooms in on gallon-sized pickle jars filled with gasoline, homemade napalm (“napalm B”), and rifle cartridges, balanced on chairs, with magnesium ribbon and detonation wires going into their tops. Several two-liter soda bottles filled with gasoline are on the floor near the chairs, and a few feet away sit eight or ten six-inch black fireworks spheres, a container of gunpowder, and a mortar and pestle with homemade thermite. The camera shows spots of fresh motor oil on the rug, magnesium ribbon, lengths of “quick fuse,” and electrical wire everywhere, leading to and from all the incendiary and explosive devices.

  Holmes’s bicycle leans against the corner of a wall; it has wires wound around it, connected to the explosives. His computer desk seems an island of sanity by comparison, clean and free of explosives, but the computer’s CD player was the hub of his plan to draw someone to the apartment. Some of the bomb and incendiary configurations seem to make no sense, such as electrical clips on fuses designed to be lit with a flame or punk and flashing lights that aren’t connected to anything.

  One of the zoom lenses finds “Planty,” the only other thing that ever lived in the apartment, looking terribly untended, maybe dead, on the breakfast table. Another peers into a closet with cleaning materials, a box of Tide, extra toilet paper, and a Monopoly game.

  About forty minutes into the video, the operator shifts to a low-light camera mode. The colored light from the lamps, the computer, and the tiny, flashing LEDs gives the room an almost artistic ambience. Little blue patches, maybe artifacts of the low-light setting, appear on the wall behind the red lamp as dawn shows through the living room blinds.

  Just after 7:00 a.m., video from the doorway shows the ladder boom team’s pole camera peeking through a broken living room window, parting the vertical blinds and swiveling about for different views. From the robot’s viewpoint, it looks a little like the searching alien cameras in the vintage movie War of the Worlds.

  The clearing process is very slow, too slow even to be suspenseful. The robot has been in place for well over two hours, sometimes waiting patiently while things happen outside the building. Maybe the operator needed a break. No one is in a hurry.

  About 9:20 a.m., the windows having been broken out by the ladder boom team, the first human comes upstairs to enter the apartment. He’s wearing a ballistic suit with a helmet, visor, and air supply, carrying an instrument on a pole. He communicates to the team over the robot’s microphone, talking about how to remove the fishing line and disarm the glycerin-potassium-permanganate booby trap. Hours later, nothing has been disarmed. They’re being extremely careful. The rest of the day is spent figuring out what to do to prevent a holocaust.

  At 3:45 p.m. on July 20, while the bomb disposal and hazardous devices teams were paused to plan their next steps, Detective Appel and Special Agent Garrett Gumbinner, an FBI explosives expert, interviewed Holmes again. Although interrogation about the shootings had to be delayed until a defense lawyer could be appointed, it was important, and perfectly legal, to question him about things that might pose an immediate danger to the public.

  Gumbinner and Appel told Holmes that any explosions or fire at his apartment would endanger small children and appealed to his stated concerns about kids. Holmes agreed to describe his incendiary devices and provide information to help defuse and dismantle them. He understood that the conversation would not refer to the theater shootings.

  Holmes sounded quite normal during that second July 20 interview. Although Defense psychiatric expert Dr. Jonathan Woodcock would later describe him as psychotic and almost autistic during Woodcock’s examination a few days after the shootings, Holmes’s recorded conversation with Gumbinner and Appel sounds psychiatrically uneventful. He spoke a little slowly but was completely logical, answered questions without delay, volunteered comments, and often explained his answers to be sure the officers understood.

  At about 11:00 a.m. the next morning, Saturday, July 21, the robot operator moves his machine slowly toward the bottle of glycerin in the tilted plastic jug. Close up, it’s apparent that just a few more degrees of tilt will spill the liquid into the skillet. Guided by views from different camera positions, he eventually nudges the jug away from the skillet, grasps its handle with the robot arm, and lifts it up, away, and out of the apartment. The first device has been disarmed.

  After that, robot video shows the end of a pole camera protruding into the dining area from the broken kitchen window. It seems to be looking around, checking an
area the robot can’t see, and then it leaves. Suddenly there’s an explosion in the kitchen, outside the robot’s “vision.” The freezer door from Holmes’s refrigerator flies into the dining area in a cloud of black smoke; framed posters come crashing down. Soot settles on the walls and ceiling. A Batman mask still peeks up from behind the television. The blast came from police purposely destroying a dangerous fireworks ignition transmitter without detonating the flammable materials and gunpowder still in the living room and a container of gasoline a few feet away in a kitchen cabinet.

  The robot now begins to clear a path toward the kitchen through still-flammable debris and broken window glass, moving the black fireworks spheres and pulling wires and magnesium ribbon out of the jars, bottles, and a black plastic container of gunpowder. Then it backs through the apartment door into the building hallway. For the first time, the camera shows the operator, standing at the far end of the hall in firefighter gear. Another officer, in a ballistic suit and visor, arrives to take more photos.

  Demolition experts removed the remaining explosive and flammable materials for disposal at the Denver Research Institute Explosives Range in Bennett, Colorado. Some were detonated in concrete-block cubicles, others in special containers covered with cushioning material. Still others, such as the jars of gasoline, “napalm,” and cartridges, were simply placed in reinforced structures and burned.

  After the apartment was rendered safe for evidence gathering, officers found more than booby traps. They found files that had been used for grinding down aluminum rods, pans of chemicals that had been mixed on the stove, and lots of little fir tree automobile air fresheners that Holmes had used to mask the gasoline fumes. The red satin sheets seen in one of Holmes’s photos were still on the bed.

  There was lots of ordinary stuff, too, like his bicycle lock, clock radio, contact lens case, and a box of tissues on the nightstand. Holmes’s passport was in a nightstand drawer; other drawers held shotgun shells and handgun ammunition, and there was a bag of M&P15 magazines on the floor. A poster on the wall looked violent at first but turned out to be an ad for a paintball video called Soldiers of Misfortune, apparently the source of a phrase he had written in his notebook.

  It would be a long time before the other residents could return to 1690 Paris Street; many never did. Apartment 10 was back on the market a year and a half later. The Zillow.com rental ad, which didn’t mention Holmes or the deadly contents that had taken more than a day to disarm, described it as “only two blocks from University Hospital … completely renovated and furnished … a steal at $850.”

  Three days after the shootings, a US Postal Service truck pulled into the westernmost bay of the large CU Denver Anschutz mail receiving room. Fifteen or twenty bins were unloaded and stacked inside. The authorities knew that Holmes had mailed something to Dr. Fenton and took special precautions; anything associated with Holmes had to be considered dangerous. Staff put on gloves and masks and began sifting through the new mail. Just before noon, they located the bin that held Holmes’s package; then they got out of the way.

  A bomb disposal robot, probably the same one used to clear Holmes’s apartment, went into the evacuated mail receiving room. Its power cord looked oddly like a wagging tail in the robot’s video as it took almost twenty-five minutes to retrieve the bin with the package, fish out the large white envelope addressed to Dr. Fenton, and stand it against a wall for inspection with a portable x-ray machine. After the x-rays, an Adams County technician in an isolation suit and breathing apparatus knelt over the package, photographed it, and placed it in a flexible, clear plastic isolation compartment. He opened the envelope by manipulating it through glove holes in the plastic. It looked harmless, and it was. Inside were Holmes’s notebook and $400 in oddly charred twenty-dollar bills.

  ____________

  If there is any solace to be had in that dark night, it is that the tragedy could have been worse. Holmes wasn’t very good at what he did. The killer who wanted to be remembered as someone “familiar in the ways of weaponry” spent more time in fantasy and trying to look the part than in learning the craft. He fired thousands of rounds in practice but remained inexperienced with everything about his firearms except their triggers.

  He didn’t understand combat technique, particularly handling the M&P15 carbine while wearing a gas mask. He held the rifle wrong, set the stock improperly, aimed relatively poorly, overloaded his magazines, chose the wrong features for his tactical shotgun (a pump action and fixed stock, for example), and didn’t know what to do when his most effective weapon jammed. Special Forces and SWAT experts tell me that a well-trained assailant could have fired far more shots in the theater, with better aim, and hit more than twice as many people in the same length of time. That’s cold comfort to those who were wounded or killed but very important to those who weren’t.

  A simple cartridge jam cut short the deadly process, and, in Holmes’s own words, “the mission was over.”

  10. James Holmes in Jail

  “I took the blood that wasn’t mine to take.”

  (James Holmes, while delirious, November 2012)

  Soon after his arrest, rumors quickly spread that Holmes identified with The Joker from Batman comics and movies. It was all hype, used to sell a sensational image in a case that already had plenty of tragic sensationalism. There is almost no evidence that Holmes ever identified with The Joker. In addition to an absence of references to any such concept in the eighty thousand pages and scores of interviews, photos, and videos that make up the case record, Holmes himself denied any such intention.

  REID: “When, again, is the first time you recall people talking or calling you The Joker?”

  HOLMES: “Early on after I was arrested.”

  REID: “Do they still do that?”

  HOLMES: “Sometimes. I’ve actually heard them say it…. They were in a cell kind of adjacent or near my cell and just yelling The Joker…. They said, like, ‘James The Joker.’”

  REID: “Did you ever call yourself ‘The Joker,’ refer to yourself as ‘The Joker’?”

  HOLMES: “No, I didn’t.”

  REID: “Even in private thoughts or private fantasies?”

  HOLMES: “I can see why people would call me The Joker with the dyed hair and the setting, the movie being the Batman movie.”

  REID: “Did you ever, even in a private fantasy, refer to yourself as The Joker; ‘Hey, I’m The Joker’?”

  HOLMES: “No, I don’t think so.”

  ____________

  Holmes was taken to the Aurora police station, handcuffed but not shackled, in the back of Officer Irons’s patrol car. He told me the handcuffs hurt a little, and he was “uncomfortable” submitting to police authority; otherwise, “there were no surprises” during his arrest. He remembers the flashing lights, the short drive, and a long wait—“hours and hours”—with a guard in the interrogation room. He told the investigators who eventually came that he wanted a lawyer, and then he was fingerprinted, photographed, and had paper bags taped to his wrists to preserve gunshot residue.

  I asked why he requested a lawyer, since he had already decided that he would either be sent to prison or killed by police, and any chance of getting away was now gone. He said, “To protect me from incriminating myself.” I asked again. “They’d make me talk,” he added, “and I don’t like talking.” His lawyers came, the investigators returned, and he talked anyway.

  After being in the interrogation room almost all night, deputies took him to the Arapahoe County Detention Facility (ACDF). At the first lawyers’ visit, he told them about his “notebook” and that he loved his family. Then he was taken through a tunnel system to the courthouse next door. His lawyers were with him in court, but he doesn’t remember much more.

  Except for a few brief periods, Holmes’s home for the rest of his pretrial incarceration was a single, isolated room in the medical area of ACDF. Contact with other prisoners was strictly prevented, primarily out of fear that he would be assaulted. O
ther inmates soon learned who he was, but he was kept away from them.

  The cell was modern, well lit, and reasonably comfortable. There was a sturdy wooden bunk, not unlike the campers’ bunks at Camp Max Straus, where he had been a counselor during college, but without camp amenities. He had no other furniture except a stainless steel combination sink and toilet. A small, high window, above his reach, allowed a bit of natural light. He could turn the main fluorescent light on and off, but the video light was always on; the camera could always see him. There was no radio or television.

  The cinder block walls were bare except for an emergency intercom, two small metal mirrors, and two blue rectangles about thirty inches tall and eighteen inches wide. He was allowed to tape photos or papers within those blue painted spaces and nowhere else. He was given a plastic dishpan, known as a “jail bucket,” to hold his possessions; everything he had would fit into that bucket. He often used his blanket as a rug.

  Holmes was offered an hour or so outside his cell every day. The time could be taken either in an outdoor “yard” or in a nearby cell that had been converted to a spartan TV lounge. The exercise yard was a small, bare, paved area with four solid walls and wire netting above. He usually chose to watch TV. Guards often searched his cell while he was out; he didn’t care. Except for brief, well-guarded walks to court, all of his time out of the cell was away from the sight or sound of other inmates.

  Daily video early in his incarceration shows that Holmes’s behavior was largely limited to sleeping, eating, and reading. He often ate his meals and his purchased commissary treats slowly, as if to savor both the taste and the experience. Doritos were his favorite snack. He exercised a little during the first few months, wrote down his thoughts from time to time, and tried a few simple amusements such as juggling his socks. There’s not much for inmates to do in administrative segregation (“admin seg,” isolation). They wouldn’t let him have hard objects such as chess pieces or checkers.