A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  ____________

  The first thing I discovered about the case was the extraordinary level of caution taken by Judge Samour to assure Holmes a fair trial while efficiently moving the pretrial process along. Samour balanced the public’s constitutional access to the proceedings against constant threats to judicial fairness from an ever-pressing media and dangers to Holmes and others from zealots and worse.

  Many of the judge’s actions, and almost all work on the case by anyone outside open court, were confidential at the time, protected by gag orders. Participants were firmly reminded not to talk with the media or other outsiders. E-mails involving the case were encrypted, and US mail was rarely used. My office staff, like those of every other expert, were instructed about the necessary security measures and advised of the penalties for breaching them. Records were sometimes transported to me in person by legal staffers rather than being entrusted to FedEx, UPS, or even the US mail.

  A nonpartisan government attorney, Tanya Smith Wheeler, was continuously available, as she had been for Dr. Metzner, to help with legal questions, communicate with the court on my behalf, make sure I had everything I needed to do my job, protect me from media and other unauthorized intrusions, and keep me from inadvertently stepping outside the boundaries set by Judge Samour.

  The next thing I learned was that this was going to take an enormous amount of time. The two sides, prosecution and defense, were cooperative to a fault, supplying all their records, explaining their views of the case, and being available for conferences and interviews. Colorado and federal law enforcement officers and officials were generous with their time, providing, as they had for Dr. Metzner, records, audio, video, and details of their investigations. Boxes of paper, CDs, and DVDs filled my office. My other cases slowed to a crawl as I worked to review the materials, contact dozens of people associated with Holmes or the case in some way, negotiate the complex legal waters, and prepare to interview Holmes himself.

  After weeks of reviewing the records and interviewing witnesses, family, and the other experts, I went to Arapahoe County to see the relevant venues in person and talk with as many people as I could. The Century 16 theater had been renovated by then, reopening six months after the shootings as the Century Aurora, completely free of any sign that people had been terrorized there, shot and shot at, bloodied, and traumatized in a hundred ways. I visited Holmes’s former apartment building and then the police station to which he was initially brought, interrogated, and held until he was sent to the Arapahoe County Detention Facility. Detective Craig Appel, one of those who had interrogated him just after the shootings, described what he had seen and heard and walked me along the route police had used with Holmes while taking him to the interrogation room.

  Later, at ACDF, public defender Dan King and jail staff took me to the medical unit and Holmes’s cell. I introduced myself briefly to Holmes, to let him know that we would be talking at length in a few weeks. I shook his hand; he shook mine. Then he was escorted out while I examined his cell, saw the pictures on his walls, and went to the BC cell where he had been kept for several days in November of 2012.

  Like Dr. Metzner, I asked for Holmes to be brought to CMHI in Pueblo for my first set of interviews. For security reasons, neither he nor the jail deputies were told exactly when he would be transported; he was flown there in the middle of the night.

  CMHI-P is a modern mental health facility, clean and bright, with a section devoted to high-security patients. Interim Superintendent Birgit Fisher, PhD, arranged for Holmes to be housed on an otherwise deserted unit, fully staffed with nurses and aides just for him. Getting there involved passing through two locked and monitored portals. Holmes was in a room that was part of a small, otherwise empty, locked pod with its own dayroom, television, and windows onto both the nurses’ station and the outside world. It was luxurious by jail standards, even by some hospital standards.

  No other experts had recorded their interviews or testing of Holmes, and the defense objected vigorously to my plan to video record the examinations. Video recording is important to many forensic evaluators, but lawyers often oppose it. They want to be present for questioning and to control their clients’ answers; they may be entitled to be in the room. Recording means that the other side and/or the jury may hear something the defense views as self-incriminating. They appealed to Judge Samour, saying, in effect, “If Dr. Reid is allowed to video his interviews, and especially if we—the lawyers—aren’t there, that’s the same as forcing our client to testify, which is unconstitutional.”

  Judge Samour didn’t see it that way. After reviewing a list I provided with the pros and cons of video recording and holding yet another hearing, he ordered that I be allowed to conduct the interviews as I saw fit, within security constraints, including creation of a video record that would be shared with both sides and could be redacted before being shown to a jury.

  Videographer Robert Butcher set up his equipment in the dayroom. The camera would look over my left shoulder at Holmes, who was sitting at a slight angle in front of me. A little bit of angle is better than head-on; it offers the person being interviewed an opportunity to look either at the interviewer or away without seeming forced. The setting was as relaxed as feasible under the circumstances; we faced each other beside, not across, a table. The equipment was located far enough away that it was unobtrusive. Butcher left the room before each session, after starting the camera.

  It’s best to interview defendants without others in the room, but security had to have eyes on Holmes at all times, and the videographer had to be available in case of technical problems. Half a dozen staff watched through a large observation window, out of Holmes’s sight and unable to hear him or see his face. Holmes was not handcuffed, shackled, or otherwise restrained during our interviews at CMHI-P.

  I interviewed Holmes six times at CMHI-P, each time in the same dayroom setting. I usually brought him a cup of juice to break the ice. He often had a wan smile and sipped a bit through the two or three hours of each visit. Although somewhat stiff, he was always cordial and cooperative and seemed willing to talk.

  A few weeks later, we met three times in an interview room of the Arapahoe County Detention Facility. The physical conditions at ACDF were less comfortable, more stark, but similar to CMHI-P in that security personnel and the videographer observed, but could not hear, from a glass booth outside Holmes’s line of sight. He wore leg shackles in the jail; the rules didn’t allow for juice.

  Holmes’s appearance and demeanor didn’t change much from one interview to another or from place to place. He participated willingly, interacting with me readily and sometimes, in his own somewhat blunted way, enthusiastically. He understood the situation very well, including my role as Judge Samour’s expert and the fact that information from our interviews, including the videos, could be used by either the prosecution or the defense at his trial. I sometimes repeated topics and questions in different ways from day to day; his answers remained reasonably consistent, similar but not always identical to the information he gave to Drs. Metzner and Gur.

  Psychiatrists and psychologists have a phrase to describe how an examinee looks, acts, and functions during interviews: “mental status.” It typically refers to the evaluee’s condition while being interviewed, separate from his or her past history and observed without interpretation. Holmes’s mental status during our nine interviews was close to normal in some respects and quite abnormal in others. Remember that these examinations took place two years after the Century 16 events and some eighteen to twenty months after he began taking antipsychotic medication.

  He was fairly neatly dressed and kempt, in institutional garb, sometimes freshly showered, often with tousled hair. He was slightly overweight for his height, but not fat, and had a dark, moderately trimmed beard and moustache. His eyes were generally wide open, almost, but not quite, “buggy.” His pupils were always enlarged, usually markedly dilated. He attended well to me and to the business at hand, with good ey
e contact but often an unusual, flat expression.

  Holmes’s demeanor was always polite and respectful, friendly to a point given our situation, and not particularly aloof. (Some earlier interviewers had described him as aloof, even arrogant.) He never seemed particularly distressed or, although generally a bit stiff and reserved, unusually awkward. Physical interchanges such as greetings and shaking hands were a little stilted and slow but otherwise unremarkable. His spoken responses were frequently slower than normal, with pauses and often-brief answers. Some of that may have been related to his medications, but the doses were low and he had had over a year to adapt to them. Their side effects, if present, were mild.

  He showed a variety of facial and body expressions, generally appropriate for the topic being discussed, but their range and intensity were limited. He appeared comfortable through our two- and three-hour sessions, sometimes sitting a little stiffly, but not rigidly, with an open posture. He didn’t fidget, shift about in his chair, or ask for breaks. At CMHI-P, I watched him once walking in a pleasant, enclosed courtyard, quite unlike the dismal asphalt yard at the jail. He had a mildly atypical gait and carriage but otherwise walked normally as he led a short parade of security and nursing staff around the garden setting.

  Holmes smiled from time to time, appropriately for the most part, but sometimes nervously. He chuckled very briefly at small jokes, sometimes mine and sometimes his own. Nevertheless, the intensity of his outward emotion was blunted. He was serious when talking about serious topics, but I never saw tears in his eyes, significant anger, or a deep laugh. There were times of, for example, mild sadness when talking about his family or his future but never very much emotion, even when prodded a bit. He never exhibited the raw emotion Dr. Gur described in her first session with him. When he spoke of loss, depression, or suicidal thoughts, his face didn’t show particular pain or angst, and his posture didn’t change. That absence of outward emotion didn’t come across as cold or antisocial, but as an impairment, a deficit.

  Several nurses at CMHI-P saw a somewhat different Holmes during his stay there, one who seemed to enjoy, and sometimes initiate, conversations and games with staff, many of whom were female. His smiles during those interactions were odd, they said, like a smirk and “kinda creepy.” Some said that he became much more reserved when he saw security deputies. He didn’t mention that to me. He said he liked ACDF better than CMHI-P in some ways, in spite of CMHI-P’s more comfortable living conditions, frequent human interaction, pleasant people, better access to entertainment, and nicer exercise yard. He liked the CMHI-P food better, he said, but preferred the greater isolation and separation from staff found at the jail.

  The rate and volume of Holmes’s speech when he answered questions or made comments were generally normal, but his responses were usually short. In spite of lots of open-ended questions and opportunities for him to expand the discussion, he rarely added anything to his answers, and when he did there was often a painful delay. He wasn’t having trouble speaking per se; there was no problem with vocabulary, sophistication, or nuanced humor; he had trouble formulating answers and choosing words.

  Clinicians call that “thought blocking.” It’s a kind of psychological guardedness in which an unconscious part of the mind is fearful about blurting out thoughts that the psyche might find uncomfortable to hear. The chain of words is slowed, and sometimes stopped, though not in Holmes’s case, to be sure they’re emotionally tolerable. Holmes’s words contained some inflection, but his descriptions and explanations were often simplistic or circular. Even after lots of encouragement, sometimes almost cajoling, he didn’t seem to understand that he was leaving out detail or not providing a full picture, especially of anything related to feelings or relationships. Real emotion, or at least expressing it, was risky for him.

  His mood was reserved but not depressed. He didn’t show common signs of depression such as losing or gaining weight except as related to his jail diet and inactivity. He slept a lot, but much of that could be attributed to boredom and a sedentary existence. He wasn’t unduly concerned about too much or too little sleep. His energy seemed good. He had no problem concentrating. He denied feeling worthless or very guilty, though he expressed bits of remorse.

  Clinicians refer to the manner in which a person thinks as “thought process.” We can only infer thought process, usually from the person’s speech; we can’t look into the working mind to see for ourselves. I’ve already mentioned Holmes’s psychologically defensive thought blocking and blunting of expression, some of which reflected a level of emotional guardedness.

  Separate from solely psychological influences, Holmes also knew he was being recorded and that his words might be used against him. In addition to that reality, though, there was some indication of paranoia. It seemed mild, but one can’t estimate the extent from these interviews except to say that it was not so severe as to indicate acute1 psychosis. He spoke articulately, used good logic most of the time, and wasn’t mentally disorganized. If he was mildly psychotic when I saw him, it wasn’t affecting his functioning very much.

  Some of Holmes’s thoughts were abnormal. There was evidence of many of the odd thoughts described to Dr. Gur and Dr. Woodcock, interpreted by some psychiatrists and psychologists as delusions—fixed, unshakeable, but false beliefs contradicted by reality and not normal in one’s culture. The most obvious example, probably the only one that approached the definition of a true delusion, was his consistent belief that all people have a vague, inherent “human capital” that can be acquired by killing them, each person having the same one bit or quantum, and each quantum of human capital being something desirable (provided one believes in his human capital idea).

  But many people hold unusual, even bizarre, beliefs that aren’t true delusions. Strongly held spiritual beliefs come to mind, or philosophies, or what mental health professionals sometimes call “overvalued thoughts.” Holmes held firmly to his human capital belief but at the same time readily admitted that he had made up the idea himself; it wasn’t something real unless one deemed it real. It was, he said, not true for anyone who didn’t choose to believe in it.

  One particular aspect of Holmes’s human capital conversations was redacted from the videos the jury heard at his trial and omitted from my testimony. Now that the theater shootings were over and he was in jail, I asked, did he still believe that killing more people would add to his value? He said yes and implied that he might kill again if he were allowed to do so.

  HOLMES: “I think they’re [the jail] doing everything in their power to make that [killing additional people] unlikely.”

  REID: “[G]iven the opportunity and the means … should they be worried about you?”

  HOLMES: “Um, I’d say so, yeah.”

  That self-incriminating statement might have biased the jury in the penalty phase of the trial, if such a phase became necessary. Judge Samour sustained the defense’s pretrial motion to keep it from them.

  There was no evidence of hallucinations—sensory experiences without actual sensory input, such as hearing voices when no one is there—during the interviews themselves. Holmes talked about seeing the mysterious shadows in the past and said that he could make them appear in his cell, but they weren’t present as we talked. Visual hallucinations are rare in people who aren’t taking certain drugs or suffering from physical brain abnormalities, neither of which applied to Holmes. There is some controversy about whether or not the “shadows” were hallucinations, illusions, or, at least sometimes, simply a game to play with his mind when he was bored.

  We talked about whether he would prefer a life sentence or execution. Holmes assumed that he would be isolated from other inmates in prison and was afraid that if he were eventually placed among other prisoners, they would try to kill him. He cooperated haltingly as I asked him to imagine being in prison; then he described a fantasy of being distracted in an exercise yard, feeling a shiv thrust into his back and piercing his heart, falling to the ground, and feeling
the asphalt against his face as he died. That thought, perhaps his most emotional during all our interviews, and the idea that his life was over anyway, made him contemplate execution over prison.

  Holmes’s cognition, not quite the same thing as thought process, was fair to good. His speed of expressing things was impaired, but, based on the neuropsychological testing results, his brain processing speed was unaffected. He misperceived some verbal and social cues in spite of understanding and reasoning adequately as we spoke. He wasn’t able to consider logical alternatives to some of his odd or seemingly delusional thoughts, clinging doggedly to them in order to defend his psyche against bringing feelings to the surface.

  His memory was fine. He could focus and concentrate well on most of the topics I asked him to address, and he remembered our conversations from session to session. On the other hand, he avoided, and perhaps had difficulty concentrating on, a few sensitive subjects such as his family and some things related to the shootings. There was no sign of the delirium he had experienced at the jail in late 2012.

  I measured Holmes’s pupil size and reaction to light and accommodation—normal changes in pupil size that occur when a person looks at something distant and then focuses on something very close—several times and took his pulse periodically. His pupils reacted to both bright light and accommodation even when markedly dilated but did not constrict completely. Interestingly, he denied that lights were unusually bright for him or that his vision was blurred, even when his pupils were dilated, saying that he didn’t know whether or not they were dilated unless he looked into a mirror. His pulse was somewhat elevated when his pupils were very enlarged, even when sitting quietly. When the pupils were smaller, his pulse tended to be about normal. Those findings remained a mystery to everyone who examined him.