A Dark Night in Aurora Page 10

  His psyche created the unstoppable inner drive toward his mission, a drive designed in large part, at least, to crowd out less acceptable (to him), more frightening, more anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings and keep them from reaching his awareness. Those unconscious thoughts and impulses, whatever they were, were truly intolerable. His fragmented psyche, his broken brain, couldn’t deal with them. His mind preferred to fill his thoughts, and his days, with obsessively preparing a personal Armageddon for Aurora.

  We all have intolerable thoughts locked deep in our psyches. We keep them at bay in different ways. The healthiest of us sublimate them into harmless outward representations. Unacceptable impulses to hurt others are sometimes disguised and transformed, for example, into jokes or drives to help the same people. But however you and I handle our hidden repugnant or forbidden urges, we don’t do what Holmes did. We don’t purchase psychological relief by killing people.

  7. A Dark K/Night Rises

  “… floodgates open now”

  (James Holmes, in a text to Hillary Allen, July 8, 2012)

  Less than two weeks would pass before Holmes would kill a dozen people, injure scores, and terrify hundreds. Taken together, the three guns he would take into the Century 16 cinema could fire dozens of times without reloading. Over three hundred more rounds in extra magazines and his pockets could be loaded within a few seconds, ready to fire into a crowd already crippled by tear gas, dark, and lethal chaos.

  ____________

  On July 8, Hillary Allen, who had briefly flirted and hiked with Holmes before their preliminary exams and was surprised when he didn’t pass, texted Holmes to ask if he had gone back to California. He answered that he was still living in the same apartment. They texted back and forth. She was chatty and suggested another hike. He told her he had “dysphoric mania.”

  Giving the beast a name makes it a little less frightening, and dysphoric mania was one of the names Holmes used in his notebook for what was happening to him. It was also an excuse for both his behavior and his failure to stop it: “I can’t help it; it’s the dysphoric mania” (not a quote from Holmes). Sort of a psychobabble version of “The Devil made me do it.”

  Dysphoric mania is a real but very uncommon mental condition, not always differentiated by diagnosticians from the more common “mixed” episodes of mania and depression occasionally seen in bipolar disorder. In dysphoric mania, a manic episode (extremely overactive behavior, often to a psychotic extent) is characterized by severe depression instead of euphoria. It’s a somewhat vague concept, and very uncomfortable.

  But there’s no good evidence that Holmes actually suffered from dysphoric mania, and no psychiatrist, before or after the shootings, ever diagnosed it in him. He was certainly dysphoric (which simply means unhappy). He was chronically troubled by his life and his inability to get along in it. He felt little real happiness and saw little prospect for real happiness. He searched for explanations and fixes as best he could, using his intellect and given emotional handicaps that interfered greatly with his insight and judgment, overpowering the part of him that wanted to be treated, wanted to be stopped, wanted to interrupt the juggernaut that his dark mission had become.

  Holmes wrote to Hillary during that texting session, “It’s in your best interest to avoid me. I’m bad news bears.” She looked up dysphoric mania and tried to be sympathetic and supportive, mentioning her own past depression to commiserate with him. Holmes was having none of it. He described the relief he felt as he ceased trying to control his impulses and gave in to the idea that the mission was now unstoppable. He texted, “Floodgates open now.”

  Holmes told me several times that he felt “obligated” to carry out the shootings, that “there was no other alternative.” The only one he could think of was psychotherapy, adding, “but it didn’t work.”

  I responded at one point, “What other alternatives might there have been in addition to killing lots of people or going to therapy?” He didn’t seem to catch on. I asked again, “What other alternatives?”

  “I guess I just didn’t think of any at the time.”

  “And what do you make of that?” I pressed him to be less vague. “After all, you’re a smart guy.”

  “I guess ’cause it was so absorbing that I felt like it [the mission, killing people] was the only thing to do.”

  “What would happen if you resisted the mission and didn’t do it?”

  “Then I would have to [commit] suicide.”

  I reminded him that he had denied thinking about suicide before the shootings several times during our interviews.

  “Well, I would automatically transfer those thoughts to homicidal thoughts so that I wasn’t aware of the suicidal thoughts.”

  Holmes often returned to the idea that he had been suicidal before July 19 even though he hadn’t “thought” about killing himself. His homicidal drive, he said, somehow suppressed his suicidal one, kept it at bay and out of his thoughts. He wanted to believe, and wanted me to believe, that something inside him was using the idea of murder to keep self-destruction away from his awareness. That concept makes a modicum of psychodynamic sense, but only a modicum, when applied by a psychotherapist to someone else; it rings hollow when a person applies it to himself. The unconscious part of our minds, learned psychoanalysts agree, really is unconscious; it’s simply impossible to see in ourselves. It sounded as if Holmes were trying to avoid responsibility.

  Was Holmes lying about his obsession and the mission somehow protecting him from suicide? I don’t think so. He was inaccurate, but inaccuracy isn’t the same as lying. I believe he needed something to help him make sense, even very odd sense, of his persistent, intrusive thoughts of killing. The mind greatly prefers some explanation for unthinkable thoughts and behaviors to none at all. The explanation may be less than perfect, even illogical, like the superstitions that calmed early humans when thunder rolled or eclipses swallowed the sun, but it’s better than the terror of a beast without a name.

  Life, and Holmes’s planning and preparation, went on after the texts with Hillary. Sometimes it seemed depressive and sometimes business as usual. He bought groceries at the King Sooper. A traffic camera photographed him, easily identifiable through the windshield of his Hyundai, running a newly red light in Aurora. He watched television and played video games.

  Holmes wrote in his notebook around that time, “Death is life’s fallback solution to all problems…. What is the meaning of life? … if you destroy all life then there is no question of meaning.” Sometimes his writing was vaguely philosophical, sometimes sophomoric; sometimes it just seemed crazy. But searching for answers, in one form or another, was a common theme.

  The mission date was set. Holmes drew an Ultraception symbol, his self-styled logo, in the July 19 space on his bedroom calendar. He could wake up and see the target day marked on his wall every morning. He bought incendiary materials and tools for improvising explosives and booby traps. He kept buying tickets online for The Dark Knight Rises, hoping to get one for Auditorium 9 at the Century 16 theater.

  On July 12, he bought a 12"x16" soft-sided mailing envelope, just right to hold his notebook and some other items he’d be mailing. On July 13—Friday the 13th—he wrote on page fifty-four of the notebook, “Embraced the hatred, a dark k/night rises.” The same day, he went to the CU Denver Hospital website and copied the telephone number for their mental health hotline into his iPhone.

  Holmes visited The Science Company, a Denver chemistry and hobby shop, on July 14, looking for incendiary and bomb-making materials. He bought, among other things, potassium permanganate, glycerin, ammonium chloride, and magnesium ribbon. Then he stopped at Walmart to buy several instant cold packs, the kind people use on sore muscles.

  Potassium permanganate has lots of uses. Mixed with water, it’s an antiseptic. It’s a common ingredient in fruit preservatives. Glycerin is a thick, clear liquid used in food preparation, antifreeze, and vaporizers for electronic cigarettes. But when glycerin
is mixed with potassium permanganate, a violent exothermic (heat-producing) reaction erupts into extremely hot flames and a boiling, sticky goo.

  Ammonium chloride can be used as a flux in metallurgy or, in small amounts, in medicines such as expectorants. It helps yeast to leaven bakery goods and can be found in some licorice, glue, and shampoo. It’s also an important ingredient in fireworks and contact explosives.

  Magnesium is a lightweight metal found in a great many products, from cell phones to airplanes. Magnesium ribbon, like magnesium shavings and other forms with a high surface area for their mass, is extremely flammable, burning with an unquenchable blaze that reacts violently if water is used to try to put it out.

  Instant cold packs such as those sold at Walmart and elsewhere used to contain ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make powerful explosives like those used to bomb the Murrah Federal Building seventeen years earlier in Oklahoma City. By 2012, the packs contained the much less reactive calcium ammonium nitrate instead. Holmes went to several different stores looking for products with the ammonium nitrate he wanted, but he couldn’t find any. He poured the white calcium ammonium nitrate powder around the room anyway, just to scare first responders or others who might see it.

  By July 16, Holmes was hard at work making complicated booby traps with makeshift bombs and incendiary devices designed to turn his apartment into a bullet-filled inferno. He had no bomb-making experience, so he looked for websites devoted to such things. There was no shortage of instruction and examples on the Internet, and he found them easily.

  He packed half a dozen black plastic spheres with gunpowder, put gasoline in others, and filled several two-liter soda pop bottles with gasoline, as well. He poured homemade “napalm” (a mixture of gasoline and ground-up Styrofoam cups) into large glass pickle jars, along with dozens of rifle and pistol cartridges intended to explode in the intense heat when the contents caught fire. He stored the leftover gasoline under his microwave and sprayed the apartment generously with air freshener so that neighbors wouldn’t smell the fumes and become suspicious. He filed down aluminum rods and mixed the filings with iron oxide from rusted metal to make a highly flammable dust he called “improvised thermite.”

  Everything was wired into detonating devices similar to those used in fireworks shows and hobby rocket launchers. The whole process took two or three days, during which Holmes continued to eat, sleep, and live in the apartment.

  I started to ask, “You’re spending at least one night, maybe more, sleeping in an apartment that’s—”

  He completed my thought: “With gasoline lying around.”

  “Tinderbox is an understatement.”

  “Yeah.”

  I asked him about the thoughts he had as he went to bed, as he went to sleep, with extremely flammable, perhaps unstable, materials just a few feet away.

  “I didn’t feel any different,” he said, “between going to sleep normally and with the stuff in the apartment.”

  Bomb making wasn’t one of Holmes’s particular talents. He tried to be scientific, and he is indeed a smart guy, but the end result was a sort of Rube Goldberg affair, a B-movie version of a sophisticated booby trap. After the shootings, explosives experts would disagree about how well each detonator might work, whether or not some of the materials would ignite, or how effective the bullets would be if the gasoline-submerged cartridges exploded, but all agreed that the materials and devices in the apartment were extremely dangerous.

  Holmes wondered if everything he had ordered for the mission would arrive before his July 19 deadline. He needn’t have worried; the vendors came through for him. The last online item, ballistic (bullet-resistant) pants, was delivered by FedEx early Wednesday afternoon, July 17. On July 18, he logged in to AdultFriendFinder.com and Match.com for the last time, to see if any women had written to him. There were still no responses to his posts.

  The morning of July 19 was spent wiring the firebombs to the detonators and setting up a remote detonating device for the apartment. There were two ways that the incendiary diversion he planned could be triggered. One was simple: a tripwire at the apartment door would set off the materials the moment someone entered. He programmed a CD to play loud music in the apartment soon after he had left for the theater, hoping that neighbors would complain to police or the superintendent or come through the door themselves.

  The second trigger was more creative, if less predictable. He put a boom box, a remote control toy tank, and a remote controller in the parking lot beside the apartment building dumpster. The boom box would play music to attract attention. Then, he hoped, someone attracted to the music would see the toy and try to operate it with the remote. The controller wasn’t linked to the toy, however, but to a detonator in his apartment. Playing with it would set off a conflagration, diverting police from the Century 16 and probably killing residents who were asleep in nearby apartments.

  Sometime during the previous few days, Holmes had ridden his bicycle to an ATM and withdrawn several hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, all the money he could get at the time. He painstakingly burned the corners of twenty of the bills on the kitchen stove inside his gasoline- and gunpowder-filled apartment, then put the charred bills and his notebook into the large envelope he had purchased a few days before. He addressed the package to Dr. Fenton and mailed it on July 19.

  Holmes isn’t sure why he burned the edges of the twenties. “At the time, I don’t know what I was thinking.” Maybe, he speculated, he charred the bills because he didn’t think he’d have much use for money after that. For some reason, he wanted the denominations to be readable.

  He said he was sending Dr. Fenton a kind of message, confused and confusing as it was, “to show her that that was a reason why I didn’t come back to her.” He maintained later that he stopped seeing Fenton because he lost his insurance when he dropped out of graduate school, implying that if she’d kept seeing him, he wouldn’t have committed the Century 16 murders.

  Blaming the shootings on the doctors or lack of money doesn’t wash, of course. It’s a ridiculous rationalization, or just crazy. Holmes admits that Drs. Fenton and Feinstein offered to see him regardless of insurance and that he had plenty of money and additional support from his parents. Bob and Arlene had told him clearly that money was no problem when it came to getting psychiatric help.

  Holmes also said that mailing the notebook was intended to educate Fenton and to help doctors prevent future killings. That doesn’t wash either. The notebook and, especially, the money seem to have been intended to shift part of the blame that he deserved onto his psychiatrists, an unfair “I told you so” for not reading his mind.

  The last few pages of the notebook, apparently written during the days just before he mailed it on July 19, communicate a subjective chronology of what was hidden in Holmes’s mind during the months over which he saw Dr. Fenton. He wrote about Margaret Roath and then Fenton, who “immediately prescribed antidepressants” and antianxiety medication. “Anxiety and fear disappears … no more fear of failure … no fear of consequences. Primary drive reversion to hatred of mankind. Intense aversion of people…. Began long ago, suppressed by greater fear of others. No more fear, hatred unchecked.” He described amassing the weapons and other materials, researching firearms laws and mental illness, and buying items piecemeal to avoid suspicion even as he refused to reveal his thoughts to those who were trying to help him.

  “Can’t tell the mind rapists [my] plan,” he wrote. “If plan is disclosed both ‘normal’ life and ideal enactment on hatred foiled. Prevent building false sense of rapport. Speak truthfully and deflect incriminating questions. Oddly, they don’t pursue or delve into harmful omissions…. I was fear incarnate. Love gone, motivation directed to hate and obsessions…. Embraced the hatred, a dark k/night rises.”

  The very last page of writing in the notebook reads:

  The hour was approaching.

  One of the last things Holmes did at the apartment, a little after 5:00 p.m
., was to arrange most of the weapons and regalia he would take to the theater on his bed, atop a red satin sheet, and photograph them with his iPhone. There, spread out for future viewers, were his tactical 12-gauge shotgun, M&P15 military-style carbine with short-range night vision scope, Glock 22 .40 caliber handgun with laser sight, bullet-resistant pants and jacket, Kevlar helmet, military-grade gas mask and filter canister, tactical vest, at least eleven magazines full of ammunition for the rifle and handgun, ample shotgun shells, a carrying belt and bag, and bullet-resistant neck, groin, and elbow protectors.

  He didn’t bother to photograph a fourth gun (which he would leave in the car), two knives, his handcuffs (for disabling the exit doors at the back of the auditorium), two tear gas canister grenades, road stars for disabling police cars that might chase him, a small first aid kit, and his iPod.

  An hour later, he took some selfies, including some described earlier. He left all the photos on his iPhone to be discovered by police and eventually released to the media, symbols of the persona he wanted to assume and part of the legacy—though he sometimes denied that was important to him—he wanted to leave behind.

  As meticulous as Holmes’s planning was in some respects, in others it was slipshod. He carefully chose and collected his weapons, shot thousands of rounds at the Byers Canyon range, and prepared to kill as many people as he could, but incompetent firearms practice would later limit the macabre “success” of his mission. There’s no escape plan in the notebook. He didn’t pack clothes, food, or water or even top off his gas tank. He tossed a meager first aid kit and a few road stars into his car almost as an afterthought, never really thinking about using them. Any consequences to others, or even to himself, were a very low priority. Killing, and his legacy, were the only important things at that point.

  Sometime around 11:00 p.m., Holmes took one dose of the prescription painkiller hydrocodone—to help him keep shooting in case he himself was shot, he said, or to dull the pain if he should be wounded. He loaded his car and then went back into his apartment to start the computer’s CD player and set the tripwire. He saturated the carpet with gasoline and oil, then carefully backed out of the apartment, now primed for a holocaust, closed the door, and walked downstairs to the parking lot to switch on the boom box. The CD in the apartment would play silence for about twenty-five minutes and then burst into loud music; the one in the boom box would take a little longer to get to its music and not be as loud.