A Dark Night in Aurora Read online

  Suzy Diaz was the school secretary at Castroville Elementary. She knew Jimmy from the time he registered for second grade until he moved on to Gambetta Middle School (now North Monterey County Middle School) after fifth grade. She, too, remembers that Jimmy stood out even among his especially bright peers as they moved from Ms. Hestand’s second grade class to Ms. Miser’s third grade, Mr. Frost’s fourth, and Mr. Karrer’s fifth.

  The family took lots of trips together—to Disneyland, to the beach, skiing, and camping. There are photos and videos of Jimmy and Chris in the ocean, at an aquarium, on Segways at a wildlife park, camping in the woods, playing miniature golf, snorkeling in Hawaii, and having Super Soaker fights in bumper boats at Big Bear Lake. As they got a little older, Jimmy and Chris loved visiting their Uncle Dexter and Aunt Terri near Chico, California, where they could ride horses and fish in the couple’s pond.

  Bob and Arlene cared deeply about each other and the kids. Mom made sure they had dinner together every evening. Mom and Dad went to the kids’ concerts and sports events and spent time with them whenever they could. Dad coached Jimmy’s soccer team. Chris went to his games, too, “tagging along,” she remembers, and “handing out oranges.”

  Jimmy “was happiest when he was playing soccer,” Bob said, and liked having his father as his coach. He wasn’t a star athlete, but he participated in lots of sports in Salinas and San Diego: soccer, basketball, kickball, track, and martial arts. He was a runner on the Monterey County youth track team, going with friends and family to meets around Northern California. There’s a photo of him getting a medal at their first meet on the Hartnell College campus. Former friends and team members remember him as a team player, a good sport, and never a poor loser.

  Bob and Arlene were loving and caring of each other. They never fought in front of the kids, and Chris never saw them being mean to each other. Chris remembers their father as conservative, mathematical, and analytical. Dad could be a little “socially awkward,” she says, perhaps more than James at times, “because he’s always thinking.” Bob and Jimmy were both quiet types and sometimes took a while to articulate things. Mom was more “creative, open, free-flowing.” Chris says her parents “instilled a hard-working ethic … to do well in school … treat other people how you’d want to be treated.”

  Although they were close and loving, no one talked very much about feelings. Bob testified that “we were more scientific, nonemotional.” Much as Jimmy is universally described as shy and not seeking of the limelight, Bob doesn’t like public attention or speaking to large groups of people. He doesn’t easily show his emotions.

  I asked James the adult about memories of times with his parents and what he remembered as the nicest things they’d done for him. His answers were short and a little superficial, but poignant in their own way. The three nicest times with his dad were Dad’s paying for most of his car, taking him to the beach, and helping him move. The beach vignette was the closest James came to remembering “feelings” from that list: “We had ice cream … It was good. We got to spend family time together.”

  He remembered more personal times with his mother: the letters she wrote to him, taking him to the zoo and a Where’s Waldo? adventure, and making spaghetti with him. I asked about the time they cooked spaghetti. He smiled as he remembered the boiling pot of pasta and Mom testing to see if it was al dente. “She threw a piece of the spaghetti onto the cabinet,” he said, “and she left it there. When she took it off, she stripped the paint off the cabinet.” The memory, like the pasta, left a lasting impression.

  Mom did lots of other things with Jimmy and Chris, like creating papier-mâché art projects and coloring Easter eggs. Those times in the kitchen with Mom and Grandmother Helen stand out in Jimmy’s family memories; he still likes to cook.

  Chris, their parents, and their neighbors all remember that Jimmy was gentle with his little sister and that she always looked up to him. She was occasionally annoying, like all kid sisters, but they were very close. Jimmy tried to feed her when she was a baby, and he read to her when she was a toddler. He often included her in the big kids’ games.

  Chris remembers playing with her big brother, building forts, and throwing things for Zooby, their Labrador retriever, to fetch. She remembers the secret tree house Jimmy built with his friends when he was ten or eleven years old and the day he finally let her into it. Chris would go to Jimmy when she was uncomfortable among the older kids, and he’d calm her down. She felt secure with big brother Jimmy around.

  One of neighbor Katherine Barrett’s most vivid memories of Jimmy and Chris was a trip to a water park. Chris wasn’t allowed to go on a big water slide. “That’s okay,” Jimmy told her, “I’ll stay with you,” and he put his arm around her while the older kids climbed up the steps.

  He was always there; he had her back.

  Jimmy was considerate toward the other younger kids in the neighborhood, too. He often included them in games and sports and sometimes protected them as well. Oak Hills neighbor Lori Bidwell, whose son was Chris’s age, talked about the Halloween haunted house that Jimmy and two other boys created at the Holmes home two years in a row. Jimmy would guide the little ones through the peeled-grape eyeballs and Jell-O brains in a way that made them squeal and giggle with delight, not scream in fear.

  Lori and Mark Bidwell first met the Holmes family in Oak Hills in 1995. Their son was a good friend of Chris. They remember the Oak Hills neighborhood as a family-oriented place. “Bob and Arlene were very good at making sure their children were well behaved,” Lori said. Arlene was the main disciplinarian. Bob was “reserved, very quiet.” Jimmy was shy and “laid back” but could open up once he got to know you. When Lori played Apples to Apples, a family word game, with Jimmy, “he gave really intelligent answers” and had a great sense of humor. Jimmy was very much a part of the group when they played, she says, and when he was with his friends. He never got into squabbles with the other children.

  Katherine and Martin Barrett lived four houses away, just across Charter Oak Boulevard. The Barrett home was a gathering place for the local kids, including Jimmy. To them, he was “a gentleman … sweet,” a very happy boy, fitting in well with the other kids as they built things with LEGO bricks, shot off bottle rockets, and played street hockey and basketball in the cul-de-sac. Jimmy wasn’t very outgoing, but he wasn’t an introvert, either. He was shy with the adults but interacted well with his peers. He was the least confrontational of the group, standing back when they argued, staying off to the side in scuffles. Their son Joe remembers Jimmy as a track teammate, a good friend, and “a normal kid.”

  Claire Vincent has taught piano in Oak Hills for over four decades. She taught Jimmy from the time he was about nine until the family moved back to San Diego when he was twelve. He learned easily, she says, performing in programs and recitals. There’s a photo of the two of them playing a duet in her studio and video of him playing “Jingle Bells” with Chris.

  Young Jimmy liked animals and loved the family pets. Zooby was a Labrador; Whimby was a Scottie. The dogs were with him every day, warm, ready to “listen,” never critical. James the adult could picture them in his mind as we talked: loyal friends who liked to play fetch and snuggle up to him. Then Zooby got bad hip problems and “couldn’t get up anymore.” Soon Whimby got sick, too.

  One day, when Jimmy was seven or eight years old, the vet came to the house. Jimmy had no warning for that visit, so far as he remembers, one that would end with his parents telling him that Zooby had been put to sleep. No one prepared him for the second visit either, when the vet came for Whimby. When he learned what had happened, he went into the backyard, climbed into his favorite tree, and cried. Neither Jimmy nor James the adult ever told anyone the stories of Zooby and Whimby or that he had cried. It was “pretty personal,” James told me later, and personal things were kept inside.

  Some of James the adult’s memories contradict other people’s descriptions of his childhood. Different people who wer
e there remember those early years in different ways. The record isn’t clear about whether or how much Jimmy’s outward behavior had begun to change before the family left Oak Hills, but troubling, unspoken thoughts and feelings seem to have begun around the time the family moved back to San Diego in 2000. One account says his parents began to notice that he was keeping more to himself when he was in the sixth grade at Gambetta Middle School, a few months before the move. James’s own version of his preteen years in Oak Hills and Castroville describes important differences between some of his inner thoughts and his outward behavior. Whether the earliest changes came before or after the move, seemingly ominous fantasies soon began to appear. Jimmy was thinking about killing people.

  When Jimmy was about ten years old, vague, amorphous, recurring pictures of “nuclear bombs” began to intrude on his thoughts from time to time. He recalls that they occurred sporadically, sometimes more than once a week, sometimes less. The thoughts didn’t seem attached to any particular situations at first, and they didn’t come when he was playing or interacting with other people. They happened “on my down time, and … before going to sleep … kind of times when nothing [was] happening.” He kept the thoughts to himself, never talking about them with anyone. No one else knew they were there. He didn’t think his thoughts were normal, but they didn’t particularly worry him at the time.

  I asked James the adult, “If I had been some kid about your age playing with you—age ten, eleven, twelve—would I have thought you were abnormal?”

  “No,” he answered, “… just a normal guy.”

  Young minds go through a lot as they develop, and we all find psychological ways—whether completely unconscious or within our awareness but forgotten as we grow up—to deal with childhood fears and infantile wishes. Every small child has thoughts and fantasies that, if taken alone and at face value, are unsettling. But the early disturbing thoughts that James the adult remembers are unusual both for their content and for the fact that he appears to remember them at all. (Most of our childhood memories become distorted with time to some extent, and entirely false memories are not uncommon.)

  After five years in Oak Hills, Bob and Arlene reassessed their situation. Arlene missed her family in Southern California; her mother had become ill, and both she and Bob were dissatisfied with the Castroville schools. Bob landed a very good position with a San Diego software company and soon found a house for the family in the Rancho Peñasquitos subdivision.

  The decision to move back to San Diego came quickly. They would leave about two weeks before the end of the 1999–2000 school year. Jimmy and Chris would have to start school in San Diego just as the year was closing and just as final grades were being determined. Jimmy dreaded the prospect of starting over in a completely unfamiliar place. From his viewpoint, life was turned upside down, and his protests were ignored. No one listened to him.

  Jimmy and Chris stayed with the Bidwells for a few nights while Arlene and Bob packed and prepared for the move. Lori Bidwell describes the children’s final moments before leaving as “heartbreaking.” Chris, age seven, was in the family van “plastered to the window screaming.” Jimmy, she said, “just had tears in his eyes” as they drove away.

  Jimmy sat alone in the back of the van as they left, watching his home, then his neighborhood, then whole years of his short life disappear. No one noticed as he tore a stiff piece of cardboard from a box and began sawing at his wrist.

  ____________

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

  Veronica was six years old when her pregnant mother, Ashley, took her to the Century 16 Theater. Veronica wanted to sit on her mother’s lap, but Mom said she was a big girl and could sit in her own seat. She settled between her mother and her thirteen-year-old friend, Hailee.

  James Holmes shot Veronica four times that night. Another friend, Kaylan, tried desperately to give her CPR as she became the youngest victim to die. Ashley was shot twice, lost the baby she was carrying, and remains paralyzed from the waist down.

  2. The Changes Begin

  “We stopped playing together as much, spent less time together.

  Maybe it was because of having to restart everything.”

  (Chris Holmes, Jimmy’s sister, about the family move back to San Diego)

  Jimmy never told anyone about the way he felt in the back of the van as the family left Oak Hills for the last time. His mother noticed his wrist, but he told her it was a paper cut. When I asked why he never told anyone that he cut it himself, James the adult said, “Just because I wanted to keep it private.”

  Things had begun to change.

  ____________

  Rancho Peñasquitos is a northeastern San Diego suburb of about fifty-five thousand people. Peñasquitos is Spanish for “little cliffs.” It has lots of hills, parks, and open space, including the huge Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve. Bob and Arlene bought a two-story Spanish-style home on Sparren Avenue, just a mile, as the crow flies, from the one they had left five years before.

  His father’s hope that Jimmy would make friends easily when he started Mesa Verde Middle School during the last couple of weeks of the school year and cultivate friendships over the summer didn’t pan out. Instead of adapting when he was thrust into Mesa Verde, he turned inward. Summer came with no new pals.

  Jimmy focused on reading, sometimes in his bedroom closet, along with video games and other things he could do alone. Arlene tried to help by going around the new neighborhood and introducing herself to families, seeking those with boys who might befriend him. She made a few connections, but nothing clicked. She took Jimmy to a local comic book store, hoping he would join the kids there who played fantasy games, but at that point he gravitated to online games, playing from his own room and having pseudorelationships with faraway, faceless people and their avatars.

  Autumn and the seventh grade at Mesa Verde brought better social opportunities. Jimmy developed friendships, joined the Mesa Verde Eagles school band, and played soccer. School at Mesa Verde went fine. Jimmy’s intelligence served him well, and there were plenty of boys who enjoyed being with him. Many either shared Jimmy’s shyness and social awkwardness or excused it. He began to play a strategy card game called Magic: The Gathering with real people, and he had a best friend, Earl.

  “Best friend” is a relative term. Today, Earl agrees that he and Jimmy did lots of things together, were often immersed in Magic, and ran with the same group for several years. But Earl also remembers Jimmy as “very quiet, very soft-spoken … not warming up, or even talking to you until you get to know him.” In all those years, Earl says, Jimmy came to his home only once.

  The various descriptions of his childhood, by Jimmy, his family, schoolmates, neighbors, and others, are understandably inconsistent. We view memories of long ago through all kinds of filters, and the filters change with context. James himself sometimes remembered an ordinary kid and sometimes an unusual, even odd one. Childhood themes, often accurate, are there, but none of us ever remembers things exactly as they were.

  Everyone agrees that Jimmy was accepted at his new school and in Rancho Peñasquitos, but he wasn’t forming the kinds of relationships he had as a younger child. It wasn’t anything like the gang of kids in Oak Hills, running in and out of neighbors’ houses on Foxtail Place, Clover Trail, and Trefoil, shooting hoops in the cul-de-sac, and playing capture the flag in the kid-sized “canyon” behind Jimmy’s home. From age thirteen or fourteen, James the adult said, he used “escapist stuff like video games,” as well as schoolwork, sports, and television, to ease the painfully awkward feelings that swept over him when he was with others.

  In October of 2001, when Jimmy was nearly fourteen, the family sought counseling once again. “We were concerned,” Bob recalls. “Chris seemed to be making friends and fitting in, but Jimmy seemed to be having a little trouble. He seemed to be much more isolated than he did before.” They went to an agency called PsyCare and began family counseling with social worker
Mel Lipsey. The detailed records of their twelve or fourteen sessions were destroyed years ago, but the visits seem to have focused on adjustment issues related to the move from Oak Hills to San Diego.

  Jimmy was indeed becoming more isolated. He talked and interacted less than before and often seemed irritable and angry around home. Arlene told a defense team investigator that by middle school, Jimmy had developed an aversion to talking on the telephone. She once rehearsed making a call with him, but when he tried using the phone by himself, he “clammed up” and couldn’t do it.

  Lots of adolescents are socially awkward. Bright kids, the so-called nerds of the world, may be a little more awkward than most. Jimmy had some friends. He did well in school and participated in sports. Some readers may wonder whether his isolation and self-absorbed activities were truly pathological or were within the normal range for adolescent boys. The childhood thoughts and fantasies that James the adult looks back on today may or may not have been so pronounced in his early teens. Holmes himself is our only witness to them, and, as mentioned earlier, memory is a fragile, changeable thing.

  Jimmy’s home life didn’t seem to be a cause of his isolation. People who were there around that time describe the Holmes family as very close, but neither Jimmy nor his father was very open with emotions. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have them. Bob, himself somewhat reserved, says Jimmy’s relationships with his parents and sister were fine. He describes Arlene as the main disciplinarian of the family and says Jimmy and Chris had a normal teenage brother-and-sister relationship, teasing and sometimes picking on each other, but with no big fights.