Behind the mask of the Batman shooter

(File image) Colorado shooting suspect James Eagan Holmes makes his first court appearance in Aurora, Colorado.

(File image) Colorado shooting suspect James Eagan Holmes makes his first court appearance in Aurora, Colorado.

Published Jul 28, 2012

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Colorado - Looking dazed and dishevelled in his first court appearance, he never uttered a word. Alternately frowning with bug-eyed bewilderment or nodding with his eyes closing, James Holmes seemed barely aware of his surroundings, let alone of the murder charges being read out by the judge.

But surely, for those 12 minutes, Holmes must have known he had the world’s undivided attention.

Staring out from under a clownish mop of orangey-red hair, the 24-year-old stood accused of committing one of America’s worst gun massacres - and offered no clues as to why he did it.

As the world got its first glimpse of the man accused of shooting 70 people - 12 fatally - in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, no one could be sure whether his bizarre behaviour in court earlier this week was drug-addled tiredness, psychosis or simply a cynical attempt by a clever but deeply wicked man to pretend he was mad. All week America has been trying to understand what could have driven a gunman to open fire without any mercy on men, women and children enjoying a midnight first screening of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises.

Nor were they Holmes’s only intended victims - police say the fiendishly intricate booby traps he left in his apartment would not only have ‘cut in half’ the first person who came through the door, but also set off explosions and fires that would have consumed the apartment building.

It would perhaps be more reassuring if the alleged killer was revealed to be a born sadist who tore the wings off flies as a child. Instead, the picture of James Eagan Holmes that has emerged is of a good-natured, painfully quiet child who became a gifted academic, brimming with potential as he embarked on a career as a neuroscientist, studying the brain and nervous system.

He is the son of Robert Holmes, a talented scientist working for a financial services company in San Diego, and Arlene Holmes, a registered nurse. They have refused to talk about him.

He and his sister, Chris, grew up in sun-dappled southern California in the wealthy San Diego suburb of Torrey Highlands, and nothing suggests Holmes’s early years were spent in anything but a normal, happy family.

Neighbours and old classmates say Holmes found making casual conversation difficult and tended to answer questions with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

At high school, Paul Karrer, his former teacher, remembers him as a ‘well-dressed boy who was neat, wore glasses, liked to read and excelled in all academic areas’. He was good at computing and a fast runner.

Classmate Breanna Hath says Holmes was ‘really sweet’, but painfully shy and lacked self-confidence. ‘There were no girls he was involved with . . . it seemed he was really into a video game group that hung out together.’

One of that nerdy gang, Ritchie Duong, knew Holmes at high school and as an undergraduate at the University of California at Riverside. ‘I had one college class with him and he didn’t even have to take notes,’ Duong says. ‘He would just show up to class, sit there and around test time he would always get an A.’

Timothy White, Riverside’s chancellor, says Holmes graduated at the ‘top of the top’ and had the ability to ‘do anything he wanted academically’. He adds: ‘He was kind of quirky, just the way you expect smart people to be.’

Occasionally a different side to Holmes would show itself. After graduating with a degree in neuroscience, some things started to go awry.

John Jacobson, his supervisor during a summer internship at a prestigious research lab, found Holmes ‘oddly stubborn’ and - in contrast to previous academic reports - ‘very undistinguished’. Whenever Jacobson tried to talk to him at lunch, conversation was impossible unless Holmes could answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

When Holmes moved to the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine in June 2011 to join a PhD neuroscience programme, he struggled academically in his first year and did badly in an end-of-year oral exam.

For a man hoping to follow in the illustrious footsteps of his father, who had degrees from Stanford, UCLA and Berkeley - three of America’s top science universities - failure must have been a heavy blow.

Three days after the exam, in June this year, Holmes told the university he was leaving - but gave no reason.

On a CV he then posted on the job search website Monster.com, he said he was an ‘aspiring scientist’ looking for a post as a lab technician. It was a dramatic fall for someone whose list of research work included mapping the neurons of Zebra finches and studying the flight muscles of hummingbirds.

His CV showed he had also worked as a counsellor to underprivileged children at a summer camp in Los Angeles in 2008.

Holmes was living in an apartment in Aurora, Colorado, in a neighbourhood riven by gang warfare and where nearly everyone is Hispanic.

Far away from his family in California, he retreated further and further into his private world.

He turned for companionship to the internet, in particular to dating and casual sex sites such as Adult Friend Finder. The picture he supplied to that site seemed to sum up his self-delusion - he superimposed a photograph of a glamour model pouting over his shoulder as he sat looking geeky in his badly-dyed red hair and headphones.

He described himself on the site as a nice guy. But, in a disturbing foretaste of what was to come, he asked potential lovers: ‘Will you visit me in prison?’

On another dating website, Match.com, he used the name ‘Classic_Jim’, and described himself as having ‘middle of the road’ political views, adding: ‘I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, mind = blown.’

He is said to have used prostitutes frequently in the weeks before the shooting, leaving online ‘reviews’ of the women on a local call girl message board. ‘I had no issues with him . . . he was really nice,’ one of the girls, Tiffany, told an entertainment news website.

Like the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik, Holmes was a devotee of violent computer games, particularly the hugely popular fantasy game World of Warcraft, which could only have strengthened his detachment from the real world.

Neighbours regularly complained about the way he played poundingly loud techo music - often the same track repeatedly - and some noticed a strange purple light in his apartment windows. Sometimes Holmes covered up his windows with newspaper.

What his neighbours couldn’t have known was that, even as his academic life was falling apart, Holmes was drawing up a chilling plan to achieve notoriety by other means.

Over four months, say police, much of that time while still at university, he received more than 50 mail order packages. They included the head-to-toe black body armour and combat gear he wore on his killing spree, and a huge amount of ammunition.

Police found he had a staggering 6 000 rounds and 350 shotgun cartridges, ordered online for about £2 000. There are virtually no laws regulating ammunition sales in the U.S. and by ordering over the internet, Holmes avoided embarrassing questions from a local gun shop as to why he needed so much. Not that U.S. gun stores ever ask many questions.

Between May and July, Holmes assembled a deadly arsenal.

No warning bells rang for the simple reason that he had no criminal record - the only real bar to buying a gun - beyond a speeding fine.

His four guns were bought legally: first, a Remington 12-bore pump-action shotgun; then, two Glock handguns, which he bought from a Denver sports shop. On June 7, the day he took his end-of-year exam, Holmes bought a semi-automatic Smith & Wesson M&P assault rifle from another shop. The civilian version of the U.S. military’s M-16, it’s a devastating weapon - and Holmes increased its killing potential by adding a high-capacity drum magazine that held 100 rounds and fired up to 60 bullets a minute.

Holmes used mail order to get hold of the final piece in his arsenal - the explosive materials he used to create what Aurora’s police chief said was an elaborate booby-trap.

Police and federal agents who later defused the traps described finding tripwires running throughout the flat connected to jars full of explosive liquids, bullets and chemicals. The scientist had also turned 30 aerial shells - usually fired from mortar tubes at professional firework displays - into grenades.

It seems almost impossible no one ever became suspicious of Holmes, but bizarrely only once did anyone think there was something sinister about him. Glenn Rotkovich, owner of a local shooting range, said Holmes applied to join by email a month ago.

But when Rotkovich rang him back, he was disturbed by Holmes’s chilling voicemail message, spoken in a strange, low-pitched voice with heavy breathing. Rotkovich told staff not to let Holmes on the range, but he never turned up anyway.

His last few days before his gun rampage are still being pieced together, but a neighbour says that from around mid-June, Holmes would leave each morning with a rifle bag for target practice. Where he did this is still not known.

Holmes also posted a spiral-bound notebook to a psychiatry professor at his medical school. In it, he detailed how he was going to kill people, adding crude illustrations of stick people shooting other stick people.

The psychiatrist treats patients at an outpatient facility, but Holmes may have known him from his neuroscience programme. Did Holmes - whose return address was on the package - intend to be prevented from carrying out his cinema attack?

It would seem unlikely given the effort he put into planning it. But according to some reports, police believe the package lay unopened in the postroom for eight days before the shootings. The university insists the package was found on the day it arrived - last Monday. By then, the whole world knew who those stick figures were intended to represent.

For at around 12.30am the previous Friday, Holmes put all his months of planning into devastating effect in theatre nine of Aurora’s Century 16 cinema. He propped open an emergency exit to the car park to make his escape and strode back in - dressed in his armour, gas mask and helmet and armed with his assault rifle, shotgun and a handgun.

Two minutes of horrifying carnage later, he calmly walked out the same way he came in. Police believe the gunman’s hit ratio of 50 per cent was so accurate he must have done considerable target practice beforehand.

Holmes was seized outside the cinema while removing his body armour beside his white Hyundai car. Inside the vehicle, police found almost 1 000 rounds of ammunition.

Police chiefs said if alert officers hadn’t spotted his gear wasn’t quite the same as that used by its SWAT teams - and this may have been the intention - he might have been mistaken for a policeman and escaped.

As he sits in a solitary confinement cell in Arapahoe County Jail, possibly in earshot of the screams of other inmates who say they will kill him, Holmes is refusing to co-operate with police.

Sources say his court appearance isn’t the only example of his weird behaviour since the massacre.

It’s claimed he spent hours staring at a police station wall after his arrest and when police put evidence bags on his hands to preserve gunpowder residue, witnesses say he pretended the bags were glove puppets. In jail, he has reportedly had to wear a mask to stop him spitting at guards.

But is it all an act or genuine signs of psychosis? Some have speculated that the stress of failing his exam coupled with the pressure of following in his father’s footsteps may have triggered dormant schizophrenia.

Perhaps, but Holmes started buying guns before he took the exam.

What about the Batman connection? Holmes has been dubbed ‘The Joker Killer’ after reportedly telling police he was emulating the Batman villain. But how much he was influenced by the darkly violent Batman films made by British director Christopher Nolan is another mystery. He dyed his hair red like the Joker in Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight and he reportedly kept a Batman mask in his apartment.

Police found the narcotic painkiller Vicodin there, and he may have taken it before going to the cinema. Is it just a coincidence that Vicodin was one of the drugs in the fatal overdose taken by Heath Ledger, who played The Joker in the The Dark Knight film?

According to one report, Holmes is still thinking about the Dark Knight, asking a prison guard in a flat tone if he had seen the new film, adding: ‘How does it end?’

No one knows how Holmes’s case will end. Prosecutors are expected to push for the death penalty (though Colorado has not executed anyone since 1997). Holmes’s best hope of escaping it is to be declared insane.

Legal experts believe his crimes are clearly premeditated, making it difficult to make that defence stick. But Holmes’s mental state will be key to his trial.

It’s a bitter irony that the man who threw away a career trying to reveal the marvels of the human mind must sit and listen as a court tries to unlock the dark and disturbing secrets inside his own brain. - Daily Mail

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