For nearly three months, jurors have been searching for answers inside a broken mind.
It belongs to James Eagan Holmes, a failed neuroscience graduate student who became one of the nation’s worst mass shooters when he opened fire at a midnight show in a crowded movie theater in July 2012.
Looking into the depths of Holmes’ psyche hasn’t been a pleasant or comfortable journey, and now nine women and three men have the unenviable task of deciding this question: Was Holmes’ movie theater massacre an act of murder — or madness?
Some 400 people had gone to the midnight premiere of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. They hoped to be entertained by a hero dressed in black, “someone who would fight insurmountable odds for justice,” as prosecutor George Brauchler told jurors Tuesday in his closing argument.
Instead, a shooter — also dressed in black — came gunning for them. Twelve people died and 70 others were wounded. For many of the survivors, going to the movies would never again be simple or fun.
“He came there with one thing in his heart and his mind and that was mass murder,” Brauchler said, pointing at Holmes, who sat passively at the defense table, occasionally rocking back and forth. “That guy was sane beyond a reasonable doubt, and he needs to be held accountable for what he did.”
Nobody disputes that Holmes was the gunman in black. And nobody is disputing that he was and is severely mentally ill. But was he so sick that he couldn’t appreciate that what he was doing was wrong? So sick that he shouldn’t be convicted of murder?
In Colorado, the burden rests on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Holmes was sane. Most states and the federal government place the burden on the defendant to prove insanity.
Not surprisingly, the experts called to the witness stand were divided in their opinions. Two court-appointed psychiatrists — William Reid and Jeff Metzner — said Holmes was mentally ill but sane at the time he committed the crime. He knew what he was doing, and he knew that it was wrong, they testified.
The judge told jurors they should find Holmes legally insane if “he was so diseased or defective in mind at the time of the commission of the act as to be incapable of distinguishing right from wrong with respect to that act.”
Jurors can also find him insane under an alternative theory, that a mental disease or defect “prevented him from forming a culpable mental state.”
Jurors were cautioned not to confuse insanity with “moral obliquity, mental depravity or passion growing out of anger, revenge, hatred or other motives and kindred evil conditions.”
In other words, there’s insanity — and then there’s just plain old evil.
Indeed, Holmes acknowledged to Reid during hours of videotaped sessions that killing was “legally wrong,” adding, “You get punished for killing.” And, he said, “It’s wrong to kill children.”
Two defense psychiatrists — including the University of Pennsylvania’s Raquel Gur, a nationally recognized expert on schizophrenia — testified that Holmes was so psychotic, his view of reality so warped, that he fit the criteria for legal insanity.
“The severe defect in his brain made him incapable of distinguishing right from wrong by societal standards,” she said.
Defense attorney Daniel King urged jurors to set aside their fears, prejudices and discomfort and confront the issue of mental illness head on in their deliberations. Society is not comfortable talking about mental illness, King said, and even Holmes feared the stigma enough to hide his mental illness from his family and doctors.
“Accept the mental illness,” he urged the jury. “Acknowledge the fact that the overwhelming evidence is that Mr. Holmes was in the throes of a psychotic episode. We can’t separate the mental illness from him, or from this crime, because the mental illness is the sole reason for this crime taking place.”
Jurors began grappling with the question on Wednesday morning. By the end of their first day of deliberations, they’d already sent back four questions for the judge.
Their written instructions from Judge Carlos Samour Jr. are more than an inch thick, and the verdict form is 650 pages long. Jurors must consider 165 counts — murder, attempted murder and weapons offenses related to the massacre, and explosives charges in connection with Holmes’ effort to booby-trap his apartment as a diversion.
If jurors decide Holmes is sane — and guilty — the case will proceed to a penalty phase, estimated to last a month, and then they will be asked to make another, even more difficult decision: Should Holmes pay for his crimes with his life?
If the jury finds Holmes guilty of a lesser charge — second-degree murder or manslaughter — then he will likely spend the rest of his days in prison. And, if his insanity defense results in a “not guilty” verdict, Holmes will be sent to a state mental hospital.
The defense asserts Holmes has struggled with mental illness and homicidal thoughts since his early teens. By the time he opened fire, he had been battling what he called his “broken brain” for a decade. He was exhausted and only getting sicker. He had always felt something was wrong with him, according to testimony, and his studies in neuroscience may have been his way of trying to fix himself.
His childhood seemed normal, but he became withdrawn at age 12, when his family moved from Castroville to San Diego. He didn’t want to leave his friends and slid into depression. His concerned parents sent him to a therapist, and he was diagnosed with something called “oppositional defiant disorder.”
He described his battle with mental illness in a notebook he mailed hours before the shootings to Lynne Fenton, a University of Colorado psychiatrist who was treating him at a campus clinic. He had sought help for his social awkwardness but did not tell her about his homicidal thoughts. The notebook wasn’t discovered until days after the movie theater massacre.
Holmes began seeing Fenton in early 2012, but by then his mental illness was winning the battle. He’d always done well in school, but he was failing. He broke up with the first girlfriend he’d ever had, and he lost his best friend at grad school. Why? Because he told them about his homicidal thoughts — the first time he’d dared articulate them to anyone.
In his twisted mind, defense attorney King said, Holmes now felt compelled to act on his homicidal impulses because he had spoken out loud about them. He had made them real.
He now viewed killing as his “mission,” King said.
And so, the defense attorney argued, Holmes was beyond reason at the time he opened fire in the theater. He had lost touch with reality.
Holmes bought a ticket and entered Theater 9 in the Century Aurora 16 movie complex around midnight, choosing a front-row seat. He pretended to take a phone call and left through an emergency exit, propping the door open with a plastic doorstop. He returned 18 minutes into the movie, tossing a tear gas grenade into the audience. He then opened fire with a 12-gauge pump action shotgun and then an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle with a high-capacity clip that jammed. He also fired several shots with a Glock 40-caliber pistol.
Starting at about 12:30 a.m., 41 calls came in rapid succession to 911. The Aurora police station is just three minutes away, and the first officers arrived to find a horrific scene: Blood, body tissue and spilled popcorn were everywhere, the air was filled with tear gas and gun smoke, and panicked people were screaming. Cell phones were going off but weren’t being answered. Ten people lay dead in the theater, and two more would be pronounced dead at hospitals.
Holmes had brought 700 rounds of ammunition. Metal piercing bullets went through seats — and even through walls into Theater 8. He dressed in protective gear and took a painkiller in case he was injured during his capture by police. He feared being killed, and he did not want to feel pain.
The defense acknowledged that some of Holmes’ thoughts and actions might seem rational. He was able to plan intricately. But, they argue, the planning supported his primary delusion — what Holmes called his “life capital” theory.
It was spelled out in the notebook he’d mailed to Fenton. Holmes also shared details of his thinking during hours of videotaped sessions with Reid, the court-appointed psychiatrist.
In Holmes’ skewed worldview, each life he took was worth a point, adding value to his own life. If his life had value, he reasoned, he wouldn’t have to kill himself. And so, by the end of the theater shooting, Holmes believed he had raised his “life capital” to 13, adding all the qualities and experiences of the people he killed to his own.
“The dead can’t be repaired,” he told Reid. “It’s kind of irreversible.”
He had accomplished his mission, even if getting arrested was the price he had to pay. But he said he gained nothing from injuring people or leaving them behind to grieve for the dead. He spoke of the 70 people wounded as “collateral damage.”
Prosecutor Brauchler says Holmes’ actions — dressing in protective gear and taking painkillers for fear of being shot or killed by police — sounds like the thinking of a rational person. A sane person.
But the defense argued that Holmes didn’t need to be catatonic or babbling gibberish to fit the criteria for legal insanity. Some of his actions seem sensible — until one considers they are being done to support his delusional “life capital” plan.
“His delusional process cannot be separated from him. It’s part of his being,” said defense attorney King. “You cannot divorce the mental illness from this case, or from Mr. Holmes, because the mental illness caused this to happen. Only the mental illness caused this to happen, and nothing else.”
Surely only a madman could do such a thing, to shoot into a crowded movie theater. And there’s a lot about Holmes’ story that seems, well, crazy. He dyed his hair orange, posed for selfies wearing diabolical black contact lenses, armed himself to the teeth and donned what a prosecutor called his “kill suit.” He fired metal-piercing bullets into the crowd. He would have fired more but the gun jammed. And so he walked calmly outside to his car and surrendered to police.
Brauchler says surrendering is what any rational person would do in that situation. He points to the uneventful arrest as a sure sign the defendant was sane at the time of the shooting. And Holmes was able to plan the attack with meticulous detail, he added. Could an insane person do that?
But just hours later, a different side of Holmes emerged at the Aurora police station. He seemed almost childish. When detectives covered his hands with paper bags to preserve gunshot residue, he played with the bags as if they were puppets. Would any sane person accused of multiple murders do that?
The defense attorneys maintain that Holmes was in the throes of a psychotic breakdown. It had been building up for a long time and had gotten progressively worse between March and late July 2012.
He exhibited some symptoms at that time, but many more emerged during the first few months he was in jail.
The psychosis was so intrusive, according the defense experts, that Holmes’ high IQ dropped by seven points.
In hindsight, there may have been some red flags. Fenton and a colleague treating Holmes at the university clinic grew concerned he was headed toward a breakdown. But he stopped seeing them when he withdrew from school. And he hid aspects of his disease from them, saving his homicidal thoughts for the notebook.
The loss of his friends after he told them about his homicidal thoughts should have put Holmes on warning that society frowned on killing, that what he was planning was legally and morally wrong, Brauchler argued.
But a person in the grips of a psychotic delusion doesn’t pick up on social cues, defense attorney King countered.
Once he was in jail, Holmes was a compliant prisoner, but his mental illness worsened. He experienced what doctors believe was a psychotic break nearly five months after his arrest — on November 12, 2012.
By then, shadows and voices haunted the walls of his cell, urging Holmes not to eat, especially the red food.
He banged his head on the cell walls, raising big bruises on his forehead, and fell over backward from his bunk to the hard floor. Asked why he’d done that, he responded that he was saving his captors from himself.
He placed a paper drinking cup over his penis and tried to keep it in place as he performed a backwards somersault. The cup fell off on every try. In a video, he is seen naked, with a blanket covering his head.
He smeared feces throughout his cell and then curled into a catatonic ball on the floor, his limbs contorted and seemingly frozen at odd angles. In an ambulance, on the way to a hospital, he babbled nonsense. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he mumbled, over and over, like a mantra.
He seems better now, or at least his behavior does. He has been a passive presence during 50 days in court. But, his lawyers say, Holmes still holds on to the delusion that he can add value to his life by killing others.