As the detectives tried unsuccessfully to interrogate Holmes, a bomb squad rushed to his three-story Aurora apartment complex at 1690 Paris Street. When they arrived, they were confronted with something so disturbing that the best option seemed to be blowing up the entire structure.
“We knew that building would go,” Aurora police Lt. Thomas Wilkes, the incident commander at the scene, said later. “The idea was, ‘Can we defend the other buildings around it?’”
It was too dangerous to send human beings in to investigate what Holmes had devised inside his third-floor, 800-square-foot living space. The bomb experts didn’t know how many IEDs were placed within these walls, what kinds of explosives they contained, and how far the damage could reach if detonated. Would other nearby buildings come down? Would hazardous fumes endanger people blocks away? The first step was evacuating the entire building, which a SWAT team did in the middle of the night.
Several officers maneuvered a 480-pound robot into the building and up the stairs to Holmes’s apartment. While the robot blasted open the front door, the bomb squad sat outside in a van and watched through a camera attached to the robot. Inside Holmes’s living space, they detected a booby-trapped explosive that had just cleared the swinging front door, three clusters of incendiary devices, black balls resembling fireworks, a half-opened soda bottle, and flashing LED lights. A trip wire led across the room to an open thermos of clear liquid, and in the kitchen, a frying pan, precariously perched on the stove, held a dark-colored substance. Mortar shells and white powder were scattered on the floor. Other wires, like triggering devices, streamed off the LED lights. The squad also saw something that looked like napalm.
A strong gas smell poured from the apartment, so they decided not to send the robot in any farther. One spark could ignite everything. They examined more images from the camera and spotted an antenna, indicating that the explosives were likely attached to a remote device, but where was it?
By the time the police had escorted Holmes to his cell at three a.m., other inmates had already heard about the massacre. They spewed taunts at the young man—calling him a “kid killer” because of reports that he’d shot children at the theater—and promised revenge if they got him alone in the jail. Realizing that he was in danger, officials at the detention center placed Holmes in a bulletproof vest, his hands cuffed behind him and his legs shackled. None of this kept him from flailing wildly, screaming at corrections officers, lurching and spitting so aggressively that he had to be restrained.
“Let’s just say he hasn’t shown any remorse,” a jail employee later told the New York Daily News about the suspect’s first few hours of incarceration. “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.”
Denver’s alternative paper Westword would eventually report on Holmes’s first night in jail and focus on the claims of a Steven Unruh about his alleged predawn interactions with the new inmate. Unruh, who had a history of theft and drug charges, told the weekly that he was being held in the cell next to Holmes and that Holmes had tried to harm himself—or end his life—by repeatedly bashing his head and body against a wall (those running the detention center quickly denied Unruh’s story, but Unruh in turn disputed them).
According to Unruh, Holmes spent four hours yelling at him through cracks in the cell doors, saying that he’d been programmed to commit mass murder by an “evil therapist.” Unruh further reported that Holmes said he “wasn’t on his meds” and that during the shootings he felt “like he was in a video game.” He stated that “nobody would help him” and mentioned a form of psychotherapy known as neuro-linguistic programming, which many in the psychiatric field had tried to discredit in recent years.
At seven a.m. on July 20, bomb technician Casey Overton climbed into a cherry picker outside Holmes’s apartment building. As an officer covered him with a firearm, just in case someone was hiding inside Holmes’s home, Overton was hoisted up to the apartment’s bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen windows. The shades were pulled and the bedroom and bathroom lights were out, so he broke the glass in the bathroom. Using a wireless camera, Overton could only partially see within, making out a green ammunition can. He called for a lift truck to rip out the blinds and give him better sight lines.
By now, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the FBI, the Aurora Police Department, the Denver Bomb Unit, the Adams and Arapahoe County Bomb Units, and the Aurora Fire Department were all at the scene. The consensus was that attempting any other maneuvers without more knowledge of what was in the apartment would put too many lives at risk. Before doing anything else, they needed to speak to the person who’d built the IEDs: James Holmes himself. Even though several hours ago he’d asked for a lawyer, it was better to get to him now, before he actually had an attorney, and seek his help in defusing the apartment. Weren’t the public safety issues more important than his Miranda rights? They all agreed that they had to talk with the suspect now in order to “make themselves smarter.” Given the size of the operation, they needed all the intelligence they could gather.
In Holmes’s car, an FBI agent had found an iPhone and passed it along to an Aurora police detective. He retrieved digital photos depicting Holmes right before the massacre and pulled up tracking data for a FedEx package. Three weeks earlier, on June 29, six boxes weighing a total of 170 pounds had been shipped from Atlanta to Aurora, arriving at Holmes’s apartment four days later. The boxes came from a company called BulkAmmo.com and contained more than three thousand handgun rounds, three thousand rounds of .223-caliber rifle ammunition, and three hundred shotgun shells. Holmes had bought a second Glock and ordered a SWAT-style vest and magazine pouches from Tacticalgear.com.
As the bomb squad made plans to speak with Holmes at the jail, news of the shootings was spreading not just through Denver and the region, but across the nation and far beyond.
Just after dawn, the media contacted Arlene Holmes, a nurse living in a San Diego suburb, and asked if her son was the James Eagan Holmes who attended the Anschutz Campus at the University of Colorado. Startled by the question, she said yes and learned that the young man was in custody allegedly for mass murder. She immediately began searching for an attorney while the suspect’s father, Dr. Robert Holmes, caught the first plane to Denver.
By mid-morning, Arlene had reached Iris Eyton, who worked in the Denver law office of Larry Posner, a well-known local defense attorney. Iris called the Aurora County Jail and said that she represented Holmes, but was told that for now no one was allowed to see him.
A few hours earlier, when APD Detective Craig Appel had briefly and frustratingly tried to interrogate Holmes, he’d told himself that he felt very sorry for the individual who’d eventually be put in charge of this massive investigation. Then he received a call from the police brass telling him that he’d been chosen to oversee the Aurora theater case.
One of his first duties as commander was to call Iris Eyton and inform her that the authorities were getting a search warrant from a judge so they could talk with Holmes in greater depth—without his lawyer present. Eyton wasn’t happy about this, but Appel was unbending. Extreme public safety issues were in play, and the order to interview Holmes as soon as possible had come down from the head of the FBI in Washington, Robert Mueller.
The Denver Public Defender’s office had already become involved in the case, and Chief Public Defender Daniel King and his investigator, John Gonglach, wanted to meet with Holmes, but they too were being kept at bay.
At 3:30 that afternoon, Appel and FBI Special Agent Bomb Technician Garrett Gumbinner sat down with Holmes, dressed in an orange jump and shackles. They did not re-inform him of his right to remain silent or of his right to an attorney but did say that in all their years in law enforcement, they’d never seen anything like his apartment and needed his assistance to prevent more destruction.
Was he willing to help them?
Holmes had come down from his playful mood and interrogation-room antics, no longer smirking or making hand puppets. He looked extremely tired and was very soft-spoken, but lucid. He talked with the men for thirty-eight minutes, describing the workings of the pyrotechnic firing box on his refrigerator and a remote-control detonating device that he’d planted outside his apartment building.
Like Holmes, Appel was emotionally drained and exhausted from not sleeping the night before—so tired that he forgot to turn on his tape recorder and half of the interview was lost.
They asked the suspect about the black shells and white powder inside his living space, about the three fusing systems they’d spotted with the robotic camera, and about some propane tanks.
Holmes said that once he’d left for the theater, a boom box inside his living room had been programmed for forty minutes of silence. At one a.m., it would start playing very loud music—so loud it would be heard throughout his building. He’d hoped to bring someone to his front door who’d push it open, trip the wires, trigger the IEDs, and demolish the entire structure.
Neither the detectives nor Holmes knew that one of his downstairs neighbors had heard the pounding music, angrily walked upstairs, and stood outside the door at a little after one a.m. Her hand was inches away from pulling the knob and tripping the wire, setting off a chain reaction that would level the building and send ripples of destruction up and down the block. She noticed that the door was ajar, striking her as suspicious, and returned to her apartment to call in a noise complaint to the police.
Should the authorities, Holmes was asked, evacuate other nearby apartment complexes?
No, he said, while calmly and methodically detailing the more than thirty homemade grenades, ten gallons of gasoline, and other explosives he’d built. During the thirty-eight minutes of conversation, he told the men precisely how to defuse the bombs. They thanked him, and he was taken back to his cell. His information would prove to be both accurate and invaluable.
The rest of that Friday, the Denver Public Defender’s office continued trying to reach the suspect, but their requests were denied. Holmes’s defense team would later claim that the police had deliberately misled them about where he was being held so that their time and efforts had been wasted in hunting for him at one correctional facility after another.
“Counsel spent the entire day attempting to locate and consult with Mr. Holmes,” they wrote in a motion, “but were actively, improperly, and unconstitutionally rebuffed by law enforcement.”
Because of this, the defense contended, all the information obtained in the inmate’s discussion with Appel and Gumbinner, and the materials later recovered from his apartment, had been “involuntarily” gathered. Therefore, none of the statements or other evidence could be used against Holmes, since he’d already requested an attorney but not been provided one. Over the coming weekend, he finally was able to meet with a public defender, who outlined what would happen at his first court appearance on Monday morning, July 23.
No major crime in twenty-first-century America was complete without being surrounded by instant speculation on the Internet, much of which ran counter to the mainstream coverage of the event. Almost as soon as Holmes was booked, cyberspace began to cook with theories about what had really happened at the movie complex.
On August 1, 2012, a freelance writer from New York City named Jerry Mazza began trying to connect the dots around Holmes’s family, his educational background, and his dark evolution into a mass shooter. Mazza posted an article called “James Holmes had Links to DARPA, the Salk Institute, and the DoD (Department of Defense).”
During the premiere showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, he wrote, a man dressed all in black and wearing a gas mask suddenly appeared at the front of the theater. After tossing several gas grenades, he opened fire with a forty-millimeter Glock, a 12-gauge shotgun, an AR-15 assault rifle with a 100-round drum magazine, and six thousand rounds of ammunition. A second Glock lay on his car seat.
Mazza described Holmes as a twenty-four-year-old neuroscience doctoral candidate with links to the Salk Institute, which was “involved in neurologically enhancing soldiers’ abilities on the battlefield, and with connections to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the central research and development organization for the United States Department of Defense . . .”
A few years before the massacre, Mazza wrote, Holmes had worked at the Salk Institute, which had partnered with DARPA and the Mars Company (manufacturers of Milky Way and Snickers bars) to deter fatigue in combat troops through the enhanced use of epicatechina, found in cocoa and dark chocolate.
“The research,” Mazza contended, “was part of a larger DARPA program known as the ‘Peak Soldier Performance Program,’ which involved creating brain-machine interfaces for battlefield use, including human-robotic bionics for legs, arms, and eyes . . .”
Like others posting their findings online, Mazza had looked into the Holmes family. According to his LinkedIn profile, James Holmes’s father, Dr. Robert Holmes, worked for San Diego–based HNC Software, Inc., from 2000 to 2002: “HNC,” Mazza wrote, “known as a ‘neural network’ company, and DARPA, beginning in 1998, have worked on developing ‘cortronic neural networks,’ which would allow machines to interpret aural and visual stimuli to think like humans, something you might find in the Batman epic.”
Mazza wouldn’t be the first or last commentator to compare what had happened inside Theater Nine to a fictional plot in a Robert Ludlum novel: “The links between the younger and elder Holmes and U.S. government research on creating super-soldiers, human brain-machine interfaces, and human-like robots brings forth the question: Was James Holmes engaged in a real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?”
From a twenty-three-year-old male working in the food industry:
Young people have these conspiracy theories around cases like James Holmes because we don’t really want to believe that others would do such things, or do them willingly. It’s easier to think that someone was set up by some outside dark force than to look at these events and say, “What are they telling us about what’s out of whack in the society? What are they saying about our emotional reality? What’s standing in the way of social progress? What doesn’t work anymore so that we can look at it and get rid of it now?”