A Subway sandwich bag swung from the handlebars of his BMX bicycle, not quite big enough for his lanky frame, as he crossed Peoria Street and rode toward the Anschutz Medical Center. The June sky was sunny and warm, with pedestrians dressed casually in shirtsleeves and shorts on a perfect late-spring day in Aurora. James Holmes was in the process of severing his ties to the prestigious graduate program he’d entered the previous year.
He owned a car, the white Hyundai, but it was much easier to ride his bike the few hundred yards from his apartment on the west side of Peoria to the Center for Neuroscience on the east side. The Center was part of the new Anschutz campus, holding 3,100 postgrad candidates, six professional schools, and the University of Colorado Hospital, which billed itself as the “world’s only completely new education, research, and patient care facility.”
Denver’s Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian prominent in the Republican Party, was an oil and railroad tycoon before branching out into the media business. He owned The Examiner newspaper chain, the neoconservative Weekly Standard, and the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), one of the world’s largest sports and entertainment companies. In October 2010, Forbes magazine ranked him as the thirty-fourth-wealthiest person in America, worth an estimated $7 billion. He quietly and modestly contributed to charitable causes and to individuals in need, but the Anschutz campus wasn’t modest at all.
His foundation had given a $91 million grant to help finance the new Medical Center, 577 acres that had once housed Fitzsimons Army Hospital. An elegant mixture of new glass-and-steel structures, the Center rose above manicured lawns featuring large, whimsical sculptures. The east side of Peoria Street conveyed money, privilege, and careers in research and academia, while the west side featured weathered bungalows with tattered roofs, gritty taverns, gang members, cheap restaurants, and the down-at-heels aura of a struggling neighborhood. Crossing Peoria, one could feel a dramatic shift in possibilities and hope.
Holmes had worked hard to earn that hope. By his early twenties, he had done everything he could to place himself on the path to academic and financial success. Throughout his earlier education, he’d been well liked and much admired for his achievements, the definition of a young man in pursuit of the American Dream. In March 2011, Holmes had been admitted to the CU neuroscience program and given a $26,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, one of only six students accepted for the coming year. That May, he’d moved to Aurora and the following month he’d begun classes and lab rotations, drawing very little attention to himself.
On September 18, he e-mailed a CU Department of Psychiatry researcher who did brain scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging—fMRI—to study people with schizophrenia.
“The fmri study,” he wrote the researcher, “sounds interesting and I would like to be a subject if possible. Cheers, James Holmes.”
When the researcher responded with a schedule for the tests, he wrote back, “Ah, I can’t make any of those times, best of luck.”
On October 28, Holmes was ticketed for driving 46 mph in a 35 mph zone, his first-ever run-in with the law.
As a grad student, he was given a key card allowing him access to areas forbidden to civilians, including the sixth floor of the neuroscience building. Card in hand, he passed through a security door and entered a vast, gleaming, state-of-the art laboratory that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of feet, from one end of the structure to the other. Test tubes, vials, fuel tanks, refrigerators, laptop computers, electron microscopes that could enlarge objects four hundred times, “Radioactive Material,” and the brains of fruit flies abounded. Students sat quietly in front of their screens, probing the wiring and synaptic firings of the brain and its connections to nerves, muscles, cells, molecules, and intestines. Holmes regularly huddled next to this elite group but rarely interacted with them.
In both labs and classrooms, he stood out for his silence and quirky sense of humor, giving one- or two-word responses to questions from professors or just nodding and smiling and saying, “Yo.” He was physically quiet too, slinking off to study or eat alone, his five-foot-eleven-inch frame gliding out the door and down the hallway with barely a rustle. If he thought that he might have schizophrenia, or if he felt that he was drifting toward something dangerous, he mentioned this to no one.
At age twenty-four, he wasn’t on Facebook, didn’t e-mail or text much, and had a very outdated page on MySpace—as elusive online as he was in person. He’d done just about everything to remain anonymous, slipping quietly through the American educational landscape.
He wasn’t as invisible as a youngster in Castroville in Northern California, the small farming community that he has referred to as “The Artichoke Center of the World.” He had to wear a uniform to school every day, he once wrote in an application to graduate school at the University of Kansas, “to curb gang rivalry.” Looking back on his early years and devotion to science, he explained that “my life could have gone in a completely different direction had I not possessed the foresight to choose the path of knowledge.”
Holmes remained rather outgoing after his family relocated to Southern California, in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Penasquitos. His mother was a registered nurse and his father a leading scientist with the American credit score company FICO, previously known as Fair, Isaac and Company. James was a highly imaginative child whose natural inclination was to explore the furthest corners of his mind. His parents were more practical people who didn’t always understand their son’s flights of fancy. He could escape into his fantasy mind and stay there until something, or someone, brought him out of it.
At Westview High, he played soccer and ran cross-country. He liked to make other kids laugh with his improvisations and ad-libbing routines, but as he went deeper into science and the mysteries of the brain, he became more interior. He wanted to penetrate the secrets of the waking world, the dream world, and the mind—starting with his own. He wasn’t that close to anyone, including his younger sister, Chris, a short-haired musician who resembled her brother.
People intrigued Holmes less than his own mental excursions. From puberty onward, he was captivated by the notion of being able to create one’s reality using just the mind, and he was drawn to subjects like perceptual/temporal illusions and bending time. Science was clean and gave solid answers to complex problems.
Much later, when those from his past recalled Holmes, they spoke of him as a vague memory, a fleeting presence, a wisp of a young man who wasn’t intimate with anyone—a trace of a person always on the move. Most could barely remember anything he’d said and not much that he’d done, not those in Castroville or those at Westview High or those at the University of California-Riverside, where he earned his undergraduate degree, or even those more recently at the Anschutz campus in Aurora.
Everybody conceded how bright he was. On the Anschutz campus, he’d critiqued other students’ papers at a higher level than anyone else in the program. CU had turned down scores of other applicants, but Holmes’s credentials were sterling, at the “top of the top” of his class. After winning a merit scholarship to UC-Riverside, he’d graduated in June 2010 as an honors student, earning a 3.94 grade point average. In a philosophy class titled “Ethics and the Meaning of Life,” taken in the winter of 2010, he got an A. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, with Graduate Record Exam verbal scores in the ninety-eighth percentile. Leaving UC-Riverside, he’d worked briefly at a fast food restaurant while seeking out a graduate neuroscience program. A trio of UC-Riverside staff members wrote letters on his behalf, including director of student affairs Kathryn Jones and professors Khaleel Razak and Edward Korzus.
In one letter of recommendation penned by an unidentified author, Holmes was described as “truly exceptional.”
Another letter read, “James is an extraordinarily gifted student who is very dedicated to his academic pursuits. He takes an active role in his education, and brings a great amount of intellectual and emotional maturity into the classroom. He is passionate about a career in science and seeks out opportunities to learn as much as possible about his chosen field of interest, and how he can positively contribute to the world.”
His command of language was on display in his own applications.
“Rational people,” he’d written, “act based on incentives for self-fulfillment, including fulfilling needs of self-development and needs of feeling useful and helpful to others . . . I look forward to fulfilling my quest to advance my knowledge, and I plan to use my critical thinking skills by studying the subject I am passionate about, neuroscience.”
He had an “unquenchable curiosity, a strong desire to know and explore the unknown, and a need to persist against the odds . . . I have always been fascinated by the complexities of long lost thought seemingly arising out of nowhere into a stream of awareness. These fascinations likely stemmed from my interest in puzzles and paradoxes as an adolescent and continued through my curiosity in academic research . . .
“These are the very cognitive processes which enable us to acquire information and retain it. They are at the core of what distinguishes us as people. Due to the seemingly infinite vastness of indefinite knowledge, we must be selective in our pursuits of knowledge. This is why I have chosen to study the primary source of all things, our own minds . . . My lifelong goal is to increase the efficiency of how human beings learn and remember.”
In his applications, he wrote about being a summer camp counselor and working with a dozen ten- and eleven-year-olds. Two of them had attention deficit disorder and another had schizophrenia. One night the latter child awoke at 3:30 a.m. and began vacuuming the ceiling of their cabin.
“These kids were heavily medicated,” he recollected, using words that years later would eerily evoke his own case, “but this did not solve their problems. The medication changed them from being highly energetic creative kids to lax beings who slept through the activities.”
In applying to the University of Alabama-Birmingham, he wrote an essay about his research into “the illusion between cause and effect relationships.” He talked about a high school project and how he’d created an illusion in which “the mind is actually tricked into believing an action precedes the event that caused it.”
A professor on the admissions committee at UAB had some concerns and wrote of Holmes, “Not sure. He may be extremely smart, but difficult to engage. Hard to tell how interested he is. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in my research.”
The interviewer had ranked Holmes a “4” on a scale of “1 to 5” and said that he had an “ability to describe research experience with clarity and depth.” He gave Holmes a “3” in having clear goals and a “5” in research background.
Another UAB member of the admissions committee rated Holmes a “5” in all five categories, saying, “Excellent applicant! Great GPA and GRE scores.”
A third UAB interviewer dismissed Holmes’s introverted nature as being problematic: “His personality may not be as engaging as some applicants, but he is going to be a leader in the future.”
Despite the good reviews, UAB told Holmes that many “well qualified students applied, which forced the admissions committee to make difficult decisions. We regret to inform you that you have not been recommended for admission.”
Others schools were more welcoming. The University of Kansas offered him an interview, but then he withdrew his application. In early 2011, the University of Illinois accepted Holmes with this comment, “Those who met you . . . during your interview visit felt that your personal and professional qualities are truly outstanding and that you will be an excellent match for our program.”
But on January 30 of that year, Daniel Tranel, the neuroscience program director at the University of Iowa and the head of the grad school admissions committee, sent a stark e-mail to his colleagues about seven “applicants from this past weekend.” Six of the seven were described with words like “stellar” or “solid, not spectacular.” Only one candidate was dismissed outright: James Holmes. After meeting with Holmes, Tranel urged the admissions committee to reject his application.
“Do NOT,” he wrote, “offer admission under any circumstances,” but he did not explain the reasons for taking this position. Nor would he comment later on why he’d reached this conclusion.
Mark Blumberg, also on the Iowa faculty, wrote in an e-mail, “James Holmes: I agree with Dan. Don’t admit.”
So he did not receive acceptance to the University of Iowa. With schools in Kansas, Iowa, and Alabama out of the running, he chose the University of Colorado over Illinois and made plans to move to Aurora, finding an apartment just two blocks from the Anschutz campus and four miles from the Century 16 movie complex in Aurora.
From a twenty-nine-year-old male in medical school:
If I had a magic wand, the first thing I’d do is try to make myself better, instead of fixing the world around me. We act out of fear way too often instead of acting out of love. If I could change that within myself, then maybe I could believe that others can do this too. Who knows how something like that small shift inside might have helped James Holmes? What keeps people from going insane are the tiny things—regular contact with people, making music with friends, or being a little bit more understanding of others. It’s the absence of all these things in Holmes’s life that’s most revealing. Fear controls everything and most everyone—the fear of making yourself vulnerable and of being exposed, the fear of coming out of your isolation and taking a chance with someone else. You can’t really know who you are until someone has taken a good hard look at you and told you the truth about yourself, but you have to be willing to go through this process with another human being. Or you can stay hidden.