He’d hardly been accepted into the Anschutz academic community without scrutiny. Each year about thirty to forty undergraduates applied to the CU Neuroscience Program with a dozen or so brought in to be interviewed for the openings. Of this group, usually four to six were chosen for that fall’s entering class. An applicant went through a routine background check for illegal activities and might be interviewed and screened by as many as eight faculty members. Entering the program, the grad student was paired with a mentor whose specialty was often in the branch of neuroscience the PhD candidate was most interested in. He or she initially took elective courses with overviews of cellular and molecular biology and various mental disorders. The candidate also had a series of laboratory rotations, working with three doctors and spending about ten weeks on miniature projects. Students were observed for unusual behaviors or high levels of stress and kept under what one professor has called “a fair amount of oversight.” Therapy was available, but serious problems were rare. In the past, one PhD candidate had simply vanished for a while, before showing up alive in another location.
“The stress level that first year,” says a member of the Anschutz faculty, “is moderate for most students. In the case of James Holmes, nobody on the staff felt that he was under excessive pressure or brought it up in meetings. No one was waving red flags.”
During the 2011–12 school year, Holmes studied the human auditory system in the lab of Dr. Achim Klug; the “messenger” chemicals in the brain with Dr. Curt Freed; and synaptic signaling with Dr. Mark Dell’Acqua. The young man was on track to succeed in one of science’s most advanced fields. Physicians were using neuroscience to isolate which parts of the brain control which movements of different appendages of the body. The possibilities were stunning. Paraplegics whose brains were intact, for example, could now successfully employ robotic arms, hands, and fingers—by simply thinking about what a hand can do and then transmitting that thought electronically to the robot. The mechanical hand reached out and retrieved a cup of tea or a cookie and brought it up to one’s mouth.
Neuroscience could penetrate the deepest physical secrets of the brain, but did it have anything to say about emotional stability?
“In early 2012, after James had been in the program for about six months, I heard him give an oral presentation,” says a professor at Anschutz. “I was really quite impressed. It was about the nervous system of lobsters and about how the neurons connect to the nerve cells and how this creates behavior in the lobster’s stomach. Holmes had clearly done his homework and was good at conducting complex scientific experiments and analyzing data. He knew how to read scientific papers and how to talk about them.
“It isn’t enough in grad school just to be able to do research or even to write a good paper. You also have to know how to present your information clearly to an audience, and Holmes did. His presentation was really excellent. He was probably already thinking about what he was going to do, but he was still able to compartmentalize everything in his life.
“What I remember most was his odd sense of humor when speaking in public. It wasn’t dark, really, just strange. I tried to explain this to a detective when he came to the school to speak with us, but it was hard to put into words. His sense of humor was odd, but not that odd. You’ve got to remember that many gifted scientists are quirky, so his behavior didn’t stand out here. You can get away with being quirky, if you’re good enough at what you do.”
Off campus, Holmes said little to those at the Laundromat, the pawnshop, the liquor store, or the discount ethnic outlet, MexMall, where he went shopping. At night, he sat by himself in Shepes Rincon, the Spanish-speaking bar across from his apartment, sipping beers and saying almost nothing to the other patrons. After emptying three or four bottles, according to later accounts from people at the bar, he slid off his stool and headed home. Some evenings, he played video games or surfed adult sites on the Internet. Other times he met up with a prostitute in a brothel or had one entertain him in his own bedroom. He always had in hand the $240 cash for this service. He didn’t talk much to the call girls, either, or tell them anything about his dreams or violent fantasies. He could be gentle but suddenly turn rough, painfully twisting their hands or wrists, giving the impression that he didn’t understand they were suffering.
As he drank at Shepes or had sexual encounters, he didn’t talk about the movies he’d been watching obsessively, or the materials he was having delivered to his apartment, or about checking out firing ranges in the Denver area for target practice. One gun range owner, Glenn Rotkovich, had recently received an e-mail from Holmes asking to apply for membership at his place of business. Rotkovich called him back, and Holmes’s returned the call, leaving a bizarre, Batman-style voicemail. Rotkovich felt unnerved by the message. If the young man showed up at the club, Rotkovich warned his staff, don’t let him in.
Holmes didn’t talk to anyone about what he was imagining or feeling—not his parents, sister, classmates, or other acquaintances. He didn’t have any close friends at the campus and didn’t reveal to his teachers or his CU mentor what he’d been thinking or learning about mental disorders. He didn’t let anyone know about his growing interest in guns or that for months he’d been keeping a detailed, one-hundred-page brown spiral notebook holding his most private thoughts and desires. He liked to write and draw stick figures who acted out his deepest visions. The notebook, entitled “Of Life,” was decorated with an infinity symbol. Because he had trouble speaking with others, he used these pages to carry on a conversation with himself, sliding further and further into the realm of make-believe.
An unseen line, nothing like the tangible strip of pavement that separated the wealth on the east side of Peoria Street from the relative poverty on the west side, stood between the world of academia Holmes had been living in and the world he was now entering. He was developing a secret identity, dressing up like Batman in his apartment and slipping black contact lenses into his eyes, as revealed later at his preliminary hearing. He was planning on dying his hair orange, the color of The Joker’s. He’d once thought about working for the U.S. military and using his neuroscience insights and techniques to interrogate prisoners of war in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. He was certain that he knew how to get information out of people that no one else could. Weren’t you supposed to identify evil and stamp it out? Wasn’t that how you might become revered as a hero? His only connection to the world of warfare now, as for so many of his generation, came when he was playing video games by himself.
The professors at the CU Neuroscience Program had all studied the brain and the central nervous system and knew everything about neurons and proteins, but they had no concept of what was moving through his brain and nerves. They saw only the surface—his little smiles and friendly nods as he passed them in the hallways and kept moving. Holmes knew they’d interpret him as harmless. Even the name he’d given himself on campus, “Jimmy James,” was innocuous.
He only made one shocking admission, in March 2012, nine months after starting the PhD program and about four months before the Aurora theater massacre, telling a fellow student that he wanted to kill people “when my life is over.” But nobody followed up on this remark or knew that when he left the campus, he drove around greater Denver, scouring the city and the suburbs for guns. He studied Glocks at the Gander Mountain outlet in Aurora; looked at Remington 12-gauge shotguns at Bass Pro Shops in Denver; and handled the Smith & Wesson AR-15 semiautomatic rifles at Gander Mountain in Thornton. He constantly went online searching for gear—combat vests, magazine holders, and knives—paying extra for the two-day shipping.
From a twenty-four-year-old male in Wisconsin:
Why is violence such a large part of our entertainment culture? Because it’s so profitable. When I was ten, we were all playing less graphic video games, but as you get older, the companies you buy the games from start to make them more and more graphic and violent. Call of Duty is one of the most popular games of all time. When you’re playing it, you become the figure in the game who wakes up in a drugged-out state. You don’t know where you are. You’re an assassin who’s been neuro-linguistically programmed to kill President Kennedy.
These games are what countless young males get for Christmas now. They wake up that morning, open their presents, and start playing this game with other kids—killing people all over the world in these videos. It’s how they celebrate what’s supposed to be America’s biggest and most sacred holiday. Is this escapist? Sure. Is it desensitizing? Absolutely. Does it reward you for creating as much chaos as possible? Yep. It is fun to play and beat others? No doubt.
When I was in college, my roommates would come home from class and sit down and play the games for two or three straight hours. They weren’t young teenagers anymore. They were in their twenties and studying to be doctors and engineers, but this is still how they relaxed.