On Monday morning, July 23, as Holmes came to court for his initial appearance before Judge William Sylvester, a bomb squad kept working to disarm the IEDs in his apartment, as they’d been doing for the past three days. While the legal proceedings got underway, a FedEx package showed up at the Anschutz campus central administration building. A classic Art Deco structure with an elegant façade and a marble interior, it was a holdover from when this address had been home to Fitzsimmons Army Base. It was the building that held the office of Dr. Lynne Fenton.
After being taken into custody on Friday, Holmes quickly told the police about the IEDs in his apartment. But there was some information he hadn’t shared with them. Over that weekend, he’d confessed to one of his lawyers that hours before the shootings, he’d mailed a package to Dr. Fenton at the Anschutz campus; it could be easily identified because of how boldly he’d written his return address across the front. The lawyer phoned the CU medical school to let them know about the package and that it was absolutely a private communication between a patient and his psychiatrist. Therefore, went his legal argument, it could never be used as evidence against Holmes. His defense team wanted it returned to them as soon as possible.
That Sunday evening, Doug Abraham, Chief of the CU Police Department, was contacted by Dr. Robert Feinstein, Chairman of Outpatient Services for the CU hospital, who was also Dr. Fenton’s supervisor. Dr. Feinstein had received a call from a Holmes representative who said that the suspect wanted the package back—unopened. Chief Abraham passed this request along to Police Commander Steve Smith.
Early on Monday morning, the CU police conducted a search of Dr. Fenton’s office and found a FedEx package slid under her door. It instantly raised suspicions, but because Holmes’s address wasn’t written on it, the package was deemed irrelevant to the investigation.
Several hours later, Chief Abraham learned of another heavily stamped white envelope, which had just come into the loading dock of the campus mailroom. It showed Holmes’s address, so they cleared the building of about fifty employees and cordoned off the perimeter around the dock. The authorities called in the Adams County bomb squad, which soon arrived at the scene with a five-ton truck and a robot. The FBI was sending in a weapons-of-mass-destruction expert to be joined by environmental safety personnel and members of the Aurora Police Department.
All of this was just one front of an investigation now expanding outward across the United States, which would eventually include 444 police officers and fifty-six lab personnel. The case would generate more than 40,000 pages of discovery and 3,500 potential witnesses. Forensic experts who searched Holmes’s Internet browsing history on the PC in his apartment would find, among many other things, a website called “Rational Insanity.” As many would speculate after the massacre, Holmes was studying himself in his classes and apparently looking online for insight into his own mental condition. Or he may have been gathering information for an insanity defense in the future. Whatever his motive, he was looking into some very sophisticated psychological concepts leading up to the shootings.
At the campus mailroom that Monday morning, the robot was activated to pick up the package Holmes had sent to Dr. Fenton and place it inside a hooded container. Sensors were attached to the container, and the envelope was x-rayed for bio-chemical hazards and explosives. The reading came up zero. Wearing a gas mask and a crinkled plastic head covering, a technician then carefully removed the package’s contents, pulling out a brown spiral notebook, decorated with Holmes’s name and an infinity symbol. The title on the notebook read, “Of Life.”
The officers at the mailroom studied the notebook, and at least two of them, Aurora Police Detective Alton Reed and Chief Abraham, handled it during the course of the day, the Chief poking it with a pen. As Reed rifled through the pages wearing latex gloves, some burnt $20 bills tumbled out. Reed would later testify at a pre-trial hearing that he’d only thumbed through the notebook to see if there were any more bills inside. He claimed that he hadn’t scrutinized any of the pages or read any of Holmes’s drawings and writings.
“I just kind of fanned through it,” he said.
For his part, Chief Abraham admitted that by handling the notebook, he’d been “careless.”
Reed, Abraham, and all the other official personnel overseeing the package that day denied that they’d perused the notebook’s contents or spoken about them with anyone in the media.
Based on their statements in court, none of them grasped the significance of the burnt money. In The Dark Knight, The Joker had set fire to a huge stack of American currency worth around $30 million in order to make a social/political statement: Money was corrupting, and society could easily be controlled or manipulated by its hunger for financial gain.
Most of Monday, July 23, was devoted to the robotic testing and the human examination of the envelope and the notebook. Around ten p.m. that night, Sergeant Matthew Fyles of the Aurora Police Department came to the mailroom with a search warrant and took the notebook into custody. Like the police before them, prosecutors would contend that these pages were clearly relevant to the investigation and part of the evidence against Holmes, and that they should be allowed to view its contents.
From a twenty-six-year-old male working in the entertainment business on the West Coast:
In these huge mass shooting cases, we see very clearly the individual crimes, but we don’t see how deeply the overall community is now divided against itself. It’s the whole society that’s in conflict with itself and that conflict plays out within the media and our politics and the legal system too. That’s why it’s so hard to find out the things about James Holmes that we really need to know. Everyone involved in the case just wants to cover his own ass so the public doesn’t learn what’s important. Instead of being able to discover who this person was and how he ended up where he is we fight over the right to have access to anything of value.
We have the right to know who James Holmes is and why he did these things. We have the right to know what happened to him before he became a killer. That’s a small thing to expect when a dozen people are dead and a lot more have been wounded.