At midnight on August 6, 2013, Holmes was shipped out of Arapahoe County and transported 100 miles south to the state hospital in Pueblo. The mental health staff had spent months clearing out a forensic wing of the facility for the psychiatrists to test him in. They were assigned to address three basic questions: Was the defendant sane at the time of the shooting? Was he currently mentally competent to stand trial? Did he suffer from a mental illness that could provide a valid defense against the death penalty? As this process played out in Pueblo, Holmes’s lawyers kept up a barrage of motions—scores of them, eventually hundreds of them, piling up week after week—designed to prolong or save his life, if he were found sane and then convicted and faced the death penalty.
While they kept the judge busy, the secrecy around the proceedings in Pueblo was impenetrable. Dr. Hal Wortzel, Director of Neuropsychiatry Service at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, had performed roughly two hundred of these evaluations himself. He agreed to speak about the general protocol at the mental hospital without getting into the specifics of the Holmes case.
“Some people undergoing this kind of exam,” says Dr. Wortzel, “will try to fake their mental illness. They’ll say they can’t remember anything or they’ll exaggerate their behavior. This is called ‘malingering’ and we have paper and pencil tests that try to detect it, but we also have a lot of other data to draw on. Before a psychiatrist or psychiatric team comes in to evaluate a patient staying at the Pueblo facility, that patient will have been under observation 24/7 for some amount of time. If someone has been hallucinating every day throughout the day, or talking to the walls, that behavior will be observed and passed along to those doing the exam. If the patient’s sleep is disjointed or if he’s neglecting basic personal hygiene, that will also be noted. It’s one thing to try to fool a psychiatrist for a couple of hours in a face-to-face situation, but another to try to fool an entire staff for a much longer period of time.
“When I’m doing these kinds of evaluations, I ask the patient very open-ended questions, like: ‘Tell me what happened. Help me understand why you did this . . .’ While it’s more difficult to conduct this exam on someone a year after the events, in the vast majority of cases you can render an opinion about their sanity with a high level of confidence. You aren’t working for the DA’s office or the defense. You’re there to give a fully independent evaluation, and the state just wants you to do your job.”
On August 21, Holmes was returned to the Arapahoe County jail, and sixteen days later copies of the 128-page report generated on him in Pueblo were given to the prosecution and defense. While the media awaited the revelations surrounding the sanity exam (and perhaps even the contents of the spiral notebook), the defense kept up its legal assault. On September 3 alone, Holmes’s lawyers filed twenty-one new motions, most of them protesting capital punishment.
“The death penalty,” they wrote, “is in steep and consistent decline in Colorado . . . Even if this Court restricts its view to the Colorado Constitution it should strike the death penalty as inconsistent with the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
In a 2013 Denver Post editorial, Arapahoe County DA George Brauchler wrote, “Our elected prosecutors prudently exercise discretion as to which few murder cases truly warrant the pursuit of the death penalty. Which killer currently facing death in Colorado deserves a lesser sentence?”
Since the Aurora massacre, other members of the defendant’s generation had begun appearing in the news again and again, making headlines for their own violent behavior. Following numerous mass shootings in the summer of 2012, the carnage continued into 2013, but with a twist. On April 15, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two pressure cooker bombs detonated, killing three people and injuring 264. Days later, the suspects were identified as brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ages twenty-six and nineteen. The suspects also allegedly killed an MIT officer, Sean Collier; carjacked an SUV; and traded bullets with the police in Watertown, Massachusetts. During the mayhem, Dzhokhar ran over Tamerlan, who died, but the younger brother escaped and led police on a door-to-door manhunt through suburban Boston. When he was caught, he told authorities that he and Tamerlan were motivated by the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their actions were a political statement delivered though calculated domestic terrorism.
On Monday morning, September 16, 2013, Aaron Alexis stepped inside Building 197, home to three thousand employees at the Navy Yard complex in Washington, DC. At 8:15 a.m., the thirty-four-year-old naval defense contractor opened fire with a shotgun from a fourth-floor overlook and then a third-floor hallway, spraying bullets into a glass-walled cafeteria as workers ate breakfast. Weeks earlier, he’d informed the police in Newport, Rhode Island, that he heard voices that wanted to harm him and that people were following him and using a microwave machine to feed damaging vibrations into his body. The authorities relayed this information to the Newport Naval Station, but no one there saw Alexis as a threat.
By August 25, he’d left Rhode Island for the DC area, where he worked at the Navy Yard for a defense-related computer company. Living in hotels, he had trouble sleeping and was on the antidepressant Trazodone while undergoing treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs. None of his actions caused him to lose his security clearance. On Saturday, September 14, he visited the Sharpshooters Small Arms Range in Lorton, Virginia, just southwest of the nation’s capital. He bought bullets, rented a rifle, and took target practice, before purchasing a shotgun and twenty-four shells. Two days later, he walked into the Navy Yard—protected by armed guards and metal detectors—carrying his base pass and shotgun. Once inside Building 197, he took a handgun from a security officer and began firing. By the time he’d stopped shooting, nearly half an hour later, eight people were injured, twelve were dead, and the police had killed Alexis himself.