A Dark Night in Aurora
Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings
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James Holmes killed or wounded seventy people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Only one man was allowed to record extensive interviews with the shooter. This is what he found. On July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, a man in dark body armor and a gas mask entered a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with a tactical shotgun, a high-capacity assault rifle, and a sidearm. He threw a canister of tear gas into the crowd and began firing. Soon twelve were dead and fifty-eight were wounded; young children and pregnant women were among them. The man was found calmly waiting at his car. He was detained without resistance. Unlike the Columbine, Newtown, San Bernadino, and Las Vegas shootings, James Holmes is unique among mass shooters in his willingness to be taken into custody alive. In the court case that followed, only Dr. William H. Reid, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist, would be allowed to record interviews with the defendant. Reid would read Holmes’ diary, investigate his phone calls and text messages, interview his family and acquaintances, speak to his victims, and review tens of thousands of pages of evidence and court testimony in an attempt to understand how a happy, seemingly normal child could become a killer. A Dark Night in Aurora uses the twenty-three hours of unredacted interview transcripts never seen by the public and Reid’s research to bring the reader inside the mind of a mass murderer. The result is chilling, gripping study of abnormal psychology and how a lovely boy named Jimmy became a killer.
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I have read this before, and have no memory of it. Not a good sign. Perhaps that's brain fog plus Covid stress.
This is a fascinating but irritating read: irritating because Holmes is a liar and malingerer, and because the first part of the book is devoted to describing how he was an all-American child—baseball, big smiles, good grades, lovey-dovey, the whole nine yards. That part goes in far too long, and could have been summarized; the length of it was insensitive given what he did. It just went on and on about how he was the Best Boy you could have ever wanted, and not in context of his mental illness developing later. So odd.
For the lying and malingering: Is he severely mentally ill? Absolutely. But. He lies to his therapist and to the author, and others. He creates symptoms, writing in his notebook and telling the author that his symptoms interferes with what he wanted to do, so he chose to be only be catatonic at lunchtime. He claimed to be not be fully in control of his actions, yet stopped before he headed out to the theater to check his dating profiles, to see if he might have a chance of hooking up. And on and on. He also claimed that, in the theater, he couldn't see to choose targets because his helmet visor was scratched up—it was brand new. I found myself really getting angry and frustrated with the subject in a way I never do; I have been studying psychology since before I started my undergrad degree in it in 1990, and this never happens. This guy got under my skin.
this case would not leave my head for like a week and dats why i decided to read the book. the first half of the book i read very fast and found interesting, the second half was bit boring and slow but i did learn more abt the case at the end of the day. im not gonna rate the book coz it feels weird to put a rating on a case like that, but i would recommend the book for ppl who want to know more abt this.
The killer had a accomplice, since there were two people at the cinema the day of the shooting incident, but the accomplice left before the shooting began.
Two gask masks were found at the crime scene, this was mentioned in a documentary about the shooting, but otherwise this minor but important detail is mostly ignored.
Where is the accomplice and what happened to them?
