James Holmes: Possessed by the Devil and what Tiffany the prostitute knew
JAMES Holmes: Killing Christian Bale, confessing to a mental doctor, evil and other media facts…
Did anyone know if James Holmes was dangerous? The Daily Telegraph reports:
James Holmes, the Colorado cinema shooting suspect, sent a notebook detailing his chilling plans for the massacre to a psychiatrist at his university up to a week before carrying it out.
Only, the package never made it past a post room. Inside were drawing of “gun-toting stick-like figures shooting each other”.
According to one law enforcement official it was “full of details about how he was going to kill people.”
Image: Actor Christian Bale carries flowers as he visits a memorial to the victims of Friday’s mass shooting.
Why did Holmes do it, allegedly?
Some experts said academic failure could have affected his state of mind. Psychologist Marisa Randazzo said: “All of those things could actually make dormant schizophrenia come out, and come out relatively quickly.”
A witness says:
Stephanie Davies, 21, who was in the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado during the rampage, said: “He would shout ‘What are you doing? I said stand up!’ And he would pick people up. I saw him stand over someone. I just see hair and him holding the shirt and – boom.”
It’s alleged that Homes had been seeing prostitutes. One, a woman named Tiffany, tells TMZ:
When asked what the madman was like back then, she replied:
“I had no issues with him … he was really nice.”
In fact, Holmes was so nice that he felt sorry for her because her business wasn’t booming.
“He felt bad that I wasn’t getting more customers while in Colorado,” she recalled, “so he called a few days later and we met up again.”
Is the man accused of murdering 12 people a bit odd?
Officials say that since his arrest Holmes has been displaying odd behaviour.
According to ABC News, in the hours after his arrest Friday, he stared at the wall in the Arapahoe Police Headquarters with his eyebrows twitching.
Holmes told police he was the fictitious Batman villain, the Joker, and when cops put evidence bags over his hands to preserve traces of gunpowder residue, he pretended the bags were puppets.
How did he pay for the guns?
James Holmes may have used grant money from the National Institutes of Health to purchase the weapons he allegedly used to kill 12 people and injure 58 others.
Included in the purchases was an assault rifle bought immediately after Holmes failed an important oral exam, according to the New York Daily News.
The Holmes I knew:
Holmes’ neighbor from across the hall was not comfortable giving his name for publication, but said he was frustrated by the lockout.
He watched Holmes on TV on Monday during the suspect’s first court appearance for the shooting. “He looked crazy. I’ve never seen him look like that before.”
An expert speaks. Dr Keith Albow:
If Holmes hadn’t shot people with an assault rifle, he would have blown them up with makeshift bombs or sprayed gallons of acid into the faces of children or ignited an inferno in a hotel.
I lost a friend to murder several years ago. He was run down by a mentally ill doctor who accelerated to 60 mph, aimed straight for my buddy, who was jogging in a park at the time, and plowed his car into him, crushing his skull. He had no gun. The two men had never met.
Another expert arrives:
Jack Levin, co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, notes that Holmes relatively young age sets him apart from most mass murderers…
“Apparently he was not able to get his PhD, he struggled. And that’s true of most of these mass killers,” said Levin, who is also a criminology and sociology professor at Northeastern University.
“They may not be in a graduate program, but they’re in the process of getting a nasty separation or divorce, they’ve lost their job or they’re deeply in debt. There’s some catastrophic loss and he shares that characteristic,” he said.
Anyone else?
“I think there are two possibilities going on here,” Marissa Randazzo, former chief research psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service and an expert in mass shootings, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Tuesday.
“One is that he is in the middle of a psychotic episode which is quite possible. We see him distracted at multiple points, an almost sort of ‘coming to’ and trying to figure out where he is and process what’s going on,” she said. “The other thing that we’re seeing — and we’ve seen some of this behavior in the past couple months — might suggest mania. Meaning hyperactivity, hyper energy, been possibly up and not sleeping for days. What we might be seeing here is the post effects.”
But Randazzo also said there was a third possibility: he might simply be faking it.
“It’s possible,” she said when asked if Holmes’ behavior could be all an act. “It is possible. We’ll leave that open,” she said, adding that most people who lie about that sort of behavior are sociopaths and “what we’ve heard about his history does not suggest sociopath at all.”
“Let’s keep that in mind that he was studying neuroscience. He was studying exactly the type of brain issues that we’re going to be talking about throughout this whole case,” she said.
How do we report on the massacre?
Tom Teves, whose son Alex was among 12 people shot and killed Friday in Aurora, Colo. at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” challenged TV news divisions during a Monday interview with Cooper.
“I would like to see CNN come out with a policy that said moving forward we’re not going to talk about the gunman,” Teves said. “What we’re going to say is, a coward walked into a movie theater and started shooting people. He’s apprehended. The coward’s in jail. He will never see the light of day again. Let’s move on to the victims. Never talk to him again.”
But some people like Holmes:
A flood of tweets describing Holmes as “hot” or “cute” rebounded across the Internet after images were released of the baby-faced 24-year-old accused of killing 12 and injuring 58 in a Colorado movie theater last week.
“James Holmes is kinda hot,” Twitter user Chelsea Montani wrote on Friday, following news of the massacre.
I’m disappointed that James Holmes is mildly attractive.Now I feel like I’ve got a problem.
— Duke E. Brown (@hotterthanjuly) July 20, 2012
“How many people are judging me for thinking James Holmes is hot?” user Henry Valentine wrote. “I want to write him letters when he goes to prison.”
Damn and James Holmes was kinda cute too #next
— Emily ? (@dartersauce) July 20, 2012
Is Holmes a vicim of…racism? Michael McGough searches for angle in the LA Times:
Here’s an excerpt from NPR’s early coverage of the shooting:
“I’m Steve Inkseep. The man in custody for last night’s shooting in Aurora, Colorado, was identified by police as James Holmes. He’s 24 years old. If you’re wondering — he’s white, he’s American and, as always, innocent until proven guilty. Throughout this morning we’ve heard eyewitnesses describe a man who walked into the Century 16 multiplex. He had multiple weapons. He had a gas mask. He stepped into Theater Number 9, which was premiering the latest Batman film, threw some kind of gas canister, it’s unclear what, and then opened fire on the audience; a dozen people dead.”
Is this racist? Racially insensitive? Or unobjectionably informative? You tell me.
When it doubt, call it evil:
Is James Holmes demon possessed? It is impossible to say without a detailed diagnosis. Even then, it is a slippery question. We are dealing with a reality that is rubbery. In many ways this is the wrong question. Better to ask, “Was James Holmes taken over by Evil?”
Yes. Something happened to the mild mannered science geek. He turned into a monster. Something twisted in his mind and heart, and Evil made an entry. Evil infested his life. It took him over. Whether the twist was through mental illness, some inner wound or some terrible dark intelligence, we cannot say. The fact that we can’t say what went wrong and don’t have a neat and tidy answer is the key to understanding the terrible conundrum of evil..
Oh, and this just in:
The National Enquirer says Holmes wanted to murder including Bale and Morgan Freeman, at its premiere in New York on July 16 . But didn’t.
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Eyewitness Chandler Brannon, 25, sits outside Gateway High School where witnesses were brought for questioning after a shooting at a movie theater showing the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises," Friday, July 20, 2012 in Aurora. A gunman wearing a gas mask set off an unknown gas and fired into the crowded movie theater killing 12 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said. (AP Photo/Barry Gutierrez)
Posted: 25th, July 2012 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
