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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening. As an expert and speaker on mass shootings and gun violence, Doctor Lynn Fenton knew it was impossible to spot a killer. But when she met her new patient, troubled grad student James Holmes, the hair on her arm stood up. She feared he was going to kill, yet she could find no way to thwart him. A few months later, Holmes struck. He entered a packed movie theater and opened fire, killing twelve people and wounding seventy. Some
were left brain damaged. Se were paralyzed for life. Immediately, the familiar debates reignited, the crisis of mental health access, more restrictive gun laws versus more good guys with guns, the morality of the death penalty, the legitimacy of the insanity defense. But what about the victims and bystanders whose lives would never be the same. Doctor Fenton's memoir is a voice for them. Her inability to thwart Holmes's mass
murder made her escapegoat and elicited innumerable death threats. Her chilling account provides an intimate look at her life before and after the Aurora massacure, as well as alarming insight into the sinister patient who called himself Fear Incarnate. With unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, audio and video recordings, trial transcripts, medical records, and notes, Aurora attempts to answer the question Holmes himself posed in his infamous
notebook Why Why Why. The book that we're featuring this evening, is Aurora, the psychiatrist that treated the movie theater killer tells her story with my special guests, Doctor Lynn Fenton. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Doctor Lynn Fenton.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this incredible book. Let's start off in twenty twelve, as you do in your book. Right away, tell us what your position was at the faculty of the University of Colorado School of medicine.
So at the time that Holmes was a graduate student in twenty twelve, I was the chief of the Student Mental Health Service and we treated all the graduate students in all of our medical grad programs.
Tell us about some of the things that you did. You talked about a yearly lecture that you did on mass shootings. Which shooting did you particularly talk about and why what did you try to and want to convey to your students about the mass shooting.
I taught lots of courses, and one of them was course on student Mental Health, and that particular class was for our most senior fourth year psychiatry residency trainees, so they're just finishing their specialty training. And it so happened that that year twenty twelve, when I was giving the lecture, a number of the students in my class had been in high school when the one of the early terrible school shootings occurred at Columbine, which is south of Denver
and Aurora. So I chose to first focus on that for the lecture because it just was important personally and a lot of those students' lives. None of them had gone to Columbine at the time, but a lot of them, had friends and knew some survivors.
From that, you write that three out of four school shootings, the attacker made no direct threat against the teachers or students, but they still posed a threat. You also discussed with your students Virginia Tech that killer. So what did you discuss with them regarding the Virginia Tech killer.
So Virginia Tech was is still to this day one of the most horrible shootings mass shootings period, let alone school shootings. Over thirty people were killed. And one of the big lessons that we learned from Virginia Tech in retrospect was that members of one department, say the English department, were reluctant to speak with members of department. I think it was maybe the Math department, or to speak with mental health providers or law enforcement for fear that they're
violating the student's privacy. And so in that case, even though the shooter, Chow had been placed at one point on a mental healthhold, he also was known to the police and he was exhibiting all these alarming behaviors before the shooting. People were not talking to each other. They were kind of protecting his privacy. So after the Virginia Tech shooting, it was clear that we cannot do that.
So if you are suspicious that a student is potentially dangerous to themselves or others, then you can contact other people if you need to get more information or to
pass on your concerns about this student. And so that was a huge thing that do not let worries about privacy about a student to prevent you from saying something if you're worried, And then analogous to that, in mental healthcare, we of course try Usually we really protect our patients' privacy and will not be divulging things to anybody else. But in the case of possible danger, like if you think a person is a danger to themselves or to others in that emergency, then you can break that rule
and talk to other folks. So we spent a lot of time to sort of reminding the students about this and how to proceed if you run into somebody that you're fearful might commit one of these mass shootings.
You introduced James Egan Holmes, twenty four years old, doctoral student in neurosciences and one of a handful you write of gifted students accepted into the college. The college is prestigious neuroscience program. But you said that Holmes had some problems publicly speaking, what we're some of those problems.
He was a very anxious, nervous guy. And in fact, this is why he first came to Student Mental Health was he had so much anxiety during his lab presentations and what was just made all these awkward jokes that one of his supervisors suggested that he come into Student Mental Health to see if we could help him. And so that's why he came of his own accord to Student Mental Health and came to see me.
In fact, you got a voicemail from a colleague social worker, Margaret Roath, and she said that she knew you had a long waiting list, but you should make an exemption for this guy. You quote her saying he's a bit unusual, might be best to keep him in the system, and she wanted him monitored closely and said that he was a most anxious person she had ever dealt with, period, and that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. And you knew who that woman was because you had
referred her to another counselor. You agreed and tell us about this first appointment with James Holmes.
Well, I was already expecting somebody very nervous. Margaret, who was the social worker on our team and saw lots of these students, was real veteran, and so when she said this is the most anxious guy I've seen, you know, my ears perked up. And when she was she said, you know, he'd be mentioning he has thoughts of killing and killing others not but she said, I don't think he's actually dangerous, but he's really very odd. So let's
could you please see him yourself. Usually when we have a long waiting list somebody needs to get in right away, we'd refer them to a psychiatrist in the community. That Margaret thought, he's a little odd, let's let's keep a closer eye on him. So that's how I came to see him. So I contacted him right away. A few days later, we had our first appointment, and boy, so he was absolutely very sort of anxious, nervous, unusual eye contact, kind of like staring at different points around the room
and inter mentally staring at me. And he also even just moved kind of awkward and nervously, almost robotically, kind of shooting up from the chair in the waiting room. Kind of marching back into the treatment area. But the most difficult thing really was that was really hard to get him to say more than about a two word answer, sort of like if you're talking to, say, a teenager who doesn't want to talk to you, and you say, oh, I was cool, fine, you know, just these very brief,
uninformative answers. And so I spent the most of the next six sessions, over several months, trying to figure out what was behind this thought of killing people? Did he actually have any intent of hurting someone or that capacity to do that? And he was really hard to work with.
Now you just skipped a little bit ahead to what he said about hurting people killing people, Yeah, you knew. And yet you write in the book that he had first seen a therapist when he was eight years old, when he punched his sister in the face. He had only gone to three sessions. They had diagnosed him with oppositional defiance disorder, but that was about it. It seemed that
he would be okay. He was okay. So no one had seen him before, He had no psychiatric record before you saw him, Is that correct, right?
You know, kind of nerdy, anxious kid. Yeah, had that sort of brief issue.
And then once when they moved to a larger city in California, they had a little family counseling. But I mean he didn't have a history problems, he didn't have any legal record, and yeah, no prior psychiatric treatment.
It's interesting you talk about you write about his background is his parents, his father and his grandfather, and that there had been they had been involved with something called DARPA and so this was involved with a peak soldier performance experiments and study. Interestingly, James Holmes comes into treatment, but how do you get around You said, it was very hard to extract anything from him, especially in that
first interview and that first session. How did you come upon the subject of him wanting or fantasizing about killing people?
Yeah, so it's very interesting. So he first saw my colleague Margaret and said, you know, I'm here for anxiety, and she asked him about it. But at some point when she was talking to him, he just said, almost kind of out of the blue, offhandedly, I have thoughts of killing people, you know, just like what and try to find out more. He wouldn't really say anything, and
so it was very similar with me. You know, I sort of said, so Margaret said, you have these thoughts, tell me about that, and he just you know, wouldn't or couldn't elaborate, just just thoughts of killing people one person, interviewing everybody. But you can't do that. That's not a good solution. And so he's the one who brought it up.
And then you know, I kept pursuing it, but he think in retrospect he didn't want me to learn more because there was a chance that maybe I'd lock him up or somehow prevent his plan.
Now regarding that, what are the rules, what is your protocol? What do you do when somebody in treatment says that they want to kill somebody or they're thinking of killing somebody, or what are the rules? And yeah, tell us what those rules are governing you.
Yeah, So if you get some specifics like maybe target or a group of people or a place, or if you get the sense that this this is something kind of imminent that they're planning, it's not a statement like someday I'm going to get that person, then you can place them on what's called a mental healthhold, and that is where we can so called lock people up on a psychiatric unit for up to seventy two hours against their will, and that gives us a chance to gather
more information, So mostly talking to the patient saying if they'll elaborate more, but also contacting law enforcement and family members, colleagues, things like that to try to find out more if is there truly risk of this person doing something and is there somebody place or a group of people we need to warn so they could watch out. In Holmes's case, he just never came close to meeting criteria for a
mental healthhold. He was just too vague. And even when you do put somebody on a mental healthfold for homicidal ideation to a large ex stent relying on what the patient tells you to and if somebody smart and determined like Holmes was to carry out a mass murder, then they can just lie or not talk during the mental healthhold and at the end of the seventy two hours you have to let him go.
You when you first learned about James, you thought a way through to be able to communicate with him was to empathize with him about breakups. And he had just broken up with his girlfriend, or at least she had redefined the relationship and he wasn't interested tell us what he had to say about the relationship and its effect on him.
Yeah, it was very strange. So one a sort of a general statement he made about his relationships was, I don't have relationships with people. They have relationships with me, sort of as if he's kind of going through his life he does not seek out any kind of interactions. You'd rather just be to himself. What you know, if somebody comes in the picture and wants to be his friend or date him, then you know, he might go
along with it. But he had Yeah, I had some strange statements about when we were talking about the breakup. Then he said, let's see, I don't see the I don't see the glasses half full or half empty. I see beyond the glass, and a couple of other sort of sophomore very strange statements, sort of as if he thought they were, you know, quite intellectual and penetrating or something.
But meanwhile, to an average person they just seem odd overall, though, I mean, a breakup can be stressful enough that somebody who's inclined to commit some kind of murder might be a tipping point. So was really interested to find out, you know how he was coping if he was okay.
I mean, he did admit to you know, he's a little bit sad, but he wasn't torn up about it, and you know, they were still kind of friendly and talking after so and he never expressed anything like I hate all women, you know, because they won't date me, or something like you'd be just each time I would pursue what I thought might be something that would give me more information, it would just kind of evaporate by his saying nothing or what he said reassured me that he wasn't that upset.
This patient really concerned you and consume your thoughts, and so you spoke with other psychiatrists that were your colleagues and your friends, and you also at some point spoke to your supervisor, Steve. Tell us why you spoke to Steve and what did you want potentially Steve to do.
So A great thing about working in a university setting, as you have all these fabulous colleagues all around you, and we're used to collaborating, so you can discuss difficult cases with other folks and with psychiatry. We had the culture at the University of Colorado to occasionally bring in one of our colleagues and have sort of a joint visit and say, you know, hey, what do you think of this person? Can you does he connect better with you? Can you think of anything else I could do? So
that's how worried I was about this guy. I had discussed the case with my supervisor and we decided to have joint visit, and you know, it did go a little better because I was wondering, maybe Holmes is extra awkward with women, maybe he'll do better with a man. Steve was a little bit older, had kind of a different style than I do, and so I thought, you know, maybe they would connect better. It actually did go a little bit better. Homes was more talkative at one point.
It was almost like he was having a normal conversation, which kind of shocked me because I never had seen that side of Homes before. And so we decided to have on the follow up of that because it went a little bit better, we were going to do another joint session, but that turned in to be our last session. Actually, we didn't have a chance to get very far with the co console.
He thought in that session when he spoke to Steve that there had been a couple of things in your sessions with Holmes where again distracted or you inadvertently wrote the wrong name down on a pharmaceutical prescription and also
inadvertently locked them out of the office. So when you brought in Steve, Steve asked about that, and so he thought that that there was he was paranoid about certain things from those sessions, but also that he addressed that he thought that you were afraid of him, right right, and.
He thought that's why I brought Steven. He's like, well, that's why you're here, right, Fenton's afraid of me, and Steve's like, oh, what do you mean, And then Holmes kind of said, well, there was time she locked me out of the office, which was just a mistake. I'm carrying a lot of things coming into the office in the morning and you have to sort of like manually locked the outer door, and I just hadn't done that, and then I forgot to go back and unlock it.
So he was the first patient of the day, so when he came, outer door to the waiting room was locked. And then he also mentioned another time that I had like a big box in the office, and so I don't know if he thought it was like a weapon or something. But it was just some shoes that you know, they didn't fit, and so I was returning in life, I had them there to drop them off at the
UPS drop off. Yeah, he also had thought so Steve had like sprained his wrist and so he came in kind of wrapped up and it was in a sling, And in retrospect during the trial, Holmes had said he thought that Steve did that on purpose to like see if he could generate some sympathy in homes. So again, just like really strange lines of thinking.
You had a calleague that had a disturbing experience with a killer that she was treating, and she had no idea. Again, she he did talk about killing, but nothing specific. And then this one person went on to create an incredible crime involving his girlfriend and putting her remains in a blender. Now, what was her fear more than just the normal as you say that did I do enough? Did I do everything I could have done to prevent something like this happening? But what was her other fear?
Her big fear was, well, you know what if my name goes out and everybody knows who I am, they're gonna be Oh, there's that doctor of you know, the murder, who's Decka's girlfriend, and the blender, and you know, will I lose my job? And what about my kids? She had young kids in school, you know, are they going to will they be in danger from people who hate me? And so it was really like a fear of being outed.
Let's get back to Holmes's girlfriend, this GUARDI she tells him, I'm interestingly on Valentine's Day, you write, he makes a fancy dinner candlelight and she says, you know, I think we shouldn't see each other anymore. I don't see a future. I think we should just be friends with benefits. After that, they correspond in G chats. As you write what does he have to say to her? You provide that exchange. What does she say to him in response to the things he says to her in that chat?
Well, I'm not sure I remember that exact chat, but he was kind of saying something about killing people, So it was more direct than I have thought of this. It's something more along the lines that he would like to kill people. And then she was sort of trying to ask a little bit more, Oh, really, you know why? And it wasn't making sense the answers back to her, She said, well, why did you kill me other friend?
You know He's like, no, no, no, I only want to kill like random people that I don't no. And then this odd idea that he would accrue their human capital, which reminds me of a video game. You know, you kill somebody and maybe you get points or you get some of their attributes. So his girlfriend, of course, was like, what are you talking about? This makes no sense. You know that he was conveying to her more than he'd ever said to me.
Now, the reason why James comes to your attention is also because he can get treatment because he's a student at the university. What about his course? And with the session with Steve and yourself, Steve asks him and you ask as well about how is the course going, how is school going? And what is his response?
Right, So this was by then we're well into the spring. I think it was probably May that session, and which is the time of year that all the grad programs, the first year students have this big preliminary exam, so it's to make sure that they've got some basic scientific knowledge about their specialty, so they're ready to go on and work in the labs and start doing some research. So it's a big deal. People study for a long
time about it. Everybody's really nervous about prelimbs. Occasionally somebody doesn't pass. I've had worked with some students who didn't pass. But the schools are very invested in their students and they're like, well, that's okay. We're going to set you up with a tutor. How can we help you, and then they'll let them retake the test. So when we asked Holmes, you know, how are things going, because we knew these pre limbs were coming up, he said, you know,
I'm not studying. I'm Musli. I'm just playing these It was, you know, some one of these first person shooter video games. Right, Oh, that's kind of worse. And then sure enough he comes back for what turned out to be the last session in early June, and I said, how did your test go? And he said, very flatly, I failed. I was like, oh, no, well, shoot, that's okay. You know, I know some people haven't passed the first time, and they'll they'll help you and you'll
pass the next time. It's like, no, actually, I'm not interested. I decided that I'm going to drop out, and so both Steve and I, you know, were alarmed because a lot of times it's a big negative event like this that can set somebody off where they do commit a crime or kill themselves. So rapidly we're asking him, you know, what are you going to do? Well? It turns out he had a lot of money in savings, He had
lease on his apartment for a while. He thought, well, I won't break the lease, so I'll stay there, you know, at least through the end of the calendar year. What are you going to do well, Probably I'll I'll get a job somewhere and you know, just think about my career, next career start. Well, your family are they going to be upset? Oh? No, I already told them. I was thinking it wasn't a good match. They'll be supportive of me. So all the things that we were kind of worried
might make him feel desperate were not occurring. He seemed, you know, pretty resigned to the fact he was leaving. And he didn't seem that at the school either. It wasn't like those darn teachers wrote to Howard of a test or, I hate this school. If it weren't for them, I'd be fun nothing like that. He was just kind of non chalant. So he at the end of that session, which he cut short about usually we talked forty five
to fifty minutes. About twenty minutes into the session, he said, well, I have to go, I have to go talk to my advisor. And he just, in his weird way, he like just shot straight up. He was looking right at the exit door, and he just kind of marched very stiffly straight to that door and walked out. Didn't look at Steve or me, didn't say one more word thanks for your health or anything like that. It was just the oddest ending.
Now, was that the time that he decided you offered interestingly to treat him for free.
Yes, exactly. He said, well, I'm dropping out, so this is going to be my last session. And so I can't remember if it was Steve or me, but we both essentially we're offering to keep treating him for free, even though his student health insurance was going to end, and he said, well, not going to be here anymore, so what's the point. Because he was looking at it that we were treating his anxiety for the presentations, he wouldn't be presenting anymore, so in his head, what's the point?
But then Steve said, well, what about treatment for your life? You know, because both of us were just concerned in just his whole direction was going to happen, and I was hopeful for a few seconds like Post didn't answer, maybe it was yes, He's like, nah, so you turn that down.
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licensed therapist today, go to talkspace dot com. Make sure to use the code true Murder to get one hundred dollars off your first month and show your support for the show. That's true Murder and talkspace dot com. Now, Lynn, doctor Fenton, we were speaking about what was happening in May twenty twelve, as you write fifty three days approximately before this massacre, while classmates prepared for their preliminary exams. You write that he ordered a glock thirty.
Four to nine mills Liminar handgun from a Wisconsin company and they have about one hundred websites that they could you could buy weaponry from. Also, two grenade style canisters of tear gas, a gas mask with a special air filter, but when that pistol failed to arrive, he bought a glock twenty two forty caliber handgun with hollowpoint saber cartridges, just from.
The local sporting goods shop. So while that is going on, what is going on in Home's life besides that weaponry accumulation of those weapons.
Well, he at some point during the treatment with me had kind of shifted from just vague thoughts of killing people to actually creating an action plan, and so he had cased out various locations and sort of narrowed it down to this particular theater. And we know a lot of this because he wrote a sort of manifesto that is referred to as the Notebook, and he sent it to me just shortly before the shooting, so not intending to actually get to me prevent the shooting, but kind
of explain why he had done these things. So he was going and not only massing this arsenal of weapons and tactical self protective equipment, but he was also going to the shooting range and with tons of ammo enough that it caught the eye of some of the folks who worked there, and shooting up very violently these human silhouettes. Yeah, so he was doing that, he was playing video games and not studying for his big exam.
You were very concerned, but you had ethical constraints, but you called his mother tell us about that, right.
So normally, if a patient, if you ask a patient, if you can call a family member, talk to friends for more information. If they say no, then you know you don't call them. The one instance where we'll break that rule is if we're really concerned that the patient might kill himself or somebody else. And so even though I had no specifics and Holmes would not even let on that he had, he denied he had any weapons, He denied that he was intending to do anything. I
still had such a bad feeling. I thought, I really need to talk to somebody who hasn't known him for a long time so I can figure out if this is a new episode of psychosis, like a first psychotic break for schizophrenia, for instance, or has he always been
just kind of nerdy, awkward and strange this way. So even though he specifically said don't call my family, I called her anyway right after that last visit, and in talking to her, I really had the impression that he'd always been, you know, kind of a little odd, very shy kid, kind of a little odd nerdy, But so to me, it did not sound like this was new
strange behavior, that he was undergoing a psychotic break. So yeah, as similarly, I called actually all the members of our threat assessment team, which, since Virginia Tech the terrible school shooting, pretty much all institutions of higher learning have these threat assessment teams where we're able to bring information from different angles and put it all together in case, you know,
somebody seriously is a danger to themselves or others. So I talked to the legal representative, I talked to folks in the neuroscience's grad program. I spoke to some of his supervisors who'd worked with him, and they all agreed, you know, he's pretty weird. We just kind of chalked it up to being very nervous, and they never had heard him say anything that was alarming or frightening, that he was going that he was threatening anybody, or that
they thought he was capable of doing anything. And I talked to the campus police officer too, who was able to check and see that he did not have a criminal record. At the time. I had the misconception that she would be able to see if he had purchased any guns, not realizing that Colorado is a state where you don't have to register or get a license to
get a gun. So on June eleventh, when I called around to all these people, Holmes had already amassed part of his arsenal, but that was not something that the police officer could locate in any database.
You talk about the July sixth, you wondered, it was two months after he had quit the sessions, and you wondered about him, did you do enough? And then July twelfth, you're write that he was at Walmart, and this is eight days before buying bomb making materials at a Denver hobby shop, and he was at Walmart getting various chemicals, electrodes.
And then you write about that faithful night near midnight July nineteenth, twentieth, he had everything set up at his apartment, the detonating devices, the fishing line, trip wire to an
ignite upon entry and explode. He had a ghetto blaster or a boom box, I would say, and set up that he would have forty minutes of silence and then have this trigger this explosion, and eleven forty five he left to go to this dark theater, the Century Theater, where he had cased this out previously in the weeks before he knew the police response, and he had all kinds of tactical equipment he had ordered. He had this ballistic helmet, he had the tactical gear, the pants, the top,
the jacket, he had everything. He had the look. He had his hair, you say, July first, he had dyed his hair bright orange to look like the Joker. He had memorized most of many of the scenes involving the Joker from the movie The Dark Knight, and had taken selfies get possession lens you say, to look even better than usual. So he was ready at eleven forty five heading towards that movie theater to enact to his plan, his action plan. Tell us about that.
Yeah, what he did was went into the theater and he had a little glitch he had. It was one of those multiplexes, and there was a particular theater he wanted to get into because it had an exteriar exit and very few ways for the people to get out. So he had a little glitch where he tried to buy a ticket and it kept giving him one to the wrong theater. Then he realized nobody was really checking which theater on the ticket. So once he realized once he was past the ticket person, he could just walk
into the one he wanted. And he had parked his car right close to the exteriar exit of that theater. So one point he pretended he was answering his phone as people you know, are kind of coming in and getting their seats, getting excited for the show, and he's sort of faked talking and opens the exit door as if he's being you know, polite to step out and take this call. But he put it. It's like a tablecloth holder. He's stuck on the door such that when
it closed, it wouldn't lock. And he went to his car and got all his weapons, his helmet, and some panisters of teargas, and so he came back in with
this stuff. He was sitting right in the upper corner and then started his attack, which started off by detonating some of the tear gas, and at first people thought maybe it was part of the show, because this was opening night of you know, a popular Batman movie, And it wasn't until they started hearing the shots and people started screaming that they realized this is not part of the show, and he shot just multiple rounds. At some point the semi automatic jammed, but he was shooting people
as they were running for the exits. The high caliber bullets would just pierce right right through the theater seats, and so, you know, just so many people shot. There were a total of seventy people injured in addition to the twelve who were killed. One was a child. So just horrible, horrible event. And when he decided it was over because his gun jammed, he went back out that exit and was by his car when the police came.
At first, because he was in all this tactical year, at first they thought he was part of the response team. But then a smart person realized, wait a minute, there was something off, and they realized they had the killer with them.
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Now you say that they he was quickly arrested, he was brought in for questioning. Things move very quickly. You hear from Steve that your patient is involved in this massacre. Of course, all your fears come true. You're in some form of panic mode. The police speak to you and ask you questions that are you have to explain that you were not responsible, that you did everything according to protocols, and that there was again no imminent serious threat of
imminent danger. So you have to explain those sort of things to them while you were reeling from all of this, and while the world was reeling from this, and especially Denver. You found out soon after that you were outed. Tell us what that meant and this, as Carrie Droven, co author wrote, this is the first time in American history that a psychiatrist who treated a patient was ever outed. So tell us about that experience.
Yeah, so so unusual to have one of these people who had been treated beforehand, and then even then, a lot of these shooters, most until recently, would end up dead at the end of one of these events. So to have a guy who was still alive talking to police who actually had seen a psychiatrist relatively recently beforehand is just unprecedented. But normally you would not release the name of a therapist or a psychon chiatrist to the public might come out in a trible or something like that.
But what happened was there was a court document filed that had my name on it because Holmes was telling the police that he had sent me this notebook sort of a manifesto of why he did what he did, that he mailed it to me, and so they there was a big scramble. They thought maybe it was bomb in the package, and you know, they had to evacuate the buildings at the university and stuff they ended up
finding in the mailroom. But that's why my name was in this court document, and they somebody did not redact my name and just filed So that was exactly a week after the shooting, so the press and the public had my name and then instantly, as sort of a normal reaction when one of these terrible shootings occurs is to think, well, what, how could we have stopped this?
Is there, you know, somebody who dropped the ball, and so as the psychiatrists who had seen him before, people not knowing anything about the details of what I did, just kind of automatically thought well, she should have stopped it. And some people were really angry and felt they knew what happened, that I dropped the ball, and so I got lots of just threatening emails and voicemails and packages and ail and all kinds of stuff. It was really tough.
And one thing that really made it hard was the judge enacted a gag order on myself and anybody else who might be testifying in the trial, So there was no way for me to say, wait a minute, here's what I did, Here's what happened, Here's why I couldn't lock him up. So lots of hatred, but not able to defend myself.
You were being prepared for potentially for trial. Colorado has unique law in terms of the potential insanity defense that the defense could mat in this. Basically that notebook your sessions would be inidmissible. The things that he said to you would be inimissible if he were not defending himself with the insanity. Please tell us about this onus reversal here on or the burden of proof that's unique to Colorado.
Yeah, so there's a different legal definition of insanity versus what most of us think is insane. So to be considered sane in a criminal act, a person has to have known that what they were doing was wrong, that the people they killed did not want to die, and that they should not be doing this. So Holmes, I mean knew he was facing the death penalty, So that doesn't leave his defense a lot of room. You know, he was caught red handed. There's no question that this
was this was the perpetrator. So they decided to go for the insanity plea to say he was not guilty because by reason of insanity. So because he pled Ngira, that meant that all of his records that had anything to do with his mental state at the time would
be admitted. So that's all of my records. That's when Steve the consultants saw him, and Margaret grow saw him briefly before me on the student mental health team that involved two extensive psychiatric forensic evaluations, and so all this stuff that normally would be protected by privacy laws became part of the trial. And excuse me, at the end of the trial, the judge released all the evidence to public record. So that's that's how we're able to look at all of this.
You had a harrowing experience having to hide. You got for a bulletproof vest. People suggested you get a gun to defend yourself, which in the end you said no. But this was a harrowing experience where you had death threats, you had you had to not stay at your own home,
that this place there was a sanctuary for you. For all this time you've stayed with friends and this grueling preparation to be able to testify as a prosecution witness in this trial against Holmes, James Holmes, And after six months you got this to face James Holmes at court at this trial. Tell us about that.
Yeah, So that was one of the first hearings, just sort of the first time I saw him. They were trying to decide whether the notebook that he had sent me should be part of the fens. So the actual trial wasn't until three years after shooting. So at the time, I had a gag order on me and couldn't say anything for three years. But when I saw I knew he was going to be there at the hearings, so
I tried to prepare myself for seeing him. And he still had his orange hair at that time, and I wieled myself to not look at him other than just this brief glance. So as I walked into the courtroom, I saw him kind of sitting on the defendant side, but then I just focused on witness stand where I was walking to. I went up there, and I after that was just looking straight at whoever was asking me a question and did not look at Homes again, because
it was upsetting. Even the two seconds that I looked at him, it was just like, oh my god, there he is.
Let's talk about sorry, let's talk about that three years, three years later, now two and a half more years later, and now this is the trial. James Holmes looks much different, not the orange hair. And you have photos in this book, some amazing photos, especially showing James the photo that he texted wanted people to think he was monavol with the possession lenses, and but later at court where he's looking bored and yawning.
Yes, yes, that sort of goes along with this sort of non chalant persona that I saw when, for instance, when he failed this huge exam, most people.
Would be upset, and he's just kind of like, yeah, I failed, you know, no problem. I think I'll just drop out. Yeah. It's like yawning at your murder trial and you're up for the death penalty.
Yeah, tell us about this trial. I mean, he was up for one hundred and sixty five charges. They had this notebook, they had dueling psychiatrists, not so unusual psychiatrists for the defense to say he didn't know the difference between right and wrong. But there was a a psychiatrist that spent extensive time with him, almost twenty five hours. And Holmes not like unlike your session, he was not so reluctant to talk in some of those sessions.
So right, right, he talked a fair amount more. And you know freely that he did this, that he had this strange idea of human capital, that he wanted to kill these folks so he could gain their human capital, and which you know, to a lot of us, we might think, well that sounds kind of insane. So why why did he not. Was he not judged to be insane. So the reason is he meticulously planned this out. So folks,
when they're very psychotic, get quite confused. It can be hard for them to you know, make a meal, let alone plan out something like this, this mass murder. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew and he admitted in some of these forensic interviews that the people he killed did not want to die, that they would have, you know, stopped him if they could have. He knew it was wrong that he not only was there a law against it, but like ethically he should not be
doing this, So that all was the key. He just showed every sign that even though he had these strange, seeming like kind of psychotic ideas about human capital and such, he knew what he was doing. He was organized, He planned it out, He picked the theater, you know, he bought all this equipment. He went and he practiced at the shooting range, and you know, there just wasn't any sign that he was criminally insane. So he did not win his case, and then he was up for the
death penalty, so he narrowly escaped the death penalty. There was just one dissenter who was sort of morally opposed to the state executing people and voted against it. But then the judge gave him the longest possible sense, and I think it's about the longest sence that's ever been handed down some three thousand years, so multiple, multiple life sentences he's serving.
His life changed, obviously. You write about the victims, the twelve victims, and the people that appeared at the trial that gave statements, witness statements. You ask we talked about in the synopsis with the notebook, maybe we could have the answer of why why why? After all of this, your life changed as well, forever tell us how you adjusted or moved on and did you ever get to the why.
So after the shooting, after a few weeks, I decided I was going to resign as the head of the student Mental Health Center, and even though the department thought I should stay there, just had become too complex and upsetting. So but since then, I've continued to work for the
University of Colorado and the Apartment of Psychiatry. We have many, many psychiatric clinics, so I've worked in a number of them, and currently I'm doing telehealth a little bit of a lot less teaching than I used to do because that takes up so much time, and I decided to cut back my hours to part time, so I'm doing mostly direct patient care now. Really was just the support of my colleagues and friends and family that got me through
this ordeal. And the fact that we had a number of experts look at the case and see if they thought I missed anything or there was anything else that possibly could have been done, and that they all came back and said no, they didn't see anything, and they thought I probably went above and beyond and some of the things I did after his last visit. As for why, I mean, it sort of defies any kind of logic or emotion of you know, why would a person care
kill all these random people. I mean, they weren't even people that he was mad at, They didn't represent something he didn't like. It was just makes no kind of sense. He tries to explain it by this sort of psychotic idea of he's going to accrue their capital, which makes no sense at all. But we can expand it out a little further to some other killers. And we've got a couple cultural things going on which I think can be behind some of the acceleration of the mass shootings.
One is that there are some spaces, mostly on the dark web, that actually celebrate this type of violence, and folks will study things like about the Columbine shooters and try to emulate them, and people, believe it or not, will actually encourage others to commit mass shootings and other types of violence. So I think that is one thing we're dealing with that is relatively new in our in
the history of our country. The other thing is something called a threshold effect, which and for the threshold, so if there could be something that is so horrific that it doesn't even enter anyone's mind to do, like use a I don't know, nuclear bomb on your neighborhood or something like that, people they don't even consider it. But and it used to be mass shootings were one of
those horrible, not considered things that sense Columbine. And then each time somebody commits one of these mass shootings, it becomes more thinkable, more possible. And so now young angry people who are blaming the rest of the world or perhaps a group of people for their personal problems in their mind, committing a mass shooting now becomes a possible act, and the more of these that occur, the more likely it is to pop into these people's heads that well,
maybe I'll shoot up a place. First argument is, we don't have worse mental health than other similar countries, yet we've got, you know this, exponentially worse gun violence, these
mass shootings. The other argument you can see a good example of in Holmes case, is that mental healthcare, although it's helpful for all kinds of things, including the other type of gun violence, which is suicide, mental health care will help for lots of things, but it's not going to help these mass shooters who blame their problems on other people and are about the last folks who would
avail themselves of any treatment, even if it's free. And Holmes had, you know, all kinds of treatment, it was easily accessible. We offered to keep seeing them for free, he declined. But you can't treat hatred of people or wanting, you know, to commit a mass killing. That's not a mental illness. That's more of an anger and an ethical way oral problem, not something that we treat with for mental health providers.
Not to get into this at all, but it is very interesting to see the ease that James Holmes was able to gain all of this look like military grade weaponry to enact his mission, his killer mission.
Yes, online and in person, no impediments to that. You know, he had no criminal history. And another thing that bothers me is that he didn't have to get any kind of a weapon or a license. So when I did sort of break protocol and even talk to our campus police officer, it's not like she had a way that she could even tell that he was buying all these
guns and ammo. So another point I think where we could change some rules and make it easier for folks who are concerned that somebody might be a danger to others to sort of check on them. Do they have weapons? Did they just get a license and they're planning to get them?
Yeah? Incredible. I want to thank you very much doctor Lynn Fenton for coming on and talking about Aurora, the psychiatrist that treated the movie Theater Killer. Tell us her a story. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening.
Thank you so much for having me. Good night, good night,