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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 BTK 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.
Zupanski, Good Evening.
On July twentieth, twenty twelve, twelve people were killed and fifty eight wounded at a mass shooting in a movie theater in Colorado. In nineteen ninety nine, thirteen kids at Columbine High School were murdered by their peers. In two thousand and twelve, twenty children and seven adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, thirty two were killed at Virginia Tech.
Twelve killed at the Washington Navy Yard. In May two thousand and fourteen, after posting a YouTube video of retribution and lamenting a life of loneliness, rejection, and unfilled desires, a lone gunman killed six and wounded seven in Isla Vista. All of these acts of violence were committed by young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Mass violence
committed by young people is now an epidemic. In the first fourteen school days of two thousand and fourteen, there were seven school shootings, compared to twenty eight school shootings in all of two thousand and thirteen. New York Times best selling author Stephen Singular has often examined violence in America and his critically acclaimed book Here He is teen with his wife Joyce for their most important work yet, one that investigates why America keeps producing twenty something mass killers.
Their reporting has produced the most comprehensive look at the Aurora shootings yet and draws upon the one group that has been left out of the discussion so far, and that's the twenty somethings themselves. The Spiral Notebook follows the legal proceedings in the Aurora shooting and is full of interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma and antidepressants in ad HD drugs, by a doomsday apocalyptic mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that
has turned violence into parlor games. The book that we're featuring this evening is Spiral Notebook The Aurora Theater Shooting and the Epidemic of Mass Violence by American Youth, with my special guest Joyce and Stephen Singular. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Joyce and Steven.
Singular, Thank you Dan for having us.
Thank you very much Joyce and Stephen for joining us here today in the first program of twenty seventeen. And again, we couldn't be discussing a more important case and important cases as this phenomena that we are discussing this evening, mass shooting in America. Let's talk about again why this was important to you. It becomes very obvious for those of people read the very first pages. But tell us how close to home this case is for the Singular family.
Well, Joyce's a Denver native and I've lived here for more than three decades. And in nineteen ninety nine the Columbine massacre occurred, which you alluded to a little bit earlier.
Our son would have been five years old at that point, and we went out to Columbine when that happened and looked at that scene and all of the mourners, and it was very, very powerful, but it was about twenty miles or so from here, fifteen to twenty miles probably, which was quite close, and it sent shockways through the city.
But that happened in nineteen ninety nine. Then in twenty twelve when this happened in Aurora, this was in a theater that Joyce and Eric myself somewhat less, but they had been in that theater many times, watched many movies, and this was much closer literally to our house, probably you know, five to seven miles something like that. So it was it was literally closer. And there had been a number of mass shootings between Columbine and this event.
So and so, the morning that was being broadcast on the local news stations, I told Steve that we should probably drive over to the scene to where they were doing the examination for bombs at James Holmes apartment, which
is not very far from us. So we drove over there and then we talked to people his neighbors as they were, you know, examining the apartment, and then we went over to the theater site and we began with other journalists interviewing people that had been kept in a school that were in the theater that night that had survived the shooting, but they bust them all over to a school, so they were up on and then they let the survivors come out, and we started interviewing people
that had actually been in the theater that had witnessed what had gone on, and that's when we decided to start looking into it more. And we came home that day after beat at these scenes, we asked our son, who was home from his first semester of college, what did his friends think when these events happened? And we were rather surprised by what he said, Steve, you want to continue?
Yeah, he I mean the most formative thing that he said was, you don't understand how I grew up. I knew kids who could have done something like this, and we were the first sentence there. You don't know how I grew up? Really took us aback, because we've worked at home doing writing the whole time he was growing up. I mean, not only did he have two parents that were around all the time, but you know, we were literally in the house all the time. How could we
not know how he grew up? So what he really meant by that was you don't really understand the social influences on me and on kids of my generation from the time we were very very young, and so a lot of writing. You know, if you look at a mass killer, you say, well, this is an a individual, and let's focus on the aberrations of that person. That applies in this case. But we thought, well, what would happen if you started to look at more of the
aberrations of the society. Why do we keep producing these same killers over and over again? The numbers you just alluded to, and our son being that age, the age not very far from Holmes's age, in the age of some of these other kids who had done this, was really providing a doorway into that world. So that's where it all started.
Yeah, it's very interesting that you enlist your son to really add a dimension of understanding to this, because again, things have changed, and things do rapidly change. So let's talk about specifically the case that people have heard about.
But as you detail in great excruciating detail about him parking the Hyundai hatchback behind Theater nine and what he was wearing, if I could read it, or you could list what exactly how he was equipped behind this movie theater, and then talk about the police officer that encounters him, who at first believes that it's a fellow officer responding to the emergency calls to the theater itself.
Yes, he was dressed in sort of two modes. I mean, one was like someone dressed for combat and the other was having some of the gear of a police officer. When the first officer on the scene arrived, I as obiot. When he arrived, he glanced at Holmes, who was leaning against his car right after the shootings, and thought he was a fellow officer, except the gas mask didn't fit the standard issue, and he approached Holmes and told him to go on the ground, and then he arrested him.
But what was extremely striking to the officer was that Holmes offered no resistance whatsoever. He was totally relaxed. He did everything they asked him to do. This officer to arrested a number of people before, obviously over his six
years in law enforcement, and he couldn't. You know, when people are being arrested or being handled, they tend to stiffen up their muscle stiff and Holmes was experiencing this great sense of reliefs and almost peace, and it was a very unusual moment for the officer and for anyone else who showed up on that scene. So it just goes to the sort of the notion that he was
in combat mode. He'd watched movies like that, he'd watched a lot of video games of that nature, and he was really He told someone but in the jail that night after his rest, that he felt that he was in a video game when he was actually doing the shooting. So it evokes all kinds of things that we would explore in the book about the video game culture, violent entertainment.
Et cetera.
I believe he was he had some music playing, Deny stephen Is ear. He had like some electronic music plane.
Real loud, real harsh music was playing in his ear so that he could not, you know, hear the results of what he was doing as he stood in front
of that audience and open fire. So I mean, he had completely dehumanized himself in order to do this, which which of course is very interesting because this was a you know, a very intelligent young man who was in the PhD neuroscience program here at the Universe of Colorado, and he had, you know, so much potential and so much intelligence, and this is how it turned out.
You put something that's incredible in this and very of course, very movieesque in that when the police removed his gas mask, he has this shock of orange hair and he says, I'm the Joker, and he has huge, these huge, super huge pupils.
Right.
He had identified, from what we understand, with the character of the Joker in that Batman, the first Batman movie in that particular series, I guess, so he had watched the movies obsessively leading up to the crime. He had actually called someone who'd made sort of a trailer that sort of took off from that movie, and he had
just obviously thought a lot about it. One of the details that many people don't know about was that he there's a scene in that movie where the Joker burns stacks and stacks of money to kind of make the point that society is overly interested or obsessed with money, and then it doesn't really have that much value. Holmes
mailed his own spiral notebook. He kept the Spiral notebook, which in itself was fascinating because it contained his thoughts and feelings leading up to the crime, and then he sent it to his psychiatrist one day, the afternoon of the crime. But he put these burnt twenty dollars bills in the spiral notebook so they would fall out when it was eventually open, making the connection with the joker and sort of making a statement about the society that he felt he was living in.
Getting back to the chaos and the mayhem at the movie complex, you write that there's two hundred and twenty three police officers from Denver and Aurora descending on this complex and at the same time they arrest Holmes and ask him questions about explosives and if he has any partners. Tell us about this sort of the unnerving scene where one of the officers asked him if he has a partner.
Yes, I mean he is asked if he's the only one present, and he says no. And then that one of the officers says, you have explosives and this is what Joyce had referred to earlier, and he says, yes,
I have explosive wired to detonate in my apartment. And they said what are they and he said, IEDs And these are improvised explosive devices mostly found in I Rock and other places that America has been at war since two thousand and one, So, I mean, one of the themes that were sort of exploring in the whole book is that a lot of this violence is not occurring at a time of peacefulness in American history, but a time when the United States has been at war essentially
for the last fifteen years. So there are some connections that are made there. But he I think Joyce could talk about the impact of this on the community. She was in the courtroom, maybe a little bit more than I was. But you think, you know, a guy opens fire literally I think for twenty seven seconds, thirty seconds I believe was the like the amount of time that
he was actually shooting. That brings two hundred and twenty three officers to the scene, and then it just the impact that this created on the community over the next three or four years was just incredible.
Yeah, the impact not only on the you know, the victims, the survivors, the families, but also on the first responders to the scene, the people at the hospitals that had to treat them. I mean, the ripple effect is huge in a community when this type of event occurs. The damage that it inflicts is it's hard to put into words.
Well, there were seventy people besides the twelve that were killed. Ultimately the number was seventy who were injured. A number of those people came into the courtroom and testified in wheelchairs or incapacitated in some ways, and it was just it was devastating to sit through and watch it, but we felt that was something we needed to do to write the book.
You talk about the damage, so you cite this incredibly personal story of a woman named a police officer going against protocol and transporting victims to the hospital because he figures it's just prudent to do that expedient, and so he in the back seat of you write there's a woman named, a pregnant woman named Ashley Moser, and she's bleeding heavily from shots to her head and chest, and her husband Ian Sullivan, and the police officers determined to
get these people to the hospital, despite them wanting to go back to look for their six year old daughter. This is an incredible example of the damage that you talked about. Can you tell us a little bit more about this again, tragic story of just three.
Right, his wife is pregnant and bleeding profusely, and Ian, her husband, is next to the police officer who's driving, and he says, you've got to go back and get my six year old daughter. I have to know if she's okay. And the officer says, I can't do that. We have to get to the hospital. And the guy says, you have to do it, and then he says no again, and Ian grabs the door handle and starts to jump
out of this fast moving patrol car. The officer grabs him, pulls him back in and says, you know you can't do We have to try and save her life. Ultimately, what happened was that the six year old girl was killed and the woman miscarried. So, I mean again, we felt compelled to sort of try and explore this tragedy and these other tragedies, not because we think we have all the answers or anything, but just to feel what
this does to a community is an overwhelming thing. And so our book is really an exploration of kind of trying to examine the whole social forces that caused these things and to boil it down into the Holmes case.
So it's interesting too. You write that one of the victims named Caleb they rushed to the University of Colorado Hospital, where you say, again, ironically, Holmes had been in graduate school just a few weeks earlier.
Right, They had to use a variety of hospitals around Aurora and Denver because there were so many victims. And yes, Holmes had been a student there. He'd actually been a very good student during the first semester of his first year of graduate school, and then things began to deteriorate. But again, there's so much irony and tragedy around the
whole thing. He was in a PhD program. He was one of six students who was selected from across the entire United States, and he was around some very intelligent people. We interviewed his professors, one or two in particular, and you know, they observed him fairly closely, and they just didn't see what was unfolding, but beneath his surface, they did.
Say also that, you know, some of the people are quite nerdy in these types of programs and they might be a little eccentric. So they just attributed his behavior to just being a little bit more, you know, of a loner, stand offish, but extremely intelligent and very good at what he did. But then they started noticing that
his behavior was socially awkward, especially in his presentations. He didn't he had a real hard time speaking in front of the group, not in the content, but just to make the strange little jokes he would make, and the inappropriate jokes and the lack of eye contact. And then that's when they started kind of noticing in you know, in retrospect that his behavior was a little.
Different and he was deteriorating in the second semester. That's probably one of the more interesting aspects of the whole story is that he he knew he needed.
Help.
He knew that he had problems. He was going to enter an experimental study on and get a functional MRI that fall that I believe would have looked at his brain, but at the last second, you know, he decided to pull out. Then in the late winter of twenty twelve, he sought out a therapist, then began to go to her, and he was seeking help. I mean, that's one of the really poignant parts of this story. And he was
seeking meaning. And when you read his spiral notebook, which actually came out during the trial, that's what you see. So Joyce, why don't you tell him about the therapist to part of it.
Well, he started going to the therapist on the university campus and she began prescribing andy depressants, and I believe Zoloft was the main one. And then she, you know, then she prescribed more zoloft, and then she prescribed even more zoloft where she tripled his original dosage, and he was and then he was also taking other drugs to opiums and or benzo benzo benzoids, and also drinking and
self medicating with other types of medications street drugs. So he just began getting more and more frustrated with his sessions with this doctor Lynn Fenton at the university hospital. Eventually she pulled in one of her superiors and they it was surprising to us that between the two of them, they didn't recognize these signs that he was because at that point he had actually said that he wanted to kill.
People a lot of people. Yes, that's true.
And then she did make some contact with his mother, Arlene in California and San Diego, but she didn't tell the mother that he had actually stated that he wanted to kill people a lot of people, because in court his mother said, if I would have known that I would have crawled on my hands knees back to Colorado. So that was pretty shocking to us.
Yeah, he was, I mean, he was unlike some of these shooters, he was quite aware that he was troubled. Some people felt he went into neuroscience to study his own brain and figure out what was malfunctioning in it. There's a section in the book where it lists a lot of the most prominent mass shooters over the past decade or so, and the one thing they have in common is all having been on some of these on
some of these same meds. And I mean, he was trying to make a connection with the therapist and explore his own reality more and she just really didn't seem to have time for that and gave him, you know, the medications and it it did not help at all.
Was there any legal option that she was available once they did hear the talk of homicidal violence, Yeah, they did.
Colorado the laws that once you a therapist makes that determination of danger to the self or this public, you can hold them for a mandatory toory seventy two hours. And you know, in retrospect, obviously, hindsight is twenty twenty but we talked to a number of people who said that option should have been exercised. He was clearly disintegrating. And then in early June he did poorly on a test, and then four days later he told the therapist that
he wanted that he was going to quit school. And so that's sort of the dividing line in the whole narrative, because coach he continued to have sessions with him or not after that, and after he made that announcement, she she couldn't do that. So he was on his own, really for the first time, not in school, not connected to the therapist, not studying, didn't have a job, and it just descended over the next five or six weeks and it led to the crime.
And also importantly that he had broken up with his girlfriend. He wasn't the type that had had many girlfriends, and the one that he did have when he was in school had recently broken up with him. We had found that with some of these other mass shooters there also seemed to be some sort of masculinity and crisis type of factor going on as well. Rejection by women, inability to have a functioning relationship with women.
Yeah, yeah, very true. But again the sort of poignancy in the story is that he was trying to help himself and he just couldn't find something there to, you know, that would assist. And if some one had or if something had, it might have not happened this way.
Wasn't he also interested in the study of schizophrenia.
Yes, he was interested in schizophrenia. He had, I believe, taking some classes in that. And again he was again thinking about entering that study in the fall of twenty eleven, which would have I think examined some of those areas, and he kept I think when he went to the therapist. That's what he was looking for. He was looking for some real feedback at an emotional, intellectual, spiritual level that would have sort of you know, connected him to himself
and to other people around him. I mean, by the time the crime happened, it was so impersonal that it was just it was absolutely shocking. Again, he asked to somebody in the jail, he just felt like he was in a video game. And in that build up to the crime, in the last five weeks or so, he was watching one video game about eight hours a day. He was drinking, and he was just sliding further and further into this fantasy realm.
Let's talk about we'll go back to that, but let's go back to just jump to the he's arrested. You've got a person that ends up being the guy that handles this case, a guy named Appel, and there's another guy named Mel. Two officers are about the question Holmes. Now they put as you write, they put paper bags on his hands to preserve the gunpowder residue for testing, and what does he do which they've never seen before with these paper bags? And then they start asking them
some questions. So this scene is very telling. I would think, tell us what started feeling like.
The bags on his hands were like little finger puppets. And it really makes you question, especially when you sit through all the expert psychological testimony for both sides, the defense of the prosecution, if it was an act or if he really was, you know, having a a what do you call a.
Break, a disassociative or a break from.
Reality Exactly after the trial, it was really hard to determine whether or not that was calculated or whether that was really happening. And I think even the experts couldn't really agree.
Yeah, the police officers had never seen anything like it. I mean, they brought him in again. There was no resistance whatsoever of any kind up till that point. And he started playing with these hand puppets. And then right after they began questioning him about you know, you have to read people there Miranda rights and say do you want an attorney present? And he cut off the interview and said, I want to exercise my six Amendment rights. And that's not something a lot of people, you know,
who've just been arrested say. So it showed that he was very intelligent, He was aware of certain things. He just seemed to have no emotional connection whatsoever to what he did, but his mind was still quite functional.
Now, this book incredibly goes back and forth between real examples, past examples, keeps you uppa with current events, and then goes back to this delayed case. It takes well over two years to wind through the courts with all the delays. And as you write, it's an historic case based on the insanity plea and based on confidentially lawyer confidentiality.
And this makes you doctor patient doctor patient partinentiality. Actually the confidentiality between his psychiatrist and himself. You know what responsibility did she play in that? That was part of the thing in the trial, part of the issues.
You're also right here because again keeping up with current events, you say, by the end of the year, as this case is delayed, by the end of the year you have Adam Lanza and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
And then you go from there. And when you talk statistics, about eleven thousand a year gun homicides thirty times the murder rate of France or Australia and about twelve times most countries, tell us what you include in this book in terms of examples, and what is some of the most profound statistics that you found other than the ones I decided.
Well, I think I have a little statistical material here. I mean, you alluded to some of it, but near the end of the book we wrote the numbers surrounding the phenomenon of mass shootings may be hard to absorb, but they were repeating. In the nineteen sixties there was one prominent school shooting, The nineteen eighties saw twenty seven of them, the nineteen nineties had fifty eight, and from two thousand to twenty twelve there were one hundred and two.
An increase of more than ten thousand percent over fifty years, so clearly, you know it's something that had grown. And the next sentence and that is, actually the shooters were usually between about fifteen and twenty, so many of them were quite young. So to go back really to where we started with our son, I mean, he said, you know, you need to look at several things in the culture that that are very prominent that they weren't around as
nearly you know when you were growing up. You really don't understand my experience and the experience of young young people my age. And he pointed at He pointed at video the video game culture.
The internet.
He pointed at the Internet, and you know, the things that young people could see on on there. He pointed at at pharmaceutical drugs, which was really interesting because if you go back a couple of minutes to what I was saying earlier, if you look at the home situation, it involves again a huge increase in playing video games leading up to this, an obsession with violent entertainment, which
is something else Eric talked about. It absolutely involves the use of those pharmaceuticals as opposed to you know, getting some real therapy or real help.
Or he also said, you know, was telling us about the usage of drugs to treat I think it's adderall right for ADHD that you know, college students are trading amongst themselves to study for tests. So you know this, this is a whole different world that the millennials are involved in than we as baby boomers were.
Yeah, and I mean again he went in comparing himself to us. You know, we we were you know, we grew up in the sixties. I mean, we were attached to a number of social and political causes, things that we really believed in, things that were larger than ourselves, things that were occurring within a moral context. And when he talked about their generation, I mean that just wasn't there.
It just wasn't present in the same way. And it was just it was very striking to us to sort of make these comparisons and to sort of dig below what he was really saying. And if you look at Holmes's spiral notebook, the one that he wrote and sent to a psychiatrist, it's all about trying to find some meaning beyond himself, some value in other people and in himself. So these things really did square up that our son told us about from the very beginning.
Now, we didn't touch on gun culture itself, but of course it's a big part of this story as well. And you talk about the Fedek's package that was tracked, and you also will go back to he said there was explosives in his apartment. It was too dangerous to go there. They sent a robot in to take a look,
but ultimately they had to go back to Holmes. What happens with Holmes when they ask him both these explosives and is he any different than when he is the first arrested, And what is the result of this interview with him about the explosives and diffusing of them potentially.
Well, he seemed to be in some kind of a manic phase.
And he'd also been up all night.
Yeah, he'd been up all night. Why his pupils were so dilated? We never quite well, I thought.
That he had put Let me answer that, because in court I saw, you know, the photos of him as he was preparing to go to the shooting. He was putting these black contacts in his eyes and putting these very strange you know, putting his hair really weird, and making himself look almost you know, devilish and taking selfies of himself like that. So I think he probably still had those black contacts in.
Yes, so he may have been rather manic, you know when he was first arrested in doing those things with his hands. Then the next afternoon, I mean, the bomb squad went to his apartment and they felt it was too dangerous to What Holmes had planned on to happen was that he had music, very loud, raucous music set to go off at one am the morning of the crime.
His apartment, Yeah, his.
Apartment, And then he thought, and the whole apartment was wired so that if the front door was pushed open, the whole thing would detonate and it would not just blow up his apartment, but the whole building. He had nay palm in there. He had numerous explosive devices. And the music went off, and a woman came upstairs and looked in the door, but for some reason she did not push it or touch it, so it never that
did not happen. And when he spoke with the authorities that afternoon after his arrest, he was much calmer, and he was quite lucid, and he told them how to defuse the bombs.
Have to also remember that, you know, had his plan gone according to what he had originally wanted, that would have created a diversion so that a lot of the law enforcement would have been drawn to that apartment scene. He's gun hadn't jammed, that AR fifteen or whatever weapon he had at the time that he was fired, hadn't jammed, he would have killed a lot more people and wounded a lot more than he did.
Yeah, I mean this was a huge, hugely destructive plan, the level of building with I don't know, johnish what fifteen or twenty probably units apartments in it, yes, and then shoot more people. As she said, I mean, he was on a path of mass destruction.
Now, let's when we talk about James Holmes, what happens with his rights as being he knews his sixth Amendment rights, but to be able to question him about this explosives and the diffusement. Tell us how they get around this and obvious argument from a defense.
Lawyer, Well, they they felt, the police felt, the investigators felt that public safety issues overrode his miranda rights of having an attorney present. As we said, about three am that morning, about two and a half hours after the event, he asked for a lawyer to be present. He didn't get a lawyer at that time, so they put him
in a cell and then they brought him out. And what the police essentially did was confused the Public Defender's office over the course of that day about where he was actually being held, so those lawyers couldn't s go up to help him so that they could sit down with him and get this information out of him as quickly as possible about his apartment. They thought the entire thing was going to blow and that was more important
than that he should have a lawyer presence. So defense lawyers jumped on that later on and said, well, then all the information he gave you can't be used against him. That was fought out in court. But ultimately, of course, he did confess to doing all of this and then pled insanity as a defense.
Right now, you talk about this bulkamo dot com. So a few days before this crime, he simply went online tell us how easy it was to get the kind of ammunition he did.
Yeah, I've said this before in other situations, but I've had somebody charge a little something to my credit card or some little glitch in a credit card situation. And you get a call from Visa or master Card or whomever, and they said, somebody put a fifteen dollars charge on your credit card. Here was a guy ordering mass amounts of ammunition, six thousand rounds of one kind of ammunition, all kinds of tactical gear, guns, etc. A whole arsenal really to plan this crime, and it set off no
ripples anywhere within you know, the law enforcement system. So it raises a lot of questions about access to weapons like AR fifteens that are purely military weapons, access to that much ammunition, spending all of that money, and no red flags came up, So that you know, it has produced some changes in the laws in Colorado that make it somewhat harder to get gun, so that that's been a positive result.
Now, tell me Joyce about the this touching scene or shocking scene where the media calls tracks down our lean homes. And she's a nurse living near San Diego. And how does she find out about this information? Tell us this exchange where she finds out that her what her son has been accused of.
Well, I believe somebody called her and told her what had happened, and she said, well, yes, that sounds like my son. But they you know, I think they were confused, and people thought it to mean, oh yeah, that sounds like him, because that's the kind of stuff that he does. But that in court later she clarified that she was just you know, they they called in the middle of the night and she was very confused as to what
was going on. From what I could tell from their familial relationship, it wasn't like they were a very communicative family. The father was sort of like the same personality of James Holmes kind of. I mean, not to say that they weren't loving, but not real demonstrative sort of to themselves. But she was you know, they came to court every day and they and you could tell it was It was heart wrenching. It was hard on the sister as well.
James Holmes had a younger sister, and it tore their family apart just just as much as it did the families you know that.
Experienced loss right And it sounds simplistic, but what's missing from the whole story is that some sort of human touch, you know, that's what he was looking for when he went to the therapist. As he's building up to.
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With the crime, buying all the ammunition, the guns, making the plans, you know, he's sending his parents these emails. This is what I made for dinner, you know, this is what I bought up the store. There's no you know, there's just no connectiveness there. And his parents seem like very decent people. I mean watching them in court as Joey said that the mother testified they had no clue who their son was, none whatsoever, and by the time they got a glimpse it was far too late.
He did get some help, some you know, help with therapist, says he was growing up. So they knew he was he had some emotional problems. I don't think they had any idea to what extent.
Right, right, Yeah, what you talk about. We touched on pharmaceutical drugs, and I think the gross over prescription and over reliance and overtrusting of these pharmaceutical drugs to solve all kinds of problems, and the over labeling. I think of people with all kinds of problems that seem anew But also you examine the phenomena of video games and the rise in popularity and the tendency towards more and more violence. Tell us about what your son had found
and what you spoke with other people. Tell us about this very important and interesting part of the story.
Well, yeah, again, I don't think either Joyce or has ever played a video game. So this was one of the key things that Eric meant when he said that. And you know, we watched some of these things after
this happened. I mean, the violence of it and how it sort of mirrored the wars that America was fighting, I mean from Vietnam to Desert Storm, you know, right right into the present with Iraq and all that, and they just kept incorporating all of these things into the games, and then they incorporated the torture that they came out from the reports in Iraq, Abu Grave and other places
that occurred after the turn of the New millennium. And you know, we just had no idea what kids were really watching, what they're really interacting.
Even the movies you know, he was telling us about, you know, he had us watch The Matrix and Fight Club and movies that I don't know, after a point, it just seems like you just get desensitized to a bit of this just instant violence.
Right, And we talked to a number of professionals about, you know, the effects of all that. I mean it. They would tell you that in preparing soldiers for combat, one man in particular, the VA and he talked about all the studies where, you know, to try and get people to go into combat and actually shoot people, you use a lot of video techniques to sort of soften them up to be able to do that or harden them up. And you know, this was the same sort of phenomenon, and you just, you know, we just did
not really understand the way our son grew up. Just as he told us.
He also told us about you know that what it was like to be brought up with Y two K nine to eleven, you know it. Stent was just like one apocalyptic type of thing over and over again and reflected in their movies, you know, post apocalyptic. When he went up to see you the first year that he was up there, he was riding his bike onder an underpass and there was just a big sign saying something like it's all going to end. Just go ahead and kill yourself.
Now, right, dystopian. Yeah, the whole thing. And again to just you know, to compare it more to our growing up, which had its share of turmoil, but you know, a civil rights movement which was a very good thing, of war protests, which was a good thing, you know, making the more inclusive society in all kinds of ways. These were all large social things that touched most people our age and I think, you know, helped us as human beings.
And there was just this sense of emptiness or disconnectedness that Eric talked about, and you know, most kids adjust to it in one way or not, but Holmes was just the classic example. He just didn't connect with anything and descended so far into his world he didn't even know that he was shooting people.
Now you talk about the issues that delay a trial that would normally not have taken as long as this at all, and also the incredible amount of secrecy involved in this trial, which was unprecedented. So tell us the nature and the reason for the secrecy and also the reasons for the numerous delays. What were the issues?
Well, they had to the defenses, I recall, waited almost a year to enter a plea. The American legal system is you know, kind of string things out like nothing else. So the defense stalled, installed, installed. After eight months or so, entered a plead which was finally not you know, not guilty by reason of insanity. So that took the best
part of the year. Then one of the first judge quit and a new judge came in and he had to appoint someone to study homes from a psychiatric point of view and determined if he was sane or insane at the time of the crime, which is a very you know, difficult and sort of abstract thing to do.
Well, we were sent to the state hospital in Peblo for that examination.
Right, and that took an extraordinarily long time, basically of about a couple more years. So the crime occurred in July of twenty twelve. I think the psychiatric report was done in the fall of twenty fourteen. It's more than two years and the trial began. Our jury selection began in January of twenty fifteen. And you know, it's a dubious enter I am sort of in my view to interview somebody two and a half years after they did something to try and determine their state of mind when
they actually did it. So that the psychiatric part of it was not very satisfying in many ways in terms of this case. So that was one of the frustrating parts of it. It took it took three years to you adjudicate the thing, and you still didn't really get a psychologically penetrating view of Holmes. The most revealing part of it was he wrote himself, you know, and his experience leading up to the crime.
Tell us explain to our audience what was the the the issue between the notebook again the confidentiality between patient and doctor, and you talked about it in that she felt that the sessions were ended. But this becomes a very big, very big part in delaying this trial and affecting this trial is the status of that notebook and the status of that psychiatrist in relation to Holmes and that notebook.
Right, So he left her sessions on June eleventh of twenty twelve. That was his last session with her. He had told her, as Joyce said that he wanted to kill a lot of people. They didn't really intervene, and then he left. On the afternoon of July twentieth, twenty twelve, which is five or six weeks later. He is preparing to go to the theater and commit the crime. He puts in the mail his viral notebook, which essentially talks
about killing people and all of those things. So the question was it arrives at her office three days later, I think on July twenty third, So the question was is that confidential material between a psychiatrist and a patient or has that relationship been severed because he stopped going to see her on June eleventh. You can only imagine what lawyers could do with that kind of argument. I mean, the defense said, yes, it's protected, you can't open it,
nobody has access to it. The prosecution says, of course, we have access to it. It's material evidence in this crime. So it took a very, very long time for them to sort all of that out, and the notebook was not opened to the public until the trial actually began, which was in April twenty fifteen, so you're writ at
about three years before that notebook gets open. So I mean that one of the discouraging, disheartening parts of this and what we were kind of trying to examine was the sort of emotional psychological underpinnings of it, and our legal system can delay that process for a very long time. So I mean, I feel I think we feel there's a sort of overwriting need to understand why young men are doing this. Apart from all the legal arguments, there's no question about who did this and what happened and
all of that. We were trying to get more the why of it.
What you talk about the media, and it's always take on this and how they speculate and also how they
just present this case to the public. But you speak about a particular freelance journalist that puts a few things together like Robert Holmes, James holmes father's occupation and some of the things that James was hoping to do and working in terms of areas of science, and puts together another narrative that's far more against storybook, but very very interesting tell us about this scenario he puts forward in the media about the reason for maybe even the shooting,
but at least his connection to science and the father in the military.
Well, very early on, I mean, there was all kinds of speculation on the media, in the media that you know, somehow this was connected to very secretive research being done in the neuroscience department at the University of Colorado.
It was connected to wasn't Wasn't that one of the ones that they were saying it was connected to. There was all kinds of conspiracy theories because there was so much time that elapsed between the crime and the actual trial that all kinds of strange theories started popping up on the internet.
It seems to me, and I think it seems in our book that the truth is simpler. You know, this guy could not make a human connection that made his life worth living or other people's lives worthwhile, And that's the more basic point of it. You know that that tell them about the woman Kira Jones, you know, because that story really does illuminate a lot about the spiral outbooks.
Well, we you know, we interviewed a woman that had been living in Barcelona when the crime occurred, and she was on her way back to the States and somebody said, you know, why do you even want to move back to the States, And she told us some of the
difference between say, the European culture and American culture. For example, if someone was sitting in a sidewalk cafe and everybody is in Barcelona at night and they're sitting and they're talking and they're eat drinking and eating and having fun, and somebody was sitting at a computer by themselves, that would that would raise concerns to people over there. They would think that that was unusual. Over here, not so much, because there's more of a sense of community there, she said.
And also, it takes a year to get a gun in Spain, and then she would say why and why would you even want a gun in the first place. So we noticed the real difference between the European mindset and the American mindset as far as guns, as far as socializing and sense of community and watching out for other people that might raise red flags and their behavior isolating behavior.
Is that what you mean, Steve bil Yeah, I mean that it's it's not as conspiracy about the Department of Defense or something, or an implant in James Holmes's brain or something like that. It's this sort of isolated and
isolation inability to connect you with other people. When we get to the end of the book, we devote a couple of chapters to this concept of mindfulness, which is basically about teaching kids certain things about how to control themselves more, how to interact with other people, how to get their emotions under control, and all of those things, because as we've seen in all of these shooters who are again around age say, eighteen to thirty, by the time they're there and by the time those wires are
not hooked up, it's too late, you know, they're too detached from their own humanity and other people to be stopped. So that we were not you know, trying to exploit the violence in what we were writing about, but understand it and even offer some potential solutions to some of these things, because you've got to help kids when they're young, you know, to make those connections.
You write in the book that there is all kinds of media joined forces to be able to in this delay to try to protest and petition Judge Seymour to allow the media to know the contents of what was happening in the hearing. But also, as you say, they were very interested in the contents of that spiral notebook. So tell us about the trial and what is learned about the contents of the notebook.
Well, I think the main thing that comes out of it is is what you could almost paul, a spiritual search for meaning of a young man who's got great intelligence, really would have a great future in neuroscience, but he's looking for something else, some emotional or spiritual underpinning to life. That science doesn't give him that. When he turns to the world of psychiatry, it doesn't give him that. When he tries to have a relationship with a young woman,
it's not working out. And these are the things that culminate in the crime. I mean, if we're going to focus this much attention on an event like this or a person, and it seems that we the public have the right to know what, you know, what he's thinking, what he's feeling, and what we can learn from that, what we might be able to teach kids out of something like that or help people. And that was the whole frustrating part of watching this unfold. Legally, Lawyers arguing
doesn't get us anywhere. It's just one more level of conflict. And we were trying in this book to get past that.
When you say you get past that, you also wanted to again. It's always an elusive search for meaning, for reasons for why this can happen. But you include a lot of from Eric and as other contemporaries that that something that even I didn't realize. I mean, I went to high school. I don't think we didn't my friends that went through high school. We don't talk about the
bullying that we had in high school. So I think bullying itself, and it has changed, and that effect seems to be evident with most of these shooters as well, of vengeance ensues from the bullying that they encountered in high school. And so you type of pressure that seems foreign to to the baby bloomers.
Well, that's very true because now when you think about it, you can bully someone on social media much more effectively than you could back when we went were in high school. And you're probably younger than us. Dan, that's true, much far reaching effects. And you look at the Columbine killers. I mean, they were bullied and they they you know, they took out their revenge and the best way possible
in their minds. So Eric said to us, you know, watch just he said, just watch when the school years starts, that's when you'll start seeing more of these shooter shootings occur, because that's where it's it's that's where it's starting to take place, the bullying in the schools. You Eric always said that something needs to be changed in the schools themselves when the children are young, with bullying, with conflict resolution.
Right, And that's why we put the mindfulness in there, because that's when kids need to be shown alternative ways of thinking, alternative ways of resolving conflict. You know, when the shooting comes, I mean you're just seeing that, you know, tip of that proverbial iceberg. There has been a lot of pain in the build up to that, and you know that's what we need to explore.
You also explore again and you single out a couple games for I think for good reason. In the examples that you provide is Grand Theft, Auto and call of Duty, and that you say cite examples that are quite telling. I think when you can fly the same jetis as the nine to eleven into a building and sort of courting all these destructive not sort of courting destructive impulses, reinforcing the most violent racist, anti Buslim slurs, extreme humor,
all of these things reinforced. And you pose the question it, you know, engineers and other people like Holmes and other people do this unwind and may not go on obviously go on to do anything like this, But how does this affect the mental ill a mentally ill young man in America today?
Well, I just think it tilts everything in a very dangerous direction, you know, if that's your you know again, I mean, if we want to make the comparison we we when we were young people, we thought that, you know, bombing Vietnam and killing a lot of people probably wasn't accomplishing anything, you know good, and history turned out to, you know, support that it wasn't a video game to
people our age. It wasn't a form of entertainment where you would show people being nay palmed and then you would play a game around that and do high fives and drink beer. I mean, it's a detachment level from what violence actually is. If you're reinforcing that constantly. It's a very questionable thing to do. And then you throw in metal instability, and it's a real problem. So, you know, people want their entertainment. We understand that, but you really have to stop and question it.
And yes, you cite other countries like Germany that would edit video games or limit video games, whereas it seems like America has no limit. And you talk about eight hundred million dollars worth of product for grant Seft Auto in three days, up to a billion dollars within a short period of time, and titles like body count and Hatred and genocide crusade. But explain what you mean by this change from deductive learning to procedural learning.
Well, I mean to go back to what you said. You know, Germany learned enough about violence where they could actually reinforce in their culture that there's certain things that are not going to be allowed. You know, we haven't reached that point. I mean, we're debating whether anybody can go buy an AR fifteen and fire off one hundred rounds in a minute. You know a lot of countries I believe you're Canadian, but I think a lot of other countries would have crossed that threshold much more easily.
This is about American culture. We were writing about the culture, not just the individual. And that's the whole point of the book. You know, we have a responsibility as a culture to decide what we're going to allow on what we're not going to allow, and unfortunately, you know, we're still we're not at that point of understanding that this stuff are devastating on a community. I mean, that's what Joyce experienced, you know, when she was in the courtroom
and when I was there. And that's the whole point of writing the book. These are not we're all involved in this in some way, in terms of the gun control, in terms of the mental health issues, in terms of the drugs. These are not things that are out there.
They're right here. And that was the point of saying, you know, it's one thing to read about there's a mass shooting in Florida, But when it occurs five miles from your house, in a place that you've been in with your kid on a repeated basis, that can touch you, that can kill you, and what is our responsibility visa vi all of those things as a society. That's the conversation we were trying to start by taking on the book and listening to the things our son said.
What was interesting too, is that somehow, rather the contents of the Spiral notebook again all the secrecy in this case, were leaked to a Fox reporter named Jana Winner. Why do you think that happened? And what was the effect on this trial that leakage?
Well, it's a good question. I think it was leaked from someone in the.
In law enforcement.
Hello, okay, yes, from law orsement.
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble with this phone. Can you speak to that?
See yeah, hold on, Yeah, it was it was leaked by somebody in law enforcement to a reporter, and that became another, you know, major issue and legal issue and delaying everything. But ultimately it didn't affect that much of the trial.
Now with this with this trial in the end, with all the delays and with all the issues, uh and and the call for another assessment again, the defense had a vigorous defense for James Holmes trying to save his life. In the end, what did everyone learn from this trial?
You you talk about that you have the argument that somebody puts forward anyway in the book that you support, is that you know people will thirst for revenge in this, but maybe he would be a really good idea to put this person in the hospital, especially because he's intelligent, especially because he wasn't born to kill, he wasn't killing that there can be something very valuable to learn from studying this man rather than the death penalty. Now, did
anybody see that in this trial? And what was the outcome and what did we learn in America from this trial that took those long and enacted such a toll.
Well for our state anyway, were to go after the death penalty, I thought was I don't know, and a lot of people thought was a huge mistake. It was. It cost millions and millions of dollars. It put people through so much trauma that had to go through this trial. They ultimately was not that they didn't give him the death penalty. He should be studied. What do you think.
See, Yes, I think that the ultimate lesson was if you see somebody who really is troubled, or if somebody is talking about violence, you need to take it seriously. I mean, he mentioned this to friends, He mentioned this to his girlfriend, He mentioned this to the psychiatrist. I mean, it shocked me that you could go into a psychiatrist at the University Hospital and repeatedly say, you wanted to kill a lot of people after all of the school
shootings that we had had in the United States. We've already given you the numbers, and that wouldn't set off a lot of bells. I found that extraordinary and so to be that's the lesson. We're all a part of this, and we all need to be observant and to realize that, you know, it has a connection to us, it can happen to us.
What about the effects of because as I read it and I look at this issue, I am very dismayed. Again. I know, I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that, you know, an unbridled video game industry that resorts to violence and this kind of stuff like killing people and high fiving, like you say, is a conditioning that is going to end up to be destructive and highly destructive, and that seems to be bore out by
these these crimes. But also what's even more disturbing, I think is if you think about it, somebody's taking what what somebody would think as a very innocuous or an innocent antidepressant, but if what you say that these killings the evidence looks like there's they're linked to psychotropic drugs themselves.
Right I I they're You know, there is no more compelling image of the eight years of Barack Obama in office and standing in front of the country and saying, we've had another mass shooting. This one was in Aurora, this one was in Sandy Hook, this one was in Florida or wherever we're But but there's no follow through on the real substance of dealing with these issues. You know, that's it's that's a hard thing to do, to take on,
you know, some of those industries. It would be good to see somebody at that political level speak up about these things and to open a dialogue. And again not to say, well, we have all the answers, you know, this is the way to do it, but to be able to talk about it more openly and freely. And again, that was the whole purpose in writing the book was to start that conversation. It got close enough to us, it was disturbing enough to has to say, how else can we think about this problem?
Right?
Right? He had such a huge problem to tackle, so obviously the issues have to be complex. There's certain factors and as you do in this book, it deserves an incredible exploration, as you've done, because you can't look at any easy answers. If you looked at things separately, you
could see an influence. But as James Holmes really illustrates, it was a sudden departure from his behavior, from this promising intelligent man, that there has to be something, some outside factors, because it otherwise it almost looks like some kind of possession or something for somebody to go and do this without any reason. What do you think America learned as a result of this. It's been a little bit of time. You've seen the continued violence, it's unabated.
As you mentioned, it seems that America's handcuffed by the industries. There's going to be no gun control, there's not going to be any changes in psychotropic drugs. That conversation hasn't been ignited because of this case. What do you think America's learned from this case?
If anything, well, you know, to us, it's like it seems like something would have happened after the Sandy Hook shooting. If anything was going to happen, it seems like that was the one would have started it all. But I mean, I wish somebody in the government would form some sort of committee to at least study the phenomena and start asking the questions that we're asking here about what part the violent video game industry, the movie and television industry,
the big pharma. I wish somebody could put together on a government level that type of a committee to start studying this, But I don't see that happening.
Right.
It's very discouraging. I mean, that would be the best possible outcome, just to raise the awareness around the issue. And again that's that's what we were trying to do in writing the book, So we hope it's it's had some impact. We were interviewed recently by a young man from Canada who is sort of doing a study of this phenomenon, and he was asking all the right questions. So there is some movement out there, but we need to do a lot more.
What do you think Eric thought of your If not that you come to a direct black and white conclusion, you really used Eric enlisted him for this to be able to more fully understand this entire phenomena.
If you'd like to ask Eric himself, he's right here. He's listening to the podcast and he has a lot to say on the subject. Would you like to answer that question?
Eric? Hello, Hi Eric. As I mentioned, I appreciated your input in this, and as I'm sure that your parents did as well, to get a more rounded perspective of this from us old timers that are living in the past, and I'm not really aware of exactly how fast change happens. What did you think of this exploration that your parents undertook with your help to a certain degree. What do you think about this and what what are your ideas about this phenomena itself.
Well, one of the funny things, maybe not funny, but one of the things we kind of realized very early on and after this happened and we started talking about it, was that I wasn't very shocked by it, and to them it was like the most unthinkable thing that someone could possibly do, and that that in and of itself lends it, you know, is kind of surprising. It shows what a difference then, you know, how different the world that we grew up in really was.
So well, let me ask you this question there, because I see in this phenomenon another aspect of it and that is, once upon a time, like we mentioned, I guess maybe a lot of the people that were thinking, that were open minded, were against the Vietnam War, and they were against it, and they protested and they were
vocal about it. Now, when you talk about this different sentiment, what is it if you can offer any kind of input in this is how is it that people don't care about the same kinds of values in terms of it for fame. It looks like a lot of these men don't care whether it's infamy or fame as long as they get noticed, as long as they are remembered.
Is there something to that? Is there something contained in the video games that encourages that the sort of no matter what, at least if I go out on top, as as long as they remember me, as long as my name's in Wikipedia.
I'm sure.
I would I agree with that assessment, but I would try to just add an element of a little bit of the psychology around around the you know, these guys in general, And I would say that beyond just the fame or you know, getting some recognition, I think it has a little bit more to do with a sense of isolation that all these guys have and almost feeling to some degree like they just don't have a very
big effect on the world and they feel ineffectual. And a big thing we talked about in the book, and we used, you know, some examples from movies, just because there's such a you know, a good way to kind of capture a little bit of culture is masculinity in crisis. Some movies like Fight Club, a movie like American Beauty that explores, you know, men, it explores masculinity, explores violence. I would say that in some regard, a lot of the guys they actually go and do mass shootings are
trying to have an effect. And obviously it's a very harmful effect, but maybe in that you know, in the place where they're coming from it, it is just an effect and just to you know, almost proving to yourself
that you are powerful. And I know, you know, I know that that, you know, a sense of isolation, a sense of kind of maybe alienation isn't the right word, but you know, this generation of people growing up in the height of social media and somewhat being disconnected from real life interactions with people.
You know.
I went to college and one of my professors told me that the most shocking thing he'd seen over the past forty or years of teaching, above everything else, was that people used to walk into a classroom together and they used to talk about used to talk to the people around them. They used to talk about, you know, what was happening in the news, or what was happening on the campus, or just you know, ask someone how their day was going. And now you have one hundred
people walk into a room. They're all you know, these are this is a peer group, a group of people who should have something in common. Not only are they at the same same school, but they're in the same class. They ought to have some overlapping interests. They come in, they sit down, they open a computer and get on their phone. Nobody talks to each other, and then he comes in and lectures for an hour and then everybody
gets up and goes. You know, so there's something there's something there for sure in terms of just a cultural change over the past you know, past decades.
Well, thank you, Eric, that's very insightful. Inputs appreciate that. I want to thank you Joyce, Stephen and Eric for coming on and talking about this incredible book, The Spiral Notebook, and this very very important issue for those people that might want to follow up. Do you have a website Facebook page, Steven.
Than Joyce, It's www dot Stephen Singular dot com and that's Stephen S T E P h eGain.
Oh, thank you very much.
Yeah, we're both on Facebook, Joyce and Steven Singular. I don't know if you got that if it was Stevensingular dot com. S T E p h E n uh singulars s I N g U l A r dot com. This book and a number of other books that Joyce and I have worked on are on the website. Connect with us on Facebook.
Or the website is the best, actually though, because we do have a contact link there too.
That's true. So anyway, we appreciate h Dan, You're giving us a chance to talk about the book, and it's very thought provoking.
In my pleasure. It's always a pleasure, Stephen. It's such a huge other dimensionality. Did you bring to these cases that it's not just the current event? Is such a comprehensive and I love the exploration that you did in this because this has to be the most important issue in America at this time and it deserves a much more discussion by everyone. Because if we continue on the same route, nothing will get accomplished. And these numbers are
increasingly and frighteningly going to continue. So I thank you and applied you for this spiral notebook, and thank.
You very much for this interview, this evening. Thank you very much, appreciate it.
All right, I have a great evening, good night.
And here's an hour and a half. I asked him. I asked him, how long? How long?
Damn it?
Wh