Jan. 15, 2026
The Joker Killer: James Holmes and the Aurora Theater Massacre
The Joker Killer: James Holmes and the Aurora Theater Massacre James Eagan Holmes murdered twelve people and injured seventy others during the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises at a Colorado movie theater on July 20, 2012. The Aurora theater...
The Joker Killer: James Holmes and the Aurora Theater Massacre
James Eagan Holmes murdered twelve people and injured seventy others during the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises at a Colorado movie theater on July 20, 2012. The Aurora theater shooting investigation revealed a University of Colorado neuroscience PhD candidate who meticulously planned a mass shooting while simultaneously rigging his apartment with homemade napalm and thermite explosives designed to kill first responders. Holmes bought his arsenal the same afternoon he failed his doctoral exams, then spent weeks building what the FBI called a "jungle gym of booby traps" in his apartment.
The headlines about the "Joker killer" completely missed the real horror. Holmes developed something he called the "Human Capital" theory, a twisted philosophical framework where he believed killing people would transfer their value to him. He'd been hallucinating violent shadows fighting each other since childhood, saw things he called "Nail Ghosts," and told his girlfriend months before the shooting that he wanted to "kill people, of course." She thought he was joking. His psychiatrist knew he thought about homicide three to four times a day, but couldn't legally hold him. And when three young men heard gunfire in that darkened theater, they all made the same split-second decision to use their bodies as shields, saving the women they loved while dying in the process.
#AuroraTheaterShooting #JamesHolmes #DarkKnightRises #ColoradoMassShooting #TrueCrimePodcast #MassShooterProfile #AuroraMassacre
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1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,000
July 20, 2012, 400 people packed into a Colorado movie theater for the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.
2
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:19,000
30 minutes into the film, a neuroscience PhD student walked back in through the emergency exit, dressed in full tactical gear.
3
00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:25,000
What happened over the next seven minutes left 12 people dead and 70 injured.
4
00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:34,000
The shooting was only half of his plan. Five miles away, his apartment was rigged to explode and kill every first responder in Aurora.
5
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:41,000
This is the story of James Egan Holmes and the midnight massacre that almost went exactly according to plan.
6
00:00:41,000 --> 00:01:04,000
[Music]
7
00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:14,000
Most people remember the Aurora theater shooting through the media's Joker Killer Narrative. Guy with bright orange hair shoots up a Batman movie premiere.
8
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,000
That story is mostly fiction. The reality is far more calculated.
9
00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:26,000
James Egan Holmes was a PhD candidate in neuroscience at one of the top programs in the country.
10
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:32,000
He had a national institute of health grants. He graduated from UC Riverside with honors.
11
00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:44,000
Somewhere between studying how the human brain works and completely failing to understand his own, he developed a theory called human capital that turned people into mathematical equations.
12
00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:53,000
The equation was simple. One human life equals one unit of value. Kill that person and their value transfers to you.
13
00:01:53,000 --> 00:02:01,000
This was a guy trying to solve the meaning of life like it was a calculus problem and decided that murder was the answer.
14
00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:11,000
James Holmes grew up seeing things that weren't there. When he was a kid, he called them nail ghosts. He'd lie in bed and hear them hammering on his bedroom walls at night.
15
00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:22,000
Most kids grow out of their imaginary fears. Holmes fears evolved. By the time he got to Colorado, he was seeing what he called shadows at the edges of his vision.
16
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:37,000
He described them fighting each other with guns and weapons. This violent movie playing in his peripheral vision constantly. He's in the neuroscience program studying the brain while his own brain is showing him hallucinations of gun violence.
17
00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:43,000
And he's functional enough that nobody around him realizes how broken he is inside.
18
00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:59,000
In late 2011, Holmes started dating a fellow grad student. Their emails to each other started off normal. He's trying to be charming, making references to the matrix, offering to tell her, quote, "an amazingly best-ever worlds greatest knock knock joke."
19
00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:11,000
It's awkward and sweet in that nerdy grad student way. After she breaks up with him in February 2012, things get dark. They're chatting on Google on a Sunday afternoon in March.
20
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:22,000
She tells him to do whatever he feels like doing. Holmes types something back that should have stopped everything right there. He says what he feels like doing is evil.
21
00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:29,000
So she asks what's so evil? His response? "Kill people, of course."
22
00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:36,000
She thought he was joking. She later testified that she assumed it was dark humor from a socially awkward scientist.
23
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:49,000
He told her exactly what he was planning to do, and it was too horrifying to be believed. He even explained there's no way to do it and not get caught. That justice would be served by taking away his time or life.
24
00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:56,000
She asked why those people would be worth ending his life for. He changed the subject to video games.
25
00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:11,000
Holmes entered the University of Colorado's neuroscience PhD program in 2011. Six students accepted out of hundreds of applicants. His professors noticed he was struggling. He was smart and couldn't work with people at the same time.
26
00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:20,000
One professor said he, quote, "seemed not engaged in the lab." Another worried that Holmes's presence was hurting the morale of the other researchers.
27
00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:32,000
June 7, 2012. This is the date that everything changed. Holmes had to take his preliminary oral board exams. The test that determines whether you're good enough to keep going in the program.
28
00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:45,000
He bombed it. One professor told him to try another business. That same afternoon, hours after the exam, he walked into a gander mountain sporting good store and bought a smith and wesson rifle.
29
00:04:45,000 --> 00:05:00,000
Three days later, he withdrew from the university. By late June, he'd been banned from campus for threatening a professor. This whole time, he's buying thousands of rounds of ammunition, tactical gear, and materials to build bombs.
30
00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:09,000
Holmes went to the student health clinic and saw Dr. Lynn Fenton, a psychiatrist. He told her he thought about killing people three or four times a day.
31
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:21,000
Dr. Fenton was alarmed. She wrote that Holmes might be, quote, "shifting insidiously into a frank psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia." She contacted the campus police threat assessment team.
32
00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:31,000
Holmes never named a specific target or articulated a concrete plan so they couldn't hold him. He was careful. He knew exactly where the legal lines were.
33
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:43,000
Before the shooting, Holmes mailed Dr. Fenton a spiral notebook laying out his entire human capital theory, complete with stick figure diagrams showing how killing people would increase his value.
34
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:49,000
That notebook sat unopened in a campus mail room while he murdered 12 people.
35
00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:57,000
Holmes spent weeks turning his apartment into a death trap. He called it a shindick when talking to the FBI later.
36
00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:08,000
The entire apartment was rigged with homemade napalm, thermite that burns at 4,000 degrees and containers full of bullets and mortar shells that would cook off in the heat.
37
00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:16,000
The trigger was a fishing line tied to the front door. Open the door, pull the line, and the whole building explodes.
38
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:28,000
He set his stereo to blast techno music at maximum volume so neighbors would complain and someone would open his door. The song playing was "Becoming Insane" by infected mushroom.
39
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:33,000
He hung Christmas tree air fresheners everywhere to mask the smell of gasoline.
40
00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:39,000
He left a remote controlled car on a dumpster outside, hoping a kid would pick it up and trigger the explosion.
41
00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:47,000
His neighbor heard the music. She walked upstairs, found his door unlocked, and stood inches from that fishing line trigger.
42
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:54,000
She had a bad gut feeling and didn't want to open the door. That decision saved an entire apartment building.
43
00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:05,000
July 20, 2012, after midnight. The Century 16th Theatre in Aurora is packed with over 400 people watching The Dark Knight Rises.
44
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:15,000
Fans showed up in costume. It's a party atmosphere. Holmes bought a ticket, walked into Theatre 9, sat in the front row, and pretended to take a phone call.
45
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:20,000
He walked out the emergency exit and prop the door open with a plastic tablecloth holder.
46
00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:28,000
When he came back, he was wearing full tactical gear and a gas mask. He threw two tear gas canisters into the theatre.
47
00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:37,000
People applauded at first, thinking that it was a special effect, part of the show. Then, he fired a shotgun into the ceiling.
48
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:44,000
For the next seven minutes, the theatre became a kill box. The tear gas made it impossible to see or breathe.
49
00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:50,000
The fire alarm strobed and blared. Hans Zimmer's score from the movie mixed with screams and gunfire.
50
00:07:50,000 --> 00:08:00,000
Holmes fired his rifle into the 100-round drum magazine jammed. Then switched to his clock. 12 people died. 70 were injured.
51
00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:12,000
In the chaos, three young men made the same instantaneous decision. Matt McCuin was 27. The second he heard gunshots, he dove on top of his girlfriend, Samantha, and her brother.
52
00:08:12,000 --> 00:08:22,000
He took multiple bullets. Samantha got shot in the knee and survived. Matt died. Jonathan Blunk was a 26-year-old Navy veteran.
53
00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:29,000
He pushed his girlfriend, Jensen, under the seats and covered her with his body. He was killed. She survived.
54
00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:38,000
Alex Tevez was 24. He pulled his girlfriend to the floor and shielded her. He was shot in the head and died. She lived.
55
00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:44,000
These guys didn't run. They made a choice in the worst moment to give their lives for someone else.
56
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:55,000
Holmes thought value could be stolen. They proved it could be given. Among the dead was Veronica Moser Sullivan, six years old, shot four times.
57
00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:59,000
Her mother Ashley was paralyzed and lost her unborn baby.
58
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:08,000
Police arrived within 90 seconds. An officer saw someone in tactical gear standing by a white Hyundai behind the theater.
59
00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:16,000
At first, he thought it was another SWAT officer. Then he realized the guy was standing completely still while everyone else was running and screaming.
60
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:27,000
Holmes surrendered without resistance. He was calm and appeared dazed. When asked if he had weapons, he said something that probably saved dozens of first responders.
61
00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:31,000
The apartment is booby trapped. He told them.
62
00:09:31,000 --> 00:09:41,000
Holmes did not tell police that he was the Joker. That never happened. He died as hair red and later explained that it had nothing to do with the Joker.
63
00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:48,000
Who, by the way, has green hair. The Joker killer narrative was pure media invention.
64
00:09:48,000 --> 00:09:55,000
The transcripts of his interrogation show a guy talking about chemistry and explosives. Not comic books.
65
00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:03,000
Dr. William Reed, one of the court appointed psychiatrists, called the Joker Theory Nonsenseical. The myth stuck anyway.
66
00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:16,000
The trial revolved around whether Holmes was legally insane. To be found not guilty by reason of insanity, the defense had to prove Holmes was so mentally ill, he couldn't distinguish between right from wrong.
67
00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:29,000
The prosecution argued that planning shows sanity. Holmes bought weapons, built bombs, wore armor and set diversions. Those are rational actions designed to maximize damage and avoid capture.
68
00:10:29,000 --> 00:10:40,000
The defense brought it an expert who diagnosed Holmes with schizophrenia. She pointed to the nail ghosts, the shadows, his flat affect, his family history of mental illness.
69
00:10:40,000 --> 00:10:52,000
She argued that his brain was physically broken. The court appointed psychiatrists agreed Holmes was mentally ill. They diagnosed him with schizophrenia disorder and schizophrenia personality disorder.
70
00:10:52,000 --> 00:11:01,000
They concluded he was legally sane though. One of the doctors said that he was extremely confident Holmes knew the shooting was illegal and morally wrong.
71
00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:18,000
On July 16, 2015, the jury rejected the insanity defense, guilty on all counts. They couldn't agree on the death penalty so the judge sentenced him to 12 consecutive life sentences without parole, plus 3,318 years.
72
00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:27,000
The judge said at sentencing, quote, "James Holmes was an angry quitter who gave up on life and turned his hatred into murder and mayhem."
73
00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:38,000
James Holmes is currently at USP Allenwood, a federal high security prison in Pennsylvania. Colorado transferred him out of state after another inmate attacked him in 2015.
74
00:11:38,000 --> 00:11:44,000
In a letter to the Denver Post, the inmate said he regretted not being able to, quote, "wipe him out."
75
00:11:51,000 --> 00:12:13,000
Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, binge-able True Crime Stories. My name is Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email from one of you that listens, subject, listening habits. Hey Joe, do you still listen to other True Crime podcasts since you started your own, or do you need breaks from that genre? Natalie in Bellingham, Washington.
76
00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:32,000
Natalie, great question, and thank you for the email. Yes, I do. Now, it's way fewer than I used to listen to. I used to listen to nearly everyone I could get my hands on. But I've had to cut way back on that because I spend more time researching this podcast, whereas I used to spend that same time listening to podcasts.
77
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78
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That way it's going to be more easily available to you when you want to listen to True Crime. You open your app wherever it is that you listen and then boom, 10 Minute Murder is going to be right there waiting for you.
79
00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:59,000
And also there are like hundreds of episodes in the back catalog that if you're a subscriber, you can more easily access those.
80
00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:13,000
If you have subscribed and you want to know more about the podcast, you can go to 10minuteMurder.com and on my website you can send me an email, check out the Murder Blog, and more importantly, you can sign up for the weekly newsletter that I send out.
81
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If you're digging the podcast you've been listening a while, please share this with your friends and your family. And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,000
July 20, 2012, 400 people packed into a Colorado movie theater for the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.
2
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:19,000
30 minutes into the film, a neuroscience PhD student walked back in through the emergency exit, dressed in full tactical gear.
3
00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:25,000
What happened over the next seven minutes left 12 people dead and 70 injured.
4
00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:34,000
The shooting was only half of his plan. Five miles away, his apartment was rigged to explode and kill every first responder in Aurora.
5
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:41,000
This is the story of James Egan Holmes and the midnight massacre that almost went exactly according to plan.
6
00:00:41,000 --> 00:01:04,000
[Music]
7
00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:14,000
Most people remember the Aurora theater shooting through the media's Joker Killer Narrative. Guy with bright orange hair shoots up a Batman movie premiere.
8
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,000
That story is mostly fiction. The reality is far more calculated.
9
00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:26,000
James Egan Holmes was a PhD candidate in neuroscience at one of the top programs in the country.
10
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:32,000
He had a national institute of health grants. He graduated from UC Riverside with honors.
11
00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:44,000
Somewhere between studying how the human brain works and completely failing to understand his own, he developed a theory called human capital that turned people into mathematical equations.
12
00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:53,000
The equation was simple. One human life equals one unit of value. Kill that person and their value transfers to you.
13
00:01:53,000 --> 00:02:01,000
This was a guy trying to solve the meaning of life like it was a calculus problem and decided that murder was the answer.
14
00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:11,000
James Holmes grew up seeing things that weren't there. When he was a kid, he called them nail ghosts. He'd lie in bed and hear them hammering on his bedroom walls at night.
15
00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:22,000
Most kids grow out of their imaginary fears. Holmes fears evolved. By the time he got to Colorado, he was seeing what he called shadows at the edges of his vision.
16
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:37,000
He described them fighting each other with guns and weapons. This violent movie playing in his peripheral vision constantly. He's in the neuroscience program studying the brain while his own brain is showing him hallucinations of gun violence.
17
00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:43,000
And he's functional enough that nobody around him realizes how broken he is inside.
18
00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:59,000
In late 2011, Holmes started dating a fellow grad student. Their emails to each other started off normal. He's trying to be charming, making references to the matrix, offering to tell her, quote, "an amazingly best-ever worlds greatest knock knock joke."
19
00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:11,000
It's awkward and sweet in that nerdy grad student way. After she breaks up with him in February 2012, things get dark. They're chatting on Google on a Sunday afternoon in March.
20
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:22,000
She tells him to do whatever he feels like doing. Holmes types something back that should have stopped everything right there. He says what he feels like doing is evil.
21
00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:29,000
So she asks what's so evil? His response? "Kill people, of course."
22
00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:36,000
She thought he was joking. She later testified that she assumed it was dark humor from a socially awkward scientist.
23
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:49,000
He told her exactly what he was planning to do, and it was too horrifying to be believed. He even explained there's no way to do it and not get caught. That justice would be served by taking away his time or life.
24
00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:56,000
She asked why those people would be worth ending his life for. He changed the subject to video games.
25
00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:11,000
Holmes entered the University of Colorado's neuroscience PhD program in 2011. Six students accepted out of hundreds of applicants. His professors noticed he was struggling. He was smart and couldn't work with people at the same time.
26
00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:20,000
One professor said he, quote, "seemed not engaged in the lab." Another worried that Holmes's presence was hurting the morale of the other researchers.
27
00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:32,000
June 7, 2012. This is the date that everything changed. Holmes had to take his preliminary oral board exams. The test that determines whether you're good enough to keep going in the program.
28
00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:45,000
He bombed it. One professor told him to try another business. That same afternoon, hours after the exam, he walked into a gander mountain sporting good store and bought a smith and wesson rifle.
29
00:04:45,000 --> 00:05:00,000
Three days later, he withdrew from the university. By late June, he'd been banned from campus for threatening a professor. This whole time, he's buying thousands of rounds of ammunition, tactical gear, and materials to build bombs.
30
00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:09,000
Holmes went to the student health clinic and saw Dr. Lynn Fenton, a psychiatrist. He told her he thought about killing people three or four times a day.
31
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:21,000
Dr. Fenton was alarmed. She wrote that Holmes might be, quote, "shifting insidiously into a frank psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia." She contacted the campus police threat assessment team.
32
00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:31,000
Holmes never named a specific target or articulated a concrete plan so they couldn't hold him. He was careful. He knew exactly where the legal lines were.
33
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:43,000
Before the shooting, Holmes mailed Dr. Fenton a spiral notebook laying out his entire human capital theory, complete with stick figure diagrams showing how killing people would increase his value.
34
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:49,000
That notebook sat unopened in a campus mail room while he murdered 12 people.
35
00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:57,000
Holmes spent weeks turning his apartment into a death trap. He called it a shindick when talking to the FBI later.
36
00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:08,000
The entire apartment was rigged with homemade napalm, thermite that burns at 4,000 degrees and containers full of bullets and mortar shells that would cook off in the heat.
37
00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:16,000
The trigger was a fishing line tied to the front door. Open the door, pull the line, and the whole building explodes.
38
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:28,000
He set his stereo to blast techno music at maximum volume so neighbors would complain and someone would open his door. The song playing was "Becoming Insane" by infected mushroom.
39
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:33,000
He hung Christmas tree air fresheners everywhere to mask the smell of gasoline.
40
00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:39,000
He left a remote controlled car on a dumpster outside, hoping a kid would pick it up and trigger the explosion.
41
00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:47,000
His neighbor heard the music. She walked upstairs, found his door unlocked, and stood inches from that fishing line trigger.
42
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:54,000
She had a bad gut feeling and didn't want to open the door. That decision saved an entire apartment building.
43
00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:05,000
July 20, 2012, after midnight. The Century 16th Theatre in Aurora is packed with over 400 people watching The Dark Knight Rises.
44
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:15,000
Fans showed up in costume. It's a party atmosphere. Holmes bought a ticket, walked into Theatre 9, sat in the front row, and pretended to take a phone call.
45
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:20,000
He walked out the emergency exit and prop the door open with a plastic tablecloth holder.
46
00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:28,000
When he came back, he was wearing full tactical gear and a gas mask. He threw two tear gas canisters into the theatre.
47
00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:37,000
People applauded at first, thinking that it was a special effect, part of the show. Then, he fired a shotgun into the ceiling.
48
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:44,000
For the next seven minutes, the theatre became a kill box. The tear gas made it impossible to see or breathe.
49
00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:50,000
The fire alarm strobed and blared. Hans Zimmer's score from the movie mixed with screams and gunfire.
50
00:07:50,000 --> 00:08:00,000
Holmes fired his rifle into the 100-round drum magazine jammed. Then switched to his clock. 12 people died. 70 were injured.
51
00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:12,000
In the chaos, three young men made the same instantaneous decision. Matt McCuin was 27. The second he heard gunshots, he dove on top of his girlfriend, Samantha, and her brother.
52
00:08:12,000 --> 00:08:22,000
He took multiple bullets. Samantha got shot in the knee and survived. Matt died. Jonathan Blunk was a 26-year-old Navy veteran.
53
00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:29,000
He pushed his girlfriend, Jensen, under the seats and covered her with his body. He was killed. She survived.
54
00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:38,000
Alex Tevez was 24. He pulled his girlfriend to the floor and shielded her. He was shot in the head and died. She lived.
55
00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:44,000
These guys didn't run. They made a choice in the worst moment to give their lives for someone else.
56
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:55,000
Holmes thought value could be stolen. They proved it could be given. Among the dead was Veronica Moser Sullivan, six years old, shot four times.
57
00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:59,000
Her mother Ashley was paralyzed and lost her unborn baby.
58
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:08,000
Police arrived within 90 seconds. An officer saw someone in tactical gear standing by a white Hyundai behind the theater.
59
00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:16,000
At first, he thought it was another SWAT officer. Then he realized the guy was standing completely still while everyone else was running and screaming.
60
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:27,000
Holmes surrendered without resistance. He was calm and appeared dazed. When asked if he had weapons, he said something that probably saved dozens of first responders.
61
00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:31,000
The apartment is booby trapped. He told them.
62
00:09:31,000 --> 00:09:41,000
Holmes did not tell police that he was the Joker. That never happened. He died as hair red and later explained that it had nothing to do with the Joker.
63
00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:48,000
Who, by the way, has green hair. The Joker killer narrative was pure media invention.
64
00:09:48,000 --> 00:09:55,000
The transcripts of his interrogation show a guy talking about chemistry and explosives. Not comic books.
65
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Dr. William Reed, one of the court appointed psychiatrists, called the Joker Theory Nonsenseical. The myth stuck anyway.
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The trial revolved around whether Holmes was legally insane. To be found not guilty by reason of insanity, the defense had to prove Holmes was so mentally ill, he couldn't distinguish between right from wrong.
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The prosecution argued that planning shows sanity. Holmes bought weapons, built bombs, wore armor and set diversions. Those are rational actions designed to maximize damage and avoid capture.
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The defense brought it an expert who diagnosed Holmes with schizophrenia. She pointed to the nail ghosts, the shadows, his flat affect, his family history of mental illness.
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She argued that his brain was physically broken. The court appointed psychiatrists agreed Holmes was mentally ill. They diagnosed him with schizophrenia disorder and schizophrenia personality disorder.
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They concluded he was legally sane though. One of the doctors said that he was extremely confident Holmes knew the shooting was illegal and morally wrong.
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On July 16, 2015, the jury rejected the insanity defense, guilty on all counts. They couldn't agree on the death penalty so the judge sentenced him to 12 consecutive life sentences without parole, plus 3,318 years.
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The judge said at sentencing, quote, "James Holmes was an angry quitter who gave up on life and turned his hatred into murder and mayhem."
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James Holmes is currently at USP Allenwood, a federal high security prison in Pennsylvania. Colorado transferred him out of state after another inmate attacked him in 2015.
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In a letter to the Denver Post, the inmate said he regretted not being able to, quote, "wipe him out."
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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, binge-able True Crime Stories. My name is Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email from one of you that listens, subject, listening habits. Hey Joe, do you still listen to other True Crime podcasts since you started your own, or do you need breaks from that genre? Natalie in Bellingham, Washington.
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Natalie, great question, and thank you for the email. Yes, I do. Now, it's way fewer than I used to listen to. I used to listen to nearly everyone I could get my hands on. But I've had to cut way back on that because I spend more time researching this podcast, whereas I used to spend that same time listening to podcasts.
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But I still do listen to several of them here and there, as I have time. Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, make sure right now you hit subscribe to the podcast.
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That way it's going to be more easily available to you when you want to listen to True Crime. You open your app wherever it is that you listen and then boom, 10 Minute Murder is going to be right there waiting for you.
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And also there are like hundreds of episodes in the back catalog that if you're a subscriber, you can more easily access those.
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If you have subscribed and you want to know more about the podcast, you can go to 10minuteMurder.com and on my website you can send me an email, check out the Murder Blog, and more importantly, you can sign up for the weekly newsletter that I send out.
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If you're digging the podcast you've been listening a while, please share this with your friends and your family. And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.
