Cinema killer painted as cunning

Holmes acknowledged that he killed 12 moviegoers in Colorado theatre shooting

James E. Holmes sat nearly immobile at the defence table in Division 201 for four hours on Monday as attorneys began their battles to persuade a jury about how and why the promising young scientist became a killer.

Holmes, now 27, is a brilliant and cunning planner, a coward who wrapped himself in protective gear and popped a Vicodin before a 2012 shooting rampage so he could avoid injury as he “tried to murder a theatre full of people to make himself feel better.”

That’s how Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler explained one of the worst mass shootings on American soil during opening statements. Holmes faces 166 charges in the Aurora, Colorado, theatre shooting.

Holmes has acknowledged that he killed 12 moviegoers and wounded 70 others. He was arrested outside the venue with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a Remington shotgun and a Glock pistol. He had boobytrapped his apartment. But he has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

‘Delusional thinking’

As victims and family members of the dead listened — occasionally gasping, heads down, sometimes wiping away tears, covering their faces — Brauchler relayed how Holmes weighed the human costs of his deadly actions, which included playing in court a 911 call that night.

“The dead can’t be repaired or come back to life or be normal again; it’s irreversible,” Holmes told a psychiatrist after the rampage in an interview played in court. And the wounded? he was asked. “They’re like collateral damage, I guess.”

That, said public defender Daniel King, was part of the delusional thinking of a deeply sick young man, a victim himself of a different kind of attacker, the latest diseased branch in a family tree filled with fullblown psychosis.

On the first official day of the trial, which Judge Carlos Samour Jr. said could last through September, attorneys played duelling videos in an effort to sway the jurors, who will decide whether Holmes is sent to a mental hospital, prison for life with no chance for parole, or death row.