The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth

305 Pages·2015·0.79 MB·English

by  Stephen Singular

STEPHEN U.S. $26.00
Praise for THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK AND
Continued from front flap
JOYCE
with the voices of the Millennials, a group “An investigation into the plague of violence engulfing a generation of American youth … A New York Times-bestselling author
dogged by big pharma, anti-depressants, a disturbing yet fascinating treatise on the impacts of growing up in a world that previous SINGULAR investigates why America keeps producing
and ADHD drugs, by a doomsday/ generations would barely recognize. While violent video games get their due, the authors twenty-something mass killers.
also pinpoint widely prescribed drugs, the pressures of social media, a world at war, and
apocalyptic mentality present since birth, T
and by an entertainment industry that has more. What makes this book special is that for every theory they present, the Singulars On July 20, 2012, twelve people were
reference not only experts in psychology, sociology, crime, and other fields, but H
turned violence into parlor games. killed and seventy wounded at a mass
also twentysomethings, whose opinions seem at once benign in their simplicity and also
Provocative and eye opening, The shooting in a movie theater in Colorado. In
imbued with the ability to shatter the worlds of their peers. These acts may never E
Spiral Notebook is an examination of the 1999, twelve kids at Columbine High School
be fully understood, but this work certainly helps the process along.
dynamics driving the violence committed were murdered by their peers. In 2012, twenty
Tragic, gripping, and authentic, this book deserves a wide audience.”
by their peers. children and seven adults were killed at
—Kirkus, Starred Review S
Sandy Hook Elementary. Thirty-two were
P killed at Virginia Tech. Twelve killed at the
Praise for TALKED TO DEATH
Washington Navy Yard. In May 2014, after
I posting a YouTube video of “retribution” and
“The book works at every level, from melodrama to murder mystery to sociology. Singular
lamenting a life of “loneliness, rejection, and
R
has much to tell us here, and all of it is disturbing.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
unfulfilled desires,” a lone gunman killed six

A and wounded seven in Isla Vista. All of these
“Mr. Singular offers a microcosm lesson in the workings of a violently racist mind . . .
acts of violence were committed by young men.
It is the story of how broadcast communications is evolving in our era and
L
what it has cost us.” —The New York Times Mass violence committed by young peo-
ple is now an epidemic. In the first fourteen

“A chilling examination of American-born right-wing terrorism.” —Chicago Tribune school days of 2014, there were seven school
N
shootings, compared to twenty-eight school
STEPHEN SINGULAR has published twenty
shootings in all of 2013. The reasons behind
Praise for WHEN MEN BECOME GODS O
books, many about high profile crimes and
this escalating violence, and the cultural
their impact on society. His articles have ap-
“This book shines much-needed light on the disturbing activities of these outlaw T forces that have influenced a generation, are
peared in New York Magazine, Psychology
communities. I only wish it had been written years ago.” the subject of an important new study, The
Today, Inside Sports, The New York Times E
—U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Spiral Notebook.
Magazine, Rolling Stone, and American Photo.
New York Times-bestselling author
B
“A raw and bracing account of Warren Jeffs’s sex crimes and fugitive years . . . Stephen Singular has teamed with his wife,
JOYCE SINGULAR is a researcher and collab-
Troubling and fascinating.” —Publishers Weekly Joyce, and their forensic reporting has pro-
orator on a number of titles with her hus- O
duced the most comprehensive look at the
band, adding a female perspective on the na-
“A harrowing, well-written account of a frightening cult.” —Kirkus
ture of crime. They live in Denver, Colorado. O Aurora shooting yet, while drawing upon
the one group left out of the discussion of
ISBN 978-1-61902-534-9 K violence in America: the twenty-somethings
52600
themselves. The Spiral Notebook is filled
Jacket design: Michael Kellner
Authors photo © Matthew Goforth COUNTERPOINT Continued on back flap
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
9 781619 025349
T H E
S P I R A L
N O T E B O O K

T H E
S P I R A L
N O T E B O O K
8
THE AURORA THEATER SHOOTER
AND THE EPIDEMIC OF
MASS VIOLENCE COMMITTED
BY AMERICAN YOUTH
STEPHEN JOYCE SINGULAR
AND
COUNTERPOINT  |  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Copyright © Stephen and Joyce Singular 2015
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven-
tions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quota-
tions embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-61902-534-9
Cover design by Michael Kellner
Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
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Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Eric

AUTHORS’ NOTE
On the morning of July 20, 2012, we drove to the Aurora apartment
of James Holmes and then to the Century 16 movie complex. Sev-
eral hours earlier at this theater, Holmes had unleashed the largest
mass shooting in U.S. history, and news reports of the event were still
breaking across the country and around the world. Since his living
space and the crime scene were only a few miles from our Denver
home, we wanted to see the locations for ourselves—marking the be-
ginning of an investigative journey that would last for the next two
and a half years.
The first people we interviewed were Holmes’s neighbors, who
were standing a few hundred yards from his blocked-off apartment
building, now wired with explosives and ready to blow. As the bomb
squad worked to defuse the situation, the locals stared at the building
in bewilderment and talked about what had happened in the theater.
We continued on to Century 16, and in an adjacent parking lot we
spoke to moviegoers who’d survived the massacre. Police had just
released the witnesses from their custody.
Over the next thirty months, we attended all of the significant legal
proceedings for Holmes. These included motion hearings, evidentiary
hearings, hearings on the spiral notebook itself, and those on psychi-
atric issues, the death penalty, and the debate over criminal sanity
versus insanity. Most importantly, in January 2013 we sat through the
preliminary hearing, where the prosecution outlined its case against
Holmes. We heard two full days of police testimony, which helped
us to reconstruct a timeline of Holmes’s movements leading up to,
during, and following the massacre. This process was aided by our
own investigations and by numerous journalistic sources, both local
viii AUTHORS’ NOTE
and national, devoted to uncovering and tracking Holmes’s behavior.
In addition to this, we conducted personal interviews with many
people and businesses in and around the Anschutz CU campus, most
speaking to us under the condition of anonymity. We were able to talk
with several staff members in the graduate department of CU, again
under the condition of anonymity. None spoke directly about the case
itself, but only about Holmes’s routine at the school, offering a sense
of who he was before he became infamous.
We visited Anschutz and retraced Holmes’s steps around the
campus. We saw his classrooms, his lab, and where he’d had his
therapy sessions in the spring of 2012. In 2013 and 2014, we sat in on
the kinds of lectures on the brain and mental illness that Holmes might
have attended had he not been incarcerated. We went to the tavern
where he drank in the evenings and to the places in his neighborhood
where he shopped or ate his meals. Many years before the massacre,
we’d watched films at the theater where the shootings occurred, and
we returned to the movie complex after it had been remodeled and
renamed following the tragedy. All of these things provided us with a
more intimate feeling for the young man’s life as he made his descent
into violence during his year in Aurora.
Starting in the summer of 2012 we also began a series of inter-
views that lasted over two years and included psychologists, psychia-
trists, first responders, psycho-pharmacologists, private investigators,
teachers, and many, many young people throughout the nation. Be-
cause the thousands of pages of legal documents the shootings had
generated were sealed and all of the principals in the case were under
a gag order, we couldn’t approach this as a true crime story and put
together a conventional narrative of Holmes’s actions, as we’d done
in many previous books. Instead of writing about one mass shooter,
we started to explore the society and the generation that had pro-
duced not just Holmes, but so many other young male killers. This
turned out to be our deeper interest, partially because we had a son
AUTHORS’ NOTE ix
not much younger than Holmes himself. By taking our investigation
outside of the courtroom, we stumbled onto a much larger stage.
During those thirty months of investigation, we talked to anyone
who’d speak with us about the mass-shooting phenomenon: from
teenagers to those in their eighties and nineties; from people we met
at social gatherings to those we ran into at coffee shops. Everyone in
America is a part of this story, and most everyone, if probed a little,
has something to say about it. Our job, first and foremost, was to start
the conversation. Because of the impact and reach of social media,
most young people were much more comfortable and much more
open when speaking with us if their names weren’t used. All of these
voices, whether they’re in the book or not, make up the fabric of this
story. They offer a portrait of America passing through a scourge of
violence new to our national experience.
It’s both reflexive and normal to recoil from the phenomenon of
mass shootings. But that reflex hasn’t solved the problem or made it
vanish. In the summer of 2012, we decided to move toward this phe-
nomenon rather than away from it to see if we could learn something
new about ourselves, our own family, and our society.