A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings by William H Reid, 269 pages
On July 19th, 2012, James Holmes wrote "Embraced the hatred, a dark k/night rises" in the notebook he had been keeping for the past few months. By this time Holmes' apartment was cluttered with weapons, bombs, and booby-traps, some genuinely dangerous and others merely meant to look dangerous, and similarly his notebook contained a combination of threat and pretense. When, several hours later, Holmes surrendered to police after opening fire on the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring dozens more, it became the labor of experts to separate the two - explosives specialists to disarm the trapped apartment, psychological experts to untangle his true thoughts and motivations. One of these latter was forensic psychologist William Reid, and this book presents his process and conclusions.
More often than not, mass murderers do not survive their rampages - indeed, self-destruction is often their end goal. Yet Holmes' survival is, from the standpoint of understanding, a mixed blessing, since human beings generally, and criminals especially, tend to be dishonest when accounting for their own past actions. Thankfully, as might be expected given his professional background, Reid is well aware of this. Unfortunately, his profession does not include some of the skills of novelists and journalists, so that his account, while clear, is not particularly compelling. Nor does he have much in the way of answers - in his view, Holmes' actions were influenced but not determined by his very real mental health issues. He does, however, provide an interesting inside look at how the legal system adjudicates oftentimes competing claims of culpability and mental illness.
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