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Speaker 6: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 6: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 6: written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK every
Speaker 6: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 6: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 6: journalist and author Dan.
Speaker 4: Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 7: On July twentieth, twenty twelve, twelve people were killed and
Speaker 7: fifty eight wounded at a mass shooting in a movie
Speaker 7: theater in Colorado. In nineteen ninety nine, thirteen kids at
Speaker 7: Columbine High School were murdered by their peers. In two
Speaker 7: thousand and twelve, twenty children and seven adults were killed
Speaker 7: at Sandy Hook Elementary, thirty two were killed at Virginia Tech.
Speaker 7: Twelve killed at the Washington Navy Yard. In May two
Speaker 7: thousand and fourteen, after posting a YouTube video of retribution
Speaker 7: and lamenting a life of loneliness, rejection, and unfilled desires,
Speaker 7: a lone gunman killed six and wounded seven in Isla Vista.
Speaker 7: All of these acts of violence were committed by young
Speaker 7: men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Mass violence
Speaker 7: committed by young people is now an epidemic. In the
Speaker 7: first fourteen school days of two thousand and fourteen, there
Speaker 7: were seven school shootings, compared to twenty eight school shootings
Speaker 7: in all of two thousand and thirteen. New York Times
Speaker 7: best selling author Stephen Singular has often examined violence in
Speaker 7: America and his critically acclaimed book Here He is teen
Speaker 7: with his wife Joyce for their most important work yet,
Speaker 7: one that investigates why America keeps producing twenty something mass killers.
Speaker 7: Their reporting has produced the most comprehensive look at the
Speaker 7: Aurora shootings yet and draws upon the one group that
Speaker 7: has been left out of the discussion so far, and
Speaker 7: that's the twenty somethings themselves. The Spiral Notebook follows the
Speaker 7: legal proceedings in the Aurora shooting and is full of
Speaker 7: interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma
Speaker 7: and antidepressants in ad HD drugs, by a doomsday apocalyptic
Speaker 7: mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that
Speaker 7: has turned violence into parlor games. The book that we're
Speaker 7: featuring this evening is Spiral Notebook The Aurora Theater Shooting
Speaker 7: and the Epidemic of Mass Violence by American Youth, with
Speaker 7: my special guest Joyce and Stephen Singular. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 7: and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 7: Joyce and Steven.
Speaker 8: Singular, Thank you Dan for having us.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much Joyce and Stephen for joining us
Speaker 7: here today in the first program of twenty seventeen. And again,
Speaker 7: we couldn't be discussing a more important case and important
Speaker 7: cases as this phenomena that we are discussing this evening,
Speaker 7: mass shooting in America. Let's talk about again why this
Speaker 7: was important to you. It becomes very obvious for those
Speaker 7: of people read the very first pages. But tell us
Speaker 7: how close to home this case is for the Singular family.
Speaker 8: Well, Joyce's a Denver native and I've lived here for
Speaker 8: more than three decades. And in nineteen ninety nine the
Speaker 8: Columbine massacre occurred, which you alluded to a little bit earlier.
Speaker 8: Our son would have been five years old at that point,
Speaker 8: and we went out to Columbine when that happened and
Speaker 8: looked at that scene and all of the mourners, and
Speaker 8: it was very, very powerful, but it was about twenty
Speaker 8: miles or so from here, fifteen to twenty miles probably,
Speaker 8: which was quite close, and it sent shockways through the city.
Speaker 8: But that happened in nineteen ninety nine. Then in twenty
Speaker 8: twelve when this happened in Aurora, this was in a
Speaker 8: theater that Joyce and Eric myself somewhat less, but they
Speaker 8: had been in that theater many times, watched many movies,
Speaker 8: and this was much closer literally to our house, probably
Speaker 8: you know, five to seven miles something like that. So
Speaker 8: it was it was literally closer. And there had been
Speaker 8: a number of mass shootings between Columbine and this event.
Speaker 9: So and so, the morning that was being broadcast on
Speaker 9: the local news stations, I told Steve that we should
Speaker 9: probably drive over to the scene to where they were
Speaker 9: doing the examination for bombs at James Holmes apartment, which
Speaker 9: is not very far from us. So we drove over
Speaker 9: there and then we talked to people his neighbors as
Speaker 9: they were, you know, examining the apartment, and then we
Speaker 9: went over to the theater site and we began with
Speaker 9: other journalists interviewing people that had been kept in a
Speaker 9: school that were in the theater that night that had
Speaker 9: survived the shooting, but they bust them all over to
Speaker 9: a school, so they were up on and then they
Speaker 9: let the survivors come out, and we started interviewing people
Speaker 9: that had actually been in the theater that had witnessed
Speaker 9: what had gone on, and that's when we decided to
Speaker 9: start looking into it more. And we came home that
Speaker 9: day after beat at these scenes, we asked our son,
Speaker 9: who was home from his first semester of college, what
Speaker 9: did his friends think when these events happened? And we
Speaker 9: were rather surprised by what he said, Steve, you want
Speaker 9: to continue?
Speaker 8: Yeah, he I mean the most formative thing that he
Speaker 8: said was, you don't understand how I grew up. I
Speaker 8: knew kids who could have done something like this, and
Speaker 8: we were the first sentence there. You don't know how
Speaker 8: I grew up? Really took us aback, because we've worked
Speaker 8: at home doing writing the whole time he was growing up.
Speaker 8: I mean, not only did he have two parents that
Speaker 8: were around all the time, but you know, we were
Speaker 8: literally in the house all the time. How could we
Speaker 8: not know how he grew up? So what he really
Speaker 8: meant by that was you don't really understand the social
Speaker 8: influences on me and on kids of my generation from
Speaker 8: the time we were very very young, and so a
Speaker 8: lot of writing. You know, if you look at a
Speaker 8: mass killer, you say, well, this is an a individual,
Speaker 8: and let's focus on the aberrations of that person. That
Speaker 8: applies in this case. But we thought, well, what would
Speaker 8: happen if you started to look at more of the
Speaker 8: aberrations of the society. Why do we keep producing these
Speaker 8: same killers over and over again? The numbers you just
Speaker 8: alluded to, and our son being that age, the age
Speaker 8: not very far from Holmes's age, in the age of
Speaker 8: some of these other kids who had done this, was
Speaker 8: really providing a doorway into that world. So that's where
Speaker 8: it all started.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's very interesting that you enlist your son to
Speaker 7: really add a dimension of understanding to this, because again,
Speaker 7: things have changed, and things do rapidly change. So let's
Speaker 7: talk about specifically the case that people have heard about.
Speaker 7: But as you detail in great excruciating detail about him
Speaker 7: parking the Hyundai hatchback behind Theater nine and what he
Speaker 7: was wearing, if I could read it, or you could
Speaker 7: list what exactly how he was equipped behind this movie theater,
Speaker 7: and then talk about the police officer that encounters him,
Speaker 7: who at first believes that it's a fellow officer responding
Speaker 7: to the emergency calls to the theater itself.
Speaker 8: Yes, he was dressed in sort of two modes. I mean,
Speaker 8: one was like someone dressed for combat and the other
Speaker 8: was having some of the gear of a police officer.
Speaker 8: When the first officer on the scene arrived, I as obiot.
Speaker 8: When he arrived, he glanced at Holmes, who was leaning
Speaker 8: against his car right after the shootings, and thought he
Speaker 8: was a fellow officer, except the gas mask didn't fit
Speaker 8: the standard issue, and he approached Holmes and told him
Speaker 8: to go on the ground, and then he arrested him.
Speaker 8: But what was extremely striking to the officer was that
Speaker 8: Holmes offered no resistance whatsoever. He was totally relaxed. He
Speaker 8: did everything they asked him to do. This officer to
Speaker 8: arrested a number of people before, obviously over his six
Speaker 8: years in law enforcement, and he couldn't. You know, when
Speaker 8: people are being arrested or being handled, they tend to
Speaker 8: stiffen up their muscle stiff and Holmes was experiencing this
Speaker 8: great sense of reliefs and almost peace, and it was
Speaker 8: a very unusual moment for the officer and for anyone
Speaker 8: else who showed up on that scene. So it just
Speaker 8: goes to the sort of the notion that he was
Speaker 8: in combat mode. He'd watched movies like that, he'd watched
Speaker 8: a lot of video games of that nature, and he
Speaker 8: was really He told someone but in the jail that
Speaker 8: night after his rest, that he felt that he was
Speaker 8: in a video game when he was actually doing the shooting.
Speaker 8: So it evokes all kinds of things that we would
Speaker 8: explore in the book about the video game culture, violent entertainment.
Speaker 4: Et cetera.
Speaker 9: I believe he was he had some music playing, Deny
Speaker 9: stephen Is ear. He had like some electronic music plane.
Speaker 8: Real loud, real harsh music was playing in his ear
Speaker 8: so that he could not, you know, hear the results
Speaker 8: of what he was doing as he stood in front
Speaker 8: of that audience and open fire. So I mean, he
Speaker 8: had completely dehumanized himself in order to do this, which
Speaker 8: which of course is very interesting because this was a
Speaker 8: you know, a very intelligent young man who was in
Speaker 8: the PhD neuroscience program here at the Universe of Colorado,
Speaker 8: and he had, you know, so much potential and so
Speaker 8: much intelligence, and this is how it turned out.
Speaker 7: You put something that's incredible in this and very of course,
Speaker 7: very movieesque in that when the police removed his gas mask,
Speaker 7: he has this shock of orange hair and he says,
Speaker 7: I'm the Joker, and he has huge, these huge, super
Speaker 7: huge pupils.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: He had identified, from what we understand, with the character
Speaker 8: of the Joker in that Batman, the first Batman movie
Speaker 8: in that particular series, I guess, so he had watched
Speaker 8: the movies obsessively leading up to the crime. He had
Speaker 8: actually called someone who'd made sort of a trailer that
Speaker 8: sort of took off from that movie, and he had
Speaker 8: just obviously thought a lot about it. One of the
Speaker 8: details that many people don't know about was that he
Speaker 8: there's a scene in that movie where the Joker burns
Speaker 8: stacks and stacks of money to kind of make the
Speaker 8: point that society is overly interested or obsessed with money,
Speaker 8: and then it doesn't really have that much value. Holmes
Speaker 8: mailed his own spiral notebook. He kept the Spiral notebook,
Speaker 8: which in itself was fascinating because it contained his thoughts
Speaker 8: and feelings leading up to the crime, and then he
Speaker 8: sent it to his psychiatrist one day, the afternoon of
Speaker 8: the crime. But he put these burnt twenty dollars bills
Speaker 8: in the spiral notebook so they would fall out when
Speaker 8: it was eventually open, making the connection with the joker
Speaker 8: and sort of making a statement about the society that
Speaker 8: he felt he was living in.
Speaker 7: Getting back to the chaos and the mayhem at the
Speaker 7: movie complex, you write that there's two hundred and twenty
Speaker 7: three police officers from Denver and Aurora descending on this
Speaker 7: complex and at the same time they arrest Holmes and
Speaker 7: ask him questions about explosives and if he has any partners.
Speaker 7: Tell us about this sort of the unnerving scene where
Speaker 7: one of the officers asked him if he has a partner.
Speaker 8: Yes, I mean he is asked if he's the only
Speaker 8: one present, and he says no. And then that one
Speaker 8: of the officers says, you have explosives and this is
Speaker 8: what Joyce had referred to earlier, and he says, yes,
Speaker 8: I have explosive wired to detonate in my apartment. And
Speaker 8: they said what are they and he said, IEDs And
Speaker 8: these are improvised explosive devices mostly found in I Rock
Speaker 8: and other places that America has been at war since
Speaker 8: two thousand and one, So, I mean, one of the
Speaker 8: themes that were sort of exploring in the whole book
Speaker 8: is that a lot of this violence is not occurring
Speaker 8: at a time of peacefulness in American history, but a
Speaker 8: time when the United States has been at war essentially
Speaker 8: for the last fifteen years. So there are some connections
Speaker 8: that are made there. But he I think Joyce could
Speaker 8: talk about the impact of this on the community. She
Speaker 8: was in the courtroom, maybe a little bit more than
Speaker 8: I was. But you think, you know, a guy opens
Speaker 8: fire literally I think for twenty seven seconds, thirty seconds
Speaker 8: I believe was the like the amount of time that
Speaker 8: he was actually shooting. That brings two hundred and twenty
Speaker 8: three officers to the scene, and then it just the
Speaker 8: impact that this created on the community over the next
Speaker 8: three or four years was just incredible.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the impact not only on the you know, the victims,
Speaker 9: the survivors, the families, but also on the first responders
Speaker 9: to the scene, the people at the hospitals that had
Speaker 9: to treat them. I mean, the ripple effect is huge
Speaker 9: in a community when this type of event occurs. The
Speaker 9: damage that it inflicts is it's hard to put into words.
Speaker 8: Well, there were seventy people besides the twelve that were killed.
Speaker 8: Ultimately the number was seventy who were injured. A number
Speaker 8: of those people came into the courtroom and testified in
Speaker 8: wheelchairs or incapacitated in some ways, and it was just
Speaker 8: it was devastating to sit through and watch it, but
Speaker 8: we felt that was something we needed to do to
Speaker 8: write the book.
Speaker 7: You talk about the damage, so you cite this incredibly
Speaker 7: personal story of a woman named a police officer going
Speaker 7: against protocol and transporting victims to the hospital because he
Speaker 7: figures it's just prudent to do that expedient, and so
Speaker 7: he in the back seat of you write there's a
Speaker 7: woman named, a pregnant woman named Ashley Moser, and she's
Speaker 7: bleeding heavily from shots to her head and chest, and
Speaker 7: her husband Ian Sullivan, and the police officers determined to
Speaker 7: get these people to the hospital, despite them wanting to
Speaker 7: go back to look for their six year old daughter.
Speaker 7: This is an incredible example of the damage that you
Speaker 7: talked about. Can you tell us a little bit more
Speaker 7: about this again, tragic story of just three.
Speaker 8: Right, his wife is pregnant and bleeding profusely, and Ian,
Speaker 8: her husband, is next to the police officer who's driving,
Speaker 8: and he says, you've got to go back and get
Speaker 8: my six year old daughter. I have to know if
Speaker 8: she's okay. And the officer says, I can't do that.
Speaker 8: We have to get to the hospital. And the guy says,
Speaker 8: you have to do it, and then he says no again,
Speaker 8: and Ian grabs the door handle and starts to jump
Speaker 8: out of this fast moving patrol car. The officer grabs him,
Speaker 8: pulls him back in and says, you know you can't
Speaker 8: do We have to try and save her life. Ultimately,
Speaker 8: what happened was that the six year old girl was
Speaker 8: killed and the woman miscarried. So, I mean again, we
Speaker 8: felt compelled to sort of try and explore this tragedy
Speaker 8: and these other tragedies, not because we think we have
Speaker 8: all the answers or anything, but just to feel what
Speaker 8: this does to a community is an overwhelming thing. And
Speaker 8: so our book is really an exploration of kind of
Speaker 8: trying to examine the whole social forces that caused these
Speaker 8: things and to boil it down into the Holmes case.
Speaker 7: So it's interesting too. You write that one of the
Speaker 7: victims named Caleb they rushed to the University of Colorado Hospital,
Speaker 7: where you say, again, ironically, Holmes had been in graduate
Speaker 7: school just a few weeks earlier.
Speaker 8: Right, They had to use a variety of hospitals around
Speaker 8: Aurora and Denver because there were so many victims. And yes,
Speaker 8: Holmes had been a student there. He'd actually been a
Speaker 8: very good student during the first semester of his first
Speaker 8: year of graduate school, and then things began to deteriorate.
Speaker 8: But again, there's so much irony and tragedy around the
Speaker 8: whole thing. He was in a PhD program. He was
Speaker 8: one of six students who was selected from across the
Speaker 8: entire United States, and he was around some very intelligent people.
Speaker 8: We interviewed his professors, one or two in particular, and
Speaker 8: you know, they observed him fairly closely, and they just
Speaker 8: didn't see what was unfolding, but beneath his surface, they did.
Speaker 9: Say also that, you know, some of the people are
Speaker 9: quite nerdy in these types of programs and they might
Speaker 9: be a little eccentric. So they just attributed his behavior
Speaker 9: to just being a little bit more, you know, of
Speaker 9: a loner, stand offish, but extremely intelligent and very good
Speaker 9: at what he did. But then they started noticing that
Speaker 9: his behavior was socially awkward, especially in his presentations. He
Speaker 9: didn't he had a real hard time speaking in front
Speaker 9: of the group, not in the content, but just to
Speaker 9: make the strange little jokes he would make, and the
Speaker 9: inappropriate jokes and the lack of eye contact. And then
Speaker 9: that's when they started kind of noticing in you know,
Speaker 9: in retrospect that his behavior was a little.
Speaker 8: Different and he was deteriorating in the second semester. That's
Speaker 8: probably one of the more interesting aspects of the whole
Speaker 8: story is that he he knew he needed.
Speaker 4: Help.
Speaker 8: He knew that he had problems. He was going to
Speaker 8: enter an experimental study on and get a functional MRI
Speaker 8: that fall that I believe would have looked at his brain,
Speaker 8: but at the last second, you know, he decided to
Speaker 8: pull out. Then in the late winter of twenty twelve,
Speaker 8: he sought out a therapist, then began to go to her,
Speaker 8: and he was seeking help. I mean, that's one of
Speaker 8: the really poignant parts of this story. And he was
Speaker 8: seeking meaning. And when you read his spiral notebook, which
Speaker 8: actually came out during the trial, that's what you see.
Speaker 8: So Joyce, why don't you tell him about the therapist
Speaker 8: to part of it.
Speaker 9: Well, he started going to the therapist on the university
Speaker 9: campus and she began prescribing andy depressants, and I believe
Speaker 9: Zoloft was the main one. And then she, you know,
Speaker 9: then she prescribed more zoloft, and then she prescribed even
Speaker 9: more zoloft where she tripled his original dosage, and he
Speaker 9: was and then he was also taking other drugs to
Speaker 9: opiums and or benzo benzo benzoids, and also drinking and
Speaker 9: self medicating with other types of medications street drugs. So
Speaker 9: he just began getting more and more frustrated with his
Speaker 9: sessions with this doctor Lynn Fenton at the university hospital.
Speaker 9: Eventually she pulled in one of her superiors and they
Speaker 9: it was surprising to us that between the two of them,
Speaker 9: they didn't recognize these signs that he was because at
Speaker 9: that point he had actually said that he wanted to kill.
Speaker 8: People a lot of people. Yes, that's true.
Speaker 9: And then she did make some contact with his mother,
Speaker 9: Arlene in California and San Diego, but she didn't tell
Speaker 9: the mother that he had actually stated that he wanted
Speaker 9: to kill people a lot of people, because in court
Speaker 9: his mother said, if I would have known that I
Speaker 9: would have crawled on my hands knees back to Colorado.
Speaker 9: So that was pretty shocking to us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was, I mean, he was unlike some of
Speaker 8: these shooters, he was quite aware that he was troubled.
Speaker 8: Some people felt he went into neuroscience to study his
Speaker 8: own brain and figure out what was malfunctioning in it.
Speaker 8: There's a section in the book where it lists a
Speaker 8: lot of the most prominent mass shooters over the past
Speaker 8: decade or so, and the one thing they have in
Speaker 8: common is all having been on some of these on
Speaker 8: some of these same meds. And I mean, he was
Speaker 8: trying to make a connection with the therapist and explore
Speaker 8: his own reality more and she just really didn't seem
Speaker 8: to have time for that and gave him, you know,
Speaker 8: the medications and it it did not help at all.
Speaker 7: Was there any legal option that she was available once
Speaker 7: they did hear the talk of homicidal violence, Yeah, they did.
Speaker 8: Colorado the laws that once you a therapist makes that
Speaker 8: determination of danger to the self or this public, you
Speaker 8: can hold them for a mandatory toory seventy two hours.
Speaker 8: And you know, in retrospect, obviously, hindsight is twenty twenty
Speaker 8: but we talked to a number of people who said
Speaker 8: that option should have been exercised. He was clearly disintegrating.
Speaker 8: And then in early June he did poorly on a test,
Speaker 8: and then four days later he told the therapist that
Speaker 8: he wanted that he was going to quit school. And
Speaker 8: so that's sort of the dividing line in the whole narrative,
Speaker 8: because coach he continued to have sessions with him or
Speaker 8: not after that, and after he made that announcement, she
Speaker 8: she couldn't do that. So he was on his own,
Speaker 8: really for the first time, not in school, not connected
Speaker 8: to the therapist, not studying, didn't have a job, and
Speaker 8: it just descended over the next five or six weeks
Speaker 8: and it led to the crime.
Speaker 9: And also importantly that he had broken up with his girlfriend.
Speaker 9: He wasn't the type that had had many girlfriends, and
Speaker 9: the one that he did have when he was in
Speaker 9: school had recently broken up with him. We had found
Speaker 9: that with some of these other mass shooters there also
Speaker 9: seemed to be some sort of masculinity and crisis type
Speaker 9: of factor going on as well. Rejection by women, inability
Speaker 9: to have a functioning relationship with women.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, very true. But again the sort of poignancy
Speaker 8: in the story is that he was trying to help
Speaker 8: himself and he just couldn't find something there to, you know,
Speaker 8: that would assist. And if some one had or if
Speaker 8: something had, it might have not happened this way.
Speaker 7: Wasn't he also interested in the study of schizophrenia.
Speaker 8: Yes, he was interested in schizophrenia. He had, I believe,
Speaker 8: taking some classes in that. And again he was again
Speaker 8: thinking about entering that study in the fall of twenty eleven,
Speaker 8: which would have I think examined some of those areas,
Speaker 8: and he kept I think when he went to the therapist.
Speaker 8: That's what he was looking for. He was looking for
Speaker 8: some real feedback at an emotional, intellectual, spiritual level that
Speaker 8: would have sort of you know, connected him to himself
Speaker 8: and to other people around him. I mean, by the
Speaker 8: time the crime happened, it was so impersonal that it
Speaker 8: was just it was absolutely shocking. Again, he asked to
Speaker 8: somebody in the jail, he just felt like he was
Speaker 8: in a video game. And in that build up to
Speaker 8: the crime, in the last five weeks or so, he
Speaker 8: was watching one video game about eight hours a day.
Speaker 8: He was drinking, and he was just sliding further and
Speaker 8: further into this fantasy realm.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about we'll go back to that, but let's
Speaker 7: go back to just jump to the he's arrested. You've
Speaker 7: got a person that ends up being the guy that
Speaker 7: handles this case, a guy named Appel, and there's another
Speaker 7: guy named Mel. Two officers are about the question Holmes.
Speaker 7: Now they put as you write, they put paper bags
Speaker 7: on his hands to preserve the gunpowder residue for testing,
Speaker 7: and what does he do which they've never seen before
Speaker 7: with these paper bags? And then they start asking them
Speaker 7: some questions. So this scene is very telling. I would think,
Speaker 7: tell us what started feeling like.
Speaker 9: The bags on his hands were like little finger puppets.
Speaker 9: And it really makes you question, especially when you sit
Speaker 9: through all the expert psychological testimony for both sides, the
Speaker 9: defense of the prosecution, if it was an act or
Speaker 9: if he really was, you know, having a a what
Speaker 9: do you call a.
Speaker 8: Break, a disassociative or a break from.
Speaker 9: Reality Exactly after the trial, it was really hard to
Speaker 9: determine whether or not that was calculated or whether that
Speaker 9: was really happening. And I think even the experts couldn't
Speaker 9: really agree.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the police officers had never seen anything like it.
Speaker 8: I mean, they brought him in again. There was no
Speaker 8: resistance whatsoever of any kind up till that point. And
Speaker 8: he started playing with these hand puppets. And then right
Speaker 8: after they began questioning him about you know, you have
Speaker 8: to read people there Miranda rights and say do you
Speaker 8: want an attorney present? And he cut off the interview
Speaker 8: and said, I want to exercise my six Amendment rights.
Speaker 8: And that's not something a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 8: who've just been arrested say. So it showed that he
Speaker 8: was very intelligent, He was aware of certain things. He
Speaker 8: just seemed to have no emotional connection whatsoever to what
Speaker 8: he did, but his mind was still quite functional.
Speaker 7: Now, this book incredibly goes back and forth between real examples,
Speaker 7: past examples, keeps you uppa with current events, and then
Speaker 7: goes back to this delayed case. It takes well over
Speaker 7: two years to wind through the courts with all the delays.
Speaker 7: And as you write, it's an historic case based on
Speaker 7: the insanity plea and based on confidentially lawyer confidentiality.
Speaker 9: And this makes you doctor patient doctor patient partinentiality. Actually
Speaker 9: the confidentiality between his psychiatrist and himself. You know what
Speaker 9: responsibility did she play in that? That was part of
Speaker 9: the thing in the trial, part of the issues.
Speaker 7: You're also right here because again keeping up with current events,
Speaker 7: you say, by the end of the year, as this
Speaker 7: case is delayed, by the end of the year you
Speaker 7: have Adam Lanza and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Speaker 7: And then you go from there. And when you talk statistics,
Speaker 7: about eleven thousand a year gun homicides thirty times the
Speaker 7: murder rate of France or Australia and about twelve times
Speaker 7: most countries, tell us what you include in this book
Speaker 7: in terms of examples, and what is some of the
Speaker 7: most profound statistics that you found other than the ones
Speaker 7: I decided.
Speaker 8: Well, I think I have a little statistical material here.
Speaker 8: I mean, you alluded to some of it, but near
Speaker 8: the end of the book we wrote the numbers surrounding
Speaker 8: the phenomenon of mass shootings may be hard to absorb,
Speaker 8: but they were repeating. In the nineteen sixties there was
Speaker 8: one prominent school shooting, The nineteen eighties saw twenty seven
Speaker 8: of them, the nineteen nineties had fifty eight, and from
Speaker 8: two thousand to twenty twelve there were one hundred and two.
Speaker 8: An increase of more than ten thousand percent over fifty years,
Speaker 8: so clearly, you know it's something that had grown. And
Speaker 8: the next sentence and that is, actually the shooters were
Speaker 8: usually between about fifteen and twenty, so many of them
Speaker 8: were quite young. So to go back really to where
Speaker 8: we started with our son, I mean, he said, you know,
Speaker 8: you need to look at several things in the culture
Speaker 8: that that are very prominent that they weren't around as
Speaker 8: nearly you know when you were growing up. You really
Speaker 8: don't understand my experience and the experience of young young
Speaker 8: people my age. And he pointed at He pointed at
Speaker 8: video the video game culture.
Speaker 9: The internet.
Speaker 8: He pointed at the Internet, and you know, the things
Speaker 8: that young people could see on on there. He pointed
Speaker 8: at at pharmaceutical drugs, which was really interesting because if
Speaker 8: you go back a couple of minutes to what I
Speaker 8: was saying earlier, if you look at the home situation,
Speaker 8: it involves again a huge increase in playing video games
Speaker 8: leading up to this, an obsession with violent entertainment, which
Speaker 8: is something else Eric talked about. It absolutely involves the
Speaker 8: use of those pharmaceuticals as opposed to you know, getting
Speaker 8: some real therapy or real help.
Speaker 9: Or he also said, you know, was telling us about
Speaker 9: the usage of drugs to treat I think it's adderall
Speaker 9: right for ADHD that you know, college students are trading
Speaker 9: amongst themselves to study for tests. So you know this,
Speaker 9: this is a whole different world that the millennials are
Speaker 9: involved in than we as baby boomers were.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I mean again he went in comparing himself
Speaker 8: to us. You know, we we were you know, we
Speaker 8: grew up in the sixties. I mean, we were attached
Speaker 8: to a number of social and political causes, things that
Speaker 8: we really believed in, things that were larger than ourselves,
Speaker 8: things that were occurring within a moral context. And when
Speaker 8: he talked about their generation, I mean that just wasn't there.
Speaker 8: It just wasn't present in the same way. And it
Speaker 8: was just it was very striking to us to sort
Speaker 8: of make these comparisons and to sort of dig below
Speaker 8: what he was really saying. And if you look at
Speaker 8: Holmes's spiral notebook, the one that he wrote and sent
Speaker 8: to a psychiatrist, it's all about trying to find some
Speaker 8: meaning beyond himself, some value in other people and in himself.
Speaker 8: So these things really did square up that our son
Speaker 8: told us about from the very beginning.
Speaker 7: Now, we didn't touch on gun culture itself, but of
Speaker 7: course it's a big part of this story as well.
Speaker 7: And you talk about the Fedek's package that was tracked,
Speaker 7: and you also will go back to he said there
Speaker 7: was explosives in his apartment. It was too dangerous to
Speaker 7: go there. They sent a robot in to take a look,
Speaker 7: but ultimately they had to go back to Holmes. What
Speaker 7: happens with Holmes when they ask him both these explosives
Speaker 7: and is he any different than when he is the
Speaker 7: first arrested, And what is the result of this interview
Speaker 7: with him about the explosives and diffusing of them potentially.
Speaker 8: Well, he seemed to be in some kind of a
Speaker 8: manic phase.
Speaker 9: And he'd also been up all night.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he'd been up all night. Why his pupils were
Speaker 8: so dilated? We never quite well, I thought.
Speaker 9: That he had put Let me answer that, because in
Speaker 9: court I saw, you know, the photos of him as
Speaker 9: he was preparing to go to the shooting. He was
Speaker 9: putting these black contacts in his eyes and putting these
Speaker 9: very strange you know, putting his hair really weird, and
Speaker 9: making himself look almost you know, devilish and taking selfies
Speaker 9: of himself like that. So I think he probably still
Speaker 9: had those black contacts in.
Speaker 8: Yes, so he may have been rather manic, you know
Speaker 8: when he was first arrested in doing those things with
Speaker 8: his hands. Then the next afternoon, I mean, the bomb
Speaker 8: squad went to his apartment and they felt it was
Speaker 8: too dangerous to What Holmes had planned on to happen
Speaker 8: was that he had music, very loud, raucous music set
Speaker 8: to go off at one am the morning of the crime.
Speaker 9: His apartment, Yeah, his.
Speaker 8: Apartment, And then he thought, and the whole apartment was
Speaker 8: wired so that if the front door was pushed open,
Speaker 8: the whole thing would detonate and it would not just
Speaker 8: blow up his apartment, but the whole building. He had
Speaker 8: nay palm in there. He had numerous explosive devices. And
Speaker 8: the music went off, and a woman came upstairs and
Speaker 8: looked in the door, but for some reason she did
Speaker 8: not push it or touch it, so it never that
Speaker 8: did not happen. And when he spoke with the authorities
Speaker 8: that afternoon after his arrest, he was much calmer, and
Speaker 8: he was quite lucid, and he told them how to
Speaker 8: defuse the bombs.
Speaker 9: Have to also remember that, you know, had his plan
Speaker 9: gone according to what he had originally wanted, that would
Speaker 9: have created a diversion so that a lot of the
Speaker 9: law enforcement would have been drawn to that apartment scene.
Speaker 9: He's gun hadn't jammed, that AR fifteen or whatever weapon
Speaker 9: he had at the time that he was fired, hadn't jammed,
Speaker 9: he would have killed a lot more people and wounded
Speaker 9: a lot more than he did.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean this was a huge, hugely destructive plan,
Speaker 8: the level of building with I don't know, johnish what
Speaker 8: fifteen or twenty probably units apartments in it, yes, and
Speaker 8: then shoot more people. As she said, I mean, he
Speaker 8: was on a path of mass destruction.
Speaker 7: Now, let's when we talk about James Holmes, what happens
Speaker 7: with his rights as being he knews his sixth Amendment rights,
Speaker 7: but to be able to question him about this explosives
Speaker 7: and the diffusement. Tell us how they get around this
Speaker 7: and obvious argument from a defense.
Speaker 8: Lawyer, Well, they they felt, the police felt, the investigators
Speaker 8: felt that public safety issues overrode his miranda rights of
Speaker 8: having an attorney present. As we said, about three am
Speaker 8: that morning, about two and a half hours after the event,
Speaker 8: he asked for a lawyer to be present. He didn't
Speaker 8: get a lawyer at that time, so they put him
Speaker 8: in a cell and then they brought him out. And
Speaker 8: what the police essentially did was confused the Public Defender's
Speaker 8: office over the course of that day about where he
Speaker 8: was actually being held, so those lawyers couldn't s go
Speaker 8: up to help him so that they could sit down
Speaker 8: with him and get this information out of him as
Speaker 8: quickly as possible about his apartment. They thought the entire
Speaker 8: thing was going to blow and that was more important
Speaker 8: than that he should have a lawyer presence. So defense
Speaker 8: lawyers jumped on that later on and said, well, then
Speaker 8: all the information he gave you can't be used against him.
Speaker 8: That was fought out in court. But ultimately, of course,
Speaker 8: he did confess to doing all of this and then
Speaker 8: pled insanity as a defense.
Speaker 7: Right now, you talk about this bulkamo dot com. So
Speaker 7: a few days before this crime, he simply went online
Speaker 7: tell us how easy it was to get the kind
Speaker 7: of ammunition he did.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've said this before in other situations, but I've
Speaker 8: had somebody charge a little something to my credit card
Speaker 8: or some little glitch in a credit card situation. And
Speaker 8: you get a call from Visa or master Card or whomever,
Speaker 8: and they said, somebody put a fifteen dollars charge on
Speaker 8: your credit card. Here was a guy ordering mass amounts
Speaker 8: of ammunition, six thousand rounds of one kind of ammunition,
Speaker 8: all kinds of tactical gear, guns, etc. A whole arsenal
Speaker 8: really to plan this crime, and it set off no
Speaker 8: ripples anywhere within you know, the law enforcement system. So
Speaker 8: it raises a lot of questions about access to weapons
Speaker 8: like AR fifteens that are purely military weapons, access to
Speaker 8: that much ammunition, spending all of that money, and no
Speaker 8: red flags came up, So that you know, it has
Speaker 8: produced some changes in the laws in Colorado that make
Speaker 8: it somewhat harder to get gun, so that that's been
Speaker 8: a positive result.
Speaker 7: Now, tell me Joyce about the this touching scene or
Speaker 7: shocking scene where the media calls tracks down our lean homes.
Speaker 7: And she's a nurse living near San Diego. And how
Speaker 7: does she find out about this information? Tell us this
Speaker 7: exchange where she finds out that her what her son
Speaker 7: has been accused of.
Speaker 9: Well, I believe somebody called her and told her what
Speaker 9: had happened, and she said, well, yes, that sounds like
Speaker 9: my son. But they you know, I think they were confused,
Speaker 9: and people thought it to mean, oh yeah, that sounds
Speaker 9: like him, because that's the kind of stuff that he does.
Speaker 9: But that in court later she clarified that she was
Speaker 9: just you know, they they called in the middle of
Speaker 9: the night and she was very confused as to what
Speaker 9: was going on. From what I could tell from their
Speaker 9: familial relationship, it wasn't like they were a very communicative family.
Speaker 9: The father was sort of like the same personality of
Speaker 9: James Holmes kind of. I mean, not to say that
Speaker 9: they weren't loving, but not real demonstrative sort of to themselves.
Speaker 9: But she was you know, they came to court every
Speaker 9: day and they and you could tell it was It
Speaker 9: was heart wrenching. It was hard on the sister as well.
Speaker 9: James Holmes had a younger sister, and it tore their
Speaker 9: family apart just just as much as it did the
Speaker 9: families you know that.
Speaker 8: Experienced loss right And it sounds simplistic, but what's missing
Speaker 8: from the whole story is that some sort of human touch,
Speaker 8: you know, that's what he was looking for when he
Speaker 8: went to the therapist. As he's building up to.
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Speaker 8: With the crime, buying all the ammunition, the guns, making
Speaker 8: the plans, you know, he's sending his parents these emails.
Speaker 8: This is what I made for dinner, you know, this
Speaker 8: is what I bought up the store. There's no you know,
Speaker 8: there's just no connectiveness there. And his parents seem like
Speaker 8: very decent people. I mean watching them in court as
Speaker 8: Joey said that the mother testified they had no clue
Speaker 8: who their son was, none whatsoever, and by the time
Speaker 8: they got a glimpse it was far too late.
Speaker 9: He did get some help, some you know, help with therapist,
Speaker 9: says he was growing up. So they knew he was
Speaker 9: he had some emotional problems. I don't think they had
Speaker 9: any idea to what extent.
Speaker 7: Right, right, Yeah, what you talk about. We touched on
Speaker 7: pharmaceutical drugs, and I think the gross over prescription and
Speaker 7: over reliance and overtrusting of these pharmaceutical drugs to solve
Speaker 7: all kinds of problems, and the over labeling. I think
Speaker 7: of people with all kinds of problems that seem anew
Speaker 7: But also you examine the phenomena of video games and
Speaker 7: the rise in popularity and the tendency towards more and
Speaker 7: more violence. Tell us about what your son had found
Speaker 7: and what you spoke with other people. Tell us about
Speaker 7: this very important and interesting part of the story.
Speaker 8: Well, yeah, again, I don't think either Joyce or has
Speaker 8: ever played a video game. So this was one of
Speaker 8: the key things that Eric meant when he said that.
Speaker 8: And you know, we watched some of these things after
Speaker 8: this happened. I mean, the violence of it and how
Speaker 8: it sort of mirrored the wars that America was fighting,
Speaker 8: I mean from Vietnam to Desert Storm, you know, right
Speaker 8: right into the present with Iraq and all that, and
Speaker 8: they just kept incorporating all of these things into the games,
Speaker 8: and then they incorporated the torture that they came out
Speaker 8: from the reports in Iraq, Abu Grave and other places
Speaker 8: that occurred after the turn of the New millennium. And
Speaker 8: you know, we just had no idea what kids were
Speaker 8: really watching, what they're really interacting.
Speaker 9: Even the movies you know, he was telling us about,
Speaker 9: you know, he had us watch The Matrix and Fight
Speaker 9: Club and movies that I don't know, after a point,
Speaker 9: it just seems like you just get desensitized to a
Speaker 9: bit of this just instant violence.
Speaker 8: Right, And we talked to a number of professionals about,
Speaker 8: you know, the effects of all that. I mean it.
Speaker 8: They would tell you that in preparing soldiers for combat,
Speaker 8: one man in particular, the VA and he talked about
Speaker 8: all the studies where, you know, to try and get
Speaker 8: people to go into combat and actually shoot people, you
Speaker 8: use a lot of video techniques to sort of soften
Speaker 8: them up to be able to do that or harden
Speaker 8: them up. And you know, this was the same sort
Speaker 8: of phenomenon, and you just, you know, we just did
Speaker 8: not really understand the way our son grew up. Just
Speaker 8: as he told us.
Speaker 9: He also told us about you know that what it
Speaker 9: was like to be brought up with Y two K
Speaker 9: nine to eleven, you know it. Stent was just like
Speaker 9: one apocalyptic type of thing over and over again and
Speaker 9: reflected in their movies, you know, post apocalyptic. When he
Speaker 9: went up to see you the first year that he
Speaker 9: was up there, he was riding his bike onder an
Speaker 9: underpass and there was just a big sign saying something
Speaker 9: like it's all going to end. Just go ahead and
Speaker 9: kill yourself.
Speaker 8: Now, right, dystopian. Yeah, the whole thing. And again to
Speaker 8: just you know, to compare it more to our growing up,
Speaker 8: which had its share of turmoil, but you know, a
Speaker 8: civil rights movement which was a very good thing, of
Speaker 8: war protests, which was a good thing, you know, making
Speaker 8: the more inclusive society in all kinds of ways. These
Speaker 8: were all large social things that touched most people our
Speaker 8: age and I think, you know, helped us as human beings.
Speaker 8: And there was just this sense of emptiness or disconnectedness
Speaker 8: that Eric talked about, and you know, most kids adjust
Speaker 8: to it in one way or not, but Holmes was
Speaker 8: just the classic example. He just didn't connect with anything
Speaker 8: and descended so far into his world he didn't even
Speaker 8: know that he was shooting people.
Speaker 7: Now you talk about the issues that delay a trial
Speaker 7: that would normally not have taken as long as this
Speaker 7: at all, and also the incredible amount of secrecy involved
Speaker 7: in this trial, which was unprecedented. So tell us the
Speaker 7: nature and the reason for the secrecy and also the
Speaker 7: reasons for the numerous delays. What were the issues?
Speaker 8: Well, they had to the defenses, I recall, waited almost
Speaker 8: a year to enter a plea. The American legal system
Speaker 8: is you know, kind of string things out like nothing else.
Speaker 8: So the defense stalled, installed, installed. After eight months or so,
Speaker 8: entered a plead which was finally not you know, not
Speaker 8: guilty by reason of insanity. So that took the best
Speaker 8: part of the year. Then one of the first judge
Speaker 8: quit and a new judge came in and he had
Speaker 8: to appoint someone to study homes from a psychiatric point
Speaker 8: of view and determined if he was sane or insane
Speaker 8: at the time of the crime, which is a very
Speaker 8: you know, difficult and sort of abstract thing to do.
Speaker 9: Well, we were sent to the state hospital in Peblo
Speaker 9: for that examination.
Speaker 8: Right, and that took an extraordinarily long time, basically of
Speaker 8: about a couple more years. So the crime occurred in
Speaker 8: July of twenty twelve. I think the psychiatric report was
Speaker 8: done in the fall of twenty fourteen. It's more than
Speaker 8: two years and the trial began. Our jury selection began
Speaker 8: in January of twenty fifteen. And you know, it's a
Speaker 8: dubious enter I am sort of in my view to
Speaker 8: interview somebody two and a half years after they did
Speaker 8: something to try and determine their state of mind when
Speaker 8: they actually did it. So that the psychiatric part of
Speaker 8: it was not very satisfying in many ways in terms
Speaker 8: of this case. So that was one of the frustrating
Speaker 8: parts of it. It took it took three years to
Speaker 8: you adjudicate the thing, and you still didn't really get
Speaker 8: a psychologically penetrating view of Holmes. The most revealing part
Speaker 8: of it was he wrote himself, you know, and his
Speaker 8: experience leading up to the crime.
Speaker 7: Tell us explain to our audience what was the the
Speaker 7: the issue between the notebook again the confidentiality between patient
Speaker 7: and doctor, and you talked about it in that she
Speaker 7: felt that the sessions were ended. But this becomes a
Speaker 7: very big, very big part in delaying this trial and
Speaker 7: affecting this trial is the status of that notebook and
Speaker 7: the status of that psychiatrist in relation to Holmes and
Speaker 7: that notebook.
Speaker 8: Right, So he left her sessions on June eleventh of
Speaker 8: twenty twelve. That was his last session with her. He
Speaker 8: had told her, as Joyce said that he wanted to
Speaker 8: kill a lot of people. They didn't really intervene, and
Speaker 8: then he left. On the afternoon of July twentieth, twenty twelve,
Speaker 8: which is five or six weeks later. He is preparing
Speaker 8: to go to the theater and commit the crime. He
Speaker 8: puts in the mail his viral notebook, which essentially talks
Speaker 8: about killing people and all of those things. So the
Speaker 8: question was it arrives at her office three days later,
Speaker 8: I think on July twenty third, So the question was
Speaker 8: is that confidential material between a psychiatrist and a patient
Speaker 8: or has that relationship been severed because he stopped going
Speaker 8: to see her on June eleventh. You can only imagine
Speaker 8: what lawyers could do with that kind of argument. I mean,
Speaker 8: the defense said, yes, it's protected, you can't open it,
Speaker 8: nobody has access to it. The prosecution says, of course,
Speaker 8: we have access to it. It's material evidence in this crime.
Speaker 8: So it took a very, very long time for them
Speaker 8: to sort all of that out, and the notebook was
Speaker 8: not opened to the public until the trial actually began,
Speaker 8: which was in April twenty fifteen, so you're writ at
Speaker 8: about three years before that notebook gets open. So I
Speaker 8: mean that one of the discouraging, disheartening parts of this
Speaker 8: and what we were kind of trying to examine was
Speaker 8: the sort of emotional psychological underpinnings of it, and our
Speaker 8: legal system can delay that process for a very long time.
Speaker 8: So I mean, I feel I think we feel there's
Speaker 8: a sort of overwriting need to understand why young men
Speaker 8: are doing this. Apart from all the legal arguments, there's
Speaker 8: no question about who did this and what happened and
Speaker 8: all of that. We were trying to get more the
Speaker 8: why of it.
Speaker 7: What you talk about the media, and it's always take
Speaker 7: on this and how they speculate and also how they
Speaker 7: just present this case to the public. But you speak
Speaker 7: about a particular freelance journalist that puts a few things
Speaker 7: together like Robert Holmes, James holmes father's occupation and some
Speaker 7: of the things that James was hoping to do and
Speaker 7: working in terms of areas of science, and puts together
Speaker 7: another narrative that's far more against storybook, but very very
Speaker 7: interesting tell us about this scenario he puts forward in
Speaker 7: the media about the reason for maybe even the shooting,
Speaker 7: but at least his connection to science and the father
Speaker 7: in the military.
Speaker 8: Well, very early on, I mean, there was all kinds
Speaker 8: of speculation on the media, in the media that you know,
Speaker 8: somehow this was connected to very secretive research being done
Speaker 8: in the neuroscience department at the University of Colorado.
Speaker 9: It was connected to wasn't Wasn't that one of the
Speaker 9: ones that they were saying it was connected to. There
Speaker 9: was all kinds of conspiracy theories because there was so
Speaker 9: much time that elapsed between the crime and the actual
Speaker 9: trial that all kinds of strange theories started popping up
Speaker 9: on the internet.
Speaker 8: It seems to me, and I think it seems in
Speaker 8: our book that the truth is simpler. You know, this
Speaker 8: guy could not make a human connection that made his
Speaker 8: life worth living or other people's lives worthwhile, And that's
Speaker 8: the more basic point of it. You know that that
Speaker 8: tell them about the woman Kira Jones, you know, because
Speaker 8: that story really does illuminate a lot about the spiral outbooks.
Speaker 9: Well, we you know, we interviewed a woman that had
Speaker 9: been living in Barcelona when the crime occurred, and she
Speaker 9: was on her way back to the States and somebody said,
Speaker 9: you know, why do you even want to move back
Speaker 9: to the States, And she told us some of the
Speaker 9: difference between say, the European culture and American culture. For example,
Speaker 9: if someone was sitting in a sidewalk cafe and everybody
Speaker 9: is in Barcelona at night and they're sitting and they're
Speaker 9: talking and they're eat drinking and eating and having fun,
Speaker 9: and somebody was sitting at a computer by themselves, that
Speaker 9: would that would raise concerns to people over there. They
Speaker 9: would think that that was unusual. Over here, not so much,
Speaker 9: because there's more of a sense of community there, she said.
Speaker 9: And also, it takes a year to get a gun
Speaker 9: in Spain, and then she would say why and why
Speaker 9: would you even want a gun in the first place.
Speaker 9: So we noticed the real difference between the European mindset
Speaker 9: and the American mindset as far as guns, as far
Speaker 9: as socializing and sense of community and watching out for
Speaker 9: other people that might raise red flags and their behavior
Speaker 9: isolating behavior.
Speaker 8: Is that what you mean, Steve bil Yeah, I mean
Speaker 8: that it's it's not as conspiracy about the Department of
Speaker 8: Defense or something, or an implant in James Holmes's brain
Speaker 8: or something like that. It's this sort of isolated and
Speaker 8: isolation inability to connect you with other people. When we
Speaker 8: get to the end of the book, we devote a
Speaker 8: couple of chapters to this concept of mindfulness, which is
Speaker 8: basically about teaching kids certain things about how to control
Speaker 8: themselves more, how to interact with other people, how to
Speaker 8: get their emotions under control, and all of those things,
Speaker 8: because as we've seen in all of these shooters who
Speaker 8: are again around age say, eighteen to thirty, by the
Speaker 8: time they're there and by the time those wires are
Speaker 8: not hooked up, it's too late, you know, they're too
Speaker 8: detached from their own humanity and other people to be stopped.
Speaker 8: So that we were not you know, trying to exploit
Speaker 8: the violence in what we were writing about, but understand
Speaker 8: it and even offer some potential solutions to some of
Speaker 8: these things, because you've got to help kids when they're young,
Speaker 8: you know, to make those connections.
Speaker 7: You write in the book that there is all kinds
Speaker 7: of media joined forces to be able to in this
Speaker 7: delay to try to protest and petition Judge Seymour to
Speaker 7: allow the media to know the contents of what was
Speaker 7: happening in the hearing. But also, as you say, they
Speaker 7: were very interested in the contents of that spiral notebook.
Speaker 7: So tell us about the trial and what is learned
Speaker 7: about the contents of the notebook.
Speaker 8: Well, I think the main thing that comes out of
Speaker 8: it is is what you could almost paul, a spiritual
Speaker 8: search for meaning of a young man who's got great intelligence,
Speaker 8: really would have a great future in neuroscience, but he's
Speaker 8: looking for something else, some emotional or spiritual underpinning to life.
Speaker 8: That science doesn't give him that. When he turns to
Speaker 8: the world of psychiatry, it doesn't give him that. When
Speaker 8: he tries to have a relationship with a young woman,
Speaker 8: it's not working out. And these are the things that
Speaker 8: culminate in the crime. I mean, if we're going to
Speaker 8: focus this much attention on an event like this or
Speaker 8: a person, and it seems that we the public have
Speaker 8: the right to know what, you know, what he's thinking,
Speaker 8: what he's feeling, and what we can learn from that,
Speaker 8: what we might be able to teach kids out of
Speaker 8: something like that or help people. And that was the
Speaker 8: whole frustrating part of watching this unfold. Legally, Lawyers arguing
Speaker 8: doesn't get us anywhere. It's just one more level of conflict.
Speaker 8: And we were trying in this book to get past that.
Speaker 7: When you say you get past that, you also wanted
Speaker 7: to again. It's always an elusive search for meaning, for
Speaker 7: reasons for why this can happen. But you include a
Speaker 7: lot of from Eric and as other contemporaries that that
Speaker 7: something that even I didn't realize. I mean, I went
Speaker 7: to high school. I don't think we didn't my friends
Speaker 7: that went through high school. We don't talk about the
Speaker 7: bullying that we had in high school. So I think
Speaker 7: bullying itself, and it has changed, and that effect seems
Speaker 7: to be evident with most of these shooters as well,
Speaker 7: of vengeance ensues from the bullying that they encountered in
Speaker 7: high school. And so you type of pressure that seems
Speaker 7: foreign to to the baby bloomers.
Speaker 9: Well, that's very true because now when you think about it,
Speaker 9: you can bully someone on social media much more effectively
Speaker 9: than you could back when we went were in high school.
Speaker 9: And you're probably younger than us. Dan, that's true, much
Speaker 9: far reaching effects. And you look at the Columbine killers.
Speaker 9: I mean, they were bullied and they they you know,
Speaker 9: they took out their revenge and the best way possible
Speaker 9: in their minds. So Eric said to us, you know,
Speaker 9: watch just he said, just watch when the school years starts,
Speaker 9: that's when you'll start seeing more of these shooter shootings occur,
Speaker 9: because that's where it's it's that's where it's starting to
Speaker 9: take place, the bullying in the schools. You Eric always
Speaker 9: said that something needs to be changed in the schools
Speaker 9: themselves when the children are young, with bullying, with conflict resolution.
Speaker 8: Right, And that's why we put the mindfulness in there,
Speaker 8: because that's when kids need to be shown alternative ways
Speaker 8: of thinking, alternative ways of resolving conflict. You know, when
Speaker 8: the shooting comes, I mean you're just seeing that, you know,
Speaker 8: tip of that proverbial iceberg. There has been a lot
Speaker 8: of pain in the build up to that, and you
Speaker 8: know that's what we need to explore.
Speaker 7: You also explore again and you single out a couple
Speaker 7: games for I think for good reason. In the examples
Speaker 7: that you provide is Grand Theft, Auto and call of Duty,
Speaker 7: and that you say cite examples that are quite telling.
Speaker 7: I think when you can fly the same jetis as
Speaker 7: the nine to eleven into a building and sort of
Speaker 7: courting all these destructive not sort of courting destructive impulses,
Speaker 7: reinforcing the most violent racist, anti Buslim slurs, extreme humor,
Speaker 7: all of these things reinforced. And you pose the question it,
Speaker 7: you know, engineers and other people like Holmes and other
Speaker 7: people do this unwind and may not go on obviously
Speaker 7: go on to do anything like this, But how does
Speaker 7: this affect the mental ill a mentally ill young man
Speaker 7: in America today?
Speaker 8: Well, I just think it tilts everything in a very
Speaker 8: dangerous direction, you know, if that's your you know again,
Speaker 8: I mean, if we want to make the comparison we
Speaker 8: we when we were young people, we thought that, you know,
Speaker 8: bombing Vietnam and killing a lot of people probably wasn't
Speaker 8: accomplishing anything, you know good, and history turned out to,
Speaker 8: you know, support that it wasn't a video game to
Speaker 8: people our age. It wasn't a form of entertainment where
Speaker 8: you would show people being nay palmed and then you
Speaker 8: would play a game around that and do high fives
Speaker 8: and drink beer. I mean, it's a detachment level from
Speaker 8: what violence actually is. If you're reinforcing that constantly. It's
Speaker 8: a very questionable thing to do. And then you throw
Speaker 8: in metal instability, and it's a real problem. So, you know,
Speaker 8: people want their entertainment. We understand that, but you really
Speaker 8: have to stop and question it.
Speaker 7: And yes, you cite other countries like Germany that would
Speaker 7: edit video games or limit video games, whereas it seems
Speaker 7: like America has no limit. And you talk about eight
Speaker 7: hundred million dollars worth of product for grant Seft Auto
Speaker 7: in three days, up to a billion dollars within a
Speaker 7: short period of time, and titles like body count and
Speaker 7: Hatred and genocide crusade. But explain what you mean by
Speaker 7: this change from deductive learning to procedural learning.
Speaker 8: Well, I mean to go back to what you said.
Speaker 8: You know, Germany learned enough about violence where they could
Speaker 8: actually reinforce in their culture that there's certain things that
Speaker 8: are not going to be allowed. You know, we haven't
Speaker 8: reached that point. I mean, we're debating whether anybody can
Speaker 8: go buy an AR fifteen and fire off one hundred
Speaker 8: rounds in a minute. You know a lot of countries
Speaker 8: I believe you're Canadian, but I think a lot of
Speaker 8: other countries would have crossed that threshold much more easily.
Speaker 8: This is about American culture. We were writing about the culture,
Speaker 8: not just the individual. And that's the whole point of
Speaker 8: the book. You know, we have a responsibility as a
Speaker 8: culture to decide what we're going to allow on what
Speaker 8: we're not going to allow, and unfortunately, you know, we're
Speaker 8: still we're not at that point of understanding that this
Speaker 8: stuff are devastating on a community. I mean, that's what
Speaker 8: Joyce experienced, you know, when she was in the courtroom
Speaker 8: and when I was there. And that's the whole point
Speaker 8: of writing the book. These are not we're all involved
Speaker 8: in this in some way, in terms of the gun control,
Speaker 8: in terms of the mental health issues, in terms of
Speaker 8: the drugs. These are not things that are out there.
Speaker 8: They're right here. And that was the point of saying,
Speaker 8: you know, it's one thing to read about there's a
Speaker 8: mass shooting in Florida, But when it occurs five miles
Speaker 8: from your house, in a place that you've been in
Speaker 8: with your kid on a repeated basis, that can touch you,
Speaker 8: that can kill you, and what is our responsibility visa
Speaker 8: vi all of those things as a society. That's the
Speaker 8: conversation we were trying to start by taking on the
Speaker 8: book and listening to the things our son said.
Speaker 7: What was interesting too, is that somehow, rather the contents
Speaker 7: of the Spiral notebook again all the secrecy in this case,
Speaker 7: were leaked to a Fox reporter named Jana Winner. Why
Speaker 7: do you think that happened? And what was the effect
Speaker 7: on this trial that leakage?
Speaker 5: Well, it's a good question. I think it was leaked
Speaker 5: from someone in the.
Speaker 8: In law enforcement.
Speaker 7: Hello, okay, yes, from law orsement.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I'm having trouble with this phone. Can you
Speaker 5: speak to that?
Speaker 8: See yeah, hold on, Yeah, it was it was leaked
Speaker 8: by somebody in law enforcement to a reporter, and that
Speaker 8: became another, you know, major issue and legal issue and
Speaker 8: delaying everything. But ultimately it didn't affect that much of
Speaker 8: the trial.
Speaker 7: Now with this with this trial in the end, with
Speaker 7: all the delays and with all the issues, uh and
Speaker 7: and the call for another assessment again, the defense had
Speaker 7: a vigorous defense for James Holmes trying to save his life.
Speaker 7: In the end, what did everyone learn from this trial?
Speaker 7: You you talk about that you have the argument that
Speaker 7: somebody puts forward anyway in the book that you support,
Speaker 7: is that you know people will thirst for revenge in this,
Speaker 7: but maybe he would be a really good idea to
Speaker 7: put this person in the hospital, especially because he's intelligent,
Speaker 7: especially because he wasn't born to kill, he wasn't killing
Speaker 7: that there can be something very valuable to learn from
Speaker 7: studying this man rather than the death penalty. Now, did
Speaker 7: anybody see that in this trial? And what was the
Speaker 7: outcome and what did we learn in America from this
Speaker 7: trial that took those long and enacted such a toll.
Speaker 5: Well for our state anyway, were to go after the
Speaker 5: death penalty, I thought was I don't know, and a
Speaker 5: lot of people thought was a huge mistake. It was.
Speaker 5: It cost millions and millions of dollars. It put people
Speaker 5: through so much trauma that had to go through this trial.
Speaker 5: They ultimately was not that they didn't give him the
Speaker 5: death penalty. He should be studied. What do you think.
Speaker 8: See, Yes, I think that the ultimate lesson was if
Speaker 8: you see somebody who really is troubled, or if somebody
Speaker 8: is talking about violence, you need to take it seriously.
Speaker 8: I mean, he mentioned this to friends, He mentioned this
Speaker 8: to his girlfriend, He mentioned this to the psychiatrist. I mean,
Speaker 8: it shocked me that you could go into a psychiatrist
Speaker 8: at the University Hospital and repeatedly say, you wanted to
Speaker 8: kill a lot of people after all of the school
Speaker 8: shootings that we had had in the United States. We've
Speaker 8: already given you the numbers, and that wouldn't set off
Speaker 8: a lot of bells. I found that extraordinary and so
Speaker 8: to be that's the lesson. We're all a part of this,
Speaker 8: and we all need to be observant and to realize that,
Speaker 8: you know, it has a connection to us, it can
Speaker 8: happen to us.
Speaker 7: What about the effects of because as I read it
Speaker 7: and I look at this issue, I am very dismayed. Again.
Speaker 7: I know, I don't believe in censorship, but I do
Speaker 7: believe that, you know, an unbridled video game industry that
Speaker 7: resorts to violence and this kind of stuff like killing
Speaker 7: people and high fiving, like you say, is a conditioning
Speaker 7: that is going to end up to be destructive and
Speaker 7: highly destructive, and that seems to be bore out by
Speaker 7: these these crimes. But also what's even more disturbing, I
Speaker 7: think is if you think about it, somebody's taking what
Speaker 7: what somebody would think as a very innocuous or an
Speaker 7: innocent antidepressant, but if what you say that these killings
Speaker 7: the evidence looks like there's they're linked to psychotropic drugs themselves.
Speaker 8: Right I I they're You know, there is no more
Speaker 8: compelling image of the eight years of Barack Obama in
Speaker 8: office and standing in front of the country and saying,
Speaker 8: we've had another mass shooting. This one was in Aurora,
Speaker 8: this one was in Sandy Hook, this one was in
Speaker 8: Florida or wherever we're But but there's no follow through
Speaker 8: on the real substance of dealing with these issues. You know,
Speaker 8: that's it's that's a hard thing to do, to take on,
Speaker 8: you know, some of those industries. It would be good
Speaker 8: to see somebody at that political level speak up about
Speaker 8: these things and to open a dialogue. And again not
Speaker 8: to say, well, we have all the answers, you know,
Speaker 8: this is the way to do it, but to be
Speaker 8: able to talk about it more openly and freely. And again,
Speaker 8: that was the whole purpose in writing the book was
Speaker 8: to start that conversation. It got close enough to us,
Speaker 8: it was disturbing enough to has to say, how else
Speaker 8: can we think about this problem?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 7: Right? He had such a huge problem to tackle, so
Speaker 7: obviously the issues have to be complex. There's certain factors
Speaker 7: and as you do in this book, it deserves an
Speaker 7: incredible exploration, as you've done, because you can't look at
Speaker 7: any easy answers. If you looked at things separately, you
Speaker 7: could see an influence. But as James Holmes really illustrates,
Speaker 7: it was a sudden departure from his behavior, from this
Speaker 7: promising intelligent man, that there has to be something, some
Speaker 7: outside factors, because it otherwise it almost looks like some
Speaker 7: kind of possession or something for somebody to go and
Speaker 7: do this without any reason. What do you think America
Speaker 7: learned as a result of this. It's been a little
Speaker 7: bit of time. You've seen the continued violence, it's unabated.
Speaker 7: As you mentioned, it seems that America's handcuffed by the industries.
Speaker 7: There's going to be no gun control, there's not going
Speaker 7: to be any changes in psychotropic drugs. That conversation hasn't
Speaker 7: been ignited because of this case. What do you think
Speaker 7: America's learned from this case?
Speaker 5: If anything, well, you know, to us, it's like it
Speaker 5: seems like something would have happened after the Sandy Hook shooting.
Speaker 5: If anything was going to happen, it seems like that
Speaker 5: was the one would have started it all. But I mean,
Speaker 5: I wish somebody in the government would form some sort
Speaker 5: of committee to at least study the phenomena and start
Speaker 5: asking the questions that we're asking here about what part
Speaker 5: the violent video game industry, the movie and television industry,
Speaker 5: the big pharma. I wish somebody could put together on
Speaker 5: a government level that type of a committee to start
Speaker 5: studying this, But I don't see that happening.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: It's very discouraging. I mean, that would be the best
Speaker 8: possible outcome, just to raise the awareness around the issue.
Speaker 8: And again that's that's what we were trying to do
Speaker 8: in writing the book, So we hope it's it's had
Speaker 8: some impact. We were interviewed recently by a young man
Speaker 8: from Canada who is sort of doing a study of
Speaker 8: this phenomenon, and he was asking all the right questions.
Speaker 8: So there is some movement out there, but we need
Speaker 8: to do a lot more.
Speaker 7: What do you think Eric thought of your If not
Speaker 7: that you come to a direct black and white conclusion,
Speaker 7: you really used Eric enlisted him for this to be
Speaker 7: able to more fully understand this entire phenomena.
Speaker 5: If you'd like to ask Eric himself, he's right here.
Speaker 5: He's listening to the podcast and he has a lot
Speaker 5: to say on the subject. Would you like to answer
Speaker 5: that question?
Speaker 7: Eric? Hello, Hi Eric. As I mentioned, I appreciated your
Speaker 7: input in this, and as I'm sure that your parents
Speaker 7: did as well, to get a more rounded perspective of
Speaker 7: this from us old timers that are living in the past,
Speaker 7: and I'm not really aware of exactly how fast change happens.
Speaker 7: What did you think of this exploration that your parents
Speaker 7: undertook with your help to a certain degree. What do
Speaker 7: you think about this and what what are your ideas
Speaker 7: about this phenomena itself.
Speaker 10: Well, one of the funny things, maybe not funny, but
Speaker 10: one of the things we kind of realized very early
Speaker 10: on and after this happened and we started talking about it,
Speaker 10: was that I wasn't very shocked by it, and to
Speaker 10: them it was like the most unthinkable thing that someone
Speaker 10: could possibly do, and that that in and of itself
Speaker 10: lends it, you know, is kind of surprising. It shows
Speaker 10: what a difference then, you know, how different the world
Speaker 10: that we grew up in really was.
Speaker 7: So well, let me ask you this question there, because
Speaker 7: I see in this phenomenon another aspect of it and
Speaker 7: that is, once upon a time, like we mentioned, I
Speaker 7: guess maybe a lot of the people that were thinking,
Speaker 7: that were open minded, were against the Vietnam War, and
Speaker 7: they were against it, and they protested and they were
Speaker 7: vocal about it. Now, when you talk about this different sentiment,
Speaker 7: what is it if you can offer any kind of
Speaker 7: input in this is how is it that people don't
Speaker 7: care about the same kinds of values in terms of
Speaker 7: it for fame. It looks like a lot of these
Speaker 7: men don't care whether it's infamy or fame as long
Speaker 7: as they get noticed, as long as they are remembered.
Speaker 7: Is there something to that? Is there something contained in
Speaker 7: the video games that encourages that the sort of no
Speaker 7: matter what, at least if I go out on top,
Speaker 7: as as long as they remember me, as long as
Speaker 7: my name's in Wikipedia.
Speaker 4: I'm sure.
Speaker 10: I would I agree with that assessment, but I would
Speaker 10: try to just add an element of a little bit
Speaker 10: of the psychology around around the you know, these guys
Speaker 10: in general, And I would say that beyond just the
Speaker 10: fame or you know, getting some recognition, I think it
Speaker 10: has a little bit more to do with a sense
Speaker 10: of isolation that all these guys have and almost feeling
Speaker 10: to some degree like they just don't have a very
Speaker 10: big effect on the world and they feel ineffectual. And
Speaker 10: a big thing we talked about in the book, and
Speaker 10: we used, you know, some examples from movies, just because
Speaker 10: there's such a you know, a good way to kind
Speaker 10: of capture a little bit of culture is masculinity in crisis.
Speaker 10: Some movies like Fight Club, a movie like American Beauty
Speaker 10: that explores, you know, men, it explores masculinity, explores violence.
Speaker 10: I would say that in some regard, a lot of
Speaker 10: the guys they actually go and do mass shootings are
Speaker 10: trying to have an effect. And obviously it's a very
Speaker 10: harmful effect, but maybe in that you know, in the
Speaker 10: place where they're coming from it, it is just an
Speaker 10: effect and just to you know, almost proving to yourself
Speaker 10: that you are powerful. And I know, you know, I
Speaker 10: know that that, you know, a sense of isolation, a
Speaker 10: sense of kind of maybe alienation isn't the right word,
Speaker 10: but you know, this generation of people growing up in
Speaker 10: the height of social media and somewhat being disconnected from
Speaker 10: real life interactions with people.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 10: I went to college and one of my professors told
Speaker 10: me that the most shocking thing he'd seen over the
Speaker 10: past forty or years of teaching, above everything else, was
Speaker 10: that people used to walk into a classroom together and
Speaker 10: they used to talk about used to talk to the
Speaker 10: people around them. They used to talk about, you know,
Speaker 10: what was happening in the news, or what was happening
Speaker 10: on the campus, or just you know, ask someone how
Speaker 10: their day was going. And now you have one hundred
Speaker 10: people walk into a room. They're all you know, these
Speaker 10: are this is a peer group, a group of people
Speaker 10: who should have something in common. Not only are they
Speaker 10: at the same same school, but they're in the same class.
Speaker 10: They ought to have some overlapping interests. They come in,
Speaker 10: they sit down, they open a computer and get on
Speaker 10: their phone. Nobody talks to each other, and then he
Speaker 10: comes in and lectures for an hour and then everybody
Speaker 10: gets up and goes. You know, so there's something there's
Speaker 10: something there for sure in terms of just a cultural
Speaker 10: change over the past you know, past decades.
Speaker 7: Well, thank you, Eric, that's very insightful. Inputs appreciate that.
Speaker 7: I want to thank you Joyce, Stephen and Eric for
Speaker 7: coming on and talking about this incredible book, The Spiral Notebook,
Speaker 7: and this very very important issue for those people that
Speaker 7: might want to follow up. Do you have a website
Speaker 7: Facebook page, Steven.
Speaker 9: Than Joyce, It's www dot Stephen Singular dot com and
Speaker 9: that's Stephen S T E P h eGain.
Speaker 7: Oh, thank you very much.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we're both on Facebook, Joyce and Steven Singular. I
Speaker 8: don't know if you got that if it was Stevensingular
Speaker 8: dot com. S T E p h E n uh
Speaker 8: singulars s I N g U l A r dot com.
Speaker 8: This book and a number of other books that Joyce
Speaker 8: and I have worked on are on the website. Connect
Speaker 8: with us on Facebook.
Speaker 5: Or the website is the best, actually though, because we
Speaker 5: do have a contact link there too.
Speaker 8: That's true. So anyway, we appreciate h Dan, You're giving
Speaker 8: us a chance to talk about the book, and it's
Speaker 8: very thought provoking.
Speaker 7: In my pleasure. It's always a pleasure, Stephen. It's such
Speaker 7: a huge other dimensionality. Did you bring to these cases
Speaker 7: that it's not just the current event? Is such a
Speaker 7: comprehensive and I love the exploration that you did in
Speaker 7: this because this has to be the most important issue
Speaker 7: in America at this time and it deserves a much
Speaker 7: more discussion by everyone. Because if we continue on the
Speaker 7: same route, nothing will get accomplished. And these numbers are
Speaker 7: increasingly and frighteningly going to continue. So I thank you
Speaker 7: and applied you for this spiral notebook, and thank.
Speaker 4: You very much for this interview, this evening. Thank you
Speaker 4: very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 7: All right, I have a great evening, good night.
Speaker 9: And here's an hour and a half. I asked him.
Speaker 9: I asked him, how long? How long?
Speaker 5: Damn it?
Speaker 9: Wh