June 16--The University of Colorado psychiatrist who treated James Holmes longer than any other mental health professional described the mass shooter as taciturn and deeply anxious but said he never spoke of a concrete plan to kill people.
Dr. Lynne Fenton took the stand Tuesday morning and began delivering some of the most anticipated testimony in Holmes' lengthy trial.
She is the doctor who saw Holmes -- now 27 and on trial for his life -- just weeks before he strapped on protective gear and blasted his way through a suburban Denver movie theater, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more.
She is the one to whom the failed neuroscience graduate student mailed his notebook, with its strange ramblings on life and death and its detailed, chilling plans to attack the Century 16 multiplex and kill as many people as he could.
Fenton is the medical director of Student Mental Health Services at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where Holmes was pursuing a doctorate. She treated him between March and June of 2012, after he first was assessed by a social worker named Margaret Roth.
Roth "thought he was one of the most anxious people she ever had seen," said Fenton, who was called by the prosecution. "She thought he had obsessive compulsive disorder. He had thoughts of killing people, but she didn't think he was imminently dangerous."
Fenton, who repeatedly referenced her case notes while testifying, said Holmes was seeking help for what he described as anxiety around other people. He had recently broken up with his first serious girlfriend, she said, and he told her that he had relationship problems.
"He said, and I am going to read this, because I have a quote, 'I don't have relationships with people. They have relationships with me,'" Fenton recounted. "I asked him a lot about his background. He described how, when he was 10, he got glasses and, after that, he wanted to overcome his biology."
In response to questions from Arapahoe County Dist. Atty. George H. Brauchler, Fenton painted a picture of a secretive, tightly wound young man whose "thinking was rather off."
"I suspected he might have a personality disorder," she said, something along the lines of a "schizoid or schizotypal" disorder and that he would benefit from antipsychotic drugs.
He never talked about the system of "human capital" that he would eventually write about in the notebook and discuss during 22 hours of recorded interviews with a court-ordered psychiatrist after he pleaded guilty by reason of insanity to the Aurora, Colo., rampage.
During those interviews, which were played for the jury, Holmes described this system as a means of making himself feel better by killing: "I just designated arbitrary value of like one to each person. One value unit.... As a human being they have this value, and I take that value.... I increased my self worth, and I didn't have to die."
When Fenton pressed Holmes about the homicidal thoughts that led him to seek help, he talked about how breaking up with his girlfriend caused an increase in his "obsessive thoughts" about women. He added further that he had three categories about obsessive thoughts, one that had to do with women, one with men, one with everyone.
"I tried to get more information," she said. "But he would not give more details."
It was a pattern repeated until he broke off his therapy just weeks before the July 20, 2012, massacre.
