June 02--REPORTING FROM SEATTLE -- First, he found a post office box so he could mail his psychiatrist a brown, spiral-bound journal filled with his plans to massacre "as many people as possible" and his meanderings on life, death and mental illness.
Then, James Holmes stowed his gear into the trunk of his white Huyndai Tiburon and headed to the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colo. It was July 19, 2012, nearing midnight, and driving, he said, was "somewhat dangerous."
"I put tinted windows, tinted window film, on my windows so I could gear up inside the car," he said. "But it doesn't let that much light in, so it was hard to drive.... I wasn't very nervous. I was prepared."
The failed neuroscience graduate student is on trial for his life, having killed 12 moviegoers and wounding 70 more in one of the worst mass shootings on American soil. On Tuesday morning, the jury heard the defendant speak in detail for the first time about the final hours before the massacre.
Holmes wasn't on the stand. Instead, jurors listened to the back and forth between the acknowledged killer and a court-appointed psychiatrist who recorded 22 hours of interviews. Prosecutors are playing that footage in its entirety during the lengthy trial, and the trial itself is being live-streamed.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to 166 felony charges, including first-degree murder and attempted murder.
In the days before the rampage, Holmes bought three tickets online to the midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises," but none were for the auditorium he had carefully cased. He found out, however, that it didn't matter. Once he got into the multiplex, he said, no one kept him from his target: Theater Nine.
"I just went to the very front and sat down in one of the chairs and pulled out my phone to make it look like I had a phone call and then went out the [emergency] exit," he told Dr. William Reid. "I looked back in the stands and saw they were all full."
Before leaving his booby-trapped apartment, Holmes had loaded the magazines for his four weapons and pulled on a pair of ballistic pants. Inside the cramped Hyundai in the theater parking lot, he said, he quickly put on the rest of his gear -- the arm guards, the protective coat, the wireless earbuds blasting techno music from his iPod.
"Then an employee came out to the dumpster and threw something away," Holmes said. "But I had tinted the windows and they didn't see me. I heard them."
He worried, he told Reid, about whether "they're going to interrupt the process or not. But they didn't. They just went back inside the theater after throwing the trash away."
Reid: "What if they had?"
Holmes: "I had a handgun."
Reid: "Were you prepared to do that if necessary?"
Holmes: "Yeah."
Reid asked whether Holmes had any other thoughts as he prepared to reenter the theater and carry out his "mission," whether his heart was pumping, his adrenaline racing.
"Calm and collected," Holmes replied.
And then the trial stopped for lunch.
This story will be updated after the afternoon testimony is completed.
