Sunday, July 22, 2012

Did the Batman Killer have an accomplice? (Updated 6 times: At last, we have a POLITICAL statement from James Holmes!)

Things are heating up. Cops have interviewed a second "person of interest" in the case who...
either called or sent a text “threatening violence” if suspect James Holmes “was not released from jail.”
Police have interviewed but not charged this person, who has a Masters in biomedical science. My question: How can someone with a Masters be dumb enough to send a threat like that from a traceable phone?

The second person of interest also had a roommate, and that both parties left home hours before the massacre. Which means we may have a third participant.

More soon...

Update 1: At least one source has identified the second person of interest as Yeom Pyo Lee. That's not been confirmed. However, the Facebook page reproduced here matches the blurred-out FB page previously released by a local TV station.

Update 2: On another front: ABC has come out with a video Holmes made when he was 18. This is fascinating...
In the video, he is standing among his peers at a science camp held at Miramar College in San Diego talking about "temporal illusions."

"Over the course of the summer I've been working with a temporal illusion. It's an illusion that allows you to change the past," Holmes said in the video.

He appears slightly nervous speaking to the group but also extremely intelligent. 
I can't help but be reminded of the most famous passage in the most famous of all Joker stories, Alan Moore's The Killing Joke. These panels, in turn, inspired the "conflicting recollections" riff in the first Dark Knight movie.


Update 3: A gun nut site is claiming that Lee has expressed "anti-gun" sentiments on his Facebook page. I've not seen this claim confirmed. At any rate, the freaks are theorizing that the massacre was all a plot to institute the mythical Great Gun Round-Up.

Update 4: A friend got on Lee's Facebook page and found no hint of "anti-gun" sentiments. In fact, it's a bare-bones page that expresses no opinions about...anything. So once again, it seems that the rightwingers are making things up.

It also occurs to me that someone who sends an insane message of that sort is not necessarily an accomplice.

About that message: The first report I read indicated that Lee used a cell phone. A comment on a discussion thread averred that he used VOIP, which would be a more intelligent choice, since tracking a VOIP call is much more difficult. So I'd like to know more about how the cops found him.

Update 5: An odd thought just occurred to me. How do we know that Lee sent the VOIP message? Even if the message can be traced to Lee's computer -- a point which has yet to be established -- we cannot be sure that Lee was the author. As we have discussed in a previous post, it is very possible for someone to use a trojan to take over another system and use it to make a call or send a text. As far as we know right now, Lee could be someone Holmes considers an enemy.

Of course, if Holmes managed to set up something like that in advance -- well, I believe such a scenario would pretty much define the term "crazy prepared."


Update 6: At last -- we know the politic stance of James Holmes! Turns out he also created a profile at Match.com.
-- Favorite movies: "Too many good movies to have a favorite, maybe Dumb and Dumber, Hachiko, Star Wars, etc."
-- Favorite book: Where's Waldo?
-- "You should message me if you're interested, obviously. Or lookin' for sexy times. Very nice!"
-- Political views: Middle of the road
-- Faith: Agnostic
-- "I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Mind = blown"
Middle of the road? MIDDLE OF THE ROAD? That's it? The right doesn't get a chance to beat up the left, and the left doesn't get a chance to beat up the right? Yeesh. Zap Brannigan was right all along: You just can't trust those neutrals.

He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa and his favorite book is Where's Waldo? And one of his favorite films is Dumb and Dumber?

The equation mind = blown seems sound; I won't ask for further proof. Now that he has no future, I wonder what he will spend his time thinking about?

We have a report on Jimmy's first day in jail:
Holmes, held under suicide watch in solitary confinement, remained in his murderous “Joker” persona after arriving at the Arapahoe Detention Center, a jailhouse worker told the Daily News.

“Let’s just say he hasn’t shown any remorse,” the employee said. “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.”

The man accused in the midnight theater massacre was still acting bizarrely a day after his rampage at a screening of “The Dark Night Rises” — the last film in the Batman trilogy.

“He was spitting at the door and spitting at the guards,” one released inmate told The News outside the jail. “He’s spitting at everything. Dude was acting crazy.”
Do you think the Joker would describe his politics as "middle of the road"?

God, that irks me. So disappointing. If he had been a Chomsky aficionado or a follower of Michelle Malkin, at least we would all have something to write about. A political blogger can do something with that sort of news. But...middle of the freakin' road?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess this was a work in progress during my comment on previous thread.

Ben franklin

Joseph Cannon said...

Ben, I don't LIVE at the computer.

At least not ALL of the time...!

At any rate, I do thank you.

ColoradoGuy said...

One political dimension is a re-set of the Presidential race. It's a good question if the scandal of RMoney's offshore-banking and secret tax returns will continue to grow or be set aside by the MSM. They do have short attention spans in the Village.

I personally think 20 to 30 trillion dollars disappearing into secret bank accounts - definitely something RMoney was also engaged in - is a hell of story. But it also gets a little too close for comfort for the folks who own media empires, so I doubt the missing-money story will get much traction in this country.

As a Colorado resident that lives on about 20 miles away from Aurora, there's nothing all that special about where it happened. Most of the Front Range suburbs are hard to tell from anywhere in Los Angeles - we just more extreme weather and views of the Rocky Mountains.

Twilight said...

Thanks for keeping us so well up-to-date, Joseph. I feel somewhat guilty for wanting to know these things, asap - but I do want to know.

From latest updated detail,and if what Holmes had set down in his profile was the tuth and not just an effort not to politically alienate potential new friends, then it's looking more and more as if his higher than average intelligence has skidded over that supposed very fragile border into pure, dangerous madness.

Mr. Mike said...

Holmes' Facebook page likes sound like sarcasm. Also, you don't have to know Holmes to send a threatening message about releasing him, you just have to be nuts is all. Horrifying incidents like this tend to draw out more crazies and conspiracy nutz.

Dwight said...

Hundreds of websites and some well known talk shows are repeating the assertions of an obscure Florida private investigator that Holmes was a member of Black Block Occupy - the only unhoaxed evidence, so far, being that he fits a profile constructed by the investigator.

With this post -

http://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/updated-is-james-e-holmes-a-occupy-black-bloc-member-he-plotted-to-kill-copsjames-e-holmes-shoots-up-aurora-co-movie-theater-killing-12-and-wounding-59-as-batman-movie-slams-ows/

- Warner completes the link between Holmes, Occupy and various scuzzy, violent anarchists.

But these folk who excoriate leftish protesters in general aren't against violence and terrorism per se. On the same page is this link and comment:

CIA Bomb Plot Takes Out Bashar al-Assad’s Inner Circle of Top Military and Security Leaders in the Syrian Regime, HOORAH!

Innocents may have died there too, as in Colorado, but what the hell... Hoorah!

Anonymous said...

Well I don't see why this has anything to do about gun control in context to the accomplice. It is how the issue is spun regardless of the issue it will probably result in signing of the UN Gun treaty regardless.

Of course the attack wasn't politically motivated (but Michelle Malkin and Chomsky aren't really the extremes on either side; I mean Malkin wrote "The Case for Internment" [approving of a highly liberal war time interpretation] and Chomsky works for the army and Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.)

Any how, I think your analysis is fairly close. Now don't think I am going on a crazy path but a lot of people who were hypnotized or programmed by the MKULTRA project by the CIA often were forced to watch a lot of movies and take a lot of drugs.

They often used Wizard of Oz, Disney Movies or Through the Looking Glass. So I think it is possible that he programmed himself with the Dark Knight, or someone did.

Thanks for the info.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anonymous: I know of no reliable information that MKULTRA researchers used "the Wizard of Oz" and similar pop culture artifacts in their hypnotic work. The only people who have made those claims are Mark Philips and Cathy O'Brien and their weirdo associates. I know a lot about them. They're con artists and everything they say is crap.

That said, if you read fairly widely in the literature of hypnosis you'll find that hypnotists do sometimes make use of pop culture references during their induction routines.

Colorado Guy: I think Denver may be the nicest big city I've ever visited. Denver's downtown is just what a downtown OUGHT to be -- clean, friendly, fun.

Dwight: I've talked about the thing with Warner in a previous post. I'm not sure if he deserves to be swatted again. What that man is doing is absolutely appalling. The fact that so many right-wing personalities are embracing his nonsense bugs the hell out of me. What bugs me even more is that they will pay no price for doing so.

Peter Renfrew said...

And did you like the new Denver Airport just as much as you liked downtown, Joe?

(If you're nonplussed by this inane question, just Google that spooky "civilian" facility a bit and you'll be up all night chasing ever stranger links, I predict.)

Anonymous said...

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21126462/real-life-shooting-imitates-training-exercise-at-parker#ixzz21PsxLV7Q

med students practice to respond to attack in movie theatre, as attack in movie theatre takes place. what are the odds?

prowlerzee said...

Here a slant for political writers (to counter the nutso Great Gun Roundup conspiracy): Holmes was able to amass all of his ammo and armor, etc, online without triggering any alerts. At a time when we have telecommunications companies spying on Americans for the gummint, and riot police lining up en masse when Occupiers show up at Art Walks to chalk the sidewalks, apparently any American can stockpile weaponry without raising a single flag.

Special note: even the owner of a shooting range found Holmes too creepy to allow in his establishment.

Anonymous said...

tp://www.helpfreetheearth.com/news617_batmanwhohow.html

Gulp! deeper goes the rabbit hole