50 Shades of Evil: Colorado

Bloody Angola: A Podcast by Jim Chapman

Envision Podcast Productions

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On July 20, 2012, a packed midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colorado, turned into one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. Dressed in tactical gear and heavily armed, 24-year-old James Holmes known as the “Colorado Theatre Shooter” opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others in a matter of minutes.

Once a high-achieving neuroscience PhD student at the University of Colorado, Holmes had meticulously planned the attack for months—rigging his apartment with explosives, stockpiling weapons and ammunition, and even alerting authorities to his booby-trapped home before surrendering. What drove this brilliant but troubled young man to commit such unimaginable violence? In this episode, we examine Holmes’ background, his documented mental health struggles, the controversial insanity defense that played out in a high-profile trial, and the jury’s ultimate decision to reject it—convicting him on all 165 counts and sentencing him to 12 consecutive life sentences plus 3,318 years without parole.

“50 Shades of Evil” is a podcast series brought to you by “Bloody Angola Podcast”.

Chapters
01:32 The Early Warning Signs of James Holmes
14:53 The Manifesto
16:24 Inside the Notebook
21:18 Final Preparations
24:19 The Theater Attack
32:45 Aftermath and Arrest
35:13 The Trial
37:18 Life in Prison

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I walk a straight line
0:17.3	shackle chain
0:20.6	oh gluesome gertie is calling my name there is no mercy and they spend a
0:32.8	tentary just ask the hill string gang
0:38.2	Rangled of three
0:40.7	I'm here for life
0:44.7	I'm here to die
0:47.8	Inside these walls
0:51.8	Inside the wide And when the wolf cries these walls inside the wild
0:54.7	And when the world cries
0:58.4	I know it's over
1:01.6	Oh, bloody Angola
1:08.1	Oh, oh, bloody angola.
1:14.9	Hey, everyone. and welcome back to Bloody Angola.
1:32.8	I'm Jim Chapman and I am back with another 50 Shades of Evil series episode.
1:39.0	And this time we are going to go to Colorado when on June 12th of 2012, a 24-year-old male by the name of James Holmes entered a midnight movie screening of Batman the Dark Night.
1:54.6	And he was armed with an AR-15, a 100-round magazine, as well as a 12-gauge shotgun and a Glock 40 caliber pistol.
2:04.7	He killed 12 people, injured 70 others, and when you talk about evil, this guy embodies it.
2:12.1	So today we are going to talk about what led up to this shooting, what became of James Holmes, and we're going
2:18.5	to go to the state of Colorado to do it and tell you the story of the Colorado
2:24.2	Theater shooter. And for James Holmes, it all started in 1987, but it was not in Colorado.
2:31.4	It was in San Diego, California, where he was born to parents
	...

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