I’ve spent my morning scouring the Internet for clues to who James Holmes is and why he, according to police, shot and killed 12 theater goers (while wounding dozens of others) at a midnight showing of Batman Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo. So far, I’ve come up empty.

Most of us share too much online, and history has shown that crazed lone gunmen often telegraph their intentions on the Internet long before they actually commit any acts of violence.

Not, apparently, James Holmes.

Police say he’s 24, with no previous criminal record. Another report said he hails from San Diego and that his mother is still there. We'll know more details soon enough: Holmes is in custody, and there’s a 1 p.m. ET press conference.

Still, I cannot get over what an online ghost Holmes appears to be. Like many others, I have searched Facebook and found many James Holmeses. One, who is not the shooter, had to go on Facebook to defend himself. Other than that, Facebook has no apparent evidence of the suspect Holmes’s existence.

I scoured MySpace and Twitter and found people with the same or similar names, but nothing fit. I kept digging. (I lived in Colorado for a time; at one point, not very far from Aurora — we often drove there for pizza — and felt an odd and uncomfortable connection to the tragedy.)

In the absence of real information, tasteless fake posts have emerged. They anger me both because they make it harder to get at the truth and because they’re just plain heartless.

I moved my search to gun enthusiast and support sites based in Colorado. I didn’t look them up because people who like guns are violent people; they’re not. But someone who wants to use a gun for violence might gravitate to such a site or even boast on it about his plans.

These sites are easy enough to find. There’s COGunOwners.com, for one. The forum lacks a search engine, but I used Google search to dig in. Searches on "Aurora," "theater" and "Batman" returned nothing related to the incident or any chatter by any random poster about a plan to shoot people in a movie theater.

I also stumbled on this site, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners: "Colorado’s only no-compromise gun rights organization." But they weren’t talking about anything except gun rights and the second amendment.

Three hours in and I couldn’t unearth a single piece of useful online information.

As I scoured on Google, more and more of my results were filled with real-time reports of the incident, making it even harder to do research. Restricting my search by date helped somewhat, but even then, fresh reports on the shooting crept into the results.

I tapped Twitter’s advanced search, which let me search by keywords, phrases, area and sentiment, but not by date. There was little of use in there.

It’s inconceivable to me that Holmes has no online profile. The most obvious answer is that he has not been using his real name. What his handles could be on these various social networks, I have no idea.

But I am convinced: somewhere online there are facts about the gunman and why he did this. The Internet will eventually tell his tale.

Though I doubt his actions will ever make sense to any of us.

Mashable's Coverage of the Colorado Theater Shooting