CENTENNIAL — Inside the notebook, the words were written in red ink.

Page 27: “1. What is the meaning of life? 2. What is the meaning of death?”

Page 35: “The obsession to kill since I was a kid with age became more and more realistic.”

Page 54: “Embraced the hatred.”

At the beginning of its fifth week, the trial of James Holmes leapt into the dark heart of the case Tuesday, as prosecutors and defense attorneys provided the most details yet about the Aurora movie theater shooting’s most critical piece of evidence.

LISTEN to newly released 911 audio

Passages of Holmes’ brown, spiral-bound notebook read aloud in court Tuesday described detailed planning for an attack, down to diagrams of different movie theaters and notes about their number of exits. “Case the place” was the heading for a section discussing possible manners of killing. A check mark was placed next to the category “mass murder/spree.”

“Maximum casualties,” an adjacent note stated.

The pages also revealed a lengthy self-diagnosis by Holmes of his mental health, including a description of various symptoms — catatonia, excessive fatigue — and a chronology of the areas on his head where he pulled out his hair. It started on the back of his head in high school until he developed a bald spot.

“Most recently eyebrows and eyelashes,” he wrote.

DOCUMENT: Aurora theater shooting gunman’s 35-page notebook

Both sides in the trial have described the notebook as a kind of interpretive key to the attack at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. To prosecutors, who contend Holmes was sane at the time of the attack and are seeking the death penalty, its writings and diagrams show a calculating murderer who understood his actions were wrong. To defense attorneys, who say Holmes was suffering from “florid psychosis” at the time of the attack, the notebook shows a man swallowed by mental illness.

Holmes mailed the notebook, along with $400 worth of burned $20 bills, to his psychiatrist at the University of Colorado just hours before the July 20, 2012, shooting. The envelope it arrived in carried 16 stamps — from a series featuring prominent scientists. Holmes wrote his return address in the upper-left corner.

It was found in the mail room at the Anschutz Medical Campus three days after the shooting, following a call from Holmes’ attorneys asking for it to be given to them. Instead, police seized it as evidence, prompting a months-long fight over it that ended when Holmes entered an insanity plea.

When jurors were handed copies of the notebook Tuesday, they immediately flipped them open and began reading. What spilled forth from those pages alternated between rambling incoherence and precise clarity, sometimes on the same page.

After settling on an attack at a movie theater, Holmes meticulously listed out different theaters inside the Century Aurora 16 complex and wrote a list of pros and cons for each one. He noted the theaters’ sizes, their sightlines, their access points. He put stars next to the most vulnerable theaters, including the one he ultimately attacked, Theater 9.

DPTV: Why James Holmes chose Theater 9

On one page, he noted the proximity of Aurora police headquarters to the theater, with an estimated police response time of 3 minutes. On another page, he wrote that his victims should be randomly chosen.

“The cruel twists of fate are unkind to the misfortunate,” he wrote.

But interspersed among the plans were long passages on the value of life and the morality of killing. Three times in the notebook, Holmes drew a symbol that intertwined the numeral 1 and the infinity symbol — the same symbol that marked the shooting date on his calendar at home.

“Moral imbeciles are those who side with zero or negative infinity,” Holmes wrote in one passage. “The ideal of society are founded on positive infinity.”

Seven consecutive pages of the notebook were filled with a single question written over and over again: “Why?” Then, on the first page after, Holmes seemed to answer that question.

“The message is there is no message,” he wrote. “Most fools will misinterpret correlation for causation, naming relationship and work failures as causes. Both were expediting catalysts, not the reason. The causation being my state of mind for the past 15 years.”

On one of the notebook’s first pages, Holmes wrote that the writings were meant for his mother and father, Arlene and Robert. They sat a dozen feet behind him in court Tuesday, Arlene Holmes writing on a notepad and then holding Robert’s hand when the presentation finished.

Across the room, the families of many of those killed in the theater stared stone-faced at a screen where pages of the notebook were displayed. An hour later, relatives of AJ Boik held hands as Boik’s girlfriend, Lasamoa Cross, described the night of the shooting.

She told of how AJ whispered to her to move when the shooting started and of how he dropped to the floor after only two steps. She told of holding his head and feeling blood run out into her hands. She told of trying to carry him, then shouting the names of friends, even those she knew weren’t in Theater 9 that night.

“I wanted to get him out of the theater,” she said through tears. “But I couldn’t do it alone. So I just called names of guys I knew were there.”

District Attorney George Brauchler asked her whether she ever saw AJ alive again after the shooting. She did not.

Looking up at a video screen in the courtroom, she described a picture she and AJ took an hour before the movie began. She had a Batman hat. AJ had an enormous smile. She never saw the hat again.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold