For the third straight day, as a riveted courtroom heard grisly new details about Aurora shooter James Holmes’s July rampage—this time that he scoped out the movie theater in advance, snapping photos along the way—there was one woman, her hair dyed red in solidarity, who was firmly on the gunman’s side.

“It seems crazy, but I’m not crazy,” Misty Benjamin, 30, says of her hair. “I wanted something that if he saw me he knew it would be me—a supporter.” An Aurora resident who lives just four miles from the apartment Holmes set up as an explosive booby trap on the day of the massacre, Benjamin has been watching the trial from an overflow courtroom at the Arapahoe County courthouse. …

“When they showed photos of him, everything I saw were cries for help,” said Benjamin, who says she joined the church of Latter Day Saints nine years ago after her dentist committed suicide, and is dating a man who knows of her affection for the accused killer. “He wanted someone to stop him. He knows he is in trouble. He stands and sits when he is told. There is a kid-like quality to him.” …

Prodded, Benjamin admits that she keeps photos of Holmes in her wallet and on her bedroom wall. “When I get upset, I look at his picture and I calm down.”