Colorado inmate Steven Unruh is having a hard time convincing anyone that he spent hours talking to Aurora theater shootings suspect James Holmes shortly after his arrest last July. Jail officials say there’s no way that Unruh could have had that kind of access. Yet certain elements of the story — which includes a description that resembles the headbanging routine that sent Holmes to the hospital last week — have been attracting attention from law enforcement and even families of the shooting victims.

“They’re going to try to discredit my story,” Unruh told Westword in a recent interview at the jail. “But I was able to have a four-hour talk with him. I talked him out of suicide.”

Unruh insists the sporadic conversation continued even after Holmes was moved to another cell in the area. He says that Holmes told him “he felt like he was in a video game” during the shooting, that “he wasn’t on his meds” and “nobody would help him.” He says Holmes also mentioned NLP — presumably, neuro-linguistic programming, a much-scorned and outmoded approach to psychotherapy — and claimed to have been “programmed” to kill by an evil therapist.

“When he got out to his car, he wasn’t programmed no more,” Unruh says. “It sounded kind of crazy. He was trying to run it by me, basically.”

[link to www.secretsofthefed.com]