Alison Ernst, the 36-year-old Phoenix, Arizona woman who on Thursday threw a shoe at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during Clinton’s speech to a recycling convention in Las Vegas, has been bizarrely obsessed with the Colorado movie theatre massacre gunman James Holmes, according a report in Friday’s New York Daily News .
Stripped of the long, platinum-blonde wig she wore to the Mandalay Bay Hotel when she threw what is now said to be a sneaker at Clinton, Alison Ernst was released from custody in Las Vegas Friday, but ordered to appear in court again on June 24. While federal authorities declined to bring charges against Ernst, at the local level she is expected to face a disorderly conduct charge.
Ernst did not say why she threw the sneaker at the 66-year-old former New York Senator. Though some news reports identified her as “a protester,” she gave no indication what she may have been protesting when she entered the auditorium at the Mandalay Bay without a credential to do so, and came within 60 feet of Hillary Clinton where she pulled a sneaker from her purse and flung it at the stage, narrowly missing Clinton’s head.
There was a report that contained in the shoe was a document recovered later that referenced a 1967 Bolivian military operation to capture revolutionary leader Che Guevara. But what the connection might be between Alison Ernst, or for that matter Hillary Clinton, and the effort nearly five decades ago to stop Che Guevara remains a mystery.
But the Daily News learned that in August 2012, Alison Ernst appeared in a Denver courtroom during a hearing for admitted mass killer James Holmes, who opened fire in a crowded movie theatre showing the Batman epic, The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people on July 20, 2012.
Alison Ersnt turned up in the courtroom wearing a red dress and with her head shaved and announced that she possessed, “information vital to the defense of James Holmes.”
The strange woman was escorted from the courtroom on August 7, 2012. But at the time she identified herself at Alison Michelle Ernst. An astute Daily News reporter made the connection, and placed a call to Colorado officials who confirmed that the woman in the courtroom was the same Alison Michelle Ernst who threw an orange sneaker at Hillary Clinton on Thursday in Las Vegas.
It later became clear that Ernst was in the grip of some sort of deranged fixation on James Holmes, when she filed a lawsuit seeking “a restraining order to stop Holmes from entering my mind through subliminal messaging,” and going into great detail about her love for him.
“James enters my head like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace and he zooms to my heart and plays with it and forces me to care for him,” Alison Ernst wrote, making a reference to a 1987 science fiction film .
