“What I haven’t seen is any mention of who bankrolled this guy.”
Darn near anyone with a pulse can manage to get $20K worth of credit on credit cards.
All he needed was plastic.
And, as I have observed repeatedly:
He was a grad student in the sciences. He surely had a full-ride plus stipend fellowship, and could easily have taken out graduate student PLUS loans on top of it.
The $20K figure everyone is bandying about came from some blogger, who seems to hav pulled it out of thin air, and who was criticized in the comments on his blog by folks who estimated that Holmes’s kit could have been obtained for as little as $2K if he’d bargain-hunted. (I favored an estimate of $5K, others with more direct experience of the arms and tactical gear market suggested $7500 as a maximum figure.)