ARIZONA SHOOTING UPDATE: SEE HIS CREEPY MUGSHOT

Tucson shooting suspect Jarred Lee Loughner made his first court appearance yesterday, but since he killed John Roll, the chief federal judge for Arizona, the federal judges on the case took themselves off of it.

Loughner is due back in court Jan. 24. Until then, he is being held without bail.

He could face the death penalty.

Jared Lee Loughner has an attorney… her name is Judy Clarke.

She is the same attorney who represented Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”; the Atlanta Olympics bomber, Eric Rudolph; Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh; and Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her two children by driving her car into a lake.

The alleged Tucson gunman may have had a fascination with the occult.

Hidden inside a camouflage tent in Jarred Loughner’s backyard is an altar with a skull on top of a pot filled with shriveled oranges. A row of ceremonial candles and a bag of potting soil were also on the altar.

Experts said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups.

LOUGHNER LEFT HIS PAL A VOICEMAIL

At 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, which was about eight hours before he allegedly killed six people in Tucson, Jared Lee Loughner phoned a close friend.

The friend was up late watching TV, but he didn’t answer the call.

When he checked his voice mail, the message from Loughner said: “Hey man, it’s Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later.”

That was it.

Later in the day, when the friend heard about the Tucson massacre, he said: “They hadn’t released the name, but I said, ‘I think it’s Jared that did it.’ For some reason I felt like I knew…I felt like if anyone was going to shoot her, it would be Jared.”

The friend said Loughner had a long-time grudge against Giffords and had repeatedly said she was a “fake.” Apparently, Loughner went to an earlier rally and asked Giffords a question and wasn’t satisfied with the answer.

The friend also said Loughner was obsessed with “lucid dreaming” - that is, the idea that conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control.