Madness to murder, p.3
Madness to Murder, page 3
Interestingly, he said nothing about his sister. Later I learned she cut herself off from the family and refused to speak with Earl. Why, I wondered? But no one seemed to know or was willing to talk about her.
The jail only allowed us one hour at a time, so It took many months to get a history, and I was never sure it was complete. I thought about stopping at different times.
“Why waste my time getting to know this man,” I’d ask myself? “He’s murdered two women and will probably go to prison for the rest of his life if the state doesn’t kill him. Besides, if I help him, some of my feminist colleagues will be angry with me for not supporting the woman he murdered. But each time I’d think about stopping, I have to admit I was fascinated with his story. Most murderers are nasty angry hostile men. They are easy for me to interview because their stories are similar. They’ve had horrible childhoods, experiencing lots of abuse and torture. It is easy to feel sorry for them and to understand that the trauma they went through was a primary cause of their violent behavior. The chance of them ever being able to live in a normal society is pretty slim; the point of rescue was long passed. They knew it, too.
Like John, a 25-year-old man who’d been arrested after killing at least five women. I saw him when I was an intern. I was arguing with the deputies to take the chains off his hands so he could complete the psychological tests. He looked me in the eye and slowly said, “Stop arguing with them. You’re too young to understand but I want you to hear me. I will hurt you if I think by doing that I can escape from here, so protect yourself first. I won’t. No one ever protected me, so why should I worry about you?”
But Earl was different. We began to develop a relationship. Not that I ever forgot he was the client in jail awaiting trial for killing a woman – two women if you count the first girl in Germany. But I was surprising myself that I began to like listening to his descriptions of his life and then comparing them with what others said or even with what I expected to happen based on my psychology teachings.
“I was born prematurely,” Earl said without much emotion. “And, I had to be in an incubator for several weeks.”
Earl’s mother later told me that there were complications during her unplanned pregnancy, and she was devastated that she couldn’t hold him during the three weeks he was in an incubator. He had health problems from the beginning, didn’t eat or sleep well, and finally she had to quit work to stay home and care for him.
Earl remembered some of his illnesses and agreed with his mother that he had to stay home from school a lot.
“I had mumps, measles, chicken pox, double pneumonia with high fevers and vomiting. When I was in first grade, I had to stay out of school for over a month. When I went back, I didn’t know what to do when the others were learning addition. I just sat there being scared that people would start laughing at me.”
I wanted to ask him why he was scared that people would laugh at him but decided to wait and let him go on. Timing is everything in deciding when to follow up with another question and when to just let the person talk and clarify it later.
“I wouldn’t do my homework when I was sick. If not for my parents. I would have flunked third grade. One time I had to go to the doctor’s office, I remember throwing up in the car and feeling so sick, I wanted to die.”
He insisted that he didn’t seem to mind staying home but hated feeling sick. But he didn’t seem consciously aware of his feelings of ‘shame’ that seemed to permeate his childhood. He was ashamed of being sick, of being laughed at, of not knowing what the other children were learning in school. He hated that his mother and father both smoked in the house and blamed their smoking for making him sick. Perhaps it did.
One story stood out.
“When I was young, maybe about two years old, I remember being in the crib and my mother and some women and men were in my room smoking cigarettes and I was coughing. I felt like I was choking, smothered in their smoke, and they were just laughing and enjoying themselves, not even looking at me. Maybe they were the prostitutes who lived next door. Now that I think about it, there seemed to be something sexual going on at the time. The room was dark. I could faintly see my mother through the glow of the cigarettes.”
Before I had a chance to follow up on the strange comment from a supposedly two-year-old about prostitutes living next door and sexual behavior that seemed to be somehow connected with smoking cigarettes, he continued.
“Another time, I remember climbing out of my crib and going over to the coffee table. I chewed on the table and then chewed on cigarette butts I found in the ashtray. I don’t know why. Can you believe that my mother gave me the coffee table with my teeth marks still on it when Teresa and I got married.”
I put a star next to these revelations given the information later revealed that he would never let anyone smoke near him as an adult except for Carolina. She could smoke in his presence, blow smoke in his face, kiss him with smoke in her mouth, and one time even got him to try to smoke a cigarette.
What does this mean? Did Earl make some connection between sexual desire and toxic cigarette smoke with Carolina? Such connections happen but usually in young adolescents. Why did he refuse to permit any of the other women he dated or married smoke in his presence? Why did he reportedly have sexual arousal problems with some women but not with Carolina? But I am getting ahead of myself.
Earl liked to talk about himself and his life, so collecting information was getting easier than when we first began. What to do with it all became more of a challenge.
Earl said he rarely saw his father since he traveled so much. He didn’t feel they had a close relationship while he was growing up. His mother contradicted this memory.
“My husband was very hard on Earl. He had expectations for that the sickly child couldn’t fulfill. At times, he would spank Earl with his hand on the butt, but not with any objects. He wanted everyone to think we were a perfect family.”
“Did he treat your daughter the same as he treated Earl?”
“I think he gave her more attention. But really he didn’t show much affection to either child. Me either.”
Earl’s memories seem different than hers.
“I remember my father sitting and watching Perry Mason on television holding a Hires Root Beer bottle. I walked over to sit with him and accidentally spilled the root beer on the floor.”
“Was he upset that the root beer spilled?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did he call you clumsy or otherwise let you feel badly that you spilled it? I continued to probe.
“I don’t remember.”
“What do you remember about your father and you?”
“When I was sick, my father would come in my room and I would tell him stories about the Roman and Greek warriors.
I was much closer with my mother, he finally admitted. “She would read to me and wanted to be affectionate, but I pushed her away because I hated the smell of smoke. One time I thought about poisoning her cigarettes to make her stop.”
“You must have been pretty angry to think about poisoning her cigarettes?”
“She shouldn’t have been smoking in front of me when I was so sick with asthma.”
When I later checked, Earl’s mom agreed that he always wanted her to get him books on Greek and Roman history from the time he was in kindergarten. He was an avid reader during his childhood years which continued into adulthood. He liked to watch scary movies, too, but only at his friend’s house. He couldn’t remember the names of any of his friends from childhood.
He forgot about the head injuries he suffered as a child that later were revealed. When he was 14 years old, he was knocked unconscious while playing football. Although he was told he’d been unconscious for a few minutes, he didn’t want to go to the hospital, so they didn’t force him. Too bad as hospital records from that injury might have helped us make a diagnosis now. Another time, also when he was around 14 years old, he got hit in the head with a bat playing baseball. He was unconscious then too, and again, he refused to go to the hospital. Today, a school would be considered negligent for not notifying a parent or getting the child medical attention. At age 16 he was in an automobile accident where he hit his head on the windshield. Again, another head injury but no medical attention was given.
Earl reported he had headaches on and off during his entire lifetime that began during childhood. He didn’t know when they started. He had dizzy and fainting spells and blackouts. Sometimes he would make clicking sounds with his mouth that others told him about while in college, but he was unaware when doing it. He also saw walls bending and other distortions but infrequently. These are all signs that something was possibly wrong with his brain. But exactly what was wrong and what role it may have played in his violent episodes is not known. It could be important in mitigating his responsibility for his impulsive behavior, especially if he is found guilty. I kept wanting the attorneys to order neuropsychological tests to try to learn more about what was wrong and how if impacted his behavior. They kept refusing.
Sometimes when I was with him Earl would suddenly become silent and then start talking in a different tone of voice.
One time it happened when we were talking about his home life.
“I felt lonely in that house”, he said, in a softer child-like tone. “It was no fun.”
“When we moved to the new house, I remember feeling so much hatred towards both my parents. I don’t know why,” he continued as his voice got louder and angrier.
“It was a two-story house and I would spit on the walls as I would stomp upstairs to my room, screaming.”
Calming down, as quickly as he became angry, he continued. “I couldn’t discharge my anger towards my mother or father, but it was worse towards my mother. I don’t know why.”
More pensive, he went on, “I didn’t like my mother touching me. It was okay for my father to hug me when I hit a home run in baseball. I liked that. I even let my grandmother hug me. But my mother didn’t make my pain go away and I was angry with her for that.”
“When I was 11 or 12 my father and mother both tried to stop smoking. The allergist told her it was not good for me. For two weeks neither of them smoked. But then they both started up again. I was so mad I stole $20.00 out of her purse.”
I found these fits of anger very interesting. Did he have an explosive disorder as a child? His mother said, ‘no.’ He obviously responded to things he couldn’t control with bouts of strong anger. He was impulsive, often a sign of poor executive function of the brain. These signs and symptoms could have been caused by many different disorders.
Later, some other images came to his mind.
“I was about six years old, sick with the chicken pox and home from school. I saw an old movie from the 1940s where a beautiful blonde woman was in a big house smoking, with a lot of people, like Hollywood style. A man liked the woman but didn’t know how to talk to her, so he dressed like an Indian and then they talked. He got her! I remember fantasizing about this blonde woman smoking when I would masturbate as a teenager.”
I noted that this memory might help understand why he permitted Carolina to smoke, especially during sex.
“I like blonde women. When I was in 7th grade, I liked this girl who was blonde. She liked me, too. But I didn’t have enough confidence to ask her out. I fantasized about her a lot, too.”
“Throughout high school I fantasized a lot about girls. One was a blonde girl. I went out with her. I wanted her to smoke. She said okay but when she went to light up, we both got afraid.”
“Carolina’s hair was blonde when I met her. Her previous boyfriend persuaded her to dye it. She didn’t want to smoke in my presence, but I persuaded her to do it. She knew I was an athlete and it wasn’t right to smoke in front of me. But I persuaded her. I don’t know why. At first, she would just smoke on the patio but then I let her do it inside the apartment. Why? All these years I hadn’t let any woman smoke in my presence. Why her? Could I have been thinking she was the same woman who smoked in the Hollywood movie I saw when I was 6 years old? I always wanted to meet someone just like that woman. I spent years trying to find her.”
He had moments of insight during our interviews but couldn’t make use of them.
As we continued speaking about his childhood memories, it seemed that other than his illnesses as a child, there was nothing significant that stood out as being different from other children raised in his culture at the time. He went all through school with good grades, graduated from college, completed law school, and obtained a library science degree. He loved listening to classical music. He learned to speak seven different languages and used these skills to develop the international collection of books at the public library where he worked. His illnesses seemed to lower his threshold for pain and certainly his reaction to his mother’s cigarette smoking was significant, but otherwise, there was nothing that foretold of his two violent murderous episodes as an adult.
His behavior, as he talked about the childhood memories that were significant to him, told a different story. The feelings of anger and hatred towards his parents, particularly his mother, were palpable in that tiny jail room as he retold their sins of omission and commission towards him. His spitting on the walls as he walked up the stairs screaming was an unusually vivid memory still filled with unresolved angry feelings. He shut down that anger rather quickly, like the way he distanced himself from his mother’s hugs.
His fascination with blonde women smoking also held some promise if I could learn more about it. Was it a trigger for stronger unresolved emotions that got released when something evoked them? Did this happen in particular situations or was it more widespread in the way he lived his life?
These questions did not have easy answers. But, as a psychologist, I wanted to find out more about Earl’s triggers. Why Kathy and Carolina, 20 years apart and not his two wives or other women he dated in between. What other walls did he erect to keep those nasty hostile feelings under control? To do this, I had to begin going through his writings, and then try out my own ideas using psychological tests.
Chapter 4
Dr. Ariel Lewis
I left the jail after that first visit and drove the few short miles down to the beach before returning to my office. The ocean is my favorite go-to place when I need to restore my own sense of balance after being locked up in the jail with a client. Something about the contrast between the ever changing blue and green colors of the ocean, against the café-colored sand, sunny blue skies dotted with a few clouds here and there, and the shimmering white sails on the boats is the best cleanse from the horrors that I hear when I interview people whose disheveled lives are filled with abuse. Although as a psychologist I was trained to separate my feelings from the tales told by my clients, it does have an impact. I’ve learned ways to contain it, to not let it creep into my daily life, but some stories are more difficult to shake off than others. Earl’s story was one of those that wouldn’t easily go away. If I could replace the horrible images of him bludgeoning a woman to death with images of him as a small frightened abused child, it would make it easier for me to work on his case. Other than repeated illnesses, which may well have been aversive and traumatic for Earl, I couldn’t find evidence that he was abused. I wondered about the impact of the head injuries he suffered and if it caused the later behavioral problems. Perhaps he suffered anoxia or lack of sufficient oxygen at birth. Organic brain disease could explain a lot of his symptoms but very difficult to assess without good records or brain scans. I hadn’t yet heard about anosognosia yet, a brain disorder that could explain a lot of his behavior.
I sat watching the changing ocean and sky for a long time just taking it all in. Sometimes I’d meet my office staff for lunch in a little café right on the beach where we’ll mingle with the tourists as they too enjoy the fresh ocean air. It did seem to cleanse us from the horrors we hear from our clients who have been hurt and traumatized. But not this time. I finally moved with my husband, Joe, who is also a forensic psychologist, to a large apartment on the beach so I could be there daily.
Sitting on the warm sand and sifting it through my fingers, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the state wanted to kill Earl, charging him with capital murder. If he had a serious mental illness, his life might be spared although he would spend it in prison unless his lawyers could prove the murder was spontaneous and unpremeditated. My job as his forensic psychologist was to assess Earl’s mental state when he killed Carolina. It was not my job to judge my client’s behavior; that was for the judge and jury. But as the weeks passed, I started to like this strange man as I listened to his interesting stories week after week. It was difficult to juxtapose his brilliant analyses of literature with his lack of insight into the brutal murders, but I wanted to do my best to make sure he would get a fair trial.
Four weeks in, I left the jail and called a staff meeting as it was time to present the data I had collected so far. The discussion went something like this:
“I know Earl has an underlying mental illness, but I just don’t seem to be getting at the data I need to document it. Am I doing something wrong?
Giselle, a psychologist in her mid 30’s, who had been working with me for over ten years by then, reminded me: “Dr. Lewis, you always say that it takes time for some of the more serious mental illnesses to reveal themselves.”
