Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (39 page)

Marilyn wasn't surprised to learn that the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) and other tests had shown "no evidence of psychopathology." She read that her husband had a "need to suppress unacceptable impulses," and that he was especially angry about the recent intrusions into his life, "but even here his anger is blunted and expressed obliquely, e.g., cutting remarks on the side. He tends to approach his life and work compulsively."

Marilyn paused to imagine the results of the same scientific tests if they'd been administered to women like Arden McArthur, Meg, Minda, Aletha, some of the others. Would they show "no evidence of psychopathology"? And yet the Medical Board had acted as though John was the weird one! How would the Board have ruled if they'd read this report? Dr. Dolby was a licensed psychologist, a graduate of Baylor University, a former teacher at Wheaton College, John's own alma mater. His findings were hard evidence, not malicious gossip.

Marilyn agreed with the doctor's evaluation of John as a "private person who has spent an adult lifetime serving people as a physician" and a deep believer in religion and ethics. His sexual fantasies, according to the psychological tests, were "normal and unimaginative," and he lived a normal, "provincial" sex life with neither sadistic nor aggressive fantasies. Above all, he was emotionally stable and mentally healthy, and the charges against him were "inconsistent with the results of this diagnostic examination."

As part of his fee, the Denver expert had agreed to study the case and distill his findings into an affidavit. Marilyn felt relieved as she read his sworn observation that female patients frequently indulged in sexual fantasies about their physicians, and that this "could be a powerful dynamic which might be the core fantasy around which a myth is built." Dolby likened the case to the Salem witchcraft trials. The accusers, he noted, seemed to "have a difficult time thinking and functioning as independent units."

A covering letter ended with a ringing statement that if John were convicted, it would "indeed be a travesty of justice."

Marilyn felt like dancing around the sunstruck room. Dr. Dolby had never seen or heard of John before they'd met in Denver. Who could disregard impartial testimony like this?

* ♦ *

After Wayne Aarestad read the Dolby report, he formally agreed to take the case. In the first strategy session, he insisted that John take the attack. "You've got to speak up," he said. "Look at you, Doctor. You're an intelligent, likable, honorable man. You represent the highest principles of medicine. Why can't you get that across?"

"I can't brag about myself," John insisted. "And I don't like to bad-mouth my patients." Marilyn thought, John would rather drink formaldehyde than violate the rule of doctor-patient confidentiality.

"If you can't talk about yourself," the beefy lawyer said, "we'll have to find someone who can."

Marilyn suggested Dr. Douglas Wrung, John's colleague at the hospital and a fellow member of the Lovell Bible Church. John had helped to bring Doug to town and they'd become social friends, at least to the extent that the homebody Storys were social with anyone.

Marilyn stayed up past midnight, running off a fresh set of depositions and transcripts on the clinic's clunky old copying machine in the back of the storage room. The next morning a sympathetic Doug Wrung promised to study the two thousand pages and respond with his own honest interpretation.

As far as Marilyn was concerned, the result was a masterpiece of logic. "Frankly," Doug wrote, "Meg Anderson's testimony reveals
no direct visible witness
of anything improper or irregular in her examinations by Dr. Story." Doug stressed how "bizarre" it was for Minda and Meg to bring their children back to the clinic after claiming that John had molested them.

As she read, Marilyn found her head bobbing in agreement. She was sure the courts would be equally impressed. Doug suggested that Minda suffered from emotional instability and other disorders, including a tendency to be incoherent, agitated, talkative, disoriented about time, overly dependent on her mother, and highly insecure. According to Doug, she was just after attention.

Marilyn blushed when she came to an especially frank passage. John's fellow physician noted that he'd conducted tests in his own examining room and concluded that Minda's allegations made no sense unless John's flaccid penis measured at least ten inches. Poking her in the side with such a huge instrument, Doug wrote, "would seem an anatomical feat that only a
rare
individual might possess. . . ." On the other hand, he went on, Minda might well have imagined it.

Wayne Aarestad seemed pleased with the Wrung report but insisted that more letters and affidavits were needed—"all we can lay our hands on." What better way to expose the Medical Board's error and reverse the revocation?

Marilyn thought of a psychologist who'd briefly rented space at the Story clinic and attended the Bible Church before moving to Grand Forks, North Dakota. John and Dr. Russell Blomdahl hadn't always seen eye to eye, but Russ was a good Christian and he'd recently expressed an interest in the case. Marilyn made another photocopy of the massive Medical Board material and mailed it off for comment.

The reply came fast. Russ Blomdahl modestly discounted his comments as "not intended to be a comprehensive, complete diagnosis," then produced a penetrating analysis of the McArthur girls and their motivations. He noted that Minda hadn't received enough love and attention from her parents, especially her father, and that she'd engaged in rebellious acting-out, including premarital sex and a subsequent marriage at seventeen. This was her way of punishing her parents, Russ wrote, "as well as forcing them to take notice of her."

The groove in Minda's tongue appeared to be a conversion reaction or hysterical reaction, Russ explained, and "was common among sexually disturbed women. He called Minda's relationship with Arden "significant," as shown in remarks that she would climb into her mother's bed and "get cuddled," "Mother would climb into my bed," and "I always listen to my mother."

The psychologist discerned a love-hate-jealousy triangle among Arden, Meg and Minda, with poor John in the middle. He observed that Minda had a strong need for a real or imaginary relationship, and when John treated her in a friendly, caring manner, she became infatuated. The report went on:

Without doubt, she very much enjoyed, subconsciously, the pelvic exams and had fantasies of intercourse with mixed feelings of guilt and anger—guilt relating to her husband, mother, and the Church; anger that the exam was uncomfortable during the instrumentation and bimanual manipulation. She expected that the fantasies of intercourse with this otherwise pleasant, gentle man should not be painful but it always was. . . .

Russ suggested that Minda suffered from "pseudoneurotic schizophrenia" and "erotomania." He described her accusations about John as "explicit examples of psychotic illusions."

As for sister Meg, the Blomdahl report noted "numerous emotional and personal problems including her marriage, relationship with her mother, and sexual functioning." Russ likened Meg's childhood experiences to Minda's and noted that "in-depth psychological evaluation would undoubtedly reveal significant distorted perceptions and emotional functioning."

Marilyn was jubilant when she read his conclusion: the McArthur girls shared a mentally disturbed relationship known as "Folie A deux ... a communicated emotional illness between two persons."

In other words, Marilyn whispered to herself in glee, they're crazy. She could have hugged the two behavioral scientists and Doug Wrung. Together the three professionals had answered a question that had troubled her sleep for months.
Why would so many women make so many insane charges against an innocent man?

The dogged Aarestad warned against complacency. He agreed that there'd been a conspiracy against John, and the best defense against conspiracy was exposure. He hired a husband-and-wife detective agency in Red Lodge, Montana, and a female investigator from Casper. La Vera and Jan Hillman were still providing confidential information, but it wouldn't hurt to bring in a few seasoned gumshoes. From now on, the conspirators would be watched at every step.

61

JUDI CASHEL

It is estimated that for each rape that is reported, there are anywhere from 3 to 10 others that are not reported.

—Coleman, Butcher, and Carson,
Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life

In the beginning she'd thought, How will we ever get this case into court? But after Judi had interviewed nine or ten victims, clear patterns began to emerge: the repeated use of Examining Room No. 2; the automatic table, so out of place in a smalltown general practice; the frequency with which Story conducted pelvic exams (sometimes ten a day) and the length (up to forty-five minutes); the repeated instructions to slide a little bit past the end and contract the vaginal muscles; the pelvic exams for sprained limbs, colds, sore throats, infected earlobes; the peculiar requests ("Do you want to help guide it in?") and the inappropriate comments ("You have lovely breasts"); the instructions to strip and jump in place; the little touches and feels. . . .

Now if the victims would just cooperate, Judi said to herself, we might just be able to bring some charges. But there were still big problems. Minda McArthur Brinkerhoff, one of the most important witnesses, was acting reluctant. When Judi suggested that they meet in Gillette, Minda said, "Shoot, you won't do anything. How do I know you're not working to get him off?"

Judi felt a flush of anger. There was the suggestion of corruption in that remark—payoffs, malfeasance, the standard slanders about cops. But she kept a smile in her voice till she extracted a grudging

okay.

She drove seventy miles in her Fiero and was welcomed inside the Brinkerhoff home. Her first thought was, Oh, God, another Mormon family with wall-to-wall kids! How am I supposed to do an interview? Two towheads with gleaming faces and plastered-down hair squealed at one another while a third banged a piano with a wooden hammer and a fourth sucked on a bottle of pop. The floor was deep in toys. At a word from their mother the kids quieted down.

"I hear you're planning a lawsuit," Judi began.

"You bet."

"Why?"

Minda looked disgusted. "Well, gol, it's been eighteen months since we wrote the Medical Board, and he's still practicing."

"How much are you suing him for?"

"Mooga-bucks, that's all I know. The lawyers are handling it. We're giving the money to charity. We don't want his dirty

money."

It didn't take long for Judi to realize that she was dealing with a severe case of disillusionment. You poor kid, she thought, you placed your trust in all those LDS absolutes about chastity and worthiness and then you learned that there's more to real life than the Book of Mormon.

When Minda got started on her story, it was almost impossible to take notes. She sounded like a schoolgirl trying to recite the history of the world in three minutes. Judi remembered that Meg had also seemed kind of fluttery for a while, but that first impression had proved wrong. What made these McArthurs put their Worst foot forward?

Minda giggled even more than her sister; it seemed to be the family's all-purpose nervous reaction. Judi reminded herself that giggling rape victims make bad witnesses. You want a woman who Wrings her hands and sobs, like Terri Timmons, Caroline Shotwell, Wanda Hammond. Minda might be the Joan of Arc of this case, the first one to take on the male establishment, but that's no reason to let her blow it.

Even when the rape story came gushing out, Judi didn't feel that she'd gained the young mother's trust. Minda seemed as fed up with the justice system as she was with Story. She seemed to be saying, Look, I'll go along with you and give you this information, but you're not fooling me for a second. . . .

The sugar factory's white smokestack looked good as it came into sight on the return trip. Judi drove straight to the police office and learned that while she'd been gone, Wilcock had turned up more victims. The investigation was snowballing. Even the out-of-state leads were paying off. At Judi's request, a Pennsylvania state trooper had interviewed a woman named Susan Moldowney who claimed that Story had locked the examining room door, pulled on a condom, and "dilated" her so cruelly that she begged him to stop. "The doctor continued for a few minutes," the report noted, "telling her that he had to do this."

A detective in Mesa, Arizona, had located a Mexican-American woman who said that Story had dilated her three or four times and finally revealed his erect penis. She acknowledged that her twenty-year-old son might be his but refused to take the matter any further.

At Judi's request, a policeman in Maine interviewed another Mexican-American, Emma Briseno McNeil, who said that Story had dilated her and then turned to the sink and washed his penis in full view.

On October 16, two more Hispanic victims made it clear that there was a Mexican connection. Juana Garcia told how Story had probed her for fifteen minutes with something that felt like a finger, "only it was bigger." She could feel his clothing rubbing against her inner thighs.

Bettina Diaz said that Story accompanied his assault with advice: "Never let a man touch you. They only want one thing," and "Your body is too beautiful to ruin by having children." Toward the end of a pelvic exam, he began sweating and making "funny noises—panting, heavy breathing, grunting."