Hillside Stranglers (29 page)

In sum, however, the tests added up to conclusive proof that Kenny was malingering, as Dr. Orne would phrase it, and his behavior in general convinced Dr. Orne that here was an actor. Kenny went through, as Steve, his cigarette-tearing routine again, once more expressing a childlike bewilderment afterward when he pretended to notice for the first time a heap of filterless butts in the ashtray. To Dr. Orne this was transparent fakery, not only because of the obvious overacting but because, having gone through the cigarette routine before with other doctors, Kenny, had he been telling the truth, would not have been surprised that the mischievous Steve had been at work again. He would have remembered what had supposedly happened with Steve before, since he had been told about it when awake, as Ken. And since he was faking amnesia now, Dr. Orne concluded, he had doubtless been faking amnesia from the beginning. What had been obvious to commonsense detectives from the start had now been proved scientifically.

Kenny, unaware that Dr. Orne had tricked him into betraying himself, continued to add baloney to his diary:

I just had my first session with Dr. Orne, nice guy. Strangest thing happened, we were doing the test for hypnosis and it seemed that I was dreaming that Dean came into the room only it wasn’t clear. It was like I was seeing him in a strobe [light], and it looked like he was standing next to Dr. Orne.

There remained for Dr. Orne the question of multiple personality disorder itself. Dr. Orne cagily admitted to Kenny that there might be a problem with the multiple personality diagnosis. Although Dr. Allison had asked whether there were more than two personalities involved, so far only Ken and Steve had emerged. “That’s pretty rare for there to be two,” Dr. Orne suggested. Usually, he said, there were more than two. Three at least and sometimes eight or ten or more. Dr. Orne conducted this discussion when Kenny had not been hypnotized, or rather without giving Kenny the opportunity to pretend to be hypnotized. Dr. Orne wanted to establish that Kenny was reacting to cues and clues thrown out by the doctors. If Kenny was faking multiple personality, he would find a way to invent a third personality. Dr. Orne hinted that it was an important matter and that he was worried about there being only two parts.

Dr. Orne went through a hypnotic induction again and summoned Steve. He then sent Steve away and began exploring whether or not a third personality might exist. Kenny crouched down into his chair and began whimpering.

“Are you Steve?” Dr. Orne asked. “Tell me about yourself. What’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s all right. Tell me.”

Kenny began crying, like a frightened child, and pleaded, “You’re not going to hit me, are you?”

“No, I’m not going to hit you. It’s all right. I’m not your mother. She hit you a lot?”

“Yes.”

All this was Dr. Orne’s way of setting Kenny up. All he had
to do was throw out a cue, and Kenny would pick up on it. Deliberately using the same language as Watkins and Allison, Dr. Orne then asked to talk to that “part” that was trying to get out, a “part” separate from Ken and Steve. Kenny was having trouble coming up with another name. Mewling about, he finally called his new self Billy. But poor Billy was afraid. Billy needed more time to come out. That was just fine with Dr. Orne: as far as he was concerned, Billy could keep his own schedule, there was no need to rush. Dr. Orne suggested that they break for dinner:

“Billy, all right. I will soon wake you and the next time, you may talk to me. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” Kenny said, whining. Dr. Orne offered him a Kleenex.

Kenny had two hours to get his new self together, and, sure enough, after dinner Billy emerged right away. He was a little bitty boy. He did not know his last name. Did he know Steve?

“He’s a bad egg,” Kenny said in his new Billy-voice, small and scared, full of infantile metaphors. Billy did not get into trouble like bad Steve. Billy did not know foolish Ken. Billy liked to eat tuna fish, yum-yum. But under Dr. Orne’s questioning, which deliberately suggested more of a role for Billy than a mere baby Kenny, Billy grew up a little and took responsibility for the psychologist scam in Los Angeles. He had just done it for fun, he said, posing as a psychologist. Dr. Orne told little Billy not to worry himself. That was not a serious crime. With his faint German accent that made sarcasm easy but not blatant, Dr. Orne remarked:

“Los Angeles people don’t take these things that seriously. There are so many quacks.” No doubt Dr. Orne was thinking of one or two quacks he had encountered himself.

“I was introduced to the existence of Billy,” Kenny wrote in his diary that night. “I wonder what he’s like.”

Dr. Orne had proved that Kenny had been faking multiple personality disorder. All one had to do, he saw, was to suggest a new self and Kenny would invent one, given enough time and sufficient guidance. But, unlike Dr. Watkins, Dr. Orne did not take his findings to the press. Rather he kept them to himself
until the appropriate moment in the judicial process, working over his conclusions and phrasing them precisely.

Dr. Orne was not one to criticize his colleagues; he was content to let his work stand on its merits. He went so far as to invite Drs. Watkins and Allison to write up their own diagnoses of Bianchi for Dr. Orne’s
Journal of Experimental Hypnosis,
where he published his diagnosis as well. But later Dr. Orne did say publicly that it was probably easier for someone to fool a professional than a layman when it came to hypnosis.

Although they were deceived by Bianchi’s multiple personality hoax, Drs. Watkins and Allison can in no way be accused of unprofessional conduct. In truth they were being so thoroughly professional that what was obvious to the layman was not to them. The detectives saw the fraud at once; a BBC producer who was filming a documentary about Bianchi sensed the fakery after viewing the videotape of one session with Dr. Watkins; a writer who was doing a book about the Stranglers recognized the sham at once; the writer’s daughter, who was fifteen at the time and who knew nothing then about the case, happened to see five minutes of a tape showing Bianchi playing Steve for Dr. Allison and commented of Kenny, “What a lousy actor!”

How can it be that professionals were so easily hood-winked? A key lies in Dr. Watkins’s comment to the skeptical BBC producer that Bianchi could not possibly have known enough about hypnosis and psychology to fake multiple personality syndrome. Dr. Watkins said Bianchi would have to have had “several years of study in Rorschach [tests] and graduate study in psychology for him to be able to do that.” So great is the belief of some professionals in the intricacy and obscurity of their specialty that they can become blind to the obvious. Nor was Dr. Watkins impressed by Bianchi’s library of psychology texts. After all, Bianchi did not have a degree.

Fortunately not all professionals have so deep a belief in credentials. Kenny sensed right away that however friendly Dr. Orne had appeared, this psychiatrist might be less gullible than others. He actually seemed to be looking for the truth. Nor had Dr. Orne said anything about trying to help Kenny or even to
cure him, as had Drs. Allison and Watkins. Dr. Orne was alarmingly precise and dispassionate. Kenny started trying to cover himself. He wrote in his diary:

I don’t envy [Dr. Orne] his position. I don’t have any real ideas except I don’t see how he can reach a definite conclusion. I’m beginning to wonder if the personality I’ve been told about is not being truthful with me (the Dr’s that is). What bothers me is I’m told I have a problem, I’m told what it is. I’m told because I don’t know, now I don’t know what to think. . . .

In other words, Kenny was already trying to find a way of blaming Drs. Allison and Watkins for the entire scam, just in case he was found not to have multiple personalities. Something in Dr. Orne’s manner—his scientific approach—had made Kenny begin to worry.

Dr. Saul Faerstein, who followed Dr. Orne, did nothing to reassure Kenny. Dr. Faerstein simply made Kenny talk, as Kenny, about his past and about the murders, and elicited a history of lies. “I had my first day with Dr. F[aerstein],” Kenny wrote in his diary on June 1st:

He’s not very objective. I can’t help what my past was. . . . I know what he’s shooting for and I don’t blame him. But I don’t understand what’s happening to me. . . . I dislike it when people make up their minds before they get into a situation. He doesn’t understand that there’s a difference between knowing of doing something and having no control and
not
knowing of doing something, therefore having no control. He’s definitely not objective. I don’t think he really understands what’s been happening in my life. . . . Dr. F[aerstein] feels, I believe, that if I have knowledge of things now, I’ve had such knowledge all along. . . .

When Kenny wrote that Dr. Faerstein was “not very objective,” he expressed a quite reasonable fear that Dr. Faerstein was
being entirely objective and was disturbingly, to Kenny, immune to the Bianchi charm and alert to the Bianchi lies. Dr. Faerstein’s indifference to the Steve and Billy charade worried him, and after a second session with this alarmingly skeptical doctor, Kenny wrote a new kind of entry in his diary:

I, Kenneth A. Bianchi, being of sound mind and body, do hereby write this, my last will and testament. To my son Ryan I leave all my worldly goods, as little as that may be, it goes to him with my deepest love. It is profound to me that I have had to experience more confusion and mistrust and insincerity in society, if only the right people had been wise enough to follow through with their responsibilities, during the years of forming me into the mold of adulthood, I wouldn’t be where I am now. There’s a sadness in misunderstanding, an emptiness like a hollow egg. The egg which can produce life in two ways, one in creation and one in sustenance [sic] and not realizing the potential of either.

Of course, Kenny did not have to write a will to leave his son the only Bianchi legacy, malignity and shame. But the will does serve as testament to his final thoughts whenever he would come to breathe his last: Whatever I have done, be sure to blame someone else. The will is in its own way and with its banal final simile an eloquent statement of an approach to life not unique to Bianchi in the twentieth century.

But if Kenny felt discouraged, Dr. Allison did not. Dr. Allison reviewed the videotapes of Dr. Orne’s interviews and, ignorant of Dr. Orne’s techniques and conclusions, saw there not a refutation but further confirmation of a multiple personality diagnosis. Why, a third personality had emerged! Billy! If Billy would talk to Dr. Orne, surely Billy would talk to Dr. Allison. Here was a challenge. Now that Billy had arrived, could additional personalities be far behind?

Dr. Allison began his new interviews on June 28. (Bianchi had now been talking to psychiatrists and psychologists for
three and a half months.) He began by telling Kenny at great length about the history of his involvement with multiple personality cases: the articles he had written, the book he was preparing, the oceanic vastness of his experience in the field. “I was the communicator between the psychiatrists around the world. I’ve been in India, Germany, United States, Canada, Austria. I sort of became the coordinator of passing information around because they were all very lonely out there. Nobody understood them. You think
you’re
not understood: the psychiatrist who’s treating such folks is also not understood by the other psychiatrists. . . .” Dr. Allison wanted Kenny to know that Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, “also known as Connie,” was a personal friend. She was the doctor who had treated “Sybil.” Did Kenny know that book or had he seen the movie? No, no, Kenny said. He thought perhaps Kelli had seen it, he was not sure. Well, Dr. Allison said,
Sybil
was “a super best-seller” as a book and “since that time they’ve made a movie out of it with Joanne Woodward playing Dr. Wilbur and I forget the name of the young girl who played the patient. She was formerly the flying nun.”

“Sally Field,” Kenny said helpfully.

“Sally Field, right. . . . Well, anyhow Dr. Wilbur got to be friends with me and when this case came up your attorney presented the defense that there might be another personality in there doing these dastardly deeds.” Dr. Wilbur had actually recommended Dr. Allison for the present case, because she was seventy years old and he was on the West Coast and, after all, he was such an expert: “I have collected up to now fifty cases I’ve seen, which is not a world’s record, but it’s close to it. I know another psychiatrist who’s had about sixty-five back in Philadelphia [and] one that had that amount in Honolulu. The three of us have the largest numbers. . . . I’ve got three in therapy right now in my clinic.” (By 1984 Dr. Allison himself was up to seventy and closing fast on the Hawaiian.) Dr. Allison told Kenny that, sad to say, some psychiatrists were skeptical about multiples. Kenny shook his head. Gee, weren’t all psychiatrists open-minded?

“No, I have to say that’s not true. Well, anyhow, you’re
learning about psychiatrists. We can’t help exposing some of ourselves when we expect you to expose yourself.”

“I’ve already picked out my favorites,” Kenny said coquettishly.

Having exposed himself at length, Dr. Allison now brought up a touchy issue. Why had Billy talked to Dr. Orne but not to him, Dr. Allison? “Somebody lied to me,” Dr. Allison said.

“Steve,” Kenny offered.

“I’m not trying to lay blame. I consider it like military secrecy. You got to have the secrecy clearance,” Dr. Allison said. Why had he not received clearance? His goal now was to get that clearance and to find out more about Billy.

“I like you, Dr. Allison,” Kenny said. “I feel comfortable with you.”

Dr. Allison suggested that they would talk to Billy during the next session. He concluded this interview with a lengthy digression on the collective unconscious according to Carl Jung and further digressions on the “transpersonal self,” seven levels of consciousness “and five more about that,” Freud and ego theory; and “the source of all wisdom that we need to solve all these crazy problems while we live in this crazy world. . . . And heavens to Betsy,” Dr. Allison said, “we all have to have some help for that!”