Sybil Exposed (36 page)

Under treatment Heather eventually came up with much more blameworthy accounts of trauma. One of her alter personalities remembered her father offering her to a business associate to be raped at his pleasure. That story competed strongly with the other Open Hospital patients’ tales of parental rape.
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The three young psychiatrists on Connie’s staff had deeply respected her when they studied with her at the University of Kentucky. But they were not happy at the Open Hospital, according to one of them, Rosa K. Riggs. She had been excited about multiples in the early 1970s, after learning about Jonah, the black man with the four alter personalities and the different EEG readings. But when Riggs joined Connie’s staff, her excitement swiftly faded.
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The main problem was that Connie insisted that her employees act just as selfless as she had when she’d treated Shirley. Interviewed for this book thirty years after working at the Open Hospital, Riggs remembered how her boss demanded that staff take patients out to eat and accompany them to the movies. They were also supposed to give out their home phones, and answer day and night when patients (and their many alters) called to report a “crisis.”
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If her staff neglected to do as she did, Connie would grow cold, disapproving, and distant. “You didn’t argue with her,” Riggs said, even though she and the other employees knew that Connie’s treatment methods violated psychiatric ethics. Riggs would see patients who she didn’t believe had alters, but Connie would insist that they did and order Riggs to do more hypnosis. Riggs did not disobey her.

Connie’s facility folded in 1980, after the staff quit. By then, however, other psychiatrists and psychologists all over town were diagnosing people as suffering from multiple personalities. Thanks to Connie’s influence, Lexington had become like one of those nineteenth-century European villages whose primary business was offering “rest cures” to neurasthenics and hysterics. For her part, Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur now had dozens of new clinical tales about alter personalities—more stories, with more amazing details, than any other doctor in the field.

Using these stories, she worked with other psychiatrists to popularize multiple personality. She hoped her efforts would get the condition listed for the first time in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
It was popularly known as the
DSM,
and it was due for a revision soon. Politicking to list a new diagnosis typically begins a few years before a new edition goes to press, and to make sure the American Psychiatric Association—the APA—got on board to add multiple personality to the
DSM,
Connie began giving workshops about the diagnosis at the APA’s national conventions.

One workshop was offered in Chicago in 1979. There, Connie mounted an exhibit of paintings by “Sybil,” and she raved about how brilliant and talented Sybil’s multiples had been, not just as artists but as writers, too. Virtually all her multiples were women with high IQs and tremendous creativity, Connie added. As a matter of fact, she was acting as a literary agent for many of them, sending their manuscripts to New York in search
of publishers. The workshop was covered by the media, and an article about Connie’s talented multiples was printed in newspapers throughout the country.
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Multiple personality became an official psychiatric diagnosis the next year. It was defined as “the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” each of them “complex and integrated,” with “its own unique behavioral patterns and social relationships.”
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As with every other diagnosis in the
DSM,
multiple personality received its own multidigit number. Therapists could now use it to bill insurance companies for their treatment of the newly recognized condition. Because multiple personality patients typically remained in treatment for years, their illness was worth good money.

Connie once again did a spate of media interviews, and she brought her patients with her. In 1980 she appeared on a New York City television news show with Marcy, the “janitor” who had always been trying to kill herself at the Open Hospital.
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Marcy curled on the floor of the news studio, assumed the voice of a three-year-old, and recited the details of rope-and-meat-hook torture which she said her mother had perpetrated on her. Not only that, but both of her parents, as well as her brothers, her neighbors, and a dog had inserted toothpaste tubes into her vagina for sixteen years, beginning when she was six months old, and kicked the tubes farther inside her with combat boots. Marcy had not remembered any of this until therapy, when Dr. Wilbur managed to communicate with her alters. There were eighty-nine of them.

All of Marcy’s claims were presented as fact. The reporter who narrated the program noted that she had not contacted Marcy’s mother for her side of the story because Marcy had asked her not to. The show won a local Emmy award. Not long afterward, Connie went on
Good Morning America
and
20/20.

With the Open Hospital closed back in Lexington, Connie asked Dr. Robert Kraus, chairman of the University of Kentucky Medical School’s psychiatry department, if she could treat her patients at the University hospital. No problem, Kraus responded. But soon there were problems galore.

“She would sweep in” to the hospital to make rounds, Kraus remembered.
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She would gather all the psychiatry residents and medical students around a patient she was treating for multiple personality. Then she would
question everyone about the case. She seldom thought they got it right. “You’re stupid!” she would scream, and “Thank God I’m here! I’ll straighten you out!” Turning to the multiple, she would explain that “You’ve got to be patient with these people—they don’t know anything.” Pandemonium would erupt on the ward, with residents cursing, nurses trembling, and patients refusing to follow hospital protocol. “Dr. Wilbur said I can do this and I can do that,” Kraus remembered them insisting. When the staff disagreed, the patients ordered them to “Go to hell!”

Kraus intervened, telling Connie that from now on he, rather than she, would call the shots about her patients’ medications, privileges, and passes to leave the hospital. She agreed but soon afterward stopped making admissions to the hospital.

Connie’s home was also a battleground. Years after the book
Sybil
had first appeared, she was still struggling to keep Shirley under wraps and under control. Shirley had grown furious that she had been forced to go into hiding, and Connie tried to keep her mind off the situation. She helped Shirley launch another business, “Mason Arts, Inc.,” by “buying stock” in it—in other words, giving Shirley money with no payback date. Shirley tried to develop and sell her “Sybil” board game, but she had no luck.
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She exacted vengeance by throwing tantrums when Connie tried to socialize with others.

Connie’s older brother Oliver was still alive in Canada. One of his daughters had gone through a divorce after Connie moved to Lexington and needed help putting her life back together. Ever eager to help a woman fulfill her dreams, Connie offered assistance if her niece would move to Lexington. She did, with her three teenaged daughters, Connie’s grandnieces. They all started coming to Connie’s home to socialize with her. But Shirley wanted Connie to herself. She tattled that one of the grandnieces was having boys in the house when Connie wasn’t there. The grandniece said that was a lie. She and her sisters and mother stopped visiting.
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Things got worse when eighteen-year-old Brenda Burwell, another grandniece, moved from Canada to live with Connie and finish high school. Brenda was having discipline problems in her own home and Connie offered to take her in. Brenda loved her aunt, and though Connie almost never talked about her past, she did confide certain things—that
she’d had plastic surgery to rejuvenate her buttocks, for instance, and a touch-up on her facelift, no doubt to impress Hollywood. Connie also told Brenda that Shirley was Sybil. And Brenda learned about late-night calls from patients. Connie told her never to answer the phone when she was out of town, but Brenda did anyway, and found the experience mind bogglingly entertaining. She would chat for hours with women who switched into an array of voices.

Shirley hated having Brenda around. The first thing she’d told her when she arrived was that she, Shirley, “could get rid of anyone she wanted to, get them out of Connie’s life,” Brenda remembered years later.

Brenda tried to keep her distance but found it difficult. Shirley spent so much time at Connie’s that she’d never bothered to furnish her own place with care. Only one room there reflected her personality: it was graced with natural light and filled with vintage dolls from her youth—all those Peggys and Peggy Anns. Otherwise, Shirley’s home was bare inside, and she mostly stayed away from it. She showed up first thing every morning at Connie’s to cook her breakfast. Later, she would cook dinner and wait for Connie’s return from work. Brenda was usually there, too, and she never saw Shirley displaying any alter personalities. What she did see was a skittery, trembling woman, not just thin and anxious but shakingly, palpably angry.

One afternoon when Brenda came home from school she made the mistake of throwing her coat and books on a chair. Shirley scolded her. Minutes later Brenda went into the kitchen and started fixing herself a grilled-cheese sandwich in a pan on the stove. Shirley walked in and became enraged that Brenda had not first lined the pan with aluminum foil. She “flipped out,” according to Brenda, and physically attacked her. Connie’s housekeeper, an older black woman, witnessed the violence.

When Connie got home, Brenda and the housekeeper told her what had happened. Connie refused to believe them. Shirley would never do such a thing, she insisted, and she summarily fired the housekeeper. Brenda was evicted, too, and had to move in with a girlfriend.

Shirley was often alone in the house after Brenda was kicked out, while Connie spent days and sometimes weeks at meetings and conferences organized to turn the treatment of MPD into a specialty. In 1983, she was able to enjoy the fruits of her labors when a new professional organization was born: the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality
and Dissociation. The ISSMP&D held its first conference a year later, featuring presentations like “Inpatient Management” and “What to Do till the Friendly One Comes: Managing an Angry Alter.”
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At the conference, Connie spoke about “Multiple Personality Disorder and Child Abuse: An Etiologic Overview.” The title suggested that the talk would be a snooze: after all, her longtime axiom, that alter personalities were invariably created by severe child abuse, was by now so entrenched that her colleagues were starting to dub it “the post-Wilburian paradigm.” But up on the podium, she launched into a circus of weirdness as she described a woman patient who’d recovered memories of her family as an organized cult of vicious assassins.
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That idea had been born in the popular culture in 1980, when the best seller
Michelle Remembers
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came out, a book about a patient who had suddenly recalled that her parents were Satanists who had led their coven in sexually torturing little Michelle when she was only five years old. It was co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a Catholic psychiatrist in Canada, and Michelle Smith, Pazder’s patient and later his wife.

Michelle Remembers
told of ritual crimes in endless, gory detail. Marketed as truth, it became an instant bestseller. Seven years earlier,
Sybil
had awakened in many disturbed women the idea that they, too, possessed multiple personalities. Now, among this same demographic,
Michelle Re-members
evoked phantasmagoric memories of sexual torment by evil groups—everyone from devil worshipers to the Ku Klux Klan.

“How would you like to be exposed to multiple murders as an infant and a child, since your grandfather formed the first Klan and your father formed the second Klan and the family literally owned the town?” Connie asked rhetorically at the 1984 ISSMP&D conference. “I don’t know how many murders this child saw … she tells me that a group of individuals in that part of the United States killed every single black person that came within their purview and they killed a great many … whites that were itinerant farm workers, including the children.”
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The KKK had apparently been able to erase all evidence of their murders, Connie continued. They dismembered the corpses and put them “in these large burners on the farms that are used to burn trash from the harvest.” During therapy, she added, her patient also remembered being forced by her father to slit victims’ throats with a knife. “Blood was caught in
jars and often times, everyone shared in drinking the blood,” Connie said, adding that the killers would cut off a body part “and pass it around for everyone to take some, in order to eat it.”

“I don’t think that we can possibly deny the truth” of the patient’s story, Connie concluded. “These are not allegations. They’re descriptions of behaviors that she was forced to participate in.”
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Though some conference attendees might have been shocked by Connie’s story, it is safe to say that most were not surprised. By 1984, almost every therapist at the meeting had patients who’d recovered memories of chillingly sadistic and bizarre group crimes—or they had colleagues whose patients had these recollections.

Soon even children were telling these stories. By the mid-1980s a wave of sex-torture allegations was washing over preschools and day care centers throughout the United States. From California to Massachusetts, teachers, teacher aides, and babysitters were accused of enacting intricate, organized rapes on children barely old enough to tie their shoelaces. The charges terrified early childhood educators, driving untold numbers from the profession. Dozens of public child care facilities were shuttered.