The Insanity Plea (6 page)

Boston was Mecca for marathon runners
long before the twenty-six mile ordeal became a rite of passage for tens of
thousands of other Americans. It started in 1897 when the Boston Athletic
Association sponsored its first race. Fifteen men chose to accept the
challenge. The Boston Marathon remained a local spectacle until the nineteen
seventies, drawing a few hundred brave souls who ran from rural Hopkinton
through small towns and ended in downtown Boston on Patriots’ Day every April. It
was not until Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic marathon that everyman and
everywoman decided that almost anyone with determination could finish the race.
By the twenty-first century, what had started with fifteen entrants had grown
so that the Boston Athletic Association had to limit entries to twenty-two
thousand.

One of the qualifiers was a young man
who was out for a solitary run on a Sunday morning in early March. He left his
dormitory room at Harvard on a gray, overcast day, wearing shorts, a hooded
sweatshirt and cotton gloves to blunt the chill. If he chose, he could watch
each of his breaths as he crossed a bridge over the Charles River and wound his
way through Boston’s Back Bay. Soon he was on the Boston Marathon course. Today
he was running it backwards, intending to do twenty miles, maybe a little more
if he felt up to it.

He pushed himself hard up the three
hills of Newton and down the other side. His goal was to break three hours on
Patriots’ Day, slightly under seven minutes for each of the twenty-six miles. With
a smattering of cars on the road, early Sunday morning was the ideal time for a
long run. The light traffic allowed him to focus on his stride, but when he
topped the third hill his mind was back in his dorm room, staring at a blank
computer waiting to be filled with a history paper.

A dog’s persistent barking brought
him back to his run. Wandering dogs were the sworn enemies of joggers. Too
often they joined in the run, nipping at the heels of a runner and occasionally
taking a piece of flesh from an ankle or calf. The runner looked toward the
sound, expecting to see a dog come charging onto the road. Instead, the dog, a
Labrador retriever mix, was standing over something twenty or thirty feet off
the road. His first instinct was to ignore the animal and keep up his pace. Then,
something about the dog’s bark caused him to stop and walk back for another
look.

He approached cautiously, telling the
dog what a good boy he was. The dog stopped barking and silence filled the
morning when the jogger realized what had the lab’s attention. The form of a
female runner lay at the dog’s feet. She wore only a Wellesley sweater and
Nikes. She was bare from her sweater to her shoes. Blood filled the slight
depression where she lay and still oozed from a gash in her neck that extended
from ear to ear. The jogger turned and ran back to the road to look for help as
the dog, realizing he had done his duty, lay down beside the body and remained
silent.

By the time Dan was charged with
capital murder, Wayne and his mother had grown to accept his living arrangement
as a fact of life. Certainly, Wayne was not alone when he declared that he had
done all that he could do.

Still, it ate at him. He tried to
work; he joined Duke at Fonde, hoping the exertion, sweat and competition would
clear his head; he and Rita went to Rockets games, often with Duke and Claudia.
If any of them brought up how his brother was doing, he changed the subject.
 
Duke volunteered to pay a call on the public
defender on one occasion when he had a court appearance in Galveston. Wayne
told him not to bother. In his mind, Dan died years ago. The person accused of
murder in Galveston was someone else, unrelated to the big brother he once
idolized. Wayne’s attitude stayed the same until one evening he received a call
from his mother.
 

“Wayne, you haven’t even been down
here since Dan was charged.”

“Mom, I thought you and I crossed
this bridge years ago. We both wanted Dan out of our lives. Nothing’s changed
in my mind.”

“I thought so, too. Even when he was
charged I didn’t call the jail at first. Still, I’m a mom and he’s my son. I
started checking on him every week. They were getting him on some medicines and
I was told he was improving.” She paused, coughed, and continued. “Then, I got
a call from a friend of mine who works at the jail. She was born on the island
and we’ve been friends for forty years. She said that Dan must have missed some
of his medications. The jailers are not very good about keeping them on a
regular schedule. Anyway, he started talking that stuff about aliens again. Supposedly,
he’s on a unit with other sick patients. Still, they all started laughing at
him and poking fun at him. He got so agitated he hit one of them in the mouth. Then,
Emily, that’s my friend, said four of them jumped on him. He’s got a broken
nose, two loose teeth and four broken ribs. They’re also worried he slipped a
disc in his back.

“I’m worried about him. One of us has
got to get involved. We’re his only family.” There was a long silence on the
other end of the line, long enough that Sarah asked, “Wayne, are you still
there?”

“I’m here, Mom. Let me think on it. I’ll
call you tomorrow.”

Wayne walked over to Rita’s townhouse
and found a “Do Not Disturb!” sign on the door. He thought about banging on the
door until her date gave up and left but knew that would piss Rita off. Instead
he went back to his place, poured a drink, went up to his balcony and sat,
gazing into the heavens as if between the scotch and the stars there would be
an answer. After his second scotch he took his cell phone from the wrought iron
table and called Duke.

“Hey, bro, I’m going to Galveston
tomorrow to check on Dan. I’m starting in the D. A.’s office.”

The poster was a small one, found
only on a bulletin board at Harvard Medical School. It announced a speaker who was
a medical doctor, a psychiatrist to be precise. Soon, though, a buzz began in
the hallways of the medical school and found its way to other buildings,
dormitories and classrooms. Frederick Parke, M.D., noted forensic psychiatrist,
profiler for the FBI and a pioneer in the effort to understand the growing
problem with serial killers in the country, was going to lecture on
Serial Killers and the Criminal Mind.

Originally scheduled for a classroom
in the medical school, the lecture had been moved twice, the last time to an
auditorium in the law school to accommodate the hundreds of faculty and
students who wanted to hear first-hand what such a renowned expert had to say
about an issue that touched so many academic disciplines.

The auditorium was packed and the
buzzing of voices was that of a giant beehive when Dr. Parke walked from behind
the curtain to take the solitary seat on the stage. The room went silent as the
head of the department of psychiatry took ten minutes to introduce the speaker.
With pages still remaining in the speaker’s resume, he finally stopped and
invited a round of applause as Dr. Parke rose, shook his hand and stood behind
the podium. Dr. Parke was in his early fifties with sandy blond hair and a
hawkish yet handsome face. He carried a lean 185 pounds on a six foot frame. For
this occasion he was dressed in a Pierre Cardin suit, a blue dress shirt and a
yellow tie. A yellow handkerchief in the suit breast pocket accented the tie.
 
He took time to look over the audience, first
one side and then the other, then to the balcony, as if to make eye contact
with everyone in the room before he spoke. Next he stepped from behind the
podium and flipped the switch for a microphone attached to his lapel as he
walked to the edge of the stage

“How do we identify a serial killer? Anyone
want to take a shot at the answer?”

The audience was silent.

“Take a look at the person to your
left and then to your right. Go ahead,” Parke encouraged his audience.

“Now, with one major exception,
anyone in this room could fit the description of such a killer,” Parke smiled. “The
exception is that you can exclude the women in the room. Oh, it happens
occasionally, but women usually don’t work alone. The Manson family is a
classic example. Otherwise, they are men, usually white men. Not men who look
like werewolves or vampires. Most are plain, ordinary guys. John Wayne Gacy was
a member of the Jaycees and dressed as a clown for children’s parties.
 
Ted Bundy could have blended into any class on
this campus. The self-proclaimed BTK murderer was president of his Lutheran
Church congregation. Most are adept at putting on a public façade. They melt
into whatever society where they choose to do their hunting. Think of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a fictional character, but nonetheless an example of a
respected scientist in the daytime and a mad killer when darkness fell.

“People always want to know why a man
turns into a killer. I’ve been studying them for thirty years. I hope my legacy
is a better understanding of serial killers so that we can stop some of them
before they begin to hunt. Some are abused as children. Some claim that they
were exposed to traumatic events. Maybe it’s a chemical imbalance. Maybe it’s
genetics. Ted Bundy never understood why people couldn’t comprehend that he
killed because that’s what he wanted to do. He rationalized that it was only
one less person on the face of the earth and there were still billions left.”

A gray haired man with a handlebar
mustache made his way to a microphone about halfway back in the middle aisle. “Excuse
me, Dr. Parke. Since you’ve been studying these killers for so long, I’m sure
the audience would like to hear your own opinions as to what makes them tick.”

Parke frowned at being interrupted,
quickly recovered and replied, “Glad to respond, Professor. Most of the killers
I’ve studied have one thing in common. They are all hunters. Not for deer or
ducks or elk. They want the thrill of the hunt and the kill, but of another
human being, most often a woman. They succeed once and then succeed again. Soon
it becomes a critical part of their lives. In fact, they tell me it’s the only
time they truly feel alive. With some, it’s sexual. And, since our society has
publicized their conquests, I’m certain there are many who want to make the
record books. They are usually confident they will not be caught. After a
killing, they scour the newspapers, TV and the internet, reveling in the
limelight. They want their fifteen minutes of fame to last for years and years.
Often, they succeed. It’s as if they say to themselves,
Now, we can let the games begin
.”

An attractive young woman rose. Her
blond hair, blue eyes and well-filled sweater immediately caught the speaker’s
attention. “Dr. Parke, how can you study these twisted individuals and almost
get into their minds to understand their gruesome lives without having it
impact you? I mean, do you also find it necessary to have two personalities?”

Dr. Parke studied the woman,
appearing to drink in her features, before he replied. “Perhaps, young lady,
Sigmund Freud put it best a hundred years ago when he said, ‘No one who, like
me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human
breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle
unscathed’.”

The next morning Wayne found the “Do
Not Disturb” sign gone from Rita’s door and knocked lightly. Shortly, the door
opened and Rita was there wearing a Texas Longhorns tee shirt and apparently
nothing else. A thought flickered through Wayne’s mind:
My neighbor is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, with or without
make-up.

“It’s a little early, isn’t it?” Rita
said, her voice still husky from sleep. “You want some coffee?”

Wayne considered the offer and then
declined. “No, thanks. I just wanted you to know that my mother called last
night. Dan’s been beat up pretty bad. I’m going down there this morning.”

Instantly awake, Rita said, “Give me
five minutes and I’ll go with you.”

“Appreciate the offer. I’m not
looking for company. I just thought you should know. I told Duke last night. I’m
sure he’s told Claudia by now.”

Rita nodded, knowing that Wayne would
not change his mind. “Fair enough. I’d like to go, but I damn sure know and
understand you. Just get over here for dinner tonight, just the two of us. I
want to know how he is and take your pulse, too.” She then grabbed him, gave
him a hug and a slightly lingering kiss goodbye. Turning to leave, Wayne’s
thoughts about his brother were momentarily overridden by the feel of her lips
and her breasts against his chest.

When he got to I-45 South, he
returned his focus to what lay ahead. He had successfully severed ties to his
brother for over nine years, choosing not to even bring his name into a conversation.
Alienated is the word that popped into his mind. Deep down he knew that something
like this was going to occur, eventually. Why now? On the other hand, nine
years was a long time without having to deal with the problem. And what a
problem this turned out to be. It was bad enough that he had a brother with
schizophrenia who was beyond help. Now he was charged with a murder,
capital murder.

This trip was really for his mother. Typical
of her, she had injected herself into the process. Wayne owed it to her to at
least understand more about the charges and defenses. He would start with Harry
Klein.

He crossed the four lane causeway that
served as the island’s umbilical cord to the rest of Texas and felt himself
drawn back to the culture and heritage that he had left behind.
 
Perhaps, the island should never have been
inhabited. Maybe it would have been better to have left it an unoccupied sand
bar as God and nature intended. But, starting with the Karankawa Indians, long
before the white man discovered the island and leading up to the day that Wayne
drove over the causeway, man could not stay away. Cost, be it dollars or human
lives, was not an issue. From cannibals, to pirates to freebooters, to
prostitutes and gamblers, and now to more solid citizens, Galveston had
evolved. It was an island of sixty-five thousand people, numbers little changed
from 1900. Some worked at the medical school and its adjoining hospitals. Others
worked in hotels, restaurants and shops along the beach and in the old section
of downtown known as The Strand, at the port on the east side of the island,
and servicing cruise ships that disembarked from Galveston and circled
Caribbean islands on a weekly basis. Galveston needed its tourists but if truth
be told, residents would probably just as soon be left alone on their island.