Twisted Ones (15 page)

(From the Labor Day issue
of a national news magazine)

ALL SHOOK UP

Almost to no one’s surprise, the past Memorial Day weekend was filled with tragedy characteristic of the holiday time. Among the statistics of automobile deaths, home accidents, drownings and racing-car crashes, there were three tragedies not quite as common to the normal long weekend—and yet, vaguely reminiscent of past Christmas, Easter, and Labor Day celebration periods, in this time of the youth gone cuckoo.

Manhattan psychiatrist Arnold Kurgler, commenting on the three murders committed by young people over the Decoration Day hiatus, said the reason for many such brutalities occurring on “special occasions” might well be attributed to too much family pressure.

“Children are usually underfoot more at such times,” said the paunchy, balding authority, “and if they are not welcome, if they feel that they are in the way of the cocktail party, the barbecue, the napping father, or the sibling who wants the family car at the same time they do, the inhibited resentment is triggered, and mere impulses may become raging compulsions.”

Manhattan Chief of Police Jack Graney chose stronger language to explain the phenomenon of the rise in crime among youngsters during holidays.

“We’ve watched this thing for a long time,” said cigar-smoking, hefty, tight-knuckled “Mutt” Graney, “and it all adds up to the fact that the kids are out to raise hell whenever there’s a few days with nothing for them to do! We put extra men on to watch it, and we’ve been proven right. This last long weekend in New York City, there were no murders committed by kids, only four known thefts committed by criminals under 18, and very few acts of violence of any other kind. When you know there’s going to be a rough time, you got to put on your gloves, stick in your mouthpiece, and go in fighting!”

Whatever the cause of juvenile crime, and if there is any consistency to its pattern during a vacation time, none of the youthful offenders of this past Memorial Day weekend were able to shed any light on the matter.

In Sykes, New York, handsome, immaculate 16-year-old Brock (“my mother’s maiden name—she was a Brock”) Brown was asked why he committed the rape-choke-knife murder of Caroline Bates, the same age. He gave the inarticulate, shoulder-shrugging answer almost any teen-ager gives for almost anything these days, from why he dances the fish, to why he leaves a girl’s brutally stabbed body on a back-country road and goes home to change his clothes and watch television. His answer? “I was all shook up.”

In Reddton, New Jersey, the parents of Charles (Chuckles) Berrey, poor loser on the Cash-Answer television quiz program, could think of no way to explain why their son set fire to the local library, causing the 59-year-old, white-haired librarian, Margaret Schuster, to die in the flames. They adamantly denied the rumor that their “Chuckles” had made the blaze out of anger at his failure to identify a zebra swallowtail butterfly, thereby losing $52,000 and allegedly inspiring his family’s scorn.

The eight-year-old had little to add to his parents’ silence on the subject. His statement? “I’m sorry.” His next thought. “I want my brother to have my knife collection. He doesn’t live with my family. He lives in West Virginia.”

The tall, stuttering, Vermont 19-year-old who beat his mother’s head in with a hammer in the sleepy New England town of Auburn, Vermont, was more direct in his response to the question: “Why did you do it?” but was by far the least endearing of the three.

“She wouldn’t give me back my cigarettes,” he said, “so I picked up the hammer and hit her.”

Brock Brown and hammer-killer Reginald Whittier were declared legally sane. Both will stand trial on charges of homicide. Quiz kid Berrey was released in his family’s custody due to his age.

At the Memorial Day weekend’s finish, the Eastern part of the nation, was almost as “shook up” by the shocking fact of these three sordid crimes as the “shook-up” generation itself.