That was true, too, Elizabeth answered quickly. “They were making arrangements for all of us to leave Virginia and Jens did not like it.”
Updike flipped through his papers some more. At another time, he said, she had claimed that her parents were murdered because
she
wanted her freedom. She asserted that her parents had controlled her siblings’ lives and now they were trying to control hers as well. But she wanted them to leave her alone.
That was true as well, Elizabeth agreed. In fact she had said that earlier in the day.
“You felt that they were interfering with your life and you felt the only resolution was for them to be murdered?” Updike asked, anxious to clarify the issue for the record.
“No,” Elizabeth shot back. “I didn’t mention anything about murder. I said I wanted them to leave me alone.” That may have been Jens’s motive, she added, or at least one of them. But it was not hers. She steadfastly maintained that she had never wanted them killed.
Updike swallowed hard. He knew she was not going to give him an honest answer. “You’re just trying to minimize your involvement,” he said angrily. “Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”
“No,” she snapped, “that is
not
what I am trying to do.”
All day Updike had been trying to provoke her into making an uncontrolled response. Now, just as he was about ready to give up, he had succeeded. She poured out a torrent of words about how badly she wanted Jens to be convicted of the deaths of her parents and how she had lied, particularly about the knife.
Updike’s eyes widened in surprise. Before he could interrupt to ask about the knife, she told him.
She had told Gardner about the butterfly knife, she said, because Jens had told her he had used a steak knife to kill her parents. She was worried that if Jens came to trial and he had told her the truth about using a steak knife, his lawyers could argue that he had not been involved because the wounds on her parents’ bodies could not have been made by the knife
she
described; therefore Jens would be liable to get off on a technicality.
Updike’s head was spinning. Elizabeth Haysom was totally unpredictable, he told himself yet again. She could change her stories quicker than a camera flash. How could anyone tell when she was speaking the truth? He turned his attention back to her. She was still explaining her latest tale about the knife.
No matter what the murder weapon had been, Elizabeth said, she was convinced that Jens had planned to kill them. “When I came over here, I believed that if I was convicted of premeditating this murder with him, that he also would have to be convicted of premeditated murder and that he would not be able to give an insanity plea or to give a selfdefense plea or to get a second degree murder conviction. I was trying to help you,” she told Updike angrily.
That is not true, Updike thought. She is not trying to help me. She is trying to help make sure that Jens is convicted. And that she gets off as lightly as possible.
“I’m sorry if it appears I’m trying to minimize my guilt,” she said. “I believe that I am thoroughly guilty, thoroughly responsible for what happened. I agree that I have betrayed, lied, and deceived, and I wouldn’t be in this position if I had not done those things.”
UPDIKE KNEW WHEN TO QUIT. HE COULD ASK HER QUESTIONS into next week, and they would never get any closer to the truth than they had already. He felt he had made some points, not nearly as many as he had wanted to, but he was not going to get any further. I have to look at the proceedings
objectively, he told himself. The only opinion in the courtroom that matters is Judge Sweeney’s. I just hope he has not been fooled.
She could go, he said. He had no more questions. He slumped into his chair. He needed a breather. Elizabeth’s psychiatrist was still to come, and he wanted to be as fresh as possible for him. He knew that was going to be another fight.
AT MIDAFTERNOON, JUST WHEN THE AFTER-LUNCH blahs were starting to settle in, Drew Davis decided to enliven the proceedings. He called the psychiatrist, C. Robert Showalter.
In answer to Davis’s summons, the author of a lengthy psychiatric evaluation of Elizabeth strode briskly to the stand, jutting his chin and swinging his arms like a soldier on parade. A compact man with startlingly white hair covering the tops of his ears, Showalter had a florid, outdoorsy look that contrasted markedly with his expensive dark suit. His voice was pleasant and well-modulated, but when he opened his mouth, his speech was as distinctive as Elizabeth’s, although in a different way. Elizabeth spoke pure English; Showalter’s language was psychiatric jargon, liberally peppered with phrases such as
impetus stimulus
and
threshold criteria
.
In the beginning, though, he was understandable enough, explaining that he had been a practicing psychiatrist for twenty-four years, had testified in hundreds of court cases, and currently was associate medical director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
As far as Jones and Davis were concerned, Showalter was a star. He could be invaluable to their case if he could convince Judge Sweeney, as they hoped he would do, that Elizabeth had not been totally to blame for her actions because of a long-standing psychiatric condition. Next to Elizabeth herself, he was the defense’s most important witness.
However, he did not rank as high in Updike’s book. As the psychiatrist listed his credentials for the record in his resonant voice, Updike sat a few feet away with a deep
frown on his forehead, angrily flipping through Showalter’s thirty-nine page report. The defense had waited until the psychiatrist was seating himself in the witness box before giving the prosecutor a copy. The stratagem did not put Updike in the best of moods.
Just as Jones had done with Elizabeth, Davis treated Showalter gently and only occasionally gave him a verbal nudge or politely interrupted to get him back on track.
The first thing he wanted to make clear, Showalter said, was that Elizabeth’s psyche was not so out of balance that she was not competent to stand trial. Nor had he found any indication, he added, that she had been sufficiently disturbed at the time the crimes were committed to meet the legal definition of insanity. He and the other scientists at the institute who examined Elizabeth or interviewed her friends and family members came away feeling that she was a very bright, articulate young woman. Not that she didn’t have problems. Serious problems. She did, in fact, show symptoms of a serious psychiatric “dysfunction” known as a
borderline personality disorder.
In layman’s language,
borderline
means neither here nor there. Someone on the borderline is in the middle. In psychiatric terms, however, there is nothing in the middle about a borderline personality disorder. In mental health jargon, borderline has a much more rigid meaning. A borderline personality disorder, the psychiatrist explained, is a condition that develops early in life but commonly does not become apparent until the person reaches puberty or later. A person suffering from a borderline personality disorder commonly has trouble maintaining personal or social relationships. Generally, he or she does not function very well in day-to-day life. He or she has a lot of hang-ups.
Personality disorders, he said, differ from each other in the symptoms displayed by the sufferer. All the symptoms of all the disorders are enumerated in a huge tome called the
DSM III,
the third edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
It is the mental health worker’s Bible. Symptoms of a person suspected of suffering from a personality disorder
are listed by a diagnostician, then the listed symptoms are compared with the ones inventoried by the
DSM III.
The book catalogs eight clearly identifiable criteria for a borderline personality disorder. Mental health workers agree that anyone exhibiting five of those eight criteria can be judged as suffering from the disorder. Elizabeth, Showalter said, exhibited seven of them.
She tended, for example, to judge others in the extreme. Either the person could do no right or the person could do no wrong. “Her mother was seen as seductively attentive yet critically rejecting,” Showalter said. “Melinda was an understanding albeit possessive friend with whom Elizabeth lived and traveled, and then from whom she abruptly separated. Jens was her passionate paramour with whom she played out highly charged physical and emotional scenes.” In each of the relationships Elizabeth found herself bouncing between submissive and dependent or resentful and manipulative.
She was also impulsive to the extreme; she was frequently depressed; she mutilated her own body—once, at age eleven by trying to cut away a mole on her chest, and at other times by slicing her wrists or sticking pins in her feet. She suffered from a poor self-image and a confused sexual orientation; she often felt lonely or bored; and she felt incapable of standing up to her mother. This last compulsion was particularly strong for Elizabeth, Showalter said. Instead of rebelling against Nancy, Elizabeth “felt compelled to placate and appease her, agreeing even at one point to pose nude for her upon request.” The same compulsion, he added, made her accept “physical beatings” from Jens and “participate in his bizarre sexual interests.”
The only criterion of the borderline personality disorder that she failed to exhibit, Showalter said, was an inability to control her anger. With prompting from Drew Davis, Showalter agreed that this probably indicated that Elizabeth was basically a nonviolent person.
Despite such a plethora of psychiatric problems, Elizabeth’s real troubles did not begin until she met Jens Soering.
JENS AND ELIZABETH FIT TOGETHER WELL INTELLECTUALLY, Showalter said. Indeed, they fit together too well for their own good. One of their favorite activities was playing “head games” in which they would try to work out extremely difficult, perhaps unsolvable problems. One of those head games included plotting several murders, such as those of her parents and Jens’s parents. Talking about these things helped relieve “tension” for Elizabeth, Showalter said. It helped to bring her “a little closer to a reasonable level of psychological functioning.”
Despite their discussions, Showalter said, in his opinion Elizabeth never felt that Jens would actually kill her parents. Murder was not reality to her—murder was “something that happened in a metaphorical, fanciful mental life.”
Davis asked Showalter why he thought Elizabeth was so loyal to Jens after the murders, why she stood by him and made alibis for him.
The psychiatrist replied that her doing so proved a basic tenet of the mental health fields—namely, that to some people negative attention was better than no attention at all. “She so craved and was so starved for some type of relationship that the negative aspects of the relationship were somehow denied or attenuated to a level where they could be tolerated,” he said. “Her fear of being alone, her fear of being unloved, was so intense that she paid virtually any price to have a friend.”
During Elizabeth’s testimony there was a lot of discussion about Jens manipulating Elizabeth and Elizabeth manipulating Jens. Who, Davis asked, did Showalter think was the dominant party in the relationship?
Showalter showed no hesitation at all. “There is no question in my mind,” he said, “that throughout this relationship Mr. Soering was the dominant, the stronger of the two personalities.” This, he said, was made abundantly clear by the Neil Woodall letter. In it, he said, Jens clearly outlined his philosophy on a number of things, especially on his relationship with Elizabeth. “I think that this letter should very
clearly establish the fact that Mr. Soering saw himself as the sort of prime mover and certainly as a self-contained young man fully capable of carrying out whatever deeds or acts he wanted to do,” he said.
Showalter also had an opinion on Jens’s motive in killing Derek and Nancy. “I think after extensive research and study, it’s my impression that Mr. Soering carried out the murders largely motivated by his fear that he was losing Elizabeth.”
JIM UPDIKE WAS FIDGETING IN HIS CHAIR. HAVING FINISHED skimming Showalter’s report, he listened skeptically as the psychiatrist made every explanation he could for Elizabeth. What really struck the prosecutor, Updike said in the courtroom, was the similarity between the points Showalter made in his presentation and the points Elizabeth had made in her testimony. Already frustrated by Elizabeth’s dogged evasiveness, irritated by the defense ploy not to give him a copy of Showalter’s report until the psychiatrist was literally on the stand, and bothered by the similarities in the testimony, Updike could hardly wait to get his shot at Showalter. He did not have to wait long.
FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE A LONG TIME, UPDIKE AND Showalter simply stared at each other. It was not love at first sight. As a veteran expert witness, Showalter had seen his share of highly aggressive prosecutors. He was not intimidated by Jim Updike. For his part, Updike was unconvinced by Showalter’s explanations of Elizabeth’s psychiatric condition. The psychiatrist was too glib to suit Updike, his judgments too unpersuasive. Showalter was not the first psychiatrist Updike had cross-examined, and he was not going to be cowed by what he considered to be Showalter’s elusiveness.
Updike was entitled to throw the first blow. Slowly he walked around the table and stood close to the psychiatrist, who glared up at him. “You’ve made some rather broad statements here today, haven’t you?” Updike drawled. “I mean, you’ve not only offered a psychological analysis of the defendant, but you’ve offered an analysis of the facts of our case as well, haven’t you?”
Showalter was tense but unperturbed. “No,” he said, locking eyes with Updike. “By no means.”
It promised to be a bloody fight.
THERE WAS NOT MUCH OF SHOWALTER’S TESTIMONY that Updike did not attack, from the way the report was compiled to the conclusions it drew. Updike was particularly critical of the way the psychiatrist had described Elizabeth’s position in what Updike felt were simplistic terms. Showalter had been too eager, Updike said, to conclude that the entire plot to kill Derek and Nancy had been conceived and carried out by Jens. “It seems to me what you’re saying is that Ms. Haysom had nothing to do with this really, other
than through some mere fantasies,” Updike said. It also seemed to him, he continued, that Showalter felt that Elizabeth had not participated in the attempt to create an alibi. If Showalter were successful in advancing that opinion, Updike believed, he could destroy the prosecution’s case against Elizabeth as an accessory before the fact. He leaned close to Showalter. “Do you feel she had
any
participation in advance of the murders?” he asked belligerently.
The psychiatrist was not flustered. In his opinion, he said, Elizabeth’s participation occurred primarily at the “head game” level, but even that left her with a huge load of guilt. “She feels intensely guilty,” he added.
Updike paced. Turning on his heel, he fired another question. “What you’re saying is that she played some mind games and that those were misconstrued by Mr. Soering. Is that it?”
Showalter, who had been intently following Updike’s progress around the room, agreed with the prosecutor’s assessment. Either that, he said, or he had acted upon their joint fantasies when Elizabeth had not expected him to.
“So you don’t think she encouraged him at all?” Updike asked.
“Well,” Showalter allowed, “that depends on how you define encourage.”
UPDIKE WAS BOILING. HE COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HOW Showalter could have examined any substantial amount of documentation in the case, interviewed the people involved, particularly Elizabeth, and come away with such conclusions. It was obviously crucial to his case that he discredit Showalter’s findings. He was going to do this, apparently, by showing first of all that the material in the doctor’s report was incomplete.
In long strides he made his way to the prosecution table and picked up his copy of the psychiatrist’s report. Thumbing through it, he called out the names of people interviewed in connection with the study. When he reached the end, he looked up at Showalter and asked if he personally had
talked to them. Showalter said he had not, that they had been interviewed by members of the institute’s staff. Updike nodded. Turning back to the report, he read the list of documents, noting that the report enumerated thirty-five. He asked Showalter if he knew what any of them said, citing particularly a document identified as an affidavit from him. Showalter said he did not remember.
“Was it my grocery list?” he barked at Showalter, “Or did it have some pertinence to this case?”
Everything listed had some pertinence to the case, Showalter responded. “That’s why it’s there.”
That was what Updike was hoping he would say. “No, sir,” he fired back. “That’s not why it’s there. That affidavit was required by the State Department to state the law of this Commonwealth for purposes of extradition. It had nothing at all to do with this woman’s psychological status at any time in her life. Yet it’s listed here, and it doesn’t even seem that you know what’s in it.”
Updike looked at the list again. What about Ricky Gardner? he asked. The report listed an affidavit from the investigator as being among the documents. Did Showalter know what it said?
Showalter admitted he did not. “I’m not going to play that game,” he told Updike angrily.
Updike pounced. “I’m not asking you to play a game,” he said. “I just want to know the essence for these wide, far-reaching opinions that you’ve stated.”
His opinions, Showalter responded, dealt only with Elizabeth’s psychiatric condition.
HAVING MADE HIS POINT ABOUT THE DOCUMENTS, UPDIKE moved on to what he considered the most vital issue: that Showalter had based his opinion on Elizabeth’s mental state almost exclusively on what Elizabeth herself had told him. If he could get Showalter to admit that, he felt, he would be able to demolish the report because everyone in the courtroom had seen what a changeable, unreliable witness Elizabeth was. But Showalter himself was a savvy witness
and would not be easily trapped. Updike was going to have to hammer away at the report item by item and hope when he finished that Judge Sweeney would agree with his assessment of its unreliability.
Turning to Showalter, Updike abruptly asked the psychiatrist why he had assumed that Nancy had
forced
Elizabeth to pose for the nude photographs later found in Nancy’s bureau.
Elizabeth told him that, he said.
That’s what he meant, Updike shouted.
“Elizabeth
told
you.
And based upon that you assumed that she was telling the truth and you used that in formulating your opinion, didn’t you?”
Showalter was not to be that easily cornered. That was only one tiny bit of information that went into the report, he said. There were many other pieces as well.
FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR, UPDIKE AND Showalter battled. Often, the conflict went beyond the giveand-take expected when a prosecutor is cross-examining an unfriendly witness; it was obvious that Updike and Showalter did not like each other. The animosity was evident.
At one point Updike questioned Showalter about his frequent use of the word
metaphorical
to describe Elizabeth’s actions. She metaphorically plotted their murders. She metaphorically hated her father. She metaphorically encouraged Jens. “What is it, Dr. Showalter,” Updike asked sarcastically, “that indicates all this was metaphorical? Mr. and Mrs. Haysom are not metaphorically dead.”
Showalter conceded his point.
AT ANOTHER TIME, UPDIKE HAMMERED AT SHOWALTER about the basis for determining when Elizabeth was telling the truth. How could he tell? the prosecutor asked.
Showalter said he made his judgment after hours of interviewing and of assessing and evaluating her responses.
Updike reminded Showalter that he had interviewed her
for hours on the witness stand and all he got was a number of different answers. “It comes across to me,” Updike said, “that the truth is the same every time you tell it, and when she’s telling things different ways each time, she’s lying.” Thinking to zing the psychiatrist, Updike added, “And she is capable of lying, isn’t she?”
A grin flickered across Showalter’s lips. “Anyone is capable of lying, Mr. Updike.”
THEY HAD BEEN GOING AT IT FOR ABOUT THIRTY MINUTES when Showalter agreed for at least the second time that much of the information on which he based his conclusion had come from Elizabeth. When he said that, Updike appeared to be relieved. His tone softened slightly. At least it was less combative. “You’ve got this extremely bright young woman,” he said almost conspiratorially, “who knows what she’s charged with, knows she’s pleaded guilty, and knows that you’re going to be down here one day testifying in her defense. And she has this very good capability of deception as you’ve already admitted. Talking to her for a few hours, it’s right hard to tell whether she’s deceiving you or not, isn’t it?”
“It can be difficult,” Showalter agreed. Then he qualified his statement. “But it’s less difficult for a clinician, I think, than for someone else.”
That set Updike off again. “What is it about being a clinician,” he said aggressively, “that tells you whether she is lying?”
“A clinician has a special ability to listen to a case history, to listen to the facts, to knit it together, and make it mean something,” Showalter said.
“I got the idea,” Updike said drily, “that’s what the judge was for.”
ONE OF THE THINGS THAT WAS REALLY EATING AT Updike about Showalter’s testimony was how closely his opinion of events paralleled Elizabeth’s. Updike explained to Showalter, who had not been allowed in the courtroom
while Elizabeth was testifying, that when Elizabeth got on the stand, she changed her story from what she had told investigators. Rather than admitting her involvement in manipulating Jens, in formulating an alibi, and in buying the knife, as she had to Beever, Gardner, and Wright, she got on the stand and said it was all Jens’s fault. And that, said Updike, sounded almost exactly like what Showalter said when he testified. The reason she changed her story, Updike said pointedly, may be because Elizabeth had been talking to the psychiatrist.
Showalter was incensed. “That has nothing to do with this,” he said angrily. “That’s an excellent demonstration of sort of an
in vivo
or real life demonstration of what I’ve been talking about here all afternoon, Mr. Updike. You witnessed a clinical phenomenon!”
Updike was not sure whether to laugh or blow up. “A clinical phenomenon!” he exploded. “So that’s what that was.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, WHEN BOTH HAD COOLED DOWN, Updike again raised the issue about how Elizabeth had changed her story once she got into the courtroom. Why, he asked the psychiatrist, did he think she had done that?
“I wonder why, too,” Showalter said, “because she’s not asking for mercy. She feels very guilty and feels that probably the rest of her life should be spent as a sacrifice, offering herself as a sacrifice for her involvement in the death of her parents.”
It appeared to him, Updike said, that the answer got right back to Elizabeth’s interviews with Showalter. Maybe the psychiatrist had not been trying to influence her intentionally, Updike said, but since Elizabeth was so bright she might have picked up on the psychiatrist’s feelings on her own.
The inference infuriated Showalter. “I would beg to disagree with that,” he said icily.
Updike was surprised. Why is it so impossible that he telegraphed his feelings, Updike wanted to know.
“Simply because we don’t fashion defenses,” Showalter said haughtily. “That’s not my job.”
UPDIKE WAS SATISFIED WITH THE WAY THINGS HAD worked out. With one last glare at the psychiatrist, he strolled back to his table. “Thank you, Dr. Showalter. I don’t have any more questions.”
As SOON AS UPDIKE SAT DOWN, DREW DAVIS POPPED TO his feet. Eager to defend his witness, he pointed out that Elizabeth had admitted to Gardner on May 11 that she had made up the story about going with Jens to buy a knife. That was weeks before she had met with Showalter. “Apparently everything the prosecution says about her formulating this afterthought story can’t all be accurate, can it?”
“Absolutely not,” Showalter said. “I would take strong issue with even the embryonic notion that conveys.”
Imagine, Davis continued, that Elizabeth had come to him as a patient off the street and not as a woman charged with involvement in the murder of her parents. What would be his diagnosis then?
“I have a notion,” Showalter said, “and this is pure speculation and I want to be very clear about that. But had I met Ms. Haysom as an attending psychiatrist in student health at the University of Virginia in her first semester, I would have been able to make very clearly and unequivocally the diagnosis of a borderline personality disorder.”
THAT GOT UPDIKE EXCITED ALL OVER AGAIN. HE plunged back into the fight. What did having a borderline personality disorder have to do with the murders of her parents? Updike demanded, springing to his feet.
“It’s offered as an explanation,” Showalter said coolly.
But Updike was aroused. He had gotten so carried away earlier, he said, that he had forgotten to ask Showalter about his comments on Jens. When the psychiatrist testified that he thought Jens was the dominant figure in the relationship, did he mean before or after the murders?
Showalter said he was not distinguishing.
Updike said he was puzzled. Elizabeth had carefully made the distinction at one point, saying that she thought she had manipulated Jens before the murders, but afterwards he had manipulated her. It was important that the distinction be observed, Updike felt, because Elizabeth had pleaded guilty to being an accessory before the fact. That meant that she had acknowledged that she was involved
before
the murders. He asked Showalter why he did not make such a distinction.