The Executioner's Song (55 page)

After a while, he did get Gilmore to talk a little about the murders, but it was no help. Gilmore seemed genuinely perplexed over his behavior. Kept going back to his feeling of being under water.

                "Lot of strange things," he would say. "You know, it was inevitable."

This vagueness impressed Woods as pretty straight, a convict trying to convince you he was insane would give more of a picture show. Instead, Gilmore gave the impression of a man who was quiet, thoughtful, cornered, and living simultaneously in many places.

                On the other hand, Gilmore had been in seclusion all the way.

                That had been altogether against Woods's ideas of treatment, for it cut off interaction with the other patients. They had a new brand of therapy to offer at this hospital and he was all for giving Gilmore some of it. The prison authorities, however, had only agreed to transfer Gilmore from County Jail for these two- and three-day visits if he were kept in lockup all the way. So there you were. A man who had spent nearly all of his last twelve years locked up every night in a cell the size of a bathroom, was still being locked up.

In addition, they had all been concerned, himself included, that no error be made with the guy, so they kept seeing him in pairs.

                Later, he heard Gilmore had said, "One thing I have against Woods is that he never talks to me alone." Yes, Woods thought, I really kept my distance.

                Of course, he knew why. Becoming a psychiatrist had left Woods in a funny place, philosophically speaking. He did not like to stir his doubts. His own contradictions, once set moving, had a lot of momentum. Woods hadn't had, after all, the kind of upbringing that tended to land you in the psychiatric establishment.

Woods's father had been a hell of a football player in college, and tried to raise his son to be more of the same. Woods grew up on a ranch, but his father made sure there was a football around, and he was one son who spent his boyhood running out for passes. As soon as his hands were large enough, he was pulling them in over his shoulder. When he got through high school, there was an athletic scholarship at the University of Wyoming.

                At Wyoming, the real talent seemed to be imported from the East. Woods got the idea that just as the greatest potatoes grew indigenously in Idaho, so football players came naturally from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Woods had always thought he was pretty good and pretty big and pretty crazy until those eastern football players came in from the mill towns. Six of those Polacks, Bohunks, and Italians shared the same girl all freshman year. It wasn't that they couldn't have others, it was that they liked keeping it in the family. It was better that way. One of those monsters, right out of the middle of defensive line, got so tired one night of being turned down by a new date that he proceeded to urinate on her.

Another night, with a lot of snow on the ground, a group of them took off in two cars for a ride through the mountains. A bottle of booze for each car. On the way back, in a snowstorm, the lead vehicle came around a curve, went into a skid, and smashed into a snow bound Chevy by the side of the road. There were only two football players in the first collision, and they jumped out into the middle of the highway. Woods, in the second car, following at high speed, came around the same turn and went into the ditch to avoid hitting them. The two from the first car and the three in the second got together and lifted Woods's car onto the road again. That felt so good that the fellows from the first car now ripped their license plates off, and pushed the vehicle over the mountain and into the ravine. It struck on rocks with the great noise of thunder, and made soft deep sounds like the wind when it plowed through deep snow. They watched with the awe attending large events.

                Of course the car they had smacked into was a mess. So they decided to roll it down the highway. Woods tried to talk them out of that. Right in the middle, he could not get over the fact that he, with his own big reputation to maintain, was being the peacemaker.

                He failed. They set that wreck rolling. A police car coming up the grade just avoided a head-on collision. Some rich alumnus settled the cost. One did not lose five talented sophomores for too little.

Woods never starred. After a while he was too scared. You could get maimed out there. The coach he liked moved on, and the new coach disapproved of the hours Woods had to give to pre-med labs.

                Told him to switch to Phys. Ed. Woods didn't. He never starred.

Nonetheless, he didn't have any illusions about the scope of the problem. There were two kinds of human beings on earth and maybe he had been placed to know both kinds. The civilized had their small self-destructive habits and their controlled paranoia, but they could live in a civilized world. You could tinker with them on the couch. It was the uncivilized who caused the discomfort in psychiatric circles.

                Woods had long suspected the best-kept secret in psychiatric circles was that nobody understood psychopaths, and few had any notion of psychotics. "Look," he would sometimes be tempted to tell a colleague, "the psychotic thinks he's in contact with spirits from other worlds. He believes he is prey to the spirits of the dead. He's in terror. By his understanding, he lives in a field of evil forces.

                "The psychopath," Woods would tell them, "inhabits the same place. It is just that he feels stronger. The psychopath sees himself as a potent force in that field of forces. Sometimes he even believes he can go to war against them, and win. So if he really loses, he is close to collapse, and can be as ghost ridden as a psychotic."

For a moment, Woods wondered if that was the way to build a bridge from the psychopathic to the insane.

                But he always came back to the difficulty. The speech was of no legal use to Snyder and Esplin. You could not appear in court with spirits from other worlds.

                There did remain one legitimate possibility. In the record from Oregon State Penitentiary was Dr. Wesley Weissart's psychiatric entry for November 1974:

IT IS MY IMPRESSION THAT AT THIS TIME GILMORE IS IN A PARANOID STATE, SO THAT HE IS UNABLE TO DETERMINE WHAT HIS BEST INTERESTS ARE. HE IS TOTALLY UNABLE TO CONTROL HIS HOSTILE AND AGGRESSIVE IMPULSES.

                . . . I FEEL COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED IN GIVING GILMORE MEDICATION AGAINST HIS WISHES AS HE CREATES A SERIOUS PROBLEM TO THE PATIENTS AND TO THE ENTIRE INSTITUTION.

That was the unclean report to which Dr. Kiger referred when the staff interviewed Gilmore. "Why," asked Woods, of Snyder and Esplin, "don't you get that doctor down here to testify."

                Gary didn't want him, that was why. Gary had said: Of all the dirty, mean, rotten sons of bitches. He did not want to be evaluated by that man.

                Woods said even if they had to go to Oregon and rope the fellow, they ought to get him for the trial.

                It was very hard, they replied, to get a person to respond to a subpoena if he lived out of the state. Woods said, "Man, that seems critical to me."

                Snyder and Esplin called Weissart, but he told them he did not wish to be involved. They received the impression that, if he had to get on the stand, he would say that Gilmore might be four-plus paranoiac, but was not, in the legal sense, psychotic. Another dead end.

Woods had seen the difference between experienced trial lawyers and young attorneys. It was a hell of a difference. He said to them as diplomatically as he could, Why don't you get somebody else in on this who can pull some shots? He couldn't get across. They kept on trying to get some evaluation of Gary as a victim of mental illness.

Actually, Woods did hate Prolixin. He saw it as incarceration within the incarceration. One morning he even woke up exhausted from the ardors of a dream that had him conducting a cross-examination:

QUESTION          What was his dosage?

ANSWER              Fifty milligrams a week, that's pretty much an average, standard dose.

QUESTION          But he swelled up under it, didn't he?

ANSWER              Well, they get side effects from all these antipsychotic drugs. The more potent the drug, the more apt they are to develop side effects. Prolixin causes many more side effects than Thorazine.

QUESTION          What would be the advantage then of using Prolixin?

ANSWER              You'd only have to give him medicine one time a week, rather than try to give it to him every day.

QUESTION          It's really a matter of administering it.

ANSWER              That's right.

QUESTION          If you have a saddle a bad horse, you want to be able to do it once a week, not twice a day.

ANSWER              That's right. Prolixin is the only drug out now that we can give at infrequent intervals. Everything else has to be given hourly, two or three times a day, or daily.

QUESTION          What were Gilmore's side effects?

ANSWER              He had a real severe reaction. Oh, as I recall, he had swelling in his feet and it was difficult to get his shoes on, he had trouble walking and his hands swelled, he really had a severe reaction.

QUESTION          How long did it last?

ANSWER              Well, let me put it this way, that's a long-acting drug, Prolixin, you give a shot today, probably there will be some of that same shot in his system maybe six or eight weeks from now. That's why, if they develop a reaction it takes them two or three months to get over it.

QUESTION          Well, what did you use for medication after that didn't work, the Prolixin?

ANSWER              I don't think I used any medication after that at all.

QUESTION          So he was just a problem then . . .

ANSWER              Just talking, we just talked.

QUESTION          How did Gilmore himself respond to the Prolixin? I mean, when the side effects had hit him, how did he respond in his relationship with you?

ANSWER              Well, he was very unhappy with me, naturally.

QUESTION          He got paranoid about you, wouldn't you say?

ANSWER              Oh, yes, yeah.

QUESTION          He thought you were out to get him.

ANSWER              Uh-huh, yes.

QUESTION          Did you feel bad about the Prolixin, sort of like oh, Lord, you know, what have I done?

ANSWER              Well, I don't like to see that type of reaction on anybody, and I certainly didn't on Gary. The way it developed, though, I thought that we got along reasonably well after that.

QUESTION          Aren't you worried about Prolixin in the sense that you don't really know? You've got a machine, which has two levers sticking out of it. You walk up and push one lever in, and the other lever comes out at the other end of the machine. What goes on in the machine, you don't know. Is that a fair description of its effects? That you can't name the inner process that goes on?

ANSWER              Well, there . . . well, I guess maybe you're right. Really, we don't know the direct effects of these antipsychotic drugs on the brain cells . . .

Woods wasn't at all certain that the Prolixin hadn't done a real damage to Gary's psyche. Whole fields of the soul could be defoliated and never leave a trace. Yet how did you convince a Jury? The medicine had been accepted by a generation of psychiatrists. Once again, Woods wished for some absolute dazzler of a lawyer who could handle a Jury like a basketball and take them up and down the court.

Chapter 26

STONE IN LOVE

Nicole asked Gary if there wasn't a chance to get a real good lawyer.

                Gary said big leaguers like Percy Foreman or F. Lee Bailey sometimes took on a job for the publicity, but in his case there were not special elements. A big man would want money.

                Of course, one of the really good ones, he said, might be able to get him acquitted. Or bring in a short sentence. Without money, however, they had to forget it.

                She had no idea what a big lawyer would cost, but that was when she got the idea of selling her eyes. She never told Gary, and in fact felt a little dumb about it. She really didn't know how it came into her head. It could have had a lot to do with those commercials where they told you how much your vision was worth. She thought if she could get $5,000, maybe that would pay for a good lawyer.

Gibbs got a little excited by the idea. There was a fellow in Salt Lake who happened to be the biggest criminal defense man in Utah, Phil Hansen. In the past, Phil had been Attorney General and everything. Had more volume of cases going through his office than anybody in the state. He could perform miracles. Once, he even got a guy off who shot a Sheriff in front of another Sheriff. Sometimes, Gibbs said, Hansen would take a case for free. Gary lit up.