Read The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Online
Authors: Will Storr
Tags: #BIO000000
There were two men in separate rooms, each working quietly at their computers. At 09:02, the phone rang. The elder man, who had been checking his emails, lifted the receiver.
‘Hello, this is Richard Felstead.’
‘Is this the brother of Carole?’ asked the caller.
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘I’m calling from the coroner’s office in Battersea. I’m very sorry to tell you that your sister Carole was found dead in her flat on the twenty-ninth of June. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for us to get in touch. Carole’s next of kin – she told us there was no family. But a letter was found, in her flat. It was from you. So I thought I’d let you know.’
It was 09:03. Richard was breathless with crying.
‘I’ll …’ said the coroner’s assistant. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll call back later.’
Richard walked to the next-door office, where his brother David was entering addresses on a database. When he told him the news, David didn’t turn around. He stopped typing, he leaned his head all the way back and he said, very quietly, ‘Oh.’
The telephone rang again. It was a different caller – a woman, but this one was speaking in a strange voice.
‘Are you Richard?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you’re not one of the ones that harmed Carole.’
‘Who is this?’ said Richard.
She sounded slow, drawn out, modulated.
‘I’m Carole’s next of kin.’
She sounded
weird
.
‘Yes, but who are you?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘Do you know how Carole died?’ said Richard.
‘She had a very difficult childhood.’
‘What was wrong with her? Was she sick?’
‘As I said, she had a very difficult childhood.’
‘No, no, hang on a minute. That’s a lie. Carole had a great childhood. Who is this?’
‘I’ve already told you. I’m Carole’s next of kin.’
She was patronising now, like she was admonishing a naughty child.
‘But – give me your name.’
‘My name is not important. I just wanted to tell you that it’s Carole’s funeral tomorrow. She’s being cremated. People have taken time off work. It’s
very important
that the cremation goes ahead.’
Richard became furious.
The phone went dead.
Richard and David drove to Cheadle to collect their father, Joseph, from the factory where he was employed as an engineer. They knew many of the men that Joseph worked with. As they walked past their tool-strewn benches, his colleagues tried to say
hello
,
all right?
,
mornin’ boys
but it quickly became obvious that something was wrong. They watched the brothers approaching Joseph’s bay, where he was busy welding. When he saw his sons, he smiled and wiped his hands clean. His face fell when he registered their expressions. And then they had to tell him that his daughter was gone.
When the three men arrived at the family home in Davenport, half an hour later, their mother was delighted to see her husband. ‘Oh, Joseph!’ she beamed. ‘Have you come to take me shopping?’ The other two Felstead brothers soon joined them – first Anthony and then Kevin, whose lasting memory of that morning is the sight of his mother: ‘Finished. On the floor. Drained. Shattered. Gone.’
The family began talking. Nothing made sense. Who was the mysterious caller who said she was Carole’s ‘next of kin’? Why did she talk of a ‘difficult childhood’ when Carole was happy, popular –
spoiled
, if anything? And how could Carole die? She was in the midst of a successful nursing career down in London. She was only forty-one. Why had it taken two weeks for the family to be informed? And how could there be a funeral taking place
tomorrow
?
Joseph stood up.
‘She’s not getting cremated tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll put a stop to it.’
‘You can’t stop a funeral, Dad!’ said Kevin. ‘How do you stop a funeral? What, are you going to march in there and take the coffin?’
Joseph telephoned the coroner’s assistant. She brusquely informed him that now the family had been discovered, the funeral would be halted regardless. But instead of relief, Joseph felt troubled. Why was her tone so short? So
angry
? The coroner told him: ‘We’ve been handed a life assessment that your daughter wrote. It’s very upsetting.’ It was six pages, typed. It said: ‘My parents were abusive in every way imaginable: sexually, physically and emotionally. I grew up in constant terror. At three years of age, my mother smothered my sister. She sat me on top of her and then set the house on fire.’
Joseph was astonished.
‘No, no, hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘Had she been ill or something? Had she been sectioned?’
The coroner’s assistant said, ‘Yes.’
Throughout the coming weeks, there came more questions. Officials dealing with Carole’s death kept mentioning a ‘psychiatrist friend’ who accompanied her to many of her medical appointments and seemed to have some role in the cancelled funeral. And then there was this mysterious ‘next of kin’, who, to the family’s fury, emptied Carole’s flat of her possessions. On 6 August, Joseph was in conversation with the police inspector who was involved in the case when something occurred to him. ‘This psychiatrist and this next of kin,’ he asked. ‘Are they the same person?’
‘That’s right,’ said the inspector. ‘Dr Fleur Fisher.’
Shortly after the call, Joseph searched the Internet for her name.
*
When he was discussing the notion of sexual abuse causing people to hear voices, Dr Trevor Turner said something that – even after learning all that I have – managed to stagger me. ‘Thirty per cent of our memories are false memories anyway. It doesn’t matter who we are.’
If Turner is correct it suggests that all of us are far closer to that fuzzy, imaginary line than I could have imagined. I used to think of creationists as existing on one distant end of the continuum, with the bland massed-army of the scientists on the other. Now, in my mind at least, they have all shuffled a little closer. I am sure that the doctors Nick Mann and Anne Oaklander are correct, in that many Morgellons patients have been incorrectly diagnosed as suffering from DOP. Those sorry souls are victims of the kind of binary, dismissive thinking that I worry is evident among some Skeptics. In their haste to dismiss the ranting, scratching dispossessed, subtler truths are being missed. The itch might not be caused by tiny wasps, but in many cases, it does appear to be caused by
something
. Just because they are wrong about one thing, it hasn’t necessarily followed that they are wrong about it all. And yet they are crucified for making one mistake. They are denounced as crazy and crazy is what many have become.
Ron Coleman’s long battle against the scientific establishment is brilliantly illustrated in his observation that, ‘In 1994, the Royal College of Psychiatry called the Hearing Voices Network “the most dangerous organisation in psychiatry.” In 2000, they described us as “one of the most important.”’ Just because he was mad and biased by his own experiences and fighting against senior scientists and years of consensus and orthodoxy, it didn’t mean that he was wrong. Indeed, what consensus there is among experts in schizophrenia these days says that both extremes have a point – that environmental
and
disease causes are probably involved in ways that have not yet been precisely fathomed. The psychiatric establishment have felt the lunatic’s embrace and, over the last twenty years, have slowly yielded.
Most humans, not least myself, are an incoherent mess of madness
and sanity. It is not as simple as I had once believed, judging who is rational and who is not. And what I am to learn over the many weeks that I will spend investigating the strange death and even stranger life of Carole Myers is that, when everyone believes they are telling the truth, and yet you are submerged in a milieu of dangerous delusion, it can be especially hard to tell.
The Felstead family’s search for answers to the many mysteries surrounding Carole’s decline is now in its sixth year. Endless letters, phone calls, hours of legal research and long nights on the Internet have resulted in the collection of hundreds of documents and the generation of yet more questions: angry ones about individuals they believe to have been malign presences in her life; strange ones about startling and little-known corners of human psychology; sad ones about the life and death of the kind and sparky woman that they still miss every day.
When I first contact the Felsteads, to ask if I can write about Carole, they pass me a telephone number. Discovered in Carole’s phone records, it belongs to the woman whose role in the tale is, they are convinced, central: that of the ‘next of kin’, Dr Fleur Fisher. The day before I travel to Stockport to meet them, I dial it, nervously. A confident-sounding woman answers.
‘Is that Dr Fleur Fisher?’ I ask.
‘Yes?’
I tell her that I want to talk to her about Carole.
‘I’m very leery about putting my head above the parapet on that subject. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s not wise for you to be involving yourself in this story either. That family, they’re bloody terrifying.’
‘You’re frightened of them?’
‘Of course I’m frightened. They’re frightening people. And the things they’ve been saying about me!’ she says, adding confusingly, ‘I’m not a psychiatrist! I’m not a therapist!’ She rings off, warning me darkly: ‘Tread carefully.’
*
The building in which Joseph Felstead lives is a red-brick terrace, whose heavy net curtains, draped in low, funereal arcs across its front windows,
block the gaze of strangers, as well as most of the light. The rooms inside are painted mauve and dark-red and are tall and shadow-struck and quiet. They are decorated with golden candlestick holders, old family portraits, strange urns and statues of dogs, birds and deer. Walking in from the street, the change is sudden and enveloping. The atmosphere has a halting, crowding quality.
Today Joseph sits glowering in the lounge, his muscular patriarch’s hands gripping his armchair. Kevin – a softer presence – informs me that Richard’s at work, and Anthony’s too distraught to speak. Their mother, Joan, passed away last year. David is here, though, friendly yet possessed of an anxious, wiry tension. Over the coming hours, he will answer questions with flumes of facts and furious analysis, fossicking in boxes for the relevant document to illustrate his point.
For these men, Carole’s life is as much of a mystery as her death. She had been a friendly, bolshie and academically successful teenager who loved watching
M*A*S*H
and wearing the tartan shorts beloved of her favourite band, the Bay City Rollers. She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down’s syndrome, and spending long hours with a lonely old man down the road. At fifteen she got a weekend job in a home for the disabled. At twenty-one she qualified as a nurse at Stockport College and rented a nearby flat, making frequent visits back to Mum and Dad to borrow milk and money, and sunbathe in the garden. And then, in the mid-1980s, there began a silent drift away from the family.
‘Her attitude became hostile,’ says Joseph.
‘What did she say was the problem?’ I ask.
‘We didn’t have any conversations about it,’ he says.
‘But you must have been worried?’
Joseph shifts in his seat. ‘I was more cross than anything,’ he says, glancing away. ‘It just seemed indifferent, that’s all. Nothing sinister. She was our daughter. We’d spoiled her. And then to being almost anti-social? It was ill mannered.’
In 1986 the family discovered that Carole had moved to Macclesfield. She would still send Christmas cards and ring occasionally, assuring them that her career was going well. But by 1992 she had
moved to London and changed her name from Carol Felstead to Carole Myers. They had to accept that, for some reason, she had chosen to stay away.
After her death, they began searching. It was slow, at first, but the family fought. Angry letters were written, court orders were threatened, freedom of information requests were made. They discovered that Carole had become mentally ill. Her medical records were a grim, broken history, told in photocopied doctors’ letters and psychologists’ reports, of self-harm, alcohol abuse and stretches in psychiatric wards. She had frequently been suicidal. Over the years, she had been seen by a series of mental health professionals and had, in 1992, been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.
The family were informed that Dr Fleur Fisher had no legal right to claim to be Carole’s ‘next of kin’. They also learned that a strange call had been made from Carole’s flat, eight days after her death, to a company called Diamond Insurance. They requested a recording of it and today, they gather around an old boxy portable hifi to play me the cassette. It turns out to be a woman, getting herself insured on Carole’s car – the one that went missing: ‘I’m dealing with her flat and possessions,’ says the caller. ‘I need to drive down to Plymouth … She was the survivor of brutal family abuse over many years … I’m a consultant in healthcare ethics … My name? It’s Dr Fleur Fisher.’
The family’s fury and suspicion towards Dr Fisher grew, like roots, through their sadness and their outrage at the claims Carole had made in her life assessment. She said that she had been abused by Joseph and his wife, who were the high priest and priestess of a satanic cult, and that during her teens she had given birth to six children – some fathered by Joseph – that she had been forced to kill. She also said that a childhood friend that she had confided in had been murdered in front of her.
The most extreme of Carole’s charges are easily proved to be false. The sister, whose murder she had apparently witnessed, actually died of a heart condition two years before Carole was born. The house fire, too, predated her birth. And yet Carole’s medical records showed that the mental health professionals involved in her case rarely challenged the grotesque visions of her memory. Most concluded that Carole’s
psychological problems came as a result of family abuse. But the Felsteads point the blaming finger straight back at the clinicians.