Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  For his part, Godejohn is still scheduled for trial in November. It was not, Stanfield told me, a listed condition of Gypsy’s plea bargain that she testify against him. At a recent hearing in mid-July, he looked bewildered and lost, a beard concealing most of his face. His family never seems to come to hearings.

  GYPSY IS NOW AN INMATE BEING PROCESSED AT THE Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri. Her hair is long, her skin clear and healthy, and she wears proper adult glasses. She’s off all her medications, and there have been no health problems in the year she’s been out of her mother’s control. “Most of my clients lose weight in prison,” Stanfield pointed out, because the food is so bad. Gypsy gained 14 pounds in the 12 months she spent in Greene County Jail before her plea.

  Kim Blanchard, who visited Gypsy once in jail, told me, “She looked much more like the person that she was, which was the complete opposite of the person that I knew, and it was like she had a costume on that whole time and then took it off.”

  But obviously, there are lingering effects. When I last checked her inmate record, it still had her last name misspelled, bearing the extra “e” that her mother somehow thought was a good disguise. In the Greene County Jail, Gypsy had a therapist she saw once a week. It remains to be seen if she’ll have one in her new home, or if that therapist will be trained to attend to the specifics of her unique situation.

  Rod and Kristy saw Gypsy not too long after the plea bargain. It has been a relief to know what’s going to happen to her. They don’t know if they’re going to sue the hospitals or doctors that Gypsy saw all her life. They’ll decide that after everything has settled down, after they can properly talk to Gypsy. While the case was pending, they never discussed the crime with her; the prosecutor forbade it. Now there will be more to talk about. They’re hoping to get up to her new facility two or three times a year. It’s a long drive, and there’s still the matter of money.

  Months ago, Rod and Kristy told me they still catch Gypsy in small lies about her life, things she’s clearly afraid to be frank with them about. It worries them. “Of course we want her to get better about that,” Kristy said.

  When I spoke to them more recently, Rod’s voice was sagging a little. He sounded older. He said he’d started to wonder what exactly Dee Dee had told Gypsy about him all those years. He had only begun to pose those questions. He was wondering lately, he said, how Dee Dee had managed to be so friendly on the phone all those years if she hated him so much. He asked Gypsy about it.

  “She said, ‘Keep your enemies close,’” Gypsy told him.

  FOR MOST OF THE YEAR I SPENT REPORTING THIS ARTICLE, the case was pending and I wasn’t able to speak to Gypsy herself. After the plea deal, that changed. I sent her a note. She called me from prison in Missouri to talk in short conversations broken up over a few days.

  Her voice is still high-pitched, though now that we know what we know, it no longer seems unusually high at all. People heard what they wanted to. Gypsy speaks in long, beautiful sentences. She is sometimes so eloquent in conversation that it is hard to believe anyone could ever have spoken with her and thought her “slow,” as some put it. It reminded me of all the doctors who wrote in her files that in spite of Gypsy’s alleged cognitive defect, she had a “rich vocabulary.”

  She was eager to talk, barely able to contain herself once she started. She wants people to know, she said, that this wasn’t a situation where a girl killed her mom to be with her boyfriend. This was a situation, she said, of a girl trying to escape abuse. In prison she’s hoping to join all sorts of programs, to help people. She wants to write a book to help others in her situation.

  I asked her what I’d long been waiting to ask her: When did she realize her life was different, that there was something wrong? “Whenever I was 19,” she said. She meant the time when she ran away with the man at the convention in 2011. When her mother came to take her back, she began to wonder why she wasn’t allowed to be alone, to have friends.

  About her mother, her opinion seems to waver. “The doctors thought that she was so devoted and caring,” Gypsy said. “I think she would have been the perfect mom for someone that actually was sick. But I’m not sick. There’s that big, big difference.”

  Gypsy still doesn’t feel she actively deceived anyone. “I feel like I was just as used as everybody else,” she said. “She used me as a pawn. I was in the dark about it. The only thing I knew was that I could walk, and that I could eat. As for everything else . . . Well, she’d shave my hair off. And she’d say, ‘It’s gonna fall out anyway, so let’s keep it nice and neat!’” Gypsy said her mother told her she had cancer, too, and would tell her that her medication was cancer medication. She just accepted it.

  As for a childlike demeanor, Gypsy grew defensive when I asked her about it. “It’s not my fault. I can’t help it. This is my voice.”

  Often, it didn’t occur to her to question any of it, and when it did, she worried about hurting her mother’s feelings. It often seems to Gypsy, even now, that Dee Dee really thought she was sick. “I was afraid that we were gonna get in trouble,” Gypsy said. “The line between right and wrong . . . was kinda blurred, ’cause that’s the way I was taught. I just grew up that way.

  “When I think about it now,” she added, “I wish I would have reached out to somebody and told somebody before I told Nick.”

  She mostly used the internet late at night, when her mother was asleep. Nick, she said, was the first person who had offered her real protection. She believed him. Ultimately, after everything that happened, she said she thinks he has “anger issues.” She repeatedly takes responsibility for the murder: “What I did was wrong. I’ll have to live with it.” But she said Nick is the one who took “a plot between us both” and “made it into action.” Gypsy was the one who had the idea to post about the murder on Facebook, so that the police would come check on her mom. She recalled asking Nick, “Can we please just post something on Facebook, something alarming, that would make people call the police?” But she said he told her what to write.

  I asked, repeatedly: Are you angry? With your mom? With the doctors? She will admit only to frustration. “It makes me frustrated that none of the other doctors could see that I was perfectly healthy. That my legs were not skinny, like someone who was [really] paralyzed. That I can’t . . . I don’t need a feeding tube. Stuff like that.” In jail, Gypsy had access to tablet computers. She looked up the definition of Munchausen, after hearing the word so often used to describe her situation. Her mother matched every symptom, she told me.

  Every once in a while, I’d get Gypsy explaining some element of her abuse in such detail that something in me would break. Once, feeling speechless but aware that the clock was ticking on her phone time, I blurted out, “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” Gypsy immediately switched into the girl she was back in those feel-good local news interviews. “It’s okay. I mean, honestly, it’s made me a stronger person, because I truly believe that everything happens for a reason.”

  Even on the subject of her prison sentence, Gypsy is a model of radical acceptance. She’s told people she feels freer in prison than she did when living with her mom. “This time is good for me,” she said to me. “I’ve been raised to do what my mother taught me to do. And those things aren’t very good.

  “She taught me to lie, and I don’t wanna lie. I want to be a good, honest person.”

  Originally published on BuzzFeed News, August 2016

  The Reckoning

  By Pamela Colloff

  [ I ]

  In the spring of 1967, when Claire Wilson was a freshman at the University of Texas, she went to the library one afternoon to track down an old copy of Life magazine. Thumbing through a stack of back issues, she scanned the dates on their well-worn covers. Finally, she arrived at the one she was looking for, and she slid it off the shelf. On the cover was a stark black-and-white photograph of a fractured store window, pierced by two bullet hol
es; in the distance loomed the UT Tower. Above the university’s most iconic landmark were three words in bold, black letters: “The Texas Sniper.”

  Claire sat down and studied the large, color-saturated pictures inside, turning the pages as if she were handling a prized artifact. She read how Charles Whitman, an architectural engineering major, had brought an arsenal of weapons to the top of the Tower on August 1, 1966, and trained his rifles on the students and faculty below, methodically picking them off one by one. She pored over the images of people crouching behind cars as the massacre unfolded, and the aerial photo of campus dotted with red X s showing where Whitman had hit his intended targets.

  On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Her gaze fell on Tom’s picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all midcentury yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. Claire stared into his eyes, tracing the contours of his face. Holding the magazine in her hands, she felt some reassurance that what she had witnessed on campus that day had actually happened.

  Not that she needed proof: above her left hip was a gnarled indentation, not yet healed, where one of Whitman’s bullets had found its mark. She had been hospitalized for more than three months after the killing spree, spending what was supposed to have been the fall semester of her freshman year learning how to walk again. But by the time she returned to UT, in January, the tragedy had become a taboo subject on campus. Absent were the protocols that would later come to define school shootings: the grief counselors, the candlelight vigils, the nationwide soul-searching. Whitman’s crime—decades before Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Newtown became shorthand for on-campus depravity—was unprecedented, and there was no language for it yet. The mass shooting was an obscenity whose memory stained the university, an aberration to be forgotten, and in the vastness of that silence, Claire found herself second-guessing what she remembered. The few times her friends tiptoed around the subject, they referred to it as “the accident.”

  The person Claire longed to talk with most was gone. She had known Tom for only a few months, but they had been inseparable. They had met as summer-school students in May 1966, when she was five months pregnant and single—a scandalous state of affairs for a middle-class girl from Dallas, though Claire had never cared much for social conventions. Tom, who was also 18 and new to Austin, had moved in with her on the spot. Claire had had no interest in getting married—the institution was an anachronism, as far as she was concerned—and Tom, whose parents had divorced when he was little, felt the same way.

  Like her, Tom attended Students for a Democratic Society meetings and saw himself as a foot soldier in the civil rights movement, once driving with her to the Rio Grande Valley to stand in solidarity with striking farmworkers. The two passed whole afternoons on the screened-in porch they used for a bedroom in their house off campus, quoting favorite passages to each other from the novels they were reading: he, Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, and she, Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. Sometimes Tom pressed his hand to her belly to see if he could feel the baby move.

  In the wake of the shooting, Claire tried to hold moments like these in her mind. But her thoughts often wandered back to that August morning, when she and Tom had set out across the South Mall—and then she would be there again, on that blisteringly hot day, walking on the wide-open stretch of concrete beside him.

  The anthropology class they were taking had let out early, some time after eleven o’clock. Claire and Tom walked to the Chuck Wagon, the cafeteria inside the student union where campus leftists and self-styled bohemians held court, and happened to run into an old friend of Tom’s from junior high. Eager to catch up, the ex-classmate suggested that they go to the student lounge to shoot some pool. Tom explained that he and Claire had to feed the parking meter first; downing his coffee, he promised they would be right back.

  Tom and Claire stepped out into the thick midday heat and headed east under a canopy of live oak trees. Tom was sporting a short-sleeved plaid shirt and his first mustache. Claire was wearing a brand-new maternity dress Tom had picked out: a beige shift with a flowery ribbon around the yoke. She was eight months along by then, and she could feel the weight of the baby as she walked. When they reached the upper terrace of the South Mall, the live oaks receded, and they were suddenly out in the open, exposed under the glare of the noon sun.

  To their left stood the Tower, the tallest building in Austin after the Capitol; to their right stretched the mall’s green, sloping lawn. As was often the case, they were deep in conversation; they had just begun a discussion about Claire’s spartan eating habits and Tom’s concern that the baby was not getting proper nutrition. Claire was in the middle of saying that she had, in fact, had a glass of orange juice that morning when a thunderous noise rang out. An instant later, she was falling, her knees buckling beneath her. Bewildered, Tom turned toward her. “Baby,” he said, reaching for her. “What’s wrong?” Then he too was knocked off his feet.

  The two teenagers collapsed onto the pavement beside each other. Claire was flat on her back, the arc of her abdomen rising up in front of her. She felt as if a white-hot electric current were coursing through her. Tom lay to her left, close enough to touch, his head turned away from her. She called out to him, but he did not answer.

  At first, no one on the South Mall seemed to realize what was happening. A man in a suit and tie ordered Claire and Tom to get up, ignoring her pleas for a doctor as he breezed by. She realized he thought it was a stunt—guerrilla theater or an antiwar protest, maybe, judging from his contempt. Moments later, she heard screams and the frantic cries of other students as they scattered, ducking for cover.

  Bullets rained down from above, dinging balustrades, shattering windows, kicking loose concrete. A dozen yards from her and Tom, a physics professor was felled in midstride as he descended the stairs to the mall’s lower terrace; his body would remain there, sprawled across the steps beside the bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, as students crouched behind the trees and hedges nearby. On the lawn, a young woman in a blue dress with nowhere to hide cowered behind the concrete base of a flagpole. Claire looked up at the Tower, where every now and then the nose of a rifle edged over the parapet, followed by the crack of gunfire and a wisp of smoke. She wondered if the Vietnam War had somehow come to Texas.

  Every fifteen minutes, the Tower’s bell would chime, but it was nearly half an hour before the sound of sirens neared, and even then, no help came. A police officer who was advancing behind a stone railing, service revolver drawn, was swiftly shot in the neck. Unable to lift herself, Claire remained where she had fallen, marooned. Blood pooled beneath her, saturating her dress. She played dead as the sound of gunshots reverberated around her, echoing off the red tile roofs and limestone walls. Dozens of students had run home to retrieve their deer rifles, and the echo of return fire rang out as they came back to take aim at the gunman.

  It was nearly one hundred degrees by then, and she ached to get off the concrete, which scorched her bare legs. When the heat became unbearable, she bent her right knee just enough to lift her calf, half expecting to be torn apart by gunfire. She did not know whether to feel relief or dread when she was not. She feared that Tom was dead, and that her child was lost, too; instead of the thrumming energy she usually felt inside her, the baby had become still.

  A young woman with long red hair suddenly ran into her field of vision, offering to help. “Lie down quick so we don’t get shot,” Claire pleaded. The woman dropped to the pavement and, from the spot where she lay, a few feet away, tried to keep Claire conscious by peppering her with questions. “What classes are you taking? Where did you grow up?” Claire whispered a few words back, struggling to answer.

  Finally, more than an hour after the shooting had begun, three young men bolted from their hiding places and sprinted toward her and Tom. One grabbed Claire’s arms, the other her ankles, and together they ran as her body dangled between them. The thir
d man hoisted Tom’s wilted frame into his arms, steadying himself under the weight of the teenager’s lifeless body before following close behind.

  As they raced across the mall, Claire did not feel the penetrating pain of her injuries or realize that she was losing copious amounts of blood. She could not make sense of what had just happened, much less begin to fathom how the jagged path of one bullet had, in a single moment, redrawn her life’s course forever. She knew only that if she was lucky, she might live.

  [ II ]

  Growing up, Claire had never thought of guns as something to fear. As a kid she had taken riflery at summer camp in East Texas, where she had delighted in the thrill of target practice. Her parents kept guns in their house in East Dallas—her father, a bird hunter and ex-marine, stashed his long guns in the closet, where they leaned up casually against the wall. Guns were intertwined in her family history; they had made Texas passable for her Tennessee-born ancestors, who received a land grant from Stephen F. Austin in the 1820s. At age twelve, her maternal grandfather had used the proceeds from his initial cotton harvest in Brazoria County to buy his first rifle.

  Even when President Kennedy was assassinated, Claire did not blame gun violence but rather the culture of intolerance that gripped her hometown. She knew all too well what it meant to be an outsider in Dallas: at a time when the John Birch Society and archconservative oil magnate H. L. Hunt held sway over the city, her father, John, had dedicated his legal career to representing clients, many of them black, in worker’s compensation cases. Her mother, Mary, was the local precinct chair for the Democratic Party, so consumed by her work championing various liberal causes that Claire came to measure time in election cycles.