by John Philpin
When I was completing my psychiatric residency in Boston, my supervisor remarked that he considered me the angriest person he’d ever met. He wanted to know about my family, so I told him. His facial expressions ranged from contortions of horror to open-mouthed disbelief.
“You understand rage because you contain so much of your own,” he said.
He intended his observation as a penetrating insight for me. It was not. I never denied my anger. I struggled with my closet ghouls and achieved a working relationship with fury.
Later, when I opened my practice on Beacon Street, a friend gave me an urban renewal map of the Roxbury section of Boston. The map was detailed, and a small square represented the tenement where, for a decade, my family had occupied the third floor. I framed the map and hung it on my office wall. It was my reminder of a past that I could too easily have left behind.
Dear Lucas.
Katrina Martin’s last letter arrived in the spring of 1967. I remember wondering why she wrote. I told myself that on a few rough occasions the previous summer, I was kind to her. That was all.
She had sensed the turbulence that was my life. She knew that I was not yet comfortable with the person I was becoming.
Feeling so much better. Married. Baby. Do you remember Steampot Pond?
I don’t know if I would have answered the letter. It didn’t matter. I lost it, and could not remember the return address, although I was nearly certain it was somewhere in Maine.
One Sunday that summer, we carried a picnic lunch to a pond that had no name. It was near a low railroad bridge where a steam train stopped to take on water for its boilers. Perhaps she derived Steampot from that, but what did it have to do with getting married and having a child?
Now I turned from the window and told Jaworski, “If we refuse to know and feel the early wars in our lives, we end up reliving those conflicts in our relationships with others. We hurl all of our shitty baggage at our friends and lovers and wives and children and colleagues.”
“You’ve got Jasper diagnosed, do you?”
“Herb, I don’t have myself diagnosed. When it comes to human behavior, it’s the biggest toss-up there is. Heads, I’m sane; tails, I’m starkers.”
In five minutes, Jasper was back.
“I apologize,” I said to the detective.
Arms folded, she glared at me.
“Scan the highways for Markham,” I said to Jaworski. “I’ll chase after the Martin angle.”
The three of us marched upstairs to the select board’s conference room. I wandered in through the rear door behind two dozen newspaper and TV reporters, sharks crowding the shark pool.
Jaworski and Jasper entered at the front. The detective stood to one side; the chief stood behind the podium and eight microphones. Before he could speak, hands shot up, accompanied by a howl of shouted questions. The chief called for quiet.
“It’s late,” Jaworski said. “We’re all tired. I’ll answer as many of your questions as I can. There are some things that we can’t talk about, and I’ll ask you to respect that.”
Stanley Markham topped every agenda.
“The state police have established additional patrols on all the main roads,” Jaworski said. “The next step is roadblocks. We’re flooding the area with his photograph, and we ask your help in giving it maximum exposure. We don’t know that Markham had anything to do with these killings, but he’s got to be found. The United States Marshals are directing the search.”
I was impressed with Jaworski’s handling of the media. He was waiting for forensic test results in the Weld case, he said, and refused all comment.
Only Bailey Lee, the local reporter, asked about Harper Dorman. Lee’s big-city colleagues paid no attention.
“You’ll have to talk to Portland P.D. on that,” Jaworski said.
Yes, the chief was aware that folks in the village were frightened. “We all got a little panicky during the big storm and the flooding we had last winter, and we survived that. We’ll get by this, too.”
He also knew that some students had opted to leave Harbor College. “That’s their choice. We’ve got a state fella who’ll be on the campus tomorrow to talk about safety measures for those who choose to stay.”
“Has the department retained Lucas Frank to do a profile?” Bailey Lee asked. “If so, will you release it?”
“Dr. Frank is teaching at the college, and he’s been kind enough to give us some of his time.”
“On a profile, or on the Markham angle?” Lee persisted.
I left after twenty minutes or so, as the questioning remained fixed on Stanley Markham, and I was unable to evict Katrina Martin from my thoughts.
MORNING CRASHED INTO MY ROOM.
Brilliant sheets of sunlight reflected from the ocean’s rolling swells and cascaded onto the walls. I showered, trimmed the shag from my beard, yanked on jeans, a sweatshirt, and hiking boots, started Mr. Coffee, then headed uphill to the bluff overlooking the Atlantic.
Visions of Katrina Martin danced in my head.
Three decades earlier, she sat across from me in Provincetown’s Pilgrim Restaurant eating clam chowder and gazing at the framed caricatures of celebrities that lined the walls.
“Why now,” I wondered, “and why here?”
In the roadside pullout near the dead end, a battered gray Volvo on four flat tires, its two doors open, listed over the embankment. I walked to the passenger door and gazed inside. A blue plastic tag dangled from the ignition key. I leaned forward and read the tag’s stamped, gold message: “Your name and address printed here.”
“Big fuckin’ help,” I muttered as I turned and walked down the hill to call Jaworski.
The chief arrived at the house in minutes, and we returned to the bluff. Jasper drove in behind us.
“We’ll need a flatbed,” Jaworski said as he approached the Volvo.
Jasper circled the car. “He sliced the tires,” she announced as she scribbled in her notebook.
Jaworski followed the detective. “Somebody seems to be sitting on your doorstep,” he said to me.
“It’s my magnetic personality.”
Jasper’s head snapped up, her expression setting new records on the Richter glare scale.
“Occasionally magnetic,” I amended.
“Sure likes your neighborhood.”
“Chief, who do I call about the flatbed?” Jasper asked.
“Call Sue’s Sunoco. Tell her to leave the car inside the town garage.”
“The mobile crime lab should finish at Weld’s this morning. Then they can tear this apart.”
Jasper walked to her car.
“So far, they’ve pulled twenty different hair samples in Weld’s living room,” Jaworski said. “More fibers. Turns out he held one of his classes in that room. Maybe we’ll get lucky with the car.”
Jaworski stood beside me, gazing at the Volvo. “You know, I can understand Jasper putting all her time into the Markham angle. He’s a known quantity, something she can get her teeth into. He’s predictable.”
He nodded at the Volvo. “This guy’s unreal.”
EARLY THAT AFTERNOON I NEGOTIATED MY WAY through the traffic snare on Main Street and drove onto the hill. I had an obligation to my students to discuss killers. I had another obligation to track a killer. Gender and violence—what difference did it make? Male killers, female killers—they took lives, period.
The classroom was quiet.
Jen Neilson doodled on her notebook cover. Dawn Kramer rubbed her tired eyes as she prepared to forge ahead. Betsy Travis read her Ragged Harbor Review. Sara Brenner was absent.
“Aileen Wuornos kept me up all night,” Kramer began, rubbing her bald head as she consulted her notes. “Wuornos’s parents were teenagers who split up before she was born. She lived with her mother until she was four. Her grandparents raised her. She got pregnant when she was fourteen and gave up the baby for adoption. Her grandmother died around that time, so losses keep coming up in her life. She qui
t school and worked the streets as a prostitute.”
Kramer possessed the rare ability to bring a clinical curiosity to questions of the killer’s personality while retaining a sense of horror over the act of murder.
“What about her facial scarring?” our future doctor, Amy Clay, asked. “I noticed it right away in the photographs. She had to be self-conscious about it.”
“That happened when she was younger,” Kramer said, “kids playing with matches. Maybe she felt that life had dealt her a bad hand, that she’d paid for the right to do whatever she wanted. She carried a gun when she was in her teens.”
“There are many other women and men who experienced similar or worse events in their childhoods,” I said, “and they did not become serial killers. Some never experience anything remotely traumatic, but they kill.”
“I read that paper you gave us,” Kramer said, “the one on dissociation. I read a bunch of stuff that Wuornos said, but I didn’t see anything that suggested dissociation.”
“In her confession to police,” I said, “if she had consistently used a passive voice—‘He was shot,’ or ‘Then he was killed’—she would have been presenting herself as someone who observed events unfold without any direct participation. That descriptive style distances the killer from the act and from any responsibility for the act. When Wuornos uses the passive voice, within a sentence or two she says, ‘So I shot him,’ or ‘That’s when I shot him.’ She claimed that she was defending herself, that the men who picked her up hitchhiking hurt her, or threatened to hurt her, or took advantage of her. She seems to have a porous denial system, accompanied by the desire to place blame elsewhere. I think Wuornos was very much in the moment when she killed.”
Kramer nodded. “It’s like she was saying, ‘If I didn’t have the gun, none of the murders would have happened.’ It was the gun’s fault.”
“She emptied the gun into one of her victims, reloaded, and shot him again,” I said with a shrug.
Amy Clay’s research took her to Springfield, Vermont, and fundamentalist church member Gary Lee Schaefer. The slightly built, bespectacled Schaefer confessed to the abduction-murders of two young girls. Police suspected him in other killings.
“What he described,” Clay said, “sounded like what you called ‘splitting.’ One psychologist who examined him thought he was dissociative.”
Schaefer claimed to have been the victim of a sexual assault by an older sister and her friend in a cemetery. He said he was just a boy at the time. The family history included a repressive religious atmosphere, a hostiledependent relationship with his sister, a sense of betrayal when his sister announced that she was pregnant and leaving home to marry. Each of Schaefer’s victims bore a striking physical resemblance to this sister.
“He cruised around in his car,” Clay said, “listened to music, usually Styx or Led Zeppelin, and then, it’s like he snapped. He drove past this girl standing at the side of the road, looked into his rearview mirror, and clicked out.”
“Bogus,” Travis said. “Even that ‘Hillside Strangler,’ Bianchi, had it more together. He watched Sybil on latenight TV, wrote a script for himself, faked a multiple personality, and suckered psychologists into believing his act.”
In the late seventies, Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono, claimed ten victims in a five-month killing spree in Los Angeles. The pair dumped their victims’ bodies on hillsides around the city.
“What went on in those sessions with the psychologists,” I said, “became classic lore on how not to conduct an evaluation, especially using hypnosis. The clinicians approached Bianchi harboring a diagnostic expectation, MPD, then proceeded to ask leading questions which reinforced their own suppositions. They were duped. The gentleman who exposed Bianchi’s fraud was Dr. Martin Orne from the University of Pennsylvania.”
“I’d rack up Bianchi as another psychopath,” Travis said.
“What about Danny Rolling?” Kramer asked, referring to the killer of five in Gainesville, Florida. “Didn’t he claim multiple personalities?”
“He’s the worst of them all,” Travis said. “Talk about gaining inspiration from the movies. He saw The Exorcist III, called his evil self Gemini, then spelled his own name backward… Ynnad… and that became another entity. Totally spurious. Life does another poor imitation of art. That bastard sold his autograph and his drawings. I’ve always been against the death penalty, but I’d make an exception for him.”
“What about this observation?” I said. “The men we’re talking about possess stereotypical female qualities. Rolling fussed about cleanliness, his hands, his fingernails. The women are more masculine than the men. Aileen Wuornos was the toughest guy in Daytona Beach. Do they embrace those characteristics? Do they hate themselves for them?”
“What about Sydny Clanton?” Amanda Squires asked.
“I’d forgotten about her,” I said.
It was the Clanton case that I had tried to recall while examining the photographs of Harper Dorman’s remains. In 1967, at age nineteen and wearing flowers in her hair, Sydny Clanton set out from her hometown near Moscow, Idaho. Behind her, in their three-bedroom ranch home, lay the bodies of her parents. She had hacked her father beyond recognition.
Clanton’s destination was San Francisco and the “summer of love.” She was ready for the Bay Area’s party in the park before she crossed the Idaho state line, wildly tripping on two hundred micrograms of LSD.
She made her way to a crash pad on Waller Street in San Francisco, and within days met a man who told her he would crawl inside her mind, change her middle-class thinking, and broaden her to new experiences. He said that he was just like God.
Sydny Clanton told the five-foot-two-inch Charlie Manson that he was full of shit.
When one of Manson’s omnipresent girl-gofers interceded, Clanton grabbed her by the hair, slapped a knife against her throat, and glared at Manson. “You know what decides whether she bleeds, Charlie?”
Manson glanced at his silent audience. One witness said it was the first time that the little con lacked a snappy retort.
“How I fuckin’ feel,” Clanton said, and shoved the young woman at Manson.
The rumor in Haight-Ashbury was that Manson left town and hung out on the north coast because he feared Sydny Clanton. Manson did not know it, but Clanton’s run-in with the self-styled guru meant nothing to her.
She moved on to the posh environs of Walnut Creek, where she broke into a house. She found eighty dollars in a sock drawer, ate a peanutbutter-and-clover-honey sandwich, and watched TV until the family—Herbert Gleid, his wife Emily, their two sons Bill and Kevin—returned. Clanton killed them all.
“Something happened in the Gleids’ house,” Squires said. “Clanton couldn’t leave. She had plenty of time to get out of there, but she didn’t.”
“The FBI doesn’t include her as a true serial killer,” Travis said. “She killed because she wanted the eighty bucks. Or she killed to steal a car. She gained something from the murders. There’s a word for that, but I don’t remember it.”
“Instrumental,” I said.
“They always go hunting for a sexual motivation,” Dawn Kramer said. “If you aren’t aroused, you don’t get to be called a serial killer. With Wuornos, supposedly it was okay because she was a prostitute. I don’t understand what that has to do with anything besides how she found her victims.”
Squires clasped her hands and leaned forward. “I think there’s a confusion about what Lustmord means,” she said. “It is the pure joy of killing, the excitement that is unlike any other. Some of us love to fuck. Some of us love to kill. Karla Faye Tucker learned that when she sat on her victim and hammered him with a pickax. Sydny Clanton knew that to be passionate about murder is certainly not the exclusive province of men.”
“Clanton was a predator,” I agreed.
“God, she was so beautiful,” Travis said. “She could’ve been a model.”
“It was like the Gleids became her famil
y,” Kramer said. “A court-appointed psychiatrist said she was delusional.”
“One of the psychologists blamed the LSD,” Squires said. “None of them considered the possibility of a peak emotional experience. To quote a friend of mine, ‘Sydny Clanton was dreaming the blue dream that never ends.’ ”
“She was watching TV when the Gleids arrived home,” Travis said.
“Does anybody know what she was watching?” Kramer asked.
I believed that TV triggered Clanton’s dissociative episode in the Gleids’ home, and that LSD caused the synesthesia she experienced. “I could smell what that girl was saying,” Clanton said of the newscaster she watched. “She had an aura of fresh-cut pine. The screen turned blue. It made me sad, and I don’t like to feel sad. So I got mad.”
The capacity to translate depressed feelings into rage was a phenomenon I’d frequently encountered in my practice. When a patient presented depression, I probed for unexpressed anger.
After killing her parents and eviscerating her father, Sydny Clanton hitchhiked I-80 west. Everyone who picked her up—two men, a woman, a young couple—died.
In Walnut Creek, California, Clanton watched an in-depth TV account of her parents’ murder. Carl Clanton, the respected realtor and Rotarian, received most of the coverage. The broadcast included Mrs. Clanton only as one of the two found dead in their mountain home.
Later, when they considered Sydny Clanton’s account of her parents’ murders and the physical evidence at the scene, investigators speculated that the rebellious daughter returned home drunk and stoned late one night, became embroiled in a heated confrontation with her father, and killed him. When her mother walked out to see what all the noise was, Clanton killed her, too, then gutted her father.
It was a sixties wrap: rebellion, drugs, and violence. Case closed. The town buried its dead, and America banished the case to its great, silent subconscious.
When Clanton later told a tale of sexual abuse by her father while her mother pretended to be unaware, it was a one-day story on the inside pages of mainstream newspapers on the West Coast. The tabloids gave it page two at the grocery checkout.
