The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  There was only so much yard work to do at his new house. They had bought the house three months before he resigned. Now he tore into his gardening with all his pent up energy and talent with growing things. There was only so much to do and then it was done. He had applied for some jobs. One was as a loader on a dock. The employer had checked with the police department and somehow found out the circumstances of his resignation. He was refused employment because of it.

  “You shoulda seen the people working there,” he told his wife bitterly. “They’d hire anybody there. Half of them were probably thieves. But they wouldn’t hire me. Next time I won’t list my former employment. They won’t be able to check on me.”

  But he really didn’t try very hard again. He was afraid. He knew they’d find out somehow. They’d learn about him, discover that he’d been a thief. So he stayed home and Helen supported a husband and three small children on a bookkeeper’s salary. He stayed at home and took care of Laurie and Kurt and the baby, Christine, and wondered how they could possibly continue to make their house payments.

  Now, when we’re so desperate, he thought, ironically, I can’t steal. The very thought of his recent thefts filled him with shame and made him physically sick to his stomach. One day when the two older children were napping, the baby began crying. He went to her and felt but she was dry so he shushed her for a moment. Still she wouldn’t stop. He left her room and tried to read a newspaper and drink his beer and ignore her. She cried louder.

  At least there won’t be more of them, he thought angrily, and he thought of his impotency, the shame of it. Still the baby cried.

  The longer he tried to ignore her the louder and more insistent were her wails until his headache was becoming brutal.

  “Shut up,” he said, grinding his teeth unconsciously. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

  Then he found himself bursting into the baby’s room, slapping the baby on the bottom. The child’s terrified screams startled him.

  He looked down at the baby, at the red finger marks on her buttocks. “Oh, God,” he said, and stumbled straight to his room, but the magnum wasn’t there. He had sold it to make a house payment. Then he thought of the service revolver, and found it in the closet. He looked at the barrel, at the hideous black hole, at the gun he had surrendered to Jimmy Smith. The baby was still screaming.

  He wanted to see them for the last time and he went to the room where the other children slept. Kurt was two and Laurie, her daddy’s girl, was three. She used to awaken when he came home from the station at night and wouldn’t sleep until he kissed her. She adored her father. He looked at them and began to cry. He wept brokenly. He wasn’t even enough of a man for this. He couldn’t even spare his family by ridding them of himself. The baby still screamed. He ran to her.

  “Oh,” he said, seeing the pathetic frightened face on the sheet wet with tears. “Oh.”

  He picked up the infant and walked with her and rocked her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, I’m so sorry.” Finally the baby stopped crying, but her father could not.

  Pierce Brooks, now a lieutenant of detectives, sat in his home and held in his trembling hands a decision handed down by Justice Stanley Mosk and the California Supreme Court on July 18, 1967. He had his own copy of the decision replete with margin notes, underscoring, footnotes. It was a raging detective who sat and smoked and reread late into the night:

  Defendant’s principal contention is that the receipt into evidence of each of the extrajudicial statements violated the constitution rules set forth in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) and People v. Dorado (1965). Those rules are controlling here even though the trial took place in 1963, i.e., before they were enunciated.

  Brooks angrily scrawled in the margin: “Interrogation took place more than a year before the ex post facto requirement of Escobedo and two years before Dorado!”

  Then Brooks read further:

  … the record does not establish that defendants were adequately advised at any time of their right to remain silent and their right to counsel. Neither Chief Fote’s admonition that Powell’s statement “could be used in court against him” nor Officer Cooper’s remark that anything Powell said “may be used as evidence against you at a later time” amounted to advice that he had an absolute right to remain silent in the face of police questioning.

  Brooks wrote: “But I told Powell that he could very definitely have an attorney. That only a fool would …”

  Brooks broke his pencil scribbling this remark and threw the pencil down, continuing the reading:

  … applying the Chapman test to this record, as we must, we are compelled to conclude there is at least a reasonable “possibility” that the evidence complained of might have contributed to the conviction.

  The detective read the court’s disapproval of the many statements he took from Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith and of his arraignment of the defendants on Wednesday, March 13, 1963, instead of March 12, within forty-eight hours. By now, Brooks was making his margin notes with a fractured pencil he had sharpened with a kitchen knife: “I called the D.A. on Tuesday afternoon and was ready but D.A. advised wait until Wednesday morning. Said Defendant’s 48 hour period was not up until after court’s close Tuesday afternoon. D.A. told me no problem!”

  Brooks’s rage knew no bounds when he got to the end of the California Supreme Court decision:

  The submissive acceptance of an inquisitorial process was the desired result of a number of “techniques” used on defendants. For example, Officer Brooks maintained an air of confidence in defendants’ guilt and his “conversations” with them were often characterized as merely “a few questions” about certain “details”; yet while they began with relatively minor topics, they soon proceeded to issues central to establishing that the crime was in fact committed by these defendants … and each was trapped in a web of shifting and inconsistent explanations.

  “That’s bad? That’s bad? That’s my job!” the usually unflappable detective shouted aloud in the quiet room and his own voice startled him. Then he held the coffeecup in both hands and continued:

  Most importantly, throughout these four days of questioning, Officer Brooks successfully cultivated a relationship of trust and “friendship” with these defendants, despite the fact he must have believed they had murdered one of his brother officers. Such psychological devices for extracting confessions without crossing the line of coercion were condemned by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

  “That shows … that shows,” Brooks whispered brokenly. “That proves where your head is. Where it is as far as cops are concerned!”

  He turned to the last pages and read:

  We do not lightly reverse these judgments. We are well aware of the heinous nature of the crime involved, and of the strong indications of defendants’ guilt.

  “Strong indications!” said Pierce Brooks, and threw the sheaf of papers halfway across the kitchen.

  “I felt that Irving Kanarek had to be appointed,” Judge Mark Brandler said many times to justify his decision. “Lord, I presided during the motions for a new trial. I sat through that incident involving Mrs. Bobbick. I sat through weeks of it. But it’s not up to me or any other judge or the district attorney or anyone else to question the defendant’s choice of attorneys, not when the attorney was thoroughly familiar with the case and had won the reversal on appeal. That was finally the thing that decided for me, not just that Smith wanted him. I couldn’t let my unpleasant experiences with the man enter into it. I couldn’t let the Supreme Court have another opportunity for criticism.”

  A detective named Norm Moore contacted Karl. Moore had been an officer in the Police Protective League, the rather weak and ineffectual collective bargaining arm of the Los Angeles force which had only a fraction of the power of the police unions in cities like New York and Chicago.

  Moore had lived near the Hettingers when Karl was a boy in Glendale, had known h
im most of his life, had worked Highland Park Detectives with Karl just before he resigned. Moore was nearing the end of his own police career, about to take his service pension. He was a plain-talking man and not afraid to speak his mind. Moore came to talk to Karl who by now was earning a little money helping his friend Officer Stew James, who moonlighted in landscaping and maintenance gardening.

  “Listen, Karl, don’t be dumb. You deserve a pension,” Moore would say to him.

  “I don’t know, Norm. I stole. You have no idea how much I stole.”

  “Goddamnit, kid, I don’t care what you stole! If you stole, it wasn’t you stealing. Don’t you see that?”

  “It wasn’t just the cigars, Norm. That’s all the department knows about. I stole all kinds of things. I stole big things like an electric knife and a saber saw. I even stole a portable sewing machine once. I stole …”

  “Look, Karl, there’re reasons that people do things. Sometimes the guy that does them is the last to understand. Now I know damn well we can get you a pension. And I know damn well that nobody deserves it more. Now all you’re gonna have to do is see a few doctors …”

  “Psychiatrists?”

  “Yes, psychiatrists.”

  “So, you think I’m …”

  “No. No. Look, you just see these doctors. It won’t cost you anything. I’ll arrange everything. You just level with them. Tell them everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything, Karl. Damn, don’t you talk to anybody?”

  “You’re the first one I’ve told about all the things … the things I stole.”

  “Well tell them everything, for chrissake. Get it all off your chest.” Then the older man looked at his young friend thoughtfully. “Look, kid, are you pretty depressed these days? Is it all pretty bad?”

  “Yeah, pretty bad.”

  “I think you’re gonna feel better when you see these doctors. Maybe you can pick out one and see him once in a while. Don’t you have anybody to tell your problems to?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you tell Helen?”

  “No.”

  “Why in the hell not?”

  “I don’t know, Norm. I just … I don’t know. I wasn’t raised that way. We didn’t talk about … personal things when I was a kid. You just didn’t burden other people.”

  “There must be somebody. How about your church? Do you go to church?”

  “No. Helen goes. I don’t go.”

  “You have to learn to talk to people.”

  “Norm, now that I’ve told you about the stealing, I just gotta give the things back. I’ve got some stolen things in my garage. I’ve used some, some I haven’t. The things seem to accuse me every day when I look at them.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t. Maybe I’d feel better if I gave them back.”

  “How many places did you steal from? How many times?”

  “Fifty. I don’t know. Maybe a hundred. I just don’t know.”

  “That’s what I thought. Just forget it. There’s no point in humiliating yourself any more. Do you trust me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. I say it’s all right, keep the stuff. It’s a bunch of petty junk anyway. For God’s sake, stop worrying about it. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I can’t. I feel so guilty.”

  “What do you feel guilty about?”

  “About the stealing. Of course. About the stealing, what else?”

  He was to see doctors, seven of them. He couldn’t understand it. The city just kept sending him to one doctor after another. Some of his friends suggested that the department must be hoping to hit upon a psychiatrist who would say his emotional problems were not serviceconnected. That his stealing was not a direct result of the murder, so the city wouldn’t have to pay a pension.

  The psychiatric interviews were similar. The patient would list his many physical ailments and tell of his terrible crimes and how guilty he felt about them.

  “I worry a lot that I’ll meet policemen I know, sir. And what they’ll think of me. About my stealing. That I was a thief.”

  And then he was invariably asked if he felt guilty about anything else.

  “No sir, what else is there? I stole so many times!”

  “Did you ever feel guilty about something before you began stealing?”

  “No sir. There was nothing to feel guilty about. If I could just get over these feelings about the stealing. If I could just understand what made me do it.”

  The diagnosis read:

  It appears that Mr. Hettinger is an intelligent honest man who has a history of not having good, close, stable relationships to his parents or other people. The trauma of the Bakersfield incident threw him into a psychological regression. This resulted in the formation of incapacitating psychological symptoms. (Loss of self-esteem, obsessive thinking, compulsive stealing, diminished sexual response, withdrawing from friends.) He denies any guilt about the shooting, but evinces unconscious guilt which leads him to be self-defeating and self-punishing. He shows a remarkable lack of insight into his problems. I do not believe his compulsive stealing is a basic characteristic of him, but rather reflects his need to manipulate the environment to agree with his obsession that he is an unworthy person, to punish himself and relieve the anxiety of unconscious guilt, and to unconsciously avoid his police colleagues whom he felt looked critically at him. Had he received intensive psychiatric care earlier, it is likely much of the psychological regression could have been avoided.

  Karl told another doctor: “And I stole bigger things, sir. I stole a sewing machine! I stole …”

  “Yes, Mr. Hettinger, and is there anything that made you get these same bad feelings before you began stealing all these things?”

  “No sir, I had bad feelings. I had dreams. I had pains. But I didn’t feel the same way I feel about the stealing.”

  “And how do you differentiate your feelings about the stealing?”

  “I feel guilty about the stealing, sir. I never felt guilty before. Just bad.”

  The doctor wrote:

  Mr. Hettinger is a well developed, neatly dressed, pleasant and cooperative man who looks somewhat older than his stated age of thirty-two. He verbalized quite freely, however he frequently became tearful and occasionally cried when describing the incident of the murder of his partner four years ago. He appears to be unable to escape obsessive ideas which were mostly concerned with the death of his partner. The general picture suggests an individual who is undergoing a severe depressive reaction associated with compulsive behavior which takes the form of ruminative thinking about the murder of his partner masked by the compulsive need to steal. Because of the excessive self-criticism and self-devaluation, he seems to behave in a way which is crying out for help, as well as showing his desire to be punished. The possibility of suicidal behavior should be seriously considered.

  He is experiencing a considerable amount of unconscious guilt, which is not expressed overtly, but which he associates with his lack of having done all that was possible the night of the murder. As such, therefore, his present condition should be considered as service-connected. Intensive psychiatric care is recommended.

  The reports were all quite similar in their findings. All recommended vigorous psychiatric treatment. One report represented the findings of several doctors of the Julius Griffin Clinic. It was a psychiatric evaluation in great depth. The doctors took an intense interest in this unusual patient, making an extensive check into his physical history as well.

  The doctors discovered that the patient evinced certain textbook symptoms. His shrinkage for example was not a perception but real, only partially explained by his tendency to hunch his shoulders. He was unable now to stand erect. It was a classic Lilliputian reaction reflecting his view of himself.

  His patient poured out his heart to Dr. Griffin. He told of as many thefts as he could remember, described in detail the horror of his crimes. Tried to remember every peccadi
llo in his entire life. To reveal all to this confessor who broke down the barriers. He told of the erasers he and another little boy had stolen. Of the fishing plugs he and a young friend stole from a Sears store so many years ago. Of one benny he had swallowed while in the marines. He dragged it out, all of it. Every sin of his life, everything which might be a sin. Every inadequacy. His failure to be able to support his family, his recent impotence, which itself was a crime against the girl who had been his first and only love, and which shamed him almost as much as his crimes. Of his striking a helpless baby. All of it. All the terrible unspeakable things he had done to everyone who trusted him. And he spoke of the rumors of a coming retrial for the killers.

  The patient says that he would almost refuse to appear at another trial. He is considering running out of the state and will resist extradition back. As he spoke of this he cried. Mr. Hettinger admits that he cries frequently and has episodes of severe depression. He also has great guilt feelings as to whether he deserves a pension. He realizes that from a financial standpoint it can make a great deal of difference in his future security. He has always wanted to work a farm, and he hopes that he can go into farming work. He is extremely depressed because he does not know where his life will lead him.

  The Griffin report presented an interesting chapter entitled “Patterns of Vocational Interest” which was not found in the other evaluations.

  His interest clearly lies with the care of growing things. Within this group, the destruction of anything is most traumatic, and of any living thing especially so. Very often, people with this pattern of interest care excessively about the welfare of people and all living things. Often they are shy in interpersonal relationships, and show the degree of their care through service or making useful objects.

  Under “Aspects of Personality” he was described: