The only answer that runs more than a few words is the response to question #14, which asks about “other facts indicating insanity.” Here the two examiners wrote the following: “Brought to D.H. [Detention Hospital] order Judge Superior Court Dept. 11, charged with attacking girl—at D.H. patient apathetic—difficult to elicit information—hears voices and spirits and sees them—threatened suicide. People about him say that he is crazy—will not associate with him—claims to have lapses of memory.”
The cursory quality of this document leaves little doubt that Drs. Lustig and Beardslee did not subject the prisoner to a particularly probing psychological examination. Even so, they came to a reasonable conclusion, finding Earle Ferral “so far disordered in his mind as to endanger health and person.”
The Hon. John J. Van Nostrand declared that “by reason of insanity” Earle was “dangerous to be at large.” A commitment order was filed that same afternoon. On June 16, 1921, Earle Leonard Ferral, who had escaped from Napa State Hospital exactly two years earlier, found himself back inside its walls.
Once again he was put under the supervision of Dr. J. B. Rogers, though it was another staff member, a psychiatrist named William Pritchard, who conducted Earle’s preliminary interview. “This patient shows to good advantage on superficial examination,” Pritchard wrote in his report. “To bring out his defects, it is necessary to recount his life’s story.”
Pritchard’s brief synopsis of Earle’s dismal past touched on all the salient points, beginning with the early death of both his parents from syphilis. It noted Earle’s rudimentary formal education, which ended when he was fourteen—the same year he himself contracted a venereal disease that left him with a urethral stricture and a chancre in the perianal region.
Questioned further about his sexual habits, Earle replied that he had “masturbated several times a day” from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. He confessed that his sex drive remained undiminished. Since his marriage to his fifty-nine-year-old wife, whom he described as his “soul mate,” he had engaged in “excessive intercourse” as well as in “occasional periods of excessive masturbation.” Otherwise, Pritchard noted, he “denied further sexual perversions.”
Earle did admit to two vices: using tobacco “excessively” and indulging in “alcoholic sprees at irregular intervals of a week to a year since puberty.” He had apparently experienced some fearsome d.t.’s as a result of these binges. “After dissipations,” Pritchard reported, “he sometimes sees snakes.” Earle complained that he had not been physically well since puberty, “considering himself suffering from his stricture (which he was ashamed to seek medical relief for), from fleeting pains in various parts of the body, and from occipital headaches. He has also fainted a few times and infrequently felt dizzy.”
After summarizing the patient’s sorry work history and even sorrier military record, the report went on to speak of Earle’s previous stint in Napa, explaining that he had been committed “for refusing to work in the navy and doing nothing but read the Bible and expound his religious views.”
Earle continued to hold all sorts of “views” derived from a dizzying array of religious, occult, and pseudoscientific sources. “In his conversation,” Pritchard reported, “the patient uses the lingos of various cults and ‘isms,’ and says he has studied Phrenology, Psychology, Anatomy, Palmistry, Occultism, Christian Science, Plain and Solid Geometry.” At one point, Earle asked the psychiatrist to touch a spot on his skull. “Feel that cranial depression?” he said as Pritchard put a finger on the place. “There’s a brain lesion under that.”
As the interview progressed, the psychological “defects” that Pritchard had detected earlier became increasingly evident. Earle began to speak of his hallucinations, delusions, and dark, destructive moods. “He has seen faces,” Pritchard recounted, “heard music, and at times believed people were poisoning him. Voices sometimes whisper to him to kill himself. Says that if he were kept in jail, he would get something sharp and cut the veins in his wrists.”
Still, the interview ended on an upbeat note. When Pritchard asked Earle how he felt about his future, the young man’s expression grew thoughtful. “I feel I can do much better now,” he replied after a moment. “I am ready to lead a more evolved life.”
The very next afternoon, according to the hospital records, Earle made a “desperate attempt” to escape. He was thwarted by two husky orderlies, who managed to subdue him and wrestle him back into his cell. For the next several weeks, he was never allowed outside his cell unless he was locked in restraints.
On July 5, 1921, three weeks after Earle was committed to Napa, the supervising psychiatrist, Dr. J. B. Rogers, recorded his formal diagnosis of the patient: “Constitutional psychopath with outbreaks of psychosis.”
The surviving record of the next two and a half years is extremely sparse, consisting of just seventeen entries by Dr. Rogers, most of them no longer than a few curt sentences. The first of these “progress notes” (as they are labelled) is dated July 13, 1921, when Earle began receiving intramuscular injections of the arsenic-based, antisyphilitic drug, Salvarsan (also known as “606,” the number of experiments that its inventor, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, conducted during his researches).
The very next day, July 14, Earle attempted to escape again, this time from the infirmary where he’d been taken for his injection.
There are no further notes until November 1. For the remainder of Earle’s first year at Napa, Dr. Rogers made only one brief entry per month. After that, the entries become even more infrequent. Perfunctory as they are, however, these notes provide a revealing glimpse of Earle’s “progress” during his incarceration:
Nov. 1, 1921: Patient has a dose of Salvarsan this morning, feels nauseous. Has been well behaved most of the time but made a desperate attempt to escape from the hospital last June. About three weeks ago, was seen to have a piece of wire fashioned as a screwdriver. Was in a plot with Gary, Hutchinson, Sessions, Stark and Reynolds to escape.
Dec. 19, 1921: Patient is quiet and well behaved on the ward—rational in ordinary conversation. Says he feels well; is much better, as though he has a “blessing upon him” since he had treatment. Nothing bothers him except his past troubles; he hopes to get over them.
Jan. 14, 1922: Well behaved on ward. Causes no trouble. Excellent physical condition.
Feb. 14, 1922: Patient talks rationally. Is out of restraint. Quiet and well behaved.
March 8, 1922: Patient has been confined to bed for several days since he had marked reaction from dose of Salvarsan. Is now feeling better. Quiet and well behaved.
April 12, 1922: Patient is quiet and well behaved. Talks rationally. Helps about the ward. No longer wears restraints when out of doors.
May 3, 1922: Patient is quiet and well behaved. Appears to have improved as a result of treatment. Eats and sleeps well.
June 1, 1922: Patient is well behaved and appears to be cooperating in every way in what is done for him.
July 1, 1922: Doing well. Well behaved. In excellent physical condition. In hospital one year.
For the most part, as these records show, Earle was a model inmate—cooperative, uncomplaining—during his first year in Napa. Having been foiled in his early escape attempts, he seems to have bowed to circumstances, even experiencing something like a religious conversion around Christmastime when he felt he had been visited by a regenerative “blessing.”
However, by the time of the next entry, recorded in early October, 1922, something had changed. Earle was clearly growing disgruntled again, if not yet openly rebellious. Increasingly, the word quiet, which appears so frequently in the preceding entries, is supplanted by the more ominous word restless.
Oct. 2, 1922: Patient remains about the same, has been taking treatment for some time. Seems to be a little excited at times, helps some with work, reads a great deal. Well behaved, except has made several attempts to escape. Was caught with a saw a short time ago.
Jan. 12, 1923: Patient remains
the same. Is quiet and well behaved. Occasionally seems to get a little melancholy and wants to get outside, says he could get along all right. Helps some with work. Reads a great deal. A little restless at night.
April 2, 1923: Restless, says he will try to escape again soon, that he is not insane. Helps some with work. Bad record—ran away four times. Sleeps restlessly.
July 23, 1923: Patient has been dissatisfied for the last couple of months. Has been asking for front yard privileges and several other favors. Has threatened to stop working on the ward if he is not granted more consideration. Refuses to take any more 606 treatments, stating he is well. Has a bad reputation. No delusions manifested at present. Sleeps little.
Oct. 5, 1923: Patient about the same.
There is only one more entry in this series, made a month later, on November 2, 1923. Given the tenor of the notes leading up to it, it does not come as a surprise. The entire entry consists of a single word: Escaped.
Lillian Fabian and her family were moving to a new, larger house. On the afternoon of November 2, the day of Earle’s escape, she and her husband had been over to the new places getting it ready for the move, which was scheduled for the following morning.
It was already dark by the time Lillian returned home. Her husband wasn’t with her. He had stayed behind to take care of a few last-minute tasks. As Lillian stepped into her darkened kitchen and reached for the light switch, a funny feeling came over her—one of those strange, unsettling sensations, as though she were being watched. She turned to look behind her. Earle was standing right outside the back door, his face pressed to the glass panes.
Later Lillian would recall the incident in a tense, breathless style that captured the terror of that moment:
He had his face right against the glass with a horrible crazy hat on, and I let out one terrible scream because he looked so awfully insane. His eyes were just black, glaring in at me, and the children rushed up to me, and of course, I opened the door because he was my own flesh and kin, and I loved him, and I opened the door, and he came in, and he acted so queer in the house, and I was scared to death of him because of the condition he was in. His legs were all bleeding with no stockings on at all and old ragged shoes that he must have picked up on the ground when he tried to escape there. And I hurriedly gave him a suit of my husband’s clothes and a cap and stockings, and had him clean himself up, and I said, “For goodness’ sake, Earle, get out of here as quick as you can.” I was scared to death of him, and I gave him some food to take and money. I said, “Get away from here and don’t come back,” because my husband wasn’t home that night, I was alone. And I rang up Napa State Asylum and told them who I was, and that Earle was there and that I was scared to pieces of him. They said they would look for him, and Earle went away.
He had been gone for several hours when two police detectives arrived at the Fabian house looking for the escapee.
“He was here earlier,” Lillian told them.
“And where is he now?” one of the men asked.
Lillian shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. And that was the truth.
The detectives thanked her and left. Two days later, Earle was apprehended in San Francisco and returned to Napa.
And that, more or less, is where the official record of this period in the life of Earle Leonard Ferral runs out. He would remain locked up in Napa for another sixteen months. But for unexplained reasons, there would be no more monthly “progress notes” entered into his files. The only record that remains of this period is the testimony of his wife, Mary Fuller, who visited him in Napa sometime in the fall of 1924. But even these recollections are extremely sketchy. Mary would describe the west ward of the asylum where her husband was confined—how it looked like a hospital ward, “very clean” with “little cells” lining the walls. She would recall the unsettling sights she had witnessed there—the patient who had cut out his own tongue because he imagined that his“father and mother despised him”; another who had “been a prominent attorney” and was declaiming to the other inmates as though addressing a jury.
She found Earle looking very melancholy, staring off into space, muttering that he had nothing to live for. The world was against him, he cried. “I’ll cut my wrists if I get the chance. Damned if I won’t.”
And that is all the documentation that exists for this epoch in Earle Leonard Ferral’s life—except for one final, terse notation, just three words long, entered into his file on March 10, 1925: “Discharged as improved.”
Three months later, the matter of Mary Summers’ assault was officially laid to rest in the superior court of California. Because of the statute of limitations, the outstanding indictment against Earle Ferral was dismissed on June 13, 1925, four years having elapsed since he was charged with assaulting the child in the basement of her San Francisco home.
7
†
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
When Earle was discharged from the Napa asylum in March 1925, he was about to turn twenty-eight. Except for two limited stretches of freedom, he had spent the past ten years in lockup, behind bars in San Quentin or immured in a mental institution.
Momentous events had transpired during that decade, from the Great War to the Russian Revolution. In our own country a different kind of revolution had taken place, a social revolution so sweeping that nothing like it would be seen again until the heyday of the sixties counterculture.
The Roaring Twenties had gotten underway with all its now-familiar features—the flappers and flaming youth, speakeasies and bootleggers, petting parties and hip flasks, sax music, sex talk and sleek, high-speed automobiles. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age had given the era a name, and Ernest Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises had defined the disillusioned ethos of his “lost generation” contemporaries. During that time, the country was rocked by sensational events—the Red Scare, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the Teapot Dome scandal. The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, while the “Black Sox” sold out the whole country. For diversion, the public had the Little Tramp on the big screen, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the radio, and, on the newsstands, a brand-new spate of lurid tabloids and true-confession magazines.
Altogether, the changes in manners, morals, styles, and daily living were so radical and complete that, for someone like Earle Leonard Ferral—buried alive for the bulk of that era—reemerging into the world must have been akin to the experience of Rip Van Winkle, who awakens to find his sleepy, pre-Revolutionary village transformed into a bustling part of a new, independent nation.
There was another way in which Earle resembled Washington Irving’s mythic sleeper. Though Rip awakens after twenty years to find himself gray-bearded and arthritic, he is essentially the same man—older but in no way wiser or more mature. Something similar was true of Earle Leonard Ferral. Though a decade had passed since his first incarceration, he was, in every meaningful way, unchanged. Dr. Roger’s assessment of his patient as “improved” was not just wrong. As events would soon prove, it was dangerously wrong.
The paper trail documenting Earle’s public life during the year following his discharge from Napa is very sparse. We know from her testimony that he spent some of this time helping his Aunt Lillian paint the interior of her new house. He wasn’t staying with her, however, but rooming at an unknown place. Even she wasn’t sure where he was living. He would show up in the morning, work for as long as he liked, then abruptly disappear, usually returning the next morning but sometimes staying away for days at a time.
Some months later, at the tail end of 1925, he left San Francisco and returned to Palo Alto, where—after making a tearful appeal to his long-suffering wife—he finally persuaded her to take him back.
For several months, they lived together in relative serenity. Then, on a warm day in mid-February, he abruptly announced that he had decided to go to Halfmoon Bay in search of work. Mary didn’t see him again until June
25, when he showed up unexpectedly at her door. Less than two months later, he took off again, headed—so he said—for Redwood City.
Mary didn’t raise any objections. Though he no longer threatened her with violence, he was still a burden to have around. Besides, she knew that the poor man was possessed by forces beyond his control. The doctors at the mental hospital had explained to her that, among his other disorders, Earle suffered from “nomadic dementia,” an irresistible urge to wander.
The only eyewitness accounts of Earle’s activities from this particular period of his life are those of Frank J. Arnold—the sales manager for a printing company called the Walter Brunt Press—and one of Arnold’s acquaintances, a Mrs. L. J. Casey of Los Angeles. Sometime in the spring of 1926, Earle found work with Arnold, who needed a handyman, gardener, and groundskeeper for his premises at 1927 Alma Street in Palo Alto.
Though Earle’s habits were, as always, highly erratic, he could work hard when he wanted to. Arnold seems to have felt some patronizing affection for his oddball employee, perceiving him as a “simple fool” and even deriving amusement from Earle’s peculiarities. Several years later, when Arnold was asked to describe those peculiarities, he recalled the way Earle would “repeatedly go to work with his tools in one hand and a Bible in the other and, laying down the Bible, proceed to work with his tools for a short time, when he would suddenly cease, stand fixed as a statue, gaze upward at the sky and remain in that posture.” Interrupting his work to stare at “nothing in particular” was, in fact, a habitual practice of the eccentric handyman.
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