The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  Whether using traditional drugs or new ones, narco-hypnosis was experiencing a brief popularity in law enforcement. Evidence that police obtained using “truth serums” resulted in the release of murder suspects in California, Oklahoma, and elsewhere during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The drugs, Kelley and other proponents maintained, could elicit confessions, help rule out falsely accused suspects, and draw from witnesses details of crimes that their memories had suppressed. Even as Kelley acknowledged that people could lie while under the influence of the drugs, he emerged as perhaps the treatment’s most loquacious advocate, and he frequently regaled journalists with his own dramatic stories of success. One such case involved a teenaged girl who in a fit of hysteria had lost her memory of her parents. They were strangers to her. Kelley’s application of Somnoform wafted the girl into a suggestive state that allowed the psychiatrist to plant in her mind the imperative to remember all important events of her life, including experiences with her parents. Kelley asserted that the girl awoke from her narco-hypnosis, looked at her parents, and declared, “Hello, Mother and Daddy!” Kelley diagnosed her as suffering from “parental denial,” a rejection of her mother and father. That disorder still required treatment, but the narco-hypnosis had freed the patient from her worst symptoms.

  For years a specialist in the study of psychiatry and criminals, Herman Morris Adler, had worked on plans at the University of California at Berkeley to start a new and groundbreaking academic program in a relatively new discipline: criminology. After Adler died suddenly in 1936, the proposal became moribund. It regained momentum after the war, and university administrators cast about for candidates to lead the school, which would be the first academic program for the study of criminology on the West Coast and one of the first in the nation. With 22 Cells published and attracting attention, Kelley’s name came up. In a dramatic turnaround from its offer of an instructorship with weak prospects for advancement only a few years earlier, the university now offered Kelley a full professorship in criminology, to begin in the fall term of 1949. Kelley admitted that he was “seriously considering the offer” but would wait until he discussed it with Bowman-Gray’s administration before making a final decision.

  The Kelleys had their first child, Doug, at the end of 1947. (Two more, Alicia and Allen, followed in 1951 and 1953, respectively.) But because Dukie had recently inherited $400,000, the couple could now afford Kelley’s changing the course of his career. A move to Berkeley would involve more money and prestige, but it also would alter Kelley’s long-cultivated national image as a clinical psychiatrist. “It would be an exclusive teaching and research position,” Kelley said while he was considering the offer. “If I accept, I will retire from psychiatric practice and devote full time to research work.” He could not resist. He handed his Bowman-Gray supervisors his resignation, effective July 31, 1949, just two years after Graylyn had opened with him as its director. He had supervised the care of more than 560 inpatients during his time there, and an additional 1,600 veterans had come for outpatient care.

  22 Cells in Nuremberg had gone out of print a few months earlier, and Greenberg sold the publication rights back to Kelley for $250. Tired of the war, its aftermath, and the trial, readers did not have much appetite for more information about Hitler and company. The book dropped from the limelight, although it continued to lend Kelley prestige. That prestige carried him a long way in Berkeley, until the day it changed to notoriety.

  9

  CYANIDE

  Kelley never lost his love of being the center of attention. A natural raconteur and entertainer, he adored teaching. His move to the School of Criminology at UC–Berkeley in 1949 gave him the chance to immerse himself in the field of study that had gripped him at Nuremberg. It placed him before law students, future law enforcers, and soon-to-be judges, those whose world he had increasingly inhabited as a consultant for the police department and attorneys in Winston-Salem. From the cigarette-littered police stations and coffee-scented law offices of North Carolina, he moved to the bell towers and landscaped lawns of California’s largest university (and to a princely annual salary of about $9,000). He would quickly bur-row his way into the grimy dens of justice that he so liked. His switch to criminology intrigued many of his psychiatrist colleagues. “Do you accept armchair detectives in your course?” wrote one physician. “If you get a chance some time, I would very much like to hear about this venture of yours, as what avid follower of Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, etc., would not?”

  In his first semester at Berkeley, Kelley taught courses in criminologic psychiatry and the detection of deception. Students could see that the physician-professor did not match the common picture of a psychiatrist. He joked in class, made dramatic pauses during lectures to let his authority and good looks sink in, and filled chalkboards with bubble-filled diagrams that resembled works of abstract art. He was developing a new collection of criminal paraphernalia, which included sharpened spoons and other felon-crafted weapons that he acquired from the warden at San Quentin Prison.

  In the course “The Detection of Deception,” Kelley taught the concept that different perspectives and points of view could rationally lead to different conclusions. And he was happy to resort to sleight of hand to teach those lessons. He often used what he called the “water trick” in the class-room. Kelley set up vessels of water that were hot, at room temperature, and cold and asked volunteers to plunge in their hands. Then, after they had acclimated to a temperature, he told them to withdraw their hands and immerse them in a bucket of cold water. The class was always amused to hear how the cold water felt frigid, medium cool, and warm to different students. Kelley’s point was that the perception of what was legal or criminal—not to mention what we perceive as just—varies according to the perspective our senses afford us.

  He still enjoyed playing the magician, letting on that “by learning the techniques of the magician in deception one can recognize the same maneuver in the deliberate lying of the criminal.” As he had baffled the denizens of Berkeley two decades earlier by driving a car blindfolded and making his escape from locked boxes, he now produced simpler but no less effective tricks. He sometimes pulled out a deck of cards in class, surreptitiously drew the same card from the bottom of the deck time after time, and convinced his students that all of the cards were identical. He then let them examine the deck and discover that it held fifty-two different cards. The senses, he impressed upon them, can deceive us. “All the students come to class,” he said, a point of pride for a teacher who hoped never to bore. He soon began planning to write a book on deception that would powerfully meld his experiences with Nazis, common crooks, and magic.

  Now in his forties, Kelley had aged into a ruddy, solid, meat-slab sort of man, with a beer belly and fleshy thighs that supported his 165 pounds. Many mornings before going to campus, he stared at his face in the bathroom mirror and intoned the vowels a-e-i-o-u, exercising the voice that was such a commanding part of his presence. Before anyone (except Kelley) realized it, the newcomer was an international leader of his field, a previously low-profile discipline populated by attention-shy academics that one criminologist noted “contained nobody but us chickens.” Kelley took pleasure in pulling the study of criminology down to earth, and he assigned students such street-level texts as Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and David Maurer’s The Big Con. “He also picks up a tidy bit of scratch as a medico-legal expert, as a lecturer, etc.,” wrote friend and fellow criminologist Howard Fabing admiringly to a colleague.

  A lot of that income came from the Berkeley Police Department, which engaged Kelley as a psychiatric consultant in November 1949, almost as soon as he hit town. The local law enforcers had taken advantage of nearby academic expertise for many years, and a legendary police chief, August Vollmer, had taught criminal justice at the university. Another School of Criminology teaching star, Paul L. Kirk, frequently volunteered as a police consultant. A former chemist with the Manhattan Project who turned his sc
ientific talents to the microscopic examination of physical evidence in criminal cases, Kirk later conducted blood analysis for the defense in the infamous Sam Sheppard murder case in Ohio, helping overturn the defendant’s conviction.

  Throughout the 1950s Kelley worked closely with police superintendent John Holstrom, who administered the police oath to Kelley, gave him the title Psychiatric Chief of Police, and issued him a chief of police badge from Alameda County, which Kelley could produce, as necessary, with the same dexterity with which he could deal a card from the bottom of the deck. Once while speeding along a highway in Northern California with his son, Kelley was stopped by a state trooper. “The Old Man popped out his wallet and showed him the badge,” Doug remembers. “The officer said, ‘Oh, I see. Excuse me.’ I thought, ‘What a hypocrite! How do I get a badge?’”

  Kelley earned his badge for the most part for psychologically evaluating Berkeley police recruits. Among his first tasks for the force was to examine thirteen candidates for patrolman and patrolman-clerk jobs, and he found three of them “sufficiently unstable to be considered potential hazards in these positions.” That high percentage of recruits that the psychiatrist rejected prompted Holstrom to let Kelley schedule regular psychiatric evaluations of all recruits, and as the doctor’s proficiency in weeding out bad candidates increased, he gained fame around the country as an exponent of the rigorous screening of prospective police officers.

  Strangely, Kelley also took it upon himself to evaluate the psychiatric health of certain citizens of Berkeley who reported crimes. In 1950 alone, he examined seven residents who had made frequent reports, plus the families of two of those people. He concluded that several of these people were mentally disturbed and should be “either committed or referred for psychiatric treatment.” As a result, he predicted, “bizarre calls for aid” would dramatically fall. “I don’t really think Berkeley is any crazier than any other city,” he said in a press interview, “but Berkeley has a high percentage of psychotics and lunatics wandering the streets. We find about two new ones a week.” Kelley launched a similar campaign against chronically bad drivers in 1953 and asserted that frequent traffic offenders could be classified as mentally unfit.

  He capitalized on his police department expertise by frequently writing and speaking on law enforcement themes. One of his topics was “dumb cops.” “About one-third to one-half of the policemen in this country are totally unfit to protect you or to solve crimes,” he declared sweepingly in one article. “They are emotionally unstable, low in mentality and psychologically unsound.” Even worse, he claimed that many cops on the beat were paranoiac, sadistic, and actually insane. “They’re just as dangerous as the thug who steps out from behind the shrubbery in your garageway and sticks a gun in your back.” His solution to this perilous situation was for more police departments to subject officer candidates to screening tests like those he championed in Berkeley, including IQ and Rorschach examinations. In speaking engagements, he sometimes told the story of a police recruit he examined who looked at a Rorschach inkblot and said he saw “a bisected, stomped-on rabbit.” That candidate, Kelley noted, advanced no further in pursuing police work. He often berated police chiefs whose departments lacked scientifically based barriers to entry. “That’s awful,” he scolded. Over time, as he immersed himself more in the world of crime and detection, Kelley seemed to develop a progressively bleaker view of the criminality of society in general and a dimmer view of the competence of detectives.

  Sometimes his targets shot back. In the summer of 1954 members of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police placed on their meeting agenda a discussion of one of Kelley’s recent “dumb cops” articles and complained about it to the FBI. An agent found Kelley’s views “highly unfavorable to law enforcement generally” and irrelevantly added that Kelley’s book 22 Cells in Nuremberg had received a good review in a publication of the Washington Cooperative Book Shop Association, an organization identified as politically subversive. When Kelley attended a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police a few weeks later, FBI agents monitored his talk on traffic offenders, found that he said nothing about unqualified police officers, and filed a memo on the incident.

  Lecture audiences could not count on Kelley to keep to a narrow range of topics. In Los Angeles he told a crowd that the Russians were as dangerous as the Nazis and that the United States should use firmness, not appeasement, in handling Soviet involvement in Korea. In 1951 he informed an audience in San Francisco that many of his colleagues in psychiatry were in over their heads, and that they used big words “to conceal the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about.” He often discussed psychopaths, declaring that the personality type, like an elephant, was difficult to define but “you can sure tell one when you see one.” A listing of his lectures in a promotional brochure issued by his lecture representative included “Fact and Fable in Psychiatry,” “Fear: Its Facts and Fictions,” “Fads, Frauds, and Fools,” “How to Keep Young in Mind,” and “Nothing But the Truth.” He spoke animatedly about juvenile delinquency, and he blamed rising crime rates among the young on modern parenting, which too often ignored teaching children to limit their impulses to do wrong and to feel remorse when they strayed from right. Kelley found a lot wrong with the human condition.

  Kelley applied his psychiatric expertise to many prominent criminal cases. Working sometimes for the prosecution and sometimes for the defense, he consulted and testified in the cases of such notorious Bay Area defendants as Ray Cullen, tried for killing his wife and father-in-law in 1949; Mary Edna Glenn, charged in 1952 with murdering her two children; Hildegard Pelton, who murdered her husband after he repeatedly abused her; Rodney Sheran, convicted in the 1955 murder of his wife; and Saul Sidney Klass, a jeweler convicted in 1957 of shooting a physician to avenge his wife, who had died under the doctor’s care. With the aid of prosecutors, Kelley examined Stephen A. Nash, who had committed a series of “thrill murders” in Los Angeles, without disclosing that he was a psychiatrist. Kelley then testified that Nash was legally sane. In many cases such as these, he put his Rorschach expertise to good use, and he made the psychological test a centerpiece of his consulting arsenal for the remainder of his career. The book he had written in 1942 with Bruno Klopfer, The Rorschach Technique, stood prominently on a shelf in his home office. Kelley insisted publicly that the test was a valuable tool, despite the mystery that continued to surround it—though on occasion he let slip a doubt about exactly why the Rorschach test worked. “The Rorschach method has come fast in the 29 years of its existence,” he wrote in 1951. “Whether it has come far is harder to say. We still have little notion as to why it seems to work—theories, yes, by the pound, but [few] facts measured in the microbalance.”

  Similarly, Kelley held fast to his conviction that various forms of truth serums and truth detection were effective. He continued to champion Somnoform as a treatment to elicit criminal confessions and to overcome amnesia. Pathological liars, he admitted, would continue to dissemble under Somnoform’s influence, but those people were uncommon. He still hoped for a truth drug that was even better. “I’m hunting a drug which can be contained in a container as small as, say, a pencil,” he told a reporter. “When I get it, then I’ll be really happy.”

  The murder of a fourteen-year-old girl named Stephanie Bryan in 1955 drew Kelley into the most notorious case of his career. Walking home from her junior high school only a few blocks from the UC–Berkeley campus, Bryan, the daughter of a local doctor, had vanished while taking a shortcut through a wooded area. The girl’s body eventually turned up in a hurriedly dug grave in Trinity County, in far northern California. A twenty-seven-year-old former Berkeley student named Burton Abbott was the chief suspect. Abbott was something of a cipher, a skinny, smart, dapper, and bespectacled man with a thin mustache and well-manicured fingers whom one reporter likened to “a pencil standing on end.” The police brought in Kelley and polygraph expert Albert Riedel t
o grill Abbott, and their work slowly broke through the suspect’s glib and nonchalant façade. After Riedel’s insistent lie-detector interrogations, Kelley took over and put his questioning and listening techniques to use. In the middle of many other questions, he asked Abbott if he had attended a coin collectors’ convention at the Claremont Hotel, a building near Bryan’s fatal shortcut. “Do you collect coins?” Kelley prodded. “No,” said the suspect, who then mentioned that his wife did. “What kind?” Kelley asked. “The spending kind!” Abbott joked. Kelley did not laugh, but he took note of Abbott’s inappropriate hilarity. In another interview, Kelley subjected Abbott to a detailed description of the scene of Bryan’s grave and the state of her decomposed and animal-mangled body when her remains were found. Abbott took it all in with no sign of emotion: “Damn you, O’Meara,” Abbott said to another person in the room, “where is that ham sandwich you promised me?” Kelley later observed that “Hermann Göring and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered” of all the people he had professionally interviewed during his career.