The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  Abbott grew to dislike and fear the psychiatrist, calling him a brain-washer and complaining that Kelley “put me through hell.” He responded disdainfully to Kelley’s suggestions that he lacked a conscience and was emotionally immature. “He’s all wet,” Abbott said. “My conscience is quite well developed. If anything, I am rapidly developing a persecution complex. Dr. Kelley seems to be impressed with his own importance.” Such remarks must have convinced Kelley that his questioning was getting close to the truth. Denying his guilt to the end—even after the murdered girl’s clothing and purse turned up in his basement—Abbott was convicted and sentenced to death in 1956, and he perished in San Quentin’s gas chamber the following year.

  Such cases propelled Kelley into prominence as a consultant, and he won jobs advising authorities on personnel selection and criminal matters at Travis Air Force Base, San Quentin Prison, Letterman Army General Hospital, the California Attorney General’s Office, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Oakland Police Department. In the few spare hours he left himself, he took on freelance consulting gigs in Central and South America, Pakistan, Thailand, and other parts of the world. He stretched his time thinner by shouldering the responsibilities of the presidency of the East Bay Psychiatric Association. During the mid-1950s Kelley was considering adding further to his workload by starting a new business as a psychiatric consultant in corporate management.

  With his return to California, maybe the call of Hollywood was inevitable. In 1954, before the production of the film Rebel Without a Cause, director Nicholas Ray contacted Kelley to consult on the criminological soundness of Stewart Stern’s screenplay (which Ray and Irving Shulman had adapted from Robert Lindner’s novel). Ray wanted Kelley to focus on the script’s portrayal of youth gangs and juvenile delinquency. Kelley pointed out to Ray only a few inaccuracies in the script, including police dialogue and interviewing techniques that struck him as wrong, an unrealistic encounter between the James Dean and Sal Mineo characters, and insufficient attention to juvenile psychiatry, although he acknowledged that giving psychiatry its due “might slow down the action.”

  Also in 1954, Kelley consulted on a TV program about stage magic for NBC. He splurged with his earnings from that work and bought a color television—an expensive and rarely seen home electronic appliance at the time. For a long time the storytelling techniques and potentially large audience of television had drawn his interest, and over the years he had sketched several proposals for TV shows about crime and psychiatry. One nascent show he discussed with friends, Fakes, Frauds and Fools, would each week feature an infamous con, quack, or carnival cheat, along with the frauds they perpetrated. Kelley’s inspiration for the series was a letter his father had received of the “Spanish prisoner” type—an ancestor of the Nigerian 419 scams that later invaded e-mail inboxes. Turning the tables, Kelley convinced the Mexican swindlers who had targeted his father to wire him $50 to travel south to complete a transaction. “He figures he has enough script ideas,” one of Kelley’s friends said of the con show concept, “to go five or ten years without straining himself to think or read. . . . Kelley would wind it up, title and all, as Professor of Criminology, scientist, doctor, psychiatrist, magician, etc., who knows all the answers to everything dealing with human cupidity, including the basic psychology which motivates both the mark and the con.” That itself sounded a bit like a con, but the University of California seems to have been an enthusiastic supporter. The School of Criminology would gain credibility and publicity for its programs and faculty, as well as credit for advancing the notion “that crime does not pay, for the thought that the shepherds of Berkeley are watching over the little sheep of America,” Kelley’s friend reported to a colleague.

  However, the series never got off the ground. Kelley appeared in some other programs, including ten episodes of a series titled Science in Action and another, sponsored by the California Medical Association, called Why, Doctor? He received nearly $50,000 in funding for another program, titled Criminal Man, from the Educational Television and Radio Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan. His teammate in the production was a local writer and producer named Gordon Waldear, a former test pilot who had become a journalist after he was injured in a crash. The two had previously collaborated, with Waldear as ghostwriter, on a book manuscript gathering much of Kelley’s experience and wisdom on the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Kelley came to view Waldear as “a psychopath,” as Dukie later recounted. While working on the book, “Doug had had a rough time with him,” she said. “It would be hard for you to imagine the degree of frustration and pressure he suffered because of Waldear’s lack of ability to work with any degree of speed, his inability and at times complete failure to get to work at all, his not showing up for appointments, his constant lies, and his complete irresponsibility both in his contractual arrangements and in his finances.” Kelley’s judgment was excessive: Waldear may not have been as rigorously productive as Kelley had hoped, but he was far from psychopathic. In later decades, Waldear became a beloved and respected figure among Bay Area documentarians and TV producers.

  Waldear’s undeniable talents as a television producer ensured that Criminal Man proceeded smoothly and achieved a stunning success. In twenty episodes the series covered the history of crime, its causes, various categories of criminal acts, crime-fighting strategies, and solutions to criminality. The series strove to “bring about a better understanding by the public of the person who commits a crime so that attention in the future may be shifted from what Dr. Kelley calls ‘simple vengeance’ to true rehabilitation of the offender,” explained the original proposal for the program.

  Kelley believed that TV programming, even shows on academic topics, could interest a mass audience. “Why shouldn’t all educational programs be as dramatically interesting as a play?” he wondered. On camera, he worked hard not to look or sound like a tweedy professor. He put his considerable powers of persuasion to use, modulating his voice, turning up his speaking volume at times, grimacing and smiling, and raising his bushy eyebrows. “No!” he exclaimed to the audience in an episode that investigated whether criminals have physical features in common. “There is no such thing as a criminal type. It is simply folklore. It is like saying the world is flat. You can’t tell by looking. Criminals are not born.” In another episode about the causes of violence, Kelley’s son Doug appeared as a child whose incessant beating on a drum drives his father into a frenzy. Kelley played the exasperated father.

  Shot at the studios of KQED in San Francisco, Criminal Man did not reach completion until the end of 1957 and was scheduled to air nation-wide on educational television stations, the forerunners of today’s PBS network, during the summer and fall of 1958. Kelley never saw his programs broadcast to the screen of his beloved color TV set or to any other. The show was the final professional project of his career.

  The Kelley kids knew that when the Old Man was upstairs working on a sensitive police or legal project, he was immersed in darkness, lost in an inaccessible state of mind. He wanted no interruptions and often played loud tribal or classical music when holed up in his office at those times. “To us, the music was synonymous with Daddy’s most important cases,” Doug remembers. Often police officers, criminal suspects, and prosecution or defense lawyers would visit the house to meet with Kelley. The psychiatrist had equipped his desk with a hidden drawer that contained a tape recorder and an ashtray with a concealed microphone, and he used them surreptitiously to record his interviews. One time a man came to the house for a psychiatric evaluation, a criminal “who had shot people from his overcoat with a shotgun,” Doug recalls. The boy played with the visitor in the living room for a few minutes until Kelley came down from his study. The two men went upstairs, closed the study door, and the loud music came on.

  Even as a child, Doug detected the dual allure that attracted his father to psychiatric criminology. The intellectual puzzle of these cases merged with Kelley’s need to feel like “the big man on campus.
” The combination made police and criminal consulting irresistible. But police work also awakened fear in Kelley, almost paranoia. The crimes of others disturbed him, stirring the anger he felt from the buried emotions and view of the world that he could never acknowledge or confront. He expressed his anxieties in the fear that criminals would invade his home to harm him and his family. He had two handguns from the Berkeley police that he kept handy with ammunition, and he installed high-quality locks on the first-floor windows.

  His fame as the Nuremberg psychiatrist persisted, and his interactions with Nazis sometimes reemerged unpleasantly. In 1952 he received an angry letter from Christa Schroeder, a former secretary to Hitler whom Kelley had interviewed during her incarceration in the Nuremberg jail. Schroeder objected to Kelley’s characterizations of her, which had appeared in newspapers four years earlier and in 22 Cells in Nuremberg. In the book Kelley had called her “a motherly, maiden female in her late forties, of medium height, stocky, sloppy, non-Nordic in appearance.” He had also reflected on her loyalty to Hitler: “[E]ven when the evidence of his brutality became undeniable, he remained a hero. Her comments, consequently, though frank, are those of a person who refused to see anything but greatness in Adolf Hitler.”

  Schroeder accused Kelley of breaking a promise not to use his interview with her in any published work, and she took him to task for inaccuracy and unkindness in his observations. Of all people, she wrote, he should have understood that the harsh conditions in the prison made it impossible for women to keep up their appearance. She noted that when they met she had already been behind bars for six months, had been traumatized by Germany’s collapse, and had no personal articles such as “combs and hair pins, shoe laces, creams and manicure things not to be mentioned.” At the time, she asserted, she was thirty-eight years old. “My appearance is absolutely not ‘unnordisch.’” She stood 1.7 meters tall. She demanded from Kelley an apology and “a settlement and reparation of the insult” if he wished to avoid unfavorable press coverage in Europe. Kelley’s reply, if he made one, is unknown, and he never faced a campaign against him in European newspapers. Schroeder went on to work for several German businesses and died in 1984.

  Kelley’s consulting income, plus his professor’s salary, allowed for plenty of spending money. And Kelley spent it. He bought specimens and equipment for his home laboratory, folk art and crafts from his travels, books, and kitchen doodads. He made the money, he thought, and he should spend it. Saving for the future did not often enter his thinking, although Dukie thought differently.

  Meanwhile, Kelley and Dukie settled into a striking house on Highgate Road in Kensington, a well-to-do community of university professors, doctors, and lawyers just north of Berkeley. It was a Spanish-style house with red tiles on the roof, stucco on the outside walls, and an expansive brick patio between the wings of the U-shaped layout. A green gate opened to the yard’s eucalyptus and redwood trees, plus a grove in which grew almonds, cherries, peaches, and persimmons. The property cascaded in terraces down to a lawn, to a road, and finally to the neighboring cemetery. Stone walks snaked among the plants. A hired gardener tended the yard, although Dukie sometimes sought out the gardens for their sunshine and to work the earth.

  Inside the house, living areas and bedrooms branched off from long and expansive hallways splashed with sunlight from tall windows. The rooms nevertheless gave an impression of darkness, perhaps because of the attention-seeking hodgepodge of Donner Party artifacts, fossils, plant and animal specimens, and other weird collectibles that filled the many nooks and crannies. Vials of wood splinters from the Donner cabins, labeled and certified authentic by Charles McGlashan, were holy relics in this household. The second-floor closet held a mysterious assortment of objects, including straitjackets, card decks subtly marked with tiny wheels and other symbols, and Oscar, the comical wooden duck mounted on a small pedestal whose head and bill Kelley could manipulate mechanically to pick cards from decks held in the hands of his audience members. Kelley no longer performed his magic tricks professionally, but he could not pass up opportunities to dazzle others as a showman and continued to display his talents in legerdemain to friends and neighbors, at class reunions, and in his lecture classrooms.

  Upstairs Kelley set up an office commanding a magnificent view. Fog often flowed between the hills enclosing Golden Gate Bay and shrouded Alcatraz Island. Rosy sunsets set the office on fire with color. This was Kelley’s private preserve, a room that the children—Doug, Alicia, and Allen—knew they should not enter without permission. Kelley’s desk, spotless and tidy, stood in front of the windows. Across the room, behind a door, was the doctor’s lab—a wondrous cabinet of curiosities that contained bones, plant specimens, cranial saws, stoppered jars of chemicals, minerals and rocks, and an assortment of scientific investigative equipment. Kelley’s library had only enlarged since he had moved from North Carolina, and it now boasted a notable collection of books on such topics as Southwestern art, mythology, and witchcraft, in addition to texts on biology, zoology, chemistry, and astronomy. Kelley also kept handy the autographed volumes by Nazi leaders that he had collected at Nuremberg.

  A black staircase led down, its descent interrupted by a large, white-railed landing six feet above the first floor that was visible from anywhere in the living room. Kelley relaxed in the living room when he managed to push professional concerns from his mind. Alcoves beneath the stairs housed a well-stocked record collection and a high-fidelity music center equipped with a phonograph, radio, and speakers, all enclosed in a custom-made wooden cabinet that had been hauled to Berkeley from North Carolina. Music could entrance Kelley, and he liked Hawaiian, African, and classical recordings. Across the room was a baby grand piano. A horned toad and a lizard stood as still as statues in a terrarium against one wall.

  Wearing boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, Kelley liked to decompress in a green leather chair that faced the TV. He had the piece of furniture specially designed to allow him to sit with Doug and Alicia on the arms of the chair, with little Allen on his lap. At other times he occupied the chair for long periods while he watched boxing matches on television; a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer invariably sat on the table at his side. The more he drank, the more closed-off to the children he grew. He would often end the day in a condition “between squiffed and smashed,” according to Doug.

  The kids watched the beer cans pile up and wondered whether Kelley was investigating a new scientific question: How much Pabst Blue Ribbon could a man consume in a day and continue to think and function? Their father, however, labored under a different preoccupation. How could he escape from the turbulence he felt from the torments of criminology, the discipline that agonized and attracted him? Pabst provided the simple answer.

  The living room, and the dining room down the hall, with its large cherry table and leather-armed chairs, were the scene of all sorts of board game sessions, chess matches, and spontaneous mental play. Kelley and Dukie were both quick to laugh, and their wordplay and slightly manic, competitive punning filled the house. It was up to the kids to keep up. “If you didn’t know what a word meant, you had to look it up,” Doug says. Wearing socks, the children could take a running start and glide the entire length of the living room’s polished brick floor. Outside, hay bales stacked against the outside wall of the kitchen pantry served as archery targets, at least until an errant arrow once sailed through the window.

  The kitchen, down the hall from the living room, was Kelley’s domain—the place in which he exercised unrestrained control. “Dad was like a Boy Scout, always prepared for anything,” Doug remembers, and his father kept the kitchen and adjoining pantry stocked with fifty-pound sacks of beans and rice and a hoarded supply of water. Using a hand-cranked grinder, he pulverized prodigious quantities of meat. His larder filled two refrigerators and three freezers, and he maintained an extensive stock of spices. Kelley believed that cooking food required continual modification and frequent sampling, and he liked to proclaim, “Beware
the lean and hungry cook.” He adored making his signature recipe, Indian curry, but he also dished out pressed duck, bird’s-nest soup, great big slabs of bacon, and even stuffed bear paws that he made with two stoves bristling with eight gas burners and equipped with a fast-food style griddle that seared at 450 degrees.

  Kelley often cooked up ambitious meals when he and Dukie hosted dinner parties for neighbors and friends. Dukie had never really learned how to cook, and Kelley insisted on taking charge of the preparation. The psychiatrist could not resist making himself the center of attention at these gatherings. He often prepared a prized duck recipe at such meals, and the fanfare with which he displayed the duck press, dropped the bird inside, and started cranking the big handle to extract the juices was an important part of his staging and performance. He would pour gravy into a special tureen and proudly ladle a serving onto each plate. He found other ways to grab the spotlight, as well. At one gathering outdoors on the Kelley patio, the visitors noticed a large animal—a badger or a possum—creeping through the yard. Kelley, ever the master of ceremonies, astonished the guests by rising from the table and cornering the animal, which triggered its instinct to play dead. Not content to leave the creature alone, Kelley grasped it by the tail and raised it high for everyone to admire. Or perhaps it was so they could admire him. Kelley was a showman to the end, ever eager to place himself center stage, at the heart of the action—no matter how strange.

  Here and elsewhere, the Kelleys never discussed politics, and the children never learned which political candidates they favored, except during the 1952 presidential election, when Kelley and Dukie wore Ike buttons. It was the McCarthy era of academic intimidation, and Dukie warned Kelley never to sign any petitions; they would come back to soil his reputation. Your name was your most valuable possession, they believed, and you had to guard it. It was a tense, watchful time.