By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  When her husband came home she showed him the paper. The man had taken thirty dollars from him, a supreme insult. “I hope they kill the son of a bitch” was all he said. He hadn’t seen the face clearly that night. But she had. “I’m not positive,” she told him, and he threw the paper down in disgust.

  For days Sara thought about going to the authorities. But what good would it do? They hadn’t reported it at the time because neither wanted to get involved with the police. And of course she had told her future husband that the man was impotent, that he had just played with her a little that night and had then left. She wasn’t sure she was believed but she didn’t really care, that was her story. Now with the baby coming, it might not be a good idea to bring all that up again. In the end she decided to do nothing about the night. But she followed the case in the papers, and when they started calling Chessman the Red Light Bandit because he had flashed a red light on the occupants of cars, she was almost certain he was her man.

  On April 30, 1948, a son was born to Sara Owens. Named Thomas William, his eyes were brown and his hair dark, whereas both Sara and her husband had light-brown hair. At a glance he looked nothing like his father, but a nurse kindly pointed out that physical characteristics often skipped a generation. The father nodded gravely.

  On May 18, 1948, Caryl Chessman was convicted on seventeen of eighteen counts of armed robbery, kidnapping and rape. He was subsequently sentenced to death and given a July date of execution. In handcuffs and under heavy guard, he was taken to San Quentin. His appeal delayed the execution, and by summer’s end the Chessman case—except for further appeals and various legal actions over the next twelve years—was out of the headlines and the public mind for the moment.

  In the Owens household the addition to the family brought about subtle but increasingly disruptive changes over the next several years. Sara lost some of her energy, which had never been vast anyway. The birth had drained her physically and emotionally. She vowed never to have another baby, no matter what. She would die first. Then, too, her great disappointment at not having had a girl could not be contained forever. Unconsciously at first, without willful deliberation, she began to resent the boy. Toward her husband as well she became increasingly remote. After losing the job at the garage he had run through a string of odd jobs that never seemed to bring in enough money. She herself could not work because of the boy, nor did she feel up to it any longer. With growing alarm she sensed her husband changing, not realizing that she was changing as well. She came to feel that he was careless toward her, that he was no longer accepting his responsibilities. She resented the spiraling amount of time he spent away from home with his friends, whom she saw as drifters and bums. She worried that he might be with other women. In short, Sara gradually began to feel cheated out of whatever it was she should have had, and as always she saw it as a plot directed against her by men.

  Harry, for his part, also felt cheated. His wife no longer was the sex toy he had married. She wasn’t exciting anymore, she didn’t make him feel alive. Now she just nagged him and was sloppy around the house and screamed at the kid all the time. And he resented her wanting him to work night and day, especially when she did no work. He was good with cars and he liked money, sure, but he couldn’t see spending his life just working to take care of her and the brat. He never should have tried to settle down, it just wasn’t in him. He felt trapped, and somehow he knew it was all her fault. What he would do is figure out a way to get enough money to leave.

  By the third year of their marriage Sara and Harry were openly dissatisfied with each other. Yet they remained together in their three-room apartment, each afraid to let go of the old, fearful of the new. She still gave him what sex he wanted, or at least some of the time. He still gave her what money he had, or at least part of it. Sara had taken to drinking wine in the house. Harry, strictly a beer man, didn’t think women should drink, at least not married women, and certainly not his wife. The first time Sara got drunk, at least the first time Harry came home to find her drunk, he hit her. After that the beatings became more frequent.

  On June 24, 1951, Caryl Chessman again made the Los Angeles papers in one of his many legal actions. Sara, glass in hand, read the account avidly. Over the years Chessman had assumed celebrity status for her because of his notoriety. Everyone seemed to know of him; why, she had even seen magazines with stories about him. For her, Chessman was no longer just a rapist; he was a name and a face, someone familiar. Of course he was still a man and therefore to be hated and despised. But at least he wasn’t around to torture her every day of her life, as others were doing.

  By the time Harry got home Sara had had a number of drinks. When the shouting started she turned on him and loudly informed him that he was not the boy’s father. He laughed, and Sara, stung by his derision, blurted out that she had lied to him. “It was Chessman in the car that night, Caryl Chessman, you stupid son of a bitch. And he wasn’t impotent. He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.” Now it was Sara’s turn to laugh. “You think you’re so good. By the time I let you touch me his seed was all the way inside me, keeping me warm. What do you think of that, Mister Big Shot?”

  She didn’t notice Harry’s eyes getting smaller. “You don’t believe me, do you?” She stormed into the next room, coming back a moment later dragging the boy by the arm. He had been sleeping and his eyes were half shut. “Look at his hair,” she shouted at her husband, “it’s dark. Yours is light brown and so is mine. Look at his mouth, his whole face. Nothing like yours. Not even the skin’s the same.” She grabbed up the paper from the table. “You want to know whose kid he is? You really want to know?” She tossed it at her husband. “There’s his picture, right on that page. Look at it, you poor dope. Look at it,” she screamed at him.

  Harry, deathly still, took the paper and examined the picture. He looked at the boy, who was sniffling now with fright. He looked at the picture again for a long time, then again at the boy. Without a word he gently put the paper back on the table and quietly walked over to his wife and hit her full in the eye. She staggered back and he hit her again with all his strength on the side of the cheek. She fell and lay there. The boy, terrified, stood rooted to the spot. Harry walked up to him and with doubled fist slammed him in the face, knocking him unconscious.

  After three days Harry returned home, unshaven, smelling of liquor and perfume. He didn’t mention the incident. Neither did Sara, nursing a black eye and puffed cheek. Nobody mentioned the boy, who was still sick in bed from the beating.

  Sara knew that her husband would soon be gone for good. But she just didn’t care anymore. She wondered only why he had bothered to return at all.

  That night Sara dreamed about Caryl Chessman. He was chasing her and she couldn’t seem to get away. He was all around her. There were other people in the dream too, crowds of men. But the next morning she could not remember exactly what they were doing. That afternoon she picked up a man in a bar and had illicit sex for the first time since her marriage. It was unsatisfying and she came home tired and defeated. She lay down on her bed and cried bitterly and asked God to grant her wish that all men be horribly killed that very second, all men everywhere, right down to infant males.

  Six weeks later her boy was admitted to a hospital with seconddegree burns covering his left arm and side. An accident, Sara told the doctor. She had been boiling water for coffee and he crashed into the stove while playing. When it was pointed out that such extensive burns would require a large amount of water, she replied that she always made enough coffee in the morning for a small army. “Saves time later on,” she murmured sweetly.

  In the afternoon the hospital administrator and resident physician met with the intern who had admitted the burned boy.

  “Where is he?”

  “I put him here in 412.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Hyperemic and vesicant damage from the neck to the waist. Same for the left arm almost to the wrist. Some plasma leakage already.
Could be worse, I guess.”

  “You’re an optimist, Doctor.”

  “I have to be in cases like this or I’d go nuts.”

  “We all would.”

  “Is the mother in the hospital?”

  “Home. Or somewhere. I think she got scared.”

  “The son of a bitch.”

  “Daughter.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Daughter of a bitch. She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

  “She’s still a son of a bitch.”

  A nurse came into the room.

  “Joanne, make sure someone stays with him tonight. Just in case.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Christ, he’s tiny.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Three.”

  “Oh my God,” said the administrator.

  “There are two others worse than this in the burn section downtown.”

  “The Ames girl?”

  The resident physician nodded. “Of course she’s older.”

  “Yeah, she’s five.”

  “What’ll happen to him when he gets out of here?”

  “Go back home, I guess.”

  “Back to more of that, you mean.”

  They stood at the foot of the bed watching the boy, unconscious now. He was wrapped in white.

  “Can’t he be taken away from her?” asked the nurse, her voice cracking. “I mean, can’t somebody—” She stopped, her eyes watery.

  The administrator shook his head. “There are cases like this all over the city,” he said quietly. “Thousands of them. Parents who burn their children, beat them, starve them. Sometimes they kill them. And if they don’t, they get scared and come running to a hospital. It’s always an accident.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The hell of it is you can’t prove anything most of the time. The boy could’ve burned himself accidentally.”

  “Not hardly likely,” said the intern.

  “Not likely,” agreed the administrator wearily. “But without definite proof the hospital can’t go to the authorities. No one can.” He replaced his glasses.

  “And so she gets a second shot at the boy, and then a third.”

  “Only if he’s lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “If he’s lucky enough to survive the second,” whispered the resident physician, walking toward the door.

  “You can never tell how these things work out. No one knows for sure.”

  “I know one thing for sure,” said the intern vehemently in the hall. “One thing I know for goddam sure.” His voice shook with anger. “That boy in there is doomed. No matter what happens, he’s doomed.”

  The others nodded, their lips tight, their eyes sad.

  “Doomed,” he repeated.

  Doomed or otherwise, the boy was visited every day by his mother, a bundle of concern. When she finally took him home she bought him a pint of chocolate ice cream, his favorite. The next day she banged his head on the side of the bathtub when he accidentally splashed water on her. Screaming, he fainted.

  Sara decided that she had better give up drinking in the house. Frightened now, because she still had feeling for the child even though he was a hated male, she sought help from a self-styled minister of the Astrological Church of the Planets, one of the many religious sects that seemed to grow like crabgrass in southern California. He listened politely to her problem, then told her that for a fifty-dollar offering to the church he would study her astrological chart. Two days later he sadly informed her that she labored under a double cosmic cross, “perhaps the gravest sign in the heavens.” However—and here he brightened considerably—her planets were such that she would soon enter a peaceful phase, one filled with great opportunities and rich rewards. How soon? He couldn’t tell unless he did her horoscope, which would require a further offering of course. Sara thanked him and left, stopping in the bar next door for a glass of wine.

  After the third glass she felt better, thinking about the peaceful phase to come. God knows she deserved some peace. When the man came in and sat next to her, she smiled back at him. Later in the motel room, looking at the stranger sleeping alongside her naked body, Sara just knew that her phase had already begun.

  By the end of September she also knew that she was pregnant again. Scared now, more scared than she had ever been in her life, and insanely angry at the gods, all males naturally, who somehow conspired to bring this fresh horror on her head, Sara Owens vowed that she would not have another baby. No, never. Whatever else happened she would take, but not that. Never again.

  Set in her determination, the helpless fright subsiding, she tried to figure out how such a thing could happen. All those years with her husband produced nothing. Now, the second time she strayed in almost four years of marriage, and she’s pregnant again. It wasn’t just punishment and it couldn’t be mere coincidence. Suddenly the answer seemed clear. Of course. Her husband was sterile, that had to be it. For all his crazy sex urges, he couldn’t make a baby if he tried. Sara nearly burst out laughing, the thought was so delicious. He’s only half a man, the poor bastard. Wait a minute—if he’s sterile, then the boy really is Chessman’s. Or the rapist, whoever he was. Sara shook her head. It was Chessman, all right. She needed to believe that, for it was easier living with a name than a faceless nobody, so over the years she had convinced herself that Chessman was her rapist.

  Sara saw what she must do. She would get an abortion. First, somehow, she would get the money. Then she would never again have sex with a man, any man. Not even her husband. Let him go to hell for it, let them all go straight to hell. She didn’t need them and didn’t want them. All she ever really wanted was to be left alone.

  Every afternoon Sara put on her best dress and stockings, her highest-heeled shoes and a freshly made face and sat in elegant cocktail lounges in the best sections of town, smiling at moneyed men with murder in her heart. She could still act, and if she no longer gave Academy Award performances she was nonetheless a better player than many wives waiting at home.

  In three weeks she had nine hundred dollars. Fifty of it bought her the name of a doctor who would handle her problem. Eight hundred more bought the doctor. An overnight stay in an elaborate address on Mulholland Drive and she was free to go.

  Free! Even the air in this part of town felt better to Sara. She had the cab stop at a plush lounge, where she ordered a glass of very expensive wine. Then another. Though it was early afternoon, several well-dressed men were at the bar. She returned their smiles and when one joined her she engaged him in conversation. She was charming, animated, flirtatious, seductive, everything a man could desire. When he finally asked if he could help make her day profitable as well as pleasurable, Sara turned to him with eyes wide and a sweet smile and told him in graphic language what he could do with his manhood. She then delicately put her last fifty-dollar bill on the bar in payment for her drinks and walked out, head held high.

  At home she fed the boy, who hadn’t eaten since the previous day, and then slept for fifteen hours. She had no intention of telling her husband anything. He wasn’t home half the time anymore and she wished he would never come home again.

  Harry didn’t really want to go home, it was just that he wasn’t ready to make the break yet. All he needed was one big score, anything, and it would be goodbye forever. There was nothing more for him at home, not since she had told him about Chessman and the brat. Harry didn’t like that, made him feel foolish. What he should do was just pack up and go, he kept telling himself. Sure, it’d serve her right, serve them both right. Her and that damn brat.

  For months Harry had been brooding about Chessman and the night in the woods years before. He had never been sure it was Chessman; he didn’t remember any flashing red light. But she was so damn sure, at least since the kid came. She probably enjoyed it, the slut. And then lying to him like that, telling him the guy did nothing. Forcing him to make love to her right after someone did a thing like that. He should have hit her and
driven away, just he felt sorry for her.

  Harry was very certain that his wife would suffer terribly when he finally left her, and for that he was glad. But it was Chessman who really bothered him, laughing at him, taking what was his, insulting him that way. The more Harry thought about it, the angrier he got, until one day he decided that he would kill Caryl Chessman. He would wait for them to bring Chessman to Los Angeles again for something and then he would shoot the bastard, just like that.

  Three months later, in January 1952, he got his chance. Chessman was whisked into town for a hearing on a petition filed by his lawyer. Harry bought a stolen gun through a friendly connection and waited across the street from the courthouse. The gun, a Colt .45 army issue, was in his topcoat pocket and Harry fingered it warmly. He had never killed anyone, never even fired a gun in his life. All he knew about guns was what he had seen in the movies. The good guy always killed the bad guy, and he always had more bullets in his gun. Harry knew he was the good guy, so all he had to learn was how to load the bullets. When this was done, he felt ready for anything.

  As he sat on a bench in the small park waiting for the bad guy to show, Harry’s mind raced through all the war movies he had ever seen. Machine guns, tanks, bombs, grenades, dead bodies everywhere. He remembered Bogart hitting the beach, his trusty .45 in his hand, killing every Jap around him, crawling under barbed wire, racing forward ahead of his men. When the tank rolled over him he just slid between the treads, then leaped on it, opened the turret and dropped a grenade down its throat before diving off. Boom! One dead Jap tank. Only Bogart could’ve done that. Wait a minute—it was John Wayne. Was it John Wayne? Goddam right it was. So what, same thing. Harry wished he could have been there, he would have shown them a few things. If only his trick knees hadn’t kept him out of the army.

  Two police cars braked to a halt across the street, one behind the other. A half dozen reporters rushed down the courthouse steps. Harry jumped up, his hand still on the gun in his pocket. The people suddenly looked so small across the street, he didn’t think he could hit anything. Hesitating, he watched as a wedge of cops hustled somebody up the stairs and into the building. Then they were gone. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds and he had hardly caught a glimpse of Chessman.