By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  Spanner walked to the edge of the drain. “Maybe he didn’t know,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe Mungo never knew about it. Maybe he’s dead.”

  Oates followed him to the edge. He wanted to laugh, but nothing came out. He shut his eyes, opened them again. “What’s on your mind, John?” he said softly.

  “Maybe the body we found was Vincent Mungo. It had Bishop’s uniform and all his things in the pockets. It didn’t have his watch or ring so we assumed they were taken. But all that could’ve been staged.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?”

  Oates thought furiously. The son of a bitch is trying to pull something here, but what? He can’t be that nuts. Better see what he’s up to. “Tell me more,” he said grimly.

  “The face is gone. Maybe the work of a nut, like Baylor said. But maybe so we can’t tell who it was. Fingerprints are useless; neither one ever had them taken. Again we can’t tell who it was.”

  “What about the finger?”

  “That could’ve been staged too.”

  “The wallet?”

  “Same thing.”

  He really must be nuts, the sheriff said to himself. Okay, play along, let him make a fool of himself. Serve him right, the bastard.

  “Got any suggestions?” he said aloud.

  “One that should work,” replied Spanner.

  Five minutes later they were in the records room in the main building. “Bi-g, Bi-l, Bi-m, here we are, Bi-s, Bishop, Thomas William.” The clerk handed the file to Spanner. “Is this all?” he was asked. “That’s it,” he answered cheerfully. “Let me know when you’re done.” He moved away.

  Spanner opened the file, Oates at his shoulder. Thomas William Bishop, born April 30, 1948. His finger quickly ran down the sheet, stopping at Physical Description. No mention of any scars, tattoos or other identifying marks. The bottom line was obviously a recent addition. Both men read it: “Small V-shaped scar on upper right shoulder below the scapula.” They exchanged glances.

  Soon they were talking to one of the guards in the experimental unit. Yes, he remembered how Bishop got the scar. The year before, the man had gone absolutely berserk: he set fire to the ward, then attempted to kill another guard. One of the patients tried to stop him. He stuck a scissors in Bishop’s shoulder, made a few gashes. “Even that didn’t stop him. Took four of us to get him off the guard.”

  Another twelve minutes and they were getting out of the screaming police car in front of Hillside’s small hospital. “We’ll know in a few seconds,” Spanner said evenly. Inside they rushed to the basement, where the morgue attendant opened the drawer and wheeled out the body of Thomas Bishop. They carefully turned it over. On the upper right shoulder, just below the scapula, was a small V-shaped scar.

  Outside again, the two men were a study in moods. “Can’t win ‘em all,” said the sheriff, smiling. “You had a crazy idea, it didn’t work out. Nobody’s perfect.” He rubbed his hands. “Can’t win ‘em all,” he repeated.

  “Guess not,” said Spanner, defeated.

  “We’ll get him,” Oates said cheerfully. “Mungo, I mean.” He laughed. “By tomorrow we should have him. No problem.”

  “Hope you’re right,” said Spanner.

  “Nobody’s perfect. Don’t forget that.”

  By the weekend, fishing in one of his favorite streams, John Spanner had forgotten everything. Or almost everything. He had a hunch that he had worked up to an assumption. The hunch was based on a few little signs that he thought he had detected. But it was wrong. Maybe he was getting too old. Maybe it was time he retired, God knows he’d thought about it often enough. When he felt the tug on the line he thought about nothing else.

  That was July 5, the day the two police officials were at Willows. Two weeks later Vincent Mungo was still at large and Sheriff James T. Oates was no longer laughing. Not at all. On that very day the first elderly woman was hacked to death, her right index finger missing. Three days later the second body was found and although the diabolical killer was quickly apprehended, the whole episode served to publicize further the continued absence of the Willows maniac.

  Yet at least one man read of the capture in the San Francisco newspapers of July 24 with uncommon interest. He read the account rapidly through, then once again, absorbing each detail. He had been certain that the two elderly upstate women had been slain by the escaped madman. The killings seemed to have all the earmarks of the dedicated homicidal mind.

  Naturally he was chagrined to learn that both murders had been simple pedestrian affairs committed by a lowly handyman with a grudge. And half drunk to boot! How mundane, bethought to himself. Ah, well, a la chandelle la chčvre semble demoiselle. He brightened at the thought and helped himself to another piece of toast. As he unconsciously chewed each morsel precisely eight times he pondered his miscalculation.

  Amos Finch was an associate professor of criminology at the University of California at Berkeley. A youthful forty, still slim and athletic, he played the horses and the ladies with equal abandon. But the real passion of his life was the study of the homicidal mind, the maniacal killer, those whom society called psychopathic monsters and fiends. Finch called them his crank artists. He would tell his students in class: “You crank them up and they run out and kill, then they run down and you have to crank them up again.” What cranked them up in the first place, and what kept on cranking them, was the study to which he gladly devoted his life’s efforts.

  Finch was marvelously gifted for such work. His steady nerves gave him a lengthy attention span, and he had a trick memory that nailed down almost everything he had ever read or seen or heard. It hardly ever failed him. He was also a speed-reader and a remarkably good writer for a scholar, able to evoke the atmosphere of a time long gone or a city far removed.

  His vast knowledge of the subject had thus far produced three books, all recognized classics in the genre. The Complete Bruno Lüdke, published in 1963, recounted the horror story of the German mass murderer who killed eighty-six people, the modern record. Four years later The Complete Edward Gein appeared, which told of the Wisconsin mass murderer, necrophiliac and cannibal, in whose farmhouse police found bracelets and purses made of human skin, as well as vests, leggings, chair seats and drums. Also found were ten human heads sawed in half, another human head converted into a soup bowl, and a refrigerator full of frozen human organs.

  Finch’s third book, in 1971, was The Complete Mass Murderer’s Manual, a collection of sketches of a dozen maniacal killers of history, from the infamous John Gregg family of early eighteenth-century England to the American Albert Fish in the first third of the twentieth century. Included was a graphic compilation of the hundreds of monstrous tortures inflicted on the victims and a complete glossary, the first of its kind, of terms used in the study of the homicidal mind.

  Amos Finch thought of these books as his children, being unmarried, and he was as proud of them as any loving father. For his fourth book he quickly decided on a subject about whom he knew a great deal, the dread Jack the Ripper, only to learn that the excellent Donald Rumbelow of London was devoting efforts to just such a book. He then turned to a dream he had harbored all his professional life, the book he believed would be his magnum opus: a complete account of the vampirish Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary who killed hundreds of young girls, perhaps as many as six hundred, then drained their bodies of blood and bathed in the blood to keep her skin youthful.

  He soon saw the prodigious amount of work that would be required, including the learning of two languages and a stay in Europe, perhaps for several years. Reluctantly he shelved the magnum opus for a more suitable period of his life. Now, after a two-year layoff in which he did some preliminary work for a future book on mass murderers in the Bible, Finch was restless again. Something in the Vincent Mungo case had stirred his interest, possibly the savagery of the killing at the hospital. Unquestionably the work of the homicidal mind,
he told himself. He secretly hoped that Mungo would not be caught before he had become a true mass murderer, and therefore a proper subject for a study and perhaps a book. But he never voiced the hope of course, not even to himself.

  Sitting now in his study, disappointed that the two women had not been killed by Mungo, he wrote to Sacramento requesting that he be given special status in the investigation for purposes of scholarly research. He pointed out that as a recognized criminologist he would be valuable to the law-enforcement officials.

  During that last week of July nothing had yet been heard of Vincent Mungo. His whereabouts remained a mystery, though accusatory letters and phone calls were still being received, misguided confessions still being made. Sheriff Oates was desperate, especially since he had assured the press that the madman would be caught “in one or two days at most.” His political ambitions were not being helped by his continued failure in the case. On the other hand, at least Mungo was not killing people yet so the big pressure was not on him at the moment. That Mungo would kill again was obvious. Oates had been a cop too long to doubt that. He hoped that he could get the son of a bitch in time. If not …

  At the very end of that month, to be exact, on July 30, a report landed on his desk that was to provide the first legitimate clue to the killer’s disappearance. The report stated that a boy walking in the woods near his home had found a shirt and pants mostly destroyed by fire, both of which could have come from Willows. The boy lived nine miles south of the hospital.

  Within an hour Oates was at the site, his men fanning out to question every household. Three hours later they got lucky. A wife remembered that earlier in the month her husband had complained that some of his clothes were missing: a pants and a shirt and a pair of shoes—brown, she thought he had said. But he was always misplacing things so she had paid no attention. Anything else? Nothing, except— Yes? Well, she usually left a twenty-dollar bill in one of her old purses in the closet, just in case she ever needed quick cash. When she looked a week ago she couldn’t find it anywhere. Any signs of forced entry at any time? She shook her head. Windows were always open around here this time of year, it would be easy for anyone to get in. What about animals to guard the house? The woman laughed. They were a cat family, had four of them running loose. One last thing: could she remember when her husband missed the clothes? Yes, it was when they returned from visiting relatives over in Flint. They had spent the whole day there and she was dead tired. What day was that? The big holiday, the Fourth of July.

  If Sheriff Oates had been desperate before, he was now in despair. Vincent Mungo had got himself a new set of clothes and some money right at the start. If he kept off the highways and got a few rides he could have made it out of the area that first day, maybe even out of the state. Or by now he could be losing himself in the anonymity of a big city. Each day he was free he became harder to find.

  Oates was sure of at least two things. One was that Mungo had almost a month’s jump on everybody, and that was a helluva lot of time. The other was that he was a damn sight smarter than those records and peckerwood doctors at Willows said he was.

  In his heart of hearts the sheriff hoped that if Mungo made it out of the state, he kept going clear across the country.

  On the morning of July 31, 1973, a young man, well dressed and clean-shaven, handsome in a bland way, passed a newsstand in downtown Los Angeles. A banner on a newsweekly caught his eye. He stopped to read it and quickly reached into his pocket for some change.

  It was not until much later that the significance of that headline would become apparent to the rest of the country.

  Four

  THOMAS BISHOP sat deathly still in the strange room. Against the far wall a battered television set frantically announced a sale of summer shorts. A half-eaten banana lay on a nearby dresser, its yellow peelings clashing with the darkening fruit. A roach crawled across the windowsill. Outside a siren shrilled by and was soon lost in the morning haze. With great effort Bishop focused his eyes on the banner in the magazine he had just bought.

  Caryl Chessman a Victim of Capital Punishment? He read it for the hundredth time, yellow block type slashed across the cover’s edge. The picture below showed a bikini beauty cavorting gaily on a faraway beach. He turned to the appropriate page. At the top was a photograph, the first he had ever seen of Caryl Chessman. He stared at it a long time. Chessman had his right hand up to his face in a thinking pose, his chin resting in the arch formed between the thumb and fingers, his eyes cast down. The face was somber, the lips tight. It seemed to Bishop that the man was trying to say something but he didn’t know what or to whom. After a while the face began to blur in his vision and he thought he heard his father talking to him.

  Faint at first, then with brutal clarity, he listened to the sounds of demons destroying children, beating, burning, whipping small bodies in dreadful detail. All the demons were women in bathing suits, their globular breasts and butterfly bodies weaving madly in terrible temptation, trapping tiny faces, mouths open in frightful scream. Hideous noises gushed from secret recesses and in time all the demonic shapes rotted in leprous disgust, leaving only the screaming of the boy.

  Much later, his eyes still fastened to the page, Bishop read of the life and death of Caryl Chessman. He read the article many times, poring over each detail of his father’s crime and punishment. He learned of the rapes, as told by the accusers at the trial, of the years of caged and tormented suffering, much as he himself had suffered all those years. He saw the gas chamber with its green-splashed walls and leather-strapped chairs, heard the slow gurgling sound of death, breath by agonizing breath, until nothing remained but the body, vacant and peaceful. Eventually he came to believe that his father was not only a victim of capital punishment, about which he himself cared nothing, but of women as well.

  Again and again he studied the words for hidden meanings. He felt that Chessman was somehow behind the words trying desperately to reach him. Laboriously he began to fit the true pieces together. Women were in constant and perpetual agony, suffering perhaps because of a God-given curse. They painfully brought life into the world, knowing that the only result of that life would be death. Such knowledge, visceral and inescapable, maddened them beyond endurance. In their horrifying torment they lashed out at men, those who gave them the seed of life and thereby brought them death. Using every wile at their command they enticed, enslaved and destroyed any man within their grasp, instinctively, mercilessly, in a titanic battle for survival in a totally crazed world. But they could not win, of course. They were doomed because without death there was no life, and as they sought in their monstrous grief to kill that which brought life, they accepted in their grotesque bodies the seed which brought death. And so the horrific cycle continued unbroken, leaving only victims in its bloodied wake.

  Ultimately Bishop realized that the demons of his dreams were not only women monsters who had to be destroyed because they were evil, but women who suffered terribly and who desired to have their unspeakable torment ended by the final welcome release of death. That both the incarnate evil and the incalculable suffering should be lodged within the same body seemed to him as reasonable as a woman having two breasts.

  After his close examination of the story was completed, he carefully tore the several pages out of the magazine and neatly folded them in half, and half again, until they could fit into a pocket. He then began to write a brief letter to the editor in a disguised hand. Unfamiliar with writing anything, he labored over the words. To an unseen observer he would have looked at those moments like a college student at his books.

  In the cheap furnished room the television set was revealing the twisted emotional lives of a seemingly nice town caught in the grip of a soap opera. On the dresser the banana-half slowly turned to a soft, fragrant brown. The roach was gone from the window, and outside the noise increased as the lazy afternoon wore on toward the last night of July.

  On the first night of that fateful month Bishop had sat by
a window at Willows waiting for rain that did not come. His plans had been made. He knew what he had to do to get out and generally what had to be done afterward. His clothes were in order; the harmonica, the comb, the wallet, the ring, the watch, the axe, all were in readiness. He even had the can of whipped cream, bought from one of the kitchen staff at a profit of course, to silence the roof alarm, a trick he learned from a French movie on TV years earlier. Everything, including Vincent Mungo, was waiting for the one thing over which he had no control. But he hoped the rain would come soon.

  His rage at being locked up was now so overwhelming that only marvelous self-control had kept him from exploding his new role of subservience. Often in past months he had been on the verge of running amok, but his animal cunning saved him each time from disaster. Vihcent Mungo was part of his plan and had to be destroyed yet he wasn’t one of them, he wasn’t a demon. Bishop found himself wishing that Mungo were a woman.

  Sitting by the window, he reviewed the plan again and again in his mind. After they jumped off the roof to the soft wet ground below he would kill Mungo with the axe and hurry to the drain, where he would slip under the wall to freedom. The axe would go with him since it was lost before Mungo arrived and might thus give the plan away if found. Without proof the gardeners would never admit to a missing tool.

  Mungo’s body, the face gone, would be wearing his clothes and carrying his possessions. His watch and ring would be missing. Fingerprints would be useless because Mungo’s prints had never been taken since he had never been arrested. Neither had his. The plan was subtle and it was foolproof, and Bishop believed that he had once again proved his brilliance and superiority of mind.