by Meyer Levin
“The facts will come out in court,” Wilk said, “and all of you will get them at the same time.”
“I’ll get them before that, if I can!” Mike snapped. “And I’ll get my own facts, not the facts you want us to have.”
There was a murmur, something like “Aw, play ball.” But Mike marched out.
On the secretary’s desk was a pile of documents, just delivered from a typing service. The secretary was in the main office with the rest of us. Mike’s eye took in the doctors’ names, on the top sheet. He picked up a copy of the Storrs-Allwin report and simply walked out of the office with it.
Mike’s paper was on the street in two hours, with a full page of sensational quotes from the confidential report. Instantly, we were called to come back to Wilk’s office. Even as I dodged across the Loop streets, I was skimming Mike’s scoop. Under “Sex Pact” there appeared for the first time the story of their curious agreement, after the Ann Arbour robbery. In a special box, I found Artie’s admission of additional crimes, A, B, C, D. What were they? the paper demanded. And on the inside page were columns and columns of quotations from their fantasies.
In Wilk’s office there was an atmosphere of outrage. Edgar Feldscher handed out all the available copies of the report, with one last attempt to caution us. “This should never have got out,” he said. “Not that we want to hide anything from the public, but because these studies are still incomplete. We’re pleading mitigation, mercy, because these studies show that the boys were not entirely responsible – indeed they were far from responsible – for what they were doing, in the sense that they were not in mental and moral health.”
It may be that he said it as well, then, to our circle of reporters, as it was ever said in court. As we hurried out with our copies, we talked angrily of Mike and his scoop. Only Danny Mines of the News said, “Hell, any one of us wishes he had done it.” And there was again the question never entirely resolved in the mind of the newspaperman, the fundamental question of the means and the end.
And it must be asked, had Mike never stolen that report, would all that we know have become known? Would even that slight mention, “He admits to four other episodes” – characterized as A, B, C, D, and not further examined – ever have come to public knowledge?
The report had one stunning effect on our conception of the crime. Until then, Tom and I, like almost everyone else, had felt Judd to be the dominant power, the Svengali, the dark, sinister one; but in the office, as we digested the material, we saw that we had been wrong, everyone had been wrong. Except, I thought, Ruth.
For the alienists showed in detail how Artie had been the instigator, the leader, and Judd his “gang”. Judd had been tied to him in passion. While Tom rushed out the excerpts, I phoned Horn. He was in high spirits, alternating between ridicule of all that flimflam and indignant demands that the obscure parts be illuminated. “A, B, C, D – that’s all crime means to Mr. Wilk and his friends!” Horn shouted. “Just a couple of little boys that can say A, B, C, D, with a murder for each!” And that gland stuff – the boys were known in jail to be in perfect health. As for all those daydreams, kings and slaves, was Wilk actually going to come into court with that nonsense? No wonder he wouldn’t dare face a jury!
The terrible pressure of catching up with the American was over. Going home, I took the report along. I had really only skimmed it. After supper, I passed by Wilk’s apartment, and ran into Willie Weiss. He started at once on the report. What did I think? The material on Judd – his tremendous conflicts: Was he a boy or a girl? Was he a Jew or a Christian? Willie had never himself realized how completely Judd was torn.
From what he said, I had completely missed the important meanings of the material. We went to an ice-cream parlour on 61st Street, and Willie, with that feverish argumentative way he had, started to show me what I had missed.
Why had I paid so little attention to the family history? “Look at this-” There had been three unsuccessful pregnancies before Judd was born, and his mother had been sick throughout her pregnancy with him. Judd had always blamed himself for her illness, even for her death.
“He must have blamed his father, too,” Willie added. “Don’t forget he’s precocious. Kids get a strange idea, when they first begin to catch on – they imagine that fathers do something terrible to mothers. And this child feels his birth killed his mother, but his father killed her first. It’s the classic complex, the Oedipus-”
The term was not so popular then, but passionately Willie explained to me how well the Oedipal situation fitted the case, the boy in love with his mother, hating his father.
“His Baby Book records his first step at three months, his first word at four months.”
From the very earliest impressions, Judd was made to feel he was someone utterly extraordinary. And with this he had to keep up.
A small and sickly child, “until he was nine he had gastrointestinal disorders, complicated by fever, headaches, vomiting.” Anxiety, said Willie. He had been rather effeminate up to that age – that was the period of the girls’ school. “How could this child know what he really was?” Willie demanded. “He’s small, delicate like a girl; he hates girls because he knows he should be more of a boy, yet he is always thrust among girls. His father tries to send him to public school, but his mother still insists her darling is too frail, too special, too different. The father overrides the mother. Judd tries the public school.” Of this, the report said, “He realized his superiority over the other boys in wealthy parents, in the fact that his nurse accompanied him to and from school, and that he couldn’t attend the toilet in the school.”
“Poor bastard, holding himself in!” was Willie’s comment on this point. “Imagine this kid, feeling he is so special he can’t even use the can! No wonder he got a god complex!”
We turned back to the report. It went on to tell of his cataloguing all the churches, of his Madonna fixation on his mother.
This Willie seized upon. It fitted perfectly. “You see, by the Madonna fixation, he gets rid of his real father, whom he resents bitterly. And that leaves him free to consider himself as a magical, superior being, even magically born, the son of God. And look at this-” The report spoke of Judd’s innumerable sketches, all over his classroom notebooks. Of the thousands of things he drew the first item was “Crucifixions”. “The most interesting part of the Crucifixion for him appears to be somebody nailed to something.”
His mother was a Madonna, he was a Christ. And here, Willie supplied another conception that was new to me: “Remember, the church is a mother-idea, everything about the church is seductive, feminine; and the synagogue is a father-religion, harder and more austere, stemming from the patriarchs.”
And so Willie explained Judd’s conflict over being a Jew. At the time it seemed far-fetched to me, seemed perhaps a reflection of Willie’s own excessive concern with his “Jewish appearance”.
“But look,” Willie said, “Christ is born a Jew but in reality He becomes the symbol of Christianity. Isn’t this an inevitable identification for someone who is struggling with his Jewishness? Judd runs around to all the churches but hasn’t quite got the nerve to renounce his father-religion, to become a meshumed, a convert, so he nominally rejects all religion and says he’s an atheist. Wait. Look at his fixation on Artie-”
“But what’s that got to do with religion?”
Willie’s eyes gleamed. “Look at Artie, a tall blond fellow who is everything Judd wanted to be in appearance, who doesn’t look Jewish at all, a real collegiate shagetz type, and look what Judd says: ‘I identified myself with him completely.’” Now Willie lowered his voice, producing his culminating point. “I’m sure Judd never thought of this overtly. But remember, Artie’s mother is a Catholic. If Judd were Artie, he could more literally sense himself as the son of the Madonna.”
I thought it was too pat.
Actually, Willie argued, the entire subject of Jewish self-hatred was a rather new concept. He had read the basic
book, available only in German. It showed how every Jew had a wish not to be burdened with the problem of being a Jew. Then came the guilt feeling for harbouring such a wish. “Haven’t you ever felt it?” he challenged me.
I could not deny that his words called up something of the sort in me. “All right. Then why should such a feeling make Judd kill Paulie Kessler?”
“Why? Self-destruction! They picked a boy, a Jewish boy, just at the age when Jews become Jews – thirteen, the bar-mitzua age.”
That was going too far. “They picked him at random, on the street-”
“Yes. That’s what they claim,” he said fanatically. “That there is no meaning, that everything is at random. Do you think that maybe, somewhere far back in their minds, it didn’t ring home that Paulie Kessler was the son of a pawnbroker, the symbol of everything that is shameful in being a Jew?” He leaned back, and grinned at me.
I wanted at first to laugh. Yet his ideas echoed and echoed. Wasn’t I, myself, ashamed? Didn’t I sometimes feel a secret rage at my father’s being a cheap Jewish cigar-maker?
Willie had fallen silent, brooding over his only partial explanation of Judd, an explanation which he was to complete for me, in an extraordinary way, years later. I turned the pages. “What about Artie?”
“It’s either obvious or a complete mystery,” he said. “Maybe he’s just a born maniac.”
“You think it could be heredity, then, after all?”
Willie didn’t believe it was entirely the fault of heredity. If these weaknesses had been detected early, perhaps the new psychiatry could have helped. But why hadn’t the faults been detected? “Ah, we don’t know a damn thing.” He had become morose.
“One thing you did guess,” I said, to restore the spark in him. “About the weapon.” I told him it was his insistence about the chisel that had led us to the tales of other taped chisels, other crimes.
Willie looked at me foggily for a moment. “For crissake, that wasn’t what I meant at all.” Though he wouldn’t be surprised if other such murders had been done. “Don’t you see what it is? The chisel? The tool itself? What it represents?”
Nowadays we would say I must have been blocked in some way, not to have understood instantly. As he made an obscene gesture with his hand, it dawned on me. It seemed at once weird, far-fetched, and obviously true. I felt stupid, too stupid to ask the next question.
He did it for me, rhetorically. But why should Artie have had to kill people with that thing? And why only men? For Artie had been against Judd’s idea to make it a girl, the report told us.
In Artie’s case, too, Willie said, it was the relationship with the father that had to be studied. The very first lines about Artie said material had been obtained from his mother, brothers, uncle. “His father still keeps absolutely shut off,” Willie observed. “Upstairs, they’ve been trying to get a show of support, you know, for the public. They finally got his mother to say something, but not the old man.”
We read, “The grandfather, a quick, alert man, was abusive to his children and beat them severely. The patient’s father has been exactly the opposite in his treatment of his children, probably as a reaction to the excessive severity of the grandfather.” Willie pointed out a passage, under Artie’s sex life. When Artie had caught gonorrhoea, “he sought advice from his older brother and his uncle, being particularly desirous of keeping a knowledge of all this from his father, whose respect he wanted to maintain”.
“Almost any kid would have done something like that,” I said.
“The patient had no sex knowledge from his parents, from his brothers, from his governess. At one time, he did secure some information from the family chauffeur…”
Then Willie found a clue. In the year Artie’s little brother was born, and Artie had begun his crime fantasies, he “had some eye trouble, and his lids would tend to stick together for a period of several weeks”. The next detail Willie pounced upon – the eye trouble had returned over a month ago, the time of the murder.
“I don’t see-”
“You don’t see! That’s just it. He didn’t want to see. To see that baby brother, or, years later, to see the crime he had done.”
Now I recalled Willie’s question in the lab: Whom did each boy mean to kill? Was it his little brother, then, for Artie? Hadn’t Artie and Judd actually discussed taking Billy as their victim?
But why? Merely jealousy of a kid brother?
It all went somehow into a sense of inadequacy, Willie argued, a sense as a child of not being wanted enough – or else why would the parents have another baby? Wasn’t Artie still undeveloped, despite his great hurry to grow up? “At eighteen, his voice is still changing”, the report read. “He is retarded in his masculine development.” He hardly needed to shave. His sexual growth was delayed. “To cover up his relative impotence, he boasted of his marks at school; although he received only moderate grades. He convinced his friends that he was quite superior to them mentally…”
Impotence? Artie, the sex braggart? But of course, that would fit. For what did we really know of his conquests? Hadn’t he always let on that Myra was his mistress? And I was certain she was a virgin.
The answer to Artie was all in there, somewhere, Willie said. The violent jealousy over his baby brother, and then the shame at being somewhat impotent – all his angers and frustrations bringing a kind of rage of impotence that was expressed the way a kid would. “I’ll show you!” With a hard tool he would knock over, kill, all those who made him feel insignificant – kill that rival kid brother who was so cute and beloved. And kill his own inadequate self.
The tool – wasn’t it the absolute symbol, the murderous weapon feared and dreamed of by every little boy, who in his fantasies about adults sees it somehow as a dreadful, powerful, killing thing?
Evasively, feeling uncomfortable, I asked about the other fantasies of Judd and Artie, the daydreams or whatever they were -
“You mean the masturbation dreams?” Willie said.
I pretended that I had myself understood them as such.
“They’re wishes. Judd wished most of all to be Artie’s slave, so he became it, and Artie wished to become a master criminal and get caught and jailed.”
But even with all this inner compulsion, weren’t they both persons of intelligence, exceptional intelligence? Could they not have seen where they were being driven?
“Look,” he said, “in both cases, the reports show us, the emotional age and the intelligence age are out of kilter. Even the psychological tests showed they were emotionally still children. What’s the emotional reaction of a kid of nine when he’s mixed up, baffled? He’ll strike out, blindly-”
“But it wasn’t blind killing. It was a long cunning plan,” I objected.
“Won’t a kid brood like that and plan? And then do something violently impulsive? They planned – and then picked up a kid impulsively.”
He read again of Artie’s moods, his depressions, his declaration that he had at times contemplated suicide. “The patient has some insights into his peculiarities and says that the question has often come to him as to whether he was ‘all there’. He states that during the past year he has felt different; he feels he cannot concentrate so well, that his memory is not so good, and that he cannot carry on conversations and small talk with others as formerly…
“In our opinion this tendency will continue and increase so that he will become more and more wrapped up in his world of fantasy and less and less in contact with his world of reality.”
For the family, the report was reassuring: “There is no reason to feel that the patient’s condition is of a hereditary nature or that it will be transmitted to future generations of his siblings or relatives. Neither is there any reason to feel that the family is responsible in any way for this boy’s condition.”
Willie was restless. Responsible. He tasted the word.
“According to you,” I said, “no one is responsible.”
“I didn’t say that.�
�� He threw change on the table. “I suppose you think ignorance is no excuse?” We got up.
I was too excited to go to bed. I walked alongside the lake, ignoring all the entwined couples on the grass, in cars. And as I walked, there grew in me that peculiar elation that comes to us when we are young men, eighteen, twenty – that mystical sense of infinite creative connection to the universe, that winy sense of godlike power. And this, I then knew, was what that poor, tragic Judd must have felt at times, this elation, this intoxication with his own mental powers, and this was what he had confusedly expressed in his ideas that man was even more than God, that man conceived God and hence was greater than God. Each being in his own being was God. I felt the same thing in myself, and that night I felt even larger, larger with pity.
And then, when the exaltation was gone, and I was walking tiredly home, I found myself thinking of all Willie had said. There was much in it that could have meaning, and the tool had been explained – how else could you explain it? – and I had forgotten, in the rush of all the new ideas he had conveyed, that other hint he had given me a few weeks ago. The place of burial.
On the following Monday, the trial was to begin. Scrawled letters threatened to blow up the court building if anything but a hanging verdict was the result. Editorials screamed at the waste of public funds to provide a trial for such monsters, yet gloated over our noble sense of justice that insisted on a defence opportunity, even for them. But there were also higher expectations of the trial. Some of us, perhaps imbued by Judd, expected lofty and timeless discussions, as at the trial of Socrates.
By eight o’clock the pavement of the County Building was lined for a solid block with citizens who hoped to glimpse the killers as they were brought from jail. A special cordon of police had been stationed in the building entrance, and a constant series of arguments was in progress, with irate citizens, with blandishing women, with people using every means of subterfuge to get through.
Upstairs, I found the hallway to the courtroom packed solid. The victors in the battle for coveted admission cards were mostly friends, wives, and daughters of politicians. And there were the special visitors – visiting jurists, celebrities, big lawyers passing through Chicago on their way to a vacation – all of whom wanted a glimpse of the trial of the century.
