by Burl Barer
“According to Travis County Appraisal District information,” Fortune told him, “the home on Mission Oaks is owned by Rhonda Glover. City of Austin utility records also show an active account in Glover’s name for that same residence. The Texas Department of Public Safety has records confirming that Rhonda Glover is a white female born July 26, 1966, and she has a Texas driver’s license.”
In addition to the information acquired by Fortune, De Los Santos also checked Austin Police Department records for any previous police response to the address on Mission Oaks Boulevard.
“Austin PD was very familiar with Rhonda Glover,” confirmed De Los Santos. “I found plenty of activity for both Rhonda Glover and James Joste.”
“Activity” is a polite way of saying that there were numerous calls to 911, all placed by Rhonda Glover, and all contained the notation of EDP, the abbreviation for emotionally disturbed person.
A review of the records pulled by De Los Santos provides a chilling glimpse into the terrified mind of Rhonda Glover, a woman so beset with fear and panic that she called 911 to report a burglary in progress almost every other day. When Officers Funderburgh and Fiske arrived at the Mission Oaks home on March 3, 2003, they found Rhonda Glover still on the phone, updating 911 on the demons in her walls and the disembodied life-forms threatening her.
“This was the third time in the space of a week or two that Ms. Glover called 911 to report a burglary in progress,” confirmed Officer Fiske. “Rhonda was sure that there was someone in her house. Even while I talked with Rhonda, she kept looking around the house for the intruder. ”
There never was an intruder. “This wasn’t the first time that week that police had been called to her house,” revealed Fiske, and there were no intruders the other nights either. Unlike the other responding officers, Fiske wasn’t responding to the burglary. “I am a mental-health officer, so one of the officers on the scene called me. I am really just a regular police officer who has had training in mental illness and the procedures that police use when dealing with the mentally ill.”
The officers on the scene had searched Glover’s residence up and down and didn’t find any intruders inside. “I talked to her for some time, but she didn’t believe that there was not a person or persons in the house, and she kept repeatedly asking me, ‘Did you hear that?’ and stuff like that. It was difficult to talk to her because she was so paranoid. I remember one time while I was talking to her, she got up and went into the kitchen and was searching the kitchen and just left me sitting in the other room. She was acting in a very bizarre fashion.
“She never calmed down the entire time I was with her,” said Fiske. “She was fearful, distraught and paranoid.
“My main job,” said Fiske, “is to assist with mentally ill people that become involved with law enforcement. One of my responsibilities is if I get called to a scene, or am at a scene, and there is a mentally ill person actively dangerous to either themselves or others, I have the authority to have them committed to the hospital to be evaluated.” Her job description was seemingly custom crafted for her encounter with Rhonda Glover.
The threshold by which dangerousness is measured is quite high, and they have to be so out of touch with reality that it is feared that if this person is left alone, they may hurt themselves or others. “The institutions I take them to,” explained Fiske, “public or private, have some very high standards of what they will and will not accept for immediately dangerous. That is a determination that they make independent of my own concern. I have had several rejected by the hospitals.
“Rhonda Glover told me that she was seeing Dr. Jones at MMHR,” said Fiske. “Well, I determined that she wasn’t an immediate danger to herself or others, but since she was under so much stress and fearful, and she told me that she was bipolar, I asked her if she would like to go to Psychiatric Emergency Services to talk to somebody. She agreed, and she followed me to Psychiatric Emergency Services.
“What I do,” explained Fiske, “is when it is on a volunteer basis like that, when she wants to speak with somebody, she wants the help, I will go in, and I will help them fill out the forms. It just gives [the staff] a small synopsis of why we are even there, and what that does a lot of times is it will expedite them talking to her as opposed to having her wait in a line that is generally very long.” Once there, Fiske did not stay with Rhonda Glover. “I don’t stay there,” she said, “because it could be hours before they see her.”
As De Los Santos flipped the pages of the APD reports, a definite pattern became evident—Rhonda Glover calls 911 in a state of panic. Officers arrive, find nothing, and leave. Rhonda was not always alone, discovered De Los Santos. Most often, the one calming influence was Mr. James Joste.
At 6:25 P.M., November 15, 2003, Rhonda Glover called 911, out of breath, asking for police. “I arrived a short time later,” recalled Officer Kelly Moore, “and noticed that there were a few items lying in the driveway, including a disposable camera, travel map and various papers. I rang the doorbell and a male answered the door. His name, James Joste.”
Moore interviewed Jimmy Joste, and it didn’t take long to get to the bottom line. Basically, Joste advised him that Rhonda Glover had been diagnosed with two different forms of mental illness, but he couldn’t tell which condition was responsible for her current symptoms. “His wife, Rhonda, had been prescribed medication to control her condition,” said Moore, “but she hadn’t taken them in about a month.”
Joste informed Moore that Rhonda had been able to self-medicate by consuming no fluids other than Austin tap water. Moore had good reason to doubt the power of the tap water, due to the fact that Rhonda, according to Joste, was becoming increasingly irritable and irrational. “She had thrown a fit, called various people saying Joste was holding her hostage, wouldn’t let her leave the house, et cetera. Joste, however, had let her take their son in their Suburban and leave.”
Rhonda called Joste twice while Officer Moore was at the Mission Oaks home. “Joste was very calm with her, and seemed to fully be aware of the subtleties of her condition, and how to handle her. The second time she called, she told him that she wanted to stay in a hotel in Austin, and he agreed quite easily to this. Joste told Rhonda to call him back, and he would book her a room at a downtown hotel. He later told me,” said Officer Moore, “that he believed that she would simply come home, and that she sounded like she has returned to normal during the second conversation.”
Several times during his conversation with Joste, Officer Moore asked him if Rhonda Glover was a danger to him, herself or anyone else. “No,” said Joste. Again he was asked if he was in any danger from Rhonda Glover. “No, absolutely not,” replied Jimmy Joste. “I am not in any danger from Rhonda, none at all.”
Ten days later, on November 25, 2003, Officer George Burbank was dispatched to the Mission Oaks house in reference to a family disturbance. “Upon arrival,” stated Burbank, “I met with Rhonda Glover. She told me that she has been staying in Houston, and that her husband, James M. Joste, has been staying at the residence with their son. Rhonda said that she and James had been staying at the Omni Hotel, where she was now staying, when James told her that their son was in a crawl space in the attic. Rhonda stated that she was sure that her husband, James Joste, had killed their son and hidden his body somewhere in the attic.”
Officer Burbank dutifully searched the attic and any other part of the house where Rhonda Glover feared Jimmy Joste had stuffed the dead body of their son. “She also told me that Joste was not only a murderer, but worked for the CIA, and was connected to John Wayne Gacy and the John Lennon murder. ”
There was no body in the attic, and Rhonda’s son was safe and sound. Glover, according to the multiple incident reports in the files of the Austin Police Department, was an EDP, but she did not seem to pose an immediate threat to anyone.
“Obviously there were some mental issues involved,” confirmed Burbank, “and I titled my report in such a manner that it clearly said ‘E
motionally Disturbed Person.’ At that time I didn’t think she was a danger to herself or anyone else at that immediate time, so I didn’t call a mental-health officer.”
Burbank later acknowledged that everything Glover said—the body in the attic, something dead in the trash and something weird on a fork—were all connected. “It was all related,” he said. “I mean, it all seemed to be one linked episode of things that she was concerned about. While she was going through all this talk about John Wayne Gacy, John Lennon, bodies in the wall, she also mentioned that Joste had struck her on the back, and chased her around the house with a beer bottle. She didn’t have any pain, or indications of injuries of any kind. Her husband, Jimmy Joste, wasn’t home at the time. That may have been the time he and the kid went to the movies together. Anyway, as she wasn’t dangerous, I left and filed my report.”
There was one call to 911 that did not originate with Rhonda Glover, or with James Joste. The call was placed by contractor Larry Colt. The responding officer was Richard Cross. “Colt called 911 and told the operator that Glover had been behaving very strangely. Namely, she destroyed the bathroom with a sledgehammer, and said people were hiding in her sink.”
Cross spoke directly with Glover, and she admitted that she tore up the tub, but wouldn’t say why she did it. “My toilet is hooked up wrong,” said Glover, who told Cross that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and was taking Risperdal for it.
“Glover certainly seemed EDP, but did not pose a threat to herself or others. Glover insisted that everything was okay, and we were not needed. I stood by and typed this report while the contractor worked on the plumbing. ”
The most troubling incident of those retrieved by De Los Santos was the one where Glover called 911 to report a homicide: There were dead bodies buried in her backyard; there was “something dead in the trash"; there was “someone in her attic.” When a complaint involved trash, the appropriate agency was the City of Austin Solid Waste Services.
Mrs. Eagleston, from Solid Waste Services, went to the residence. Rhonda Glover told her that Jimmy Joste had murdered someone and put the body in the trash.
“Why do you think he did that?” asked Eagleston.
“Because,” explained Glover, “I was reading some type of crime book, and one of the suspects in the book looked like Jimmy.”
It was on the basis of that—and that alone—that Rhonda Glover concluded that Jimmy Joste was a murderer, and that there was a dead body in the trash. Employees of Solid Waste conducted a thorough search of Glover’s trash container.
“What we found,” states Mrs. Eagleston, “was trash.”
Rhonda, however, was not convinced. She continued insisting that there was something weird going on, and that there were people buried in her backyard. At this point it was obvious to Eagleston that she was dealing with an EDP, but Rhonda posed no direct threat to herself or others.
“Austin police show exemplary sensitivity to dealing with the emotionally disturbed,” commented investigative journalist Jeff Reynolds. “The very fact that Fiske received such training shows how responsive the Austin Police Department had become to this very real and challenging issue facing police departments nationwide. New York City, for example, didn’t have the type of training for officers that Fiske received until at least a year [after] the (1984) shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs, a sixty-six-year-old emotionally disturbed woman.
“Bumpurs freaked out during a failed eviction from her apartment,” recalled Reynolds, “and lunged at someone with a kitchen knife. Cops shot her dead, and the public outcry was deafening.”
Detective Rafaella Valdez, a hostage negotiator, said Bumpurs’s death was a wake-up call for the department. The incident gave rise to a new form of training to respond to people in psychiatric crisis who fell through the cracks of the system.
“We realized that you had to respond to these jobs with more than just a bulletproof vest, more than just the weapons that we carried. We had to respond with the knowledge of how to deal with mentally ill people,” she said.
The emergency psychological technician-training course, which has been altered little since its rollout in 1985, is a one-week, thirty-five-hour session taught by trainers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the New York Police Department (NYPD). Classes are held about six times a year.
Officers, such as Fiske, in other police departments in various cities addressing this issue attend special courses that focus on a variety of topics, including basic negotiation issues, types of mental illness, assessing behavior and dangerousness, substance abuse, officer suicide and domestic violence. Participants are led through role-playing exercises by actors and trainers to explore the various situations officers and negotiators may face.
“With the advent of this type of responsive sensitivity by police departments,” says crime researcher Travis Webb, “when a 911 call indicates the involvement of an emotionally disturbed person, a first-responding officer, a supervisor and an Emergency Medical Service Unit are often dispatched to the scene. In a barricade situation hostage negotiators are also sent in.”
Police and hostage negotiators often deal with barricade situations, which are much different than a “body in the trash” phone call from Rhonda Glover. “When an emotionally disturbed person is out on the street, dealing with that individual becomes a patrol function, unless a knife or some other weapon is involved,” said Dr. Raymond Pitt, an emeritus professor of sociology at John Jay who runs a training course for police officers.
“Patrol officers do not receive any additional training in handling the mentally ill beyond what is taught at the police academy. I have been a firm and long-standing advocate of patrol officers and sergeants knowing more about this,” said Pitt. “They are the ones who are the first responders, at least the officers are.”
Every time police responded to one of Glover’s calls, they all ended with the all-important question: “Does she pose a danger to herself or others?”
The definition of dangerousness has been broadened over time by state courts, noted Mary Zdano-wicz, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a group working on behalf of the seriously mentally ill. After the standard for involuntary commitment was changed in the early 1970s, police using the narrowest interpretation would have to wait until a crime was committed before they could intervene.
One of the biggest problems with police response to someone such as Rhonda Glover has been giving officers enough training so they could recognize psychiatric problems and then access the proper resources. Another issue is outpatient commitment, in which those with mental illness are ordered by a judge to take medication that would control their behavior.
Jimmy Joste would tell responding officers that Rhonda was off her medications, but that he could “calm her down.” Unless refusing to take medication is a criminal offense, there isn’t much a police officer can do.
“Jimmy always told the police I was mentally ill,” said Rhonda Glover. “He would say that I was off my medication. This is how I could be discounted, and ignored. He made sure people thought I was crazy when I wasn’t. He was the one who was out of his mind, deluded, dangerous and doing all sorts of sick things. But who do you think the police believed—me or Jimmy? I would call the police, but they treated me as if there was something wrong with me.”
“I come to deal with this person,” stated an Austin patrol officer, “they’re clearly mentally ill and they’re making themselves mentally ill because they’ve chosen not to take their meds. What am I supposed to do? How am I to determine if they are dangerous or not? If her husband says that she doesn’t pose a danger, and he keeps insisting that things will be okay, I pretty much have to take his word for it. ”
Laws that make dangerousness to oneself and others the standard for taking a mentally ill individual into custody are not always clearly defined from one community to another. In the mid-1970s, the pendulum began swinging back when a man who could not be hospitalized comm
itted a double homicide in Washington State. It was the first state to add to its law a standard that looked at the progression of the illness, or the person’s mental deterioration.
Since that time, about half the states have adopted standards in addition to dangerousness that include the person’s history of noncompliance and the lack of awareness of an illness that could lead to the inability to make good decisions.
The whole issue of dangerousness is troubling for another reason. Mental-health workers, concerned with health and communication, may not realize the degree of danger to themselves in some situations. Police officers, concerned with safety first, realize how dangerous situations can become. “A person threatening suicide can decide to take you with them,” remarked Fred Wolfson, an investigator who had former police department experience. “There is a dimension of unpredictability when dealing with the emotionally disturbed. If their thinking is fragmented, subject to sudden changes, and if they are prone to violence, they can go from weeping and asking for help, to pumping you full of lead or slashing your throat with a razor. They may see you as an angel from God one minute, and a demon from hell the next.”
When Austin police responded to Rhonda Glover’s numerous calls, she would point out areas of the house in which she believed Jimmy Joste had removed parts of the wall or brick and had replaced them. Officers found nothing to support these claims. Rhonda then showed police a plastic fork with what appeared to be the residue of some sort of cake on it. “I want this fork analyzed,” she said. “There is something strange about it.”
There was something strange about Rhonda Glover, but she did not seem to pose a threat to herself or others, and James Joste continually assured them that he was in no danger from Rhonda Glover. He could handle her. He could calm her down.
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