In 1982, Roy Meadow, the British pediatrician who had initially named the syndrome in the English publication Lancet, wrote a follow-up article for Archives of Disease in Childhood. Evelyn Xeroxed and saved the article that detailed nineteen case histories of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Meadow provided some new and interesting statistics on the families involved. Most of the children in his case studies had been examined by numerous doctors, often in different hospital settings.
In every case Meadow listed in his update, the mother was behind the fabrication. Interestingly, half of the seventeen British mothers involved possessed some nursing training, although only one was fully registered. Most of the mothers had histories suggesting that they either suffered from Munchausen’s Syndrome themselves, or had histories of symptoms similar to those they fabricated for their children. Most of them either lived in the hospital during their children’s illnesses or spent most of their time there. In general, Meadow also found that the father was the passive partner in the marriage, and in most of the families there was a greater than usual discrepancy in social or intellectual level between the parents, with the wife at the higher level. In two families, a second child fell victim to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, with a high probability in yet a third family that an older sibling’s mysterious illness was another case of Munchausen’s.
Evelyn no longer doubted that Priscilla Phillips did indeed suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. The label was helpful because it allowed Evelyn to stand back from Priscilla Phillips, to accept her—as all her life she had learned to accept medical aberrations—in what she called the Christian spirit. She viewed Priscilla Phillips with repugnance and distaste but not with hatred.
4
After Priscilla’s imprisonment in November 1981, Steve was relegated to the background at Marin County juvenile hall. While once he had dreams of promotion to superintendent, now he saw no future at the job. The community knew his identity and that of his wife. He was kept from the public as much as possible. His supervisors, initially supportive, started proposing schedule changes that would cut into his weekend time with the boys. He recognized the signs and started looking into other careers.
In the fall of 1982, he put the house up for sale; it was the only alternative to declaring bankruptcy and neither he nor Priscilla wanted to go that route: they owed too many friends. He hoped to move back South. His sister and brother-in-law were urging him to come and friends there had lined up a few job possibilities.
Priscilla did not want him to move as long as she remained jailed, however, and that posed a problem. Sometimes Steve thought he had three children once again, two at home and one in prison in southern California. He believed Priscilla was weakening in prison, not hardening. Less and less often she talked about early release or work furlough, while to him those were all that mattered. Once she had been a fighter; now she expected the worst. She had experienced trouble with visiting rights after her return to prison, and for a while that conflict gave her some reason to be assertive, but once the issue was settled, she seemed to give in to the paralysis of prison life.
Part of it, Steve knew, was that her constant illness had depleted her. It was the prison environment. Status in women’s prison depended largely on little outward signs: how often the family visited, how much money they sent, how often they wrote. Priscilla was always scolding Steve about these things. Once the flowers he sent for Mother’s Day had arrived late, and she, thinking he had forgotten, mailed off a blistering letter. Her life consisted of waiting expectantly for the next box from home or for the delivery of the food orders from Wendy’s or Taco Bell that the inmates were allowed to place from time to time. Since her illness she was not allowed to hold a prison job. And doing time in the Psychiatric Treatment Unit, where the new superintendent had assigned Priscilla and other protective custody cases—as well as the mental cases—was limiting and restrictive. Priscilla had dreaded the psychiatric unit, but her assignment there had not come as a surprise. Her friends at CIW had warned her that she would probably be placed in PTU instead of Campus because there had been some problems with child-related cases since her last stay at CIW. But now she was resigned to the unit, as she was resigned to everything about prison life. That frightened Steve.
Steve looked forward to little in Terra Linda anymore—only to leaving it. Many of his friends had moved away: the Schaefers lived in Novato now, the Dodsons in Idaho, and finally the Doudiets had relocated recently to Indiana. Nancy Greenfield remained a faithful, dogged friend to both Priscilla—whom she wrote daily—and to Steve, but many of the people who had supported them prior to the trial and verdict—Debby Roof, Maria Sterling, Marilyn Hansen—had drifted away. His support system, so carefully constructed, threatened to crumble.
Still, Steve coped better than during Priscilla’s first imprisonment. The boys were older, more independent and more capable. They could be left alone. And Steve now knew he could manage. It was just a matter of hanging in there, doing what had to be done to survive, until Pris returned.
Steve tried to let the past sift away. He stopped visiting Tia’s grave. The sixth anniversary of her death passed unobserved. He did not want to go up there and he did not want to remember. It was one of the things he remained bitterest about: Josh Thomas and Ted Lindquist and the rest had taken away the beauty that was Tia’s life and replaced it with ugliness, injustice, and anger. He would never be able to forgive them for that.
He removed Mindy’s photograph from the hall. It was too savage a reminder and evoked too many questions from visitors. The flowers painted on the pieced strips of raisin-drying trays remained on the living room walls, though, the natural lines of blossom and stem and fence still broken and distorted by the spaces between the slats.
5
Priscilla was hospitalized in the prison infirmary three months after her arrival at CIW, and in April was transferred by ambulance to Riverside General—chained to a gurney—in hypertensive crisis. She spent several days in Intensive Care, alone except for her guard. Her doctor finally asked that she be released from the cuffs holding her to the bed so that he could more easily examine her. In keeping with prison policy, no one contacted Steve, afraid that he might try to break her out. After a few days the doctors released Priscilla, but they had not cured her.
When the prescribed medications were ineffective, others were initiated. At Riverside General, Priscilla saw whichever resident was on duty; she had no regular doctor and there was no continuity of care. In her weekly ten-minute phone call, she and Steve discussed calling in a private doctor, but the red tape involved was immense, and the idea was finally dropped. Sometimes she improved for a while only to deteriorate again. By June she was passing out regularly; once she struck her head during a blackout. She suffered from repeated kidney infections that the doctors said were related to the high blood pressure.
Priscilla became increasingly concerned that she really had contracted Munchausen’s Syndrome. In an ironic moment she wrote to a friend that perhaps Josh Thomas had even “given” it to her by some strange power of suggestion. Everyone tried to reassure her. She had suffered from high blood pressure before, when she was pregnant with Jason, someone reminded her. It was only natural that during this time of stress, the problem should recur. Jerry Dodson wrote her that he believed her hypertension stemmed from her sudden loss of control over her life. He suggested once again that she had a right to be sick. Other people made different points. The medical personnel at CIW told her that she was emotionally unstable and could not deal with stress. That was the cause of her high blood pressure. She did not believe that because she had always dealt well with stress, but when she pointed this out, they informed her she was denying reality. The prison minister, a black fundamentalist, told her that her blood pressure would only come down if she “gave it all to God.” She stopped attending services.
In September 1982, ten months after her return to CIW, she was again hospitalized at Riverside. This time she
spent eight days there. Her medication was changed once more. She wrote frantic letters to her friends, raging at her illness, at how her body was failing her. Still her blood pressure soared.
But if her health remained poor, at least, after the first shock of adjustment, the Psychiatric Treatment Unit did not prove to be the sinister place of its reputation. True, she was denied many on-site facilities, training, and educational programs automatically extended to Campus residents. The unit was reserved for misfits of one sort or another; there were women there with emotional problems so severe they were constantly drugged, and there were protective custody cases such as Priscilla, whose crimes put them at the lowest end of the rigid totem-pole system in prison. But there were compensations: particularly an incredible sense of closeness within the small group. The women there were special, separate—almost specially sinned against. That was how they felt. Every night, before bed, they hugged and kissed and smiled at one another to support their isolation.
Priscilla settled into a routine. On her calendar she marked the six-week intervals that separated each visit by Steve and the boys. She instructed Steve to bring her sewing machine and she made curtains for her room. After a time she was allowed her first Family Living Unit visit—a weekend for the inmate and her family alone in a private room on the prison grounds. She enrolled in a creative writing course by correspondence and began another journal. She took up painting. When it became mandatory for all prisoners to hold a prison job, she was assigned work as a clerk for the lieutenant.
In March 1983, the doctors finally found a blood pressure medication that worked. Priscilla’s health improved dramatically. In that same month, the hearing officers representing the Board of Prison Terms met for the second time to discuss her release date. The previous year the Board had refused to grant her a date, urging her instead to see a prison psychiatrist, and she had agreed to do this, fuming. There was only one psychiatrist for a thousand inmates. Even if there was something wrong with her, and she knew there wasn’t, she doubted he could see her more than a few times. There was nothing he could do. Soon even he was gone, to be replaced by a psychologist.
Steve was counting heavily on an early release date. He had started another letter-writing campaign. If that proved ineffective, he was planning a trip to Sacramento. He had met some people there who might help. He had it in mind to contact a southern senator if all else failed. But he really believed the board might release Priscilla immediately; she had served the minimum time already. However she had marked on her calendar the last possible release date, assuming good behavior: December 10, 1984.
On Monday, March 14, 1983, the hearing officers called Priscilla in. They had read all the letters but one. Dr. Satten had spent a long time constructing a highly favorable letter, which he had sent by special messenger the week before. Strangely, although the receipt for the letter had been dated Friday, the prison administration claimed never to have seen it and it was not read by the hearing officers. What they did consider was the report from the newly hired psychologist, who had administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to Priscilla, a standard psychological profile test used universally by psychologists as a diagnostic tool. The psychologist’s report indicated that Priscilla Phillips had been diagnosed at the time of her trial as suffering from Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy—a misstatement of Dr. Blinder’s testimony—and that tests indicated that Priscilla tended to overvalue her family. It also stated that the prisoner’s future behavior was impossible to predict. On the basis of this report, the hearing officers refused either to grant parole or to set a release date.
6
In September 1982, Sarah Wrigley entered a regular kindergarten class. Because of her excellent progress in the handicapped class, her teacher had pronounced her ready for “mainstreaming.”
At five, Sarah already could read. Cytomegalovirus had left its mark on her, however. Her motor coordination—particularly the fine coordination of hands and fingers—was impaired, so that although she could form all her letters, she could not write in a straight line. Her speech handicap was severe, and it was very difficult to understand her. Half her face was paralyzed and one eye was turned in so completely that she was functionally blind in that eye; the other eye was very far-sighted. Sometimes her life was frustrating enough to cause tantrums. But in kindergarten Sarah began working with a teacher for the visually handicapped who started her on an electric typewriter. Within a few days Sarah had mastered the keyboard because although she could not see without twisting her head and staring closely at the keys, she was able to memorize their position. It was impossible to give her standardized tests so the teachers planned to convert them to large-print format. But it was evident to everyone that Sarah Wrigley possessed a very high IQ.
Both Joey and Sarah Wrigley were members of the class in the class action suit that had been filed against Syntex, and the Chicago lawyer handling the case had asked Pat Wrigley to obtain Sarah’s Kaiser records, still being held in the clerk’s office at the Marin County Civic Center. At the same time, Pat hoped to retrieve the photographs of Mindy as a baby that had also been entered as evidence. Sarah had often stared at the baby pictures that had been taken of her brother and sister, but the records of her own past were barred to her by the criminal justice system. It would be difficult—requiring a court order, Pat discovered—to recover that evidence from the Marin County clerk.
Meanwhile, every once in a while, in an effort to keep memories fresh, Pat Wrigley sat down with Sarah to retell the story that had become as familiar to the little girl as her nightly prayers. It was a story that from the beginning Sarah could participate in.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl in Korea who had a foster mother. And the little girl’s name was—?”
“Seo Yun Kim,” said Sarah.
“And her foster mother loved her very much. Then the little girl came to America and lived with the Phillips family. And her name was—?”
“Mindy Leanne Phillips,” Sarah supplied.
“And she had two brothers named Erik and Jason. Now her name is—?”
“Sarah Kim Wrigley.”
“Yes, and she has a mommy and daddy and a sister, Becky, and a brother, Joey, and they love her very much.” Pat looked down at the little girl beside her—the most affectionate and expressive of her children. Then she ended the story as she always did.
“And all her mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters have loved her very much.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nancy Wright, a native of New York, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught high-school English in Richmond, California for ten years. Shortly before publication of A Mother’s Trial, she and her family moved to Southern California. She has been a screenwriter and subsequently a real estate broker in the Los Angeles area, where she also volunteers as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for foster children. She may be reached at [email protected].
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
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Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Mother's Trial Page 38