“Certainly. Do you think Tory Troy is a good person?”
“I do.”
“And why is that?”
“During our interviews, I sensed—both professionally as well as on a more intuitive level—no animus or misogyny in her.”
“Then, in your opinion, sir, how would you explain her actions at the animal shelter?”
“Anomalous behavior that did not represent part of a pattern of behavior that would be expected if it were the result of a psychosis. Displacement activity.”
“Displacement activity? And what is that, Doctor?”
“Displacement activity, or displacement behavior, is the redirection of an emotion or an impulse away from its original object—in Tory’s case, the euthanasia system—to another, her coworkers.”
“And why does this happen, Doctor?”
“A profound stressor.”
“Sir?”
“Something triggers the break. We don’t know what triggered Tory’s break. Frankly, we don’t fully understand what happened to cause her to lash out as she did—to respond to the stressor with actions that resulted in the deaths of her coworkers—but there had to have been something that caused her to abandon her moral codes and act as she did.”
“You called this anomalous behavior.”
“Yes.”
“What would have been, for lack of a better term, non-anomalous behavior, assuming the profound stressor occurred in the same manner?”
“Action directed against the original object.”
“Could you explain what you mean, please?”
“She could have destroyed the gas chamber, or, perhaps, even set fire to the animal shelter.”
“I see. So Tory’s behavior wasn’t normal, then.”
“Well …”
“If she acted out in a manner anomalous to what she would have done had she been behaving quote unquote normally, then her behavior was abnormal, isn’t that right, Doctor?”
“Yes, but—”
“That’ll be all, Doctor.”
“Objection, Your Honor. The doctor didn’t get a chance to complete his answer.”
“Sustained. Please finish what you were about to say, Dr. Bexley.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. I was going to say that although Tory’s behavior can be considered anomalous, it is only within a very narrow context—that context being the definition of displacement behavior, and the type of behavior that does not redirect an emotion. So, anomalous, yes. Inconsistent? Yes. Hostile? Most definitely. But insane? No.”
“Thank you, Doctor. You may step down. Court will recess until ten A.M. tomorrow. We are adjourned.”
45
Tory Troy
Psychiatric Nurse Chiarra Ziegler
“Hi, Tory.”
“Hey, Chiarra.”
“What are you reading?”
“Joyce.”
“Who’s she?”
“She’s a he. James Joyce? Ulysses? Finnegans Wake?”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah, I read him in college. Couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was writing about, though. What’re you reading?”
“I’m tackling Ulysses again.”
“Again? How many times have you read it?”
“None. I have never been able to get all the way through it. But now that I’ve got, ironically, a lot of time on my hands, as well as very little time left, I thought I’d give it another crack.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve read all the People magazines my mother brought me.”
“Liar.”
“Actually, it ties in with some of that Zen stuff I told you about.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s ‘Liberation Literature.’ A writer named John White came up with the term.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s supposed to describe novels and poetry that liberate you. You know—transcend the ego.”
“Do you want to be liberated, Tory?”
“I suppose I do.”
“Liberated from what? … And what happens then—after you’re liberated?”
“Those are very good questions, Chiarra. Truly.”
“How far into it are you?”
“Ulysses?”
“Yeah.”
“Chapter Two.”
“That far, huh?”
“Very funny. That’s misleading, though—I’ve actually read quite a bit of it piecemeal. And, of course, there’s that amazing last line.”
“Really? What about it?”
“It’s incredibly romantic.”
“In Ulysses? Are you serious?”
“Oh, yeah. For all its monumental literary significance, the book’s last line is pure heat.”
“What is it? The last line? Do you know it?”
“‘… and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’”
“That’s beautiful. And hot.”
“Yeah. Too bad some of the rest of the book isn’t as … straightforward.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to your reading, then.”
“Chiarra, before you go, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“One what?”
“A lethal-injection execution?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God, Chiarra. Whose did you see?”
“Should you really be talking about this, Tory?”
“Sure. I’m fine. Tell me. Whose execution did you see?”
“This is probably going to freak you out.”
“Why? Is it somebody I’ve heard of?”
“Timothy McVeigh.”
“The Oklahoma City bomber?”
“Yes.”
“How the hell did you get to witness McVeigh’s execution?”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, then. In January 2001, I started a one-year psychiatry internship at a small community hospital outside Terre Haute, Indiana. At the time, no one was sure when McVeigh’s execution would take place. His lawyers were trying all kinds of appeals and legal maneuvers to get his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Sometime that spring—April, I think—the word came down from the state capitol that all of his appeals had been exhausted and that McVeigh would be executed by lethal injection on June eleventh, 2001.”
“I remember reading a lot of stuff that year about his lawyers trying to get him life.”
“Yeah, well, none of their attempts succeeded. So the date was set and then they went about approving witnesses.”
“I would imagine that the number of requests to be a witness at his execution would be enormous.”
“You imagine right. It seemed like every newspaper, TV station, radio station, and Web news site in the world sent in a media request.”
“So, with all those people—plus the family members of his victims—how’d you get picked?”
“The Indiana State Corrections Board allowed U.S. universities with psychiatric nursing programs to apply for permission to allow one student to witness the execution. Something like twenty out of the twenty-two U.S. schools with programs applied. Ten schools were then picked randomly, and those ten were each asked to submit one name. My dean submitted mine. The ten names were placed in a sealed box, and the warden picked one name. And that was me.”
“Did you want to go?”
“The dean came to me before she submitted my name and we talked. At first I was a little hesitant, but she told me that the experience would broaden my understanding of several psychiatric issues, including grief, anger, the death penalty—you know, things like that. She also told me that there was a chance I might be able to speak with some of the family members that were there. So I decided to go.”
“You have to tell me everything about it.”
“
Once again, are you sure?”
“Yes. Start with where you sat.”
“I was one of the ones who had to watch it on closed-circuit TV. I was with a lot of family members of victims. There were just too many people to fit in the observation room.”
“Did any of the family members know who you were?”
“No. Turns out we weren’t allowed to talk to each other. They just marched us in and we sat down and waited. The chairs were hard plastic. After a while, my butt started to hurt. We all stared at the blank TV screen for what seemed like an hour, and then they turned it on.”
“Did you see him walk into the room?”
“No. When they turned on the TV he was already strapped to the gurney.”
“What did he look like?”
“Well, it was kind of an eerie picture. The camera was above his head so the screen was filled with just his face. We didn’t see the rest of the room, or anyone else in the room.”
“You saw his face?”
“Yeah. He looked scared. His face was white as a sheet, and he looked gaunt. He looked like a lot of terminal patients I’ve seen.”
“Well, that’s certainly on-the-nose, don’t you think? After all, at that point he was a terminal patient, right?”
“I suppose.”
“What happened next?”
“His execution was scheduled for seven in the morning. We had all been given a … I don’t know what you would call it … a program to the execution, I guess. We were all given a program. How bizarre is that?”
“Extremely.”
“At seven o’clock, he was asked if he had a final statement. That was just a formality, though, since he had already told the warden that he wanted to release a written statement. We all had copies of it.”
“What did he say?”
“McVeigh himself didn’t say anything. His ‘statement’ was a poem called ‘Invictus.’ I think it was written sometime in the late 1800s.”
“He released a poem as his final statement?”
“Yeah. I read the whole thing at the time, but all I remember were the last two lines. ‘I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.’”
“He never said anything?”
“Not a word.”
“So what happened then?”
“At a little after seven, they gave him the sodium pentothal to knock him out. His eyelids fluttered a little, and then he closed his eyes. For all intents and purposes, that was it for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pentothal is used as an anesthetic for surgery, and the usual dose for an operation is around one hundred to one hundred fifty milligrams. I think they gave McVeigh five thousand milligrams. That dose alone is fatal, but they continued with the next two drugs.”
“What comes next?”
“Tory, are you sure you want to be talking about this?”
“Chiarra, I’m fine. Honestly. What came next?”
“A paralyzing agent.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Pavulon?”
“Yes. Pancuronium bromide. In a dose about twenty times what’s used for surgeries.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“At this point, they couldn’t bring him back if they wanted to. The pentothal itself was fatal, and the Pavulon paralyzed his diaphragm and lungs so his body couldn’t breathe, even involuntarily. But they proceeded with a fatal dose of the final drug, potassium chloride, which interrupts the electrical signals to the heart and causes cardiac arrest.”
“Did he move or make any sounds?”
“Not really. He just lay there. His face twitched a little, and then at seven-fourteen he was declared dead, and the screen went blank.”
“What was it like in the room with the other people? Was anybody crying?”
“No. And that’s probably because everyone I was with was a family member of an Oklahoma City bombing victim. So there wasn’t much sympathy for McVeigh in that room. All of his family members and friends were in the prison viewing room. They deliberately kept them away from the people I was with.”
“Considering who you were with, I’m surprised there wasn’t cheering or applause in the room.”
“You would think they’d all be exuberant, but in fact, everyone was very solemn. Some of the people had expressions on their faces that could only be described as angry. McVeigh might have paid the ultimate price for his crimes, but that didn’t bring back their loved ones.”
“Is that how I’ll be done?”
“Tory!”
“Oh, come on, Chiarra. You know the verdict’s going to be guilty and that my sentence will be death by lethal injection. Everyone knows it. So tell me. Is that how I’ll be done?”
“Yes. The procedure is the same in all of the states that use lethal injection for executions.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Tory—”
“Well, does it?”
“We honestly don’t know, honey. We don’t. What is pain anyway? I once dated a guy who had a wicked skin problem in the winter. His hands itched so bad he would scratch himself until he bled. He tried everything. Hydrocortisone cream. Prescription ointments. Some of them worked, but they weren’t immediate, and they were messy. He told me that sometimes those alcohol-based hand sanitizers would work.”
“That Purell stuff?”
“Yeah. But he wouldn’t use it the way most people did—you know, squirt a dime-sized drop in your palm and then rub your hands together. He would pump the stuff out onto the tops of his hands and then smooth it over until it completely covered his skin. Then he would blow on it until it dried. It formed like a glove and it gave him some relief.”
“He must have hated the winter.”
“With a passion. But even though he used the creams and the Purell, he once told me that there were times when he was literally on the verge of going insane from the itching. And that brings me back to your question about pain. Want to hear what he did sometimes to relieve the itch?”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“I couldn’t believe it when he told me about it, but he made me watch him do it once, and then I was convinced.”
“What did he do?”
“He scalded himself.”
“Scalded? With hot water?”
“Yes. He said the relief was instantaneous, and that it felt so good, he compared it with an orgasm.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m not kidding. He explained that he had to get the water running at the perfect temperature. Not hot enough, it would only make the itching worse. Too hot and the relief would turn to pain. He told me that the nerve endings in his skin were so charged from the itching and scratching that he was able to hold his hand under water so hot that he probably would have given himself first-degree burns if his skin were normal. Or possibly even second degree. Somehow the scalding heat short-circuited the itching.”
“And you saw him do this?”
“Yes. And I even asked him to let me feel the temperature of the water. I couldn’t leave even a finger under there, let alone the top of my hand. And yet he held his hand there, and he told me he could feel the heat sensation permeating his skin until it reached pure relief. He said he had gotten so precise about what worked that even a single degree difference in the water temp would not give him the relief he was looking for.”
“Wasn’t his hand burned?”
“Nope. Only red. And that went away in a little while, but the relief lasted for hours.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“When I met him, he had been doing it for years. And with no harmful results. He told me that he had gotten so good about knowing which water temps worked that he could tell where a person had their water heater set if he had to do it at somebody else’s house.”
“One man’s pain …”
“… is another man’s pleasure.”
“So what does that have to do with my question?”
<
br /> “I’m just saying that I don’t think what you will feel, if anything, can actually be described as pain. You might feel heat as the drugs run into your body. You may sense some chest pressure or heaviness. But the first drug is given in such a high dose that I find it very hard to believe that you will feel anything at all.”
“The pentothal?”
“Right.”
“That’s the one they give at fifty times the surgery dose, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess I’ll find out soon enough, right?”
“Can we talk about something else, please?”
“How about James Joyce?”
“Okay. On second thought, I’ve got rounds.”
“Chicken.”
“Bye, Tory.”
46
Court Transcript:
Tory Troy
Defense Counsel Carolyn Payne
District Attorney Brawley Loren
Judge Gerard Becker
Court Personnel
The Visitors’ Gallery
The Jury
Mrs. Viviana Troy
“Please state your name for the record.”
“Viviana Troy.”
“Thank you.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Troy.”
“Good morning.”
“Please tell the court your relationship to the defendant.”
“I’m her mother.”
“When was the last time you spoke to your daughter?”
“Yesterday.”
“Are you married, Mrs. Troy?”
“Divorced.”
“And what is your ex-husband’s name?”
“Crouch Troy.”
“Is he Tory’s father?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you two been divorced?”
“Going on fifteen years.”
“So Tory was around thirteen years old when her father left the family home?”
“Yes.”
“Could you tell us why you two divorced?”
“Objection. Relevancy, Your Honor?”
“Mr. Loren?”
“I withdraw the question, Your Honor.”
“Proceed.”
“Mrs. Troy, what can you tell us about your daughter as a child?”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“What was she like as a child? What were her interests? Her hobbies? What did she like in school?”
“She was always a good student. She always got As on all her tests. And she was always reading. I remember her sitting outside under the big elm tree with a book and an apple. And her IQ was very high. She was tested at one forty-five. She was in that club … that high IQ club … Menses?”
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