The Boy in the Park: The gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by A J Grayson

  It is only the panel that Pauline is interested in, and immediately her heart starts to feel its hope slip away. There at the centre of the table is the familiar visage of Benjamin Tolbert, again in the chair, his silver hair still several inches above the heads of the others. He wears what appears to be the same burgundy tie he’d sported at the previous hearing, though the suit today is brown rather than powder blue. It still clashes terribly.

  To his left is Tyrone Davis. Pauline had expected that. The warden always has a place on panels like this. It’s a fixed part of his remit, and he is responsible for input on all decisions relating to inmate arrangements, something today’s session is certainly slated to deal with. He looks just as stern, forceful and cross as Pauline expected.

  But the woman on the other side of the chairman is a surprise. This is not the fearsome visage of Christina Vermille, who had been there two years ago, and whom Pauline had seen on so many occasions since. In many ways, the delicately brown-skinned female who now sits at the head table is Vermille’s opposite. A soft expression instead of hard, short hair neatly done up instead of long and let down, and a smile that seems moulded in her cheeks rather than the scowl that was a plastic fixture on the other woman’s face. The placard on the table before her reads ‘Alice Anonando’, a name with an ethnic origin Pauline can’t identify, but she begins to feel the slightest touch of her hope return.

  ‘Let’s just get right to it, shall we?’ Tolbert says into the microphone. ‘All our names have already been entered into the record from the proceedings sheet I provided, yes?’ The stenographer nods in the affirmative. ‘Very good.’ He turns to Pauline. ‘Dr Lavrentis, it is difficult for this panel to understand that you would even contemplate making this request.’

  Pauline cannot miss the exasperation in the chairman’s voice. He is genuinely flabbergasted.

  ‘To seek permission for this inmate to be transferred out of isolation and granted routine recreational access to courtyard areas, less than two years after a pattern of increasing aggression led to a third escape attempt – one that included inflicting severe bodily injury upon a guard. I’m shocked you think it would even be seriously considered.’

  The warden grunts. The expression on his face makes it clear he is in perfect agreement with the chairman.

  Pauline leans in towards her microphone. ‘I realize this is unusual.’ Another sarcastic snort from the warden, and she tries not to pay it attention. ‘I know I am making this request far sooner than might be usual, but I can honestly say that in my professional estimation inmate #10481-91 poses no further risk of violence, and that granting him a return to the general population and access to common recreational areas on a limited basis will pose no security or safety issues to the institution or its staff.’

  Professional-speak, with all the right keywords included.

  Warden Davis is incredulous. ‘In your professional estimation? I’m sorry, Dr Lavrentis, but long experience or not, you cannot deny this man’s character, or what he’s done.’

  ‘I am not denying it, Warden. I am, however, suggesting – with the full weight of over three decades of experience behind me –’ she emphasizes this point as a means of pushing his indignation back a notch – ‘that this most recent venture and its consequences have changed him. Permanently.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Benjamin Tolbert asks.

  ‘It means the events of that last outburst, and its consequences … they’ve broken him.’

  ‘He wasn’t broken before?’

  ‘In a different way, yes,’ Pauline answers, ‘and we were making some real progress in overcoming some of his most fundamental issues. He was beginning to understand the nature of the rifts inside himself, and showing signs that he might be able to work towards repairing them. But that, that’s …’ She hesitates. ‘That’s gone now.’

  The new woman, Alice, readjusts her position and leans in to her microphone. She forgets to switch it on and takes a moment fumbling with the button before the stenographer gives her the go-ahead from her desk at the side.

  ‘Dr Lavrentis, can you explain to me what that means? Rifts?’

  These are the new woman’s first words, and Pauline is encouraged by what sounds, at least, like an empathetic question.

  ‘You have to understand that in patients like this one, there is a degree of psychological fracture. A break within his consciousness. In this individual’s case, that fracture has been multifaceted and severe for many years, and yet all the various pieces have still been connected. Interacting with one another. But this last trauma – the renewed thought of escape, the surge towards freedom, the violence he enacted against the guard – it was the breaking point. Internally he had perhaps made plans for crafting a new start to his life, but that new start began with a surge of violence, a shank pushed through the flesh of another human being, and more blood on his hands. As quickly as the hope had come, it was dashed. By the time that evening was over, what had been fractured in him for so long had become permanently broken. When he went into isolation, even the pieces were crushed.’

  Alice shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Lavrentis. I’m not a psychologist, and I’m only becoming familiar with this inmate’s case file. I might need some of that in more lay vocabulary. This wasn’t the first escape attempt by your patient, though it was the most violent. What set this event apart?’

  ‘I believe he had convinced himself that he was truly at the verge of walking back into his past,’ Pauline answers. ‘Rather, into an imagined version of it. Into a different life. That if he could just make it beyond these walls he could shake off everything and return to another existence. A peaceful life, with a different spirit, different circumstances. I note that on this occasion he attempted his escape with two other men. I can only assume he’d brought himself to believe they were his friends, rejoining him for a purer existence. In reality his friendships themselves are delusions he’d crafted in the first days after his crime, stirred back up and providing once again the same sense of hope.’

  ‘The new faces of imagined friends?’

  ‘Faces change for him all the time,’ Pauline says. ‘That, too, is a part of his condition. I think he’d hoped the return of familiar faces was going to help bring him into a freedom he remembered, or imagined, that he once knew. But it all fell apart, and to be placed in solitary confinement afterwards, with the prospect of remaining there indefinitely … it represented a point of collapse. Reality has simply disintegrated for him.’

  ‘All that matters,’ the warden interrupts, ‘is that he’s a man with an extraordinarily violent past.’ The skin at his temples is flexing in annoyance. ‘He’s unstable, and in the estimation of my long experience,’ he looks directly at Pauline as he says this, ‘he most certainly poses an ongoing danger.’

  Pauline forces herself to remain calm. She knows the warden has strong opinions, and doesn’t fault him for his reading of the situation. Perhaps, were she in his position, she might read it the same way. But she isn’t, and she cannot.

  ‘It is true that Thomas Warrick was once extremely violent,’ she says. It seems an appropriate moment to humanize him, especially for the new panel member, and to refer to him by name rather than number. ‘And there are reasons for that violence that are spelled out in full, and rather gruesome, detail in his file. As a young child he suffered ongoing and extreme physical abuse at the hands of his father, as did his mother. This wasn’t unknown to neighbours and others in their town, but this was the late Seventies. People didn’t exactly report things with the same urgency in those days.’

  ‘He acted out back then?’ Alice asks. ‘As a child?’

  ‘We’ve never found evidence that he was violent as a boy, but this isn’t uncommon in cases like his. As a small child the individual – despite being, as in Thomas’s case, intelligent, curious, and bright for his age – is nevertheless powerless. His father was a big man who worked in a mechanic’s shop: plenty of muscle and physical mass.
Tom would have learned early, probably through experience, that any attempt to respond to his father’s abuse with a physical reaction would only make matters worse.’

  ‘The father would abuse him further,’ Alice adds, grasping the point.

  ‘Or would take it out on the mother. Tom, like most children in this kind of situation, was equally traumatized by witnessing the violence his father enacted on his mother, and so he would have learned, too, that any acting out on his part would have resulted in more beatings for her.’

  ‘Damn,’ Alice sighs. Pauline is extremely pleased. She has found a sympathetic hearer. Someone who, perhaps, is new enough to dealing with these kinds of cases that the pure ugliness of what is involved still affects her. Pauline is well aware that it doesn’t have the same effect on the chairman or the warden. They’ve seen cases like this many times over.

  ‘His violence began when he was a teenager,’ Pauline continues. ‘According to the trial that followed his capture after the murders, Tom Warrick had run away from home shortly after his seventeenth birthday. His schoolteachers were called upon to help pin down a date, tied into his sudden departure from class. His parents, the court presumes, had assumed he was gone for good, and there is testimony from neighbours to the effect that Andrew Warrick, the father, had understood his son to be “a lost cause”.’

  ‘But I take it that wasn’t the case?’ Alice asks.

  ‘Tom had indeed run away from home, but he hadn’t gone far. Investigators eventually discovered a small makeshift hut he’d constructed for himself in the forest behind his family’s property in the north of the state. He’d remained in the area, living close by, secretly. Just how he looked after himself – food, and the like – for almost eleven months is something that was never fully explained in the trial. But it became clear that he’d been living close enough by that he could watch his home.’

  ‘Watch?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pauline affirms. ‘Tom’s intention had apparently been to monitor his home. He knew he’d escaped the direct abuse of his father by simply running away, but he stayed behind to see if it meant his father might also go easier on his mother. Maybe he thought he was the fuel that sparked his father’s venom, and if he were out of the picture his mother would fare better.’

  ‘But …’ Chairman Tolbert interjects.

  Pauline nods. He already knows the facts. ‘But that wasn’t how it happened. Tom observed, from afar, that the opposite took place. His father became more aggressive, and his mother suffered fierce and more frequent assaults.’

  ‘Christ, that poor woman. That kid.’ Alice is shaking her head.

  ‘He had all his own traumas in his conscience, plus a new feeling of guilt over the increased suffering of his mother. At some level, he felt responsible for what was happening to her. One day, he simply couldn’t take any more. He attacked.’

  ‘Not to deny the horrors that boy went through,’ the warden interjects, ‘but to say he “attacked” is putting it damned mildly, Dr Lavrentis. Tom Warrick was eighteen at the time, an adult, and he slaughtered them.’

  Alice is leaning forward. She’s read the file on the actual murders and the extraordinary violence they involved.

  ‘He acted alone?’ she asks.

  ‘No accomplices were ever found,’ Tolbert answers from the central seat at the table. He’s known the details of this case for years. ‘Nor were any ever expected, though for a time there was a search that included the possibility. But when the two weapons used in the murders were eventually recovered, there was only one set of fingerprints on them.’

  ‘In his outburst,’ Pauline continues, ‘Tom Warrick simply lost control. All his suffering and pain burst something inside him, and the result was an extraordinary show of unrestrained, uncontrolled violence.’

  Alice looks back down at the table, flips through the papers in front of her. ‘And this was the result of what you’ve called his personality issues?’

  ‘No,’ Pauline objects, ‘it’s the other way around. Thomas had been a normal, healthy boy before the abuse. Even bright, by his school reports. Creative, advanced for his age, imaginative. That’s something that’s stayed with him throughout his life, through everything. He comes from a low-heeled background, but he learned early on to absorb other worlds through books, through stories, through whatever means were at his disposal. But despite that creative mind, the result of all that torment, and then the trauma of his outburst and violent acts – he found himself engaged in actions he had never thought or believed himself capable of committing. And his mind simply could not accept what he’d done. It was too much for it to hold, too much for his personality to take. So he created another personality to compensate. Someone else to blame for the crime.’

  ‘And that other personality,’ Alice asks, ‘that’s this … Joseph?’

  ‘Tom often calls himself Joseph. I’m convinced that’s the first personality that emerged. Or perhaps it’s better to say the first split that took place within him. I haven’t been able to get fully to the bottom of its origins but, often in cases like this, the initial personality that’s created is modelled off the memory of someone the patient had trusted in his past. A childhood friend, a school mate. Someone in his life that he associated with comfort and safety. We’ve never found anyone named Joseph in Thomas’s school records, so we don’t know who that model may have been for him; but whoever it was, it was the image that became his first new personality. The first buffer between him and the reality of his situation. But as he fled the crime scene, moving east across the country in the weeks before his capture, the personalities began to multiply. With each, he was able to distance himself, mentally, a little further from his actions. Each new personality became a new intermediary, which put him a little further from the blood he had on his hands. So, before long, Joseph became Greg. Greg became Allen.’

  Alice nods a developing understanding.

  ‘And when did Dylan emerge?’

  ‘Dylan first surfaced after the trial, after his conviction. He was extradited back to California from Nashville in July nineteen eighty-seven, and by the time the trial was complete and the sentence passed the next year, Dylan had taken over. He seems to be a composite of experiences that Tom had had in his youth, together with more he’s absorbed from things he’s read and heard – his voraciousness as a reader has never left him, and he’s been one of the most frequent visitors to the prison library since he arrived. He loves poetry. There’s a chance that Dylan comes from Dylan Thomas, whose works his records show he’s checked out on numerous occasions, but I am unable to speak with certainty on this. He reads anything, everything, absorbing details of culture and social refinement he’s never experienced elsewhere in his life.

  ‘He’s been particularly interested in San Francisco as long as I’ve been working with him,’ Pauline continues, ‘as well as in gardens, parks and lakes. He discovered a book in the prison library on the history of Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, and this seems to have strongly shaped the Dylan personality.’

  ‘The man doesn’t have a goddamned clue who or where he is,’ the warden snorts. Pauline tries to ward off his dismissiveness with an affirmation.

  ‘It’s true that he has lost his hold on reality. But what he’s dreamed up has become real for him, and so his everyday experiences here in the institution are grafted into his imaginary world. Prior to his transfer into solitary two years ago, after the escape attempt, he’d been on morning work duty in the Ward Four pharmacy. In his mind he’s translated this into employment in San Francisco, working at a health food supplements shop. Mitch Whittaker, the inmate with oversight of the pharmacy, became Michael, Dylan’s friendly boss.’

  ‘He’s nuts,’ the warden states.

  ‘The walk he used to take down the mainline corridor towards his cell block, following his work shift, became a stroll through the park towards a favourite place. And,’ Pauline straightens herself as she comes to the re
al substance of her request, ‘the forty-five minutes in courtyard 4-BG became his sanctuary. BG became “Botanical Gardens”, and what he saw when he would sit there, by that small plastic fountain, was a tranquil pond in a forested retreat. The broken chair became a bench. His bench. It’s where he found his calm.’

  There is a moment of contemplation on the panel. Finally, it is Alice who speaks.

  ‘And it’s to this courtyard that you wish to request he be permitted access again, now?’

  ‘That is correct,’ Pauline answers. ‘I honestly believe –’ she gazes straight into the warden’s eyes as she says this, willing him to understand – ‘that he poses no further risk. He did before, it’s true. I don’t deny that. But Tom Warrick is gone, Warden. The fragments of him that remained, of that boy with all his tortured memories and violent past: they’ve died. There is no other way to put it. The man who injured your guard no longer exists. You saw how passive he was during his trial outing to the courtyard last week. He’s not who he was before. All that’s left is Dylan Aaronsen, a shop worker from San Francisco who thinks he’s a poet.’

  ‘And you don’t think there’s hope of helping him back?’ Alice asks. There is real empathy in her voice.

  Pauline shakes her head. Her shoulders slouch. She suddenly feels older than she did a moment ago. Depleted.

  ‘No. That boy from so long ago is gone. I can’t bring him back. All we can do is let the different person he’s become live in his delusion. He wants to sit in his park and write poetry. That’s all.’

  And that is it. Pauline has said all she has to say.

  Seconds pass in what seems a heavy silence. Finally, Benjamin Tolbert leans towards his microphone.

  ‘The panel thanks you for your request and your testimony here this afternoon, Dr Lavrentis. What you’ve asked us to consider is unusual, to say the least. And weighty.’

  Pauline doesn’t know what these words forebode.