The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  Though Stanley’s parents sought treatment and help for him from psychiatrists and other doctors and from counselors of various sorts, he himself seemed to feel no need of this and only responded by brief simulations of cooperation in order to escape some unpleasant consequence or to gain some egocentric end. On two or three occasions he voluntarily entered psychiatric hospitals, apparently to impress his wife by making her think he had at last realized he needed help and meant to change some of his ways. These visits were brief and fruitless and seemed plainly designed to manipulate domestic situations or to elicit new financial aid from his parents.

  It is interesting to note that excessive drinking has not been a discernible factor in this young man’s career. Nor is there evidence to indicate that his behavior has been significantly influenced by marijuana, amphetamines, LSD, heroin, or the other drugs that have been so popular among those of his age group. His many notable and sometimes puzzling exploits were apparently decided upon and carried off on his own, without extraneous stimulation or chemical aid. In high school, and in college during the late 1960’s, he was often thrown with and sometimes almost surrounded by groups of young people who went about in ragged blue jeans, with unkempt beards and long dirty hair that seemed to offer a standing invitation to lice. With many of these young men it was considered stylish and desirable to leave out their shirttails and, on formal occasions, sometimes to come barefooted. Among these could be found many who thought of themselves as radical activists defying the “establishment” and its laws, moral codes, and conventions. In contrast, Stanley wore traditional clothes, remained clean-shaven with neatly trimmed auburn hair. He seemed to have no special interest in changing or challenging society, or in promoting rebellion. Verbally he expressed allegiance to law and order and regularly identified himself with traditional virtues.

  Let us note briefly a few examples of Stanley’s typical power to convince and to persuade. A year or two before his second wife had to leave him he had no difficulty in getting a young women to turn over to him all her savings, which she had accumulated by steady work over years and which she had been carefully guarding to give her two young children some measure of security. She had clear knowledge of Stanley’s repeatedly demonstrated financial irresponsibility and, one would think, almost certain knowledge of what would happen to her savings. More recently he succeeded in arranging for admission to the hospital of a young woman with whom he had been living for a few weeks. She was legally married to another man but had left his bed and board. Stanley was able somehow to convince the ordinarily strict and uncompromising authorities in charge of admission to this hospital that insurance his employer carried on him would cover this lady in the same way as if she were indeed his wife. She did not claim his name as her own or attempt to falsify otherwise her name and status. When she was dismissed, the hospital was left with a large unpaid account that is almost certain to withstand even the most heroic efforts at collection.

  On another occasion, Stanley escaped the consequences of a felony charge by serenely posing as an undercover agent working with the authorities against organized pushers in the hard drug traffic. This ruse apparently worked well enough for him to avoid arrest and to leave the state and eventually to take further intricate steps to escape the legal consequences that would almost surely have been disastrous to the ordinary man.

  His unusual ability to make conviction spring to life and continue to flourish against adversity, and even obvious contradiction, emerges again in a somewhat different area. An attractive and sensitive young woman whose early years had been extremely unhappy and, perhaps, had given her a far greater than ordinary need for genuine and unstinted love, seemed to find at last in Stanley what she had sought above all else in life. She was separated from her husband and for a long time had been loved dearly by another man who apparently offered her everything in his life without qualification or demand for ordinary reciprocation. Stanley grossly mistreated this appealing sexual partner who continued to live with him despite gross and flaunted infidelity, severe and repeated beatings, and other unprovoked outrages. In attempting to explain why she continued with him despite real fear that he might kill her, she said that somehow he made her feel genuinely loved for the first time in her entire life.

  This statement seemed at first to suggest that Stanley might possess remarkable physical prowess and skill at sexual relations. It also might suggest that his partner was masochistic and actually found some perverse satisfaction from being mistreated. Continuing study of her reactions and her attitude gave increasing, and finally convincing, evidence that in neither of these possibilities lay a likely explanation of her loyalty. The more she discussed their physical activities in sexual relations, the more Stanley’s performance seemed unimaginative and his abilities at best ordinary. What she thought he offered her was not primarily physical. It was, I believe, precisely what he was almost infinitely incapable of offering, even in a small degree, but what he apparently simulated with complete success, casually and without effort. It was, she repeatedly said, the way be made her feel personally valued and cherished, deeply and truly loved, rather than a remarkable sensuously erotic experience that bound her to him. One can but marvel that Stanley, and only Stanley, of all the men she had known, could give her this invincible impression of sincerity in personal love and make it convincing time after time despite the repeated and trenchantly disillusioning contradictions demonstrated so vividly and so painfully, and sometimes brutally, by his conduct.

  During another period of marital separation, this time from his second wife, Stanley carried out an exploit worthy of our attention. After a brief sexual adventure with another attractive young woman, Yvette, he apparently tired of her and turned his attentions to Sally, one of her friends from a nearby town. She, too, was responsive and everything seemed to indicate a serious and progressive love affair. This new relationship, however, was abruptly terminated by a sudden trip to Europe that Stanley decided to make for reasons that he never made convincing to me, or even quite clear.

  Though varying somewhat from time to time in his account of this venture, Stanley has nearly always included most of these items. He claims to have learned from Sally that Yvette was about to leave the country, that she was planning to spend some time in Brussels, and later in other parts of Europe. On hearing this, Stanley says that he called Yvette’s home and was told that Yvette was not there. He, nevertheless, persisted in seeking all sorts of information about her trip, apparently making a nuisance of himself and pressing her father repeatedly for information on points he felt were not properly a matter of Stanley’s concern. The father finally hung up, and afterward neither parent would talk with Stanley on the telephone. They had apparently been unhappy about Yvette’s former association with him and did not want it to be renewed.

  Stanley sought out Sally again. According to his story, Sally now told him that Yvette had a chronic infirmity that required medication regularly and that she had left for Brussels with the wrong drug. Stanley insisted that Sally also informed him that Yvette would die if she kept taking this other medicine instead of that which was prescribed and appropriate. She did not, he maintains, know Yvette’s address beyond the fact that she was thought to be somewhere in Brussels. This, briefly, is Stanley’s usual explanation for his impromptu and, in some respects, astonishing flight by jet plane to Europe.

  When asked why he did not get word to Yvette by some simpler means, such as having Sally notify her family, he does not give a really adequate explanation. He repeatedly emphasizes his sense of mission, the urgency of his task, and his determination to fulfill it. He also fills in details of action and adventure on the way to Brussels and while there in such a way as to conceal, or at least almost magically blur, the deficiencies that leave the account of his maneuvers so far from convincing.

  His relations with Yvette had, on his part, never been serious. Even these relatively casual relations had for a considerable time been broken off. He was
no longer regarded as a suitor and probably not even regarded now as a friend, so it seemed pertinent to wonder and to ask why he should so emphatically seize his role as the appointed one to plunge into such an extravagant undertaking on her behalf. “Why,” Stanley answered promptly, and in his best tones of knight-errantry, “I’d have done that for anybody.”

  It is beyond my power to describe the glibness or convey what I believe to be the lack of substance and reality, the emptiness of real human feeling, in these fine words that came to him so readily.

  It has not been possible for me to obtain any evidence to support Stanley’s claim that he was convinced that Yvette was in danger, or that she had actually gone to Brussels, or that any mistake had been made about any medication she might be taking. Few things seem to me much more implausible than that Stanley ever cared deeply for Yvette even during the time he was seeing her. Nothing suggests that he maintained a serious interest in her welfare after he had lost touch with her and at the time he departed for Europe.

  His parents had no warning of his intentions. From notes about Stanley by his mother, I quote:

  We knew he still owed $4900 on the trailer his wife and child were living in … plus $700 for just junk we didn’t know about … He’d changed jobs five times that year … And his wife had left him nine times … But he gave a lot more bad checks … He then wrote one for $859 and flew to Brussels, Belgium. He just wrote the check and took off.

  Stanley talks freely about his apparently unanticipated and suddenly contrived trip to Europe. He maintains that within approximately twenty-four hours he packed luggage, made financial arrangements, flew to New York, obtained a passport, got emergency clearance on matters such as vaccination and other medical technicalities, communicated with the State Department in Washington to explain his mission and enlist aid, found a seat on the first jet to Europe that would get him to Paris (and so in close reach of Brussels), and was well on his way across the Atlantic. To various questions about how he moved so fast and expedited so many matters that ordinarily make for delay, he has ready and enthusiastic, though not always convincing, answers.

  His parents confirm the story that he moved with marvelous dispatch. They also report a flood of bad checks that throw light on how he took care of the heavy initial expenses of the flight. Most energetic, ingenious, and experienced travelers, even if in urgent haste, would, I dare say, have needed at least a week to complete such arrangements. And they would have needed actual money—and a good deal of it! One gets the impression that Stanley sliced through the ordinarily paralyzing masses of bureaucratic technicalities and red tape with ease and celerity suggestive of Alexander the Great when confronted by the Gordian knot.

  In expediting transactions and in manipulating people for this exploit, Stanley must have been at his best. The implausible story about Yvette having carried with her the wrong medicine and its alleged threat of danger to her life must have taken on lyrical notes in his telling. His success in carrying out such a trip indicates that at times he must have made his presentation irresistibly convincing. It seems not unlikely, however, that at other times, Stanley may have used other ruses and employed additional schemes to gain his ends. I have often wondered whether Sally or anyone else told Stanley that Yvette had gone off unwittingly with improper medication and that she was in any sort of danger, or whether he thought up this story entirely on his own and used it to account for a sudden, dramatic and irresponsible jet flight to Europe prompted by impulses having nothing whatsoever to do with Yvette.

  According to his parents, Stanley had been in very serious and unusually pressing trouble several times during the months before his unforeseen trip to Europe. He had more than once suddenly left one state and fled to another, giving no information to family or friends of his new address. Perhaps he was again seeking to escape prosecution for some criminal deed or evade the threat of dangerous measures by some person or group whom lie had given reason to seek retaliation.

  On the other hand it must be remembered that Stanley has often carried out various extremely injudicious projects, suddenly and with no apparent regard for the consequences, and without any discernible goal that could, in terms of ordinary human motivation, account for his conduct. After such behavior he has on a number of previous occasions invented implausible pretexts for his conduct similar in some respects to the story of Yvette.

  Among Stanley’s most striking features has been the tendency to spring heedlessly into action at the behest of what often seems little more than idle whims. Neither the threat of danger nor the likelihood of other serious consequences has seemed to check him. Penniless and faced with legal action for deeds that would ordinarily lead to years of confinement in prison, he has been known to celebrate by buying a half-dozen expensive and superfluous suits, two new automobiles, and then, to complete the job, by forging some additional checks to pay for a vacation trip to some plush resort in another section of the country.

  His parents first learned that Stanley was abroad through a telephone call from the American embassy in Belgium. In his mother’s notes appears this item:

  When they told my husband Stanley was in Brussels, Belgium, he keeled over with a heart attack and I had to call an ambulance and send him to a hospital in Charlotte. He was nearly dead on arrival.

  A few days later his mother wrote:

  Now today, we have had fourteen long-distance telephone calls from North Carolina, South Carolina, and from government agencies in Washington requesting his whereabouts. I am about to go crazy from people calling up about him.

  Stanley himself gives a vivid account of much excitement and of spectacular adventures in Brussels. He tells of riding all around the city in cars with newspaper men and with police agents. He dwells on the publicity he obtained, saying that his picture and also that of Yvette appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Brussels. He says that he had taken an old picture of her with him and that the press cooperated in his efforts to find her by printing it along with reports of his gallant efforts to find her and save her. He also reports that, through people at the American embassy, radio broadcasts gave an account of his mission and called on the public for aid in his endeavor. There is little doubt that Stanley gives a romanticized and at times perhaps a fantastic account of the stir he made in Europe. He speaks not only of headlines on the front pages of the Brussels’ newspapers but claims also that articles appeared in English in a Paris edition of a New York paper.

  He becomes enthusiastic in discussing his arrival in Brussels, his appeals to the press, his work with members of the American embassy and various diplomatic and civic agencies which he claims cooperated with him in his alleged romantic mission of mercy. If he obtained even a fraction of the notoriety he reports this might have contributed to his being able to cash bad checks and to obtain other financial aid from various agencies abroad. There seems little doubt that he grossly exaggerates and indulges in fantastic lies as he recounts his adventures, but there is reason to believe he attracted enough attention with the publicity he gained to persuade first class hotels and restaurants to honor his checks and enable him to live for a while in high style while lie pursued his course as a dedicated man on a desperate mission of mercy.

  There is every reason to believe that he stayed at the finest hotels, entertained at very expensive restaurants, and attracted much favorable attention. Apparently the public attention he attracted played a part in enabling him to establish credit and cash checks in ways not possible to most travelers. He boasted that he met and made friends with “at least a hundred Americans” while in Brussels. Apparently he succeeded for a while in endowing his proclaimed role not only with plausibility but with heroic and romantic aspects.

  His relations with newspapermen and with diplomatic agencies abroad led to many transatlantic calls to his parents and, for a while, to the parents of Yvette. The confusion and emotional stress of these calls and the ever accumulating bad checks written before Stanley left kept his par
ents under extreme anxiety. The heart attack sustained by his father mentioned in his mother’s note quoted above proved to be temporarily disabling but not so serious as it first appeared.

  Stanley admitted that he never found Yvette. From the best information available to me now it seems probable that she was not in Brussels at the time, perhaps not in Belgium. If Stanley learned of this even before he left the United States I hardly think it would have stopped him once he had worked up momentum to launch himself in the impulsive exploit. Here he seemed to find a role that highly elated him in some peculiarly egoistic fashion. In it he seemed to find a satisfaction somewhat similar to but greater than the satisfaction apparently given him by some of his other less elaborate lies and posings and his sprees of squandering money that he did not possess. The more I learned of Stanley the more I thought it likely that he perhaps lost track of Yvette as a real person and clung to her name as something on which to focus and use as an expedient to further his self-centered and irresponsible transatlantic prank. Some idle or uninformed remark might well have served as a spark to set off his fancy and his impulse to play a truly spectacular role. No serious consideration of the consequences would be likely to check the acceleration as Stanley let himself go.