The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Among US states, the legal components of the not guilty by reason of insanity defense vary. Some states don’t allow the defense at all. Many, like Texas, use the M’Naghten standard as a template for their definition. It originated in 1843 during an English court case in which Daniel M’Naghten shot and killed a man whom he believed to be the prime minister. Though English law had long had room to protect those who were mentally ill from punishment, the incident forced the courts to create a clearer definition. The resulting M’Naghten standard required the defendant to not have known the nature of the act he or she was committing. If he or she did know the nature of the act, then he or she must not have known it was wrong. In his book Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law, Professor Charles P. Ewing writes, “The M’Naghten standard, like the insanity defense more generally, has proven controversial but enduring. More than 165 years later, this test (or some variation of it) is still the law in the majority of American jurisdictions.”

  Texas’s derivation of the M’Naghten standard states, “At the time of the conduct charged, the actor, as a result of a mental disease or defect, did not know that his conduct was wrong.” In New Hampshire, the Durham Rule is used, under which the defendant can be found not guilty if his behavior was the “product” of a mental disease or mental defect, a vague definition that all other US courts have rejected. Still other states use the Model Penal Code, developed by the American Law Institute, which requires that the defendant must be diagnosed with a mental disease or defect and was unable to either appreciate the criminality of his or her conduct or conform that conduct to the requirements of the law. This defense lost much of its support in 1982, however, after John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan the previous year, was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

  In my own home growing up, the most prominent belief system in our day-to-day life was the reality of mental illness and well-being, a framework that has powerfully shaped how I’ve seen the world. Both of my parents are therapists, and they felt a personal, moral obligation to their work that I found inspiring. While our society still tends to see physical health as a concrete reality and mental illness as a questionable, almost mythical concept, in my upbringing there was never any question of its importance or potential deadliness if left alone or inadequately treated. That is the lens through which I see this case: I am more likely to put primacy on John’s mental health than a spiritual force that might have taken hold. That doesn’t mean I discount the role of spirituality. Both religion and mental illness are deeply personal, and a chasm will always exist between what one person experiences and another perceives.

  In John’s case, an amalgamation of religious references, drugs, and mental illness conspire to make it nearly impossible to definitively answer which of the following four scenarios is correct: John was lying about his belief that the children were possessed; the possession was real; John’s use of spray caused him to have symptoms similar to schizophrenia; or finally, John’s mental illness caused him to believe the children were possessed. Perhaps there are more scenarios than even these four. As Padilla said to Dr. Zavaleta, “You’re not right, and I’m not right.”

  John himself laid out this ambiguity for detectives in his confession shortly after the crimes.

  Q.Okay. So what is the—what is the reason you are telling us that you killed your children?

  A.Because I want to tell the truth.

  Q.But what is the reason that you’re telling us that you killed them? Why—what is the reason that you killed them? What is the reason that you killed them?

  A.Because, one, they were possessed. Two, maybe I kind of think it might have been the toxins that were there, the fumes that got me dizzy, but I don’t know. I think it might have been more than one thing, sir.

  The truth can be more than one thing. The potential targets of blame seem to combine and then explode, and in the wake of that catastrophe it’s impossible to put the pieces back together again, to parse them out and name any one as the culprit. We can’t know whether, if one part had been absent—the drugs, the mental illness, John’s early abuse—the others wouldn’t have combined and delivered the same result. This not-knowing is agonizing; it means a man may be put to death who was insane at the time of his offense. And how reassuring it would be to discern what singularly prompted his actions and then to be able to devote oneself to stamping it out.

  • • •

  Dr. Zavaleta, who refused to shrink down the complexities of folk healing to fit inside the courtroom, was not asked to testify in the second trial.

  The most important message he wished to convey, in this case as in any other religiously related murder case he’d been asked to speak about as an expert, is that a bold line separates brujería, or witchcraft, and curanderismo, or folk healing. Curanderismo, that healing side of the coin, is not solely a religious practice, but derives from the medicinal healing that was performed before institutional medicine and has continued to be practiced alongside it. In the United States, people might be more familiar with the term medicine man, a healer whose treatments are intertwined with spirituality, and who uses herbs with powerful properties.

  Dr. Zavaleta and I met at La Azteca, a hierberia owned by Ruben Garcia, a longtime student of world religions. The two men explained that the religious and healing practices of South Texas are a mixture not only of indigenous beliefs and Catholicism, but also Judaism and Afro-Caribbean religions, a mestizaje, or mixing, of global culture. It’s the story of the Americas, broadly. As I listened to them catch up and debate definitions, I felt as if I were sitting in on a graduate seminar. Both men had abundant experience and knowledge, and Garcia kept saying the phrase “so much,” struggling to convey all of the background and complexity I couldn’t possibly glean during my short introduction to these practices.

  At the end of our conversation, they talked about the most famous curanderos from across the region, naming names they wished to be left off the record. Many had passed away.

  Garcia seemed suddenly tired at the thought of these dead healers. He worried that the art of curanderismo would soon evaporate into pharmaceutical remedies and false impersonations. None of his sons were interested in the knowledge he had to pass along, and he expected it would die with him.

  “They have other professions,” he said. “One of them works in medicine, okay, and he believes, okay, that everything have to do with pharmaceutical things and all that. They believe that. So plants is totally different. But, I mean, the secrets of the plants are so incredible.”

  The way John and Angela interpreted the mal de ojo and use of the huevo did not fall into Garcia’s definition of authentic curanderismo. While John and Angela used the egg to diagnose evil in Julissa, Dr. Zavaleta said the use of an egg by a curandera would remove the ailment, and no one except a curandera would be able to divine a message by cracking the egg open.

  It was almost offensive to Garcia and Dr. Zavaleta that the case be lumped in with curanderismo, as had so many others in the past, unfairly attaching a stigma to traditions full of healing and hope. John and Angela knew only enough about curanderismo, Dr. Zavaleta said, to be dangerous.

  Like many people with paranoid delusions, John, as Dr. Morris indicated, seemed to cherry-pick aspects of the world around him and amplify them into a self-fulfilling and fungible logic, in which he was selected for an important purpose—the “chosen one,” as he told many relatives and friends. Religious symbols, altars, and concepts such as possession made it into the mix of John’s delusions, but so did horror movies and his hamsters. Religion is a natural fit for the delusions of schizophrenics because it relies on unseen forces that can’t scientifically be proven. The level of religious delusions experienced by those with schizophrenia varies widely by country and culture, according to Dr. Philippe Huguelet and Dr. Sylvia Mohr of the Geneva University Hospitals. According to their article, descriptively titled “
The Relationship between Schizophrenia and Religion and Its Implications for Care,” in Swiss Medical Weekly, 36 percent of schizophrenic inpatients in the United States had religious delusions, versus 7 percent in Japan. While at times such associations can worsen patients’ symptoms or prompt acts of violence or the rejection of psychiatric care, religion can also help many to cope and stave off suicide. Curanderismo, which aims to heal, can of course mutate in the mind of an ill person. But it could help them as well.

  “Curanderismo—it’s so pure, it’s so white, so light. There’s so much light in it,” Garcia said. When he looked at what happened on East Tyler Street, he saw only darkness.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  The End of History Illusion

  History, it seems, is always ending today.

  —AUTHORS OF “THE END OF HISTORY ILLUSION” IN THE JOURNAL SCIENCE

  John initially refused an in-person interview with me, but I felt sure that meeting him would offer something his letters did not. I worried that writing about his life without meeting him would be a disservice: without that face-to-face, he was an abstraction, a collection of words and pictures rather than a whole human being.

  I asked John if he might reconsider letting me come visit, and he wrote back, saying yes.

  I have refused to have interviews because of the reasons you know of and for some dumb reason most people take my regret and shame when talking about my kids as if I am lyeing but really it is that I can not look at a person in the face without wanting to brake down. It took a great amount of will to not lose it in the trial, since I was already emotionally drained because I cryed myself to sleep almost every night it was easyer to compose myself.

  As I prepared for our meeting, I watched video of his being interviewed in 2010 by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner in preparation for the second trial. In the tape, John sat in the corner of a blank beige room. His ankles and wrists were shackled. He wore an orange jumpsuit and rectangular, thick-framed glasses. His dark hair was thinning and slicked back, and his face was rounder and fuller than it had been seven years before, when he was arrested. He looked, from the neck up, normal.

  Thick black pouches that looked to be made of a synthetic material like nylon were over John’s hands, a security measure so he couldn’t use his fingers. The psychiatrist explained the procedure to John slowly and deliberately. John sat patiently. When asked if he understood, John told Dr. Welner that, yes, that he’d been through all of this before many times, and that he’d been tested since he was young when he was in special-education classes.

  Before the examination began, John asked if he could take his own notes.

  “I think that again,” Dr. Welner began, “if there are certain secure policies about us sitting together here, and I have no objection to you writing notes, but I’m concerned about abandoning those—”

  “It’s been done before,” John interjected.

  “I know that it’s been done before, but I’ve never met you, so if it’s been done before with us, it must have been my past life. We’re meeting for the first time. We have a videotape in order to make a record of our encounter.” Dr. Welner sounded as if he were talking to a small child. In some ways his tone made sense—he didn’t quite know John’s level of intelligence. But judging from the way John pursed his lips, he was used to being belittled this way. He looked as if he was watching an act he’d seen before and didn’t enjoy the first time.

  “It’s tiring and it kinda hurts to repeat the same things over and over again,” John told the examiner. “I don’t try to think about certain things, you know, it’s pretty hard. I know that this needs to be done so I’m going to do it.”

  The video had a disturbing symmetry. Dr. Welner was offscreen, his voice the only evidence of his existence. Like him, I asked John questions about his life, but I was always out of the frame. I had control. I listened to John, but he didn’t ask questions. He seemed to know the rules.

  The examiner’s voice was gentle, but when he started asking John questions, they seemed to hit him like stones—with a sharp and blunt force. Name this month. Now start naming the months of the year backward, starting from this month. Now memorize these three phrases. Repeat them to me. Tell them to me again in a few minutes. What’s today’s date? What medications are you taking? Where are we? Why are we here? What does it mean when someone says, “The grass is always greener on the other side”? John struggled with some of the math, but answered almost everything correctly. He seemed used to answering such questions.

  Dr. Welner moved beyond those kinds of questions, used to establish intelligence and ensure that John understood the content of the conversation, and began to talk with John about his early life. Dr. Welner asked him about dancing in high school. “I used to love dancing,” John said. “It’s just something that would make me feel better; because of all the exercise and everything I felt my mind clearer. It’s like a washing away.” He talked about his life before jail—the dances and swimming, the ROTC meetings and girlfriends—as if they were preserved in amber.

  I’d recently read about a study that showed people have a hard time predicting what they will enjoy in the future. In the journal Science, psychology researchers from Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, named this phenomenon “the end of history illusion.” Their study found that most people believe they have come to their true preferences at last and won’t change again. It’s a form of present-tense narcissism, a vision of one’s current self as the best and most advanced model possible. The researchers hypothesized that the illusion derives, in part, from the failure by most people to give time and its influence sufficient credit.

  Time is a powerful force that transforms people’s preferences, reshapes their values, and alters their personalities, and we suspect that people generally underestimate the magnitude of those changes. In other words, people may believe that who they are today is pretty much who they will be tomorrow, despite the fact that it isn’t who they were yesterday. In the studies we describe here, we showed that people expect to change little in the future, despite knowing that they have changed a lot in the past, and that this tendency bedevils their decision-making.

  John was looking back at his life. But from an outsider’s perspective, the murders created an “end of history illusion.” What could he tell the interviewer of the past seven years of his life since the murders? If his preferences had changed from age twenty-two to twenty-eight, what would that meaningfully translate to, and would anyone care?

  The study points to our inability to recognize change, even in ourselves. If people can and do change, parting from our past selves inevitably and imperceptibly, was it possible to see the John of today as someone distinct from the crime he had committed? Was it ever possible to see a person as separate from the things he or she had done, or was his crime an indispensable part of him, one that couldn’t be obscured or parted from, even for a moment? Maybe this man, the one with a knife, sweating, bloodied, with wild eyes, would stand next to him like a double for the rest of his life, leering at him and anyone who might want to talk with him again. Maybe that’s what fairness looks like—one’s mistakes are present, incapable of true erasure. The stain they leave is a warning.

  The question underscoring all these others presented itself: Did John deserve to die for his crimes? That is, the two Johns—the one who committed this act, and his present self, the one who would lie on the gurney, containing the other within. I started to feel that this decision, of whether he deserved death as punishment, was one I had to make, even if it would have no influence on the outcome. I didn’t sit on the jury that sentenced John to death, but he is not going to be killed by a juror or a judge. He is going to be killed by a representational democracy, the citizens of which support the state’s ability to wield a power usually left to forces beyond our control—the ability to decide who sha
ll live and who shall die.

  I, and you reading this, we are compelled to decide if we want to kill John.

  I need to look him in the face.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  Place of No Return

  Our time here is so short.

  —OFFICER EFRAIN CERVANTES

  I flew to Houston from the East Coast, where I was visiting family. I rented a car when I landed and drove through the soupy August heat. It ought to have taken me thirty minutes to make it from the airport to my hotel, though with bad directions and worse traffic the drive took two hours.

  Fresh cookies and lemonade were cheerfully arranged on a table in the lobby. I’m going to death row, I thought, as I took a bite of a cookie. A bartender poured a tall, cold beer in the hotel bar, which I carried up to my room. There, a king-size bed was made up, expansive and white like a clean canvas. Scented soap and lotion sat next to the bathroom sink, and a flat-screen TV was on the wall.

  I’m going to death row tomorrow.

  I slipped into bed, intending to fall asleep early. Instead I stayed up watching a movie I can’t recall.

  In the morning, I drove an hour north to the prison, a blocky series of featureless structures, ringed with shimmering layers of barbed wire, set off from a country road.

  I’d come with the basic provisions that blogs and friends recommended: a Ziploc bag containing two rolls of quarters, driver’s license, and keys. I’d dressed conservatively and brought an extra sweatshirt for the air-conditioned room.

  An officer popped the hood and trunk of the car and checked for contraband. At a small security building, another officer stripped the paper wrapping from the rolls of quarters while I walked through the metal detector. I was given a long chain with a yellow tile marked 11, and I put it around my neck. I walked through the back door, away from the first barbed-wire fence and toward the prison. Back outside, the sky was cloudy, the sun pushing through the gaps of gray. The path between the buildings was lined with flowers, zinnias, a woman later told me. Bright and healthy, and growing happily in the sunlight. I wanted to take a picture of them, but I had only my eyes. I looked at things carefully and tried to remember.