Adam Shelley then proceeded to rape Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein in front of her husband. While this was going on Dr. Frankenstein managed to work free from his bonds and threw himself at Adam Shelley. They struggled and Adam hoisted the Doctor overhead and threw him down the flight of stairs, where he suffered major cranial trauma.
Elizabeth Frankenstein attempted to flee out an upstairs window, but was caught by Adam Shelley. Leaving the house, with Mrs. Frankenstein over his shoulder, he stopped and dipped his fingers in Henry Frankenstein's blood and left a message on the mirror by the front door: "If not love, then fear me."
He then fled into the rapidly falling December snow. Henry Frankenstein managed to drag himself out of the front door of the house, where he was seen by a neighbor across the street who called the police.
Adam Shelley became the immediate object of an intensive statewide manhunt. The next day he was cornered in a nearby barn and captured. Before he surrendered, he held the body of Elizabeth Frankenstein overhead and broke her neck.
Prediction of Future Violence
Drawing on the psychological and medical findings, the social history and the recreation of the most recent violent episode, we offer the following predictions.
Violence exists as a potential within us all. There is a constant dynamic flux between those forces that inhibit its expression and those motives that it expresses. Violence occurs when a particular external situation or set of relationships destabilizes the balance of forces within an individual. A prediction of future violence must attempt to describe those forces, the stability of their balance, and what the likelihood is of a provocative situation occurring.
Adam Shelley is a permanently disfigured young man who interprets the reactions of others to his appearance as rejection. Although at one point in time that rejection may have resulted in hurt and sadness, it now sparks anger and rage. Adam's appearance is not alterable. Frankly, it is unlikely that the response to him by others can be altered either. Therefore social interactions pose a constant risk of provocation. Therapy to alter his responses to others is unlikely to be successful.
None of the emotions of "conscience" seem to operate within Adam Shelley at this time. He has shown no remorse or guilt over any of his actions. Whatever rudimentary capacity for empathy he may have had now seems gone. He views himself as something other than a human being, reducing his capacity to identify with them. Fear of retribution does not seem to motivate him. Indeed, it may be argued that he would seek out and welcome retaliation as an indirect form of suicide.
Adam's history of violence shows an increase in recency, severity and frequency. One may characterize the early episodes as accidental or retributive, but the deaths of William Frankenstein and Victor Moritz were merely expedient as means to his end, and that of Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein lapsed into the sadistic.
Conclusions
In sum, Adam Shelley seems a boy lacking in internalized inhibitors to violence, likely to run into many provocative situations, and now with a history that makes it almost certain that he will resort to violence again. Technically, the crimes that Adam Shelley are charged with constitute a mass murder, although his transportation of Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein argues for a classification as a spree killer. It is the opinion of this team that if allowed to return to society Adam Shelley would pose a constant high risk to kill again.
A number of mitigating conditions were explored in regards to criminal intent. No unusual brain pathology was noted, nor any neuro-hormonal disorders. Diminished capacity due to substance abuse, intentional or otherwise, was ruled out. Intelligence was deemed adequate to distinguish right from wrong. There was no evidence of psychotic process or command hallucinations. The crimes in question cannot be deemed to have arisen from an irresistible impulse. The original threat occurred in a letter mailed three weeks prior to the attack. There is clear evidence of planning and intentionality. During the crime, Adam Shelley reiterated his motive when he wrote in Henry Frankenstein's blood, "If not love, then fear me."
Recommendations
Reviewing the evidence accumulated by this team we must conclude that Adam Shelley was criminally responsible for the deaths of William, Alphonse, Elizabeth and Henry Frankenstein and Victor Moritz. We also conclude that he poses a constant high risk to kill again if released into society.
Despite his age, we cannot find any reason to reduce his sentence or grant a stay of execution.
M. Waldman, M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Forensic Services Behavioral Sciences Division
Goldstadt Medical Center
CHUI CHAI
S.P. Somtow
▼▼▼
THE LIVING dead are not as you imagine them. There are no dangling innards, no dripping slime. They carry their guts and gore inside them, as do you and I. In the right light they can be beautiful, as when they stand in a doorway caught between cross-shafts of contrasting neon. Fueled by the right fantasy, they become indistinguishable from us. Listen. I know. I've touched them.
In the 80s I used to go to Bangkok a lot. The brokerage I worked for had a lot of business there, some of it shady, some not. The flight of money from Hong Kong had begun and our company, vulture that it was, was staking out its share of the loot. Bangkok was booming like there was no tomorrow. It made Los Angeles seem like Peoria. It was wild and fast and frantic and frustrating. It had temples and buildings shaped like giant robots. Its skyline was a cross between Shangri-La and Manhattan. For a dapper yuppie executive like me there were always meetings to be taken, faxes to fax, traffic to be sat in, credit cards to burn. There was also sex.
There was Patpong.
I was addicted. Days, after hours of high-level talks and poring over papers and banquets that lasted from the close of business until midnight, I stalked the crammed alleys of Patpong. The night smelled of sewage and jasmine. The heat seeped into everything. Each step I took was colored by a different neon sign. From half-open nightclub doorways buttocks bounced to jaunty soulless synthrock. Everything was for sale; the women, the boys, the pirated software, the fake Rolexes. Everything sweated. I stalked the streets and sometimes at random took an entrance, took in a live show, women propelling ping-pong balls from their pussies, boys buttfucking on motorbikes. I was addicted. There were other entrances where I sat in waiting rooms, watched women with numbers around their necks through the one-way glass, soft, slender brown women. Picked a number. Fingered the American-made condoms in my pocket. Never buy the local ones, brother, they leak like a sieve.
I was addicted. I didn't know what I was looking for. But I knew it wasn't something you could find in Encino. I was a knight on a quest, but I didn't know that to find the holy grail is the worst thing that can possibly happen.
I first got a glimpse of the grail at Club Pagoda, which was near my hotel and which is where we often liked to take our clients. The club was on the very edge of Patpong, but it was respectable—the kind of place that serves up a plastic imitation of The King and I, which is, of course, a plastic imitation of life in ancient Siam . . . artifice imitating artifice, you see. Waiters crawled around in mediaeval uniforms, the guests sat on the floor, except there was a well under the table to accommodate the dangling legs of lumbering white people. The floor show was eminently sober ... it was all classical Thai dances, women wearing those pagoda-shaped hats moving with painstaking grace and slowness to a tinkling, alien music. A good place to interview prospective grant recipients, because it tended to make them very nervous.
Dr. Frances Stone wasn't at all nervous, though. She was already there when I arrived. She was preoccupied with picking the peanuts out of her gaeng massaman and arranging them over her rice plate in such a way that they looked like little eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
"You like to play with your food?" I said, taking my shoes off at the edge of our private booth and sliding my legs under the table across from her.
"No," she said, "I just prefer them crushed rather than whole. The pea
nuts I mean. You must be Mr. Leibowitz."
"Russell."
"The man I'm supposed to charm out of a few million dollars." She was doing a sort of coquettish pout, not really the sort of thing I expected from someone in medical research. Her face was ravaged, but the way she smiled kindled the memory of youthful beauty. I wondered what had happened to change her so much; according to her dossier, she was only in her mid- forties.
"Mostly we're in town to take," I said, "not to give. R&D is not one of our strengths. You might want to go to Hoechst or Berli Jucker, Frances."
"But Russell . . ." She had not touched her curry, but the peanuts on the rice were now formed into a perfect human face, with a few strands of sauce for hair. "This is not exactly R&D. This is a discovery that's been around for almost a century and a half. My great-grandfather's paper—"
"For which he was booted out of the Austrian Academy? Yes, my dossier is pretty thorough, Dr. Stone; I know all about how he fled to America and changed his name."
She smiled. "And my dossier on you, Mr. Leibowitz, is pretty thorough too," she said, as she began removing a number of compromising photographs from her purse.
A gong sounded to announce the next dance. It was a solo. Fog roiled across the stage, and from it a woman emerged. Her clothes glittered with crystal beadwork, but her eyes outshone the yards of cubic zirconia. She looked at me and I felt the pangs of the addiction. She smiled and her lips seemed to glisten with lubricious moisture.
"You like what you see," Frances said softly. "I—-
"The dance is called Chui Chai, the dance of transformation. In every Thai classical drama, there are transformations—a woman transforming herself into a rose, a spirit transforming itself into a human. After the character's metamorphosis, he performs a Chui Chai dance, exulting in the completeness and beauty of his transformed self."
I wasn't interested, but for some reason she insisted on giving me the entire story behind the dance. "This particular Chui Chai is called Chui Chai Benjakai . . . the demoness Banjakai has been despatched by the demon king, Thotsakanth, to seduce the hero Rama . . . disguised as the beautiful Sita, she will float down the river toward Rama's camp, trying to convince him that his beloved has died . . . only when she is placed on a funeral pyre, woken from her deathtrance by the flames, will she take on her demonic shape once more and fly away toward the dark kingdom of Lanka. But you're not listening."
How could I listen? She was the kind of woman that existed only in dreams, in poems. Slowly she moved against the tawdry backdrop, a faded painting of a palace with pointed eaves. Her feet barely touched the floor. Her arms undulated. And always her eyes held me. As though she were looking at me alone Thai women can do things with their eyes .that no other women can do. Their eyes have a secret language.
"Why are you looking at her so much?" said Frances. "She's just a Patpong bar girl . . . she moonlights here . . . classics in the evening, pussy after midnight."
"You know her?" I said.
"I have had some . . . dealings with her."
"Just what is it that you're doing research into, Dr. Stone?"
"The boundary between life and death," she said. She pointed to the photographs. Next to them was a contract, an R&D grant agreement of some kind. The print was blurry. "Oh, don't worry, it's only a couple of million dollars . . . your company won't even miss it . . . and you'll own the greatest secret of all . . . the tree of life and death . . . the apples of Eve. Besides, I know your price and I can meet it." And she looked at the dancing girl. "Her name is Keo. I don't mind procuring if it's in the name of science."
Suddenly I realized that Dr. Stone and I were the only customers in the Club Pagoda. Somehow I had been set up.
The woman continued to dance, faster now, her hands sweeping through the air in mysterious gestures. She never stopped looking at me. She was the character she was playing, seductive and diabolical. There was darkness in every look, every hand-movement. I downed the rest of my Kloster lager and beckoned for another. An erection strained against my pants.
The dance ended and she prostrated herself before the audience of two, pressing her palms together in a graceful wai. Her eyes downcast, she left the stage. I had signed the grant papers without even knowing it.
Dr. Stone said, "On your way to the upstairs toilet . . . take the second door on the left. She'll be waiting for you."
I drank another beer, and when I looked up she was gone. She hadn't eaten one bite. But the food on her plate had been sculpted into the face of a beautiful woman. It was so lifelike that . . . but no. It wasn't alive. It wasn't breathing.
▼▼▼
She was still in her dancing clothes when I went in. A little girl was carefully taking out the stitches with a seamripper. There was a pile of garments on the floor. In the glare of a naked bulb, the vestments of the goddess had little glamor. "They no have buttons on classical dance clothes," she said. "They just sew us into them. Cannot go pipi!" She giggled.
The little girl scooped up the pile and slipped away.
"You're . . . very beautiful," I said. "I don't understand why ... I mean, why you need to . . ."
"I have problem," she said. "Expensive problem. Dr. Stone no tell you?"
"No." Her hands were coyly clasped across her bosom. Gently I pried them away.
"You want I dance for you?"
"Dance," I said. She was naked. The way she smelled was different from other women. It was like crushed flowers. Maybe a hint of decay in them. She shook her hair and it coiled across her breasts like a nest of black serpents. When I'd seen her on stage I'd been entertaining some kind of rape fantasy about her, but now I wanted to string it out for as long as I could. God, she was driving me mad.
"I see big emptiness inside you. Come to me. I fill you. We both empty people. Need filling up."
I started to protest. But I knew she had seen me for what I was. I had money coming out my ass, but I was one fucked-up yuppie. That was the root of my addiction.
Again she danced the dance of transforming, this time for me alone. Really for me alone. I mean, all the girls in Patpong have this way of making you think they love you. It's what gets you addicted. It's the only street in the world where you can buy love. But that's not how she was. When she touched me it was as though she reached out to me across an invisible barrier, an unbreachable gulf. Even when I entered her she was untouchable. We were from different worlds and neither of us ever left our private hells.
Not that there wasn't passion. She knew every position in the book. She knew them backwards and forwards. She kept me there all night and each act seemed as though it been freshly invented for the two of us. It was the last time I came that I felt I had glimpsed the grail. Her eyes, staring up into the naked bulb, brimmed with some remembered sadness. I loved her with all my might. Then I was seized with terror. She was a demon. Yellow-eyed, dragon-clawed. She was me, she was my insatiable hunger. I was fucking my own addiction. I think I sobbed. I accused her of lacing my drink with hallucinogens. I cried myself to sleep and then she left me.
I didn't notice the lumpy mattress or the peeling walls or the way the light bulb jiggled to the music from downstairs. I didn't notice the cockroaches.
I didn't notice until morning that I had forgotten to use my condoms.
▼▼▼
It was a productive trip but I didn't go back to Thailand for another two years. I was promoted off the traveling circuit, moved from Encino to Beverly Hills, got myself a newer, late-model wife, packed my kids off to a Swiss boarding school. I also found a new therapist and a new support group. I smothered the addiction in new addictions. My old therapist had been a strict Freudian. He'd tried to root out the cause from some childhood trauma—molestation, potty training, Oedipal games—he'd never been able to find anything. I'm good at blocking out memories. To the best of my knowledge, I popped into being around age eight or nine. My parents were dead but I had a trust fund.
My best friends in the suppor
t group were Janine, who'd had eight husbands, and Mike, a transvestite with a spectacular fro. The clinic was in Malibu so we could do the beach in between bouts of tearing ourselves apart. One day Thailand came up.
Mike said, "I knew this woman in Thailand. I had fun in Thailand, you know? R&R. Lot of transvestites there, hon. I'm not a fag, I just like lingerie. I met this girl." He rarely stuck to the point because he was always stoned. Our therapist, Glenda, had passed out in the redwood tub. The beach was deserted. "I knew this girl in Thailand, a dancer. She would change when she danced. I mean change. You shoulda seen her skin. Translucent. And she smelled different. Smelled of strange drugs."
You know I started shaking when he said that because I'd tried not to think of her all this time even though she came to me in dreams. Even before I'd start to dream, when I'd just closed my eyes, I'd hear the hollow tinkle of marimbas and see her eyes floating in the darkness.
"Sounds familiar," I said.
"Nah. There was nobody like this girl, hon, nobody. She danced in a classical dance show and she worked the whorehouses . . . had a day job too, working for a nutty professor woman . . . honky woman, withered face, glasses. Some kind of doctor, I think. Sleazy office in Patpong, gave the girls free V.D. drugs."
"Dr. Frances Stone." Was the company paying for a free V.D. clinic? What about the research into the secrets of the universe?
"Hey, how'd you know her name?"
"Did you have sex with her?" Suddenly I was trembling with rage. I don't know why. I mean, I knew what she did for a living.
"Did you?" Mike said. He was all nervous. He inched away from me, rolling a joint with one hand and scootching along the redwood deck with the other.
The Ultimate Frankenstein Page 15