By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  Officials were dismayed by Owens’ death, for they had hoped that he would lead them to his companions. The investigation settled into the routine but little was immediately learned. The guards could not identify their assailants from mug shots, which meant that the five men had no known criminal records. Nor did fingerprints from the truck and abandoned Buick match any existing ones on file. Owens hadn’t belonged to any particular gang known to police. He had been a regular patron of several bars around the city, in which he had always behaved himself well enough. His wife knew none of his friends. The search continued but what was needed was a break.

  On March 26 the break came in the form of a man who walked into a showroom in Glendale and bought a new car for three thousand dollars. The man paid cash. Elated, the salesman completed the transaction and afterward routinely reported the matter to the police, as was the custom with all large cash transactions. The man had presented his driver’s license on which were his name and address. An investigation determined that he was a drifter with no visible means of support. His name was Hank Green.

  The following day Green was taken to Los Angeles police headquarters, where he was questioned about the Overland robbery. At first adamant in his denials, Green relented when the guards made a positive identification. “You got me,” he announced finally. “Make a deal and I’ll talk.”

  Within hours the police knew everything about the armored-car hijack, including all the names: Carl Hansun, Don Solis, his younger brother Lester, and Johnny Messick. Harry Owens? “Don shot him. But he deserved it.” Why? “He told us he knew all about cars.”

  Police bulletins quickly went out, and the manhunt was on throughout California and the western states. Within two weeks three of the men were captured, Messick in San Diego and the Solis brothers in Fresno. Police recovered $210,000 of the stolen money.

  Only one man escaped. Carl Hansun, 36, a wounded war veteran, got away with one hundred thousand dollars and has never been heard of since that day. Because of his war injuries he is presumed long dead. But the file on the Overland robbery in Highland Park, California, in February 1952 has never been officially closed.

  During those long months of the investigation and then the trial of the four men that June, life was pure hell for Sara Owens. She blamed Harry for everything. He married her when she didn’t really want to get married, he was the cause of her having the boy when she didn’t ever want any children. If he was not the father he was still responsible, for if she hadn’t been with him that night she wouldn’t have been raped by Caryl Chessman. And now, after four years, almost five years, of nothing but misery and no money her husband had to get mixed up with gangsters and get himself killed. Sara really didn’t care anything about that; it was the shame she had to go through every day that his name was in the papers. The neighbors knew, the police knew, everybody knew who she was. The wife of a gangster who was so dumb that he got killed by his own gangster friends. For Sara, it was the last straw. Obviously the gods had abandoned her for good. Hopeless and now alone, she determined to leave Los Angeles forever.

  On August 1, 1952, in the midst of one of the worst droughts of the century, Sara Bishop, as she now called herself again, moved out of the city. She got on a bus with her four-year-old boy and traveled north to San Francisco, where she found a small apartment and a job as a waitress. At night she would tell the boy about his two fathers, one a rapist and the other a bank robber. She would jeer him and taunt him and take out all her animosity on the boy. One day she brought home a brown leather strap.

  The following year Sara moved to a small rural community two hundred miles above San Francisco. She lived in an old clapboard house at the edge of town, a quiet, secluded existence she found neither lonely nor depressing. True to her vow, she had nothing to do with men. In the daytime she worked as a waitress in a local diner, sleeping with the boss—an old, fat man with greasy hair—once a week in order to keep her job. During those few hours she would simply shut her eyes.

  At night she would regale the boy with horror stories about terrible monsters who did bloodthirsty things to people; all the monsters were men and all the people were women. Somehow the monsters were always named Caryl Chessman or Harry Owens. As the years slipped by, all the monsters gradually became one, Caryl Chessman, for Harry Owens was dead and forgotten but Sara would read now and then of Chessman in a new appeal or stay of execution. These things she would read to the boy, always with frightful additions of her own, always about women suffering and men hurting them terribly. After such stories she would always beat the boy with the leather strap. Over the years the stories increased and grew more fearsome.

  In 1956 Sara Bishop moved farther out of town to a small farmhouse three miles away. The house had no electricity, but it did have running water and a massive woodburning stove in the kitchen. Her nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away. To get to town she bought a used car with a hundred dollars she had saved. Toward the end of that year she also bought a heavier leather strap.

  Sara had quit the waitress job several years earlier, after she burned the old man’s private parts with a cigarette one night as he lay sleeping. She then went to work for the town carpenter, answering his phone and minding the tiny shop. When he became strongly amorous one night in a drunken frenzy, she almost severed his left arm with a handy axe. A quick succession of such jobs and incidents gradually brought her the reputation of being a somewhat demented woman. She was finally no longer bothered by the menfolk, much to her relief. She was also no longer employable, for Sara had indeed become strange in her ways. Shrewish and withdrawn, mistrustful of everyone, she made few friends and invited no one to her house. Supporting herself by sewing and an occasional weekend in San Francisco, leaving the boy alone at home, she barely managed to survive. But at least Sara, to her way of thinking, was not being bothered by anyone. That is, except for the boy.

  That the boy was growing vexed Sara no end. From four years old to six years to eight years, he was swiftly becoming the hated man. Sara believed she loved him in a motherly way, though she seldom showed it. She also hated what he was, and this she showed more and more. The boy often missed school and would sometimes show up with bruises and welts. He was bright enough but very quiet and given to strange tantrums. Some people worried about the boy whenever they thought of him, but it was in a time when children were the sole property of parents, and in an area where neighbors never interfered in family matters. The boy belonged to his mother and it was all, as people said, in the hands of God.

  During the fall of 1957 Caryl Chessman was again in the papers. His third book had been published, one he had reportedly secreted out of prison after he had been ordered to publish no more. On her next trip to San Francisco Sara bought the book, just as she had bought his two earlier books, Cell 2455 Death Row and Trial by Ordeal. Sara was not much of a reader but she liked to leaf through Chessman’s books, thinking of him locked up like an animal and waiting to die. The thought pleased her. She often imagined herself watching the men in San Quentin stalking their tiny cages, alone and helpless. She wished all of them would die.

  Sara was also impressed by Chessman’s publicity. She saw him as some kind of celebrity, this man who was talked about by famous people all over the world. For a while she even kept a file of those names she recognized in the papers who had stood up for Chessman. Soon the file got so big she either had to throw it away or start a second one. She burned the file in the big wood stove. But she kept the books and the newspaper stories about him. And whenever she thought of it, the one thing she couldn’t understand was how a rapist could get all those famous people to say great things about him while no one ever said a word about his victims.

  That night when Sara got home from San Francisco she read parts of the book she had just bought. It was called The Face of Justice and on the back cover there was a big picture of Caryl Chessman’s face. It was smiling. Sara studied the face a long time, with its dark hair and dark eyes and big nose.
Then she took some paper and began writing about herself, of the rape ten years earlier and her marriage to Harry Owens, of her early life and its youthful dreams, of her later life with all the fear and hatred of men. For hours she scribbled word after word, painfully, tearfully, on the kitchen table. When she finished she folded all the pages in half and stuck them, unread, into Chessman’s book. Then she put the book away in a cardboard box with other things in the closet.

  Afterward she beat the boy for a long time with the heavy leather strap. She beat him and cried over him and she beat him and told him horrific stories of men and then she beat him again. For the next week the boy was not seen in school. When he returned his mother reported that he had been ill in bed with a cold.

  On May 27, 1958, Caryl Chessman was taken from San Quentin under heavy guard to Sacramento, the state capital, in connection with an appeal to the state’s highest court. It was his thirty-seventh birthday. Sara heard about the appearance the night before on the radio and she decided to go see him. Arriving in Sacramento in midmorning she drove directly to the court, where she found pickets demanding an end to capital punishment and the release of Chessman. Flustered by all the activity, she sat in her car, uncertain. Finally gathering her courage she went up the steps to the entrance, where a guard politely informed her that no visitors were allowed in the courthouse that day. She tried to tell him that she was not a visitor, that she knew Chessman—she wanted to scream out the word “intimately“—and had to see him. The guard, unmoved, would not listen. He had his orders, and would she please move along.

  Defeated, Sara sat on the lawn. Chessman was in the building and she couldn’t get to him. Over the years the focal point of all her hatred had been transferred from her husband, long dead, to Chessman. Sara had visions of killing him, of shooting him with a gun and taking a knife and cutting off his private parts and then shooting him again just to make sure he was dead. Harry was dead. Why wasn’t Chessman dead? It wasn’t fair. They should let women have a gun and teach them how to use it. Then women could get together and kill all the men, and everybody would live happily ever after. It just wasn’t fair.

  When the commotion started she stiffened. Chessman—he must be coming out. She ran back to the entrance as a group of men rushed out of the building. There he was, it had to be him. She stared at the face. After eleven years she was seeing him again, for it was by now firmly fixed in Sara’s mind that she had seen him that night so long ago. She kept staring, then she was shouting, she didn’t know what. A moment later he was gone, the face was gone, and she was alone again.

  An empty feeling gnawed at her all the way home. She felt drained, and desperately weary. She kept telling herself that somehow she should have killed him. She was dead in a way, and he should be dead too. Twice before reaching home she pulled over to the side of the road and cried.

  In the months that followed, Sara’s horror stories to the boy became more and more fearsome and disjointed: monsters were seen everywhere, hideous, unrelenting monsters in the shape of men destroying women in gruesome sinister detail. Carnage was rampant, pain was normal, death was release. Sara would squeeze the boy’s scrawny shoulders as her intensity mounted, clutch his head, pull his hair, pummel him, cuff him, beat him. Horror-filled eyes huge now, mouth foaming, she would scream at him, castigate him, warn him. Monsters! In the house, everywhere. Too late! Shadowy mindless things seeping through the walls. Blood demons pouncing, crushing, wrenching muscle from bone. Insane paws ripping flesh apart, huge gaping mouths gulping whole intestines, heart, liver, kidneys split open strap beating beating screaming both of them screaming now in nameless terror slowly sinking eyes unseeing frenzy-flushed pain-pleased bodies slowly sinking sinking softly into silent sleep.

  In September Sara bought a whip. She told the man she was going to buy a horse. He told her she should buy the horse first, but Sara bought only the whip.

  Winter came early that year. Sara and the boy stayed in the house most of the time, and the fire in the big wood stove burned brightly. Her mind began to wander a bit; at times she didn’t know the boy, sometimes she called him by other names. She grew even more short-tempered with the boy, shouted at him constantly, found fault with everything he did. She began to curse him and to make him the monster in her stories instead of Caryl Chessman. The whippings became more frequent.

  One night late in December the boy’s mind snapped. He put his mother, still conscious, in the wood stove and watched her burn, watched her body fry and burn to bleached bone.

  Three days later a customer came to the house to deliver some cloth and found the boy sitting on the floor in front of the dead fire. He was swaying back and forth and whining in a strange animal language that could not be understood. In his hand was a bit of charred flesh that he had been eating. His upper body was full of cuts, now festering and caked with dried blood.

  When the police came they took the boy away.

  The killing of Sara Bishop never made the metropolitan dailies and was listed in the local paper only as a woman found dead in her home. But everyone in the small community knew what had happened. The boy was quickly judged to be hopelessly insane, in the fashionable language of the day, and sent to a nearby state mental hospital. The house three miles out of town was closed and left vacant.

  In the hospital the boy was among the first to be placed in a new wing, separate from other facilities, for disturbed children who had killed. At the beginning he was isolated, and he would spend his time screaming and falling to the floor as though being dreadfully attacked. At other times he would sit quietly and softly tell himself stories of monsters and demons. If anyone approached he would immediately stop. Sometimes he would just whine for hour after hour, sitting swaying on the cold cement floor.

  Often the boy had to be forcibly restrained, for he would attack others, children and adults alike, suddenly and without apparent reason. Eventually he came to be regarded by the attendants as truly crazy and dangerously homicidal. As the decade of the fifties drew to a close, the boy was more alone than he had ever been in his young life.

  On February 19, 1960, Governor Edmund Brown of California granted Caryl Chessman a sixty-day reprieve. Some thought it to be politically motivated, since the President of the United States was touring South America, and the government quite naturally didn’t want anti-American demonstrations while Eisenhower was there. During this last reprieve the California state legislature refused to substitute mandatory life imprisonment for capital punishment. Chessman then petitioned the California State Supreme Court for a stay of execution on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment. On May 2 at 8 A.M. the State Supreme Court met in extraordinary session to render its verdict on Caryl Chessman. At 9:15 the verdict was announced. By a vote of 4 to 3, it denied Chessman’s final petition. There was no more time to go further. After twelve years on San Quentin’s death row, after forty-two appeals going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, after eight stays of execution reaching back to 1952, Caryl Chessman was executed within an hour after announcement of the court’s decision. He was thirty-eight years old.

  Chessman had made his own arrangements for disposal of the body. It was cremated the following day at Mount Tamalpais cemetery in nearby San Rafael. Caryl Chessman had no known living relatives.

  On the day of Chessman’s execution, protest demonstrations were held in various parts of the world and words of condemnation poured into government channels. In a state mental hospital some two hundred miles north of San Quentin, a boy who was believed by his dead mother to be Chessman’s son was still learning to cope with a hostile environment. Now barely twelve years old, he knew nothing of the moment of execution, but in his disordered mind of vague shapes and sinister shadows one bit of memory nevertheless stood out clearly. He had a father whose name was Caryl Chessman. That he once had another father was long forgotten. In the boy’s scarred memory of monsters and demons from hell, of dreadful pain and punishment, of women who suffered and men
who made them suffer, his father’s name was always on his mind. He wanted to be just like him.

  In the years that followed the boy secretly collected whatever mention he could find of his father in newspapers and magazines. There was not much in the limited printed matter allowed on the ward. But whatever few things he found were treasured by the boy, and he folded them into tiny scraps and hid them in a little wallet he had once been given and which he always carried with him.

  Often late at night he would take them out to read yet another time, then fold them again and tuck them away. Over the next decade and more, as the boy grew into adolescence and manhood, learning the ways of the world around him and the ploys necessary to get what he wanted, the few scraps of paper slowly yellowed with age and finally shredded into nothingness.

  Outside the walls, the world had changed. Political assassination had become a weapon. The Vietnam war had toppled a government and brought about more than one revolution. Manners and morals had radically altered. A minority race had forged a new consciousness on the country. Men had been to the moon. Everywhere the tempo was faster, more hectic. Amidst all the turmoil and confusion, the name of Caryl Chessman was largely forgotten, though capital punishment had been steadily losing ground during the decade. In many ways the sixties was a time of national nightmare. It was hoped that the seventies would be better; if not better, then at least more peaceful.

  On May 5, 1973, radio station KPFA, the flagship station of the Pacifica Foundation in San Francisco, broadcast a two-hour program on capital punishment. One of the participants spoke movingly of Caryl Chessman’s life and death, and of his losing battle against execution. Through local affiliations the program was heard in several other areas of California.