By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  Miles away two police officials were facing the problem of finding a demented murderer and an escaped mental patient. Lieutenant Spanner had responsibility for the killing in his jurisdiction, Sheriff Oates for the escape from a state institution. The only thing they knew for sure was that it was the same man. And that his name was Vincent Mungo.

  Three

  DURING THE month of July 1973 California was flooded with pictures of an escaped maniac named Vincent Mungo. His photograph appeared in daily newspapers from one end of the state to the other. His face was seen on the television evening news in all metropolitan centers. Posters with his picture and description were circulated to police in most California communities. In little San Ysidro on the Mexican line, border guards were alerted lest he slip across the bridge to Tijuana. Along the entire coast, at all bridge and tunnel checkpoints, on all roads leading to neighboring states, police were searching diligently.

  Actually the manhunt began on the evening of July 4. As people returned from a holiday visit with friends or a doubletime shift at the plant, they learned of the murder and escape. Killings were common enough of course, and men would always seek to flee any kind of imprisonment, but the word “maniac” has a menacing quality to it, a feeling of dread, that quickly caught the public’s attention. The story appeared in the big evening papers, and the following morning’s editions carried comments of hospital officials and the sheriff in charge of the investigation. Several dailies of July 5 ran front-page interviews with prominent psychiatrists on the danger to the public. In smaller communities local papers picked up the story from the wire services they used. By the end of that first week millions of California residents had heard of the demented killer, and if most of them were unable to remember the name or the face, they nevertheless tended to be more cautious among strangers, at least for the moment.

  In Hillside the town’s single newspaper headlined the escape and followed it with a blistering attack on the Willows hospital administration for allowing such a thing to happen. The editor reminded readers that municipal authorities had been trying for years to have the state facility moved elsewhere. Where? “We don’t care!” thundered the editorial, as long as the threat was removed from the townspeople of Hillside. The next day’s follow-up story tersely announced that the police lieutenant in charge of the murder investigation had placed himself unavailable for comment.

  In Sacramento the governor declined to speculate on the case beyond expressing his full confidence in the police.

  Everywhere the press was having a field day reporting on the oddities that always accompany such notoriety. A skywriting pilot lettered the word “maniac” in huge smoke columns across the afternoon sky, then dropped a ton of garbage on the unsuspecting community below. Several papers wryly observed that he was just another flying nut and not the one being sought. In Eureka a woman living alone wrote a note stating that she was afraid the maniac was entering her home. She then crawled into her freezer, perhaps to hide, and pulled the door shut. She was frozen solid when they found her.

  A young man with dark features was arrested on a San Francisco street for emitting bursts of obscenity to passersby and to the police who apprehended him. Seemingly unable to stop for any length of time, he was held in jail for seven hours as the maniac before it was discovered that he was an epileptic suffering from the bizarre Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, which forces its victims to shout obscenities. A food journal reported that the famous fruit-of-the-month club of Modesto was planning to start a subsidiary operation to be called Nut of the Week. And in Los Angeles a local toy manufacturer announced that his company was going to market new wind-up dolls called Mungo Monsters.

  In response to increasing pressure from public officials the experimental unit at Willows was closed down and the patients were absorbed into other, more traditional, wards. The new two-story building was shut temporarily until future use could be determined. Recent transfers were returned to other institutions. Dr. Walter Lang was reassigned elsewhere on the recommendation of Willows’ director, Dr. Henry Baylor, who was most cooperative with state medical and correctional authorities. Everywhere the pressure was being felt, from Willows to California’s famed Atascadero State Hospital. Patients were watched more closely, programs scrutinized more rigidly. Hospital personnel across the state held their collective breath, knowing that the vastly uncomfortable public spotlight would not long shine on them.

  An enterprising reporter soon located Vincent Mungo’s relatives in Stockton. A maternal grandmother and two spinster aunts were all he had left except, they told the reporter, for some ne’er-do-well people on the father’s side who lived somewhere in the East. And who knows how many half-brothers and -sisters from that man, added one aunt spitefully. She was admonished but stuck to her belief.

  Mungo’s parents were dead, the mother choking to death on some mislodged food when he was fifteen and the father committing suicide a year later. Before that he had been a normal healthy boy, so the reporter learned, except for the times he had to be “helped” in hospitals. How many times? Oh, maybe six or seven before his parents died. He would act strange sometimes, shouting, and then quiet, and then all that shouting again. He did strange things too. Like what? Oh, he’d pour kerosene on neighborhood cats and set fire to them. And he’d dig big holes and cover them over so the other kids would fall in. Yes, and one time the little Smith girl, used to live across the street, she fell in one of his holes and nobody could find her. But Vincent wouldn’t tell. Took them a whole day to get her out.

  What about when he sawed off the planks on the seesaw in the park after they told him he was too big to ride on it? You see, it’s not he was a bad boy. Just that sometimes he acted a little strange.

  “Once he took some paint that must’ve been down in the cellar, and he painted these Nazi signs all over that Jewish cemetery on Allen Road. Oh, I tell you, I was so mortified.” The grandmother barrumphed. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you, Abigail, that he did not do that.” Abigail protested. “He did too. Everybody knows he did.” She looked to her sister for support. “No,” the grandmother said with finality. “He would not do that. Vincent was a good boy.”

  After the death of his parents Vincent Mungo seemed to fall apart. He became abusive to everyone and increasingly unruly. His actions were frenetic and disorganized; often he would mumble incoherently to himself or storm through the house and neighborhood. Yet he did nothing unlawful, nothing of a criminal nature. School tests placed him below average intelligence. Hospital mental examinations indicated he was manic-depressive and paranoid.

  In the three years following his father’s suicide Mungo was briefly hospitalized four times. His grandmother and aunts tried their best for the boy, keeping him home with them, taking care of his needs. One aunt secretly offered herself sexually, thinking that he might be frustrated in that way since he was quite ugly and unappealing to girls.

  Nothing worked, even with the best of intentions. Mungo became increasingly disoriented, his abusiveness sometimes flashing into violence. He began fighting with other youths. As his moods became more frightening, his sense of reality more fragile, his relatives saw him slipping away from them until the day came when they were no longer able to control him. Reluctantly they committed him to a state institution.

  “He hated the hospital, all hospitals,” his grandmother said quietly, “but there was nothing else we could do.”

  “When he left he cried,” said the aunt, “and told us he knew he was never coming back. But we thought it was best for him. In those places they could watch him and help him get better. We thought that someday he’d come back to us all cured.”

  The other aunt shook her head sadly. “He never got any better.” Her head kept moving. “He never got any better,” she repeated.

  The grandmother dried her eyes with a flowered handkerchief. “We hoped—” Her voice cracked. She looked around helplessly, suddenly old and very tired. “Now this,” she said
softly.

  The reporter wanted to know if they expected Vincent Mungo to come back home. The women didn’t think so. He had felt betrayed by them for committing him. In five years he hadn’t written to them. Would he possibly return in order to hurt them? Certainly not. He was not violent unless provoked. All those stories in the papers calling him a maniac, some kind of horrible fiend, they were all lies. He was sick, yes, mentally ill, but not to the point of harming others—he was never like that. The brutal murder at the hospital? They were at a loss to understand it. That was not the boy they knew. Maybe something happened to him in the hospital, something terrible that made him turn bad. Maybe they made a mistake in committing him, but who can tell these things. Who knows what will happen?

  “You must understand one thing,” said the grandmother as the reporter was leaving. “Vincent was a good boy when he was small, and even at the end when he was here with us. He never hurt anybody, not really. If he changed later on”—she dried her eyes again—”if he changed, then it was something we don’t know anything about. God knows we did our best for him.”

  Thomas Bishop, Mungo’s “defenseless victim,” as one paper called him, was not so lucky, at least in terms of relatives. He had none. No one who knew of him, anyway. The Los Angeles Times had one of its people check his background. His father died in a robbery attempt when he was three, he killed his mother when he was ten. The mother’s parents had separated when she was a child; the father disappeared and was never heard from again, the mother was killed in an automobile accident several years later. The child, Sara, the only issue of the marriage, was adopted by her uncle, the mother’s only brother; there were no sisters. The uncle was now dead, as was his wife.

  On Bishop’s father’s side, his grandfather was dead; his grandmother, paralyzed and legally blind, lived in Lubbock, Texas. The father had three brothers; one killed in the war, one missing in action and presumed dead. The third, a hopeless victim of mongolism, had died years earlier in a Texas state institution. There had been one sister, murdered by persons unknown at age sixteen.

  As the search for Bishop’s killer continued, the net was widened to include neighboring states. Circulars were sent to police in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, even to Idaho and Utah. Pictures were shown to interstate bus drivers, ticket agents, airline personnel. Citizens in rural communities were asked to note any strangers living in woods. Women were told to be wary of anyone asking for food.

  In Gaines, Idaho, the local television station left a picture of Vincent Mungo on the screen when it finished its programming for the evening. In this way townspeople could see his face all through the night, not a particularly pleasant thought for some. And in Elko, Nevada, the girls in the town’s five bordellos were told to watch out for any strange customers. “Stranger than what we got now?” one wanted to know.

  Across the country in Washington, D.C., the National Rifle Association, coincidentally or not, sent a mailing to its members of the standard description of a person. On the card was a drawing of a man; around the drawing were the twelve things to note in describing someone: name, sex, race, age, height, weight, hair, eyes, complexion, physical marks such as scars, habits or peculiarities if any, and clothing, including hat, shirt or blouse, jacket or coat, dress or pants, shoes, and jewelry, such as rings and watches. Whatever the motivation, people were looking for Vincent Mungo.

  By mid-July the police net had caught several dozen men who answered to the description of the escaped maniac. A few were close enough to be brothers, the rest bore general resemblances. All had one thing in common: they were not Mungo.

  On the morning of July 7 a man was shot to death by a nervous homeowner in Bakersfield. Investigation revealed the dead man to have been a plumber’s helper who was working in the cellar at the request of the homeowner’s wife. She had neglected to tell her husband, who fired his pistol when the intruder didn’t answer his inquiry. The dead man had been deaf.

  In Ventura a woman waited behind a door for a midnight burglar. When he entered the room she stuck a knife in his back, then called police to report she had caught the killer. The man was dead when they arrived. He had been a former suitor of the woman, intent on winning her back even if he had to sneak into her house to talk to her.

  On July 10, San Francisco police shot a suspect fleeing the scene of a robbery. He was of average height and weight, had brown hair above an ugly face. He wore a watch and a birthstone ring set in onyx. When questioned in the hospital he refused to say anything. Police were jubilant until it was determined that he was Robert Henry Lawson, a bank robber wanted by the FBI.

  Two days later, in the most bizarre incident connected with the escape and disappearance of Vincent Mungo, a body was found on a little-used road on the outskirts of Fairfax. The head was missing and so were the arms and legs. A short-sleeved work shirt and cotton pants covered the torso, the pants crudely cut above the knees with a scissors. In the shirt pocket was a scribbled note stating “This is Vincent Mungo.”

  There were no identifying marks on the torso—no scars, no cysts, no tattoos. The medical examiner approximated the age as being about twentyfive and the height and weight as average, about 5 feet 9 inches and 150 pounds. He could go no further. Police noted the approximation as fitting Mungo’s description, but without additional proof there was nothing more they could do. After a fingerprint check that proved negative the note was sent to James Oates of the California Sheriffs Office in Forest City.

  No one ever came forward to claim the body. It was placed in a freezer locker set year-round at 39 degrees in the Marin County morgue. A padlock was put on the locker until such time as the body was identified or claimed. The file on the grisly discovery has been kept open and the details are a matter of public record.

  Besides those who resembled Mungo enough to be picked up by police, and those who innocently or otherwise became ensnared in the dragnet, there were some who involved themselves for one reason or another. At least fifty men walked into police stations to give themselves up. Each was Mungo. Others, perhaps not wanting to appear in public, called and demanded to be arrested over the phone. Either through a misdirected sense of guilt or a pathological need for punishment, most of these men convinced themselves that they were the killer. Others were of course mere publicity seekers grabbing at the spotlight, even if only momentarily, and willing to pay the inevitable price.

  The most tragic of the confessions occurred in Fresno during the second week of July. A woman in her mid-twenties, with brown hair and very pronounced masculine features and mannerisms, announced to police that she was Vincent Mungo. She told them a story of how she had been in and out of institutions since childhood, first posing as a boy and later as a man. She had fooled everybody into thinking she was male, so she said, and she had done this because she knew herself to be a man trapped inside a woman’s body. Now she was turning herself in to be punished, she had to be punished because she had killed. The police treated her kindly and escorted her home. In the house they found a two-year-old girl dead in the bathtub. The mother had drowned her daughter in the belief that no one would care for the child when she was once again put away in the institution from which she had escaped.

  On July 15 a man was wounded and captured during an armed robbery in Portland, Oregon. It was his seventh holdup of local shops in as many days. In each he announced to the proprietor that he was the deranged killer Vincent Mungo. For those who hadn’t heard the name the gun in his hand worked almost as well. He would then threaten to return if they reported the robbery, going into the most graphic details of how he would kill them. After he left, the shopkeepers quickly called the police, money being an even stronger motivation than fear.

  His general description matched that of Mungo. Though he wore a beard, his face resembled the picture on the flyers received by the Portland police earlier. California authorities were notified, and deputies from the Sheriffs Office flew to Portland to interrogate the prisoner. Hopes were raised in Sac
ramento, in Forest City and Hillside, as well as elsewhere around the state.

  In the guarded hospital room the wounded man told police only that he had read of the manhunt and had used the name to terrorize his victims. Beyond that he would say nothing. Some officials believed—hoped—this to be the lie and the earlier version the truth, but continued questioning produced no further answers. He could not be persuaded to talk about himself, nor could he be trapped into giving details of the escape unknown to the general public.

  When the routine fingerprint check returned from the regional center in Denver the following morning, the reason for his silence became clear. He was a wanted felon with three warrants out on him in as many states for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Hopes crushed, the deputies sadly returned home from yet another false alarm.

  It soon became obvious to California authorities that their insane killer had escaped again, this time from their manhunt. At least from the initial casting of the net. Vincent Mungo was nowhere to be found. He was not in the big cities, he was not in the small towns, he was not in the woods or mountains, and he had not crossed over into another state. He had simply disappeared, or he was so well secluded that it amounted to the same thing. Apparently without money or friends, and with a face quickly recognized by peace officers anywhere, he had succeeded in eluding capture. That he had lasted the first three days was miraculous; that he had remained at large for several weeks was beyond comprehension. Yet he was somewhere within the state— he just had to be.

  A stakeout had been placed round the clock on the home of Mungo’s relatives in Stockton, but he failed to show there. Another was laid at the nearby home of a man he had once threatened to kill, again without result. Police watched movie houses in the San Francisco Bay area, movies being a favorite pastime of Mungo. They checked penny arcades and amusement parks, other favorite haunts. They even looked into the hobby shops, since glue-sniffing had been his chief vice as an adolescent. No matter what was pulled into the net, their quarry slipped through.