By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  But it was time to move on to the next level. The insanity plea. He would again steal the thunder from Stoner and the rest by publishing a series of articles blasting the whole concept of an insanity defense.

  Legal insanity still followed the old McNaughton rule, which required proof that a defendant did not know the nature and quality of the act and did not know that the act was wrong. Basically it was a matter of determining if the defendant could distinguish between right and wrong. If he could not, then he was declared innocent by reason of insanity. Furthermore, if a judge found that the accused was mentally incompetent, meaning he was not able to participate in his own defense, he would not even be brought to trial, no matter what crimes he might have committed.

  Lavery believed that both parts of this concept of criminal insanity—the idea of mental incompetency and the McNaughton rule as used in criminal trials—were foolish and dangerous. Or at least he believed that he was very good at spotting trends in mass thought.

  He saw it coming as the next important step in the capital-punishment issue, and he intended once again to be there in the beginning.

  The opening position would be that the whole concept of legal insanity should be abandoned. Discarded, wiped off the books. There would be no such thing as a legal-insanity defense. Every person accused of a crime, no matter how mentally ill, no matter how obvious the illness, would stand trial for the act itself. Afterward, if the defendant was found guilty, the judge would take appropriate action in sentencing the convicted person to a mental institution rather than prison.

  Criminal law would thus be protected from the present hysteria and confusion surrounding an insanity defense. More importantly, as Layery saw for his own purposes, it would correct the growing alienation of the public over the great injustice in the criminal-court procedure. People were becoming enraged as confessed murderers were declared not guilty and given a few years in a rest home.

  Derek Lavery intended to pick up these people as readers, as many of them as possible. He believed they numbered in the millions, and their numbers were growing each year.

  The MungoChessman piece would kick off the campaign. Mungo’s psychopathology would show. But the story would also list the murders in gory detail and catch the reader emotionally.

  Then, the angle: A boxed article showing how an insanity defense could be used to thwart justice. Mungo would be found not guilty by reason of insanity and returned to Willows or the like, as though nothing had happened, as though at least five people, and God only knew how many more to come, had not been butchered, were still alive. Meanwhile Vincent Mungo would be planning his next escape and his next series of human slaughter …

  STONER WAS not amused. He had gone through various stages of disbelief before the truth dawned on him. The letter was genuine. It had really been written by Vincent Mungo and sent from El Paso. The son of a bitch had taken time out from his killing to write a stinking letter, for God sake! The senator had been given an account of what was done to the bodies of the El Paso women. He still found it hard to believe. And the same went for the letter in his hand.

  He read it again: “My Master—We do your bidding. The streets will run with blood from my knife but it is your voice that commands. The demons are everywhere around me but I will win and the people will rise up at your destruction and laugh and scream. You are the devil. My knife is sharp and ready for work so you will hear from me. They cannot catch me when you can. I will live forever.”

  Stoner glanced at the signature, “V. M.” But the initials were crossed out.

  Underneath was scrawled one word: “Chessman.”

  The man was crazy. Stark raving mad. A homicidal lunatic was stalking the cities killing at will. No one was safe. No one.

  He wondered if Mungo could hold out for one more month, all he needed was another month and he’d be on his way. Then Mungo could go to hell where he came from, and where he belonged.

  The senator told his secretary to get Roger in Chicago. He intended to use the letter to whatever advantage he could before turning it over to the police.

  TWO DAYS later, on September 20, Margot Rule was officially reported missing to Las Vegas police by worried friends. It was soon learned that she had withdrawn $24,000 from her bank on September 1. Her car was found in the garage. None of her clothes seemed to be missing from her apartment.

  Nobody knew of her brief affair with David Rogers of Florida. Nor of her planned marriage to him. She had told no one.

  THE FOLLOWING day in Los Angeles the will of the late Velma Adams was filed for probate. It was found in a desk drawer in her apartment and named her good friend and manager of her beauty parlor as sole heir.

  ON SEPTEMBER 25 Dr. Henry Baylor was removed as director of Willows State Hospital and reassigned to another post. Officials termed the move routine and denied it had anything to do with the celebrated Mungo case. The reassignment was duly noted by the Hillside Daily Observer and picked up by several metropolitan newspapers.

  Dr. Baylor was reported on vacation and unavailable for comment.

  THAT FRIDAY, September 28, a credit clerk in San Francisco called the home of Daniel Long in northern California near the Willows hospital. Long knew nothing about any trouble with his credit rating and had indeed been born on November 12, 1943. No, he never made a call regarding his credit and had not spoken previously to the clerk. There must be some mistake. The clerk thanked him and afterward reported the incident to his supervisor, who told him to note it in Daniel Long’s file.

  Long discussed the strange call with his wife. They agreed it might have something to do with the time a thief broke into their home and police had suspected the notorious Vincent Mungo.

  After five days of not wanting to become involved with the police and maniacal killers, Daniel Long finally phoned the sheriff’s office in nearby Forest City. He decided it was the right thing to do.

  IN FRESNO on the evening of October 1, Lester Solis was shot to death as he stepped into his car. His brother knew the bullets were meant for him. The next morning he found out why. Police arrested a thirtysix-year-old religious freak from Los Angeles who believed that Caryl Chessman was the son of God. A member of a fanatical desert sect that believed all prisoners were latter-day saints, he hated Solis for bearing false witness against Chessman, the son of God, who came down to earth to release all prisoners but was betrayed by his own people. All men were brothers, the religious freak believed, who must rise up and kill those who do evil. Unfortunately he had killed the wrong brother.

  BY OCTOBER 2 the issue of Newstime with the MungoChessman story was already sold out. People were fearful, and they were angry. They wanted fiends like Mungo punished and they didn’t understand about mental illness or insanity when a person could walk around in society and feed himself and pay rent and function day after day. That was all they were doing. So what made him so special that he was crazy and able to get away with murder? They didn’t want to hear it. They wanted him dead.

  ON OCTOBER 3 a court order was secured to open Margot Rule’s safedeposit box in Las Vegas. Inside was found a note saying she had withdrawn money and planned to marry David Rogers of Florida. Police in that state were notified,

  DURING THE last two weeks of September and the first days of October 1973, David Rogers, alias Daniel Long, alias Vincent Mungo, alias Thomas Bishop, was extremely busy. His unholy activity caused a reign of terror unequaled before or since in a half dozen states. In San Antonio he left behind a female body almost totally eviscerated. In Houston, two more.

  In New Orleans he struck down three women. The police pathologist reported them to be the worst violations he had seen in thirty-five years. A quiet man given to understatement, he suggested that whoever had done the mutilations had lost all human feeling.

  Police well knew the identity of the satanic killer. A V or C had been carved somewhere on each victim. In addition, the MM.— method of mutilation—was the same in all cases. There was no doubt in anyone�
��s mind that the fiend was Vincent Mungo. His work became so well known that the new term M.M. joined the standard M.O. in the police lexicon. As did the word “mungo-maniac.”

  From New Orleans Bishop turned suddenly north. Straight up to Memphis and then St. Louis. Afterward three more victims were found.

  In those horrific weeks calls were made from Los Angeles to all the cities he had passed through, but the mob was having no better luck than the police. Railroad and bus stations were watched but Mungo’s face was not seen anywhere. Besides the contract that had to be honored, the mob had received unofficial requests for help from various law-enforcement authorities. A nut like that? They were happy to oblige, if only he could be found.

  THOSE SAME weeks also saw Senator Stoner going national along with Vincent Mungo. He had made it. His name was becoming a household word in the West, he had conquered the Midwest and the central states, and he would soon do the same in the East. He was being asked to talk in New York and two TV appearances had already been scheduled. The media smelled a winner. If things kept going right he was a cinch to run for the United States Senate. Or was it governor?

  Capital punishment had really caught fire. The timing was perfect, everything clicked. Mungo had helped of course, but he was no longer needed. Stoner hoped they got the son of a bitch fast, He should not be allowed to run around killing women and violating their sacred bodies. Maybe the police were inadequate, maybe they needed prodding. Perhaps he should look into that angle. It might be good politics.

  ON OCTOBER 4 Bishop arrived in Chicago. He found a cheap hotel on Dearborn and then set out to find the city. He didn’t rent a car; unlike the West and Southwest, public transportation was adequate. Nor did he want to use Daniel Long’s identity any further except in an emergency. By now they could have discovered what he had done. He needed a new identity and he intended to get one as soon as possible.

  Meanwhile he rode the local buses and trains, walked the downtown area, ate in small restaurants on side streets. Chicago was incomprehensible to him. Big, sprawling, unknowable. Everything was congested and jammed together, there were people everywhere. It was all a bit frightening, yet he found the movement of the city, and its anonymity, exciting as well. He felt as though he could remain lost for a hundred years, a thousand, and he wondered if New York would be like that.

  ON THAT same day in California, Sheriff Oates returned Daniel Long’s call to Forest City. He listened quietly as Long told him of the credit clerk and the mysterious stranger. Could it mean something? In five minutes Oates was speaking to the clerk. What day was it? Where did the call come from? What exactly was said?

  He called Long again and got his birthplace and date. Then a call to San Jose. Did a Daniel Long request a birth certificate within the past three months? Yes? Where was it sent?

  Oates could hardly believe it. The first concrete clue to Vincent Mungo’s new identity. Maybe. He felt like Columbus discovering America. Then he remembered that Columbus was seeking the Orient.

  He picked up the phone to call Los Angeles.

  Ten

  THE TEN days that shook Chicago were among the happiest in the young life of Thomas William Bishop. He was twentyfive and a half years old and had not known freedom until exactly three months before when he had walked away from a locked building behind a big wall on a dark and dangerous night. After years of waiting and months of watching he had seized the moment—rather, had made his own kind of moment, from which there would be no turning back. With the first fall of the axe his new life had begun, and he gratefully accepted the deadly mission for which he believed he was destined. More than that, he embraced it and the sense of freedom that came with his new existence. No longer would he have to sleep and wake, eat and fast, live and die by someone else’s clock, always in the shadow of the big gray wall. No more would he say yes sir and no sir and lower his eyes and hold his tongue and agree with everything said by anyone who said it. Now he would do the talking, he would make the rules regarding himself and he would do whatever struck his fancy. From now on they were the ones who had to be careful, all of them. He was the master of reality, and he held life and death in his hands.

  The sense of power was absolute and he enjoyed it absolutely. In three months he had made his way across two-thirds of the country, alone and in complete control, learning as he went, striking as he left. His wake was strewn with the butchered bodies of the enemy and as in any war of diabolic purpose, no mercy was expected and none given. From the initial murder at Willows, through the slaughter in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the war machine rolled relentlessly eastward, moving inexorably across the face of the land, unmindful of state boundaries or local jurisdiction. As the death toll mounted, as the fearful destruction increased, authorities on all governmental levels sounded the alarm. A Texas mayor deputized all males in his city. A state’s attorney general alerted the militia. The governor of Louisiana was asked to call out the National Guard. In Memphis police went on double duty, and surrounding towns imposed temporary curfews. In St. Louis all leaves of law-enforcement personnel were canceled. In a hundred cities and a thousand towns from the West Coast to the Mississippi River men were regarded suspiciously, stopped for questioning, detained for hours; in some cases, beaten and arrested. It was no time for strangers who looked anything like Vincent Mungo or accosted women or couldn’t prove their identity or ran away or acted belligerent or talked funny or even walked around.

  As the bloody trail lengthened so did the coverage by the news media, most especially television. Their appetites whetted by the prodigious publicity given the Charles Manson murders of the previous year, TV newsmen scurried about in a frantic effort to report every bizarre detail of this fresh sensation. In news circles it was an even bet at the moment that the mungo-maniac would go bigger than Manson. The story had all the ingredients: it was occurring in more than one city or state, it was affecting in one way or another a large share of the audience, and it had the forbidding elements of mental illness and violent sexuality. In short, it had everything to draw national attention and as network coverage increased, along with column space in newspapers and magazines, the nation eventually came to realize, or was led to believe, that it was locked into a secret guerrilla war with an unseen enemy who sought total destruction of at least half its population. That the enemy was one man, if indeed it was only one man, which many seemed to doubt, made the struggle no less fearful. Like the plague, the enemy was moving at will, covering more and more area, striking wherever and whenever it pleased. The outer fringes of the populace were ready to believe anything. Some science-fiction aficionados saw it as the beginning of an invasion of alien beings from another galaxy, a vastly different life form that had no use for female earthlings. Others, mostly men, saw it as just retribution for the sins of mankind.

  Law-enforcement officials nevertheless regarded it as strictly a police matter. The FBI was involved, on direct orders of the United States Attorney General; the investigation bureaus of a dozen central and western states were coordinated in a joint effort, as were police departments in all the struck cities. Thus far nothing new had surfaced beyond the fact that Vincent Mungo, rightly or wrongly, thought Caryl Chessman his father and had now taken over his father’s role in avenging himself against women. The letter to California State Senator Stoner proved that. The initials “V. M.” had been crossed out and the name Chessman written underneath, FBI lab reports concluded that the handwriting was the same as in the letters sent to Newstime. All were regarded as genuine. As to present appearance, plastic surgery had been ruled out so police and special agents at airports and train and bus depots in the larger cities concentrated on young men with heavy beards. These were politely asked to show proof of identity; if none was forthcoming they were held until identified by others. Only the clean-shaven who did not resemble Mungo were allowed to pass un ch e eked.

  The Daniel Long thread, discovered by Sheriff Oates, was just beginning to be unraveled by California author
ities. In a matter of days Los Angeles police, working back from the address to which a copy of Long’s birth certificate was sent from San Jose, would open a bank safedeposit box containing the birth certificate, dated November 12, 1943, and a picture of a middle-aged woman. Identification of the woman as Velma Adams, a beauty-salon owner who was found murdered on a road between Yuba City and Sacramento in mid-July, would add still another victim to Vincent Mungo’s growing list.

  Police would also find a savings and checking account in the name of Daniel Long in a different bank. A further search would produce a record of a driver’s license issued to Daniel Long in Los Angeles at the end of July. The picture on the license application would show a young man with a full beard. A car-rental clerk in Phoenix would describe Daniel Long as a bearded man wearing dark wraparound sunglasses. The conclusion would be inescapable. Vincent Mungo was traveling as Daniel Long, with a complete set of identification including a driver’s license and credit card and checkbook. His new identity, sent to the proper authorities, would not be given to newsmen for a few days so that Mungo might be caught somewhere posing as Long. If not, the story would then be circulated in the hope that Mungo, forced to discard the Long name, would have no other sets of identification. Without papers, a bearded young man, he would soon be caught. Maybe.

  For the moment, however, all that was known about the California maniac was that he had been in and out of mental hospitals for much of his young life and was now free again and killing women without apparent design or pity.