Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

With his agreeable candour, Artie told Dr. Allwin of all the early little things – about swiping money from a lemonade stand he operated with another boy, about taking his big brother’s Liberty Bond, for surely the doc had already been told. Artie told of things with Judd – the Edison electric car, the bricks in windows, the time a cop shot at them, the frat house in Ann Arbour.

  “Wasn’t there something else, in between?”

  “No -?” How much did the doc know from Judd, from the family?

  “And wasn’t there a trip to Oak Park?”

  Why, yes, it had slipped his mind. Artie smiled and told of the time he and Judd planned to hijack the cellar of Joe Stahlmeyer’s house, full of Canadian stuff worth twenty dollars a bottle. Artie had a revolver along and also -

  He caught himself up.

  “Also?” probed Dr. Allwin.

  Oh, he had taken along a taped chisel for a billy.

  “Was that the first time you fixed one up?”

  Yes, but the expedition had been a flop.

  “Why the tape around it?”

  “Well, that way it made a good handle to grip, for a billy, and solid steel inside,” he ended, with a little gasp, a hiss.

  How many questions stood awakened in the mind of Dr. Allwin? The discarded chisels that had been rumoured found in the neighbourhood, the tale of a young man living nearby, drowned, a supposed suicide…

  In that little hiss, there was a release of more, much more than some story of playing robbers. It belonged with the suddenly unfocused, evasive look in Artie’s eyes. It belonged to the small raging boy inside, the imprisoned child – to an Artie in this moment almost contacted, almost released to scream out his murderous tantrum: I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you say I can’t!

  Dr. Allwin said quietly, while closing his notebook, “And there were still other times, with a chisel?”

  Artie’s smiling cunning look had returned. “Am I supposed to tell you?”

  The doctor screwed on the top of his pen. “We’re only here to help you, Artie.”

  “What if you found out something that wouldn’t help me?”

  Perhaps they had better stop for the day, the doctor said.

  The alienists had come to a deep cleft, and there they halted. Should they let themselves down into every crevice, or would it be best to leap over, perhaps to improvise a bridge of ropes? Storrs and Allwin must have debated long and earnestly over this dilemma, and in Wilk’s apartment the discussions must have gone far into the night.

  Can we judge their decision? We may say, from a purely medical viewpoint they were obliged to make every effort to explore the furthest crevice. And yet, taking into account the attitudes of that day, the prejudices and the limited understanding, their hesitation can be comprehended. They had been engaged – and the word was to be their own – in forensic medicine. In legal medicine. As experts. Did not the legal problem therefore remain a foremost factor in their work?

  Their task was to study the minds of these two boys in relation to a, specific crime. Would it help to know the details of other crimes? Lawyers and doctors agreed: that this was for the family to determine.

  Uncle Gerald came to Artie’s cell.

  “All right,” Artie said, inhaling avidly – he had run out of cigarettes and the damn screw had been holding him up a buck for a pack – “all right, there were other things.”

  “Judd know about them?”

  “He always acted as if he had it on me. Anyway, for one of them.”

  Their eyes met. “Big?” his uncle said.

  “Big.”

  “How many, Artie?”

  “You could say – four.”

  The deeds hung between them.

  “I don’t want to know,” Uncle Gerald said. “Don’t tell me, Artie. They might get me on the stand.”

  “What about the docs?”

  According to law, Uncle Gerald said, only this case was to be tried, no others.

  “Wouldn’t it make a difference if they call me nuts or not?”

  His uncle reflected on that point. It could make all the difference. “Maybe you could tell the doctors you did – a certain number of things, without saying what they were.”

  What would the family want? Artie asked, with the sudden genuine-sounding throb that could come into his voice. He didn’t wish to hurt Mumsie, the family, any more.

  In such moments, you had to believe him.

  When next he talked with Dr. Allwin, Artie kept to the line suggested by his uncle. Yes, there had been other things.

  “These other – incidents – major outbreaks, shall we say? How many were there?”

  “Four.”

  “Let’s refer to them as A, B, C, and D.” Carefully the doctor went on to remind Artie that the press attributed certain specific crimes to him, or to him and Judd.

  “That’s a lot of hooey!” Artie exclaimed, but then there came over his face his peculiar sidewise smile. “I never had anything to do with that monkey-gland robbery,” he stated. Nor had he had anything to do with the handless stranger. But, significantly, the two unsolved student deaths were not mentioned.

  Now, in the night-long meetings in Wilk’s study, the entire defence position had to be re-examined. If Artie were a multiple murderer, wouldn’t he be seen by any jury as demon-ridden, demented? And if Judd were not a participant in the other crimes, was it fair to link him completely to Artie in a joint trial? Judd had, rather, participated as one enslaved, enthralled by a madman.

  Surely this possibility must have been examined, discussed, a thousand times discarded, only to be examined again by the lawyers, during the days when Storrs and Allwin were intensively at work in the Wilk dining room, writing their report.

  But was separation really advantageous? As both Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher pointed out, Horn was no fool. He could ridicule and riddle any plea that Judd was a mere accessory. The public reaction to such a move would be only of heightened anger – a legal “trick”. Nor could it be certain that the revelation of added horrors would cause Artie to be judged insane; rather, a jury might become even more determined to destroy so dreadful a fiend.

  Fortunately, Dr. McNarry arrived during those days. His solid presence, Willie Weiss told me in a tone close to adulation, helped to clarify everyone’s thinking. Everything about him seemed full-packed – his clothing seemed packed with his large bulk, and his huge head, with veins standing out on the bald dome, seemed packed with knowledge.

  He had studied Charcot’s work at the Salpêtriére in Paris, he had been to Nancy, he had known Jung in Switzerland and Bleuler in Vienna and lastly, the great Freud himself; his pioneering book on psychoanalysis was therefore not the work of a quick enthusiast who had picked up the latest jargon, but of a lifelong practitioner who had travelled the same paths, the head of one of the world’s great mental hospitals.

  McNarry had his first few interviews with the boys, so as to obtain his own, unaffected impressions; then the three doctors conferred. McNarry’s material was much the same, the king-slave fantasies from Judd, the master-criminal fantasies from Artie, the childhood patterns. Eli Storrs laid out the results of his tests, eagerly watching for McNarry’s reactions to the new type of study, the apperception chart.

  At once the doctors got into an intense discussion involving McNarry’s central concept of the psyche. He did not believe in separating emotion and intellect, as in two compartments. All belonged to a single biological entity that reacted as a unit.

  “Well, but that unit has different aspects. Our tests obviously show us that different people react differently…”

  “Yes,” McNarry at last agreed, there was a feeling-aspect, which might be called emotional in tone, and there was an intellectual aspect -

  Gerald Straus, with an apologetic laugh, pressed them. Would all this help to show a jury that the boys were insane?

  Equally smilingly, Dr. McNarry read him a short lecture on insanity, as though for an average juryman. “People think
that at one moment a man is sane, and at the next he goes insane. To a doctor, insanity means nothing but mental derangement, sickness, and just as there are all degrees of physical sickness, from a common cold to paralysis, there are all degrees of mental sickness, from a mild neurosis to a psychoneurosis to a psychosis.”

  Uncle Gerald nodded. “How sick can you say they are?”

  “We have concluded” – the elderly Dr. Allwin took over – “that each of the patients is suffering from a functional disorder. Artie’s could develop into dementia praecox, a splitting of the personality, and Judd’s is in the direction of paranoia.”

  “How far gone are they?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Dr. McNarry said, somewhat brusquely, and Uncle Gerald subsided. McNarry had just come from talking to Judd about his philosophy. The philosophy itself he dismissed as a mere camouflage, just a smattering of things Judd had read. (As Willie Weiss reported it to me, “a mishmash”.)

  But all these philosophies of Judd’s, Eli Storrs observed, tended in one direction – paranoia. “Look how the mind seizes what it needs!” Like his tests, they proved that Judd was emotionally a child.

  “That’s interesting,” McNarry said. “You could interpret Nietzschean omnipotence the same way. It belongs to the magic phase.” This was the phase in which the infant, by crying, discovered that everyone around him would do what he wanted. And had this phase ever ended, for Judd?

  Suddenly beginning to understand, Uncle Gerald remarked, “Why, Max told me that kid didn’t even lace his own shoes until he was fourteen years old. He’d have the nursemaid do it.”

  He had felt there was “something wrong” with the boys, but now, suddenly through his own story about lacing the shoes, he saw the doctors’ meaning. Something in him was saying, Why, it’s really true! What we’ve been claiming is really true. All the better.

  The psychiatrists had moved on to a discussion of Artie and his game of “detective”. Artie had offered Allwin the explanation that he still played it only because he had to have a game he could play with his little brother Billy. But to Dr. McNarry, Artie had no longer rationalized the childish game. He had told of playing it with Judd, and even when he was alone, walking through the streets, imagining he had accomplices with him, giving them hand signals. Dr. McNarry added, “I believe he even built it up for me; he’s cunning.”

  “No, he really does it!” Uncle Gerald broke in. “Why, a year ago last fall he shadowed me all the way home one night. He came up behind me when I got to my house – he had a black handkerchief tied around his face like a real hold-up man – and he said, ’stick ‘em up!’ Of course I knew it was Artie and I just told him to run along home.”

  “That’s very interesting,” the alienists were saying to him; but to Uncle Gerald the whole case was now coming into focus. Just now, the alienists had made him see that it was a wild child inside of Artie, an ungrown child that could not yet fully understand the difference between right and wrong, that had dictated Artie’s behaviour. But could the alienists make an ordinary jury understand this complicated mechanism?

  The Feldschers, with Max and James, had come in, and now the discussion expanded, yet always kept returning to the main point: How could you make a jury see that the boys were “functionally disturbed”?

  “We’ll have to make it stronger,” Uncle Gerald insisted.

  “Well, you can’t claim that he has completely lost contact with reality,” Dr. McNarry pointed out. “Don’t forget there will be psychiatrists on the other side.”

  The very thought of this started McNarry off on his pet tirade. For McNarry couldn’t understand how any psychiatrist could bring himself to testify for the prosecution: The entire aim of psychiatry was to unravel the causes of behaviour. And if all behaviour had a cause, where was guilt? How, then, could any doctor become a prosecutor?

  “At least you and Jonathan Wilk believe the same thing,” Ferdinand Feldscher said. “But what jury does?”

  McNarry shook his head. He had only the gloomiest view of making a jury see it, in this case. For every jury had to act as a sample of the society from which it was drawn. This was inevitable, it was the very heart of the jury system. “What you will get is the herd critique through the medium of the jury.”

  He reminded them of several cases in his own experience, cases in which insanity was self-evident. There was the Father Schmidt case – a priest who had cut a woman into seven parts, on the altar. Yet the jury had declared him sane, in order that he might be hanged. “Juries invariably regard the insanity plea as a dodge. They discredit the experts.”

  What, then, was to be done?

  What about Wilk? Uncle Gerald reminded them that, after all, Wilk was the greatest jury lawyer in the world. Surely he could make a jury see it. Even one juror would be enough.

  Wilk had gone to bed with a cold; the entire group moved into his bedroom.

  It was then that Edgar Feldscher revived the thought of going to a judge with a plea of guilty.

  His brother said, “I’ve never ruled it out, in my mind. But all you’ve got is a plea for mercy on the grounds of their youth.”

  “No,” said Edgar, tentatively. “Why couldn’t we present the entire psychiatric evidence, as we would before a jury?”

  The others looked at him as though he had forgotten his ABC’s. If a judge could be convinced of insanity, he was bound to call a jury.

  “Yes, yes, but short of insanity-”

  Wilk’s head had lifted. “Mitigating circumstances,” he croaked hoarsely, pulling himself up to a sitting position. “A judge is duty bound to listen to mitigating facts.”

  “Yes, but how can you raise the question of their mental condition, in mitigation, without coming to the question of insanity? And the minute you touch on that…”

  It was indeed the paradox, and McNarry did not hesitate to express his lifelong disgust with this curious situation in which a jury of laymen, the persons least equipped for it, were always the ones who had to decide whether a person was insane.

  Uncle Gerald had a thought. “All right, suppose a judge does at some point call a jury. We’re no worse off. In fact, we’re better off, because this already shows the judge doubts their sanity.”

  It was an impressive point. “And then, we’ve still got Jonathan, here, before a jury,” said Ferdinand Feldscher.

  “We’re not doing this as a show for me,” Wilk said.

  Edgar Feldscher drew them back to the original idea. “We don’t have to raise the insanity issue, temporary or anything. We claim they are suffering from a functional disorder, short of a psychosis. These boys are not responsible for their behaviour-”

  “Who is?” Wilk interjected.

  “And if we are careful to keep the argument short of insanity, isn’t it a mitigating condition?”

  It would be a thin line to tread – to convince the judge that they were sick, but not sick enough to be called insane. The doctors would have to avoid the very word.

  “Don’t worry,” said McNarry. “It’s not really a medical word. I never use it if I can help it.”

  “There’s one thing I like about this plan,” said Max Steiner. “It’s honest to plead guilty. It’s the plain truth.”

  Wilk drawled, “It’s no easier to make people believe the plain truth than a lie. But I suppose it is always more comfortable.”

  Uncle Gerald was still uncertain. It was so risky to rest everything on one man instead of twelve.

  “He’s a good man,” Wilk commented.

  “He’s never hanged anybody,” Ferdinand Feldscher said.

  And so they agreed, but with one condition. “We’d better make sure how the boys feel about it.”

  Wilk wanted to see for himself how they reacted. Artie nervously agreed. They knew best. Judd had a touch of resistance. Pleading guilty, didn’t that mean merely going up to be sentenced? Then the case would never really be heard?

  No, Wilk assured him; in the mitig
ating evidence, everything would be heard. All his ideas would be heard.

  Thus it was that the defence made the astonishing announcement of a change of plea. In a quick, unspectacular hearing, the boys were brought into court, to declare themselves guilty.

  The Hearst papers were the most blistering. So even Wilk was afraid to go before a jury! And then Mike Prager carried an “inside” story. The defence case had collapsed, he declared on “good authority”, because the thousand-dollar-a-day alienists for the defence refused to declare the boys insane.

  We all found ourselves crowding into Wilk’s office. Wilk looked harrowed, his voice was hoarse. He gestured to the newspapers on his desk. On top was the American, with its scarehead: THEY’LL HANG, HORN VOWS.

  “Now, fellows,” Wilk said, “if you want to know why we had to change the plea, there’s the answer. You’re all part of it. How can we hope to find even one unprejudiced citizen for this jury?” He would plead evidence in mitigation, merely that their lives might be spared.

  What mitigating evidence? we all demanded.

  If they had been boys from impoverished homes, Wilk pointed out, we would all agree there were mitigating conditions. But wasn’t there something beyond the social condition, a lower common denominator, something that forced the boys to kill? That was what the psychiatrists were trying to find.

  A dozen voices demanded, Was it true that the psychiatrists had reported there was nothing wrong with the boys? The report of Dr. Allwin and Dr. Storrs was a private one, Edgar Feldscher put in sharply.

  “Why?” demanded Mike. “What are you trying to hide?”

  There might be some private family matters that had nothing to do with the crime, Feldscher said calmly.

  Mike retorted, “There’s nothing private about murder.”

  Wilk addressed Mike directly. “Now why do you want to go printing stuff you don’t know is true?” He slapped his hand down on the newspaper. “What do you want to make up stuff like this for?”

  If anything was made up, Mike taunted, then let Wilk release the facts to disprove it.