A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Best, Tina

  23

  BEGINNING IN MID-JULY 1993, I COMMUTED REGULARLY BETWEEN New York and Manassas, Virginia, interviewing dozens of people who were directly or tangentially connected to the Bobbitt story: the couple’s lawyers, their doctors, their media advisers, their relatives, their friends, their neighbors and coworkers—Lorena’s female associates in the nail-cutting salon, and John’s cargo-loading buddies who had been working with him at the depot on the day before his misfortune and who were known in the trucking trade as “lumpers.” I also interviewed the police sergeant who had discovered John’s penis in the weeds, and the female police officer who found the bloody knife that Lorena had tossed into a trash bin, and the detective who was overseeing the investigation.

  The latter was forty-nine-year-old Peter Weintz, a gravel-voiced man of six feet three inches and 260 pounds who smoked four packs of Marlboros daily and whose antipathy toward lawbreakers once extended to his arresting and imprisoning his own son. Weintz’s son, who had been sixteen at the time, had been heavily engaged in drugs, alcohol, and sometimes in stealing. After driving off one day with his father’s car and two cases of beer, he was apprehended by Weintz and escorted to jail. Following his son’s release, Detective Weintz invested about thirty thousand dollars toward his rehabilitation, which would turn out to be successful.

  When I first made arrangements to meet with Detective Weintz, I anticipated a difficult interview. I had been told by a few local journalists that he disliked dealing with the press. But I found him to be approachable and candid, and since he had been the first official to interrogate Lorena Bobbitt after she had surrendered to the police on the day of the cutting, he had a sense of her state of mind and her deeply personal remembrance of what had occurred just before, during, and after her attack on her husband on June 23. Detective Weintz had tape-recorded what she had told him, and six weeks later, at the preliminary hearing on August 4, which I and dozens of other media representatives attended at the county courthouse, he read aloud to Judge Paul F. Gluchowski the transcription of Mrs. Bobbitt’s statement.

  The purpose of the preliminary hearing was not to address her guilt or innocence but, rather, to determine if there was sufficient evidence against her to support the prosecutor’s claim that she had “maliciously” cut her husband “with intent to maim, disfigure, disable, or kill,” and should therefore ultimately be brought to trial for committing a felony. The prosecutor summoned four police officers to attend the hearing and offer evidence against her. The first officer called to the witness stand, Cecil F. Deane, exhibited to the court the photographs he had taken of the bleeding and bandaged John Bobbitt as the latter lay on a gurney in the emergency room shortly after Deane’s arrival there at 5:15 on the morning of June 23. The second officer, Michael Perry, testified that he had retrieved the severed section of the penis along the roadside at approximately 6:15 a.m., had placed it in a Ziploc bag with ice, and then delivered it by ambulance to the hospital. The third officer, Sindi Leo, confirmed that the red-handled fillet knife that was presently on display on a table in front of Judge Gluchowski’s bench was indeed the knife that she had found at around 8:30 a.m. in the trash can in front of the nail salon that employed Lorena Bobbitt. And the fourth officer, Detective Weintz, recited from the transcipt of Lorena Bobbitt’s testimony that he had obtained from her at the Manassas police station on the afternoon of June 23.

  Weintz quoted her as saying that her husband had returned intoxicated to their apartment at around three o’clock in the morning. He had been accompanied by one of his boyhood friends from Niagara Falls, New York, who was staying over on the couple’s sofa in the living room. After her husband had closed the bedroom door and had fallen asleep beside her for about an hour, he woke up and took off his clothes—and, despite her protests, he forcibly removed her panties and proceeded to rape her. “I tried to scream or do something, to push him,” she told Detective Weintz, “but I couldn’t because he’s so heavy for me.” Later, as her husband drifted back to sleep, she slipped out of bed, put on some clothes, and walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. Seeing a block of knives on the counter—“I was angry,” she recalled to Detective Weintz—she took one of them, held it in her hand, and returned with it to the bedroom. “I asked him if he was satisfied with what he did,” she said, “and he just—half asleep or something—did not care about my feelings.… He always has orgasm and he doesn’t wait for me to have an orgasm. He’s selfish. I don’t think it’s fair. So I pulled back the sheets, then did it.”

  As Detective Weintz continued with his reading of the transcript, squinting through the aviator glasses that framed his hazel eyes and rested high on the bridge of his bulbous nose, Lorena Bobbitt sat in front of him at the defendant’s table, next to her attorney. She said nothing, although she occasionally lowered her head and wept, allowing her long wavy dark hair to hang down along the sides of her face, touching her shoulders, enshrouding her as if she were wearing a mantilla. I was getting my first look at her. She was delicate-boned and petite (five-two and ninety-five pounds, one hundred less than her five-eleven husband); she wore neither jewelry nor makeup, and had on a long-sleeved belted purple dress of modest design that was buttoned at the throat. When she was not weeping, she appeared to be praying—her lips moving slowly, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes cast down. She projected an image of innocence and vulnerability; and while I reminded myself that her small manicured fingers and her slender wrists had in a split second directed a knife through her husband’s manhood, I believed that she would later prove to be convincing as a witness in her own defense, instilling doubt in the minds of the jurors that she could have willfully done what the prosecutor had charged her with doing.

  I had often tried to interview her prior to seeing her at the preliminary hearing, but both her lawyer and her media adviser had been uncooperative. I later learned that her media adviser had promised her story exclusively to Vanity Fair, which would feature her in a photo spread done by the noted photographer Mary Ellen Mark, along with a lengthy article written by Kim Masters. The issue would be published in the fall or early winter, presumably coinciding with the start of Lorena Bobbitt’s trial. Her media adviser had also come to an understanding with the producers at ABC-TV for her to be interviewed on the weekly 20/20 television program sometime in late September. In the meantime, her attorney announced that she had received dozens of phone calls and letters of endorsement, mostly from women, volunteering to contribute to her legal expenses and to assist her in other ways. An article in the Washington Post—under the headline A SYMBOL OF SHARED RAGE—described her as emerging into a “feminist folk heroine.” It quoted a thirty-one-year-old dress shop worker in Washington, Rose Maravilla, as saying, “I will be livid if they put her away.” Also expressing support for her in the article was thirty-six-year-old Evelyn Smith of Maryland, who had shot her cantankerous husband to death in 1991, had been acquitted by a jury in 1992, and had recently begun a foundation to assist battered women. In a column in Newsweek magazine, the author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, “If a fellow insists on using his penis as a weapon, I say that, one way or another, he ought to be swiftly disarmed.”

  On the day before Lorena Bobbitt’s appearance at the preliminary hearing, her husband had been indicted by a grand jury on the charge of marital sexual abuse, and, while awaiting the announcement of his trial date, he was released on a five-thousand-dollar personal-recognizance bond. His attorney, who accompanied him while he was being booked and fingerprinted, later spoke to the press and emphasized his client’s quarrel with Lorena’s version of the truth. “The only fact that is not in dispute is the fact that she committed the heinous crime of mutilation against my client,” the attorney said; and Bobbitt’s media adviser repeated the statement that had earlier been distributed in the name of John Bobbitt: “Contrary to a few published reports and the desperate excuses of my wife, Lorena, I did not attack her the night in question … she will have to
answer for her actions in criminal court.” Bobbitt’s doctors, who had released him from the hospital a month earlier, explained that he was urinating without a catheter but remained numb below the cut. One of the doctors told me privately that Bobbitt had been given a copy of the porn magazine Chic, hoping that Bobbitt might be aroused by the photographs of erotically posed nude women. So far this had not happened. As John Bobbitt walked to and from the court building, a reporter from the Potomac News noted that he was taking “long strides.” He was nevertheless trailing his wife insofar as gaining widespread public support.

  Sidney Siller, the founder of the National Organization for Men, a thirteen-thousand-membership group begun in 1983, told a Washington Post reporter that John Bobbitt lacked demonstrative backers because men “don’t come out and show support in the same way women do.” Alvin S. Baraff, director of the MenCenter counseling firm that started in Washington in 1984, defined the pro-Lorena campaign to the Post reporter as the “ultimate in male bashing,” and he added, “I think they are championing a true criminal. This woman does not deserve any support. This case is another indication of reverse discrimination and gender bias.”

  While I had so far been gathering information in Virginia for less than three weeks, and knew that my early impressions might be altered as I extended my stay and learned more about this case, which the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer called “politically correct revenge,” I thought that at least some of John Bobbitt’s image difficulty with much of the public and the press was due to his inability to speak out effectively in his own behalf, being hampered by a congenital disorder that prompted him to repeat his words again and again, often in a hasty and garbled manner. He was the son of a mentally deficient Polish-American mother who resided in Niagara Falls, New York, and a father from Oklahoma who was partly Native American and had abandoned the family when John was four or five years old. I also believed that John Bobbitt’s physical appearance—his weight lifter’s torso, his close-cropped haircut, his square-jawed, hazel-eyed, tattooed-armed, blue-collared, white working-class handsomeness, which had once appealed to the recruitment sergeant who had enlisted Bobbitt into the Marine Corps in 1987—was what lent credibility to the typecasting efforts of his wife’s defenders to portray him in the media as a militaristic pretty-boy brute who had behaved so abominably toward his diminutive wife that she finally gave him what he had deserved. When he was out of work, which he frequently was after leaving the Corps, he had spent much of his time and money barhopping at night with other young, minimally educated, minimum-wage white males like himself. If there was a national poll seeking to identify America’s least-cared-about category of men, this element would have probably headed the list. Unlike black men, who could attribute a lack of achievement to racial prejudice, there were no easy excuses for these whites who were frequently scorned as “trash” and who, unlike other minorities, lacked political defenders, affirmative-action qualifications, and the social concern of the larger population. They were an endangered species of misfits, obsolete American buffaloes ill-prepared to long survive in the quickly changing and highly technical climate of a nation in a period of ever-decreasing need for brawn except in contact sports, and in which the very nature of traditional masculinity as a worthy and singular definition was being debated, doubted, and often linguistically outmoded by the 1990s generation of young middle-class and upper-middle-class men and women from academia, politics, the law, and the media. As influences of national policy and opinion, these professionals not only mocked but sought to remake and modernize the manners and morals of lower-class men like John Bobbitt, and they no doubt believed, unless he could prove otherwise in court, that he was as his wife said he was.

  Lorena Bobbitt was cheered by crowds of women as she walked out of the courthouse at the conclusion of the preliminary hearing. The prosecutor’s evidence against her was ruled sufficient by Judge Gluchowski to force her to stand trial at a later date; meanwhile, she was free on bail. She smiled slightly as she passed bystanders and camera crews, walking arm in arm with the two female friends who had remained close to her throughout her ordeal and had been helpful to her ever since she had come to live in the United States and study at Northern Virginia Community College in 1987.

  One of her companions was her employer at the nail salon, an attractive thirty-five-year-old blonde named Janna Biscutti, who had initially hired Lorena on a part-time basis six years earlier to help care for Janna’s young son. Lorena had then been seventeen and not very fluent in English. She had been in Virginia for only a few months, and had been boarding with a Latin American immigrant family, having left her own family behind in Venezuela. She had been born in Ecuador in 1969, moving to Venezuela at the age of five with her parents and a younger sister and brother. Her father had found work in Caracas in a laboratory that made dentures. After she had graduated from high school in Caracas and had arrived in the United States to enroll at the community college in Virginia, her main hope was to become a dentist someday.

  When not attending classes at the college, Lorena worked as a daytime nanny in Janna Biscutti’s large home in Fairfax, Virginia. Janna, who had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, as Janna Abell, had made considerable amounts of money operating nail-sculpturing salons in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Janna had dropped out of two colleges in Kentucky and a third one in Tennessee after deciding that she no longer wished to become a plastic surgeon or a dermatologist. She opened her first salon as a nineteen-year-old in Vienna, Virginia, in 1977. In that same year she married a six-foot-four-inch civil engineer named Errol Biscutti, an Australian-Italian who had come with his family to the United States during his boyhood. One year after her marriage and now using her husband’s surname, Janna Biscutti started a second salon in Georgetown, Virginia, and then a third in Great Falls, Virginia, in 1980. Janna would leave her husband in 1984 but would retain custody of their only child, Kyle Biscutti, who was four years old in 1988, when Janna employed Lorena to serve as the boy’s nanny. Janna also taught Lorena how to drive, instructing her in a Mercedes 300-D sedan automatic so she could transport Kyle to and from his preschool activities. After Lorena had worked in this capacity for a little more than a year, and had improved her English—aided by regularly watching the children’s TV show Sesame Street at Janna’s home with Kyle—Janna released her from her child-rearing role (since Kyle had gone to live for a while with his father in California), and then, months later, Janna hired her to work in a nail salon.

  Lorena had meanwhile met Lance Cpl. John Bobbitt one evening at a dance hall near the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. He had recently been transferred there from Okinawa. He was twenty; she was eighteen. She was a virgin and had never seriously dated anyone before, and John Bobbitt’s vision of romance had previously been limited to seeing bar girls in the Orient. After going out with each other for less than eight months, and having a courtship that consisted mainly of weekend meetings and sharing fast food in shopping malls, John and Lorena decided to marry. This decision lessened Lorena’s anxiety about her impermanent presence in America, since she was here on a student visa, and for John Bobbitt the advantages of marriage would include moving from his crowded barracks into an apartment and extending to his bride the medical care that was provided free by the military. Inviting neither family nor friends to attend their hastily arranged civil ceremony in Stafford, Virginia, John and Lorena stood in front of a magistrate on June 18, 1989, to be pronounced husband and wife.

  It was four years later, shortly before 5:30 in the morning on June 23, 1993, that Lorena drove speedily to Janna Biscutti’s home in Fairfax, Virginia, banging on the front door loudly and ringing the bell repeatedly until the door had been opened by Janna’s second husband, a Saudi Arabian-born mortgage banker named Nizzar Suleiman. It was Suleiman who awakened his sleeping wife on the second floor. After Janna had come down and had finally understood what the hysterical and barely articulate Lorena Bobbitt was saying ab
out what she had done with a kitchen knife, Janna immediately telephoned the police and escorted Lorena to the station house—as Janna would, six weeks later, on August 4, accompany Lorena to and from the preliminary hearing.

  Lorena’s other close companion at the courthouse—the person who had first provided Lorena with a home upon her arrival in America—was a stout, dark-haired, and conservatively dressed woman of fifty-nine named Erma Castro, who, like Lorena, had been born in Ecuador, but she was a full-time resident of Virginia and had been an American citizen for nearly twenty years. Erma lived with her husband, Jose Castro, an engineer, and their two teenage daughters, in a newly developed suburban community, and she was employed as an administrator within an agency that catered to the area’s immigrant settlers and their children. She assisted these families in filling out government forms and often volunteered as a translator for Spanish-speaking people who were having difficulty reading instructions written in English.

  In the early fall of 1987, as Lorena was preparing for college, Erma Castro met her through a mutual friend and soon offered her a rent-free room in the Castro home if she would promise to keep up with her studies and set a good example for Castro’s daughters, who were a few years younger than Lorena. For at least a year, Erma was happy with the arrangement. But after Lorena had met and begun to go out with John Bobbitt, in October 1988, Erma Castro’s attitude quickly changed. She was unimpressed with John Bobbitt, having spoken with him a few times when he had come to the house, and she was worried about what might happen to Lorena as a result of dating him.

  I became aware of Erma Castro’s feelings even though I never communicated with her directly—she neither returned my phone calls nor answered my letters, and she did not receive me when I showed up at her workplace without an appointment—but I had gained access to a transcript of a pretrial interview that she had been legally bound to give during the late summer of 1993 to John Bobbitt’s attorney in order to allow the latter to better defend his client in the upcoming marital sexual abuse case. Not only Castro but others who would later testify in the Manassas courthouse—a group that would include Janna Biscutti, Nizzar Suleiman, and Lorena Bobbitt herself—had been summoned to appear individually for pretrial interviews in the office of John Bobbitt’s attorney in Alexandria, Virginia. These interviews were actually depositions. People being deposed were under oath to tell the truth. They were entitled to bring their own lawyers for guidance, but it was John Bobbitt’s defense attorney in this instance who directed the questioning from within his office in Alexandria, and the laws of perjury applied there as much as if the witnesses were being interrogated in court. A stenographer was present to record every word. A typed transcript was made of each and every deposition. And thus, after I had obtained copies of these depositions, I had as accurate an account as I was likely to get from the vantage point of those who were among the most qualified to comment on the maiming of John Bobbitt, and to explain why and how the incident had occurred.