by Gay Talese
Weaver: “… Need an officer to respond ASAP to go out to pick up some property that [the patient] needs to have immediately.…It’s pretty nasty.”
Walls: “… Has he lost a part of his body?”
Weaver: “Uh, you can’t really say over the radio, but …”
Walls: “Okay, but I mean, is it a thing?”
Weaver: “Well … they have to get that once they get out there.”
Walls: “Okay. All right. We have someone en route.”
Weaver: “… How long for an officer to get there?”
Walls: “… Fifteen minutes.”
Weaver: “… You know how this thing about being in the city, being in the county …”
Walls: “Yeah.”
Weaver: “It’s kind of crazy, but no problem.…”
Walls: “Yeah.”
After Weaver had hung up, Walls received a second call from the city’s police force, this time from Sgt. Beth Weden. “You might want to send out a couple [of officers to the apartment],” Sergeant Weden suggested, and she was less restrained than the dispatcher Robert Weaver had been in describing Bobbitt’s injury. “This man’s got his penis all cut off,” Weden told Carolyn Walls, “and the hospital needs it ASAP to try and salvage this man’s dignity.”
As three county officers, plus a rescue squad with an ambulance, motored toward the Bobbitts’ apartment, hoping to retrieve the penis, three other county officers arrived at Prince William County hospital to relieve from duty the three city officers who had arrived earlier. The city officers greeted them at the emergency entrance, and one city cop announced with a grin, “Oh, do we have a case for you guys! Yes, you’ve got a victim inside, a Mr. Less. His first name is Richard. You can call him Dick. Dick Less … ha-ha.”
One of the newly arrived county officers was Cecil Deane, who had been in the hospital a few hours earlier, interrogating the Laotian motorcycle rider Khone, who had sustained injuries in an accident. Cecil Deane was now here for the county police to take photographs of Bobbitt’s diminished penis. After the medical assistant had lifted the sheet that Bobbitt had been wearing, and just before Deane had raised the 33-mm Canon color camera and focused it down toward the patient’s groin area, he made eye contact with Bobbitt and then asked Bobbitt a question he knew was inane, but he asked it anyway: “How you doing?”
Shrugging and forcing a smile, Bobbitt replied, “Be careful who you date.”
While Cecil Deane was taking pictures, his fellow officer Dan Harris was getting permission from Bobbitt to investigate the apartment. Having obtained the key from Bobbitt’s friend Robert Johnston, Dan Harris left the emergency room and went outside to hand the key over to Officer John Tillman, who was waiting in a patrol car. Tillman then drove with it a few miles to the Bobbitt apartment, where, joined by two other colleagues, who had been waiting for him in the parking lot, he unlocked the door and began the search for the missing part of the penis.
Stepping around the bloodstains on the beige carpet in the living room, and trying to avoid rubbing against the blood smears on the walls, Tillman led the way into the bedroom and began to shake out the sheets, thinking that this was the most likely place to find what he was looking for. But no such luck. Then he and the others looked under the bed, around the floor, and lifted up the nightstand. Then they went into the kitchenette, expecting, hoping, to find a little piece of flesh near the knife rack on the counter. One of the rescue workers, Mike Perry, ran his hand through the water in the bottom of the washing machine. The others were now in the bathroom, looking in the toilet, in the trash basket, under the sink.
“Find anything yet?” came the radio query from Sgt. William Hurley, who was downstairs in his car, parked below the porch.
“Not yet,” said Officer Tillman.
“Keep looking,” said Sergeant Hurley.
Tillman and the others continued for another five minutes, searching through the closet, the bureau drawers, under the sofa bed.
“It’s just not here,” Tillman declared to Hurley.
“Okay, then,” said Hurley, “come on down and let’s look around in the shrubs and parking lot.”
It was getting close to 6 a.m. as the men came running down the staircase and began exploring the grounds around the building with the aid of their flashlights. It was then that a seventy-year-old tenant named Ella Jones poked her head outside the front door of her ground-floor apartment and called out to Sergeant Hurley: “Good morning, Officer, what you looking for out there?”
“Oh, we’re looking for something somebody might have thrown here,” said Hurley. Then he heard his car radio blaring forth with a message: Lorena Bobbitt had just turned herself in to the county police, and she told one of the lieutenants that she had thrown the penis into the grass near the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, across the street from a 7-Eleven store. This was only a quarter of a mile from where Sergeant Hurley’s car was now parked, and so he and his men were able to reassemble at the intersection within a few minutes. It was daylight now, and while the men wandered around in the fields with their heads down and their eyes intently focused on the ground around their feet—one man was reminded of his childhood days on Easter-egg hunts—Hurley stood somewhat aloof at roadside, trying to conceal the sense of ridiculousness that he felt, along with a certain personal discomfort, at being in charge of a search party that was trying to track down a wayward penis.
Sgt. William Hurley was a shortish, compactly built, dark-haired man in his forties. He had been a policeman for fifteen years, and he was also a born-again Christian and a proper and somewhat old-fashioned individual who disliked being around people who used blasphemous language or told dirty jokes or made smirking or mocking references to lovemaking or to sex organs. It was characteristic of him on this particular morning to refer to the missing body part as an “appendage,” and he was chagrined when he heard over his car radio the voice of Sgt. Beth Weden referring to Bobbitt’s lost manhood in a jocular and blatant manner: “This man’s got his penis all cut off.… [Let’s] salvage this man’s dignity.”
Hurley never expected to hear a cop, and certainly not a female cop, talking like this on the police radio network, perhaps broadcasting to hundreds of officers and employees of the department within the 348-square-mile radius of Prince William County. Although he had tried to make newly hired female officers feel welcome in what had once been an exclusively fraternal order, he suspected that some women believed that the best way to gain male acceptance was to emulate unacceptable male behavior. Sergeant Hurley thought otherwise. Which was not to say that in his younger days he had not occasionally been indiscreet and foul-mouthed, an admission that he made to me during one of our interviews. But his life had changed radically since he came to know God in 1976, he explained, and as a consequence he gradually stopped swearing, gambling, smoking, drinking, and otherwise acting in ways that had caused his wife, Cheryl, to pack her bags one day and tell him that she was leaving their marriage.
But he had persuaded her to give him one more chance to reform; and he did reform, he told me, after he had met a charismatic Christian preacher who recruited him into the Reston Bible Church and inspired within him a righteous vigor that eventually caused him to quit his job as a golf pro and apply for a position as a police officer within the Prince William County correctional system. As he might have expected, the hiring officer conducted a background check and discovered that William Hurley had been arrested six times for speeding and once for reckless driving. But Hurley convinced the officer that whatever appeared on the computer screen was an out-of-date reflection of the born-again man he currently was; and so Hurley was tentatively accepted as a police recruit in July 1978. In the fifteen years since then, he had justified the faith that the officer had shown in hiring him.
Sergeant Hurley was now standing next to his car radio at roadside, listening to the repeated calls from the hospital staff to the dispatcher: What’s the latest report from the
search party in the field? How close are they to finding the penis? WHERE IS IT? Time is running out.… The doctors are in the operating room. The patient is waiting. The operation will soon begin!
Hurley watched with his own sense of urgency as his three-man crew rummaged through the grassy intersection, searching without success for the missing appendage. So far, John Bobbitt had been separated from his penis for at least an hour and a half. Hurley wondered how much more time was available before the doctors would have to sew up John Bobbitt without it. Hurley had thought that his men would have found it easily. Bobbitt’s wife had said that she had thrown it into the grassy patch at the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, an area of only fifty square feet, and Hurley could not understand why his men had not already recovered it—unless the wife’s information was inaccurate, or unless a rodent had run off with it prior to the arrival of the police.
It was now close to 6:15 a.m., and, as Hurley’s radio continued to resound with the chatter being transmitted between the hospital and police headquarters, he decided to scrutinize the area himself, and so he slowly made his way through the grassy stretch of land with his head bent low and his eyes trained downward, assuming the posture of his golf-playing days when searching for a ball that he had hit into the rough. Within a few seconds, he had spotted it, poking up through the weeds—a curl of white flesh with a reddish tip.
“Phew,” he yelled out, holding his nose, “here it is!”
As his group hurried over to get a look at it, a female officer named Sindi Leo arrived at the intersection in her patrol car. She was a ten-year veteran of the police department, a short, robust, and round-faced brunette in her thirties, known for her efficiency and self-assurance on the job, and also for her forthrightness in chiding her male colleagues whenever she believed they were behaving in a chauvinistic manner. While she respected Sergeant Hurley’s refined and right-minded disposition, Sindi Leo often felt when in his presence that she was being privately judged, and now, as she headed in his direction, she noticed that he was frowning at her. He really doesn’t want me here, she told herself (and later repeated to me in an interview); she also overheard him complaining in a low voice to his men: “This is why I don’t like women police officers.…” She was not entirely sure what he meant, but as she joined him and the others in the field—they were circled around the spot where the penis lay, saying nothing to one another as they gazed down upon this helpless little piece of masculine pride that had proven to be so vulnerable to a woman’s vengence—she could well understand it if her fellow officers regarded her arrival to be ill-timed. She had intruded upon a male moment.
But she also had orders to take pictures of the penis as soon as it had been found, and so, without objection from the blushing Sergeant Hurley, she held up her 35-mm Nikon camera and snapped a few pictures of him pointing a finger toward the place where it had landed. After she had finished, Hurley asked that she go to the Bobbitts’ apartment and photograph the bloodstained interior, and then deliver the pictures, along with the key to the apartment, to Detective Weintz at the hospital. When she did so, she saw the detective talking to Lorena Bobbitt in the presence of Janna Biscutti. Weintz then directed Sindi Leo to retrieve the knife that Lorena had thrown into the refuse container in front of Janna Biscutti’s nail salon in Centreville.
“You’d better hurry,” Janna called out to Sindi Leo as the latter walked toward her patrol car. “It’s Wednesday. It’s trash-collection day.”
The penis had by this time been lifted out of the grass by one of the rescue workers, Mike Perry (an off-duty cop who had served in the Marine Corps during the mid-1980s); Perry, accompanied by two other rescue volunteers, hopped into their ambulance and, with sirens wailing and lights whirling, drove swiftly through the early Washington-bound commuter traffic toward the hospital. Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the trio burst through the swinging doors of the rear entrance and one of the men, pointing to the penis contained in a clear plastic bag that was held high by a partner, asked the ER doctor on duty, Dr. David M. Corcoran, who had relieved Dr. Sharpe, “Is this it?”
“I guess so,” said Dr. Corcoran. Two nurses came forward through the corridor toward Dr. Corcoran, wanting to get a glimpse of the penis, but the rescue men pushed past them into the room where John Bobbitt lay waiting, flanked by his two surgeons. One of them, Dr. James Sehn, had been there for more than a half hour, while Dr. David E. Berman had just arrived. He had gotten there as quickly as he could, but, since his wife was then vacationing with their child at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, it had been Dr. Berman’s duty to feed and walk the two family dogs before departing for the hospital. At approximately 7:30 a.m., Dr. Berman and Dr. Sehn concentrated their attentions on John Bobbitt, beginning what would be a nine-and-a-half-hour-long operation.
Sergeant Hurley was now back in his office, where someone had placed near his desk an ersatz plaque made of silver foil, bearing the inscription “Awarded to Sgt. Hurley—1st Place Winner of the PRT (Penis Recognition Technician) Award.” Ignoring it, Hurley sat down and wrote out his report for the daily police files. He had thought about referring to John Bobbitt’s injured body part as an “appendage” but then changed his mind, and so in his report of Wednesday, June 23, 1993, he wrote:
Shortly after 5 a.m., a male subject arrived at the hospital with his penis cut off. The subject stated that his wife cut this off as he slept. Shortly after he got to the hospital his wife called to report that she had been raped by her husband and that she cut his penis off after the rape. The wife came to the hospital. As she was in route to the hospital the husband gave permission to search his apartment for his lost part.
We searched the apt. with Rescue to no avail. After she arrived she told us she carried the penis to the intersection of Maplewood and Old Centreville and threw it out the window. After a short search it was located and transported to the hospital by Rescue. As I write (7:32 a.m.), Detective Weintz is at the hospital trying to sort this whole thing out. The success of the operation that is now being performed is very questionable.…
Just when you think you’ve seen it all.
—Sgt. William Hurley.
26
Many may wonder why I didn’t leave my husband sooner. Although I thought about it many times the reason is commitment—commitment I learned as I grew up in a very loving family in Venezuela. My mother and father have been married for 25 years and are still very much in love. They taught me to be committed to your spouse for life and that divorce wasn’t an option. A large part of my “American Dream” was to be married to one man for the rest of my life. I wasn’t perfect, but I was dedicated to our success as a young couple and to make our marriage work regardless of the cost. Through it all, I maintained a strong belief in God and continually held out hope that somehow through counseling and forgiveness, our marriage would eventually be saved.…
In the middle of June, 1993, I was desperate.… On June 23, shortly after 3 a.m., John returned home intoxicated and I was once again brutally attacked and forcibly raped against my will.… Everyone has a limit, and this was beyond mine.
Copyright, 1993, Lorena L. Bobbitt. All rights reserved.
Contact: Paradise Entertainment Corp., Culver City, Calif., 90230.
Alan Hauge, 818/773-1317
THE ABOVE STATEMENT WAS COMPOSED FOR LORENA BOBBITT BY a relatively obscure California-based screenwriter and director who was temporarily serving as her media consultant—Alan Hauge, a stocky, blue-eyed, sandy-haired individual who looked much younger than his fifty years and who flew into Virginia to attend meetings and press conferences with Lorena, dressed in the fashion adopted by many who dwell along the fringe of fame in the entertainment industry: cowboy boots, jeans, a baseball cap, and a leather jacket, in a pocket of which was a regularly ringing cellular phone that Hauge invariably answered in an upbeat voice and with a smile on his face. No matter what he heard on the other end, Hauge’s facial expression suggested that he was receiving
good news.
He had been introduced to Lorena through an ex-colleague in film production who had become a friend of Janna Biscutti’s in Virginia, and in the course of planning Lorena’s dealings with the press, Hauge persuaded Lorena to cooperate with him in the writing of a screenplay about her life. Although he had never before written or directed a successful feature, Hauge owned the movie rights to the story of James Dean, the Hollywood star who died at twenty-four in an auto accident in 1955 after being in three notable films—East of Eden, Giant, and Rebel Without a Cause. It was in 1988 that James Dean’s heirs sold the film rights to Hauge because the latter’s script presented a more positive image than that of other prospective writers, who tended to focus upon the late actor’s alleged drug problems, his rumored intimacies with men, and his natural kinship with the rebellious and lonely characters that he portrayed on screen. But when I first met Hauge in Manassas during the summer of 1993, shortly after Lorena Bobbitt’s appearance at her preliminary hearing—and five years after Hauge had first won approval from Dean’s relatives—he conceded to me that the Dean project was not yet ready for production, although he insisted that it would one day become a major motion picture, and he felt similarly about his future film based on the life and times of Lorena. He further explained that both of these would be shot within a commodious building that he owned just west of Los Angeles, in Culver City. He called his building “GMT Studios,” adding that the letters stood for “Great and Mighty Things” and had been drawn from his reading of the Prophet Jeremiah (“Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not”).
Alan Hauge was a devout Bible-quoting Christian, a man whose statements and comments often aroused my skepticism, although my opinion of him was probably influenced by the fact that he consistently refused to support my designs on Lorena. He did not mind talking to me about his own career, but he had insisted that Lorena stay away from me while she adhered to his plan that she grant early interviews only to 20/20 and Vanity Fair, both of which would go public with her comments shortly before her first court appearance in the fall. Displeased with this arrangement, I did everything I could to make contact with her behind Hauge’s back, timing my initiatives to those days when I knew he was not in Virginia. I appealed in person to Lorena’s main attorney, James Lowe, seeing him on three occasions after showing up at his office unannounced. I tried to pursuade Janna Biscutti to allow me to speak with Lorena in Janna’s home, where Lorena had been staying since the incident. I sent letters directly to Lorena and mailed her inscribed copies of my books. But these and similar efforts on my part were unavailing, and moreover, whether Alan Hauge was in Los Angeles or elsewhere, he quickly learned about what I was up to, and when he returned to Manassas, I would hear about it. “I understand you’re adding to Lorena’s reading list,” he said to me one afternoon as we crossed paths near the courthouse. He was smiling, as usual.