Hillside Stranglers (28 page)

Before sending Kenny to his cell, Dr. Allison asked him to try to dream that night about Steve, unusual though it was for a psychiatrist to suggest the subject of a dream to a patient. He asked him to dream how “to cope with Stevie, with the aid of the highest elements of helping power inside [Ken’s] mind. That will be the job for tonight.” Dr. Allison’s voice was soothing. He added: “I want you to keep that diary going! That’s very, very important.” Kenny could not have agreed more.

The next day Dr. Allison asked Kenny to see whether he could talk to Steve directly. Kenny responded with a rambling stream-of-consciousness monologue, or rather a bizarre imitation of one, in which he pretended to reminisce about childhood. He acted like a medium making contact with a dead relative, pausing from time to time to permit voices to pass over the great beyond. Dr. Allison was impressed. He said that it had been like listening to someone talk on the telephone without knowing what the party on the other end of the line was saying.

On the following day Dr. Watkins appeared again and presented
Kenny with yet a new opportunity to dissemble. He administered a Rorschach ink blot test to Kenny; or, to put the matter more precisely, he administered the test first to Kenny as Steve and then to Kenny as Ken. Kenny, of course, knew the test well but pretended ignorance of it, not mentioning that he had often amused himself by administering it to Kelli and others and that he knew what sorts of responses would produce the right results. As Steve he pretended to see in the blots such intriguing phenomena as “two elephants fucking each other.” In another blot he pretended to discern something “like somebody eating out a cherry broad.”

“Eating out a what?” Dr. Watkins inquired.

“Cherry broad, man.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Do you understand me?” Kenny asked, not sure that Dr. Watkins was up to Steve’s vocabulary.

“Of course.”

And on to another blot:

“Looks like Siamese twins, doesn’t it, but it’s not. It’s a big dick. . . . It’s two broads getting it on . . . . Looks like an abortion.”

Then Dr. Watkins summoned Ken.

“Hi, Dr. Watkins. Have I been sleeping or something?” As he pretended to awake from the trance, Kenny made a fuss over finding his rosary on the table, saying he had no memory of putting it there and drawing a parallel between this mystery and that of the tom cigarette filter with Dr. Allison.

“What do you think happened?” Dr. Watkins asked.

“Steve again.”

“Yeah,” Dr. Watkins agreed. What would Steve think of next?

Kenny complained sorrowfully about the headaches he had been having.

“That’s [Steve] trying to get out,” Dr. Watkins said.

“I wondered why, ’cause I usually don’t get headaches.”

Now it was time for Keriny as Ken to take the Rorschach test. Where Steve had seen elephants fucking and so on, Ken saw people dancing in a discotheque, children playing London
Bridge, two men carrying a bucket, a butterfly, a snail, a moth, a steamboat on the water, two little Indians, a leopard, rocks beside a pond, and the Asian continent. For good measure, not to appear absurdly saccharine, he added two dogs fighting over a bone and “an unborn fetus” as photographed by means of a “radioscoptomy.”

“You, Ken, are getting stronger every day,” Dr. Watkins said before leaving. “I don’t know how everything’s going to come out, but I suspect you’ll be able to handle things better.”

“It hasn’t been easy for me,” Kenny said.

To Dr. Watkins the Rorschach tests substantiated a diagnosis of multiple personality; but to verify the results, he forwarded them to Dr. Erika Fromm, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He told Dr. Fromm nothing about Bianchi, permitting her to assume that the subjects, identified simply as “Mr. K” and “Mr. S,” were two persons.

Dr. Fromm wrote formal evaluations of the tests, finding “Mr. K” to be “on the whole . . . a near normal man, mildly neurotic, mildly introverted, who possesses a great deal of fantasy.” “Mr. K” also “has greater creative ability than he actually makes use of in his ordinary life” and “spends a great deal of time in daydreaming.” Of “Mr. S’s” responses she wrote, however, that “this is one of the sickest Rorschachs I have seen in working with this test for more than 40 years. It is clearly that of a patient in whose mind sexuality and violent aggression against women are fused. I would expect him to be a rapist and a killer. . . . For the sake of society—as well as for his own sake—he should either be in prison or in a closed ward in a state hospital.” Yet he was “not a psychopath.”

Since she knew nothing of Bianchi’s background, Dr. Fromm was not in a position even to guess that he might have faked both tests; her evaluations suggest that Kenny had managed to give precisely the impressions he had intended. In an informal, covering letter to Dr. Watkins, Dr. Fromm said that she wondered why she had been sent two such radically different personalities to evaluate: one seemed to her likely to be a criminal, but the other seemed so normal that she could not
imagine why he should be in court. Was it possible, considering Dr. Watkins’s interest in multiple personalities, that the two tests represented different personalities of the same man? One response by “Mr. S”—“Some cat got hit by a car”—made her wonder whether “Mr. S” might be a black man. The word “cat” might be black slang, “cat” referring to a man. If so, “Mr. S’s” aggression would be directed against men as well as women. Yet he was clearly not a homosexual.

Dr. Watkins was now sufficiently confident of his diagnosis to give an interview to
Time
magazine. In the issue of May 7 he was quoted as saying that Kenneth Bianchi, “a very pure psychopath,” had a
Doppelgänger
inside him who from time to time “seized control of the normally mild-mannered Bianchi.” Dr. Watkins stated that he himself had been afraid of being attacked by Steve, who had first emerged when Bianchi was nine years old and was a product of Bianchi’s unhappy childhood.

The
Time
interview was too much for Bob Grogan. Alarmed by what Salerno and Finnigan had told him about the goings-on in Bellingham, Grogan had been monitoring the videotapes of the psychiatric sessions: under Washington law “discovery” worked both ways; both defense and prosecution were entitled to review any evidence before it was formally introduced in a trial. Grogan had already formed a low opinion of Drs. Watkins and Allison. He was certain that Bianchi was putting on an act, and now, on a piece of plain stationery, identifying himself simply as an outraged citizen, he wrote a letter to Dr. Watkins in Montana. He attacked Dr. Watkins for the
Time
interview, calling him “a bush league unprofessional turkey” and accusing him of trying to get national publicity for himself at the expense of a fair and effective trial for a murderer. The sanity hearing had not yet been held. What right, Grogan asked, did Dr. Watkins, in violation of any sort of legal or medical ethics, have to give out his ridiculous diagnosis to a national newsmagazine at this point? At least the other doctors had been discreet. He signed the letter simply “Bob Grogan,” not wishing to take advantage of his police affiliation nor to end up being accused of trying to intimidate a witness.

Dr. Watkins replied, defending himself. When asked about Dr. Watkins’s letter, Grogan said: “I counted nine typos. I’ll bet because I called the guy a turkey he probably thinks my mother took away my Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe I shouldn’t have pissed the guy off. If I ever murder anybody I might need him. I think I’ve got another personality inside me. His name is Derrick and he plays with his pee-pee and has a thing for shrinks.”

Kenny was delighted with the way things were going. He read Dr. Watkins’s
Time
interview with pleasure and pride and said in a tape he sent to Kelli: “Things are looking really good. Dean [Brett] and a lot of other people know now that I’m not guilty. It’s just a matter of getting all the data together.” But just to be sure, he kept up the elaborate fiction of his diary, adding dreams and feigned realizations. When Kelli wrote him about an article she had read about Sigmund Freud, Kenny took the opportunity to give himself the benefit of a spontaneous Freudian analysis in his diary:

In 1923 [Freud] finally set out his well-known triad of id, ego and super-ego. He proposed that the id is unconscious and the instinctional without moral judgment. That the super-ego is partly unconscious and represents the rules
instilled by one’s parents and society—the voice of guilt. And the ego is the conscious ego which is able to relate and adapt to the outside world.

I think that the problem that’s been is that . . . Steve could be part of the id . . . because the id is unconscious and instinctional without moral judgment. That’s really an interesting hypothesis. Anyway, just thought I’d mention it at this time.

As always, modern psychological theory offered him an agreeable escape from personal responsibility. And he liked playing in his diary with the word “responsibility,” as though it were something apart from himself, an idea, a thing, a curiosity, occasionally toyed with and questioned but never
assumed:
“I’m filled with this false sense of responsibility, not meaning that the feeling is false, meaning that I really shouldn’t blame myself for what has happened. . . .” Always “what has happened,” never “what I have done.” To Kelli he said, as if congratulating himself, citing as usual a psychological authority: “John [Johnson] mentioned that in actuality I am a victim. . . . If you ever have any questions or don’t understand anything about dissociative reaction, I’m not an expert but I’m gaining a lot of personal knowledge. . . . I hope the book I’m going to write will help people. This will be my repayment for what has happened. Now that I’m aware of what has happened, I would trade my life for bringing all those girls back. But that’s not possible. Dean says I shouldn’t blame myself. I wasn’t responsible for what happened.

“Anyway, when you get the film for the camera, take a picture of the kitty for me. You know, I never realized before I can get shots for my allergy [to cats].”

He spoke to Kelli of his plans for the family after he was released. They would sit in the park and enjoy the air. He missed her cooking. Money would be no problem: “When I get out, honey, I know that the publishing deal’s going to go through.” The book would be a best-seller, and once it hit the best-seller list, there would be still more money: “That’s the
reality of publishing a successful book, a popular book.” Fortunately “I won’t even have to have the book started before they come across with the money. Just a contractual obligation.”

Of course, Kenny did not tell Kelli that he had already proposed marriage and a book to Angie Kinneberg, nor did he tell her that he had asked Angie to spy on Kelli, whom he suspected of two-timing him. Perhaps Kelli could become his full-time secretary when he got out. As she knew, “every worth-while thing in life is won with hard work and practice and patience.”

Kenny always remembered his “dear son Ryan” in these letters and tapes:

. . . Well, sweetheart, I think I’ll end this for now. When I think of you and Ryan I have a tendency to get mushy. I don’t want to get too mushy here. I don’t know how you’ll take it. . . .

This part is for Ryan.
Ryan
[Kenny crooned, called],
Rrrryyyaaannn.
Daddy’s here. Come on, Ryan. Talk to Daddy. Say hi. Say hi, Ryan. Come on, say hi. Come on,
tinkers.
My little
tinkers. Daddy’s little man.
Perhaps Daddy will be home soon, sweetheart. I love you and miss you, you little man. Bye-bye. Bye.

The detectives were as depressed by the way things were going as Kenny was pleased, but they were not giving up. Meticulously they scanned the videotapes of the Watkins and Allison interviews, trying to spot a significant slipup. Not that they had any hope of convincing the doctors that Bianchi was pulling a scam. The doctors, Grogan said, obviously had a will to believe Bianchi. Grogan called them “true believers” and compared them to religious enthusiasts. He said that they approached the multiple personality idea as the church faithful view an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Bellingham was becoming like Fatima or Lourdes, and the next thing you knew Bianchi would start healing cripples. A political analogy also
occurred to Grogan: “They believe in this thing like my father believed in the Democratic Party. It’s like I told my dad, ‘You’d vote for Mao Tse-tung if somebody told you he’s a Democrat.’ ” But the prosecution was going to call in its own psychiatrists. Grogan knew one of them by reputation and predicted that this doctor, Saul Faerstein, would help to turn things around: “Faerstein’s no fool. Faerstein’s a hard-ass. He’ll nail the bastard. I predict.”

Then at last Salerno and Finnigan thought they might have caught something on the videotapes. It was indistinct, mumbled, but with the volume at full blast they heard Bianchi give Steve the surname Walker, and they heard Dr. Allison repeat the name. It rang a bell. Somewhere in Bianchi’s papers, the ones discovered in his attaché case, they knew they had come across a reference to a Steven Walker.

They searched through the papers and found what they needed: the letter to the registrar at California State University at Northridge asking for a diploma with the name not filled in, signed “Thomas Steven Walker.” The letter said that a ninety-dollar money order was enclosed, and the registrar or his clerk had stamped the letter “paid.” The detectives also found Cal State transcripts with Bianchi’s name on them. This was obviously another one of Bianchi’s scams and fit in with all the other fake degrees and diplomas he liked to collect.

Salerno and Finnigan hurried down to Los Angeles and on to Northridge. They showed Bianchi’s supposed transcripts to the registrar, who checked out the social security number and confirmed that the transcripts were actually those of Thomas Steven Walker. Then they traced Walker to his apartment in Van Nuys and, interviewing him, learned that he had responded to an ad in the
Times
and had forwarded his transcripts in applying for a job. A search of
Times
back issues revealed the ad, in which Bianchi had represented himself as “Dr. R. Johnson” but had given his Verdugo address.

They now had everything they needed to show that Bianchi had made the mistake of giving his phony alter ego the name of an actual person, but to round out the picture of Bianchi as the con artist of psychology, they went to see Dr. Charles
Weingarten: Kelli and other witnesses had confirmed that Kenny had rented an office from a legitimate therapist, and his counseling-service flyers had listed the address. Salerno and Finnigan wanted to establish that Kenny had been able to fool a professional psychologist even before Bellingham. Dr. Weingarten, who had a gentle, even fragile manner, said that Bianchi had identified himself as a marriage, family, and child-guidance counselor and had said that he needed temporary space while he built up his practice. Dr. Weingarten described Kenny as “very sincere and pleasant” and said that the young man had discussed Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis with obvious expertise. The interview had taken about fifteen minutes. Dr. Weingarten had been reading about Bianchi’s multiple personalities. “From what I’ve read about Steve,” Dr. Weingarten said, “I feel I met Ken.” Somehow it had not occurred to Dr. Weingarten that even as he had been duped, other doctors were being fooled now. But neither Salerno nor Finnigan had the heart to deepen Dr. Weingarten’s disillusionment by asking him what on earth made him think that Steve wasn’t just another Bianchi con.

By the time Salerno and Finnigan had completed all this important work, the prosecution had brought in a very big gun to train on Bianchi. He was Dr. Martin T. Orne, head of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other distinctions, Dr. Orne, who was Vienna-born, was considered the world authority on hypnosis and had written the definitive historical and clinical article on the subject for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In that article, published in 1974, Dr. Orne took a cautious view of the uses of hypnosis and warned of its limitations and potential abuses. “In general,” Dr. Orne wrote, “hypnosis cannot be induced against an individual’s will.” Of equal significance to the Bianchi case, Dr. Orne warned that “when unhypnotizable subjects are asked to simulate hypnosis, their performance can deceive experienced hypnotists. Simulating subjects convincingly perform extraordinary feats of strength and memory. . . .” Dr. Orne was also aware of the controversies in medical literature surrounding
diagnoses of multiple personality disorder, and he was mindful that a defendant facing a charge of murder would have much to gain by faking insanity. Dr. Orne approached Bianchi with an open mind and in a truly scientific spirit, assuming nothing except the scientist’s responsibility to prove or to disprove a hypothesis. In the forensic context of Bianchi’s statements, Dr. Orne knew that he had to be particularly alert to possibilities of malingering. Diagnosis in such a situation, he knew, was a very different and more difficult problem than in the ordinary therapeutic context.

After reviewing the Watkins and Allison videotapes, Dr. Orne decided that his primary task would be to determine whether or not Bianchi had in fact been hypnotized. He noted that Steve had first appeared under (apparent) hypnosis when Dr. Watkins had said that he believed there “might be another part of Ken that I haven’t talked to” and proceeded to summon that part. Dr. Orne also noted that Steve appeared to change or to intensify as the interviews progressed. In addition, Dr. Orne went through masses of material accumulated by the police which indicated that Bianchi was an accomplished liar. If Bianchi was faking being hypnotized, it would not prove that he was also faking the symptoms of a multiple personality, but it would obviously suggest that this was the case.

Dr. Orne had developed certain procedures which could help to determine whether someone was actually hypnotized or was simulating the state, and he decided to apply these to Bianchi without, of course, telling Kenny what was going on. Dr. Orne called these procedures double hallucination, single hallucination, suggested anesthesia, and source amnesia. Kenny’s responses to three of the four indicated that he was faking being hypnotized.

At first Dr. Orne asked Kenny to imagine that Dean Brett was sitting next to him in an empty chair. Kenny did so, pretending to speak animatedly to his lawyer. Dr. Orne then pointed to the real Dean Brett. Kenny explained that the hallucinated Brett was no longer there. But he overacted, rattling on in a manner that Dr. Orne knew was inconsistent with actual hypnosis: “Dean, Dean! How can Dean Brett be in two
places?” and so on. In true hypnosis, the subject does not question the logic of the hallucination, and it was obvious to Dr. Orne that Kenny was trying to prove to him that he had actually experienced the hallucination, when he had not. Kenny also made the mistake of getting up and pretending to shake hands with the imagined Dean Brett. It was unprecedented for a hypnotized subject to attempt to have a physical exchange with a hallucination. Equally telling was Kenny’s insistence that Dr. Orne himself “must be able to see” Dean Brett: the truly hypnotized subject simply assumes the induced reality. Kenny’s final error was to ask the phantasmagorical Dean Brett whether he would mind being touched. Again, the truly hypnotized subject would assume that the hallucination would not mind if, as Dr. Orne did, the hypnotist says that it would not mind. The hypnotized subject accepts reality as defined, within limits, by the hypnotist.

The suggested-anesthesia procedure also worked on the principle that the truly hypnotized subject acts according to the logic of the hypnotized state, as defined by the hypnotist, not according to waking, normal logic. This test involved Dr. Orne’s drawing an imaginary circle on the pack of Kenny’s hand and telling him that he would feel pressure when touched outside the circle but feel nothing when touched inside the circle. He was supposed to say “Yes” when touched outside the circle and, even though he could supposedly feel nothing, say “No” when touched inside the circle. By normal, waking logic, of course, the subject, supposedly feeling nothing when touched inside the circle, would say nothing. Kenny, seeing the test in this way, trying to prove he was really hypnotized, said nothing when Dr. Orne touched him inside the circle. But he was wrong. The truly hypnotized subject would have gone along with the hypnotist and said “No” when he was supposedly feeling nothing. Dr. Orne knew at that moment that Kenny was faking. Kenny thought that he had outsmarted Dr. Orne when in fact he had demonstrated that he was being logical and fully awake.

Kenny’s reaction to the source-amnesia procedure, however,
was inconclusive. In this test Dr. Orne asked Kenny three easy questions (including “What is the capital of the state of New York?”) and one difficult question: “What color does an amethyst turn when heated?” Kenny did not know, and Dr. Orne gave him the answer: yellow. Dr. Orne then told him that when he woke up he would not remember yellow as the correct answer. Kenny did not remember, but this was an inconclusive response. About one-third of all deeply hypnotized subjects do recall the correct answer but cannot remember the source of their knowledge: sometimes they make up a source, such as a book or a college course. Thus Kenny’s pretending not to remember the correct answer at all did not prove by itself that he was faking, only that he had failed to give absolute proof of having been deeply hypnotized, as he would have had he remembered the correct answer but not the source of it. Some hypnotized subjects behave as he had, failing to recall the correct answer altogether, so this test could not be used as certain evidence of his lying.