By Reason of Insanity (7 page)

When he was told that the doctors had recommended his continued incarceration, he thought a mistake had been made. Someone got the names mixed up. He checked with a staff member. No, no mistake. He couldn’t believe it. Had he not performed brilliantly? Had he not proved he was one of them? The doctors, he felt certain, must surely know that he was as sane as they were. It was all just a silly mistake, it had to be. It had to.

That night he dreamed of monsters feeding on flesh, and woke up screaming. The monsters were still with him as he ran hysterically through the ward. He was quickly sedated.

When the realization came that no mistake had been made concerning him, Bishop’s rage was boundless. He thought only of killing. The doctors would be first, those demons who made him suffer so. Kill them. Then the attendants and guards. Kill them. The other patients, the hospital, everything and everybody connected with it. Kill them all.

His mind dwelled on death and destruction. In his mind’s eye he saw them all dying, painfully, horribly. Again and again he looked, laughing, smiling. He sat on a throne behind a big desk pressing buttons sending pain shooting through them screaming at his feet. He stepped on their heads, crushing them flat like broken eggs oozing on the floor. When he saw enough he just changed the scene but it was always the same. He had the power now, and he was doing all the killing.

Two days later he set fire to the ward. After bunching some beds together and piling the linen in the middle, he lit matches and fed the flames. The blaze was roaring by the time an attendant raced in. Bishop attacked him with his bare hands, struggling the man to the floor. When they pulled him off, he was still banging the head on the wood slats.

A half year passed before he was returned to a ward. Locked away in isolation, he made no reply when told that the attendant had suffered a fractured skull. Nothing seemed to matter to him as the spasms once again wracked his body, contorting his features and causing him to howl like an injured animal. During such times he would attack anyone near him and was kept mostly in a camisole. He was given more shock treatments, more chemotherapy. After several months the spasms subsided and gradually disappeared. He had somehow learned again to control his rage.

His new ward was on the other side of the main building and on a higher floor. A maximum-security ward, it housed those patients who had acted out their homicidal inclinations. Massive doors were always kept locked, the steel-frame windows were iron-barred. Guards with leather thongs seemed to be everywhere. For eight months Bishop lived in that prison, ate its food, cleaned its floors. He thought he was living in hell itself For eight months he slept next to demented animals, and was surprised to find himself alive each morning. When he finally left for another ward in February 1973 he vowed never to return. He would die first.

Hospital officials, noting his good behavior since the rampage of the previous year, put him in an experimental ward in a new two-story building. Here each bed had a foot locker underneath and a night table. Six-foot plastic partitions separated the rows of beds, giving each man some bit of privacy. And here Bishop lay each night thinking about the mistake he had made, going over it again and again in his mind. He had trusted people to act fairly, to set him free if he became one of them. He had learned to talk like them, learned all their games. But nothing worked for him because they did not want him free. They were afraid of him. He was too smart, too clever to be set free.

He knew now that he would never get out. They would keep him locked up until he died. There was no hope. And so, hopeless, he began thinking of escape.

Bishop had been lucky in at least one way. The previous year his spirit had been broken in isolation, but only temporarily. Though some attendants thought it permanent because of his new docility and willingness to cooperate, he knew better. The answer to his problem, he now saw, was not to be like them but to be subservient. Then they would not be frightened of him, not be antagonistic. It was a lesson he did not intend to forget.

After his release from isolation he became more subdued, more respectful of authority. In the maximum-security ward he promptly carried out the orders of the guards. When others caused trouble he moved away quickly. It was once again an act he was performing, but this time it worked because his new role fit their expectations of him. By the time he was transferred to the new ward it was believed that he had accepted his fate and was settling down to a peaceful existence.

In his new home Bishop rapidly became a group leader, responsible for the daily actions of several fellow patients. The job pleased him, he had a certain flair for organization. It also gave him more freedom of movement to look around the hospital grounds.

Had he been an ordinary homicidal maniac or, in the psychiatric language of the hospital staff, a severely disturbed patient with homicidal tendencies, he would have been bothersome perhaps but not particularly dangerous. There were dozens of such men in the institutions. But he was much more. His mother, Sara Bishop Owens, and his father, whoever he might have been, had created a creature with a wonderfully devious brain in a marvelously resilient body. Fate then had turned the boy into a shrewd cunning animal, trapped and badly wounded. By the time he reached his majority Bishop had become brilliantly clever at normal disguise and an expert tactician in matters of survival. He had also become an authentic monster, with no true feelings except hatred and no real goals except destruction.

In his views of the world and himself Bishop was as insane as would be expected from his tortured life. But when his mind turned to solving a specific problem, his quick animal sense and calculated contempt for normal behavior were as frighteningly precise as a surgeon’s scalpel.

Propped up on his bed this early May evening, his lips silently chanting Chessman’s name, the problem of escape looked insurmountable to Bishop. He touched the still-warm radio for assurance. All the programs came from outside; even Chessman was outside—he was dead.
He
would be outside too, but he wouldn’t be dead. No matter how impossible it seemed at the moment, he would escape. His superior mind would do it. He would somehow find a way past the bars and the guards and the gates. He would plan carefully, pick his time and then disappear.

With eyes closed in concentration, he sorted out the problem in his mind. It divided into three parts: first was to get out of his locked building at night; second was to get across a hundred yards of open lawn to the gate; and third was to get through the gate, always kept locked and guarded. He felt certain he would solve each part. What was not at all certain, once free, was how he would escape detection.

The world had changed drastically during his fifteen years of institutional life; television had taught him that. Communications among law-enforcement agencies had improved to the point where the whole country was one big police network. People were more suspicious, everyone carried identification. Even bail bonds and court fines were paid by credit card.

With the outside so altered, what chance would he have? His picture would be in all the papers, on the TV. Posters would be in every police station wherever he went. People would look at him, recognize him. He wouldn’t be able to get a job or a place to live. Without money or papers he wouldn’t be able to travel far away or even to another country.

Perhaps he could live all alone in the woods or mountains where there were no people, but he didn’t know how to hunt or cook. And he didn’t know where any woods or mountains were, he didn’t even know if there was a place without people anymore.

If he dyed his hair and grew a beard he might slip by for a while, but his face would still be the same, his general description still the same. The first time anybody stopped him for any reason, and he couldn’t prove who he was, he would be caught. He would be hunted down like an animal.

His face set in a grimace, his eyes still closed in thought, Bishop again and again ran through the consequences of his escape as he saw them. Without money or identification, without friends or means to survive, his face and description broadcast everywhere, he would not last as he was for more than a day or two.

Satisfied in his organizational mind with the summary, he started taking it apart, running each thought over and over in his head until he began to be bothered by something he couldn’t quite catch. Against his will he kept returning to it.
As he was
, he wouldn’t stand a chance once he did escape. But what if the police were not looking for him, Thomas Bishop, and didn’t care anything about him? What if …

His eyes shot open in surprise. A smile slowly formed at the corners of his mouth. Suppose he was dead. He blinked in nervous anticipation. If he was dead, no one would search for him. He rubbed his hands together in the dark, thinking furiously. He had it, he had the key.

For the rest of the night into the early morning hours his mind raced, devising a plan. A hundred times he searched for flaws and found none. It was perfect, he kept telling himself Perfect.

In the morning Bishop took his two spare uniforms to the tailor’s shop in the basement of the main building to have his name sewn on all the garments. When asked the reason, he said that he wanted everyone to know who he was. The tailor, nodding, told him he would have to be dead first, since the name could be sewn only on the inside. Bishop laughed, said nothing.

Afterward he spoke with the attendant who sold watches and rings to the patients. For five dollars he bought a birthstone ring, the fake stone set in heavy imitation onyx. He worked the flashy oversized ring onto his right index finger, saying that he would never take it off again. They’d have to kill me first, he announced gravely, letting the guard see the tight fit.

The next day he exchanged his radio for a small harmonica and a comb. The harmonica was wildly distinctive, silver and red, with a cross on each side panel. He took to humming on it constantly, and he soon came to be identified with it. The pocket comb, shaped like an alligator with a mouth full of teeth, was equally noticeable. He took it out often to comb his hair.

Over the following weeks Bishop keenly felt the loss of his radio, especially at night lying in his bed, but he shrugged it off Only one more thing to find, he would tell himself Just one more thing and he would be free. Let them laugh; his day was coming.

During that time a middle-aged man was taking a vacation he had long promised himself and on a certain day in June he returned to California aboard the express running from Chicago to San Francisco. His face, though heavily creased, was bronzed and his body trimmer than it had been in years. Walking the streets to the bus station he decided that he had made a mistake in coming back so soon, that he should have stayed in Colorado for a month. Maybe even two months, he told himself. Or better still, forever. He smiled at the thought.

A thousand miles to the east, in a pastoral retreat midway between Boulder and Idaho Springs, he had led a momentary existence of an animal in communion with nature. He had fished—his pet passion— and he had strolled lovingly by mountain streams and through wooded hills. It was a perfect life, a life fit for a man along in years, and as he boarded the northbound bus he called himself a fool for leaving it. He hoped and prayed that, at the least, his first weeks back on the job would be easy.

Within a month Bishop had found the last link in his plan of escape. He was ecstatic, and fought to conceal his joy as he looked at his discovery. The inmate was the same height and approximate weight, had the same body structure and hair color. But his face was vastly different, dark and heavily lined, in contrast to Bishop’s boyishly bland features. He had bushy eyebrows almost hiding small squinting eyes, his nose was large, his mouth set in a scowl. Lines criss-crossed most of his face, deepening the glaze of the pockmarked skin. When he smiled he provoked distaste in others rather than friendliness. He was ugly as sin, and Bishop was overjoyed. His name was Vincent Mungo and he was twentyfour years old.

Mungo was living in a ward on the second floor of Bishop’s building, one of several recent transfers from other state mental institutions sent because of the experimental unit. They were all considered severe disciplinary problems, and it was hoped that they would benefit from the new unit, the first of its kind in the state, and that others could then be sent.

Bishop sought his man out immediately, offering him advice and friendship. He found Mungo aggressive, somewhat dull-witted and wholly unpleasant. He also saw him filled with despair and desperate to get out. Mungo had been in and out of mental institutions for much of his childhood and early youth. At nineteen he was finally committed by helpless relatives who could no longer control him or take care of him. Five years and three mental hospitals later he was firmly convinced that he would never leave. His despair led him to an everincreasing hatred of authority but no further. Though readily violent if confronted, he was incapable of the sustained planning required for escape. He had never even thought of it. Until, that is, he met Thomas Bishop.

Almost from the start Bishop talked of escape to his new friend, for he too was desperate, though his desperation was far more concrete and dangerous. At first in supposed jest, then with increased insistence, he filled Mungo’s head with visions of a new life. He was careful not to mention anything definite, emphasizing that no one else must know of their plan. Only the two of them were to go, only they would be free. “But how?” Mungo kept asking. “How do we do it?” And when he received no answer he would always ask, “When?” Bishop would smile. “Soon,” he would say. “Very soon.”

While the two men waited, one for the moment and the other for the word, the beginning of summer splashed itself up and down the California coast. In a splendid office atop a building in Los Angeles a man sat waiting for the arrival of two of his staff. He was Derek Layery, West Coast editor and bureau chief of one of the country’s biggest newsweeklies. Fortyish, silver hair crowning a large energetic body that kept itself in athletic trim, Lavery devoted his professional life to speed and facts. Each week he would assign his crew to work up stories of public interest. Though timeliness was the keynote, Lavery often developed articles of some depth on burning issues of the day that he would get out to the public before anybody else.