Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (38 page)

Nelson St. Thomas didn't mind discussing the case further. He was a Catholic, an easygoing cowboy type who'd drifted down from Montana, married a Lovell Mormon and joined the regiment of hardworking men wrenching a living from the badlands. When he wasn't clogging his lungs with bentonite or gypsum dust, St. Thomas photographed birds and butterflies, smoked his big pipe, and drove his pickup a little too fast on the desert road. He had flyaway black hair flecked with white gypsum dust, heavy pork-chop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. His labored breathing could be heard across the room as he spoke about the incident twelve years back:

"The night 'Nella told me what Story did to her, I racked my twelve-gauge in my old Chevy pickup and drove to town. I parked down the street from Story's house. Then I took and walked up to the front door. I was gonna waste him and get away without being seen.

"It seemed like forever till I reached that door. I was so mad I was shakin'. My finger was inside the trigger guard. I thought, I'll give him one barrel for waving that thing in front of my wife and the other for poking it in her side.

"Just before I pushed the doorbell, I thought, What if his wife answers? Then I'm in trouble. That hesitation saved me. I said to myself, Why go to prison for killing that stupid son of a bitch— excuse my French. For what? It's not worth it.

"I got back in the truck and drove to the police. I pointed my finger at Chief Averett and I said, 'You better arrest Dr. Story for rape.'

"He sat back and stared.

"I said, 'You better find that son of a bitch before I do, or he's dead meat.'

"He said, 'Mister, if you don't put that shotgun down, I might just throw you in jail.'

"I'd clean forgot I was carrying my gun. I says, 'He raped my wife. You better find him.'

"The chief told me I was wasting my time."

Wilcock drove to the Averett home to check out the story. As soon as he was ushered inside, he felt the antagonism. He asked his questions in a low key and gave no hint of his concern about Averett's behavior. The former chief's face reddened as he admitted talking to Nelson St. Thomas. "I told him he would have to get him a lawyer and get a complaint made up," the old man recalled. He insisted that he would do the same again "because anybody that thinks Doc Story would do them things has gotta be plumb loco to begin with."

After the short interview, Wilcock returned to the little police office behind the Town Hall and a few minutes later looked up to see Averett bursting through the door. "Look," the former chief said, "if you try to use anything I said in court, just remember one thing. An old man has an awful convenient memory."

Wilcock started to speak but ended up saying it to himself.
For God's sake, LaMar, you're supposed to be a cop. . . .

Sgt. Cashel uncovered a victim who was distantly related to Mayor Herman Fink. There were even more Finks than Asays in the Lovell phone book, some thirty in all. They were Lutherans descended from a colony of Germans who'd been lured to Russia by Catherine the Great and thence to the Big Horn Basin, duped both times by promises of gold.

"We've got a new name to check out," Judi told Wilcock. " 'Hayla Farwell.' Story did it to her in 1968."

"Did what?"

DAVID WILCOCK

"I don't know the details yet."

The name was familiar. "Say, who's Hayla Farwell?" Wilcock asked police dispatcher John Fink.

Fink looked up from his wheelchair. Years before, he'd fallen from a tree in the snowy Big Horns and snapped his spine. Dr. Story had been in the rescue party. "She's my sister," he said.

"Oh, I'm sorry, John," Wilcock said. "How long have you known about her and Story?"

"A month or so."

"God, John, why didn't you say something?"

The details made the chief sick. Hayla Fink Farwell, a round busty woman with a pretty face, had suffered slight loss of brain function after inhaling butane from a defective burner. The German-hating family doctor began giving her pelvic exams. Hayla hadn't realized what was going on till she saw his penis, and then she kept the information to herself out of fear and shame.

Wilcock had worked closely with Hayla's paraplegic brother and knew that reticence was a deep family tradition. John had told him about an ancestor who said of her own pregnancy,
"Um dis spricht man nicht.
No one speaks about this." Another family expression dated to the nineteenth century on the Volga: "When little men try 10 act big, they usually use their pecker."

59

JUDI CASHEL

There were nights when she fell into bed at the Super 8 with the unwholesome feeling that she was making a sick situation sicker. Lovell women were naive, shy creatures, hugely different from their counterparts in cities as close as Casper and Cheyenne. She admired them, respected their principles and ideals, but also felt that some of them must have been living in caves while the twentieth century passed unnoticed. They squirmed at the merest mention of sex and cried at the simplest questions. The mere mention of her birthday made Aletha Durtsche break into sobs; she'd been raped on that day.

Sometimes Judi had to break off interviews and reschedule them. Most of the women referred to "my bottom," "down there," "my sex." Breasts were "boobs"; one woman called her breasts "my flowers." Every victim had to be asked if she'd seen Story's erect penis, and several answered that they knew how erections felt but not how they looked. Apparently sex was performed exclusively in the dark in Lovell. The women seemed to think that it was unworthy of them to discuss the subject.

After a while, Judi found herself opening each interview with an explanation that there was nothing to be ashamed of, that women didn't need to accept victimization, that they had basic rights. "I want you to talk to me," she would plead, "and we'll see this through together." She called it her "I am woman, hear me roar speech." Dave Wilcock, working hard on his own contacts, kept threatening to bring in the Helen Reddy song on a cassette.

Aletha had turned in Mae Fischer's name as a possible victim, and it proved to be one of Judi's hardest interviews. Caroline Shotwell's daughter gave a full statement but begged that it not be used. "My husband doesn't know and he'd kill Story." A few days later she phoned to say that she'd told Bill and he was in a rage.

Not long afterward, Bill Fischer made a hostile remark to Dave Wilcock in the Rose Bowl Cafe. The next day he strode into the police office and warned, "You got exactly two months and then I'll handle this myself."

"We're working on it," Judi told him.

"You got two months!" He had a strange look in his eyes.

Judi called on Caroline Shotwell to corroborate daughter Mae's story and ended up finding another sobbing victim. The wife of the former bishop lamented that she'd been violated by Story and failed to warn her daughter. The Shotwell woman still hadn't told anyone in her family about her own involvement. She thought she would get around to it soon, if she could only stop crying.

Plump little Wanda Hammond was another vale of tears, but behind the hysteria the grocery checker had almost perfect recall of the day she'd been raped fifteen years before. Judi made a note that she would be a superior witness.

Dorothy Brinkerhoff admitted that she hadn't made an official complaint, and she refused to make one now. Minda BrinkerhofFs mother-in-law seemed to feel that the police had voodoo techniques for learning victims' names and she'd better come in before she was found out. Otherwise, Judi was convinced, they wouldn't have heard from her at all. She cried throughout the interview and acted thoroughly ashamed. She'd only told her husband a month before.

Judi began to get a line on the victims' thought processes. To her, they seemed like docile, subservient creatures, raised to serve males and continually reminded of their low station. Most of them seemed to consider themselves property, not much more important than a bell cow or a blue-ribbon hog. When the realization had hit them that they were being "dilated" with a penis, their minds simply shut down in a combination of shock and denial. Some thanked the doctor and left. Some politely asked how much they owed and wrote checks. Some scheduled new appointments. They reminded Judi of accident victims she'd seen sitting on the curb applying lipstick. In the face of unexpected horror, the mind held itself together by reverting to the familiar.

She discovered that the reason most of them had kept quiet was not the oft-mentioned rationalization that their husbands might kill Story and go to jail, but the fear of personal embarrassment and ridicule. Each wondered if she'd done something to bring on the attack and therefore deserved it, at least partially. Alone in her shame, almost every victim was sure that she'd committed adultery, or, at the least, fornication, and that she could be excommunicated. In a godly town like Lovell, that amounted to social death.

After a few weeks, Judi felt the strain herself. She'd never become so personally involved with crime victims. The constant emotional scenes, the handholding, the midnight phone conversations —it was so
draining.
There were nights when she'd almost have dumped the case for a spin on the Kawasaki with her husband.

In the daytime she couldn't relax; she had to go about her work while maintaining a low profile. She and Dave Wilcock knew that someone was keeping watch. Five or six times she picked up the police office phone and heard breathing. Her personal behavior had to be impeccable. She warned herself, Nothing will sabotage this case faster than some sort of confrontation where I can be made to look bad or the facts can be twisted against me.

So she didn't take her usual daily jog or her long walks at night; her red hair and her petite figure were too conspicuous. She ate every meal in the Big Horn Restaurant next to the motel. She always sat in the corner booth with Dave Wilcock or Patricia Wiseman, the town's new Family Violence/Sexual Assault coordinator, who was counseling some of the victims. Rather than study the long menu, she always ordered nachos. Once in a while the three of them would share a carafe of wine, make jokes and act silly. It was their only recreation.

She drove thirty miles to Powell to interview Terri Lee Timmons and found the woman to be an emotional wreck. After mailing the microcassette tape from Denver, Terri had returned silently to her hometown and tried to forget. Dave Wilcock had located her only after a frantic hunt.

The Timmons woman was small, pale, feminine, slightly prissy, and totally credible. Judi called their session a two-Kleenex interview—two packages. At the end, Terri mentioned that an aunt had been violated by Story twenty years before; she now lived in another state. It might be difficult interviewing her; she'd always been "a little . . . different."

Judi confirmed the information with another family member and sought interagency help. Back came a report from a detective:

Basically Betty claimed that when she was approx 15 she went to the doctor's office and Dr. Story told her to lay on the table and he was going to put an instrument in her mouth, that he wanted her to suck on it like a baby bottle. She was to close her eyes and not open them. She did and he placed the instrument in her mouth. She sucked for several min. before gagging. As she opened her eyes the doctor turned around quickly. He told her that she was not finished, to close her eyes again. She did and the doctor continued by placing the instrument back in her mouth. He did push it in and out as she recalls. He did have an erection according to the victim. He did not ejaculate that she recalls.

Other juvenile victims turned up. Jean Anderson Howe had been a deathly ill ten-year-old when Story violated her. Another woman told how she'd watched him stick his finger into her three-year-old daughter, then explain, "She might as well get used to it."

Carol Beach, a Lovell schoolteacher's wife, proved to be another prim and proper victim, the type who would make a good witness. She brought some of her information in writing so she wouldn't have to say certain words. Judi relaxed her with the "I am woman"

"DOC"

speech arid the interview went smoothly. At the end, Mrs. Beach asked, "How do you think it feels to be thirty-six years old and find out on your marriage bed that your doctor raped you?" Judi said she couldn't imagine.

60

MARILYN STORY

One morning when the silvery-chrome sun was so bright that it hurt her eyes, Marilyn tore open the long-awaited envelope from the psychologist in Denver. What did an experienced behaviorist think of her husband? John had felt good about the interview and the man; Dr. Dolby seemed to know his Scripture and his psychology. But how far would he be willing to go in a sworn affidavit?

Marilyn settled into a chair in the atrium in back of the house. "Dr. Story is a small, 58 year old, Caucasian male," she read. "He is average in build, wears glasses, and his face has some lines in it." Well, she said to herself, whose face wouldn't?

The report noted that John seemed almost fatalistic about the charges, as though the matter were in God's hands and out of his own. The psychologist had found John cautious and thorough, a strong conservative who believed in hard work, moral values, self-denial, obedience, and "a minimum of governmental intervention in one's work or private life."

"It appears that his father was his key model," Dr. Dolby observed. "E.g., neither he nor his father are very socially gregarious, but they both have/had many good friends."