Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (62 page)

Nebel added, "There are some of you who hold back information that is vital to Doc's freedom. I know who several of you are."

The newly formed Dr. Story Defense Committee moved to the attack. Fruit sales were held, bake sales, auctions; doorbells were rung, arms twisted, old debts called in. Jan Hillman, master telephonist and committee chairman, worked the phones. Assisted by her mother and Bev Moody, the robust bar owner soon had $20,000 in the coffers. La Vera Hillman also helped the cause by auctioning off her late husband's gun collection and other personal possessions.

Defense Committee sleuths hounded the jurors for an explanation of their verdict; most refused to talk. Pressure was applied to state witnesses in the hope that one would admit that there'd been a conspiracy and provide details. Just when they needed bucking up, the Story forces were strengthened by Ed Herschler's statement that the victims' testimony had been "hogwash." If the governor was on Doc's side, could justice be far behind?

Wanda Hammond, never far from tears, was publicly labeled "a fat whore" by a Committee member. The roundish little woman took so many abusive calls that she was afraid to answer her phone. Lifelong friends cut her dead. High priests turned away when she came through their handshake line at church. Customers pulled up to the Rose City Food Farm, looked through the window to see if she was checking, and squealed their tires to get away. Wanda was a wreck.

Over at the Big Horn IGA, the Bob Negro family remained staunchly pro-Story. Mae Fischer waited for ten minutes before she realized that the manager's wife didn't intend to check her out. Diana Harrison called "Hi, Mitch!" to the owner's young son and was ignored. The former receptionist was already hurt by the whispering campaign against her. Schoolchildren spread word that she was "the best come-sniffer in Big Horn County."

"We're catchin' hell," Nelson St. Thomas complained in his Montana cowpoke accent. "The hardest part is going down to the IGA. They turn us away like we had leprosy. I'm working in the oil fields, and some of those damn fools out there spend half their time complaining about Story. He's in jail and they still don't believe he did it! Meantime, 'Nella's back at our house, where anybody could walk right in. All day long I worry about her. She's been through enough."

A few friends and relatives of the victims finally reached the end of their tether. A Story supporter taunted Gerald Brinkerhoff on the street. "Who're you Mormons gonna go after next?" he asked.

"You, you dumb son of a bitch!" the feisty carpenter exploded.

Brinkerhoff was the husband of one victim and the father-in-law of another, and he was rubbed raw on the subject of Dr. Story's innocence. He'd heard that the second ward bishop had publicly asked the brethren to play down the case, and that the third ward bishop, Larry Sessions, had called for a more tolerant attitude toward Story and his backers. "You're hurting our missionary effort," Sessions was quoted as telling some of his people. "They're getting too many doors slammed in their faces."

The morning after Sessions made his plea, Brinkerhoff asked him, "Are you trying to tell us that it's okay to let this man have his way with our women? It's okay for our wives to be raped? You tellin' us
thatV

"You weren't there, Gerald," the bishop said. "You don't know what happened."

"I wasn't there," the carpenter agreed, "but my wife Dorothy has never lied to me. If she says that he bothered her, I believe it. There's a hundred women sayin' so. Why can't you people see the truth?"

The Story forces stepped up their campaign to bring him home. Week after week, paid ads appeared in the
Chronicle:

IT'S NOT OVER until it's over. WE KNOW THE REAL DOC!

Official-looking information packets were bound in clear blue plastic and sent out with an appeal: "Make checks payable to 'The Doctor Story Defense Fund' and mail to First National Bank, Lovell WY 82431." Jan Hillman added her money pitch to a newsletter,
The Real Story.
The first edition contained a folksy message from the prisoner himself:

I wish I had scales. I think I'm in a battle with my stomach. I'm outdoors quite a bit more here. Pretty good sun tan. Working on weights a little bit. Everyone here seems to have a Bible or something religious. ... I saw 5 antelope out in the sagebrush meadow. They ran a little then grazed back into view.

In a letter to the Lovell
Chronicle,
daughter Linda called for her father's vindication. "We should take a lessson from history," she wrote. "In 1939, the Western nations, desiring peace more than justice, sat idly by as Nazi Germany crushed Poland in less than a month and the Holocaust began. How many lives (6 million, at least) would have been saved if 'moral' nations had acted immediately on their principles of right over might—and numbers?"

Linda complained to the prison warden when her mother was chastised for using the wrong telephone during a visit. After the offending lieutenant was peremptorily transferred, word passed among the guards that the runty doctor in medium security wasn't to be taken lightly.

Letters to the judge gradually turned from wheedling to stern. Defense Committee charter member Kay Holm, identifying herself as a University of Minnesota alumna and daughter of a Lutheran pastor who'd counseled rape victims, wrote the judge that Dr. Story "is hated in a very deep and dark way because of his stand (boldly) for Christianity in a very non-Christian area. . . . I'm sure you wish with all your heart Dr. Story would admit to something, anything. Unfortunately, you picked the wrong man. Dr. Story will never admit to anything nor can he show any remorse for something he hasn't done. . . . Mr. Hartman, the disgust in my town is the very strongest for you than anyone. It was obvious from the beginning that Terry Tharp didn't have much between the ears, but there was hope for you. . . . You are a coward among cowards ... I cannot in good conscience refer to you as an honorable judge. You are not."

The day after the Holm letter arrived, former Lovell physician Henry R. Eskens was deposed under oath in an unrelated case in Casper. He testified that he'd practiced in Lovell for seventeen years.

Q And why did you leave there?

A The number one reason was John Story.

Q Why was that?

A ... When I have patients coming into my office and into my living room seven days a week, crying and complaining • • • "Dr. Eskens,
I
felt some spurt in my vagina, and when
I looked up, I
saw him zip up his pants." And when
I
found
out he examm ^
twelve-year-old girls' tonsils with his penis, but nothing wa

"DOC"

about it all these years. Year after year after year. I wrote to the Board of Medical Examiners. Nobody answered. "Henry, how do you dare to talk that way about your colleagues," etcetera, etcetera. This went on and on, and that was the number one reason we left Lovell, Wyoming. I just couldn't stomach that filth.

The Medical Board repeated its denial that any such charges had been recorded. "We don't lose those types of things," the executive secretary said angrily. He announced that the Board was considering libel or peijury charges against Dr. Eskens.

The Casper
Star-Tribune
took note of the squabble in an editorial cartoon suggesting a new motto for state medical officials: "Curamus Nostrum. We take care of our own."

88

YELLOW RIBBONS

I thought we were rid of him when he lost his license. I thought we were rid of him when he was convicted. I thought we were rid of him when he was sent to Rawlins. Gol, am I stupid or what?

—Minda Brinkerhoff

The appeal process promised to be expensive, and the Defense Committee paid a $19,000 retainer to the newest addition to Story's legal staff, Gerald Mason of Pinedale, Wyoming. In his first public statement, Mason said he'd conferred with Wayne Aarestad and assumed the convictions would be reversed by the Wyoming Supreme Court. He promised new evidence "of a significant nature."

When Judge Hartman refused to release Story on bail pending appeal, his lawyers turned to a friendlier jurist in the penitentiary town of Rawlins. Judge Robert A. Hill admitted that he knew "very little" about Story's background but authorized his release on $50,000 surety bond.

Within twenty minutes, the Defense Committee collected the money from Wes Meeker's well-to-do brother Earl. Jan Hillman began cutting up spools of yellow plastic. An ad was phoned to the Lovell
Chronicle:
"WELCOME HOME Doc! We've missed you!" Everyone was invited to the homecoming.

* * *

Terri Timmons read the ad and thought about buying a gun. "Story's people'll act more ignorant than ever," she told her husband Loyd. She ordered her children indoors. Her lymph glands swelled and a pinching pain in her stomach signaled the start of an ulcer.

On her thirty-fourth birthday, she looked in the mirror and saw her first gray hair. Loyd perked her up with a big bouquet. She wrote in her journal, "The flowers made me feel that maybe I am of some worth to Loyd and the children. It helped so that my heart didn't hurt so bad. The flowers were daisies, two white, yellow and purple ones with an orange carnation and greens. It helped bring some peace. . . ."

On Sunday night, August 18, ten weeks after her husband had been sentenced, Marilyn Story wrote in her journal, "Arrived in Lovell late last night to a beautiful sight! Yellow ribbons—all over the yard, plus posters saying Welcome Home Doc, signed by the children—his little patients.

". . . People started arriving for an open house in the backyard which was planned and served by the Defense Committee. What a wonderful, happy, heartwarming day! Probably 200 people there. . . . O Lord God! Behold, Thou hast made the heavens and the earth by Thy great power and by Thine outstretched arms. Nothing is too difficult for Thee! Jer. 32:17 Look up!"

Two months later, she wrote, "Beautiful fall days with my beloved. Hours out in the hills and up on the mountain cutting firewood—precious times here at home, cherishing each day and hour together, knowing that one sad day it will likely come to an end."

Occasionally the idyll was interrupted by the phone. "Why don't you and your husband get out of town?" a woman's voice challenged. "Your husband has raped people behind his coat."

Callers hung up when she answered, or let the recording machine's tape run out. She was horrified by a call from two sweet-voiced little girls, one talking, one prompting in the background:

"Suck my come."

"Suck my come."
"Suck my penis."

"Suck my penis."

"And your vagina."

"And your vagina. G'bye."

She and John talked more than they ever had, but seldom about the case. He explained the origin of some of the earliest rumors about him, and she repeated his explanation to a friend: "When Doc was getting started, there was a school of medicine that held that when a sick child came in, no matter what was wrong, you got 'em used to the tongue blade, the auroscope in the ear, things like that. And you gave young girls one-finger pelvic exams to get 'em used to it."

For herself, Marilyn never asked or required explanations. She knew John's problem: he was too straight, too good, too naive. He'd trusted his patients, thought more of them than he did of himself and his family. "You know, Doc's always the same man," she told Cheri Nebel on the phone. "Gentle and concerned. That's why so many of these women have crushes on him. He never flirts, but he's interested in women in a happy, teasing manner. He tells 'em they look nice, etcetera. I like that in him."

She explained to other friends that he'd set himself up for persecution by helping to found the Bible Church and being too critical of the Mormons. "He couldn't stomach that business, 'As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.' Whenever he talked to a Mormon, he'd bring that up. He'd say, 'Hey, do you really believe that?'

"And they'd say,'Yes.'

"And he'd ask 'em, 'Well, who do you think Jesus was?'

"They'd say, 'Jesus was just a man, like we are.' That rankled Doc. He'd ask 'em where the Book of Mormon came from, and they'd tell him how Joseph Smith sat behind a blanket up in his room and looked through his magic spectacles, etcetera, and all about the Urim and the Thummim, and how he translated the buried plates from Palmyra, reading through a blanket to three men who wrote it all down. Doc just bristled at that kind of stuff.

The Mormons saw him as a threat. It took twenty-six years, but they finally got him."

Pastor Ken Buttermore saw the same evil scenario. "The Mormons were tremendously jealous of Doc as a successful businessman, parent, and husband," he explained with his robust eloquence. "There's a quote in 'Mormonism's Temple of Doom' that women are like butterflies in a jar—and men control the lid. That's why you find so many Mormon women with mental problems. They want a meaningful, rich marriage, and instead they're slaves, total bonded servants, trampled on. So they look at this doctor who treats 'em very graciously, opens car doors for his wife, a gracious, kind man, and something develops."

Buttermore felt bad that he and the Bible Church had helped to worsen things for Elder Story. "We made waves, we bucked the system. I'd co-officiate at big funerals at the LDS Church, and I'd speak right out for biblical Christianity. It didn't set well with the Mormons. They had to lash out at somebody. Doc consistently refused to convert. He was a perfect target."