Journey into Darkness (36 page)

Stephen had already expressed similar sentiments that Friday evening as he sat with his parents on the edge of their bed and talked with them into the early hours of Saturday morning.

“I agree with how you feel, Steve,” Jack said. “I couldn’t agree with you more. But the guy is probably in custody now and we wouldn’t be able to gel at him. But even if we could, would we really want to become like him—a brute and a savage?”

*   *   *

What they put their faith in instead was the judicial process, and they couldn’t have had a better or more dedicated advocate than Hank Williams.

As it happens, though we didn’t know each other then, Hank and I started from a similar place at a similar time. One difference, though, was that he had a law degree. Hank joined the FBI as a special agent in 1969, one year before me. His first assignment was with the Salt Lake City Field Office, then he moved to San Francisco where he worked on the organized crime unit. While there his and his wife, Ginny’s, first daughter was born. Knowing how much moving around an FBI career can mean, and knowing that he wanted to practice law at some point, he left the Bureau, moved back home to Tennessee, and went to work as a prosecutor.

Williams was in his early forties. He wasn’t falsely or overly theatrical like a lot of trial attorneys, but his seriousness of purpose and sense of mission were always evident. He recalls, “I just thought it was a pathetic circumstance that this girl joins the U.S. military to defend her country, she’s on base with all the security around her and this happens. I read the file and said to myself, this is definitely a death penalty case. I wasn’t going to plea-bargain this one, and after talking to the Collinses, I was even more resolute in that.”

Williams not only prosecuted the case as a counselor at law, he also became a psychological counselor to Jack and Trudy Collins at a time when they desperately needed to rely on a sensitive person within the system. He took it upon himself always to be there for them, to listen to their fears and anxieties and frustrations, and considered himself their advocate as they all waded through the mountain of pretrial motions and procedures.

“When they first came to Memphis,” Williams recalls, “they insisted on seeing the crime scene photographs. I was extremely afraid of this, because I felt they needed psychological help and I thought this would be too much for them. But they told me they needed to understand just what had happened and be able to share Suzanne’s pain, so I finally agreed. But once you see something like that, you can never forget it.”

Ironically, the defense tried to have some of the photos suppressed because they could “inflame the jury.”

Sedley Alley was represented by Robert Jones and Ed Thompson, two of the preeminent defense attorneys in Memphis, both of whom Williams greatly respects. Despite what he considered the clear-cut nature of the crime, he knew he wouldn’t have an easy time with them.

Nor did they have an easy time with their client, as it turned out. I don’t mean he completely clammed up and refused to talk; he simply didn’t tell them anything relevant or assist in his defense. Going on a year after the murder, Williams and his assistant, Bobby Carter, were pushing for trial.

The defense brought in a psychologist named Allen Battle to examine Alley. When Dr. Battle interviewed him, he got a similar response to what Alley had been giving his lawyers. To any substantive question he’d respond, “I don’t remember.”

Now, there are only a couple of ways to interpret the behavior of a defendant in a capital murder case who gives investigators a detailed confession just hours after the crime and then, months later, tells a psychologist he doesn’t remember anything about the incident. My personal interpretation, barring compelling evidence to the contrary, would be that he’s either attempting to save his own skin or just telling the entire system to take a flying leap. A more charitable interpretation—and one that would play a whole lot better from a defense viewpoint—might be that the horrible event of the death of this young woman so traumatized him that he had developed total amnesia about it.

How could this happen? Dr.Battle wondered. After all, on July 12, he told the detectives what he’d done and that he’d killed her. Well …how about if
only one personality
remembered? The others didn’t,
because they had no part in it!

That was the explanation Dr. Allen Battle came up with. He then hypnotized Alley and became more convinced.

Candidly, there weren’t many other arrows in the quiver at this point. Alley can’t very well deny the crime—he’s already admitted he killed her and the medical examiner’s detailed report is pretty definitive about the way she died.
If you’re the defense, you might as well try to place it in a context that at least gets rid of some of the horrible responsibility.

Ten days before the scheduled trial date of March 17, 1986, Jones and Thompson officially raised the possibility of multiple personality disorder. They said they needed more time to study Alley’s supposed condition. The trial was postponed to evaluate for mental competency.

Alley was sent to MTMHI—the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute. For six months, six therapists of various sorts examined him without coming to any definitive conclusion. Physical tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Dr. Willis Marshall, a psychiatrist brought in by the defense, examined Alley under drug-induced hypnosis to help overcome the “amnesia.” With this type of attention, Alley was able to remember the night of July 11, 1985.

Under hypnosis, Alley revealed that he had been split into three personalities that night. There was the regular Sedley, there was a female personality called Billie next to him in the car, and there was Death, dressed in a black hood and cape and riding a white horse next to the car as it drove along.

While Dr. Battle stuck with multiple personality disorder, Dr.Broggan Brooks, for the prosecution, specifically ruled it out in his own opinion, saying Alley was a “borderline personality.” DSM-III—the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition
, the standard psychiatric reference—characterized borderline personality disorder as “an instability in a variety of areas, including interpersonal behavior, mood, and self-image.” It went on to describe intense and unstable relationships, intense anger, and impulsive, unpredictable behavior characterized by wide mood shifts. (We are now up to DSM-IV.) Four other examiners said they weren’t sure and required more time to study Alley.

With respect to hypnosis as a forensic examination tool, we’ve all seen or heard about the nightclub acts in which a hypnotist selects members of the audience and gets them to cluck like chickens, or convinces them they can’t raise their arms, or regresses them back to a past life in the court of Cleopatra. There is a tendency for us to think of hypnosis
as a combination of infallible truth serum and a state of utter suggestibility, even though when you stop to think about it, those two concepts are mutually exclusive.

The fact of the matter is that hypnosis doesn’t work on everyone—I’m not even sure it works on most people—and what it really is, is a technique for helping the subject focus and concentrate on a particular time, place, or idea. That’s why it’s sometimes helpful to police in getting specific details from witnesses, such as a physical description or a license plate number, though it certainly isn’t foolproof any more than a polygraph is foolproof. What this means in real terms is that in some cases the subject might be very suggestible on either a conscious or semiconscious level to what he thinks the hypnotist wants to hear, or, with the heightened state of concentration that the hypnosis provides, he might be even more effective in constructing his own desired account of events. I have seen remarkable control studies in which, under the guidance of the hypnotist, subjects relate extensive details of events which have already been established not to have taken place. I’m not saying hypnosis isn’t sometimes effective or useful; I’m only saying it’s far from definitive—something many doctors, lawyers, judges, and juries don’t understand.

As to multiple personality disorder: from my experience, MPD is a diagnosis that generally emerges post-arrest. In point of fact, it is a very rare phenomenon, so any therapist who tells you he has extensive experience with it ought to be suspect right from the beginning. In the few documented cases in which it is seen, it is much more common in women than in men and almost always arises out of early childhood sexual abuse. And if you’re going to see evidence of MPD, you’re going to see it early.

Another issue is that while MPD seems to be a psychological response to abuse or violence inflicted upon an individual—who then retreats into another personality to lessen the trauma or fantasize getting back at the abuser—there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that MPD has made an otherwise nonviolent person become violent. In other words, there is no literature I’m aware of, or that any of the experts I’ve consulted are aware of, suggesting that a violent personality
ever takes over and does what it wants with the other personalities unaware or unable to control it.

So, to state it plainly: If you’re going to make a case for multiple personality disorder—particularly as a defense for a crime of violence—you’re going to have to do a pretty good job of documenting the evidence going back to early childhood rather than a sudden appearance around the time of the crime. And if you’re going to use it as an insanity defense, you’re going to have to show—which I don’t think you can—that one personality was responsible for the crime and the others were powerless to stop “him.” In Sedley Alley’s case, for example, which of the personalities killed Suzanne Collins? Was it Death; if so, maybe he was just doing his job. Or was it Billie—maybe she was jealous of another woman. Or was it regular old Sedley, in which case we can forget about the other two and just try him on the merits. One thing’s for sure: some personality or other gave a detailed description of killing Suzanne to the authorities, and I’ve studied the transcript—there’s no mention of Billie or Death or indication of a feminine persona.

Kenneth Bianchi, who, along with his cousin Angelo Buono, was charged with the rape and murder of ten young women in the notorious Hillside Strangler case in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, claimed to be a multiple personality and convinced several psychiatric experts, who ultimately identified ten separate personalities under hypnosis—eight men and two women. In what has become a classic of forensic psychology, Dr. Martin Orne of the University of Pennsylvania revealed Bianchi as a fake and even showed where all of the other identities had come from and the technique Bianchi had used to develop them and call them up. Bianchi withdrew his insanity plea and began cooperating with prosecutors to escape the death penalty. Bianchi is currently serving five consecutive life sentences.

But Drs. Battle and Marshall stuck to their guns. Marshall testified that as a child, Alley was mentally abused by his father, which is where the multiple personalities began. Battle thought that because of a childhood urinary tract problem which required surgical correction Alley developed a female personality to handle the pain. The Death personality, he concluded, was the result of an underlying psychosis.

Meanwhile, the pretrial procedure dragged on.

On June 8, 1986—the day that would have been Suzanne’s twentieth birthday—Trudy wrote:

With the trial of this dreadful man, who is her confessed murderer, having been postponed twice and now, perhaps, once again, we are groping for patience, relief from our oozing wound and solace in knowing that Sue is in God’s hands and can no longer be hurt.

The need we have to start the healing by putting this deed in the court so that justice can be meted out, is great and heavy. It is almost an inhuman act to have this final reach for justice postponed and prolonged for reasons of the inadequacy of our justice system. It appears that the criminals have every card in the game of death and the victim has nothing.

Preparing to leave for the trial, Jack and Trudy had put their dog in the kennel and were literally on their way out of the house for the trip to Tennessee when the phone rang, telling them there had been another postponement. Had the call come one minute later, they would have taken on the expense and made the trip for nothing. Among the other tasks Williams took on himself was trying to convince the Collinses that as excruciating as the delays were to them, the judge was doing it right, giving the defense all the latitude they asked for to prove their case.

Still, he admits, “The frustration level was incredible.”

After four postponements, the murder trial of Sedley Alley finally got under way in early March of 1987, in Thirteenth Judicial District Criminal Court, Shelby County, Tennessee, with Judge W. Fred Axley presiding.

In the days just prior to the beginning of the trial, Williams and Carter went to interview Dr. Battle. While he insisted that Alley looked like a multiple personality case to him, when the two men pressed him, he admitted that he couldn’t say which of the personalities was in control at the time of the murder.

At the request of the prosecution, I flew down to Memphis.
I stayed at the River Place Hotel, the same hotel where Jack and Trudy Collins were staying. Jack testified, telling the jury what kind of person Suzanne was.

Williams had originally contacted me at Quantico through Harold Hayes of the Memphis Field Office because he was worried about establishing motive in what might seem to a jury (and was) so senseless a killing. His greatest fear, he said, was that Battle or Marshall would do well and, absent another reasonable motive for the killing, the jury would buy their version. As it turned out, though, they came up with a fine, intelligent jury that didn’t.

I had two main purposes in being down there. First, Williams and Carter were hoping Alley would take the stand. If he did, they wanted advice from me on how best to nail him and get him to show his true personality, as I’d helped District Attorney Jack Mallard do during the Wayne Williams (no relation to Hank Williams) child murder trial in Atlanta. Throughout that trial, Williams had come across as a mild-mannered nonentity who couldn’t hurt a fly. We knew, however, that he had a huge ego and might insist on testifying. Once he did, I gave Mallard pointers on how he could intrude on Williams’s physical and emotional space and get him to lash out emotionally, showing the jury his true colors. The moment when he did was a turning point in the trial, leading to Williams’s conviction for murder.