The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (31 page)

A lot of that income came from the Berkeley Police Department, which engaged Kelley as a psychiatric consultant in November 1949, almost as soon as he hit town. The local law enforcers had taken advantage of nearby academic expertise for many years, and a legendary police chief, August Vollmer, had taught criminal justice at the university. Another School of Criminology teaching star, Paul L. Kirk, frequently volunteered as a police consultant.
A former chemist with the Manhattan Project who turned his scientific talents to the microscopic examination of physical evidence in criminal cases, Kirk later conducted blood analysis for the defense in the infamous Sam Sheppard murder case in Ohio, helping overturn the defendant’s conviction.

Throughout the 1950s Kelley worked closely with police superintendent John Holstrom, who administered the police oath to Kelley, gave him the title Psychiatric Chief of Police, and issued him a chief of police badge from Alameda County, which Kelley could produce, as necessary, with the same dexterity with which he could deal a card from the bottom of the deck. Once while speeding along a highway in Northern California with his son, Kelley was stopped by a state trooper. “The Old Man popped out his wallet and showed him the badge,” Doug remembers. “The officer said, ‘Oh, I see. Excuse me.’ I thought, ‘What a hypocrite! How do
I
get a badge?’”

Kelley earned his badge for the most part for psychologically evaluating Berkeley police recruits. Among his first tasks for the force was to examine thirteen candidates for patrolman and patrolman-clerk jobs, and he found three of them “sufficiently unstable to be considered potential hazards in these positions.” That high percentage of recruits that the psychiatrist
rejected prompted Holstrom to let Kelley schedule regular psychiatric evaluations of all recruits, and as the doctor’s proficiency in weeding out bad candidates increased, he gained fame around the country as an exponent of the rigorous screening of prospective police officers.

Strangely, Kelley also took it upon himself to evaluate the psychiatric health of certain citizens of Berkeley who reported crimes. In 1950 alone, he examined seven residents who had made frequent reports, plus the families of two of those people. He concluded that several of these people were mentally disturbed and should be “either committed or referred for psychiatric treatment.” As a result, he predicted, “bizarre calls for aid” would dramatically fall. “I don’t really think Berkeley is any crazier than any other city,” he said in a press interview, “but Berkeley has a high percentage of psychotics and lunatics wandering the streets. We find about two new ones a week.” Kelley launched a similar campaign against chronically bad drivers in 1953 and asserted that frequent traffic offenders could be classified as mentally unfit.

He capitalized on his police department expertise by frequently writing and speaking on law enforcement themes. One of his topics was “dumb cops.” “
About one-third to one-half of the policemen in this country are totally unfit to protect you or to solve crimes,” he declared sweepingly in one article. “They are emotionally unstable, low in mentality and psychologically unsound.” Even worse, he claimed that many cops on the beat were paranoiac, sadistic, and actually insane. “They’re just as dangerous as the thug who steps out from behind the shrubbery in your garageway and sticks a gun in your back.” His solution to this perilous situation was for more police departments to subject officer candidates to screening tests like those he championed in Berkeley, including IQ and Rorschach examinations. In speaking engagements, he sometimes told the story of a police recruit he examined who looked at a Rorschach inkblot and said he saw “a bisected, stomped-on rabbit.” That candidate, Kelley noted, advanced no further in pursuing police work. He often berated police chiefs whose departments lacked scientifically based barriers to entry. “That’s awful,”
he scolded. Over time, as he immersed himself more in the world of crime and detection, Kelley seemed to develop a progressively bleaker view of the criminality of society in general and a dimmer view of the competence of detectives.

Sometimes his targets shot back. In the summer of 1954 members of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police placed on their meeting agenda a discussion of one of Kelley’s recent “dumb cops” articles and complained about it to the FBI. An agent found Kelley’s views “highly unfavorable to law enforcement generally” and irrelevantly added that Kelley’s book
22 Cells in Nuremberg
had received a good review in a publication of the Washington Cooperative Book Shop Association, an organization identified as politically subversive. When Kelley attended a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police a few weeks later, FBI agents monitored his talk on traffic offenders, found that he said nothing about unqualified police officers, and filed a memo on the incident.

Lecture audiences could not count on Kelley to keep to a narrow range of topics. In Los Angeles he told a crowd that the Russians were as dangerous as the Nazis and that the United States should use firmness, not appeasement, in handling Soviet involvement in Korea. In 1951 he informed an audience in San Francisco that many of his colleagues in psychiatry were in over their heads, and that they used big words “to conceal the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about.” He often discussed psychopaths, declaring that the personality type, like an elephant, was difficult to define but “you can sure tell one when you see one.” A listing of his lectures in a promotional brochure issued by his lecture representative included “Fact and Fable in Psychiatry,” “Fear: Its Facts and Fictions,” “Fads, Frauds, and Fools,” “How to Keep Young in Mind,” and “Nothing But the Truth.” He spoke animatedly about juvenile delinquency, and he blamed rising crime rates among the young on modern parenting, which too often ignored teaching children to limit their impulses to do wrong and to feel remorse when they strayed from right. Kelley found a lot wrong with the human condition.

Kelley applied his psychiatric expertise to many prominent criminal cases. Working sometimes for the prosecution and sometimes for the defense, he consulted and testified in the cases of such notorious Bay Area defendants as Ray Cullen, tried for killing his wife and father-in-law in 1949; Mary Edna Glenn, charged in 1952 with murdering her two children; Hildegard Pelton, who murdered her husband after he repeatedly abused her; Rodney Sheran, convicted in the 1955 murder of his wife; and Saul Sidney Klass, a jeweler convicted in 1957 of shooting a physician to avenge his wife, who had died under the doctor’s care. With the aid of prosecutors, Kelley examined Stephen A. Nash, who had committed a series of “thrill murders” in Los Angeles, without disclosing that he was a psychiatrist. Kelley then testified that Nash was legally sane. In many cases such as these, he put his Rorschach expertise to good use, and he made the psychological test a centerpiece of his consulting arsenal for the remainder of his career. The book he had written in 1942 with Bruno Klopfer,
The Rorschach Technique
, stood prominently on a shelf in his home office. Kelley insisted publicly that the test was a valuable tool, despite the mystery that continued to surround it—though on occasion he let slip a doubt about exactly why the Rorschach test worked. “
The Rorschach method has come fast in the 29 years of its existence,” he wrote in 1951. “Whether it has come far is harder to say. We still have little notion as to why it seems to work—theories, yes, by the pound, but [few] facts measured in the microbalance.”

Similarly, Kelley held fast to his conviction that various forms of truth serums and truth detection were effective. He continued to champion Somnoform as a treatment to elicit criminal confessions and to overcome amnesia. Pathological liars, he admitted, would continue to dissemble under Somnoform’s influence, but those people were uncommon. He still hoped for a truth drug that was even better. “
I’m hunting a drug which can be contained in a container as small as, say, a pencil,” he told a reporter. “When I get it, then I’ll be really happy.”

The murder of a fourteen-year-old girl named Stephanie Bryan in 1955 drew Kelley into the most notorious case of his career. Walking home from her junior high school only a few blocks from the UC–Berkeley campus, Bryan, the daughter of a local doctor, had vanished while taking a shortcut through a wooded area. The girl’s body eventually turned up in a hurriedly dug grave in Trinity County, in far northern California. A twenty-seven-year-old former Berkeley student named Burton Abbott was the chief suspect. Abbott was something of a cipher, a skinny, smart, dapper, and bespectacled man with a thin mustache and well-manicured fingers whom one reporter likened to “a pencil standing on end.” The police brought in Kelley and polygraph expert Albert Riedel to grill Abbott, and their work slowly broke through the suspect’s glib and nonchalant façade. After Riedel’s insistent lie-detector interrogations, Kelley took over and put his questioning and listening techniques to use. In the middle of many other questions, he asked Abbott if he had attended a coin collectors’ convention at the Claremont Hotel, a building near Bryan’s fatal shortcut. “
Do you collect coins?” Kelley prodded. “No,” said the suspect, who then mentioned that his wife did. “What kind?” Kelley asked. “The spending kind!” Abbott joked. Kelley did not laugh, but he took note of Abbott’s inappropriate hilarity. In another interview, Kelley subjected Abbott to a detailed description of the scene of Bryan’s grave and the state of her decomposed and animal-mangled body when her remains were found. Abbott took it all in with no sign of emotion: “Damn you, O’Meara,” Abbott said to another person in the room, “where is that ham sandwich you promised me?” Kelley later observed that “
Hermann Göring and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered” of all the people he had professionally interviewed during his career.

Abbott grew to dislike and fear the psychiatrist, calling him a brain-washer and complaining that Kelley “put me through hell.” He responded disdainfully to Kelley’s suggestions that he lacked a conscience and was emotionally immature. “
He’s all wet,” Abbott said. “My conscience is quite well developed. If anything, I am rapidly developing a persecution
complex. Dr. Kelley seems to be impressed with his own importance.” Such remarks must have convinced Kelley that his questioning was getting close to the truth. Denying his guilt to the end—even after the murdered girl’s clothing and purse turned up in his basement—Abbott was convicted and sentenced to death in 1956, and he perished in San Quentin’s gas chamber the following year.

Such cases propelled Kelley into prominence as a consultant, and he won jobs advising authorities on personnel selection and criminal matters at Travis Air Force Base, San Quentin Prison, Letterman Army General Hospital, the California Attorney General’s Office, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Oakland Police Department. In the few spare hours he left himself, he took on freelance consulting gigs in Central and South America, Pakistan, Thailand, and other parts of the world. He stretched his time thinner by shouldering the responsibilities of the presidency of the East Bay Psychiatric Association. During the mid-1950s Kelley was considering adding further to his workload by starting a new business as a psychiatric consultant in corporate management.

With his return to California, maybe the call of Hollywood was inevitable. In 1954, before the production of the film
Rebel Without a Cause
,
director Nicholas Ray contacted Kelley to consult on the criminological soundness of Stewart Stern’s screenplay (which Ray and Irving Shulman had adapted from Robert Lindner’s novel). Ray wanted Kelley to focus on the script’s portrayal of youth gangs and juvenile delinquency. Kelley pointed out to Ray only a few inaccuracies in the script, including police dialogue and interviewing techniques that struck him as wrong, an unrealistic encounter between the James Dean and Sal Mineo characters, and insufficient attention to juvenile psychiatry, although he acknowledged that giving psychiatry its due “might slow down the action.”

Also in 1954, Kelley consulted on a TV program about stage magic for NBC. He splurged with his earnings from that work and bought a color television—an expensive and rarely seen home electronic appliance at the time. For a long time the storytelling techniques and potentially large audience of television had drawn his interest, and over the years he had
sketched several proposals for TV shows about crime and psychiatry.
One nascent show he discussed with friends,
Fakes, Frauds and Fools
, would each week feature an infamous con, quack, or carnival cheat, along with the frauds they perpetrated. Kelley’s inspiration for the series was a letter his father had received of the “Spanish prisoner” type—an ancestor of the Nigerian 419 scams that later invaded e-mail inboxes. Turning the tables, Kelley convinced the Mexican swindlers who had targeted his father to wire him $50 to travel south to complete a transaction. “He figures he has enough script ideas,” one of Kelley’s friends said of the con show concept, “to go five or ten years without straining himself to think or read. . . . Kelley would wind it up, title and all, as Professor of Criminology, scientist, doctor, psychiatrist, magician, etc., who knows all the answers to everything dealing with human cupidity, including the basic psychology which motivates both the mark and the con.” That itself sounded a bit like a con, but the University of California seems to have been an enthusiastic supporter. The School of Criminology would gain credibility and publicity for its programs and faculty, as well as credit for advancing the notion “that crime does not pay, for the thought that the shepherds of Berkeley are watching over the little sheep of America,” Kelley’s friend reported to a colleague.