The Professor and the Prostitute (25 page)

Several days after the trial, I arranged an interview with Robyn Arnold, hoping to learn something about what it was like to escape so narrowly from being convicted of murder. But she agreed to talk only about why she'd gotten caught up with Delia and his/her group. “I never loved him, you know,” she said emphatically. Her nails were freshly manicured, her hair impeccably coiffed; she was wearing an exquisite red and purple bat-wing silk blouse. “It was just infatuation. No, not even that.”

What was it, then? “It was the lifestyle,” she said. “The excitement, the glamour. I found it interesting for a while. Then it grew boring.” She was planning now to marry the dentist, have children, maybe even go to law school and become a defense attorney like Michael Rosen, she told me. “And I'm going to live in the suburbs. Have the life I was raised to have.”

Won't that get boring, I asked, “I mean, considering the exciting life you once led?”

Robyn Arnold inspected her nails. “I've had enough excitement,” she said.

THE LADY VANISHES

Nantucket Island, Massachusetts

1980

L
ATE ON A WEDNESDAY
afternoon in January 1980, an executive with Avon Products in Rye, New York, was just pushing through the company's revolving door at the end of her day's work when out of nowhere, it seemed, a flustered, worried-sounding woman she'd never seen before popped up alongside her.

“I'm lost,” the stranger said. “Altogether lost. I'm a nervous wreck. Can you help me?”

The Avon lady was frightened and hesitated for a split second. It was dark. There was no one around. The woman who had approached her looked haggard, tense. But at once, as if sensing her fear, the stranger explained herself. “I'm a doctor,” she said, “from New York. I was on my way to Nantucket, but I started feeling terribly tired a little while ago. I thought I was about to fall asleep at the wheel, so I pulled off the highway. Figured I'd find a hotel and get some sleep.” She smiled. “If there's anyone who ought to know better than to drive when exhausted, it's a doctor.”

The Avon lady relaxed. The stranger had an amusing, reassuring way of expressing herself and a refined New England accent. When she went on to say “Someone told me there were some places to stay further up this road, but I've been back and forth, back and forth, and haven't seen any,” the Avon executive suggested she go to a nearby Marriott hotel, and offered to get into her own car and lead the way.

The lost woman was Margaret Kilcoyne, a New York doctor and medical researcher who, in her own words that night, was “sitting on the Nobel Prize.” Two nights later she would become altogether lost—and vanish into thin air from her weekend home on Nantucket Island.

I first learned about the disappearance of Dr. Kilcoyne from the newspapers, and it seemed, from those reports, that she must have committed suicide by drowning herself. Her wallet, passport, bankbook, and summer sandals were found neatly stacked in a pile—the kind of orderly assemblage of personal effects that many suicides make—about a mile inland from the ocean and a half mile from the pond near her home. True, her body hadn't been found. But then, Virginia Woolf's body wasn't discovered until weeks after her suicide. And the bodies of some drowning victims are never found.

I assumed that Dr. Kilcoyne had been depressed and, as a result, had killed herself. Doctors have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. Women doctors, subject to special pressures, may be at even higher risk for self-destruction than their male colleagues. And certainly, from outward appearances, Margaret Kilcoyne, who worked at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, had had the kind of lonely life that can trigger suicidal depression. Forty-nine years old, she had never married, had no boyfriend, and her principal attachment was to the children of her brother Leo, an executive with IBM, who unfortunately lived far away in Canada. So in February 1980, as I headed for Columbia-Presbyterian to interview some of Kilcoyne's colleagues, I was certain I would find in their reminiscences the anecdotes of love-lessness and despair that have traditionally marked the lives of so many other women physicians who have brought about their own deaths. Then, suddenly, I was in the midst of a mystery.

It happened while I was speaking with Dr. Rosamond Kane, a colleague who had known Margaret Kilcoyne for ten years and was, as far as I could establish, the last person at Columbia to see her.

“What was Margaret Kilcoyne like?” I asked the white-coated, gray-haired Dr. Kane.

“She was hilarious,” Kane said. “She could make the most mundane subject fascinating. Hyperbole was her mode of expression. If she started telling you how she made junket, you'd expect that Vesuvius itself would rise up on the plate.” Then Dr. Kane leaned forward, troubled, and continued, “That's why I can't figure this whole thing out. Because it
can't
have been suicide. Tell me someone has committed suicide and I'll say, ‘Well, yes, maybe he or she was depressed. Or worried about something the rest of us didn't know about.' But not Margaret.”

How could she be so sure? I wanted to know.

“Because not only wasn't Margaret the suicidal type, but when I saw her, she was particularly bubbly and excited because she was going on holiday,” Dr. Kane said thoughtfully. “But there's another reason, too. You see, Margaret was taking penicillin for a superficial skin infection. Well, just before we said goodbye, she looked in her bag and noticed that she had only a few pills left. So she asked me to write her out a new prescription.” Dr. Kane leaned forward eagerly. “Do you see? Someone planning to kill herself wouldn't have been so focused on completing her full course of pills, would she?”

The question hung between us. Certainly, it would seem that if one were contemplating suicide, one wouldn't be worrying about sticking assiduously to the cure for a minor infection.

“Look, I'll tell you something else,” Dr. Kane suddenly offered. “One of the things we talked about that afternoon was my giving her the wheel off my old Volvo, which is the same make as hers. I'd gotten a new car. Margaret wanted the wheel from my old one, and she told me she'd pick it up in four or five days.” Dr. Kane shook her head. “I just
know
she wasn't planning to kill herself.”

That afternoon I interviewed several other colleagues of Dr. Kilcoyne's. Each one described her much as Dr. Kane had. “She was friendly, outgoing, energetic, and had a marvelous sense of humor,” said one research associate, a Dr. Estes. “She was intact, witty, balanced,” said another, Dr. Braun. “She was ebullient. That's the best word for her,” said Dr. Samuel Ritter, who did clinical work with her. “She was always smiling, and she talked freely, easily, in a stream-of-consciousness kind of fashion, going from one idea to another in a witty, amusing kind of way.”

Each of these people had spent time with Dr. Kilcoyne in recent weeks, and because they insisted she hadn't been depressed, I felt the mystery thickening. Still, she could have been secretly in despair, secretly planning to do away with herself, I tried arguing with myself as I entered my home early that evening. The phone was ringing; Dr. Kane was on the other end. “There's one more thing I forgot to tell you,” she announced. “Margaret took her ID pin with her to Nantucket. Usually we leave the pins in our lockers. But the nurses were striking at the time, and to enter the building you needed an ID. She took the pin with her—you see?”

I saw. Margaret Kilcoyne, when she left Columbia-Presbyterian on Wednesday, January 23, had every intention of returning to work after the weekend.

I wasn't the only person to discover that Dr. Kilcoyne had clearly been planning to return to her job after her trip to Nantucket, and soon, both on Nantucket and in New York, numerous theories to explain her disappearance began cropping up whenever people discussed it. Primary among them was that the researcher had been the victim of foul play because she'd stumbled on some kind of important scientific discovery. The basis of this supposition lay in the fact that shortly before she disappeared, Margaret Kilcoyne had made a tape recording in which she'd announced that she'd come upon a discovery of Nobel Prize proportion. Her discovery had “the potential for great good to mankind,” she'd said, and she herself was shortly going to be “in a position of nationwide power.” People who had heard or read about the tape began advancing the notion that she might have been murdered by a jealous colleague or that she had been spirited away by Soviet spies.

Something about these theories got my back up. Those who voiced them struck me as credulous and psychologically unsophisticated. Why assume that just because a person claims to have made a monumental scientific discovery, she in fact has? I made up my mind to try, by finding out as much as I could about Dr. Kilcoyne's research and her final days, to discover why she had disappeared.

What I learned was that although her disappearance
was
mightily mysterious, it wasn't a mystery of cloaks and daggers or murder and mayhem. It was a medical mystery. Margaret Kilcoyne, as all the clues I unearthed began to indicate, had been suffering from a psychiatric disease known to cause sudden disappearances and even sudden accidental deaths. The mystery of her disappearance lay in the disease itself, for while it can easily be detected in the shy, the reserved, the meek, and the depressed, in a person who is naturally cheerful and ebullient, it can so resemble his normal state that even friends and coworkers may not see any problems until it is too late.

The disease is mania, the outstanding features of which are euphoria and hyperactivity. Other signs of the ailment are delusions, particularly those of grandeur, as well as poor judgment and the making of unrealistic decisions.

According to today's most highly respected psychiatric diagnostic tool, the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual III
, drawn up by Columbia-Presbyterian's own Psychiatric Institute, mania has as its essential feature “a distinct period when the predominant mood is either elevated, expansive, or irritable, and when there are the associated symptoms of … hyperactivity, pressure of speech, flight of ideas, inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, and excessive involvement in activities with a high potential for painful consequences.” The manual advises psychiatrists who interview patients who have possessed for at least one week “at least three” of the above symptoms to make the diagnosis of mania and begin treatment—the favored drug today is lithium—immediately.

Margaret Kilcoyne possessed all seven of the diagnostic symptoms, and her final days were like a living illustration of the manual's definition.

The shift in Margaret Kilcoyne's emotional balance from hypomania, an excited, exuberant state that many of us experience, to mania, an illness, probably started some three weeks before her disappearance. It came as the result of success.

Dr. Kilcoyne had started her career in medicine as a nurse. Then, in the 1950s, she'd decided to go to medical school. Becoming a doctor, she'd taken a position at Columbia-Presbyterian doing clinical research with hypertensive adolescents. But after a few years she found herself yearning to study the brain chemistry involved in hypertension. She was particularly interested in angiotensin II, a peptide that regulates blood pressure. Ian Phillip, a researcher in Iowa, had localized angiotensin II in cells in the hypothalamus, but although others had attempted to replicate his work, no one had succeeded. Dr. Kilcoyne wanted to work on the problem. With all her experience treating the ravages of hypertension in youngsters, she longed to see the disease eradicated. She was convinced that if the peptide regulating blood pressure could be localized, the disease might be conquered.

In 1979, she made up her mind to try to get a grant to do experimental brain research. She'd never done laboratory research before, so in order to get funding she teamed up with an internationally known Columbia neurologist, Dr. Earl Zimmerman. With his guidance, about a year before her disappearance, she submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health, outlining her interest in determining which brain cells, if any, contained angiotensin II. To her delight, the NIH agreed to fund the project.

She and Zimmerman began working on angiotensin II in the summer of 1979. It was a happy time for her. She who had been a nurse and managed the unusual step of becoming a doctor had now expanded her horizons even further, entering the heady field of pure research. She began working like a demon, but although she and Zimmerman conducted experiment after experiment, no matter how much they applied themselves, they couldn't find the evasive peptide. Then at last, three weeks before she disappeared, the two researchers triumphed. Angiotensin II was present in the brain, they verified, and they could pinpoint the exact spot!

It was a significant scientific discovery, but not as earth-shaking as Dr. Kilcoyne assumed it to be. For her, it was the crown of her career. She was excited, elated, even ecstatic. Zimmerman, used to the ups and downs of academic research, cautioned her against overdramatizing their achievement. “After all,” he pointed out, “we weren't the
first
. Phillips was here before us.” But she couldn't control her excitement. They'd accomplished something terrifically important, she insisted every time they talked about the discovery. And three days before her disappearance she said to Zimmerman, “Maybe we'll win the Nobel, Earl!”

“Hey, that seems a little strong,” he responded. “Maybe now we're going to be able to make some sense of angiotensin II, take it apart, make further experiments, and see where they take us, but right now all we've done is gotten a handle on it.”

But Dr. Kilcoyne was not in a mood for caution, and shortly afterward she telephoned her closest relative, her brother Leo in Canada, and told him, “I'm now in a position to win the Nobel Prize” and “I'm in a position of nationwide power.” She made a tape recording of the call—a tape recording police found after her disappearance and which sparked the theories that she'd been kidnapped or murdered.