Friday, September 4, 2009

WALKING IN THE MINDFIELD

I read online about forensic psychologist and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) expert Dr. John Wilson, and decided to learn more. The resulting feature article ran in the October, 2000 issue of Cleveland Magazine. I love the title, though I can't claim it. An editor brainstormed that one.

David Searls

After his first few visits, the crisply dressed doctor was shown a way around the interminable line of black, Hispanic and poor-white visitors queuing for a few minutes with fathers, sons and lovers. Once inside, he’d trudge with briefcase and files to an eight-by-ten room with concrete walls, a government-issue desk, two chairs and a door with meshed-glass observation window. Here he’d be joined for hours at a time—some 300 of them altogether—by a polite young man in orange jumpsuit carrying his own clutch of files.

“Eric was in turns sensitive and reflective. He’d cry. He’d tell me what a great man his father was. He was confused, but incredibly sharp.”

That’s Dr. John P. Wilson’s recollection of his many L.A. County Jail visits with Eric Menendez, who, along with his older brother, Lyle, shotgun-blasted their dozing parents in the family room of a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989, then hustled to their car for more shells to finish the job before their mortally wounded mother could crawl away.

Wilson, Professor of Psychology at Cleveland State University, is one of the nation’s foremost forensic experts on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s this diagnosis that he spent months exploring and two weeks trying to help sell to the second Menendez jury as some sort of mitigating explanation for the horrific events that would have constituted the pop crime sensation of the last decade if O.J. Simpson hadn’t run with that ball.

Wilson, who’s also founder and president of the Cleveland Heights-based Forensic Center for Traumatic Stress and Posttraumatic Stress Disorders, describes PTSD as “a condition of prolonged stress response in reaction to a traumatic event.” Those prolonged stress reactions have kept Wilson busy for the last quarter-century, providing fodder for eleven academic books and a slew of professional monographs. He’s hit the trouble spots of the world to set up treatment centers on behalf of the United Nations Office on Humanitarian Affairs and The World Health Organization, testified before the U.S. House and Senate Committees on Veterans Affairs and earned a Presidential Commendation from Jimmy Carter. He’s interviewed serial killers, helped save the life of a notorious terrorist and lent his expertise to abused spouses, haunted combat vets, air crash victims, war refugees, international torture and Holocaust survivors, haunted firefighters, police-battered citizens and stressed-out cops. Along the way, Wilson has taken part in such headline-grabbing criminal and civil cases as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster, and the third Sam Sheppard courtroom spectacle.

John Wilson, 54, is a soft-spoken man who’s described by Dr. Thomas A. Moran, the chief operating officer of Wilson’s Forensic Center, as “a consummate professional and one of the most sensitive and friendly people I’ve ever worked with.”

He was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio by a banker father and a mother who headed the local chapter of the American Heart Association. Initially, Wilson went to George Washington University and Baldwin-Wallace College with the intention of becoming a neurosurgeon, but his fascination with the brain’s quirky software package—the mind—steered him toward a doctorate in Psychology from Michigan State University.

Wilson’s demeanor suggests nothing more than affable fascination with the topic at hand even when painting such emotionally draining word pictures as this, concerning a much younger Eric Menendez’s relationship with his father, Jose: “When he was being sodomized and he’d cry out because it was painful, he’d get smacked and (told by Jose), ‘if you cry you’re not a Menendez, and if you keep crying I’ll have to kill you.’”

Or when relaying this impression of the boys’ mother: “Kitty knew what was going on because Eric always threw up afterwards, and then he’d shower. She’d come to him if he was sick in the night with the flu, but never after his sessions with Jose. She knew the difference.”


Sometimes Wilson inserts a mild profanity or vulgarity in his narrative, but so casually it’s almost missed: “On more than one occasion Lyle peed his pants for fear that his father was coming to admonish him.”

Wilson can just as calmly describe a fatal torture sequence in the killing fields of Cambodia as seen through the eyes of a prison camp survivor who would, years later, bumble an attempt at revenge by successfully tossing a gasoline bomb at the wrong man. His depiction of the sound of a man’s skull breaking when hitting pavement from a shove by an overzealous security guard as heard by a traumatized wife can make listeners squirm—but not him. He’s equally unruffled while voicing his suspicions that a surprise office visit from IRS agents has more to do with testimony unfriendly to the government’s case against a homicidal Palestinian hijacker and mass murderer that it does to any taxing matters. And yet, there’s something in the precision with which he recounts the ghastly details of his patients’ past that shows how deeply they’ve worked their way into his own mind.

The spacious Cleveland Heights colonial Wilson shares with his wife, Diane, and their blended family of four twenty-something children hardly serves as the proper setting for his foreboding tales. Diane Wilson’s talents as an interior designer and artist come to play in the way the natural wood, Oriental rugs and stylish, comfortable furniture make the place as tastefully relaxed as the doctor.

“Invariably when I ask Holocaust survivors whether they’d prefer to meet at one of my offices or at the house, they always choose the house,” says Wilson. “Always. Medical buildings carry lots of baggage for them.”

“People with PTSD persistently re-experience the event in at least one of several ways: recurrent distressing dreams; recurrent recollections of the event, a sense of reliving the experience (flashbacks); and intense distress at events that symbolize an aspect of the event (such as anniversaries).” From the National Center for PTSD website.

PTSD was considered little more than a last ditch effort for bleeding heart lawyers until 1980, when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder finally became an official classification of anxiety disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

The symptoms of PTSD were known in earlier days, but the disorder wore such jaunty labels as shell shock or combat fatigue. According to Wilson, Dr. William Neiderland made a name for himself years ago in New York City by treating thousands for “concentration camp syndrome.” In the 1960s Neiderland took on the case of a Polish-American Jew arrested and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for throwing bricks through plate glass windows. The doctor found that when his patient was nine and living in Warsaw, the invading Germans demolished the family’s shop and took away both of his parents, never to be seen again. As an adult, the man reenacted the symbolic and literal destruction of his family on the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), when Nazi-orchestrated German mobs looted and burned the homes, shops and synagogues of Jewish citizens.

PTSD came into the public consciousness as defense attorneys bandied it about in the seventies to explain—or justify, depending on one’s point of view—the exploits of Vietnam vets or knocked-around wives who’d finally had enough.

Although only a small percentage of PTSD sufferers commit crimes, they’re the ones that get the ink. Attorneys try out mental state defenses by presenting their clients as burdened with repressed memories of war, torture, childhood physical or sexual abuse, or other acts of long-term or sudden violence. The defendants are shown to have experienced years of nightmares and traumatic memories; anxiety, sadness or anger; avoidance or denial of the memories, sometimes to the point of amnesia; and histories of “hypervigilance”—behavior of extreme or unrealistic precaution. But as deep as the memories might be buried, explain sharp defense attorneys, they can worm their way back up through flashbacks that initiate what Wilson and other psychologists call “parallel reenactment” of the underlying cause of anxiety. One example from Wilson’s own case files is Louisiana v. Heads.

Charles Heads was an ex-Marine and Vietnam vet who shot his good friend and brother-in-law to death during one incredibly hot August night. It was the weather conditions as well as the night terrain that provided Heads with the “environmental cues” that triggered the fatal flashback, says Wilson.

The defendant had spent the night traveling from his home in Texas to Shreveport in a frantic search for his wife and kids, who’d left him. This act of perceived abandonment was a parallel reenactment of when, as a child, Heads had witnessed his mother being shot and killed by his father, who was subsequently arrested and taken from him.

Heads told Wilson that he remembered little after arriving at the home of his brother-in-law except for an orange flash from the barrel of a gun that was supposedly held by the other man, but which never actually existed. His response to this imaginary threat was to blow a hole in his brother-in-law’s chest.

When Wilson showed black-and-white photos of the field and treeline surrounding the murder house to the former members of Heads’ platoon, each and every one identified it as the Vietnam landing zone where Heads had been evacuated after getting seriously wounded during a night ambush.

“So you had a tired, stressed-out vet with untreated post-traumatic stress who can’t find his wife and kids, so now this abandonment issue kicks in,” says Wilson. “And it all takes place on the anniversary of the night Heads was shot in Nam.”

Wilson’s testimony helped convince a jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI).

“When I treat veterans,” says Wilson,” I ask them if they have a gun. Lots of times they’ve got one under pillows, locked and loaded. Having a weapon is literally a security blanket.”

Some of his patients have been known to “patrol their perimeters” at night, sometimes sleeping in trees armed to the teeth. That’s an example of hypervigilance, as is the tendency of concentration camp survivors to avoid uniforms, guard dogs and even concrete barriers—all potent reminders of camp conditions.

“You can’t just say, ‘stop doing that, you’re safe now.’ Because that’s not their reality. The world’s not a safe place.”

Dr. Wilson’s first inkling of the as-yet unnamed disorder came in observing the returning Vietnam vets in his CSU classrooms in the early 1970s. “They were so different from my other students. They sat in the back of the room, by the door. They wore their field jackets, and they were angry."

His pilot study of war vets in 1973 created enough of a stir to earn Wilson a research grant in 1977 that “gave us a good snapshot of what was really happening.” His estimate of 500,000 vets nationwide suffering the effects of PTSD came within a couple percentage points of the 480,000-victim figure reached by a more extensive government study fifteen years later.

Wilson’s courtroom reputation was made in the precedent-setting case of U.S. v. Tindall. He was able to prove to the 12-0 satisfaction of the jury that Michael Tindall, a highly decorated Vietnam War chopper pilot, was suffering classic symptoms of PTSD while smuggling 7,000 pounds of hashish from Morocco to Boston. The NGRI decision was the nation’s first successful use of the defense in federal court.

The NGRI decision was a rare one since the standards of proof are so high, but Wilson is proud to have so far helped send four clients to psychiatric care rather than prison. He responds crisply when the question is raised as to whether some defendants have gone too far to warrant his assistance. “If you understand the individual as a human being,” he says, “you wouldn’t see him as without redeeming social value.”

This attitude even extends to Omar Rezaq, the Palestinian terrorist who contributed to the deaths of sixty airline passengers and Egyptian security personnel when a hijacking went awry. As the lone surviving gunman, Rezaq took it upon himself to shoot five passengers at close range, one by one, before being overpowered. While he was convicted in federal court on all charges and sentenced to life in prison, Wilson’s testimony helped the Palestinian avoid execution.

“When I’m on a case, I’m there because of my expertise,” says Wilson. “I’m looking for the motivation, and whatever I personally think of the defendant is irrelevant.”

He’d tried unsuccessfully to gain a NGRI in Cuyahoga County three years before the Tindall decision, when an armed and troubled Vietnam medic named Ashby Leach briefly held the Terminal Tower to publicize his grievances with Chessie Systems, his employer, and draw attention to the G.I. Bill of Rights. Leach was convicted of assault, extortion and possession of criminal tools—but found not guilty of the most serious charge, kidnapping.

“In Ohio, PTSD is an all-or-nothing defense,” says Cuyahoga County Chief Prosecutor William Mason. “Either the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity, or he’s guilty.”

While in some states the disorder can allow a jury to convict on a reduced charge—such as second-degree rather than first degree murder—Ohio juries don’t have that flexibility. But according to Mason, defense lawyers often use mental defense testimony to “soften a jury” during the trial or to evoke sympathy during the penalty phase.

Wilson first came to the attention of the chief prosecutor during the final Sheppard case that, in effect, put the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office on trial. “His demeanor was forthright, and he was immensely qualified to speak on the issue,” says Mason, “but we had difficulty accepting his conclusions.”

According to Mason, the bulk of Wilson’s two or three hours on the stand was spent in rebuttal of an eyewitness and ink and handwriting experts, all testifying that Sheppard had scrawled the margin note “Yes!” in an autographed copy of his book, Endure and Conquer. Wilson, according to Mason, tried building a case for Sheppard being so wracked with PTSD as a result of the Bay Village attack, the loss of his family and reputation and years of false incarceration, that his behavior in the last few years of his life was too erratic for rational conclusions to be drawn.
Mason shrugs off with a smile the attempt at diagnosing a psychological disorder without the benefit of actually meeting the patient. “Obviously the jury had problems with it, too.”

The mere mention of the chief prosecutor causes the normally unflappable psychologist to shift uncomfortably. His cheeks flush and his mouth sets. “That’s not true,” he says when given Mason’s description of Wilson’s purpose for taking the stand. “The book was a very minor part of it. I was simply explaining a forensic PTSD diagnosis based on conclusions I could draw from Sam Sheppard’s biography and discussions with other family members, including his brother and former wife. That’s all I had to work with.”

Wilson, by the way, insists that he’s virtually certain Sam Sheppard didn’t kill his first wife.

“I was looking nationally for an expert, when we found Dr. Wilson in our own backyard,” says Cleveland attorney Richard Herman, a civil attorney who frequently takes on cases involving police brutality and traumatized immigrants. “Despite his international reputation, he’s worked with us on many cases where money just wasn’t widely available.”

Many of Wilson’s pro bono cases have involved combat vets, a group of which he says he’s never charged a penny. That sense of commitment has earned him honors from veteran groups across the nation and led to his President Carter commendation. He points to the needs of this community when asked his motivation despite the fact that he never served in the military.

“When Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan came out, the Veterans Administration got so many calls—thousands a week—from untreated World War II vets that they had to set up a 1-800 number,” he says. “Those are men still seeking treatment for experiences of half a century ago.”

The first Menendez brothers trial had ended in a hung jury. For the second go-around, celebrity criminal lawyers Leslie Abramson and Barry Levin worked hard to establish a defense based on PTSD, but the presiding judge wasn’t buying it.

In California, as in the rest of the country, battered women can present a case for “imperfect self defense” if they kill while in fear of eminent threat. If successful, the defense removes the factor of premeditation which is necessary to establish a verdict of first-degree murder. One problem for the Abramson team: While there was plenty of trial precedence for battered wives and battered children, there was nothing for battered young men.

“But,” says Wilson, “Leslie’s argument was, ‘if you’re battered, you’re battered.’”

So Abramson brought in the good doctor. Besides spending those 300 hours in the infamous Los Angeles County Jail with Eric, Wilson chalked up 20 more with brother Lyle, and interviewed teachers and Menendez extended family members from both sides.

But the trial judge would only let Wilson testify to events within a week of the murders. With such a gag in place, Wilson took the stand for two exhaustive weeks and tried to tell the jury and the world that Eric Menendez suffered from PTSD as a result of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his father. Abuse that started at the age of five and was to continue virtually to the day that Eric and Lyle stormed in on their parents for the final time.

“The prosecutors objected about every ten minutes,” Wilson says.

Much of his prepared testimony was ruled inadmissable, and the media and public had a field day envisioning the two hardy young men—both champion tennis players—being beaten up and raped, by a successful, middle-aged father who was determinedly heterosexual—and had the wife and succession of mistresses to prove it.

Wilson’s time with the two defendants and other family members dismissed whatever doubts he might had harbored.

“Eric showed me the scars on the inside of his thighs,” Wilson says. “He described the games his father would play. Eric had names for them, names like ‘Weird’ and ‘Kneel.’ And the nieces witnessed Jose sexually assaulting Lyle when he was about seven.”

Wilson also saw a snapshot taken by Kitty, of Jose hanging a pre-school-aged Eric by his arms on a workout bar and walking away to leave him up there, screaming. The object of such stunts was to toughen the kids up, make them strong.

Wilson interviewed a former co-worker who told him that Jose had “gotten a young boy” during a business trip to Mexico, and teachers in the Princeton, New Jersey school system that Lyle and Eric had attended before the family moved to the West Coast. The teachers said that they always knew there was something wrong in that family.

“They asked for a psychological evaluation of Eric when he was fifteen. He always looked dazed, disoriented, and he drifted,” explains Wilson. The younger Menendez brother would “zone out” even in the middle of a tennis match. “What was happening,” says Wilson, is that Eric was experiencing flashbacks.”

Jose Menendez’s response, the Princeton teachers told Wilson, was to have a family lawyer write a contract specifying that Eric could be tested for learning disabilities, but could be given no psychological testing. “It was unprecedented. The school had never heard of such a thing, but Jose obviously wanted to make sure that nothing came out that he didn’t want anyone to hear about,” according to Wilson.

“The boys definitely suffered years and years of abuse—especially Eric.”

It’s easy to think of Dr. John Wilson as a defense lawyer’s best friend. “John is an excellent witness, very impressive on the stand,” says local attorney Gordon Friedman. “He’s been vital, absolutely critical to some of my cases.” Wilson’s patients on behalf of Friedman have included Vietnam vets and plaintiffs in civil cases alleging the trauma of police brutality.

But despite his apparent affinity for defendants, Wilson has turned down many cases that he didn’t feel fit the framework of PTSD.

For instance, he interviewed one former vet charged with dealing cocaine in Miami. “He said he’d been traumatized from seeing napalm burns, but he couldn’t name his outfit or identify anyplace he’d been in-country.” Even more suspiciously, the defendant’s cell was full of books on PTSD, as though he were boning up for a test. “I later found that he’d been in the service, but had never left the States.”

Another turned-down patient was Ward Weaver, a Bakersfield, California serial killer whom Wilson calls, “one of the most severely disturbed individuals I’d ever met in my life.” As Wilson explains, “Weaver had a horrible history of child abuse. And when he was drafted he was made, of all things, a demolition expert in Vietnam.”

Despite what would be a stressful situation for most, Weaver got along just fine in Southeast Asia. “He was a happy camper,” Wilson says. “He enjoyed blowing up bridges and doing things to the Vietcong.”

The difference between the Bakersfield serial killer and a legitimate PTSD sufferer was that Weaver was never operating in a disassociative state after the war. He knew exactly what he was doing as he roamed the country picking up unlucky hitchhikers as a long-distance trucker.

An entire group that didn’t fit Wilson’s definition of PTSD sufferer were the residents of Prince William Sound in Alaska who were solicited by lawyers following the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill. Newspaper ads ran seeking locals who were experiencing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of the accident, and thousands turned out. Wilson examined the questionnaires filled out by untrained decoders and found what he viewed to be irregularities in the time devoted to each interview. Among other things, he testified that a full psychological evaluation could not be made in such short order. The mental disorder cases were thrown out of court.

“It’s important for me to defend the integrity of the diagnosis. It trivializes PTDS to say you can get it from seeing oil mess up birds and get on the sand. What’s next—grease in the driveway?” Wilson shakes his head slightly. “Come on, you’re going to put this person in the same category as a torture victim or Holocaust survivor?”

Wilson worked hard with defense attorney Abramson in that second trial to make the point that Eric Menendez and his brother perceived their father to be almost supernaturally powerful. When the boys finally decided to break away, it was because Jose was insisting that Eric, though accepted at UCLA, spend a couple night a week at home in order to stay on top of his homework. Eric told Wilson that he interpreted that to mean that he wasn’t going to escape his father’s advances after all. For the first time, he and his older brother flatly refused to obey. They even subtly implied that they might spill their family’s horrible secrets if forced to.

To this, Eric Menendez quoted his father as coolly replying, “Okay, you’ve made your decision. Now I’ll make mine.”

If Eric was experiencing PTSD, as Wilson believes, the trigger would be this show of ruthless and unyielding power from a figure of indescribable dominance: “Now I’ll make mine.”

On the night of the murder, the brothers told their parents they were going to the movies, but Eric was told to stay home and to go to his room. “This had never happened before, where they were refused permission to go out for the evening, and they saw it as further confirmation that they would soon be killed.”

Unless they acted first.

The jury didn’t buy it. Lyle and Eric were castigated for besmirching their parents’ reputations even after the deaths brought on by them, and both were given life sentences. As a final punishment—one perhaps harsher than the sentence itself—the brothers were split up and sent to separate penitentiaries. It’s probable that they’ll never see each other again.

“I hope, if nothing else, that this case shows that the abuse of children is not limited to the stereotypes,” says Wilson. “The brothers came from an upper middle-class and horrifically dysfunctional background. That’s obvious if for no other reason than the fact that healthy children don’t murder their parents.”

He pauses. “What went wrong?”

It’s a question that goes to the heart of Wilson’s career.

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