Creature Features

Biologically inspired robots. Yikes. When asked to write about one of the more exotic undertakings of Case Western Reserve University's School of Engineering, I was reminded of those gloriously tacky "sci-fi" movies of the 1950s. So that's the direction I took "Creature Features."

Get yourself a greasy tub of popcorn, sit back and enjoy my "bug" article. It appeared in the Fall, 2005 issue of Case Engineering.

David Searls


They creep, crawl, slither, climb, scuttle and squirm. Some take wing. But don’t worry. They don’t knock down tall buildings like the irradiated ants of the 1950s sci-fi film classic Them! These creepy-crawlies don’t even have flesh and blood and muscle except in the most bio-mechanical sense. They move pneumatically. They’re robots. Feel better now?

Dr. Evil

The critters clattering metallically across the floor and lumbering up and down stairs or flying low overhead in their own brief videos, or looking like small, dead, mechanical versions of the baddies in Aliens, actually come from Dr. Roger Quinn’s Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at Case School of Engineering.

The school’s biorobotics program began in the 1980s, by Drs. Randy Beer and Hillel Chiel. Quinn established the biorobotics lab in 1990 with Chiel and biologists Dr. Roy Ritzmann and Dr. Mark Willis. Mechanical engineering professor Dr. Malcom Cook guides students through the actual design and fabrication of the beasties.

The neatly bearded and unfailingly cheerful Quinn knows how his life’s work comes across to the general public, and he has fun with it. Why else would one of his campus email monikers be Dr. Evil?

The not-so-sinister professor can’t hide his enthusiasm. “I talk with generals and I talk with fifth-graders and they all say, ‘When can I get ahold of this?’”

“This” is any of the many versions of the creatures making the reputation of the school’s bio-robotics team of mechanical engineering and biology professors, and graduate students in both disciplines. Some of the multi-legged wonders resemble cockroaches. Some bring to mind crickets, while others could be the vaguely anthropoid nasties that lonely old prospectors keep running across on late, late night TV. And moth-, fish- and even tumbleweed-inspired models are taking early shape in the fertile collective imagination of this creative crew.

Think about the slow, humanoid robots that populated early sci-fi and even George Lucas’ modern mind. Now get rid of those images. They’re passé. Twenty-first century bots don’t look like us because they’re designed to accomplish tasks we’re, quite frankly, not very good at.
Sure, we’re the smartest critters out there (aren’t we?), but not the toughest or most mobile. We don’t fit in the tightest spaces. We can’t fly or swim underwater for long, and we don’t have much in the way of sniffers or…well, the list goes on.

Anyway, who’s up to crawling through smoke-filled rooms in search of survivors? Or waltzing down suspicious streets in hostile territory looking for IEDs before they find the undercarriage of personnel carriers? And do you really think you’re qualified to spend the rest of your life rolling around the super-hot plains of Mars?

Invasion of the Robo-Critters

Biorobotics is a field devoted to the design of mechanical devices that either “mimic” or are “inspired by” the movements and skills of their biological counterparts, and can be programmed to do tasks we can’t train the real deal to do. Why?

Imagine a war of the future where the military drafts bio-robots with sensors, rudimentary decision-making skills and miniature camera lenses. Your mechanical soldiers look and move like tiny insects. They fly behind enemy lines and park themselves on walls at the enemy high command and sends back film.

Another unit is composed of mechanical amphibians packed with explosives and released to swim underwater until they hit the beach. Think about the American lives saved had that been the first wave of attackers on D-Day.

It’s no wonder that an alphabet soup roster of military organizations and defense researchers, including NASA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Eglin Air Force Base have lined up to sponsor the university’s efforts and use or further advance whatever they like.

But it’s not all about war-making. The team is studying the flight patterns and scent skills of moths in an effort to come up with a robot that can take to the skies with chemical sensors to find explosives or gases.

“Dogs do it now, but they require a long period of training,” Quinn explains. “They have a shorter life span and can’t sniff out ordinance on the upper floors of buildings. And there’s an emotional impact when a dog is killed doing its job.”

Not so with a few twists of metal and electronic sensors.

Some of the smaller, handheld bugs in the lab look, well, cute. The Mini-Whegs™ is only three inches long, with combination wheels and legs for climbing stairs and perambulating a swift ten body lengths per second. Remember all those fifth-graders? Hold a Mini-Whegs for awhile and you can imagine someday seeing it in a Toys R Us near you. Who says all these bad boys have to save the world?

Or even work on it. Quinn’s team is also focusing on a cylindrical device that might someday roll with the wind on Mars, or any other planet where we can simply dump it. Rather than attempting to remotely control a single expensive vehicle on rugged alien real estate, release a bunch of these relatively cheap “tumbleweeds” and let ‘em go where they go, snapping pictures along the way.

As otherworldly as the potential, the school’s efforts are still fairly grounded. The “brains” of the creatures are offline while researchers focus on continuing to upgrade the mechanics of movement. Since cockroaches are pretty good at getting around—crawling, tunneling, scampering, turning on a dime—they’re a pretty good starting point.

You can sense Quinn’s frustration as he compares his decades-long effort to simulate the behavior of what most of us would incorrectly consider a pretty simple creature. Nature, it seems, has put to good use its 300-million-year head start.

“Real roaches have millions of sensors on board and they make intelligent decisions and make them rapidly,” says Quinn. “Each antenna alone contains 100,000 sensors. We’re so far from (the humanoid robot played by Will Smith in) I, Robot, it’s not even funny.”

Take leg movement. Each roach limb is jointed for “seven degrees of freedom” for maximum mobility. When on smooth surfaces, the legs move in a tripod formation, two on one side in association with one on the opposite. The gait changes when taking a hill. The legs now work in horizontal pairs, the front legs pulling. Meanwhile, antennae whipsaw through the air, touching approaching obstacles and sending electrical impulses to the brain for nearly instantaneous feedback.

How do Quinn and his people know so much about the creatures? That’s where the inquisitive biologists enter the story.

The Bug People

Alan Alda’s camera crew set him up. They had seen the cockroach room before the host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers. So they caught on film his expression—and an outtake utterance you wouldn’t expect from the quintessential sensitive male—at his first sighting of the thousands of inhabitants of the big plastic garbage cans in a backroom of the university’s DeGrace Hall.

Dr. Ritzmann loves telling the story. Alda, filming a segment of the show on biologically inspired robotics that aired in 1999, had just met Blaberus gigantius. Lots of them, actually, and the "gigantius" part didn’t sit well with him.

But there’s more to cockroach-wrangling than making TV hosts squeamish.

“The idea,” says Ritzmann, who heads the biology team with fellow professor Willis, “is to learn from the animals how to build robots. But, since I’m not a particularly altruistic person, I want to learn from the robots what the animals are doing.”

Together, the two disciplines study and imitate, study and imitate. The roaches spend a lot of time in glass display cases and on see-through treadmills with high-speed cameras capturing every nuance of movement.

Researchers continually ponder how the deceptively complex creatures always find a way over, under or around obstacles, regardless of terrain. Not out of mere curiosity. Robots with treaded footing were used in the futile search for survivors immediately after 9/11, and failed miserably.

“The camera operators couldn’t see in the smoke and dust, and the robots were unsteady in the rubble,” says Ritzmann.

What was needed was greater mobility on unstable ground and semi-autonomous decision-making skills. Meaning, says Ritzmann, that “the operator could tell the robot where to go, but not how to get there.”

The Case Engineering team has responded, through the years, with the progressively more advanced Robots I, II and II. Then came Whegs™, the grandparents of the bugs the kids like so much. The further evolved Whegs II™ resembles insect life in general, but no species in particular. The mobility innovation of wheels and legs, all running on a single motor, gives the creatures speed without loss of footwork on inclines.

Even more importantly, Whegs II can “decide” for itself whether to crawl over or tunnel under an obstacle, depending on how the sensors on its antennae hit the obstruction. It’s a thrill to see footage of it striding purposely forward, confronting an obstacle with its metallic antennae, breaking stride, considering its options and either rearing up—thanks to the team’s invention of a hinged flexion joint that lets it bend its back so it won’t overbalance when rising—or bend to crawl under if higher ground is unattainable.

The Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab always has a ways to go. Like the life form that serves as its inspiration, the program stubbornly finds its way around every blockade, through every seeming dead end. Right now it’s power.

“The batteries are just killing us,” says Quinn. “A real cockroach lives on garbage”

As for the grad students in both disciplines, they have their own varied motivation. Nicole Kern practically stumbled into the robotics lab by accident. The mechanical engineering major wants to design a leg brace that, through functional electrical stimulation, will help the paralyzed walk again. She found that “human biology and robotics are paralleling. Getting a person to walk is, in some ways, like making a robot of them. The control system is the same.”

Like a real-life Robocop, minus the arsenal. Sometimes science keeps pace with the filmmakers.

THEY'RE OUTTA HERE!

To commemorate the tail end of a Cleveland Indians season best forgotten, I'm posting one of several baseball features and brief pieces I wrote for the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. Ever wonder how many balls a team goes through over the course of a game or a season? So did I, which is why I pitched this piece that ran in the summer of '00.

David Searls

Kenny grabs an inning-ending pop fly and flips it to an imploring fan. Manny drives a hanging curve over the left field wall. Nobody on the Indians staff knows more about how quickly major league baseballs disappear than equipment acquisition/distribution manager Jeff Sipos. It’s the 17-year vet’s responsibility to keep the team stocked up—a real challenge when balls leave the playing field at the rate of about one every four or five pitches. And that’s not counting batting practice.

"(Former manager) Hargrove liked to have his players hit only new balls during b.p.," says Sipos. "Charley (Manuel) will use older ones as long as they’re not too dinged up."

Six or seven dozen dazzling white balls are rubbed up and given to the umpires before every home game. They go fast, what with Jacobs Field’s cozy dimensions and the Herculean efforts of Ramirez, Thome and friends. Plenty more leave the game as foul balls or via the tosses of generous coaches and ballplayers. And when a ball exits the field of play, it never returns.

“Can you think of any other sport where they give the equipment away to the fans?” Sipos grumps.

He also points to umpires as big offenders for the way they reject balls for even the slightest imperfections. Not without good reason. "You give a sneaky pitcher a dented ball and he can make it sing."

Batters can get in on the act too, requesting that umpires pull balls they judge to be a little too worked over. Not surprisingly, Sipos nominates mercurial ex-Indian Albert Belle as the pickiest ball hitter.

Those Tribe baseballs that don’t end up in the appreciative grasp of fans continue a life of sorts even after their brief major league careers are over. The path to retirement takes them to batting practice, then to the indoor batting cages and on to the team’s minor league affiliates. Sipos freights two boxes of about seven dozen balls each to all of the six minor league clubs every month for batting practice. The final stop from there is often to local Little League teams throughout the farm system.

All of which means that the Tribe goes through 1,000 dozen balls in spring training and 2,700 dozen during the season. That totals over 44,000 balls at the rock-bottom cost of about four-and-a-half bucks apiece, or some $200,000 a year. That’s not even counting the post-season or the new-ball needs of all the minor league teams. Think about that the next time you beg first base coach Ted Uhlaender for the foul ball snagged near the box.

LIBERTY REMEMBERS

This cover story appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of PaintPRO Magazine. Unfortunately, this attractive trade pub was discontinued in 2008 or early 2009. I still do a lot of work for several other publications from the parent company, Professional Trade Publications.

David Searls

The blue-skied autumn morning began as many that year, with Eric Grohe up on a crane amidst brushes and paint cans, working away at a wall of an old brick building in Bucyrus, Ohio. The paint on his brushes and jeans came from Keim, an all-natural German brand valued for its outdoor durability.

Kathy Grohe interrupted her husband mid-morning with a strange bit of news she'd picked up, something about a plane having crashed into a building in New York City.

Grohe went back to work. Exterior muralists savor balmy weather like politicians before attentive, deep-pocketed crowds. It was much later that evening that the artist felt the full, awful impact of September 11, 2001. At that moment, his already epic project, Lady Liberty, achieved even deeper meaning for Grohe. Without even fully understanding what he was doing, he scribbled a hurried message on a large sheet of butcher paper and hoisted it high on his unfinished canvas.

“Her torch still shines, her flag still waves,” he'd written above the in-progress painting of Lady Liberty lifting a dying warrior to his eternal reward.

The next day, the flower bouquets began showing up at the base of the building.

Leap of Faith

Ask Deb Pinion, director of the Bucyrus Area Chamber of Commerce, where her little town is situated and she mention its proximity to Mansfield, a somewhat larger city in north-central Ohio, and home to a looming, shuttered prison that incarcerated Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and other Hollywood types during filming of The Shawshank Redemption.

Bucyrus itself is a farm field-surrounded community of narrow Victorians and weathered frame homes. The downtown, like many in these Wal-Mart years, especially in hard-hit Ohio, needed...something. It looked somewhat forlorn with its derelict movie theater and empty storefronts amidst a liberally zoned accumulation of lawyers' and doctors' offices, real estate agencies, fast food joints, banks, auto parts dealers, chainr retailers and, nearby, the ornate courthouse and sky-high steeples of churches built during more prosperous times.

“We had a vacant lot on a town square, a gravel parking lot for the last twenty years,” Pinion recalls of the starting point of her envisioned revitalization. Bordering one end of that nook was an exterior wall of The Amish Vault Furniture Store. That's where she set her sights on a mural of the likes she'd seen in Steubenville, Ohio. They were created by Eric Grohe, found easily enough on the Internet.

Grohe and Kathy, his then-fiance, paid a visit and the result was 1999's American Crossroads, a truly epic view of nineteenth-century Bucyrus.

“It was entirely privately funded,” Pinion points out. As were the three Grohe murals that would follow, including Liberty Remembers.

“There are a lot of walls here,” she recalls Grohe saying while on his initial assignment.

He had his eye on the brick side of one particular building housing an Edward Jones investment branch and overlooking an ice cream stand. Nothing special, but the artist told Pinion, “I knew I was going to paint it when I left Vietnam. I just didn't know where I was going to put it.”

Now he had a place for his mind's image of Liberty Remembers.

Grohe is a gentleman, in the most literal sense, of about 60. Born in New York City, he served a tour of duty in Vietnam and eventually made Seattle his home—more or less. Most of his and Kathy's time is spent working on public projects that take up to a year to complete.

Though soft-spoken and friendly, the muralist knows when to put his foot down. One town wanted him to paint a bridge scene to honor the structure that marks its identify. Great idea, except that the project would be painted three blocks from the real deal. Why would he simply replicate the view?

“What I do isn't just a pretty picture slapped on a wall,” he explains. Some images “look good on a postcard, but don't create monuments.”

Grandeur in weather-resistant paint is what Grohe, with the help of his graphic artist wife and small teams of local art-school assistants, has created in communities throughout the U.S. And in South America and Malaysia. Communities like Bucyrus.

But while Grohe was eager to start Liberty Remembers, Pinion had only found partial funding by 2001. The artist started anyway in what Pinion calls “a leap of faith.”

They were in a “stage agreement,” and Grohe was in the second of four payment stages when 9/11 hit. The well ran dry while townspeople opened their wallets to the same sort of tragedy-related charities as did the rest of the nation.

Then a school-aged girl contributed ten dollars as a way of honoring her grandparents. After Pinion took the story to the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, “the checks started pouring in.”

They Were Soldiers

Stepping back from the work one day, Grohe's critique of Liberty was that “it was nice, but it wasn't connecting with the people. It was a political message with national meaning, but no local significance.”

The solution, he decided, would be to add busts and a few full-body portraits of Crawford County's own warriors. Once Grohe had figured out room for 75 or 80 memorialized veterans, Pinion went back to the town's newspaper, this time soliciting photographs of area vets.

Afterwards, “I opened the door and went, 'Oh my God.' People had brought in bomber jackets, canteens, letters, photo albums...”

Trying to turn down as few loved ones as possible, Grohe found space for 284 soldiers up and down and alongside the vertical pillars. He painted veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, both world conflicts, Vietnam, Desert Storm—even the RevolutionaryWar. The bluecoat had, of course, served long before the invention of the camera, but his image was captured at the age of 103.

Kathy scanned and printed each photo to a height of about eight inches. Then, using a pontillist technique, Grohe outlined facial features by poking holes into a fine mesh fabric. Through the fabric he poured powdered chalk, leaving a blue outline on the wall. With this as a guide, he painted about a dozen portraits a day.

Grohe can be unapologetically sentimental. Among the 284 Liberty faces is one young Vietnam casualty extending a Purple Heart. It's for his mother, who never received his medal through a falling out between widow and immediate family. There's also Nemo, a famous Vietnam War canine courier who completed a final mission despite losing an eye to gunfire. Nemo's handler lives in the area and submitted the photo with the comment that the dog had “saved more men than I did.” Careful viewers will also spot a horseshoe in recognition of the memorably courageous mount of a local Revolutionary War general. (“After having to turn down so many soldier photographs, I couldn't justify painting an actual horse,” Grohe explains.)

The community introduced itself as though for the first time through Liberty. “There were submarine soldiers living next door to one another who didn't know it,” Grohe recalls.

As Pinion proudly states after mentioning inclusion of an area boy who was the last Marine killed at Iwo Jima, “We were patriotic before patriotic was cool.”

Thanks to Eric Grohe, that fact will be apparent to generations of residents and visitors to Bucyrus, Ohio.

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.