victimology

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a brief post about Freddie deBoer’s case for forcing mentally ill people into treatment — or rather, about one element of the story. And then today I see a new post by Freddie on this review of this book by Jonathan Rosen, and that got the wheels turning.

None of this is within my own area of expertise or experience. I have no authority here. I just want to call attention to one point. Rosen’s book is about his friend Michael Laudor, who in 1998 murdered his fiancée Caroline Costello during a psychotic episode. I have not read the book, but when I heard about it, I think originally from Freddie’s Substack, I immediately remembered a book that made a great impact on me when I read it forty years ago: The Killing of Bonnie Garland, by an eminent psychiatrist named Willard Gaylin. I was reminded of it because of of one small detail linking the two situations: Yale University, which Laudor, Costello, and Rosen all attended in the early 1980s, as did Bonnie Garland and the man who killed her, Richard Herrin, in the mid-1970s.

Here’s how Gaylin describes the origins of his book:

Richard Herrin, then twenty-three, had killed his college sweetheart, Bonnie Garland. He had hammered her to death in her sleep in her parents’ home. This was the tragic culmination of a three-year romance. Richard Herrin, a poor Mexican-American boy, had been a junior at Yale University when he met seventeen-year-old freshman Bonnie Garland. Bonnie was a child of affluence. Daughter of Joan and Paul Garland, she had spent much of her childhood in Brazil, where her father was establishing a very successful international law practice. She had attended the fashionable Madeira School and went on to Yale, her father’s alma mater.

Bonnie Garland was an unlikely victim of a killing. But then again, Richard Herrin was an unlikely killer. And the course of events following the killing was strange and unpredictable. Within two months of killing Bonnie, Richard Herrin was not in prison but attending classes at the State University of New York in Albany, working in a religious bookshop there, and being unstintingly supported both emotionally and financially by a Catholic community.

I am not a devotee of crime news; I rarely read it in the papers. But there was something unusually bizarre about this crime and its sequelae. I remembered one brief phrase from the reporting; Richard had been quoted as saying within hours of the killing, “Her head broke open like a watermelon.” Who speaks in those terms? What kind of human being even thinks that way? One might expect a general revulsion, a turning away from the vile and indecent. But many did not turn away. The Catholic community at Yale University, where both Richard and his victim, Bonnie Garland, had been students, mobilized by Ashbel (“A.T.”) T. Wall, a former roommate of Richard’s and a member of an affluent and socially prominent New England family, along with Father Peter Fagan and Sister Ramona Pena, Catholic associate chaplains at Yale, began a crusade of compassion for Richard. The Garlands — her room in their house still soiled with their daughter’s blood and brain tissue — started a counter-crusade. This would eventually include hiring a private eye, appearing on a TV talk show, and interviews in such gossip sheets as the Star and National Enquirer.

Gaylin followed the case closely and came to focus on one question: In the aftermath of this killing, why were there so many more tears for Richard Herrin than for the young woman he killed? And this is his answer:

Our mechanisms of identification and empathy are central to our concepts of what is good and what is right. From the day of the killing, Richard attracted a host of concerned and compassionate defenders. When one person kills another, there is immediate revulsion at the nature of the crime. But in a time so short as to seem indecent to the members of the personal family, the dead person ceases to exist as an identifiable figure. To those individuals in the community of good will and empathy, warmth and compassion, only one of the key actors in the drama remains with whom to commiserate and that is always the criminal. The dead person ceases to be a part of everyday reality, ceases to exist. She is only a figure in a historic event. We inevitably turn away from the past, toward the ongoing reality. And the ongoing reality is the criminal; trapped, anxious, now helpless, isolated, often badgered and bewildered.

Gaylin attended Richard Herrin’s trial and noticed that the prosecuting attorneys did nothing to remind the jury of the former existence of Bonnie Garland. They did not even introduce a photograph of her. Meanwhile, the defense suggested that Bonnie — who had dated Richard for the better part of three years but had grown less interested in him — had not been sufficiently attentive to his emotional needs, had not really understood how difficult life was for him, a kid from the barrio, at Yale. Richard’s attorney did not accuse her of anything; as Gaylin notes, “the slight suggestion of her complicity and insensitivity was sufficient.” But gradually the defense was able to shift the jury’s attention in such a way as to suggest that she was really the one on trial. “She was diminished, and, in suggesting that she was somewhat responsible for her own fate, made an accomplice to her own killing. She was on trial, and was given no voice, no presence. No real attempt was made by the prosecution to bring her to life.”

So the jury’s sympathies, like those of the Catholic community at Yale, shifted towards Richard. Later, after the trial, the villains in the story become Bonnie’s parents, rich white people who in their arrogance and entitlement wouldn’t forgive the troubled boy from the barrio.

François Truffaut was the first person to note that the key scene in Psycho comes when Norman Bates cleans up the shower where Marion Crane has been murdered. For 45 minutes we, the audience, have been learning to sympathize with this imperfect young woman, obviously the protagonist of the story, and now she’s dead. What do we do? Truffaut says that we transfer our sympathies to Norman Bates, and the lengthy clean-up scene — which also involves the disposal of her body, which we never see again — gives us the chance to do that.

But we don’t know that Norman Bates is Marion’s murderer. Wouldn’t things be different if we did know that he’s a killer? Gaylin’s argument is: Not necessarily. Not if the victim is dead and gone, absent, invisible. In the absence of the victim, Gaylin says, the murderer “usurps the compassion that is justly his victim’s due. He will steal his victim’s moral constituency along with her life.” The living sympathize with the living, not with the dead. And — this is in some ways Gaylin’s key concern — his own profession, psychiatry, does more than any other force in American life to facilitate the transfer of compassion from the murdered to the murderer.

All this says nothing about the case of Michael Laudor and Caroline Costello — I know little about that and, again, haven’t read Rosen’s book. But I was greatly taken, all those years ago, with Gaylin’s explanation of how we transfer our sympathies from the dead to the living, from any absent victim to any present offender — whom, thanks to the mechanical workings of our criminal-justice and mental-health systems, we can easily perceive as “the real victim here.” It’s worth noting, perhaps, that when I first posted this reflection I read through it and noticed that the first sentence of this paragraph referred to “the case of Michael Laudor” — I had left out the name of the woman he murdered.