By Reason of Insanity (11 page)

Spanner ignored him. “But what bothers me most is the attack itself, the insane fury it took to destroy a face like that. Why?”

Baylor smiled indulgently. “I think you answered your own question, Lieutenant. You used the word ‘insane.’ Some of these poor devils, when they work themselves into a rage there’s no telling what they’re capable of. The face is often the focal point of their rage. It’s the face that lies to them, deceives them, laughs at them.”

“Maybe,” Spanner said, unconvinced. “Maybe so.”

Oates stood up. “I have a question for you.” He looked at Baylor. “What about Mungo? Will he kill again before we can get to him?”

The director frowned as he too rose from his chair. “I wish I could answer that,” he said quietly. “Disturbed people are like children— they’re unpredictable. I will say only that once an animal has smelled blood …” He spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Any suggestions on where we might look for him?”

Dr. Baylor thought for a moment. “Not really. I should imagine by now he’s trying to get as far away as he can.”

“With his face plastered all over, he won’t get very far.”

Spanner was not so sure. “I got a feeling we might be hearing from him again.”

Baylor nodded. “Homicidal maniacs, as the press likes to call them, are often very clever people. I shouldn’t forget that if I were you.”

He opened the door to the outer office and held it for them as they passed through. The woman stopped her typing and watched. For the first time in three hours Baylor felt a sense of relief. “I’m told Bishop had no relatives, so we will bury the body. After the autopsy of course. Is that suitable to you, Lieutenant? Good. Then I won’t keep you gentlemen any longer.”

His eyes followed the two men until they were again in the hall. After reminding the woman to cancel the Fourth of July celebration on the lawn, he reentered his office and shut the door.

For the next half hour the two doctors discussed certain legal implications of the murder of Thomas Bishop and the escape of Vincent Mungo. Questions regarding policy and procedure were sure to be raised, and they knew that appropriate answers would have to be found.

“He must have gone berserk,” Lang kept repeating. “Something snapped inside and he just went berserk.”

“That he is a berserker is obvious,” Baylor reminded him. “What is not yet obvious is our position in the matter.”

“Suppose the police can’t find him,” insisted Lang. “Suppose he kills again. And goes on killing.”

Baylor grew impatient. “See here, the police are certainly capable of finding this man. They have his description and his picture. He has nothing. Wherever he goes his face will be recognized. Kindly allow the police to do their job. Meanwhile our job is to see that no blame for this unfortunate incident attaches itself to Willows. Or to us.”

Miles away two police officials were facing the problem of finding a demented murderer and an escaped mental patient. Lieutenant Spanner had responsibility for the killing in his jurisdiction, Sheriff Oates for the escape from a state institution. The only thing they knew for sure was that it was the same man. And that his name was Vincent Mungo.

Three

DURING THE month of July 1973 California was flooded with pictures of an escaped maniac named Vincent Mungo. His photograph appeared in daily newspapers from one end of the state to the other. His face was seen on the television evening news in all metropolitan centers. Posters with his picture and description were circulated to police in most California communities. In little San Ysidro on the Mexican line, border guards were alerted lest he slip across the bridge to Tijuana. Along the entire coast, at all bridge and tunnel checkpoints, on all roads leading to neighboring states, police were searching diligently.

Actually the manhunt began on the evening of July 4. As people returned from a holiday visit with friends or a doubletime shift at the plant, they learned of the murder and escape. Killings were common enough of course, and men would always seek to flee any kind of imprisonment, but the word “maniac” has a menacing quality to it, a feeling of dread, that quickly caught the public’s attention. The story appeared in the big evening papers, and the following morning’s editions carried comments of hospital officials and the sheriff in charge of the investigation. Several dailies of July 5 ran front-page interviews with prominent psychiatrists on the danger to the public. In smaller communities local papers picked up the story from the wire services they used. By the end of that first week millions of California residents had heard of the demented killer, and if most of them were unable to remember the name or the face, they nevertheless tended to be more cautious among strangers, at least for the moment.

In Hillside the town’s single newspaper headlined the escape and followed it with a blistering attack on the Willows hospital administration for allowing such a thing to happen. The editor reminded readers that municipal authorities had been trying for years to have the state facility moved elsewhere. Where? “We don’t care!” thundered the editorial, as long as the threat was removed from the townspeople of Hillside. The next day’s follow-up story tersely announced that the police lieutenant in charge of the murder investigation had placed himself unavailable for comment.

In Sacramento the governor declined to speculate on the case beyond expressing his full confidence in the police.

Everywhere the press was having a field day reporting on the oddities that always accompany such notoriety. A skywriting pilot lettered the word “maniac” in huge smoke columns across the afternoon sky, then dropped a ton of garbage on the unsuspecting community below. Several papers wryly observed that he was just another flying nut and not the one being sought. In Eureka a woman living alone wrote a note stating that she was afraid the maniac was entering her home. She then crawled into her freezer, perhaps to hide, and pulled the door shut. She was frozen solid when they found her.

A young man with dark features was arrested on a San Francisco street for emitting bursts of obscenity to passersby and to the police who apprehended him. Seemingly unable to stop for any length of time, he was held in jail for seven hours as the maniac before it was discovered that he was an epileptic suffering from the bizarre Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, which forces its victims to shout obscenities. A food journal reported that the famous fruit-of-the-month club of Modesto was planning to start a subsidiary operation to be called Nut of the Week. And in Los Angeles a local toy manufacturer announced that his company was going to market new wind-up dolls called Mungo Monsters.

In response to increasing pressure from public officials the experimental unit at Willows was closed down and the patients were absorbed into other, more traditional, wards. The new two-story building was shut temporarily until future use could be determined. Recent transfers were returned to other institutions. Dr. Walter Lang was reassigned elsewhere on the recommendation of Willows’ director, Dr. Henry Baylor, who was most cooperative with state medical and correctional authorities. Everywhere the pressure was being felt, from Willows to California’s famed Atascadero State Hospital. Patients were watched more closely, programs scrutinized more rigidly. Hospital personnel across the state held their collective breath, knowing that the vastly uncomfortable public spotlight would not long shine on them.

An enterprising reporter soon located Vincent Mungo’s relatives in Stockton. A maternal grandmother and two spinster aunts were all he had left except, they told the reporter, for some ne’er-do-well people on the father’s side who lived somewhere in the East. And who knows how many half-brothers and -sisters from that man, added one aunt spitefully. She was admonished but stuck to her belief.

Mungo’s parents were dead, the mother choking to death on some mislodged food when he was fifteen and the father committing suicide a year later. Before that he had been a normal healthy boy, so the reporter learned, except for the times he had to be “helped” in hospitals. How many times? Oh, maybe six or seven before his parents died. He would act strange sometimes, shouting, and then quiet, and then all that shouting again. He did strange things too. Like what? Oh, he’d pour kerosene on neighborhood cats and set fire to them. And he’d dig big holes and cover them over so the other kids would fall in. Yes, and one time the little Smith girl, used to live across the street, she fell in one of his holes and nobody could find her. But Vincent wouldn’t tell. Took them a whole day to get her out.

What about when he sawed off the planks on the seesaw in the park after they told him he was too big to ride on it? You see, it’s not he was a bad boy. Just that sometimes he acted a little strange.

“Once he took some paint that must’ve been down in the cellar, and he painted these Nazi signs all over that Jewish cemetery on Allen Road. Oh, I tell you, I was so mortified.” The grandmother barrumphed. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you, Abigail, that he did not do that.” Abigail protested. “He did too. Everybody knows he did.” She looked to her sister for support. “No,” the grandmother said with finality. “He would not do that. Vincent was a good boy.”

After the death of his parents Vincent Mungo seemed to fall apart. He became abusive to everyone and increasingly unruly. His actions were frenetic and disorganized; often he would mumble incoherently to himself or storm through the house and neighborhood. Yet he did nothing unlawful, nothing of a criminal nature. School tests placed him below average intelligence. Hospital mental examinations indicated he was manic-depressive and paranoid.

In the three years following his father’s suicide Mungo was briefly hospitalized four times. His grandmother and aunts tried their best for the boy, keeping him home with them, taking care of his needs. One aunt secretly offered herself sexually, thinking that he might be frustrated in that way since he was quite ugly and unappealing to girls.

Nothing worked, even with the best of intentions. Mungo became increasingly disoriented, his abusiveness sometimes flashing into violence. He began fighting with other youths. As his moods became more frightening, his sense of reality more fragile, his relatives saw him slipping away from them until the day came when they were no longer able to control him. Reluctantly they committed him to a state institution.

“He hated the hospital, all hospitals,” his grandmother said quietly, “but there was nothing else we could do.”

“When he left he cried,” said the aunt, “and told us he knew he was never coming back. But we thought it was best for him. In those places they could watch him and help him get better. We thought that someday he’d come back to us all cured.”

The other aunt shook her head sadly. “He never got any better.” Her head kept moving. “He never got any better,” she repeated.

The grandmother dried her eyes with a flowered handkerchief. “We hoped—” Her voice cracked. She looked around helplessly, suddenly old and very tired. “Now this,” she said softly.

The reporter wanted to know if they expected Vincent Mungo to come back home. The women didn’t think so. He had felt betrayed by them for committing him. In five years he hadn’t written to them. Would he possibly return in order to hurt them? Certainly not. He was not violent unless provoked. All those stories in the papers calling him a maniac, some kind of horrible fiend, they were all lies. He was sick, yes, mentally ill, but not to the point of harming others—he was never like that. The brutal murder at the hospital? They were at a loss to understand it. That was not the boy they knew. Maybe something happened to him in the hospital, something terrible that made him turn bad. Maybe they made a mistake in committing him, but who can tell these things. Who knows what will happen?

“You must understand one thing,” said the grandmother as the reporter was leaving. “Vincent was a good boy when he was small, and even at the end when he was here with us. He never hurt anybody, not really. If he changed later on”—she dried her eyes again—”if he changed, then it was something we don’t know anything about. God knows we did our best for him.”

Thomas Bishop, Mungo’s “defenseless victim,” as one paper called him, was not so lucky, at least in terms of relatives. He had none. No one who knew of him, anyway. The
Los Angeles Times
had one of its people check his background. His father died in a robbery attempt when he was three, he killed his mother when he was ten. The mother’s parents had separated when she was a child; the father disappeared and was never heard from again, the mother was killed in an automobile accident several years later. The child, Sara, the only issue of the marriage, was adopted by her uncle, the mother’s only brother; there were no sisters. The uncle was now dead, as was his wife.

On Bishop’s father’s side, his grandfather was dead; his grandmother, paralyzed and legally blind, lived in Lubbock, Texas. The father had three brothers; one killed in the war, one missing in action and presumed dead. The third, a hopeless victim of mongolism, had died years earlier in a Texas state institution. There had been one sister, murdered by persons unknown at age sixteen.

As the search for Bishop’s killer continued, the net was widened to include neighboring states. Circulars were sent to police in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, even to Idaho and Utah. Pictures were shown to interstate bus drivers, ticket agents, airline personnel. Citizens in rural communities were asked to note any strangers living in woods. Women were told to be wary of anyone asking for food.

In Gaines, Idaho, the local television station left a picture of Vincent Mungo on the screen when it finished its programming for the evening. In this way townspeople could see his face all through the night, not a particularly pleasant thought for some. And in Elko, Nevada, the girls in the town’s five bordellos were told to watch out for any strange customers. “Stranger than what we got now?” one wanted to know.

Across the country in Washington, D.C., the National Rifle Association, coincidentally or not, sent a mailing to its members of the standard description of a person. On the card was a drawing of a man; around the drawing were the twelve things to note in describing someone: name, sex, race, age, height, weight, hair, eyes, complexion, physical marks such as scars, habits or peculiarities if any, and clothing, including hat, shirt or blouse, jacket or coat, dress or pants, shoes, and jewelry, such as rings and watches. Whatever the motivation, people were looking for Vincent Mungo.