By Reason of Insanity (18 page)

Afterward he filled out an application for a major credit card, listing his employer as the company named on the payroll stub. He made up a salary of $20,000 per year and seven years of employment. For the rest he fabricated a background, with the only facts being the place and date of birth and the upstate home address. He already knew that his credit rating was excellent. At the bottom he listed the furnished room as his summer place of residence to which the card should be sent.

On July 20 he returned to the first bank to pick up his checks. The name was correctly imprinted, and he discarded the unused plain bank checks given him earlier. While there he casually sauntered over to a waiting line at a teller’s window and soon withdrew $95 of his $100 in the savings account, using the second bankbook. On the way home he destroyed the book. He now had practically all of his money back, and a validly stamped bankbook that he could take anywhere as proof of his solvency. With that and a driver’s license he could never be arrested for vagrancy or even questioned beyond the moment. He had identification and he had money; he was a responsible member of society.

On the twentyfourth of the month he paid for one more week’s rent. His preparations were almost completed, and he knew that he would soon be leaving Los Angeles and the sovereign state of California.

Six days later two pieces of mail arrived for him. One was a California driver’s license. The other was a credit card embossed with his new name. There was no address on the card.

The following morning he returned to his bank and cashed a check for $45 of the $50 in the checking account. Again for practically no cost he had valid bank checks that were further identification, and that could be used for cash in an emergency. On the way back to his furnished room a banner on one of the weekly magazines caught his attention.

Looking out of his window now on this final July evening, the anonymous letter mailed and the Chessman article in his pocket, Thomas Bishop brooded at length about his existence and what had been done to him in his home state. They had murdered his father and destroyed his mother, they had taken him as a child and had locked him away for most of his life, they had lied to him, ridiculed him, tortured him in a thousand monstrous ways until he himself wasn’t sure at times whether he was crazy or sane. And they would have kept him a prisoner forever if he hadn’t escaped. But he was smarter than all of them, otherwise he would have already been dead. They meant to kill him, just as they had killed his father.

His eyes hardened at the passing thoughts, his hand gripped the sash at the window’s edge. They deserved something, the people of California, and he would see to it that they have something to remember. They wouldn’t understand it, just as they never understood him, but they would remember.

At nine o’clock he put his shaving gear into the flight bag and turned off the television set. He looked around the room; everything was cheap and tawdry and smelling of goodbye. He left the keys on the dresser next to the rotten banana remains. Closing the damaged door behind him, he bade all of it farewell.

A brisk mile hike brought him to a small hotel, where he registered as Bernard Parks of Cleveland. Upstairs he lay on the bed and quickly fell asleep. At 11:50 P.M. he awakened and walked down the stairs and out of the hotel into the warm Los Angeles night in search of his prey.

On that last July morning at least one other person was equally moved by the Chessman article in the newsmagazine, though incensed would be the better word. State Senator Jonathan Stoner read the story in Sacramento on the way to his office. By the time he got there he was livid with anger. He stormed in and made several hurried calls, one of them to his press secretary who had not yet arrived. “Have him call me the minute he gets in,” Stoner bellowed and banged the phone down. It was after ten o’clock, and he felt that he should be last in the office since everything revolved around him.

Jonathan Stoner was an ardent capital-punishment advocate. He believed the country was being paralyzed by a criminal element that feared nothing because there was nothing any longer to fear. Society was permissive, the courts lenient, the police disgusted, and, as usual, the middle class wound up paying for everything. The rich could afford to protect themselves, the poor had nothing to lose but their squalid lives. But the middle class, the backbone of the nation, the millions of lawful decent people of property and businesses, they were being robbed and plundered and assaulted and even murdered.

It wasn’t so-called white-collar crime, the embezzler, the forger, the tax evader, the big business deals, the political payoffs, that angered him. Stoner well understood these things; he had seen them and been around them all his political life and he was smart enough to know that grease was what made the machinery run so well. Nor did organized crime particularly disturb him; it lived off those vices men would always indulge, and it killed only its own. What filled him with rage was the violent criminal: the muggers, the rapists, the bank robbers, the petty gunmen, the thrill killers, the maniacs. They were the ones ruining the country, they were the ones turning the streets into jungles and the homes into jails.

Stoner passionately believed that all such criminals should be imprisoned forever, the key thrown away. Better yet, they should all be executed. Charles Manson should have been shot dead. Richard Speck should have been executed. Charles Schmid should have been executed. Sirhan Sirhan should have been executed. They all should have been killed, they all deserved the same death as the Harvey Glatmans and William Cooks of a few years earlier. Caryl Chessman too. He got just what he deserved. Death.

Stoner looked again at the banner. He picked the magazine up, held it a moment, slammed it back on the desk. He called out to his secretary to get him some coffee. When she came in with the coffee he handed her the copy of
Newstime
, told her to get the Los Angeles bureau chief on the phone. “Find the number from information,” he barked. “Tell them I want to talk to him personally. No one else,” he shouted to her back. He sat down, trying to calm his anger.

The senator was a self-made man. Tall and ruggedly built, with a strong face and an iron constitution, he had clawed and fought and worked his way up the political ladder over the past eighteen years. Still only thirty-nine years young, as he liked to put it, he had political ambitions beyond the state, which he wisely kept to himself and a few intimate associates. At least, he often reminded them, until the proper time.

He had been fourteen when Chessman was tried and convicted. He was twenty-six when Chessman was executed in 1960. While he had no recollection of the trial, he vividly remembered Chessman’s death. He had almost been one of the sixty witnesses. As a young assemblyman from a working-class district he had felt a duty to witness the punishment of animals that preyed on his constituents, but he had little power as yet and was not able to attend the execution. Even then he knew that such fiends had to be destroyed if the good people were to survive.

In Chessman’s case it was also personal. A cousin of his, still a teenager in the late forties and living in Los Angeles, had been raped and horribly brutalized about the time that Chessman was operating. The attack had been reported but the girl, wildly hysterical, had not been able even to describe her assailant. Afterward she was never quite the same, never marrying or even dating men. There had been no proof that the rapist was Caryl Chessman but to Stoner, who learned of the attack some years later, it all amounted to the same thing. His poor cousin had been raped at the same time that Chessman was a rapist, in the same city and in the same general area. That was enough for him.

The senator’s reactionary instincts were deep-rooted and honest, as was his passionate belief in the efficacy of capital punishment. Yet he was also a clever strategist, quick to take advantage of every opportunity. In the matter of capital punishment he swiftly saw that the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision of the previous year was unpopular with a great mass of people. The Court’s decision was now law but that didn’t mean it would remain law. As a good politician he believed in the overriding will of the people, at least in emotional issues, and he was prepared to bet that within a few years most states would vote for restoration of the death penalty. After that it would be just a matter of time, perhaps only as long as it would take for several Justices to die or resign.

In his own state Stoner was absolutely convinced that the majority wanted the death penalty restored. He realized the increasing emotional impact of the issue and over the past months he had begun to think how he might be able to use that impact to his advantage. Elections were only a year away, and it might even give him recognition outside the state. He had been in :ust such a frame of mind that very morning when he saw the Chessman article, and now the beginnings of an idea slowly started to form in his mind.

His secretary buzzed him. A Derek Lavery was on the phone from Los Angeles. As he picked up the instrument she rushed in with
Newstime
and placed it on his desk.

For the next ten minutes the senator spoke calmly and dispassionately with the bureau chief. His voice was crisp, his tone modulated, his words precise. He well knew the power of the press. In a preelection year he had no intention of giving any editors or reporters ammunition that could be used against him.

In carefully measured sentences he outlined his objections to the Chessman piece. It was sensationalist, it pandered to the emotions, it abused the public’s natural sympathy for the underdog, it distorted fact and at times bordered on fancy. Chessman was obviously guilty; he was convicted of a capital crime and he was executed for it. He was not the victim of capital punishment or anything else. He was a robber, a rapist and a kidnapper, and the only mistake made by the state was in keeping such a vicious maniac alive for twelve years at the taxpayers’ expense. It was not the times that killed him but his own criminal acts. Everything else was unimportant. What? Yes, including the fact that he acted as his own lawyer. No, he did not suffer any cruel and unusual punishment but his rape victims surely did. As for other rapes at the time, he probably committed them all. In regard to Chessman’s alleged rehabilitation, there is no such thing for these vicious criminals. Yes, that’s right. No rehabilitation. Who said so? I said so. An animal is an animal, it cannot be rehabilitated. From animal can come only more animal. What’s that? Son of animal? Is that what you said? No, I can’t say that I do see the humor in it. Yes. Goodbye.

“Son of animal,” mumbled the senator, shaking his head as he put down the phone.

A few minutes later the senator’s press secretary came in. Young, ambitious and very sharp, he had been with Stoner for two years. Before that he had taught political journalism for a year, after graduating from Stanford. A column he wrote at the time for a local newspaper caught the senator’s eye and he had been asked to join the team. The young man had plans and they did not include being a press secretary forever.

Stoner picked up the magazine and tossed it across the desk. “You see this?”

His press secretary glanced at the newsweekly. “Not my type. I go more for the sensational side of the news.”

“The story on Chessman,” said the senator. “Read it.”

“Must I?”

“Read it, Roger,” the senator said wearily.

Roger sat in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. He stretched his legs out and began reading, humming softly. After several minutes he looked up.

“What do you think?” asked the senator.

“It’s a story on Caryl Chessman, who was executed thirteen years ago.”

“I know that,” replied the senator sarcastically. “Anything else?”

“It’s well written for that kind of thing.”

Stoner smiled heavily, as though he were dealing with a mental retard. “I’m not interested in the writing style,” he said, annoyed. “Don’t you have any opinions, for chrissake?”

“Sure I do,” said Roger defensively. Then he brightened. “But I don’t necessarily agree with them.”

The senator looked at the young man for a long moment. His sigh, when it came, was loud and agonized. “You’ll go far in politics, Roger,” he said finally. “Very far indeed.”

Roger smiled. The senator would go further too, he told himself, if he had a sense of humor.

“What I mean,” Stoner said patiently after a pause, “is the idea of the article. It’s totally anti-capital punishment.”

“I see that,” said the young man, serious now. “But they’re beating a dead horse. Chessman’s long dead and gone.”

“Then they’re reviving him.” Stoner got up and walked to the window. “They are saying capital punishment is the real killer and Chessman just got caught in the machinery. They’re making a hero out of him, how he was an innocent victim who fought a losing battle against legal murder.”

“Everybody loves a loser.”

The senator paid no attention. “It’s the most vicious attack on the death penalty I’ve seen in years. They practically come right out and say we are all murderers.”

“Next week they’ll be on the other side,” Roger assured him. “All magazines work the same way. They don’t care about sides as long as the subject is hot.”

“Is Chessman hot?”

“No, but capital punishment is.”

“Exactly.” The senator smiled widely, walked back to his chair, sat down. “It’s life-and-death, it’s real, and I think it’s time I get involved. In other words”—he looked at his press secretary intently—”it can be a good vote-getter if handled right.”

“The public already knows your stand on the issue.”

“I mean get involved personally. Make it my cause. Get all the exposure I can with it. This thing,” Stoner said quietly, “is going to be around a long time, and so am I. There’s no right or wrong in it beyond what the law says is right and wrong. Everything else is emotion, and that’s where a good politician comes in.”

“Cynical but true,” sighed the young man.

“Plus the fact that I’m on the right side.”