Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (35 page)

Wilcock filed the interview under "useless" and called Minda Brinkerhoff in Gillette. He wrote up their talk:

0956—Telephone Conversation First Contact

Minda Brinkerhoff expressed distrust and is unhappy with the way things are going. She feels that everything should be made public and has taken steps to try and achieve this. Minda stated she had written "60 Minutes" and the American Civil Liberties Union. She is also upset about the way Bishop Larry Sessions is trying to stop a petition against Dr. Story.

Reporting Officer requested a more concise statement than that found in her letter to the Medical Board but was refused. R/O asked if Minda would be coming to Lovell in the future and was told no. . . .

Minda's sister Meg seemed equally reluctant at first, but after a little warm-up she let him turn on his cassette tape recorder. Meg proved touchingly eager for a friendly ear. It took Wilcock's schoolteacher wife Judy three days to type up the thirty-one pages of Q&A. But Meg's account had a glaring weakness. For all her certainty, she hadn't seen Story's penis.

Wilcock ran into more frustration when he called on a sixtyish woman named Julia Bradbury. She agreed to an interview, but soon began to fidget and fuss. Whenever she reached the scene in the examining room, she skipped ahead. The chief's own shyness was no help. When he asked questions about the "tube" and "semen," he felt like Jack the Ripper.

An interview with Diana Harrison went better—nine pages after Judy finished typing it—but he came away convinced that Story's former receptionist had held back some of the less palatable details. Country people were like that.

He called the county attorney. "Terry," he said, "these interviews aren't going so well. I need some help, and I think it oughta be a woman."

"Maybe we should ask the DCI."

"I already did. The state won't touch it."

"What about a private detective?"

"I'd rather stick with law enforcement," Wilcock said.

Tharp gave the impression that he'd lost some of his inspiration since interviewing Emma Lu Meeks a few days back. The chief remembered what he'd said on the phone that night: "I can't charge a man with rape because of what some old woman imagines she felt seven years ago. By God, Dave, we gotta do better than that!"

Wilcock opened his office mail and a cassette fell from a wrinkled brown envelope postmarked Denver. He slid the tape into position and leaned back to listen. He hadn't heard five minutes of the forlorn, weepy voice before he was on his way to Tharp's office again.

Neither man spoke as they listened to the cassette. When the frail voice trailed off, the lawmen stared at each other and slowly shook their heads. Then Tharp said, "We're gonna get that sucker."

53

TERR! LEE TIMMONS

"I wasn't able to sit myself down and write this all out, so I decided to send you a tape. I hope that your tape recorder will be able to pick up everything that I say. I've talked to people about what happened to me, after I grew up, but I've never talked to anybody about it in detail of exactly what happened, so this is going to be a little bit hard for me. I'll do the best I can.

"As I remember, it was the spring of 1968, and it seems that I had a doctor's appointment after school. I had been having pains in my right side for probably about a year since I had turned fourteen and my menstrual cycle had started.

"Just to preface this a little bit, when I was twenty-five and we had been married about six months I had my first miscarriage. At that time the records were found and gone through of my mother's pregnancy with me. It was found that she was given a drug called D.E.S. This drag affects the unborn fetus in that it makes the reproductive organs abnormal. I have a condition which is called D.E.S. exposure, so my insides are not formed correctly.

"Consequently, as I reached puberty and my hormones started working, I was in a lot of pain each month. At the time, they had no idea that this drug did this to the unborn babies, but this was what was wrong. We found this out about ten years later.

"Anyway, it seems like about three months in a row that I had gone in because I was just in so much pain. Each time he would examine me, Dr. Story would examine me through a pelvic exam, and he couldn't find anything wrong.

"The day in question, I went in and sat in the waiting room. Imogene Hansen, who was the nurse, took me back into one of the rooms and told me to undress. The doctor came in and did the preliminaries, asked me what was wrong and everything. I told him it was the same thing, I had a pain in my right side and had no idea why.

"He asked me to lay down and got out the metal instrument, put on his glove and got out the lubricant. He began examining me with his finger inside and pushing on top, like they always do, to see if he could feel anything around my ovary or uterus. He did this for a while. Of course, the door was shut, and it was just he and I. I was draped to where I could not even see him.

"Then all of a sudden he deviated from any other time that I had been in for an examination. All of a sudden, as I was laying on the table, my feet in the stirrups, I felt something start to push against my bottom in the area of my vagina that was very, very warm and fleshy and yet hard.

"I didn't know what to think. I had never been taught by my parents or anyone what intercourse was. I had no idea what a penis looked like, or anything like this. All of a sudden I felt it push inside of me. I started to cry, because it really hurt. It was much larger than his finger, and it was not a hand with a plastic glove on it. It was bare skin.

"At this point I couldn't imagine what he was doing, and yet I trusted him because he was my doctor. He kept pushing it in farther and I just cried really hard because it hurt very bad.

"He pulled it out and proceeded to rub it up and down in my crotch for a while. I could not even imagine what was going on. Then he would try it again, and each time he would try to push it in a little farther. Then he would take it out and rub it up and down on my crotch some more and push it in.

"By this time, I was just in tears, crying and crying. About the third time he pulled it out, all of a sudden I felt a warm fluid go all over my bottom on the outside and down on the table underneath me. I had no idea in the world what that was at that time.

"After this happened, he started to fuss around. He grabbed hold of the paper that covers the table that they always pull down for a new patient out from under me and he wadded it up and threw it away, and started wiping me off. After this happened he told me to sit up and to get dressed and he would be back in a few minutes, and so I did. Before he went out of the room and asked for me to sit up, he said to me, 'You did real good,' and then left.

"I got off the table and proceeded to clean myself up. The tissue which I used to clean my bottom was bloody and I was bleeding. I was very upset and in a lot of pain. I got my clothes on and sat there and a few minutes later he came back in and told me he could not find anything wrong with me, that he couldn't explain my pain. I left.

"I don't remember if my grandmother picked me up or if I walked home. It seems like I walked home, which was probably two miles, to where my grandmother lived. I remember saying to her, 'He hurt me. He hurt me.'

"She didn't know what I was talking about. I don't even know if she knew why I went to the doctor or what type of an examination it was. I was crying. She just gave me some ginger tea and put me to bed.

"I feel that by coming forth and turning this in to you, maybe I can help some other woman, some other young girl that, like me, might have happened to be a fifteen-year-old virgin and have to go through an experience like this. I have a little girl of my own. I would like to see Dr. Story get the help, the psychiatric help, that he needs.

"Just for your records, this is a statement from Terri Hansen Timmons. I live in Denver, Colorado. . . . We moved away from Lovell in May of 1970. It was over sixteen years ago that this incident happened to me."

* *
*

Terri Lee Hansen Timmons, a thin-boned Mormon woman whose grandfather had been the first president of the Lovell bank, returned the borrowed tape recorder to her Denver neighbor a few days after she mailed off the cassette and wondered why she didn't feel better. How hard it had been to make that recording! She'd trembled for the whole twenty minutes. It was scary to say all those words, even in the privacy of her locked bedroom. It would have been impossible to say them face to face. But she knew that sooner or later she would have to give her testimony, either in this life or at the judgment bar.

Well, she told herself, at least I've quit bawling. Ever since her mother had called from Powell with the news about the Medical Board hearings, Terri had been crying. She was relieved that the Holy Spirit had given her the courage to make the first move. For days, the Spirit had told her, "Call the Lovell police," but she'd held off because she didn't want the cops to think she was crazy. Chief Wilcock turned out real nice. If he'd said one wrong word, she'd have hung up.

At thirty-two, Terri had reason to be leery of men. Her truck-driver father had been difficult—"ornery," as she put it in her journal. A pack of young Lovell Mormons had raped someone very close to her. Dr. Story had done his evil, not only to Terri but to one of her aunts. And she'd wasted three years—from fifteen to eighteen—on a handsome schoolmate who went off and married another woman.

She hated to think of the years she'd spent trying to block out the Story incident. She'd had nightmares and daymares, flashes of horror, attacks of anxiety and panic. At Brigham Young University, there'd been times when the memories ruined dates. At home, she would be doing the dishes or washing her hair when she imagined herself back on the examining table. For a few years she improved, but when she returned to Lovell to see her dying grandmother, she spotted Story standing at the nurse's station in a black turtleneck and dark trousers. Black suits him, she said to herself. The memories surged back.

* * *

Every day she thanked her Father in Heaven for her husband. Loyd "Red" Timmons was the miracle in her life. When she'd met him in Powell, she'd felt an immediate burning in the bosom. He was a halfhearted Protestant with red hair to his shoulders, but 369 days later he'd turned himself into a neatly cropped Mormon who talked to the Lord and knew the Scriptures. They were married in the temple at Salt Lake City.

Terri had hoped that her life would turn around, but at first the events of her wedding night only deepened her depression. She was almost twenty-three, and she'd never been positive what Story had done to her, only that she'd bled and hurt. But after her wedding night, she knew. For a long time she couldn't explain to Red why she flinched at his touch. She sat around brooding.

One day she started to tell him, "A long time ago, this doctor did something to me. . . ."

After a few sentences, Red said, "No! That didn't happen. Don't tell me that!" He'd been born and raised in Big Horn County. He knew what family doctors did and what they didn't do.

They'd left their hometown of Powell to start a new life in Colorado. Red landed a good job as a manufacturing engineer for Robotics & Co., but he still didn't seem to comprehend what she was going through and neither did the leaders of her Denver ward.

In 1981 she planned to kill herself, then changed her mind when she remembered that Mormon doctrine equated suicide with murder and held that it brought an eternal curse. She went to her bishop for counseling. "Terri," he told her, "there are people on this earth that we call tender spirits. They're more vulnerable to the pain and suffering that go with the wickedness of the world. You're one of them."

For three more years she'd lived in limbo, and then came the nice talk with Chief Wilcock. A few days later, the Lord informed Red that it was time to quit his Denver job and return to the Big Horn Basin with his family. If someone at home needed her testimony, Terri would be available.

54

DAVID WILCOCK

He worked quietly, tiptoeing around the mayor and other Story supporters. He asked each interviewee to keep their talk confidential, and to his amazement each seemed to comply. He suspected that Lovell's reputation for gossipmongering was just another lazy cliche about small towns. He regarded such generalities as a substitute for original thought, and tried to avoid them.

It bothered him that he still wasn't getting the job done, at least to the county attorney's satisfaction. As Tharp reminded him almost daily, it was one thing to lift a doctor's license and another to send him to the penitentiary. Wilcock and the victims were still having problems relating to each other, and some had been so affronted by Story's easy return to practice that they'd refused to cooperate with anyone in law enforcement. Minda Brinkerhoff wouldn't even return his phone calls to Gillette in Campbell County.

One wasted day followed another as the cottonwoods turned deeper shades of gold and the wind from the Rockies sharpened and chilled. He had a long interview with his next-door neighbor, Aletha Durtsche, but she couldn't swear that she'd seen the doctor's penis. A Medical Board witness named Irene Park swore that the only beef she'd ever had against Dr. Story was that she'd gone to him for a tonsil check and was given a pelvic. Any other complaints? "None." How had the doctor treated her? "Fine."

Arden McArthur tipped him to the victimized Mae Fischer and suggested that he approach the family through the father, a former bishop. John Shotwell admitted that he'd had a showdown with Dr. Story, but said the doctor had explained everything. Wilcock asked if the Shotwells' daughter could be interviewed and was told that she was still skittish on the subject. It seemed that Mae hadn't told her bad-tempered husband Bill, and probably never would.