The Professor and the Prostitute (16 page)

A few days after the shooting, the surviving members of the Keeler family hired for David a well-known, highly respected criminal lawyer named Doug Mulder. Under Texas law, youthful offenders—those under fifteen—could not at the time be charged and sentenced as adults. David's crime of patricide and matricide was considered a civil offense—delinquency—rather than a criminal one. But he could, if a judge so willed, be jailed for that delinquency in a juvenile detention center until he reached the age of eighteen. The family felt David would be better served by getting psychiatric treatment and consequently engaged the silver-tongued Mulder.

In August, at a hearing to determine what to do with David, Mulder produced a team of mental health experts who testified that intense criticism by his parents ever since he was a child had caused David to repress his emotions, and that this repression—rather like a fire in a coal mine that inevitably must seek the airshaft—had finally erupted into the violent rage that made the boy shoot to kill. He needed to be taught how to express his feelings, the experts felt, and how to do so constructively. The hearing was televised, and the judge sent David to a private psychiatric hospital, Timberlawn.

The Reverend Cook, when I spoke with him, several months after David had been sent to Timberlawn, said he was happy for the boy, although, like many people, he wasn't sure that psychiatric treatment could remake a personality. He also said that the members of the congregation had learned the wrong lesson from what had happened to the Keelers. “There is a mindset here that we're dealing with the will of God, that God caused all this to happen because in some way He was dissatisfied with us,” the minister told me. “People here say, ‘In the good old days, when everyone
believed
, you didn't have things like this.' Well, you did. What you didn't have then were guns, all those loaded guns. Those loaded guns in our homes are killing more of us than bad guys ever could. But people around here don't care.”

David was treated at Timberlawn and then kept in a halfway house until late in 1984. By then I'd forgotten all about his case, but as I said, I'd made friends in Texas, and Texans are good about staying in touch. That Christmas I got letters and cards from several of my Dallas friends, and one of them sent me a news clipping. David, the clipping said, would be released from psychiatric supervision on December 29—his eighteenth birthday. His juvenile record would be sealed. And he would receive his share of his parents' $1.2 million estate.

There was also a final twist, or at least what seemed to me to be a final nod to the anxieties that people living in a gun-toting society can never fully vanquish. The financial settlement had been negotiated among the Keeler siblings, who were apparently willing enough to give David his share of the family fortune. Interestingly, however, they stipulated that he not go to college either at the University of Texas in Austin or Southern Methodist University in Dallas, because of the two schools' proximity to them.

THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE TWIN GYNECOLOGISTS

New York, New York

1975

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1975, a pair of forty-five-year-old twins, their bodies gaunt and already partially decomposed, were found dead at a fashionable Manhattan address in an apartment littered with decaying chicken parts, rotten fruit, and empty pill bottles. The bodies were those of Cyril and Stewart Marcus, doctors who had apparently died, more or less simultaneously, as the result of a suicide pact.

Like many people, I was shocked by the information. Two things contributed to my astonishment. One was the men's twinship, the doubleness that had given them a mutual birth date and now a mutual death date as well. Another was the men's prominence; they had been among New York City's most well-known obstetrician-gynecologists.

But if I was shocked, I was at the same time not surprised to hear of the death of the Marcus brothers, for I had known them, had once been a patient of Stewart Marcus. It was back in 1966, a year during which I paid several visits to his office but then abruptly decided not to continue seeing him. Though he was garrulous and even oddly confiding on one of my first two visits, on my third, he got angry about something—I no longer recall exactly what it was—and began to shout and scream at me. My husband was with me at the time, and I remember how, controlling an urge to respond in kind, he turned to me and said, “Let's go. This man is obviously crazy.” Dr. Marcus seemed not to hear my husband's derogatory remark, though it was made sharply and loudly. He just went on ranting and raving, and we felt that although the doctor was standing just across his desk from us, it was as if, in effect, he were somewhere else, somewhere very distant. We stood up and left.

No doubt it was because of that experience—when I had so clearly perceived the gynecologist's distance from life, from reality—that I wasn't altogether surprised to hear of his and his brother's peculiar death. Indeed, a part of me wondered how anyone that disturbed and provocative had managed to function, cope,
survive
as long as he had. Nevertheless, I was immensely curious about how he had died, especially since there were a number of mysteries about what had occurred.

One mystery concerned the specific cause of death. A large number of empty barbiturate bottles were found in the apartment, and at first the medical examiner had assumed that the brothers had killed themselves by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. But autopsy tests revealed no trace of barbiturates in either body. The medical examiner's office next concluded that the twins had died from an attempted withdrawal from barbiturates. Such withdrawal can, in the case of chronic barbiturate addicts—and by this time it had been established that both twins had been taking mammoth doses of Nembutal for years—be as fatal as the addiction itself by producing life-threatening seizures and convulsions. After the M.E.'s report, however, some experts questioned the finding, since the bodies showed none of the typical signs that accompany death by convulsion, such as bruises, tongue bites, and brain hemorrhaging. New tests were performed, and this time it was discovered that in Stewart's body, at least, there
were
barbiturate traces, but not in Cyril's. How Cyril had died remained a puzzle.

Another mystery was that Cyril had outlived his brother by several days. Police investigators learned that he had even left the apartment once Stewart was dead, only to return and die alongside him. Why had he left? And why, for that matter, had he come back?

I began my investigation by talking, first, with police at the 19th Precinct, a few blocks from my home. Detectives from that precinct had been called to the apartment in which the twins had died—it was Cyril's apartment on York Avenue in the East Sixties—after a building repairman discovered the bodies. A lieutenant described to me the scene the detectives had encountered. “There wasn't an inch of floor that wasn't littered,” he said. “The place was a pigsty.” He went on to explain that one of the twins had been found lying face down across the head of a twin bed, the other, face up on the floor next to a matching twin bed in a different room. The features of the one on the bed—Stewart, dead longer than his brother—had already begun to decompose.

“Not a pretty sight,” the lieutenant said. I nodded. “You want to see the pictures?” I said yes. But I couldn't bring myself to look at the bodies. I concentrated instead on the rooms themselves, vast seas of garbage, of unfinished TV dinners and half-drunk bottles of soda, of greasy sandwich wrappers and crumpled plastic garment covers. “See the chair.” The lieutenant pointed at an armchair I'd hardly noticed, a-swim in the debris. “See what's in the middle of it?” I peered but couldn't tell. “That's because you've probably never seen an armchair full of feces before.” The lieutenant guffawed. Then, serious and indignant, he said, “They used the chair for their toilet! Would you believe it!”

What I remember best about that encounter is that when I got up to leave, I noticed tacked to the back of the door a large print of the picture with the armchair. “A couple of the guys had it blown up,” the lieutenant, seeing me stare at it, explained. The pile of excrement in the center of the chair had been circled with a wax pencil, and scrawled across the circle were the words “East Side doctors!”

I understood the indignation the police felt about the Marcus brothers. Many people were to share it, particularly when it was revealed that until some two weeks before their death, the addicted twins had still been on the staff of one of New York's most prestigious medical institutions, the New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center, and had still been treating patients there. But it turned out that throughout their lives, the twins had inspired indignation. In part it was because they had always seemed to believe that, by virtue of their twinship, they were not merely different from the rest of the world but superior to it. One patient of theirs, a woman named Arlene Gross who eventually gave birth to twin sons, told me that when she was pregnant she grew very heavy, and although tests did not indicate she was carrying twins, she thought she might be, particularly since there was a history of twins in her family. Stewart, who was her obstetrician, refused to consider that she might be carrying two fetuses. “You pregnant women are all alike,” he said to her. “Just because you overeat and get fat, you think you're going to have twins.” Arlene Gross continued, “And from that time on, he spoke to me with such contempt that it was as if I'd said I was going to have the Messiah, as if giving birth to twins was something too special for the likes of me.”

They had been born in 1930 in Binghamton, New York, Stewart a few minutes before Cyril, and from that moment forth they led lives as intertwined as the one they had shared in their mother's womb. They were not identical, but they looked remarkably alike, and when they were toddlers spoke to one another in the secret, private language that many affect. Always together, by the time they entered school, they thought of themselves not as separate entities but, somehow, one person, albeit a person with two heads, two trunks and torsos, eight limbs, and no physical connection like that of Siamese twins. For them, the connection, the bond, was never palpable, but it existed just the same. In the first grade, the teacher asked the class members who were only children to raise their hands. Stewart and Cyril Marcus both shot up a waving, eager arm.

They were serious children, not athletic. Stewart told me once that he and Cyril almost never played ball when they were kids. Their father, a physician, bought them a chemistry set when they were little and, from an early age, playing doctor was their sport.

By the time they entered high school—their family had moved by then to Bayonne, New Jersey—their magic circle was impenetrable. They had no close friends but one another. “They didn't seem to need anyone but each other,” a classmate told me. They participated in the selfsame extracurricular activities: the student congress, the school newspaper, the school police force. They wore their hair in the same style, a high, wavy pompadour. And they dressed alike—not in the same clothes, but in a style that was their own and different from that of their fellows. “It was the forties,” said another classmate. “We all wore open-necked shirts and sweaters—argyle vests or those V-necked cardigans. The twins wore white shirts, ties, and jackets. They were formal all the time, as if they couldn't bear to face the world without putting on some kind of mask.” Not surprisingly, when they ran for class office—Stewart for president, Cyril for treasurer—both lost.

But if they were unpopular and almost determinedly different from their fellows, they were also extraordinarily bright. Stewart won an inter-high school essay contest and, at graduation, was class valedictorian. Cyril was salutatorian. And the very fact of their being twins gave them a kind of minor celebrity at Bayonne High. They were featured in a story in the school newspaper, “Double Trouble at Bayonne High.” In the story, they stressed their alikeness and said that whenever they got into mischief, their mother punished both of them in order to be sure she disciplined the right one.

The anecdote was an entertaining one, told to delight the world of singletons. But perhaps there was a grain of something other than the desire to amuse, a bona fide kernel of resentment toward their mother. Certainly years later they turned their backs on her—and indeed on anyone and anything connected to their childhood. They avoided all mention of Bayonne, with its chemical plants and crowded port. They told some patients that they came from the more elite, countrified town of Short Hills. And they communicated with their parents only on the rarest of occasions.

A woman journalist who was engaged to Stewart in the days of the twins' medical residencies believed they were not so much angry at their parents as ashamed of them. She told me that during her engagement, Stewart's parents moved from Bayonne to a suburb of New York, taking an apartment in a tall glass and concrete tower that faced the city from across the Hudson. She wanted to see her future in-laws' new place, but Stewart resisted the request for weeks. Finally, he gave in, and they drove across the river, but he was fretful and uneasy the whole way. His parents' apartment, she saw, was small and cramped, and after the visit, she was convinced that he had been reluctant to take her to see it because the modesty of the quarters had embarrassed him. “The twins were snobs,” she said. “I even heard that they denied to some people they knew that their parents were Jewish.”

Sometimes there was humor connected with their twinship. Once, when they were interns, they participated in a hospital show, one twin exiting stage left just as his brother entered stage right, the two of them dressed alike, gesturing alike; trick photography in the flesh, it brought the house down. But increasingly the Marcus brothers struck their peers as not just distant but psychologically disturbed. “They were schizoid,” said a psychiatrist who had been a medical resident with them. “When they talked to you—and most of the time they didn't talk to anyone, just to one another—you got the distinct impression that their responses were artificial, that they didn't really have the emotions that other people did, but were aping others' emotions, trying to imitate them.”