Surely this possibility must have been examined, discussed, a thousand times discarded, only to be examined again by the lawyers, during the days when Storrs and Allwin were intensively at work in the Wilk dining room, writing their report.
But was separation really advantageous? As both Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher pointed out, Horn was no fool. He could ridicule and riddle any plea that Judd was a mere accessory. The public reaction to such a move would be only of heightened anger – a legal “trick”. Nor could it be certain that the revelation of added horrors would cause Artie to be judged insane; rather, a jury might become even more determined to destroy so dreadful a fiend.
Fortunately, Dr. McNarry arrived during those days. His solid presence, Willie Weiss told me in a tone close to adulation, helped to clarify everyone’s thinking. Everything about him seemed full-packed – his clothing seemed packed with his large bulk, and his huge head, with veins standing out on the bald dome, seemed packed with knowledge.
He had studied Charcot’s work at the Salpêtriére in Paris, he had been to Nancy, he had known Jung in Switzerland and Bleuler in Vienna and lastly, the great Freud himself; his pioneering book on psychoanalysis was therefore not the work of a quick enthusiast who had picked up the latest jargon, but of a lifelong practitioner who had travelled the same paths, the head of one of the world’s great mental hospitals.
McNarry had his first few interviews with the boys, so as to obtain his own, unaffected impressions; then the three doctors conferred. McNarry’s material was much the same, the king-slave fantasies from Judd, the master-criminal fantasies from Artie, the childhood patterns. Eli Storrs laid out the results of his tests, eagerly watching for McNarry’s reactions to the new type of study, the apperception chart.
At once the doctors got into an intense discussion involving McNarry’s central concept of the psyche. He did not believe in separating emotion and intellect, as in two compartments. All belonged to a single biological entity that reacted as a unit.
“Well, but that unit has different aspects. Our tests obviously show us that different people react differently…”
“Yes,” McNarry at last agreed, there was a feeling-aspect, which might be called emotional in tone, and there was an intellectual aspect -
Gerald Straus, with an apologetic laugh, pressed them. Would all this help to show a jury that the boys were insane?
Equally smilingly, Dr. McNarry read him a short lecture on insanity, as though for an average juryman. “People think that at one moment a man is sane, and at the next he goes insane. To a doctor, insanity means nothing but mental derangement, sickness, and just as there are all degrees of physical sickness, from a common cold to paralysis, there are all degrees of mental sickness, from a mild neurosis to a psychoneurosis to a psychosis.”
Uncle Gerald nodded. “How sick can you say they are?”
“We have concluded” – the elderly Dr. Allwin took over – “that each of the patients is suffering from a functional disorder. Artie’s could develop into dementia praecox, a splitting of the personality, and Judd’s is in the direction of paranoia.”
“How far gone are they?”
“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Dr. McNarry said, somewhat brusquely, and Uncle Gerald subsided. McNarry had just come from talking to Judd about his philosophy. The philosophy itself he dismissed as a mere camouflage, just a smattering of things Judd had read. (As Willie Weiss reported it to me, “a mishmash”.)
But all these philosophies of Judd’s, Eli Storrs observed, tended in one direction – paranoia. “Look how the mind seizes what it needs!” Like his tests, they proved that Judd was emotionally a child.
“That’s interesting,” McNarry said. “You could interpret Nietzschean omnipotence the same way. It belongs to the magic phase.” This was the phase in which the infant, by crying, discovered that everyone around him would do what he wanted. And had this phase ever ended, for Judd?
Suddenly beginning to understand, Uncle Gerald remarked, “Why, Max told me that kid didn’t even lace his own shoes until he was fourteen years old. He’d have the nursemaid do it.”
He had felt there was “something wrong” with the boys, but now, suddenly through his own story about lacing the shoes, he saw the doctors’ meaning. Something in him was saying, Why, it’s really true! What we’ve been claiming is really true. All the better.
The psychiatrists had moved on to a discussion of Artie and his game of “detective”. Artie had offered Allwin the explanation that he still played it only because he had to have a game he could play with his little brother Billy. But to Dr. McNarry, Artie had no longer rationalized the childish game. He had told of playing it with Judd, and even when he was alone, walking through the streets, imagining he had accomplices with him, giving them hand signals. Dr. McNarry added, “I believe he even built it up for me; he’s cunning.”
“No, he really does it!” Uncle Gerald broke in. “Why, a year ago last fall he shadowed me all the way home one night. He came up behind me when I got to my house – he had a black handkerchief tied around his face like a real hold-up man – and he said, ’stick ‘em up!’ Of course I knew it was Artie and I just told him to run along home.”
“That’s very interesting,” the alienists were saying to him; but to Uncle Gerald the whole case was now coming into focus. Just now, the alienists had made him see that it was a wild child inside of Artie, an ungrown child that could not yet fully understand the difference between right and wrong, that had dictated Artie’s behaviour. But could the alienists make an ordinary jury understand this complicated mechanism?
The Feldschers, with Max and James, had come in, and now the discussion expanded, yet always kept returning to the main point: How could you make a jury see that the boys were “functionally disturbed”?
“We’ll have to make it stronger,” Uncle Gerald insisted.
“Well, you can’t claim that he has completely lost contact with reality,” Dr. McNarry pointed out. “Don’t forget there will be psychiatrists on the other side.”
The very thought of this started McNarry off on his pet tirade. For McNarry couldn’t understand how any psychiatrist could bring himself to testify for the prosecution: The entire aim of psychiatry was to unravel the causes of behaviour. And if all behaviour had a cause, where was guilt? How, then, could any doctor become a prosecutor?
“At least you and Jonathan Wilk believe the same thing,” Ferdinand Feldscher said. “But what jury does?”
McNarry shook his head. He had only the gloomiest view of making a jury see it, in this case. For every jury had to act as a sample of the society from which it was drawn. This was inevitable, it was the very heart of the jury system. “What you will get is the herd critique through the medium of the jury.”
He reminded them of several cases in his own experience, cases in which insanity was self-evident. There was the Father Schmidt case – a priest who had cut a woman into seven parts, on the altar. Yet the jury had declared him sane, in order that he might be hanged. “Juries invariably regard the insanity plea as a dodge. They discredit the experts.”
What, then, was to be done?
What about Wilk? Uncle Gerald reminded them that, after all, Wilk was the greatest jury lawyer in the world. Surely he could make a jury see it. Even one juror would be enough.
Wilk had gone to bed with a cold; the entire group moved into his bedroom.
It was then that Edgar Feldscher revived the thought of going to a judge with a plea of guilty.
His brother said, “I’ve never ruled it out, in my mind. But all you’ve got is a plea for mercy on the grounds of their youth.”