From then on she treated him with absolute contempt, heaping scorn on him day and night, causing her uncle to scold her for being "so mean to that poor orphan boy."
In the hen house each day she subjected him to every sexual humiliation she could think of, as well as painful paddlings with a fence slat and long sessions of forced cunnilingus. And there were hardly five minutes in the day when she was not reminding him that he was a hen-fucker — a sex pervert — a murderer — and assuring him that it was only a matter of time before she would let the whole world know about it. One of these days, she promised him over and over again, "they" are going to come and drag you away.
In the presence of the uncle and aunt she would paralyze him with a remark like, "Whatever happened to that sort of spotty hen with the dragging wing? She just disappeared somehow. Do some of the hens just fly away or what happens to them?" and another time, "Don't you think you ought to fill in that old dry well down below the pasture, Uncle Robert? It seems dangerous to me. You should really go down and look at it. I think you'd be surprised at how scary it looks."
Deanna's diary reports in gloating detail the humiliations and degradations she forced upon the completely submissive Bryan and indicates clearly the contempt she felt for him — more for his spineless acceptance of her dominance over him than for his bestial "murders".
Several of the diary entries later became part of the trial record in the case. The following excerpt provides a vivid account of one particularly ugly incident and shows the extreme depths of depravity which their sick relationship had reached just before the final tragedy.
"I really socked it to the freak today. And he took it like always, the jerk. He's beginning to make me puke and that's no shit. He's got no more guts than the fucking chickens!"
"I remembered that a boy showed me once how you could stroke a horse's crack under the asshole just a certain way and it would loosen up his sphincters or some such thing and he'd piss. I asked the kid why anybody would want to make a horse piss and he didn't know. But yesterday I thought about it for some reason and it gave me a new idea for something to do to the freak."
"I took him into the barn where Colonel Dobie is — the old black nag I used to ride when I was little. Then I made him lie down naked in Dobie's stall, right in the horseshit and everything. I told him if he moved one muscle, no matter what happened, then there was going to be a guided tour to the old well for my aunt and uncle and I wasn't shitting him. I got him so scared shitless now that he'd jump off the windmill in a swan dive if I told him to."
"I made him lie with his face right underneath Dobie's ass-end so he'd get the whole shower of piss right in the mush when it happened. Then I started in on Dobie, giving her the strategic tickle. It didn't seem to work at first. I guess the old nag's urogenital reactions ain't what they used to be. But then she shivered her ass one time and all of a sudden the flood gates opened. I mean old Dobie must've been holding it in since Wednesday."
"I nearly got myself splashed before I could get out of the stall and then I just stood there laughing like a bastard. The freak nearly drowned. Groovy bit, hey? Drowning in horse piss!"
"But he survived. Drenched down to his knees and choking and spitting and blinking his eyes, but he survived."
'How's it taste?' I asked him. 'I didn't put too much salt in it, did I?'
"He couldn't have talked even if he'd had anything to say. I made him stay there and soak in the puddle for awhile before I told him he could get up. And even then he didn't, but just lay there with a dumb look on his dumb face — as if he liked it, reclining in a piss-puddle."
"Twice I told him to get his ass up, but he didn't even act like he heard me and finally I just took off and left him there. He's getting weirder and weirder, I'm telling you. It's unbelievable!"
The last entry of all in the diary shows the state of Deanna's mind at the very end — the night before the blowup.
"I'm going to have to cool it with the freak. He's right on the thin edge now. I think maybe I went too far. Maybe the pissing bit was too much, although he didn't make any fuss about it at the time. He's got a look in his eye now though that gives me the creeps. He never used to dare even look at me at all and now I notice him staring at me in the house, at dinner and all. It's getting to be a drag anyway, this whole fucking scene. This farm is beyond the ass-end of nowhere. Only two weeks more and back to civilization again. What a load off! Back to normal people again. Rainey and Coral won't believe it when I tell them about the freak. Once I get the hell out of this shit-pile I probably won't believe it myself either. Two more weeks! I wish it was tomorrow. I better tell the freak tomorrow that it's bye bye. He doesn't know yet that I'm leaving. Won't he be surprised! He'll be inconsolable. I wonder what he'll give me for a goodbye gift. (Pause here for prolonged laughter.)"
What happened the next day was never established indisputably as to the exact course of events. But piecing together portions of court testimony and other data brought out during psychiatric investigations, the following would seem to be an accurate summing-up of the events of the day after the above diary entry.
In the morning Deanna was unusually pleasant to Bryan at the breakfast table — this noted with surprise by both aunt and uncle.
At the end of the meal Deanna said that she wanted to be of more help to Bryan from then on, and starting today she was going to help him take care of the chickens. She thought the hen house would benefit from a "woman's touch".
They all laughed except Bryan, who hurried out of the house and was not seen again the rest of the morning.
When her uncle left for town as usual, Deanna told her aunt that she was going out to look for Bryan — that she had some things to tell him. She never came back.
It seems that she went to the hen house to confront Bryan but she never got a chance to tell him anything. The instant she came through the doorway he hit her diagonally across the forehead with the sharp edge of a spade and knocked her to the floor, and then he hit her a second blow, harder than the first, behind the ear. She was still alive but unconscious after the second blow.
From then on Bryan apparently vented all his enormous store of pent-up resentment upon her body for a considerable time — perhaps an hour or more. He kicked and stomped her savagely, breaking several ribs and many teeth in the process and virtually pulverizing her facial features. Then he ripped away her clothes and subjected her nude body to further beating and abuse. At some point after her death he committed rape upon the corpse. This ironically was the first and only time in his life that he had ever engaged in "normal" vaginal intercourse with Deanna or any other human female.
Afterwards he hacked the body apart and chopped it into a great many small pieces, which he stuffed into two burlap sacks and carried to the old well. There he dumped Deanna's dismembered remains down into the wellshaft among the bones of the thirty-seven chickens.
But not before performing one last act of outrage upon her bloody parts. He held two raw chunks of her flesh in his hands, pressed them around his penis and masturbated one more time.
Then at last his raging fury had run its course and all his energy had drained away with it. He dragged himself back up the hill toward the hen house, but halfway across the pasture he collapsed, and there his uncle discovered him later that afternoon, lying on his back in a glassy-eyed trance, his body drenched with blood.
A jury found him innocent of murder by reason of insanity, and Bryan probably will spend the rest of his life in the mental institution where he is now.
Bryan was not the first case in history of a tormented soul turning on his tormentor and committing a brutal, vengeful murder. And although he and Deanna might not have realized it, he was not the first person who had ever raped barnyard birds and added to the pleasure by killing the bird deliberately just before orgasm and taking extra delight in its death-thrashings.