The Best American Crime Writing Page 13

  Resisting several defense attempts to respond, Justice Berkman stabbed out: “Well, now that I’ve been accused of presiding over a travesty of justice and condemning Darius to a life sentence, I suppose there is no way of the Court coming out of this looking anything but monstrous …. This man is a danger …. But in the meantime we’ve made him a poster boy for the system’s lack of compassion for the mentally ill. Well, I have a lot of compassion for the mentally ill. You know, we don’t lock them up anymore. We let them have lives, and most of the mentally ill, I hear from the experts … lead law-abiding lives. Darius McCollum does not. That’s too bad. The law says he has to face the consequences of that, because … he has free will, and that’s the nature of humanity, and unless he wants to be treated like an animal … he has to exert his free will for the good … and to say that he is incapable of doing that is to take away his humanity. So all those people out there making faces at me”—Mrs. McCollum was shaking her head exaggeratedly—“thinking of me as the Wicked Witch of the West, are, in fact, the people who are stealing his humanity from him ….”

  Mrs. McCollum stood up; before she could be pulled down Berkman had sentenced Darius to five years in prison. When the gavel hit, all the released talk overwhelmed her rapid words.

  Jackson immediately appealed, on the ground that Justice Berkman’s failure to grant an adjournment at sentencing was arbitrary. It’s a weak argument: Jackson agreed to a plea and sentencing date and then waited until sentencing to ask for more time; Justice Berkman made no technical mistakes. The DA’s office has been disinclined to consider vacating Darius’s plea and changing his sentence if he is diagnosed with Asperger’s. This option, proposed by Alvin Schlesinger, who as a Supreme Court justice developed a relationship with New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, was theoretically available to the defense as soon as Darius was sentenced. Jackson, inexplicably, has yet to have Darius examined.

  Asperger’s syndrome, which mainly affects males, is generally considered to be a mild variant of autism, with a prevalence rate several times higher. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders requires five symptoms for a diagnosis: “impairment in social interaction,” including “failure to develop [appropriate] peer relationships” and a “lack of social or emotional reciprocity;” “restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities,” including an “encompassing preoccupation with [an area of] interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus;” “significant impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning;” and “no significant delay in cognitive [4] or language [5] development.”

  Among the “encompassing preoccupations” in the literature of Asperger’s: Abbott and Costello, astrophysics, deep-ocean biology, deep fat fryers, telephone wire insulators, carnivorous dinosaurs, cows, Wagner, nineteenth-century Russian novels, storm drains, steam trains, transit timetables, Zoroastrianism, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the genealogy of royalty. Entire lives are brought to bear on one tiny piece of the world. Because abstract thought tends to be very difficult for people with Asperger’s, they satisfy their obsessions by amassing precisely defined units of information: numbers, terms, codes, dates, titles, materials, names, formulas.

  Asperger’s precludes normal emotional intuition. Behavioral cues are elusive: Winks and shoulder shrugging and sarcasm are often meaningless. Conversations are one-sided; patients generally deliver long, fact-crowded monologues on their areas of expertise, blind to gestures of boredom or puzzlement. General questions, which can require both speculating abstractly and intuiting a questioner’s intent, are often impossible for people with Asperger’s to answer. Patients may respond with a far-reaching elaboration of a single related fact or experience.

  Conventions of interpersonal behavior, if they are not explicit, remain beyond comprehension, as when a small boy, generally affectionate toward his mother, asks her why, given that he can dress and feed himself, she is still necessary, or when a boy endlessly photographs people while telling them that humans are his favorite animal, or when Darius writes to his parents from prison: “Hello There, People of America lets get down and party on as we say hello and what’s going on, cause I know there’s something going on …” and:

  I am enclosing a reese’s peanut butter cup coupon to let you read and see if you can win some money. Just read the directions …. I kind of wish that I was a Jeanie so I wouldn’t have to be here. “Ha-ha.” I’ve got a stiff neck and itching all over and cold feet and runny nose and watery eyes itchy ears o Mom I’m just in poor shape. There’s a rat under my bed and a little green man on my head but there’s a true blue inside of you that keeps stopping me to say that I Love You. In here: It’s like Death of a Salesman with a happy ending I hope. Well you guys I guess I will go to bed to get warm so have fun and keep out of trouble. Give my regards to Broadway …

  Explicit rules that make sense socially but aren’t strictly rational seem unconvincing and often go unheeded, as when a boy in junior high asks a female classmate if he can touch her crotch as casually as if he were asking to borrow an eraser. That explicit and logical rules exist along a continuum of seriousness is unappreciated, as when a young man follows a barefoot woman around a supermarket, assiduously trying to conceal her naked feet from employees, and then stands behind her in the express lane, diligently removing one of her purchases each time she turns her head until she is no longer over the ten-item limit.

  Speech is oddly formal and often unmarked by accent, as if verbal local color had been filtered out. Specialized phrases are applied in a way that is logical but, from the perspective of conventional usage, awkward or bizarre, as when an English boy describes a hole in his sock as “a temporary loss of knitting.”

  For people with Asperger’s, self-identity has little to do with internal life; information constitutes identity. One boy who was asked to draw a self-portrait sketched an ocean liner, cracked and sinking beside an iceberg; the Titanic was his obsession. Another self-portrait accurately represented a tsunami-shadowed tract of California coast; its author was fascinated by plate tectonics. An autobiographical statement:

  I am an intelligent, unsociable, but adaptable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my longhaired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig).

  People with Asperger’s recognize their difference. One patient said he wished he had a micro-brain on his head to process all the intuitive meaning that surrounded and evaded him. Another patient, studying astronomy, told his therapist that he knew how scientists discovered the stars, and what instruments they used to discover the stars, but not how they discovered the names of the stars. He said he felt like a poor computer simulation of a human being, and he invented algebraic formulas to predict human emotion: frustration (z), talent (x), and lack of opportunity (y) give the equation x + y = z.

  Darius, explaining that he has never needed to socialize and really only associates with people in transit systems, said to me, “Some people think that I’m different. Okay, fine, I am different, but everybody’s different in their own kind of way. Some people just don’t know how to directly really react to that.” Before Darius’s sentencing hearing, Stephen Jackson sent him a pamphlet on Asperger’s. It was the first Darius had heard of the disorder. When I asked him about the pamphlet, he said, “I’ll put it like this. Out of the twelve things that’s on it I think I can identify myself with at least eight or nine. And all you need is five to have, you know, that type of thing.”

  Asperger’s patients choose obsessions the way other people choose interests: Personality accounts for the choice. Sometimes, usually when they’re young, patients acquire and discard fixations in swift succession, but eventually a single subject consumes them. They are born to fall down some rabbit hole, from which they
never fully emerge.

  The Clinton Correctional Facility, where I interviewed Darius, is a leviathan relic from 1845, just south of the Canadian border, with granite walls thirty feet high. In the intake center a guard examined the cassette and batteries in my tape recorder. I was escorted across

  a lawn to the main prison building. The walls leaned in—thirty feet is claustrophobically high. There were long-barreled guns and searchlights in guard towers. I felt as if I might provoke a terrible reaction by accident. We went through the prison lobby, a leaden door, a corridor, another leaden door, and arrived at the interview room, where the guard left me. Except for a table and chairs, the room was as plain as a cell. I sat waiting in a restless institutional quiet. Two guards brought Darius in. In his jumpsuit he looked lumpy and quiescent. We shook hands—Darius’s handshake was bonelessly indifferent—and sat down. The guards left, one whispering to the other, “He’s pretty docile.”

  I made a vague little speech: I was writing an article, etc. Darius nodded politely as I talked but gave no indication that he was interested in my aims or motivations or life. When I finished he asked where I was staying and how much it cost and what train I’d come on and how long it had taken. From the time of the trip he guessed that my train hadn’t had an M-10 engine; he wished me luck getting one on the way back. I started asking about his career in transit, and he showed the transporting animation that Detective Mullen had observed. He sketched control panels in the air, he drove trains in mime, he asked for paper and drew the track intersections of subway stations. He often looked away to concentrate on the images he conjured.

  Clinton is a maximum-security facility. Darius was there because the Department of Corrections, aware of his impersonation convictions, considered him an escape risk. To keep him safe the DOC had to segregate him from the general population, which meant confining him to his cell for, Darius said, twenty-one hours a day. That morning he had made the guards laugh by wedging a sign in his cell bars that said, “Train Out of Service.” He watched TV and read general interest magazines; he studied arrangements of facts in several specialty publications he subscribed to: Truckers News, World of Trains, Truck ‘N Trailer; he made lists of various things, like 185 love songs he happened to think of one day; and he wrote a lot of letters requesting information. Unsatisfied by something he saw on TV, he wrote to the Department of Defense, which replied:

  Unfortunately, the term “discretionary warfare” is not currently used by the Department of Defense (DoD), so I am uncertain what you mean by it. In addition, there are no 12-man Special Operations units made up of personnel who are at the rank of Colonel or above. There are, however, Special Operations units made up of 12 men: the US Army Special Forces A Teams. The Specials Forces A team is made up of two officers, two operations/intelligence sergeants, two weapons sergeants, two communications sergeants, two medics and two engineers—all trained in unconventional warfare and cross-trained in each other’s specialties.

  Darius underlined the word “two” every time it appeared.

  On May 31 of this year, Darius will have spent 799 days in prison. At his first parole hearing, 912 days into his sentence, the DA’s office will present his history of violations. His full sentence comes to 1,825 days. In the interview room of the Clinton Correctional Facility, I asked Darius if he thought he would continue to impersonate transit employees and otherwise break the law. He looked at the ceiling and took a long breath. He seemed to have prepared his answer. “Okay,” he said, “trains are always going to be my greatest love. It’s something that I depend upon because I’ve been knowing how to do it for twenty-five years. So this is like my home, my best friend, my everything. Everything that I need and want is there. But I don’t want to get caught up with that again, and I’m probably going to need a little help. That much I can admit. If I can find—I know there’s no such program as Trains Anonymous, but if I can get some kind of counseling it would be really beneficial towards me.”

  Darius doesn’t like prison and complains about its deprivations, but he never expresses despair or outrage at the severity of his punishment. He sees his experience in terms of its daily components, without considering the entirety of his sentence—the abstract unbroken length of time between the present and his release. “I’ll get out of here sooner or later,” he says. And it doesn’t occur to him to imagine an alternative life for himself: He never wonders what he might have been.

  Darius calls me from prison all the time: He doesn’t appreciate the distinction between friendships and sympathetic writer-subject relationships. I take maybe a third of his calls. Unless we talk about trains, the conversations are short—he gives brief factual reports and makes requests. When he asks how I’m doing and I actually talk about my frustrations or joys, his attention instantly migrates. At the first pause hell ask, “So do you think the Eagles are going to win their division?” or “Did you get my subscription to Billboard yet?” (I got him a subscription to Rolling Stone, but it didn’t have enough music business statistics to satisfy him.) Once I told him I thought high-speed trains in Europe were cool and mentioned Acela, Amtrak’s version. “Yeah, I drove the prototype,” he said. “Now see, with Acela …” When he reemerged, I said that looking out the windows of high-speed trains made me dizzy. “You have to look out at an angle,” he said, “at an angle.”

  Last summer, shortly before his parole hearing, Darius was finally examined by a psychiatrist and diagnosed with Asperger’s. The psychiatrist told the parole board that treatment, which is unavailable in state prison, was vital to Darius’s rehabilitation. Asperger’s experts and activists wrote letters to the parole board. I sent my article, the sentencing transcript, the DSM criteria for Asperger’s, and a ten-page letter, in which I said that Darius’s criminal history was entirely attributable to his disease, there was no evidence he had ever endangered anyone, and Justice Berkman’s sentencing decision was demonstrably arbitrary. The board members did not discuss anything submitted on Darius’s behalf before denying his parole request. He was a danger to society, they wrote, and lacked insight into his own behavior. Darius will be released this summer. He is scheduled to enter a life-skills program for people with Asperger’s.

  THE BODY FARM

  MAXIMILLIAN POTTER

  On a two-acre patch of Tennessee woods that is surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, Murray Marks kneels next to a rotting dead man. The corpse is faceup on a body bag. Much of the skin is gone; what little remains on the skeleton resembles beef jerky. Marks shakes his head in frustration. “This body,” he says in his southern whisper of a voice, “should have been taken out of the bag, and the bag laid on top of him. Otherwise the body doesn’t decompose properly; it is just going to stew in its own juices.”

  Marks, a 47-year-old associate professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, grabs the bag near the body’s torso and pulls the plastic down flat against the ground. A liquid the color and texture of tobacco spit streams out from under the body onto the leaf-covered earth. It is the organic soup of putrefied organs.

  “When I find out which of my students put this body here like this,” Marks says, “their heads are on the chopping block.” He stands up and scans the area within the gates for other bodies that may need his attention. Dozens are scattered about in various states of decay.

  A nearby skeleton looks as if it had been scooped up by the hand of God, the bones shaken like dice and rolled across the dirt. A couple of badly decomposed corpses are duct-taped to trees; they are slouched over with what’s left of their hands taped behind their backs. Many of the dead still wear the clothes they had on when they died or—like the body from Chattanooga, the one whose skull was shattered by a gunshot blast—when they were murdered.

  Two corpses are what Marks describes as “fresh dead.” Carefully stepping over body parts and ducking tree limbs, he makes his way to one of them: a naked woman belly-up at the base of a tree. A tuft of gray hair protrudes from
her scalp, a scalp that has begun to slide off her skull. Marks figures she was in her early sixties when she died.

  “Smell that?” he asks me. I take a deep breath; the pungent odor is something like a mixture of fresh mulch and wet garbage, only worse. In the still heat of the Tennessee summer, the foul stench blankets this wooded bluff behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

  For a few long, quiet moments, we gaze at the woman. A bird chirps. A plane roars overhead. Tree branches rattle in the wind. A dozen or so flies are inching across the woman; one takes off and lands on Marks’s crisp white shirt. Watching the bug, he says the scent of blood draws them. Soon, he adds, flies will swarm the body; they will crawl into every orifice; they will lay eggs, and these larvae will hatch into maggots; the maggots will eat almost everything down to the bone.

  Sensing my queasiness, Marks touches my arm and says, “What you need to keep in mind is that this person made the ultimate sacrifice: She or her family decided that this is more important than a traditional burial.” By this Marks means donating her remains to the University of Tennessee Anthropology Research Facility, the only outdoor “laboratory” in the world where researchers study human decomposition. Here at the Body Farm, as the facility is known, scientists harvest information about death to help law enforcement catch killers.