“Yeah, I know it.
”I killed my mother because I was born with very short earlobes and webbed feet and wasn’t allowed to eat Cheerios for dinner; I skinned the cat because Uncle Harry never let me kiss Aunt Mary’s ass after church? on Sundays; I put the baby in the microwave because Jupiter didn’t align with Mars and no one ever lets me do what I want to do anyway.“ Yep, for every violent crime 35 there’s a shrink with an excuse. I didn’t know it all came out of one big book.” Mike’s disdain for the psychiatric community was beginning to rear its head.
“What are we looking for here, Doc?”
“I’ll have to do some more reading tomorrow. There’s one category called obsessional love. Those are the cases where there was some kind of relationship between the subject and the victim a love affair, a one-night stand, a ”fatal attraction,“ if you will. The harasser begins a campaign to regain that relationship, or to seek revenge.
“The more unusual category is quite different. It’s called erotomania and-‘ ”Erotomania? That sounds like something I’d like to catch.“ Mike was clowning again, trying to get me to cheer up.
“In cases of erotomania,” David continued, ‘there was never an affair or a romance between the parties exactly like Jed told you, Alex. The stalker suffers from a delusion, the delusion that the man she fixates on actually loves her, even if she’s had only the briefest contact with him. It’s extremely bizarre.“
Maureen questioned him, ”Are you serious, that this is a real disorder? The woman believes the man’s in love with her or vice versa, even though there has never been any kind of social or sexual interaction?“ ”Exactly. It’s a delusion that they are loved by another person. And other than that delusion, the patient’s behavior is completely normal. In fact, these people are usually extremely intelligent. No other signs of mental illness or dysfunction.“
“Would you call Segal for us tomorrow, Doc? I bet he’d jump at the chance to crawl on your couch and talk to somebody about this, really.”
“Certainly, Mike, I’ll call him. I don’t think we can ignore that history of his in view of these references that Cordelia Jeffers makes, whoever she is. I’ll leave a message for Jed at his office. Alex, you can jot down his number for me.
And I’ll pull some of the literature so we can find out more about the disorder. I have to take the shuttle to Washington first thing tomorrow meeting with the Drug Czar about funding treatment programs. But I can see Segal in my office at the end of the day, and if that works with his schedule, we should know a lot more about whatever Isabella may have discussed with him by the same time tomorrow.” “Great. I’ll call the LAPD. They’ve actually got a special bureau called the Threat Management Unit only one I know of in the country. Maybe they can pull up Segal’s file and see if there’s anything we should know about in it.” I wrote down the CommPlex number and handed it to David as he left. Chapman answered the intercom and told the doorman to send the kid with the pizza upstairs. I sat and chatted with Maureen and Mike as they devoured their dinner, then sent them on their way home just before midnight. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and started to get into bed, and remembered that I had a dog-eared copy of the DSM on the shelf with my reference books in the second bedroom, which I used as a home office. It was my habit to bring the old editions of penal codes and trial manuals here whenever the new ones arrived in my office, so I had a version to work with instead of carrying the oversized books back and forth each night.
The Diagnostic Statistical Manual was hardly bedtime reading, but I had put myself to sleep so many times with autopsy photographs and Emergency Room medical records that this would be relatively light fare. I carried the volume I needed back to my bed and climbed in, looking in the Index for Delusional Disorders.
The DSM noted a clear distinction in the two categories of behavior that David Mitchell had discussed. The more common was the one he referred to as ‘obsessional love.“
It was fascinating to read, because it seemed to have been written about Isabella Lascar and her kind of problem. The manual described the prototypical obsessional love victim as a ‘sexy actress or bombshell’ that was our girl. In these cases, the women who became victims had prior knowledge of their harassers, usually intimate, and most of the stalking activity began following a ‘love gone sour’ relationship.
The majority of the subjects the stalkers were male, who harassed with letter and telephone contact. Garelli and Burreil certainly fit the bill as soured lovers, and if she had told Jed he was just a one-week stand, he’d be in exactly the same category. I couldn’t wait to show this stuff to Mike tomorrow afternoon.
It was impossible to plow through it all, with clinical examples and scads of footnotes, but it was Thursday morning already exactly a week since I received the news of Isabella’s death and I had all weekend to research this material to see if it had any relevance to our work.
I skimmed down the pages to get to the related section on erotomania. If Jed had been truthful about his stalking experience, it appeared as though he and Isabella had been plagued by opposite aspects of a similar delusion.
In cases of erotomania unlike obsessional love most of the victims were men, and most of the harassers were women. Like the situation Jed had described to me, the person stalked has had no relationship with the stalker, who is fervently convinced that the victim would return the affection if not for some outside influence. Of course, I thought to myself, Jed’s wife would have been the obstacle.
The harasser kept calling his wife to tell her that Jed was unfaithful. Once she could get the wife out of the way, she was deluded enough to think the path to Jed’s affection would be cleared.
No wonder Isabella and Jed had so much to talk about.
It was really weird.
I wondered why I had never heard the term erotomania before, so I read on.
“Erotomania is the delusional belief that one is passionately loved by another.” But as recently as the third edition of the DSM, just a few years ago, there was no specific mention of the condition. It was only with the later publication of DSM-III-R the one I was reading that it was included as a specific category, as physicians began to document more and more cases of patients exhibiting this unusual conduct.
I was getting sleepy, so I decided to stop after the next few paragraphs, which described the history of the original diagnosis of the condition. It was originally documented in 1921 by a French psychiatrist named G.G. de Clerambault and, therefore, named for him: de Clerambault’s Syndrome, and referred to in the literature of the time as psycho se passionelle. As I lay in my bed each of these last few nights, suffering from a serious bout of post-breakup depression, ley I longed for a malady with a fancy French name like this, on and hoped some obscure footnote would drop a hint that would dignify my pathetic condition with a Gallic accent. as The early case descriptions were all quite interesting, jer as they typified the illness. The patients were usually women from modest backgrounds, while the male victims st were generally from a higher social and financial status ier executives, physicians, media figures. These otherwise sane women insisted they could provide evidence for their beliefs, in the form of signs from their love objects like ‘meaningful glances, messages passed through newspapers, or telepathic communications.“
I had to admit my amusement at de Clerambault’s first case analysis, comparing in my mind that victim King George V of England and the one I knew, Jed Segal.
The French psychiatrist wrote that one of his most dramatic cases involved a fifty-year-old compatriot who became completely convinced that King George was in love with her although, of course, they had never met. She believed that British tourists and sailors were emissaries of His Majesty, sent abroad to declare his love for her. The deluded woman made several trips to London, and on one of them, in 1918, she stood for hours outside Buckingham I Palace, waiting for a glimpse of her beloved. When at last she saw a curtain moving in a window, she interpreted this as a signal from the King. As she told all those who tried to bring her to her senses, “The King might hate me, but he can never forget me.”
It was a merrier note on which to close the book for the night and go to sleep.
I reached for the light switch and took note of the still unblinking red light on my answering machine. It seemed to me that David Mitchell said he had left a message shortly before I got home from Rao’s this evening, but then I remembered that Maureen had been in here using the phone to call her husband, and probably hit the rewind button by mistake. Tomorrow I would call my parents just to say hello, but for now I would give myself to dreams of some kind of psycho se passionelle. Everything even mental illness sounded better in French.
