My own parents taught me about sex when I was only six years old. Since I had seen my brother’s and other neighbor boys’ penises, my only source of confusion was the male erection. “If it’s so wiggly, how does the man get it inside?” I asked. When I was fifteen years old, I would learn the difference between hard and soft, coming of age with my eighteen-year-old boyfriend, one of a few partners before Ryan and I officially became a couple. By legal standards, my first lover was an adult. Did I become an adult too, when we closed the gap between our bodies on the floor in my TV room? In a world where sexual intimacy is considered a secret passageway to adulthood, what kinds of lines, if any, might be drawn, even if they remain invisible, blurry, or shape-shifting?
Parents, mothers in particular, experience a kind of hallowed proximity to our children as they metamorphose. Newborn diapers become training pants, and later, for our daughters, underwear becomes the drop cloth for menstruation. I launder my children’s undergarments, carefully, in hot water with lavender-scented Downy. These V-shaped cotton intimates will cover, and protect, one hopes, their most delicate parts, all of which, I can’t help but remember, are the anatomy one day required for reproduction. It’s no wonder jokes abound about the “family jewels.”
Purposefulness was what I loved so much about making babies—intercourse removed from all the mixed messages we are bound to encounter in a lifetime about self-gratification and pleasure. Trying actively to conceive a baby was arguably the opposite of being victimized. My goal was to reproduce, and sex was a means to that end.
After Wes touched Sabrina, his third victim, in the middle of the night, she was admitted to the hospital for symptoms of PTSD, namely paralysis. Sometimes, it seems, each baby I birthed, or perhaps each umbilical cord, was my own version of an awareness ribbon, purple and fleshy, looped inside me like perennial hopefulness. Now that Ryan had probed his way into the darkest realms of criminal defense, I worried about sex in new ways. Neuroscience reveals that we nourish our bodies and procreate because reward centers in our brains urge us to repeat what’s pleasurable. But what happens to our circuitry when our brains get misappropriated by sickening stories of sexual deviance?
When Harold Franz murdered my best friend’s mother, Laura Chapman, I was taught by my father to forgive transgressors their mental illness. The Oshkosh Northwestern revealed that after extensive evaluation, “a psychiatric report, prepared by Dr. Ralph Baker, Oshkosh, determined that Franz is not competent to aid in his own defense.” Most of my dad’s mental status examination focused on Franz’s low self-esteem: difficulty graduating from high school, an inability to perform basic arithmetic, and suicidal thoughts. The diagnostic impression was atypical psychosis, mixed organic brain syndrome, and features of a dissociative disorder as well as a major depressive disorder, all connected to his underlying multiple sclerosis.
Franz made courtroom appearances for first-degree murder, propped in a wheelchair. He murdered Chapman in February, and by June the Oshkosh Northwestern reported, OSHKOSH MAN FOUND GUILTY AND INNOCENT. The district attorney specifically stated Harold Franz posed no danger to society at large, and he was sentenced to Winnebago Mental Health Institute instead of prison. By my own father’s recommendation, the man who murdered Mandy’s mother was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, or NGI.
In spite of Franz’s diminished muscle tone and cloudy vision predicting a low likelihood of perfect aim, a lone bullet burst the bubble of Chapman’s heart, and she died almost instantly. But according to my dad, we could not justifiably hold Harold Franz, plagued by paranoia, dissociation, and mental anguish, accountable for the pain he’d caused. Did this NGI verdict make us more or less afraid of the world, more or less merciful?
Nearly three decades later, with my husband instead of my father holding the reins, Aloysius Jungwirth was not to be evaluated as leniently, even though Ryan worked just as diligently for Wes as possible. When Dr. Hammond called Ulrich Law Office, Ryan was relieved to finally hear something, as cases were always tied up and postponed. Resolving any set of charges provided a reprieve, some small deliverance from the anxiety of his career. But when his cases took surprising turns, he’d be injected with adrenaline and regret.
“What do you have for me?”
“Well, I’m not sure you’re going to want me to write a report.”
Dr. Hammond’s formal evaluation and letter of explanation were more damning than his innuendo. Just as Ryan and I had observed ourselves, Aloysius demonstrated little guilt, shame, or embarrassment, and therefore no psychological evidence could help his cause.
As opposed to psychopaths, whose mental illness is inborn, sociopaths are shaped by their environment, especially during their formative years, and sociopaths, unlike psychopaths, can form connections with others. But, in this case, impaired social function is precisely what thwarted Ryan’s case. Was Aloysius Jungwirth a sociopath, perhaps the first or only one Ryan had defended, or was he one of many? Even a client like Alyssa Brandt, criticized publicly by the judge for her lack of remorse, had demonstrated some degree of sadness, if not for her dogs, Princess and Rocco, then certainly for her own miscarried baby.
After Wes’s diagnosis, I would think often of his tumultuous childhood, but even more about his intense—almost fatalistic—bond with Annie. She sheltered but neglected him. She kept him safe from exposure to violent movies and music but exposed him
