It was a colorful history. A physician and researcher for the CIA in the early sixties, Gomble later was a practicing psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who specialized in hypnotherapy. He parlayed his skill and expertise in the hypnotic arts, as he called them, into a nightclub act as Horace the Hypnotist. First it was just appearances on open-mike nights at the clubs in Los Angeles but the act became immensely popular and he started taking it to Las Vegas for weeklong gigs on the strip. Soon Gomble wasn’t a practicing shrink anymore. He was a full-time entertainer appearing on the stages of the nicest palaces on the Las Vegas strip. By the mid-seventies his name was on the billing with Sinatra’s at Caesar’s, albeit in smaller letters. He made four appearances on Carson’s show, the last time putting his host in a hypnotic trance and eliciting from him his true thoughts on his other guests that evening. Because of Carson’s caustic comments, the studio audience thought it was a gag. But it wasn’t. After Carson saw the tape, he canceled the airing of the show and put Horace the Hypnotist on his blacklist. The cancellation made news in the entertainment trade papers and was a knife in the heart of Gomble’s career. He never made another network television appearance until his arrest.
His shot at TV gone, Gomble’s shtick got old, even in Vegas, and his stages moved further and further away from the strip. Soon he was on the road, working comedy clubs and cabarets, then finally it was the strip club and county fair circuit. His fall from fame was complete. His arrest in Orlando at the Orange County Fair was the exclamation mark at the end of that fall.
According to the trial stories, Gomble was charged with assaulting young girls whom he had chosen as volunteer assistants for matinee performances at the county fair. Prosecutors said he followed a routine of seeking a girl ten to twelve years old from the audience and then taking her backstage to prepare. Once in his private dressing room, he gave the intended victim a Coke laced with codeine and sodium pentothal—a quantity of both was seized during his arrest—and told her he must see if she could be hypnotized before the performance started. With the drugs acting as hypnotic enhancers, the girl was placed in a trance and then assaulted by Gomble. Prosecutors said the molestation primarily involved fellatio and masturbation, actions difficult to prove through physical evidence. Afterward, Gomble repressed memory of the event in the victim’s mind with hypnotic suggestion.
It was unknown how many girls were victimized by Gomble. He was not discovered until a psychologist treating a thirteen-year-old girl with behavioral problems brought out her assault by Gomble during a hypnotherapy session. A police investigation was launched and Gomble was eventually charged with attacks on four girls.
At trial the defense’s contention was that the events as described by the victims and police simply did not happen. Gomble presented no fewer than six highly qualified experts in hypnotism who testified that the human mind, while in a hypnotic trance, could not be persuaded or forced under any circumstances to do or even say anything that would endanger the person or be morally repugnant to them. And Gomble’s attorney never missed a chance to remind the jury that there was no physical evidence of molestation.
But the prosecution won the case with essentially one witness. He was Gomble’s former CIA supervisor, who testified that Gomble’s research in the early sixties included experimentation with hypnosis and the use of drug combinations to create a “hypnotic override” of the brain’s moral and safety inhibitions. It was mind control, and the former CIA supervisor said codeine and sodium pentothal were both among the drugs Gomble had used with positive results in his studies.
A jury took two days to convict Gomble of four counts of sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to eighty-five years in prison to be served at the Union Correctional Institute in Raiford. One of the stories in the file said he had appealed the conviction on the basis of incompetent counsel but his plea was rejected all the way up to the Florida supreme court.
As I reached the bottom of the computer file I noticed the last story was only a few days old. I found this curious because Gomble had been convicted seven years earlier. This story also had come from the L.A. Times instead of the Orlando Sentinel, which all the previous ones had come from.
Curious, I started reading it and at first believed Laurie Prine had simply made a mistake. It happens often enough. I thought she had shipped me a story unrelated to my request and that somebody else at the Rocky had probably asked for.
It was a report on a suspect in the murder of a Hollywood motel maid. I was about to stop reading but then I came across Horace Gomble’s name. The story said the suspect in the maid’s killing had served time at Raiford with Gomble and even helped him with some undescribed jailhouse legal work. I reread the lines as an idea spun in my mind and then finally couldn’t be contained.
Once more I called Rachel’s pager after disconnecting the laptop. This time my fingers were shaking as I punched out the number and I could hardly keep still afterward. I paced the room again, staring at the phone. Finally, as if the power of my stare had caused it, the phone rang and I grabbed it up before it had even stopped its first sounding.
“Rachel, I think I’ve got something.”
“Just hope it isn’t syphilis, Jack.”
It was Greg Glenn.
“I thought it was somebody else. Listen, I’m waiting on a call. It’s very important and when it comes I should take it.”
“Forget it, Jack. We’re pushing the envelope. You ready?”
I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past the first deadline.
“Okay, I’m ready. The faster the better.”
“Okay, first off, good work, Jack. This. . . well, it doesn’t make up entirely for not being first, but it’s a much better read and much better information.”
“Okay, so what needs to be fixed?” I asked quickly.
I didn’t care about his compliment/criticism parlay. I just wanted to be done by the time Rachel answered my page. Because there was only one phone line into the room I couldn’t use my laptop to connect with the Rocky and view the actual edited version of the story. Instead I called up the original version on the laptop and Glenn read off the changes he had made.
“I want to make the lead a little tighter and stronger, go right out with the fax a little harder. I fiddled around with it and this is what I’ve got. ‘A cryptic note from a serial killer who apparently preys on randomly selected children, women and homicide detectives was being analyzed by FBI agents Monday as the latest twist in the investigation of the slayer they have dubbed the “Poet.” ’ What do you think?”
“Fine.”
He had changed the word “studied” to “analyzed.” It wasn’t worth protesting. We spent the next ten minutes fine-tuning the main story, going back and forth on nit-picks. He didn’t make too many significant changes and with deadline breathing on his neck he didn’t have the time to do a lot, anyway. In the end, I thought some of the changes were good and some were made simply for change’s sake, a practice all newspaper editors I’ve worked with seem to share. The second story was a short, first-person account of how my search for understanding of my brother’s suicide uncovered the trail of the Poet. It was an understated tooting of the Rocky’s horn. Glenn didn’t mess with it. When we were done he had me hold the line while he shipped the stories to the copy desk.