Donald darkened a little. He told the doctor he didn’t believe in psychological tests. He thought the tests done on him were invalid, he said, and he wasn’t sure anything in his file would be helpful.
“Therapy will be difficult because of this,” Patterson wrote. “Can he be reached without denial?”
On his way out the door, Donald warily agreed to take home a paper-and-pencil personality test.
COMPLETE THESE SENTENCES TO EXPRESS YOUR REAL FEELINGS. TRY TO DO EVERY ONE. BE SURE TO MAKE A COMPLETE SENTENCE.
I LIKE: FALCONRY, SEX, SWIMMING, TRAVEL, SKIING. COMMUNICATING
BACK HOME: IS A GOOD PLACE TO VISIT FOR A SHORT TIME.
MEN: SHOULD BE MORE FLEXIBLE IN THEIR THINKING.
A MOTHER: SHOULD CARE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF HER CHILDREN.
I FEEL: TENSE.
MY GREATEST FEAR: NOT STICKING TO WHAT I ORIGINALLY WANTED.
IN SCHOOL: THERE’S THE BEST TIME OF A LIFE.
I CAN’T: SAY “I QUIT.”
SPORTS: DEVELOP CHARACTER
WHEN I WAS A CHILD: I STILL AM
I SUFFER: FROM SELF PITY (NOT MUCH)
I FAILED: CHEMISTRY
SOMETIMES: I DON’T CARE ENOUGH
WHAT PAINS ME: MOST ARE OTHER PEOPLE.
I SECRETLY: WANT TO BE HAPPY WHEN I’M ALONE.
I WISH: TOO MUCH.
MY GREATEST WORRY IS: DECIDING WHAT TO DO.
* * *
—
NOT QUITE A week later, on a Friday night in June, Donald and Jean had another fight. It was all the same conflicts all over again, but worse, more fraught than before. Things were bad enough that Jean walked out of their apartment. Donald followed her, and found her nearby, sitting low to the ground, near an irrigation ditch. Either she was trying to have some time alone, or she was trying to hide from him. But once he found her, Donald started talking about how he wanted to drown her.
Jean talked him out of it. They both made it back into the apartment, more or less together, though Jean did make one thing clear: She would be moving to Oregon without him.
The next day was Saturday morning. Donald was still upset about the fight—and about Jean’s decision to leave him after all. He took some mescaline, an experience that he later said not only offered him incredible insight, but helped him come up with the right response, the perfect plan.
That night—June 20, 1970—Donald came home with two cyanide tablets, procured, most likely, from a lab at the school. Donald dropped them into a glass of hydrochloric acid, took hold of Jean, and tried to hold her still—both of their faces above the glass as the cyanide misted into a gas.
The plan was for them to die together.
* * *
—
DONALD WAS A no-show for his next appointment. When Patterson opened the newspaper on Monday morning, he learned why.
Fort Collins Police: 10:20am Donald Kenyon Galvin, 24, of 27G Aggie Village was booked for protective custody in connection with an alleged suicide and possible homicide attempt. He was being held in city jail this morning on authority of the district attorney. He was first taken to the Colorado State University Student Health Center for treatment.
Donald’s plan hadn’t worked. Maybe he loosened his hold on Jean, or maybe his grip was never that strong to begin with. But she tore herself away, ran from the room hysterically, and called the police. After reading the report in the paper, Patterson found Donald at a hospital, where he’d been sent on a “confine and treat” order while the district attorney’s office decided whether to charge him or have him committed. Much to the doctor’s alarm, Donald still hadn’t seemed to have come down from the experience. As Donald talked, he came off as euphoric, even boastful—an unmasked comic book villain, crowing about how he’d fooled everyone for years. He talked about the time that he killed a cat, but this time instead of being terrified, he was almost gloating. He said he’d recently dismembered a dog in the bathtub, too, just to upset Jean.
Nothing in Patterson’s notes from Donald’s sessions suggested he was capable of anything like this. Had Donald deliberately pulled the wool over Patterson’s eyes, or had he simply fallen apart without any real warning signs? Had the doctor missed something violent in him? Had he been too willing to have faith in him?
That, at least, was over. Donald had a new diagnosis. “He is probably an intelligent paranoid schizophrenic,” Patterson wrote, “who has wide mood swings from elation to depression….I think the inpatient commitment procedure is definitely the right thing to do.”
* * *
The Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo is a collection of large, bland brick buildings at the center of a town that has sprung up around it, largely to accommodate the growing staff of health care workers serving the expanding patient rolls. When the hospital first opened with about a dozen patients in October 1879 under a different name, the Colorado State Insane Asylum, the facility was just a farmhouse, and Pueblo was a sleepy town on a flat stretch of desert, a hundred miles south of Denver. The institution got its new name in 1917, having grown by then to treat more than two thousand patients—each one housed there with very little hope that they might ever be released.
The early patients at Pueblo were subject to a seemingly endless array of chemical and electric treatments designed to pacify them. In the 1920s, as the eugenics movement gained momentum, Pueblo’s doctors sterilized their female patients, despite lacking the legal authority to do so. It never seemed to occur to any of them that it might be a bad idea. “We considered it a minor operation,” the hospital’s longtime superintendent, Dr. Frank Zimmerman, said years later. “So they will not produce more mental deficients.”
By the 1950s, the hospital housed more than five thousand patients, becoming a small, largely self-sustaining community—bigger than the county seat of the biggest county in the state—with parents and children and grandchildren all going to work there at the same time. Unable to rely on the state legislature for funding, the hospital arranged for patients to grow their own crops and operate a dairy farm, a pig farm, a garden, and a factory where the patients made textiles. Pueblo had become a colony for the mentally ill, where people stayed forever; the most popular treatments in those days were electroshock therapy for depression, insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia, hydrotherapy for mania, and fever therapy for tertiary syphilis.
Only after institutions like Chestnut Lodge changed the thinking about mental illness did the brutality at Pueblo and other state hospitals start to become a subject of debate in the broader culture. One of the earliest and most powerful exposés was The Snake Pit, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Mary Jane Ward—later made into a movie starring Olivia de Havilland—about experiencing scalding hot baths and electroshock therapy as a patient in a state psychiatric hospital in New York. In 1959, the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo also became the subject of a book, a provocative roman à clef called The Caretakers, written by a former employee named Dariel Telfer. If you set aside its more sudsy, Peyton Place–like aspects, The Caretakers presented a vivid picture of some of the more popular treatment practices of the time: shock therapy, Thorazine, tranquilizers, solitary confinement, sodium luminal, sodium amytal. One character’s cavalier description of a high-security ward at the hospital is especially telling: “These are mostly psychopaths. They can do anything they’ve a mind to. Mostly they want sex and good times and liquor. They need to be kept busy on account of when they got nothing to do, they get meaner’n hell. They oughta be put to work, every single one of ’em. I got one on my ward that’s been down in restraint two weeks. According to her chart, she’s had over two hundred shock treatments. Over two hundred! Thinka that!”