Few Go to Jail : Murder--or an Act of Compassion?

They had been married 51 years when he killed her. She was lying on the couch, and he sneaked up behind her. He fired a shot into her temple. Then he felt her pulse. It throbbed.

Oh, God, I loused it up, he thought. So he reloaded and fired again. But he was wrong. The pulse was reflex, and this will forever bother Roswell Gilbert. He is a man of science and he feels he should have known better.

In these final years Emily had always slept on that same soft living room couch. She propped herself on down pillows. A painful bone disease had made her body brittle, just as Alzheimer’s disease was making her mind go dim.

Roswell would wake early and sit in the big chair beside her. He would sip orange juice, waiting for her eyes to open and the questions to begin.

No Recognition

“Who are you?” she would ask.

“I’m your husband, Roswell,” he would answer.

“Roswell?” she would repeat. “Where is Roswell?”

So finally he killed her. Terminate her suffering, is the phrase he prefers. His lovely lady, he says, was gone anyway. Left was an ailing body, filled with pain and emptied of Emily. Killing was merciful. It was moral.

And last May that is just what the 76-year-old man told the jurors, told them in the same clinical voice he had used most of his prosperous life as an engineer. “Sure, I know I was breaking the law, but there seems to be things more important than the law,” he said. “So it’s murder. So what?”

The jurors measured his words. They searched his eyes for remorse. Finally, they were led to a small room in that Fort Lauderdale courthouse by the New River: 10 women and two men left to anguish with what little they knew of the murder statutes and someone else’s private tragedy.

Four Hours’ Deliberation

Four hours later they decided: To them, Gilbert had it backward. The shooting was more for his sake than hers. Their verdict was Murder One, punishable in Florida with a mandatory life sentence and no possibility of parole for 25 years.

“They killed my father!” Gilbert’s 50-year-old daughter howled in grief. Then she wept into her hands, “Daddy, daddy.”

As the tall, gray-haired defendant was being taken away, he stopped amid a circle of reporters. “I thought I’d be acquitted,” he said, trembling. “I never expected to go to jail.”

But the Roswell Gilbert case has not faded away as the old man grows accustomed to the sturdy cotton of prison grays.

Instead it has been picked apart by ethicists and lawmakers and talk-show wise men. The retiree and his 9-millimeter Luger have vicariously entered a million homes where people know the griefs of a loved one turned feeble.

What is compassionate and right but against the law? To many, the riddle is answered in this oddly contradictory coupling of words: mercy killing.

Science has lengthened life with pills and machines and surgery. But prolonged life is sometimes merely prolonged illness. Medicine fights disease to a standoff only after the body and mind have suffered terrible losses.

“This great and glorious success leaves us to confront this question: How much life is too much life?” said Dr. Joseph Fletcher, a noted ethicist and visiting scholar in biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia. “Clearly, sometimes there is a good motive for ending the suffering.”

Taut-nerved relatives, weary of watching disease smudge away a lifetime of sweet memories, are tempted to wage a preemptive strike against slow death.

Roswell Gilbert did it. So have at least two dozen other Americans in recent years. Their actions were unlawful. No state recognizes a mercy-killing exception.

Leniency Often Prevails

But leniency most often prevails. Few so-called mercy killers go to jail. At least not the elderly ones. Not those who kill a wife or husband or brother.

Judges offer them probation. Juries vote not guilty. Prosecutors or grand juries look the other way.

In August, Ruth Steppe Davis, 69, of Lynchburg, Va., was sentenced to two years’ probation for stabbing her husband with an ice pick. He was 72, disoriented and tortured by cancer.

Last year, Dorothy Healy, 71, of San Diego, was placed on probation and fined $10,000 for strangling her bedridden and senile 92-year-old husband. He had been an invalid during the final decade of their 48-year marriage.

In February, 1983, Harvey Shick, 64, of Tyler, Tex., pleaded guilty to shooting his ailing wife, who suffered from hardening of the arteries. He plea bargained for 10 years’ probation, but a district judge thought even that too harsh. He found the retired machinist not guilty and sent him home.

Gilbert an Exception

So Roswell Gilbert is an exception. And to Dr. Fletcher and others it is time to place in the books what has been true in the breach--to rewrite murder laws so they permit mercy killing as a legitimate courtroom defense, like insanity or self-defense.

“Such a law would almost always turn on motivation,” Fletcher said. “If somebody kills openly and explains why and the motive is good. . . .”

Yet such a law inevitably would be problematic. Motives often are complex, the good and bad bleeding into each other like a change of season. The line between mercy killing and murder can be woefully difficult to decipher.

That, as much as anything, is the lesson of the Roswell Gilbert case.

“I just shot my wife with my 9 millimeter,” he told the first policeman to arrive on the afternoon of March 4. “I shot her in the head.”

A Desperate Fusion

He was cooperative. He seemed composed. And in the following months, without public tears, he took the matter head-on, logically and forcefully explaining what he had done as a desperate fusion of love and pragmatism.

And then a jury of his peers--equally rational and not indifferent to mercy--concluded that no, he was over the line, that he was a murderer.

Love gets mellow in later years, and everything is fine. That’s how Roswell Gilbert remembers his marriage. He and Emily were like two adjacent pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They may not have seemed alike but they sure fit together.

He was a junior at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., when he met her at a fraternity party. She was two years younger, a foot shorter and a lot more refined. He was crazy about her right off.

Roswell was an electronics whiz who, given a radio, would think not of music but of tubes and wires. He liked the idea of romance, but he wasn’t sure how serious he and Emily Rosser ought to get.

She had more definite ideas. She wanted a husband and actually her first choice was someone else. The news shook Roswell so badly that he quit school and ran off to fire a boiler in the merchant marine.

Marriage Didn’t Work

Several years later he was shocked when she phoned him. Her marriage wasn’t working out, and they agreed to meet at a famous necking spot in the New Jersey mountains. “How about marrying me if I can get you in the clear?” Gilbert remembers asking in 1934.

Roswell would go on to a lucrative career as an electrical engineer. He was always devising some new industrial gadget for taking measurements.

The Gilberts lived well, first in Newark, then in Manhattan. The couple had one daughter, Martha. Emily was a champion bridge player and she traveled with Roswell when work took him to London or Paris or Rome.

In the late ‘60s, the Gilberts moved to a condominium on an island off the coast of Spain. By then, Roswell was semiretired. He did some consulting. He occasionally accepted pay as an expert witness in lawsuits, calmly and precisely describing to a jury some aspect of circuitry or computers.

Happy, Mellow Years

Though they did not realize it, Emily even then was in the early grip of Alzheimer’s. The brain disorder causes a relentless deterioration of memory. But in those happy, mellow years it was easy to dismiss a forgotten name or what seemed a silly slip of the tongue.

Actually, it was the osteoporosis that first jarred them. The disease softens the bones, leaving them prone to breaks. A simple brush against a wall would crack a bone and leave Emily in agony. By the time of her death, she had fractured three ribs and almost every bone of her lower spine. Her height had collapsed two full inches.

In 1976, distressed by the osteoporosis, the Gilberts left Spain for a one-bedroom condominium in a Fort Lauderdale high-rise beside the ocean. Their new doctor prescribed calcium and painkillers. He also observed a severe memory loss. He called in a neurologist.

The second doctor told Roswell that his wife had pre-senile dementia. It would only get worse, he said. It might come on fast or develop gradually. But one day Emily would be troubled to recall her name or her age or what any of her life had been about.

Only the Curse

There was no cure, only the curse.

“Her memory just folded up,” said Roswell, interviewed in prison. “She couldn’t remember her daughter’s name or if she was married or if she had grandchildren. ‘Three grandchildren?’ she’d say. ‘Well, how old are they?’

“She was just plain foggy. I’d spend half the day looking for her glasses or her cosmetics. She’d drop clothes in oddball places.”

“Oh, and the osteoporosis. It made for a hellish combination. I’d have to give her Percodan for the pain, and that made her constipated. So I had to give her enemas. Then she’d lose control.”

In the final few years, the unsocketing of their lives from the rest of the world was nearly complete.

Roswell had to give up consulting. He had left town for a one-day trip, and Emily had wandered through the building, searching for her husband, ringing doorbells at random. She thought she had been deserted.

‘She Wasn’t the Same’

People were reluctant to come around. “She just wasn’t the same person,” said John Rhodes, one of the couple’s closest friends. “She started repeating the same questions: Who are you? What’s your name?”

Mornings were the worst. Emily did not recognize the man sitting beside her. He would have to convince her that he was her husband, that the two of them had a child, that he meant her no harm.

“How can we be in Florida?” she would ask suspiciously.

A few hours later her mind would clear up. She would not only recognize Roswell, but would be petrified to be without him.

Emily had always been a snappy dresser and she demanded that Roswell help her look just so. She went to the hairdresser for a shampoo and set every week. She refused to leave the house without jewelry.

Liked Applying Makeup

She liked applying makeup. She curled her eyelashes and penciled her eyebrows. She applied several shades of eye shadow and sometimes made a mess of it. Roswell would fix it up.

At lunch time, they would cross busy Highway A1A to Denny’s or go down the block to Howard Johnson’s. They carried along a gold velvet pillow to soften Emily’s chair. She always ordered a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.

Their daughter lived in Baltimore and they saw her only rarely. Roswell never asked for help. In fact, he preferred to keep his ordeal private. He was sociable enough to be elected to the condominium’s board of directors. But he rarely complained about Emily when he spoke with others in the building.

Nor did he read books about Alzheimer’s. He did not search out support groups. And he did not much investigate nursing homes or other kinds of care.

‘That Would Be Hell’

“If I had to take her to an institution that would accept her, I figured it probably would be a state institution,” he said. “And that would be hell.”

Three days before her death, Emily hit her side against the soft arm of an upholstered chair. She cried in pain and crouched to the floor. Oh no, not again, her husband thought. He rushed to get her two Percodans.

The next day Emily still hurt and he took her to the hospital. When they arrived she seemed stunned. She didn’t want to be there. She refused to take off her clothes, and the nurses had to put her to bed in her dress and nylons and jewelry. Roswell stayed with her that night in the private room.

The next day was worse. Emily was scheduled for a bone scan and X-rays. She would not cooperate. She yanked a bandage off her arm and blood spotted her dress. She ran into the corridor, her stockings drooping down her legs.

‘It Was Pathetic’

“She was trying to find the elevators,” Roswell said. “She walked right past them. She starting pushing the bolt heads in the wall, thinking they were the elevator panel. I tell you, it was pathetic.”

He took her home, he said, and put her to bed. They had a restless night but the next morning she seemed better. She got dressed and put on her makeup. They went to lunch, though she didn’t finish her BLT.

Later, he went to a board meeting near the lobby of the building. He told her he would be right back. But a few minutes later she came looking for him.

“Where’s Ros? Where’s Ros?” she asked the secretary in the building office.

Roswell came out of the meeting.

“Emily, why did you come down?” he asked. “You promised me you’d stay upstairs. Why did you come down?”

He took her back up to their 10th-floor apartment and put her on the couch.

‘Please Somebody Help Me’

“So then she said, ‘Please somebody help me. Please somebody help me,’ ” Roswell recalled.

“Who’s that somebody but me, you know. . . . I thought to myself . . . I’ve got to end her suffering. This can’t go on.”

The Luger was a remnant of a gun collection he had sold off long ago. He kept it on a top shelf in a room he had converted into a workshop. He loaded it with a single bullet.

Then he walked across the carpet to where Emily lay still against her soft pillows.

Nearly a quarter of Florida’s population is over 60. Stories of suicides and double suicides and mercy killings among the elderly are no longer that rare. Only the most pathetic or ironic make it to Page One.

Two years before the Gilbert case, the name Hans Florian was in the headlines. He was 79 when he killed his wife. Her name was Johanna, and she had Alzheimer’s. He pushed her wheelchair into a hospital corridor. Then he shot her in the head with a snub-nosed .38.

He wanted to turn the gun on himself, but he wasn’t sure if all the blood oozing from the wound meant his Hannie was dead. “My greatest concern was my wife,” the German immigrant told the judge at his bond hearing. “I was afraid I missed or something and only hurt her.”

Inevitably the twin nightmares would be compared. The Gilberts and Florians lived in the same county, just a few miles apart. Both wives had Alzheimer’s. Both husbands used guns.

“How could one be treated different than the other?” asked Harry Gulkin, Gilbert’s attorney.

No Two Murders Alike

But murders are like fingerprints. No two are alike.

The same can be said of juries.

Johanna Florian was only 62 but the Alzheimer’s disease was far advanced. Her husband had to pry open her mouth to feed her. She wet herself and resisted being washed. She recognized no one.

Worse than anything, she thought she was on fire. She would yell the German words for “fire” and “pain” hours at a time. There was no comforting her. Her screams were so loud that neighbors half a block away could hear.

Hans, a retired butcher, had read everything he could find about the disease. He had placed his wife in a nursing home.

Finally, after eight months, he was told that Johanna was unmanageable and had to leave. He moved her to a hospital but was told she could not stay permanently. He would have to bring her home.

‘No Way to Stop It’

“There is nothing worse than this, this Alzheimer’s,” said Hans, a tall, heavyset man whose lower lip has molded into a pout. “It begins and then there is no way to stop it.

“You know how long she could have lived, lying there screaming on the sofa? Ten, 15, 20 years. Enough.”

For two hours, Hans Florian sat before a grand jury. He was a pitiful figure, squeezing tears from his eyes, trying to tell his story in broken English. The jurors asked few questions. Mostly, they just let him talk.

“He was an emotional, distraught witness,” remembered John Morris, a banker who was the jury foreman. “He broke down. He would speak haltingly, then stop to weep. We sat back and we were all biting our lips ourselves.

“He told us about the screaming and the fire and what all that did to his mind. He had lost all ways of connecting with her.

‘Knew He Pulled Trigger’

“Sure, we knew he pulled the trigger. But the question is: Pull the trigger on what? We decided it might not have been correct from a legal standpoint, but we made a judgment as a group of human beings. He hadn’t done something we wouldn’t do ourselves.”

By a majority vote, the grand jury refused to indict Hans Florian. Twelve days after he killed his wife he was free of any charges--home.

Harry Gulkin spoke with his client and knew they had a problem.

Roswell Gilbert is 6 feet 2, wears bifocals and looks smart. He could be a professor. He sounds like an encyclopedia. He killed his wife and, if bereft, explained her death as drably as a lab experiment.

“There went a temporary insanity defense,” Gulkin said. “With that, you’ve got to prove that someone was really off the wall. Well, he wasn’t then and he isn’t now.”

So they would have to fight the cold facts of the shooting with a burning plea for compassion--mercy for this apparently stone-willed man.

“We call that a jury pardon,” Gulkin said.

Prosecutor Kelly Hancock built a straightforward case against the retiree. Besides the basic facts, he questioned witnesses about Gilbert’s composure at the scene. Hard as steel, they said.

Not Hopelessly Sick

Later, Hancock tried to demonstrate that Emily had never been the hopelessly sick woman her husband claimed. His witnesses were a neighbor who had seen Emily alone at the beauty parlor, a drugstore clerk who had sold her hair nets, a waitress who often served her the BLTs.

“She always had her favorite table that she wanted by the window,” the waitress said.

The defense countered with other neighbors, Emily’s dentist, her doctor. They each testified to Emily’s sad and declining condition as well as Roswell’s devotion and patience.

But the crucial testimony in the four-day trial came from the defendant himself.

“I might break up,” he warned his lawyer before taking the stand.

“I hope to God you do,” Gulkin replied, giving him a pat.

Did Not Break Up

But Roswell Gilbert did not break up. In fact, it was almost as if he was an expert witness again, a poised expert this time in his wife’s death.

Question: Ros, why did you use a gun?

Answer: I think poison is a horrible way to die. There’s no such thing as instantaneous death with poison. . . .

Q: Ros--

A: Firing a shot in the head will cause cessation of all consciousness in one millisecond, one-thousandth of a second. I’m sure she didn’t even hear the gun go off. . . .

Q: Did you feel that you were the only one that could have ended her suffering?

A: Natural conclusion. I can’t go to the medical people. They have no cure for Alzheimer’s. The osteoporosis was getting worse slowly in time. Everything looked like it was converging to a climax. . . .

Q: Ros--

A: I couldn’t see any other end than her dying. If I put her in a nursing home, well, after that hospital thing I don’t think the nursing home would take her. The hospital certainly wouldn’t take her. . . .

The whole thing was a mess and the only solution to me was to terminate her suffering. That’s all.

The jury began deliberations with a prayer to God. It could just as easily have been a question. Why us? many of the jurors were thinking.

This was a terrible decision to make. After all, this man Gilbert was no cop killer, no hit man. The judge had told them not to let sympathy influence their verdict, but it was hard not to feel pity for an old man whose final years had come to this.

There had been 16 witnesses, but the trial left the jurors with as many questions as answers. They listened quietly, powerless to say a word. Then suddenly all of the power shifted their way, ready or not.

What they really wanted was to climb into Roswell Gilbert’s mind--to measure his love for Emily, his devotion, his goodness. Couldn’t we just talk to him? some of them wished.

Teacher on Jury

“There are too many things you need to know, but can’t know unless you’re omnipotent,” complained Rosalyn Brodsky, a retired New York City schoolteacher and one of the jurors interviewed for this story.

At the start, only a few thought the case was Murder One. Sylvia Firestone, 67, who had been elected jury foreman, felt that way. She was an anomaly on a jury, a retired lawyer. Usually, lawyers don’t get picked.

“One doesn’t go to lunch at 12 o’clock with her husband and then at 2 o’clock be ready to be terminated,” she reasoned. “Terminated, that’s his word. How telling.”

But many of the others thought Gilbert deserved some special consideration. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt,” Donald Williamson, 30, a businessman, said.

But what consideration?

Jury Had Its Duty

Emily Gilbert was dead, and her husband killed her. The jury had its duty. This wasn’t some TV program. This was the law.

And the law said there are only two excuses. Murder is justifiable if done to defend yourself, and murder is excusable if done by accident.

Neither applied.

Even then, the jurors stepped outside the law books for a while. They drew their own improvised line between mercy and murder. They asked themselves: How sick was Emily Gilbert? Was she better off dead?

They offered up clues.

“This woman was able to walk in high heels,” Rosalyn Brodsky observed.

Sandra Day, 47, a housewife, said, “When she was released from the hospital, her prescription was only Tylenol.”

Could Picture Emily

They could picture Emily before them, smiling, maybe laughing, at lunch with her husband.

On a chair in a corner sat a stack of color photographs with the Luger on top. This was evidence that had passed by them in a blur, hand to hand, during the trial. Now they studied the photos, staring at dead Emily, shot in the temple, her mouth open.

“Look at that eye shadow,” Firestone said. “The shades of mauve and beige. So carefully applied.”

Wanda Lieberkowski, a manicurist, took a magnifying glass from her purse. “There’s not an eyebrow out of place,” she said.

Emily Wanted to Live

The woman wanted to live, Alzheimer’s or not, they concluded. The proof was in the jewelry and the eye shadow and the circle of rouge that colored her cheeks.

Acquittal, then, was no longer possible.

So what was left?

Florida law provided three choices. One was manslaughter. But that involved some kind of negligence, like an auto accident. The jury moved on.

Another choice was second-degree--or murder without premeditation. For more than an hour, they tried to wedge Emily’s death into that definition: Maybe something just snapped? Maybe Roswell lost his head?

He Shot Her Again

“But then there was that second shot,” Williamson said. “He shot her once and then he walked back to the workshop and reloaded. Then he shot her again. I mean, c’mon, that gave him time to think.”

So it was like peeling a bad orange and all they were left with was the bitter fruit: Murder One--a mandatory life sentence, no parole for 25 years. Should Roswell Gilbert live to be 100, he would live the years in jail.

“The law leaves you nowhere else to go,” Williamson said.

Yet to a remaining few, all this logic seemed too sterile for a matter of life and death. Logic, be damned. What of the heart?

Juror Felt Pressure

Rosalyn Brodsky, the retired teacher, couldn’t vote Murder One, law or no law. The other jurors tried to convince her. She felt the pressure. Her mind skipped from thing to thing.

She thought of Emily Gilbert, “whose dressing table was a very sophisticated setup.” She thought of Roswell, “who had a gun in such readiness.” Finally, she thought of her own father. He had been dead eight years. Dead of Alzheimer’s.

“My father got to the stage where . . . he couldn’t talk,” she said. “The saliva would go from one side of his mouth to the other.

“But even at the end there was a clarity in his eyes. You could see he knew what was going on. There are moments of lucidity. And there are new discoveries all the time.

“We never know,” the school-teacher said.

Finally, it was unanimous.

But it wasn’t quite settled.

The Gilbert case seemed to leave Florida on edge. To many, the scales of justice had teetered wildly out of balance.

Anxious voices were heard from many places, including juror Vivian Feigenbaum, a travel agent. “I regretted it as soon as I got home,” she apologized. “How could I have sent this man to jail for 25 years?”

A poll commissioned by 20 Florida news organizations showed that 63% of the state felt Gilbert should go free. A similar percentage said a person should have the right to kill a terminally ill relative to spare the patient suffering.

Gov. Bob Graham twice recommended that the state’s best-known murderer be sent home to his high-rise condominium pending appeals. But he needed three of the six members of the Florida Cabinet to agree before Gilbert could be released. Only two did so.

‘Under Bright Lights’

“The Gilbert case has put the whole mercy-killing question under bright lights,” said Joseph Fletcher, the noted ethicist.

But it would be dangerous to leap from this single, complicated case into a simple, steadfast theory about mercy killings. The Gilbert killing was unusual--unusual for the punishment, unusual in its complexity.

“The history of the thing is that mercy killers become like conscientious objectors,” said Leonard Glantz, a professor of health law at Boston University. “They throw themselves on the mercy of the court, and mercy is what they usually get.

“We already have laws for mercy killing, in that mercy killing is murder. If you commit the crime, you have to be willing to put yourself out on the limb.”

Mercy Killer, Beware

Alexander Capron, a USC law professor who directed a presidential commission on medical ethics, said, “Our emphasis ought to be toward making people more comfortable while they are dying, providing better care. . . .

“If you write some kind of mercy-killing statute, then you’d have individuals doing away with their wives, saying I was using my mercy-killing right.”

The wisdom of most legal scholars is simple and direct: Mercy killer, beware. Murder is wrong. Any murder.

It is a stern warning for a nation whose people are living longer all the time. Roswell Gilbert will not be the last elderly person to stand before a dead spouse, the undoable done, a weapon in hand. Other juries will have to judge those who claim to have killed because of the warmth of their love.

The murder trial of 78-year-old Hilmer Sallander is set for Nov. 4. Last March, in the Fort Worth suburb of Hurst, he allegedly strangled his wife, Dorothy, 72. She had Alzheimer’s.

As she lay dead, he cut his wrists. But Hilmer Sallander lived, and now justice will comb through his motives and make up its mind.

The small white house has green trim. Pygmy palms stand in the front yard. An old blue Toyota is in the driveway. Hans Florian, now 82, killer of his Hannie, opened the door only a little.

“No, no, the lawyer tells me never to say anything,” he said, peeking onto the front step.

But he really wanted to talk. The mercy killing never leaves his mind.

“It hounds me,” he said. “She would yell such things, the noises, the ooooo , ooooo . She wasn’t the same.”

As he remembered, his hands covered his ears. His head shook.

Then he went to get a small cube made of clear plastic. There were photos against each side. Johanna smiled from inside the plastic. Hans held the good old days in his big, wrinkled hands.

‘Nothing but Sympathy’

“But it all changed,” he said, frowning. And then he anticipated the questions and he said. “I have nothing but sympathy for Mr. Gilbert or any of the others. This Alzheimer’s, this, this, Alzheimer’s.”

He swiped at the disease with his hand. Then he went on, lowering his voice, a bit hesitant: “But Mrs. Gilbert, she could come down from the 10th floor. She could eat lunch. There were nursing homes for Mrs. Gilbert.”

Then he stopped himself. It was another man’s troubles. He didn’t really know. What he knows is what has become of him.

“I have no peace,” Hans Florian, the mercy killer, said. “If I even try to write my sister, I cry the whole night.

“When I close my eyes, I will have peace.”

Roswell Gilbert, his self-proclaimed nobility now called murder, has finally shed the face of the scholarly stoic. He has cried during prison interviews. He has cried often.

“If I had rolled around that courtroom in sackcloth and ashes, maybe I could have gotten some sympathy,” he said angrily, his bony hands raking pathways through his thin hair.

“The damn jury didn’t believe me. They thought I was cold and calculating. I’m not. My damn guts were twisting and coming up.”

Prison is tedious. He is confined in the Avon Park Correctional Institution, in the sparse terrain of south central Florida, beside an Air Force base.

Could Fix the Broken TVs

If he had some testing equipment, he said, he could fix all of the broken TVs in the place. If they would let him, he could go next door and teach the Air Force something about its landing gear.

Mostly, he does nothing.

“When you love somebody, you just can’t stand to see them suffer,” Gilbert said, eager to convince. “That’s just the truth. Whatever happened to me, I knew it wouldn’t be as bad as what was happening to Emily.”

Damn the consequences, he decided.

But now he has been damned with them.

“This thing I’m going through, I can take this,” he said defiantly. “But if I had deserted her in some goddamn warehouse of an institution, I could never have lived with myself. Goddamn it, people have to understand that.”

Finally, his voice softened. Tears welled in those dauntlessly candid eyes.

“You know, Emily wouldn’t stand for a stranger taking care of her,” he said. “It was only me. I took care of Emily. It was me.”