Was This a Murderous Mind? : The Patient Was Tortured by an Urge to Kill; His Psychologist, by an Urge to Keep Silent

In early January of 1985, an unusual three-page handwritten letter found its way to my desk in the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times. A psychologist whom I will call Gary Harding, writing on his letterhead stationery from a not-too-distant city in a bordering state, was communicating on behalf of his patient. The patient wondered whether the newspaper would be interested in the diary he had been keeping. The patient’s diary, Harding explained, “revolves around his inner struggle to keep from killing again.”

The psychologist believed that his patient’s desire to communicate in this fashion represented “positive reflections of some of the gains this man has achieved.” Such disclosure would be “therapeutic.” Make no mistake, Harding cautioned, the patient “remains a highly disturbed man. He is a man who has killed and who on numerous occasions has been very close to mass killing and suicide. He speaks of impulses to ‘go into a store and open fire. . . .’ He feels, and I agree, that an account of his ordeal would provide a greater understanding to the general public about the kinds of things that go through the mind of someone who has been diagnosed as dangerously mentally disturbed.”

Harding also thought the diary might provide some insight “into the darker side that exists within most of us” and might reflect on “certain societal influences and inadequacies.” His patient-- educated and articulate--had been locked in psychiatric wards six times, treated by 16 different psychologists and psychiatrists, given 18 different psychotropic medicines and exposed to electroshock therapy. “Yet he is on the streets and functioning,” Harding wrote, “his inner struggles unbeknownst to those he encounters, even those who would say they know him well.”

The psychologist concluded: “If you do have an interest in this man, you may contact him through me at the letterhead address.”

The letter intrigued me, in part for the unstated ethical question: What of Harding’s own responsibility regarding this patient? Only six months before, James Oliver Huberty had gunned down 21 children and adults at a McDonald’s in San Diego. Did Harding feel a duty to inform the police, or did his pledge of confidentiality to his patient take precedence? I wanted to speak with him as much as with his patient. So it was that on a crisp Monday morning in early February of 1985, I stepped off an airplane in a medium-sized city in the southwest corner of the United States.

Gary Harding’s home, like many in that region, was a modest, earth-toned structure on an undeveloped, open plain dotted by sagebrush and cactus. He opened his front door dressed in casual khaki slacks and a brown tweed sport jacket. He was a thin man approaching 40, slightly over six feet tall, with light brown hair and a beard just turning to gray. His face was narrow, almost gaunt, and he had a slight stoop. “Hello,” he said cautiously. “I’m Dr. Harding.”

We sat down in a living room filled with books and manuscripts that spilled from assorted tables and chairs. Most related to psychology. The dry desert stretched out before us beyond a wall of sliding glass doors. Although he had a small office downtown, Harding explained, he conducted much of his practice from his home.

A problem had come up, he said. His patient had become fearful about meeting me. It would be best, the psychologist said, if we first talked at length about the case. The patient would drop by later if he felt more comfortable. “Given his background, his paranoia and tentativeness, this is to be expected,” Harding said. So we began.

Cooper, as I will call the patient, had first contacted Harding eight years before, the psychologist said.

“He was very tentative at first. Several times he literally fled the office. He thought he was going to fall down and pass out. He thought his heart was going to burst. He wasn’t revealing much, but from the start I perceived him as highly disturbed. When anyone comes in and says he is deeply depressed, I know the flip side of that is anger. I was surprised when the anger didn’t come out, and also worried. This guy’s suppressed anger seemed to me very dangerous.”

Cooper gradually began to open up and reveal a world full of unremitting pain to Harding.

Cooper’s family was not overtly abusive, Harding said. “The father was a professional, an engineer, president of a company, involved in civic organizations. Theirs was the best house on the block, in an upper-middle-class area. Everything seemed normal. But it was an emotionally sterile household. Cooper can’t remember any caring interaction among the parents or the kids. The parents were not mean or evil, just emotionally retarded.”

Cooper often talked about the day he came home with a straight-A report card, Harding said. “The rule in his house, the unspoken rule, was you didn’t laugh or smile or express yourself. He remembers going to his father with this report card in the seventh grade. Inside he was so happy, shouting ‘Yea, yea!’ but he had to keep stoical. He handed his dad the report card while his father was reading the newspaper. His dad looked at it, said ‘Good,’ and went back to his paper. Cooper could not express his hurt and anger any more than his happiness. He couldn’t cry. So he went to his room and just sat there, feeling sad.”

Harding said Cooper frequently talked of a football game where the seventh-grade team he was playing on beat the eighth-graders. “He led the team to victory. On his way home, he was cheering himself on. But inside his house, he felt compelled to hide his emotions. ‘Oh, by the way, we beat them,’ he told his dad, trying to appear as offhand as possible. His dad wanted to know who kept the clock on the game. Cooper was puzzled. ‘We always just play until the kids have to go home for dinner,’ he explained. ‘Well, then,’ his father said, ‘if there was no clock, the game didn’t count. You didn’t win.’ ”

The day of reckoning never came in Cooper’s family. No one ever exploded. Harding said that Cooper talked about the “deathly silence” that enveloped the dinner table for months on end. “There would be no words spoken, except maybe a request to pass something. Inside Cooper, feelings would twist and pull. He sometimes felt the top of his brain was on fire. In his movies, the movies that played out inside his mind, he would get up from the table and start throwing pots and pans out the window, beating skillets on the walls and stove, setting the garage on fire, blowing up the house. Dozens and dozens of times that last particular image kept unfolding in his eye. He could not stop thinking about blowing up buildings.”

Years later, after Cooper had left home, he found himself afraid to do things that might give him enjoyment or satisfaction, since those emotions had not been allowed in his parents’ house. Everything, from dining out at a restaurant to mowing the lawn, would bring on overwhelming feelings that his heart was about to burst, or that he would pass out and die, or that a great force would come and crush him. One day the feelings came up while Cooper was painting his apartment. “This was something he had wanted to do for years,” Harding said, “so this time he forced himself to continue, one struggling stroke at a time. ‘Go ahead, kill me, I’m going to finish,’ he thought to himself.” For years, Cooper had also longed to drive up into the surrounding mountains to escape the unremitting desert heat, Harding said. One weekend, he finally made himself go, but he spent the time greatly distressed and eager to get home. Yet when he approached his house at the end of the weekend, that too made him fearful--for his home was now the thing that he desired.

Cooper complained that parts of his body lacked sensation, and he was particularly aware of a strong shield around his heart that prevented feeling in his chest. He said he had few friends and had had just one relationship with a woman, though they never became intimate and she never knew of his interior struggles. He spent hours lying in bed, exhausted.

One fall, when the World Series was under way in Cooper’s hometown, he returned there, feeling ambivalent and scared about visiting his parents. He reasoned that perhaps he could return home if he slept in the family garage. He sat for hours in a parking lot, thinking it over. By the time he finally arrived at the house, it was so late his mother had already gone to bed. He sat up talking to his father, but Cooper told Harding that the conversation was “just chitchat.”

As often as six times a day, Cooper would start crying without any apparent cause. “There is a deep sadness all the way through,” Harding said.

Cooper developed his own coping strategies. Since he liked popcorn, he would talk to the figure of a man on his popcorn can, exchanging warm, caring thoughts. He would talk to personalities, such as an uncle, that he had created. He would talk with the parts and organs in his body that were feeling numb or causing pain. He would--in his head--talk back to his father, a 5-year-old sassing his dad, and his heart would not burst.

Yet the coping had its limits. After some months of counseling, Harding said, Cooper began to hint about urges to harm others and to commit suicide. He made vague references to having killed in the past, but would not expand on that or be specific. He talked of sitting and watching TV and suddenly having images flash before him of a person being stabbed. “Sometimes it is his father, sometimes his mother,” Harding said. “Sometimes he thinks of walking into a shopping mall with a machine gun, or running people over with farm machinery, or stalking a school playground.”

In late May, 1983, Harding decided that his patient had to be hospitalized. Cooper, frightened of his own impulses, agreed. The psychologist accompanied him to a private institution and helped him check in. But Cooper emerged just 11 days later, heavily medicated, after the hospital doctors decided he was doing better.

Harding said he never notified law enforcement authorities about Cooper’s potential danger to others.

“If Cooper said to me, ‘I’m going to plug Joe X,’ then I’d be obligated to file a report. That’s the only time when the patient-doctor relationship is held in abeyance. But when a patient talks vaguely of mass killings or blowing up buildings, that’s a gray, hazy area. I cannot automatically go to authorities. Even if I did, they could do little. They’d maybe hold him for observation for 72 hours. Sometimes when a person says he’s going to kill, he’s just grabbing attention, demanding help, and doesn’t know any other way. And some are just pathological liars. It’s very hard to know the truth. You can’t spend two hours with a person and say his relative danger quotient is X %. There’s just no measure devised. And it’s not as if it’s a static situation. It changes inside from moment to moment.”

The problem reaches far beyond Cooper’s particular case, Harding pointed out. “In the general population, there are a good number of people walking around who appear so normal. Then you find out in the paper they did something horrible. Neighbors are quoted as saying, ‘He was a regular nice guy.’ It’s a myth that struggling, disturbed people can’t function. Many can and do, despite great disturbances and turmoil inside. I can’t speculate how many people are walking around in immense turmoil.”

Outside Harding’s window, dusk had fallen. We had been talking for much of the day, taking a break only to eat lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. I stood and walked outside to stretch my legs. When I returned, Harding told me he had just talked by phone to his patient. Cooper would rather see me in the morning, he said. Could I return then? I agreed and, shortly past 6, left Harding’s house.

As I sat on the balcony of my motel room an hour later, watching the sky turn slowly from orange to black, I was troubled.

The day’s conversation had been intriguing and unsettling. Harding had been as knowledgeable and articulate as I had hoped. But he had never produced his patient’s diaries or his patient. He had not received a single phone call during the day. No patients, no hint of a practice. How could he afford to devote so much time to Cooper’s case? There was something else bothering me that I could not put into words, something to do with how intimately Harding talked about Cooper. I tried to dismiss the notion that was germinating in my mind. I told myself that my imagination was running away with me.

Finally I could avoid my doubts no longer. I found the local phone book and looked up psychologists in the Yellow Pages. There was no listing for a Gary Harding.

When Harding opened his door to me the next morning, he was wearing the same sport coat and slacks, but now, under the sport coat, he was wrapped in a ratty, tan terry-cloth bathrobe. He said nothing of this, so neither did I. Later he explained he had developed a cold. We spent the morning talking, as we had the day before, about his patient. I sat quietly, unwilling to give voice to what now seemed apparent. Rather than confront Harding, however, I pressed several times to meet his patient, saying that the time was right.

Would I, Harding wanted to know, be able to accept his patient and not feel repelled? And would I be angry if it turned out that I had come to this town for something other than the story I thought I was getting? I reassured him.

Harding swallowed and slumped into his chair. He began to shake. “There is something I want to tell you,” he said. He gasped for air and clutched his chest, then reached out and gripped my hand with his own. He looked away from me.

“The patient we have been talking about--well, I’m the patient,” he finally said.

His body shook with hard, low sobs. He would not let go of my hand.

We sat that way for some time.

“This whole thing, this whole experience is like testing reality,” he said at last. “I needed to see if I could do something I really wanted to do, like talk to you, and not be killed. Even something like taking my hand away from yours--I have some fear that in losing that connection I’ll be killed.”

He was still sobbing, still clutching my hand. He would not look at me. “I used to see so much hate and anger in people’s eyes,” he said. “I’m afraid to look at yours.” Minutes passed. I wasn’t sure what to say. “You are doing OK,” I finally murmured. “You are doing OK.”

In time, we fell into a more relaxed conversation. We talked of when and why I first sensed that he was his own patient. We talked of what he had been thinking at that time. He emphasized that everything he had told me was true except for the matter of his patient’s identity. He was in fact a psychologist, although he had not practiced for several years. He had indeed admitted his patient to a psychiatric hospital--he had taken himself there in May, 1983. He talked at length about that experience.

“I tried to check myself in late one day, but couldn’t,” he said. “I went home instead. I had 10 or 12 things I needed to try. Just coping things, like physical therapy. If they didn’t work, I was going to kill myself. That night was probably the most difficult that I’ve ever had. If I hadn’t been able to get to the hospital the next morning, I might have called the police, because by then, besides feeling suicidal, I was having thoughts of machine-gunning a crowd. It scared the hell out of me. I drove to the hospital in the morning and admitted myself. They put me in a holding cell where I considered ramming my head against the unpadded wall. Then they medicated me and later essentially said, you’re OK. The guy said to me, ‘Well, I think Monday will be your discharge day.’ I’m thinking, I feel very terrible. How does he know I’ll be better by Monday? Well, it turns out he was going on vacation on Tuesday and wanted all his patients discharged.”

That was a year and a half ago, I pointed out.

“Yes, and I continue to have the impulses that brought me to the hospital,” Harding said. “I felt some today. I just deal with them, cope with them. The solution is day by day, try to get to the end of the day.”

We continued talking for several more minutes. Then Harding slumped in his chair again. “I want to talk more about this, but I’m feeling real tired,” he said. I told him I understood. A moment later, we shook hands at his door, and I left.

I was surprised to see the sun setting. We had spent another full day together. My feelings and thoughts were confused. I felt sure I could not yet write about Gary Harding. There had been moments when Harding’s unending immersion in his depression tried my patience. Yet it struck me that I had never felt uncomfortable in his presence. Journeying part way into his tortured world had not been difficult, for it was a world that had its own logic and order. I felt I understood Harding.

At the airport the next morning, I did not sense that I was leaving a fevered and skewed world for a normal one. Rather, I felt I was moving from a private arena to a public one. I overheard conversations in the crowds around the boarding gates, and I could not help but wonder about the speakers’ private worlds. Which of them had not yet let go of the trauma of a junior-high report card or football game? Two days in a world of sharp, open edges made the airport scene seem blurred and less than real, a scene glimpsed through a strip of gauze.

Harding, in his letter, had promised to provide insight into the tortured world of a person who seemed to be functioning normally. This he had done, despite his subterfuge.

It would be several days before I readjusted to the muted environment of daily life. I spent the time researching the law on a doctor’s duty to inform authorities about dangerous patients. As it had turned out, of course, the question no longer applied to Harding, but I had started to wonder whether it might apply to me. I had pledged anonymity to Harding’s patient during our preliminary phone conversations; was that to be honored, or should I notify someone? If so, what should be the nature of my warning, since Harding had not threatened anyone specifically?

I contacted a prominent professor who is both a psychologist and a lawyer. “Any therapist with a substantial practice faces the ‘duty to inform’ problem all the time,” he told me, preferring to remain anonymous. “Many patients threaten something dangerous. If you pick therapists out of the phone book randomly, you would come up with a fair number of stories. The ability to predict behavior in this area is difficult at best. The experts have to use the same basis of judgment as you do. They are not very accurate at predicting future violence.”

As for my particular experience, he advised me to forget it and do nothing. “It sounds to me,” he said, “like just another angry psychologist.”

After other consultations with lawyers and doctors and editors, I decided I would neither write the article nor notify authorities. My own judgment was that Gary Harding was a far more likely suicide than a mass murderer, and that perhaps he was not even dangerous to himself. I thought Harding had talked of mass murder simply to gain and hold my interest.

Of course, I knew I could be wrong. Who could predict whether it was Harding or a person standing at a street corner who harbors the more darkly catastrophic impulses? What about the balding, slightly built man I had seen nervously chain-smoking in a corner of the airport on the morning I had left Harding’s town, or the overly effusive steward who greeted me on the plane? At least I knew a little about what was going on inside Harding. Or did I?

Since these were not questions I could expect answers to, in time I put my thoughts about Gary Harding aside and went on to other concerns. The story simply had not panned out, I told myself.

There matters rested for a yeand a half, until one recent evening when I picked up the telephone and, with a good deal of ambivalence and trepidation, dialed Harding’s number. I was curious, but fearful of what I might learn. Was he still alive? Was he in a hospital? Had he acted on his violent impulses, or spiraled more deeply into his private pain?

Harding answered on the third ring. I told him who was calling. Yes, he said, he remembered me well. He sounded surprised to hear from me, but not particularly alarmed or bothered. It seemed odd to ask him how things were going, but I did just that. His answer startled me.

“I feel better and healthier than I have in 20 years,” he began. “I still have a ways to go, but I feel more alive than in all those years. There are still some moments that are quite difficult, when a few demons come up, but nothing that compares to how it was for so long. I am able to deal with them effectively. It is a lot easier to get up and look at a day now.”

He sounded buoyant.

His improvement, he said, had resulted from a combination of forces that had played themselves out gradually. Yet there had been one particularly sharp moment, one morning a year ago, that might be called the turning point.

“I was taking a shower at the time, not thinking of much but where’s the soap?” he said. “All of a sudden, this regression thing came over me. I was 6 years old. It was just unbelievable. I’m thinking, What’s going on here? I was afraid. I got out of the shower, climbed into bed and hid under the blankets, like a kid in a thunderstorm. But I was sort of--I was aware of it, too, aware of an adult part of me also. Both parts were there. After a time of waiting and dreading what was going to happen, I saw that nothing awful was happening. So I started to play with it, to stay with it and use it. I started talking back and forth, adult and child. I told the kid he could trust me, lean on me, I would listen. When I let it flow, didn’t think, the child would say things spontaneously. I tried to not get in the way. The adult part of me was more conscious, thinking. My training and experience as a psychologist in working with children made this easy to do.”

Since then, Harding said, he has purposely made use of this method of regression as a regular form of therapy. He induces it by sitting or lying down. At other times, it comes spontaneously. The regressions take place at least once a week and sometimes more frequently, in sessions ranging from minutes to two hours.

“It’s sort of like being in a hypnotic state,” he said. “My voice literally changes and I talk like a kid, but at the same time I think like an adult. I have the opportunity to interact with the child in an encouraging, affectionate way that, unfortunately, never happened to me as a kid. In a sense, I am re-parenting myself. I am providing myself with what I missed as a kid, neutralizing painful experiences of the past. It’s very interesting. Like the kid will be playing ball and the adult will be there, saying, ‘Nice going.’ Or he’s crying and fearful and I reassure him. Just the basics, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Harding reminded me of how he’d had no sensation in his chest and around his heart. “Now I do,” he said. “It’s just unbelievable to be able to take a breath and feel some air flowing through my lungs and diaphragm. It’s quite a rush, to put it mildly.”

He said there are still passing moments when he has violent impulses, “but the intensity and frequency are much less. It basically doesn’t impact on me. I don’t fear losing control.”

He said he sees friends and eats out at restaurants. He drives to the mountains regularly for long walks. He has remodeled his house and acquired a half interest in another property that needs a lot of work. Yet he entertains no notions of returning to the practice of psychology.

“Life is real, real different for me now,” he said. “At my worst time, I used to make deals with God. Like I would say, all right, give me two days of feeling really well and then I’ll trade that for my life. Or I’d offer to exchange both arms, or both legs, if the pain would go away. That was the bargain, that was the deal I would have made. And I really would have done either.”

Harding laughed--the first time I had ever heard him do so.

“Now it’s fair to say I don’t want to give up any major body parts. Maybe a little finger at most. But no major body parts.”

This was simply not the outcome I had expected. That Harding had not become violent with himself or others was, of course, a relief. His self-therapy sounded extraordinary. Yet I could not entirely believe his report of healing through personal re-parenting. There was an uncomfortable degree of psychobabble in his account. The child in Harding talking out loud to the adult several times a week did not, to me, seem like the actions of a cured man. Oddly, I could understand the disturbed Harding more easily than I could the restored Harding.

I again consulted the psychologist-lawyer who had advised me months before about Harding. He found the latest twist in the tale fascinating.

“I’ve never heard of anyone doing exactly that,” he said. “And frankly, it does sound like psychobabble to me. But that’s the language he knows. My own view is to take people at their word unless there is direct, incontrovertible evidence against them. There probably is a very strong underlying crazy process in this person, but he seems to have tapped into it and used it. There is a certain strength there. I only wonder how stable it is. It could crack. In another year he might flip out or commit suicide. So much depends on the breaks of life, on life events. You know, the thing is, no one really understands why people crack.”

For a while I considered visiting Harding again, to see if he would unravel under close scrutiny. I finally decided not to. I did not want to see him stripped of his sense of recovery, be it authentic or not. I did not know the true extent of his cure, and I was no closer than before to knowing what he might do in the future. I knew only that Harding had not killed and that he was feeling less pain. I wanted nothing more than to leave it at that.