Colorado Killings : Split Egos: Trendy Alibi or Disorder?

On the morning of Aug. 18, 1983, the bodies of two attractive, well-dressed elementary schoolteachers, Rod and Marilyn Carlson, both 37, were discovered alongside a dirt road on the plains east of Denver. They were lying side by side, face down in the weeds, a foot apart. Each had been shot once in the back of the head, at close range, execution style. No signs of a scuffle, any resistance.

Within the hour, police arrived at the Carlsons’ home in a comfortable, middle-class tract in suburban Littleton, where they found the couple’s only child, Ross, 19, just finishing breakfast. An engaging, good-looking college freshman and part-time model, young Carlson was polite, puzzled. He didn’t know where his parents were, he said. Maybe gone shopping.

Scheme to Dynamite House

By sundown, police had taken him into custody after learning that he had been arrested the year before in a bizarre scheme to dynamite the family home to collect the insurance--in order, he had said at the time, to help his parents out of debt. Money was also the presumed motive for the killings: The Carlsons had set up a life insurance trust fund worth nearly half a million, made out to their son.

In a chilling footnote, Carlson had also been seeing a court-ordered psychiatrist for eight months, sometimes accompanied by his parents. The last family session had been about two weeks before the shootings. Hadn’t his parents suspected the danger? What possessed them to take that lonesome country drive with their son on that hot summer night?

The cold-blooded nature of the Carlson case made it one of the most morbidly controversial in recent years. Then it became one of the most baffling.

Who killed your parents? a psychiatrist asked Carlson one afternoon not long after his arrest.

‘You’ll Have to Ask Justin’

“I don’t know,” he replied vaguely. “You’ll have to ask Justin.”

Or Norman. Or Black. Or Blue, or Gray, or Steve. Or maybe Stacy or Michael--for, as defense psychiatrists would later testify, all of these strangely diverse personalities, and perhaps even others, appeared to reside within the body of Ross Carlson, most unaware of the others. Without treatment, doctors concluded, it would be impossible to determine which of them killed Rod and Marilyn Carlson, or why.

“I have no doubt that Ross Carlson’s body did in fact commit those crimes,” said Dr. Bernauer Newton, a Santa Monica, Calif., psychologist and key witness for the defense. “But, until he’s treated, we can’t know what actually occurred, or which of his ego states was responsible. . . . The individual is simply not there.”

Thus did Colorado join California, Ohio and a handful of other states confronted with a full-blown criminal defense based on that most exotic, least understood and most glamorized of mental illnesses, multiple-personality disorder.

What sets the Carlson case apart is the determination of both the district attorney and the state hospital that MPD as a criminal defense stops here, no matter what the courts say.

And what the courts have said, twice, in 1984 and 1987, is that Carlson is a legitimate victim of MPD who is incompetent to stand trial until treated specifically for the disorder. Twice they have ordered Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo, 100 miles into the prairies southeast of Denver, to provide that treatment or to hire private specialists who could.

And twice the hospital, which subscribes neither to mainstream psychiatric views of MPD nor to the notion that judges have any business telling doctors what to do, hasn’t done it, on grounds that it still isn’t persuaded that Carlson has MPD.

The impasse has tied the state in knots for six years. Now comes round three, yet another competency hearing, with the central question still unresolved: Is Carlson a sick young man in need of enlightened treatment, or no more than a clever killer riding the crest of a trendy new defense?

MPD was officially blessed by the American Psychiatric Assn. in 1980 as a separate and highly treatable mental condition--an adaptive mechanism caused in most cases by child abuse so severe that the mind literally fragments, creating another, separate person to cope with the pain. After the first traumatic split, experts say, it becomes relatively easy for the victim to create ever more specialized personalities to deal with evolving situations.

Although just two personalities are enough to meet the psychiatric association’s definition, the average victim is said to display anywhere from four to 12, and cases have been recorded with as many as 100. Since 1980, the number of diagnosed cases nationwide has jumped from 200 to about 6,000--most of them ordinary, functioning Americans whose most common symptoms, beyond inexplicable and sometimes bizarre behavior, are memory loss, depression, anxiety attacks and headaches.

Rare Defenses

Criminal defenses based on MPD are still relatively rare, but increasing. They began in Ohio, in 1977, when Billy Milligan, a 25-year-old rapist whose doctors diagnosed 24 startlingly separate personalities (some female, another fluent in Arabic, several gifted artists) became the first person in U.S. history to be acquitted on grounds of insanity because of MPD.

Two years later, a Florida woman, Juanita Maxwell, was acquitted of murder after a stunning courtroom demonstration in which she switched from a shy introvert who claimed no memory of the crime into a brassy, amoral killer named Wanda who coldly described how she had bludgeoned a 73-year-old woman to death.

In the Carlson case, hospital doctors have yet to agree on a diagnosis (evaluations range from “possible” MPD to mixed-personality disorder with assorted antisocial traits). But they long ago concluded this much: He is, first and foremost, a malingerer who is stonewalling to avoid a murder trial. In private, they also think he is an arrogant brat, spoiled by media attention and his fancy lawyers.

No shrinking violet, Carlson accuses the hospital of violating his rights and insults its staff for their “bottom-of-the-class credentials” and professional ignorance of MPD. (Carlson’s assigned therapist once testified that he had never heard of the disorder until Carlson mentioned it to him.)

“You’d be verbally abusive too,” said Ross Carlson mildly, sitting in the small visiting area of his maximum-security ward, “if some doctor told you: ‘I’m tired of hearing somebody who murdered their parents complain about loss of their civil rights.’ ”

Carlson is thin, very pale, exceedingly charming and seemingly resigned to being the hospital’s most despised prisoner. All he wants now, he said, is an end to the limbo. He is practically begging his attorneys, he said, to just let him go to prison. They won’t, of course; if they lose this round on Oct. 19, they will fight for an insanity acquittal.

“But I’m not insane,” said Carlson, shaking his head, looking almost amused. “I have a treatable disorder, period.”

By now, though, he knows that he is never going to be treated at the Colorado State Hospital.

“They call me a liar to my face, a fake,” he said, shrugging, matter of factly. “They think I’m just some kind of master manipulator. Before I even got here, they’d told the ward that I was just some guy who went around (knocking) people off, planning to live on millions when I got out. They’ve never given me benefit of the doubt.”

At least in prison he wouldn’t be the star attraction. And he could work. “You can’t do anything more horrible to a human being,” he said, “than put him in a room with a TV for 16 hours a day.”

Looking at him, listening to him, it is hard to picture Carlson in the setting he describes--housed with the very sickest patients, including one who “is positively convinced I’m Marilyn Monroe.” Now 25, he looks like a fragile 16-year-old in his blue jeans, sneakers and crisp, pink button-down shirt. He should be working in an ice cream parlor, or studying computer science. Or even running for political office, he is so personable and verbally sophisticated.

But in time it becomes clear, even to an untrained eye, that there is something decidedly different here. A flatness, an absence of any real emotional connection, an almost eerie maturity in one so young. It’s like watching the perfect, polished mechanical man as he glides so flawlessly through conversation.

But this, his attorneys say, is not really Ross Carlson. This is Holden, a new, shallow, one-dimensional personality created strictly to deal with the hospital, with no memory of anything that occurred before 1984. All Holden knows of the past, they say, is what he has read or been told. Which is why Carlson always carries a thick folder of documents with him, reference materials to help him through conversation.

Carlson also takes notes constantly, recording each day’s events in case another of his egos surfaces and needs a briefing on what the body has been doing. It happens, he said simply. Even in the middle of cafeteria meals. In fact, he said, a little surprised at the question, no. He couldn’t remember what he had for lunch an hour ago. He didn’t know which one of them had eaten it.

Ross Carlson has yet to explain why his parents were killed, or who he thinks killed them.

Most of what has been learned about his alleged multiple personalities came early on, during the first months of his arrest, before defense doctors were shut out of the hospital.

In those early days, as fascinated defense doctors swarmed about, Carlson seemed eager to cooperate. He allowed several doctors to hypnotize him, including one on the state hospital staff. (Hypnosis is the most common form of MPD therapy, the object being to break down walls of amnesia between egos to integrate them.)

During one videotaped session, Carlson even switched personalities at will, without hypnosis, amid wild eyeball rolls--another common trait among multiples, according to the literature.

Six Selves Displayed

He displayed six selves on camera:

Glib, suave, lively and extremely articulate at one moment, this was Justin, 16. Then, weary, mellow, almost boringly polite, he introduced himself as Steve, age 42. Followed by 10-year-old Blue, weepy and cowering, chewing his thumb. Then Norman, loud, foul-mouthed, bristling, smoking cigarettes, even with a faint Brooklyn accent. From there to Black, glowering, menacing, ripping loose a sturdy wrist restraint doctors swore had been firmly fastened.

Even Carlson’s attorneys, Walter L. Gerash, 62, and David B. Savitz, 46, thought the tapes looked “like he was putting on.”

Back then, Carlson was also fairly verbal about his various personalities.

Generally speaking, he said, Justin seemed to “be out” most of the time, gregarious and social. Steve showed up when Justin’s emotions interfered with “getting things done,” such as homework, chores or part-time jobs. Steve was sensible. Justin didn’t like Norman because “of his big mouth, he’s always getting us into trouble.”

Black regularly had to emerge to protect Norman “from getting his tail kicked.” Also Black “hates me, because he thinks I try to be a goody-goody. He wants to run things.” Blue and Gray (who is thought to be 4) were described merely as “the little ones.” They seemed to cry a lot and be afraid of nearly everything; Black, said Carlson, spent a lot of time protecting them.

Discussed Killings

Carlson also discussed the killings during one hypnotic trance. Dreamily, he described an idyllic mountain scene. Several of them were there, he said. “Myself, and Steve and Blue and Gray, and, uh, that’s all, I think. We’re just resting. The little ones are tired, we’re just sitting on a log. . . . “

Then, a psychiatrist directed Carlson’s mind to the murder scene itself. “Blue and Gray weren’t there,” Carlson said. “Black wouldn’t let them. He takes care of them. . . .” Next, Carlson was standing behind someone, looking over his shoulder. A man with a blue hood on his head. He couldn’t see the face.

Black? asked the doctor. “Could be . . . but that doesn’t make sense. Black only comes out when we’re in danger. . . . Besides, he would’ve used his hands.”

Then he “saw the gun firing and the people being killed. They’re on the ground, face first. . . . They changed. When he was holding the gun on them, they looked like me.”

All of it made Bob Chappell’s head hurt.

A no-small-talk type who could pass for a plainclothes cop with his gray suits and regulation mustache, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Chappell, 39, has been pursuing the Carlson case from the very beginning, with a determination that only grows and grows.

And he knew from Day One what he had on his hands: a glib, slick, well-read little dandy with a fixation for wealth and status who had killed his parents for money.

Bob Chappell didn’t care how many “personalities” Ross Carlson had--he knew which body committed those murders. He had the evidence. He had the gun. He had Marilyn Carlson’s purse, found in a suitcase in a weedy residential lot with a few items of her son’s clothes and his wallet.

Best of all, he even had a college classmate to testify that Carlson had once remarked that would-be presidential assassin John W. Hinckley Jr. could have won an acquittal with a MPD defense.

‘He’s Got It’

“So what? Of course he talked about it--because he’s got it!” said Walter Gerash, exasperated. A transplanted New Yorker and self-described “old leftie,” Gerash, dapper and cynical, is probably the best-known criminal defense lawyer in Colorado. (Carlson’s grandparents released his trust funds to pay legal and medical fees.) He also is a master of old-school flamboyance, the sort to weep, even sob in the courtroom if the occasion seems to call for it.

At first, he said, he was “embarrassed” to take on something so exotic as an MPD defense. Not only because he knew that it would be a sensational, uphill battle, but also because of the nature of Carlson’s crimes.

“It’s in our mores,” he sighed. “You just don’t kill your mommy and daddy. That’s at the heart of it all.”

But then witnesses began turning up to testify that Carlson had displayed crazy behavior for years prior to the homicides:

A girlfriend who said Carlson was always talking about his twin brother, named Justin Time. A neighbor who said, at age 14, Carlson mowed the lawn, then didn’t remember it two hours later. A classmate who ran into him downtown and he didn’t recognize her--nor, at first, she him because he acted “like a guy around 40.”

As the lawyers began to study case histories, Carlson’s behavior seemed to fit the pattern: The proper wife who wakes up in a motel room with a man she doesn’t know. The meticulous accountant who constantly finds his files in disarray. The Newport housewife who comes to, sitting in a chair with a phone cord around her neck.

Attorney Anguished

Dave Savitz, circumspect, legalistic and proper, was converted first. Today, he seems truly anguished, just thinking about Carlson alone in a hospital of skeptics. It is Savitz who takes Carlson birthday presents, books, new computer discs, keeps him supplied with socks and underwear.

To Savitz, Ross Carlson is no cold-hearted killer but “a human being whose mind has been terribly destroyed by events.”

Across town, Bob Chappell was reading up on MPD too. He even attended an international conference.

But the more he learned, the less impressed he was. This thing was a menace.

He picked up the phone and called the one man whose views on MPD made sense to him, Institute of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Martin Orne. Although Orne has personally treated only one patient with MPD, he won the hearts of prosecutors nationwide for his role in debunking Hillside Strangler Kenneth A. Bianchi’s brief claim of MPD in 1978.

‘Softer Criteria’ Set

It is Orne’s principal tenet that leading MPD experts are little more than cult leaders, guilty of creating the very malady they would cure by pure power of sympathetic suggestion, particularly in hypnosis.

Chappell emerged from 12 hours of consultations with Orne with a view of MPD that still serves him today.

All that the American Psychiatric Assn. has done, Chappell said recently, is “set up softer criteria--so now, it’s clear to me, it’s a whole lot easier to find them,” he said, spitting out the last word like a mouthful of curdled cream.

Walter Gerash might as well be claiming that Carlson has a caffeine disorder, as far as he is concerned. “It’s the same thing. If I have caffeine-abuse disorder, am I incompetent to proceed? Did I know right from wrong?”

Both prosecution and defense shared one fixation: child abuse. If that’s what causes MPD, then where was it in the Carlson case?

So far, defense psychiatrists have uncovered nothing spectacular. Instead, Carlson has revealed under hypnosis only that, as a dyslexic, he was berated badly as a youngster for not “learning my ABCs” and that, as a tactic of early toilet training, his father rubbed dirty diapers in his face.

Walter Gerash is convinced that there is much, much more.

“But how can we find out what really happened, who this kid really is, until we get him some treatment?” said Gerash, almost yelling. “He’s blocked it off, that’s why he’s a multiple! “

Meantime, the defense takes comfort in expert opinion that child abuse is not an absolute prerequisite to MPD. What’s more, said Gerash, the lack of any truly chilling examples is only further proof that Ross Carlson is not a faker. “Carlson is a smart kid,” said Gerash. “He could make up the most horrible stuff imaginable if he wanted to, and who’s to say different? The witnesses are dead.”

Family Background Checked

Bob Chappell almost grinned. Back in 1984, he sent his ace investigator to Minnesota to check out the Carlson family background.

What he learned from relatives, neighbors and friends was that Rod and Marilyn Carlson had been well respected super-achievers. Products of a rigidly Baptist background, the only apparent ripple in their orderly lives seemed to have been her pregnancy before marriage: Her father, a minister, had forced the young couple to repent before the congregation.

“Asking him to carry in the groceries? Is that what I’m supposed to accept as child abuse?” snarled Chappell, pink-cheeked with disgust. “And that’s the underpinning that’s got this case here, six years later! We didn’t find any evidence of child abuse.”

Chappell wasted no time in sending his child-abuse report to the hospital, where the one staff doctor who had been building a rapport with Carlson read it and decided that Carlson was a liar. Carlson hasn’t trusted a hospital doctor since.

Infuriated, the presiding judge in the case, retired state Supreme Court Justice Edward C. Day, blasted Chappell for his interference. Chappell’s answer was to move to excuse Day from the bench, on grounds of bias. Day was so insulted he recused himself.

‘Psychiatric Miracle’

“What we have here is the psychiatric miracle of the age,” Day thundered on his last day in court. “I (am asked) to listen to these people down in Pueblo--that time cures all. That by just leaving him alone down there, doing nothing, and letting three or four years go by, that he is now perfectly competent to stand trial. Well, some other judge will have to listen to this evidence. I won’t.”

Enter Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Kingsley--who promptly ordered that Carlson be treated for MPD.

In response, the hospital set up an independent panel to evaluate Carlson. It was headed by Dr. Michael Weissberg, a University of Colorado Medical Center psychiatrist. He selected as his chief MPD consultant: prosecution favorite Dr. Martin Orne.

In court, Weissberg sarcastically compared MPD to eating disorders and other “fashionable” trends. Nor did he think Carlson was salvageable. Period.

“Even before he killed his parents, he demonstrated he was not treatable,” Weissberg testified. “He was in treatment for a year while he planned the murder of his parents.”

But Carlson has not talked to either Weissberg or Orne. During hours of their videotaped efforts to interview him, Carlson sat mute and motionless. He looked comatose. He had to be carried from the room.

Hospital chief of psychiatry Dr. Mark Pecevich insisted that Carlson was awake, only displaying “willful non-cooperation.”

“And why should he cooperate?” Pecevich added, winking. “Think about it. It’s not in his best interests to face a first-degee murder trial.”

‘A Travesty’

MPD pioneer Newton, the defense expert from Santa Monica, sighed. “What’s happened is a travesty,” he said. “Ross Carlson is a multiple. I’ve seen too many of them to be deceived. Carlson hasn’t been inconsistent once, not in the five years I’ve been observing him. Nobody could keep up an act for that long.”

What Gerash and Savitz have been aiming for all along is a court order that Carlson is permanently incompetent--in which instance, all criminal charges would be dismissed in favor of a court-ordered civil commitment, allowing Carlson to be moved to a Denver hospital for treatment by MPD specialists.

But compounding their frustrations is a law passed in April that allows only a district attorney--and not a judge--to move for dismissal in an incompetency case. Gerash angrily calls it the “Carlson statute,” but unless he can get it declared unconstitutional, Judge Kingsley can’t throw the Carlson case out. Not unless Bob Chappell agrees.

Chappell, sitting at his desk, wears the tiny smile of a man who at long last sees some satisfaction on the horizon. Never mind the new law. No right-thinking judge, he knows, would set Carlson free on grounds of permanent incompetency. Nor would any judge let an incompetency ruling drag on much longer than this one already has.

In short, he would’ve won this round anyway. Victory by attrition.

Already he is trying the case in his mind. Murder One. No way does Bob Chappell intend to let Ross Carlson off on insanity.

“Because,” he said slowly, eyes gleaming, “I don’t think Carlson is incompetent, I don’t think he’s a multiple-- and I don’t think he’s insane. What I think is that he killed two people.”

“I have no doubt that Chappell thinks he has a truly bad guy on his hands, who needs to be locked up,” Carlson said in his usual, factual, detached manner. “And I respect him for that. In fact, I just wish the hospital had showed as much zeal in trying to treat me”

Carlson even agrees with Chappell that there shouldn’t be “any such thing as an insanity plea. A lot of people who commit crimes suffer temporary amnesia, and you can’t just say to the guy who can’t remember murdering his wife: ‘Oh, OK, you can go home then if you don’t remember.’ As a society we have to hold people accountable for their crimes.”

With Carlson it always comes back to the same theme: Send him anywhere except back to this hospital, where, judged insane, his fate would rest completely with the same doctors he so antagonizes now.

“One of them already told me,” he said tonelessly, “that they’ll keep me here forever just for making them look bad.”

At Loss for Words

Asking him about his multiple personalities produces a different sort of helplessness. He is momentarily at a loss for words.

Who is it we’re talking to right now? Is this Holden? Does Justin ever show up these days? Where is Blue? And who is Michael?

“I don’t know,” he finally blurted. “It’s so confusing. I look at pictures of my parents, and they don’t look familiar. They just look like people. . . . I don’t know where the others went. . . .”

The words came in a disjointed torrent. “I don’t know. I feel dizzy a lot. . . . I feel odd. Yes, Blue and Gray come sometimes . . . not Norman anymore. Or Steve. I don’t know where they went . . . or Black. No, this isn’t Ross. Not Justin. . . . Yes. I’m Holden now.”