What It’s Like on the Inside of the ‘Asylum’ : Television: Tonight’s HBO documentary follows former inmate Chris Clarke who killed his fiancee in a psychotic rage, telling his story at Patton State Hospital and as he returns to society.

The camera focuses on Chris Clarke, sitting on his bed in Patton State Hospital near San Bernardino, talking about killing his fiancee.

“Something snapped,” he says almost inaudibly. “I began thinking things that were not real. I began having paranoid thoughts and believing people were trying to get me.”

The interviewer doesn’t say a word. Clarke begins to cry softly.

“It was as if somebody else came into my body,” Clarke says. “I can’t use that excuse. I can’t tell people I didn’t do that crime, but I didn’t. Someone else did it, someone I’ve never known.

“And I don’t want to ever meet that person again.”

Six months after that interview, filmed for “Asylum,” a documentary about Patton State Hospital that premieres on HBO at 10 tonight, Clarke sits in the downtown San Diego office of Doug Smith, a program manager for the county’s conditional release program. Clarke entered the program last September when he was discharged from Patton after five years and four months.

Clarke’s release from Patton is chronicled in “Asylum,” which follows the daily activities of five inmates inside the institution for the criminally insane.

“They don’t get any worse than they get here,” one staffer says in the film. “We’re the bottom line for the treatment of psychosis.”

Clarke’s mustache is gone, but otherwise the 34-year-old looks physically unchanged from his interview in Patton. He sits casually, slumped down in his chair, relaxed. He is a big man, 6 feet 7, with the broad shoulders and body of an athlete.

Dressed in a blue sports jacket, gray slacks and striped tie, he looks like a banker, which is appropriate, since the former broadcast operations manager now works as an analyst for the investment reporting division of a San Diego bank.

It is a job he expects to lose after the HBO documentary airs and this interview is published. Some of his employers know about his background, but it is not common knowledge at the bank.

By law, he is not required to disclose details about his history to prospective employers. But Clarke, who says he doesn’t want to be accused later of misrepresenting himself, has “a tendency to reveal the full, rich nature of what he has done, and that is a handicap,” Smith said.

Smith sits nearby throughout the interview, required for Clarke to be able to talk to the press. Smith and Clarke’s friends advised him not to do this interview. In addition to the stress and the damage it could do to his employment, there is the question of the victim’s family, who have threatened him in the past.

But Clarke is on a mission. His message is simple: Anyone can fall victim to mental illness, and it is possible to recover. He is offering himself as a living example.

“There are a lot of people out there marching to the same step I did,” he says. “They’re just as driven as I was. They may not have dangerous results, but they could.”

When Clarke discusses his life before “the crime,” it is almost as if he is talking about a third party, a completely different person. A $75,000-a-year, BMW-driving Republican who worked on three different campaigns for Ronald Reagan, he was in favor of capital punishment and far from open-minded about mental illness.

“I was a borderline fascist for years, just a little to the left of the John Birch Society,” he says with a smile. “This was a rude awakening.”

In 1985, Clarke was laid off from his job of seven years with Oak Industries in Rancho Bernardo. He found a new job as the general manager of a post-production video facility in Los Angeles, but the pressures began to build. He was ordered to fire some employees. He was attempting to conduct a long-distance relationship with his fiancee in San Diego. His well-structured life began to unravel. Delusions and paranoia began to take over.

Still, no one saw the tragedy ahead, says Jenny Cullinan-James, a Bay Area resident who worked with Clarke for three years at Oak Industries.

“If I was to go through my Christmas card list and ask who could kill someone, he’d be at the bottom of the list,” Cullinan-James said. “He’s a very warm, intelligent person and that description applied before this happened, as well as afterward.”

On Sept. 21, 1985, convinced that his fiancee, Jill Hunter, was “trying to recruit him into the devil’s brigade,” he flew into a psychotic rage and choked her to death. Neighbors called the police, who arrived just moments after she died.

Clarke says he had no idea what he had done. In the film, he describes the killing as the end of a movie. “It stopped as fast as it started,” he says. “Suddenly I was Chris Clarke again and my fiancee was lying on the floor.”

Taken to jail, he couldn’t deal with the horror of the situation. He tried to commit suicide several times. In his last attempt, which almost succeeded, he tried to hang himself in the Central Detention Facility.

Found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was sent to Patton, where he exhibited signs of extreme depression. A therapist who put him on a regimen of playing tennis and other recreational activities helped start him back on the road to the world of the living.

“Asylum” gives viewers a straightforward, cinema verite look at the inner workings of the Patton facility. Several other patients also were interviewed and followed through their daily activities and therapy sessions, including one woman who killed her baby.

Clarke saw an advance copy of the documentary and says the film demonstrates what Patton does to help people.

Clarke’s problem was “not brain chemistry,” Smith says. “It is more certain that Chris’ psychosis was brought about by a series of stressors in his life, exacerbated by his upbringing,” particularly a history of abuse during his childhood.

According to Smith, Clarke was suffering from a form of schizophrenia that can result in brief psychotic episodes.

“Generally it’s not recurring. It is unlikely that he would have another psychotic episode in his life,” Smith says.

Because of the insanity verdict, Clarke is not a convicted felon and his civil rights are not restricted in any way; for example, he can vote. He will stay in the conditional release program until Superior Court fully restores his legal status, releasing him from the program. Patients such as Clarke usually stay in the system for two to three years, Smith says.

Although he lived in a halfway house when he was first released, he now lives on his own in San Diego County and is financially self-sufficient. As long as he maintains contact with the release program and doesn’t violate any of the agreements he made when he left Patton, such as not drinking or doing drugs, he is free to do what he wants. In addition to his job, he helps raise money for the La Mesa YMCA. He plays tennis and volleyball regularly, and he’s taking a French class.

He seems happy. The smile comes quickly. But the memory that he has killed a person is never far away.

“I still think about it--not every day, but I see things that trigger the memories,” he says, his voice trailing off. “And that dampens any happiness I feel.”

According to the film, 88% of patients released from Patton never commit another crime. Clarke says he would recognize if he was getting into trouble again. He knows the signs now--the mistrust of others, the lack of sleep, the compulsive behavior. He knows what to do to avoid stress.

When asked about the pressures he’s facing now, the stress of going public with his story, he takes off his glasses and leans forward.

The stress is “not as much as murdering somebody,” he says, forming the words slowly. “This is a cakewalk compared to that.”

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