A Mother's Trial (46 page)

Steve dragged himself from work to home to work again. There was Christmas to prepare for with its endless rounds of festivities. After the holidays, Priscilla applied for a part-time job at Fotos ‘N’ Films, which had a drive-in booth at the Northgate Mall in Terra Linda. To its advantage, the job offered work during school hours, but the hourly wage of $3.25 was not going to do much to solve their financial problems. Still, it was a start.

Steve had been damned proud of Pris. She had waltzed into that place, told the woman who was doing the hiring exactly who she was, and the woman had admired her honesty and hired her on the spot.

The job itself had scarcely been challenging, he knew. But within a few weeks, Priscilla was running the place, training other employees, enjoying the selling and the communication with the public. She had applied for other jobs more consistent with her training; one in particular she was hoping to get was in Social Security. But the application process was long and drawn-out. She continued studying the job openings, sending off applications to the Firemen’s Fund, which was known for a hiring system that did not discriminate against ex-offenders, and to a convalescent home in Mill Valley. She was almost hired at the home, but in the end her criminal record prevented it.

On March 7, 1980, Steve finally landed in the hospital. In January his health had deteriorated to such a degree that Priscilla began insisting he see a doctor. By then he had lost thirty-five pounds.

“Look, they’re going to say I’m doing something to you! I just get home and you start getting sick! You’re looking worse and worse. You’ve got to be checked out,” she said.

But they didn’t have a doctor. On January first, they had switched from Kaiser to Blue Cross; that had been the earliest they could accomplish the transfer of coverage. But Kaiser had supplied their medical needs since 1968, and they hadn’t needed—nor did they know—a private doctor.

Finally Nancy Schaefer arranged for Steve to see Dr. Werschky. Because Nancy knew the general practitioner, she obligingly told him about the background of the case, easing the awkwardness of the entire situation. Steve had been frank with Werschky.

“You gotta find it, doctor. If I die, they’ll accuse my wife. She’ll be right back in jail.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

But it had taken Werschky two months. Steve had improved at first when an ear infection had been diagnosed and antibiotics prescribed. But as soon as the course of medicine ended, his condition worsened again. Blood tests and an extensive physical were normal. But finally some strep showed up and Werschky hit upon the truth.

“You’ve got a bicuspid heart valve instead of a tricuspid, Steve,” Werschky had said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Been to the dentist lately?”

And that had been the solution. Steve’s heart condition had surfaced ten years before; because of it he followed standard routines before visiting the dentist. When his teeth were cleaned all sorts of bacteria were released into his bloodstream and could cause serious heart infections in people with heart abnormalities. Steve always began a course of antibiotics before dental appointments. But apparently the protocol had changed. This time his precautions had been insufficient.

“You’ve got a heart infection, Steve. We don’t fool around with those.”

Within a week of hospitalization, Steve was much improved. He began to eat, sit up, and receive visitors. One of the first to come was Jerry Dodson.

Jerry was one of the best things to happen in a long while: Steve knew that. He was good for Steve and even better for Priscilla. They had met Jerry and his wife at Christ Presbyterian, the church they now attended. They hadn’t seen Jim Hutchison since June, right before Priscilla’s imprisonment, when they had a final parting of the ways. Steve would never understand what motivated that man, what caused him to withdraw his support and then pretend he hadn’t. Marietta had seen through it; Steve admired her for that.

One day in June, Marietta had gone alone to Aldersgate, where she had been a loyal parishioner for months, and in the portion of the service during which the congregation shared its joys and concerns, she had stood to lambaste the congregation for its lack of support for her daughter.

“Only God and Priscilla know whether she’s innocent, but that is not the point. You should support her,” she had scolded. Jim Hutchison had not been present, but as always when he missed service, he had listened later to the tape recording that had been made. Then he had written a long letter to Marietta—addressed to her North Carolina home so she would not receive it while she was in Terra Linda—all filled with some sort of mumbo jumbo about the prodigal son. Marietta would never let Steve read it; she was afraid it would set him off. Just hearing about the letter had been enough for Steve. He had called the bishop to complain about Hutchison, and followed his call with a formal letter of complaint. At least—and Steve had been grateful for that small favor—Priscilla was no longer making excuses for Hutchison. She saw him for what he was. Steve had no doubts about what the man was doing: Hutchison wanted that church built up on the hill on Kaiser land; he had always wanted that. He’d do anything for it. As far as Steve was concerned, that was going to be the church that Pris built.

The congregation and minister at Christ Presbyterian had welcomed Priscilla and Steve. They had even contributed to the defense fund. And Priscilla much preferred Reverend Dave Steele’s style in church. The church, after all, was a congregation and its spirit, not the minister or the building. That was something Priscilla recently had come to realize about Jim Hutchison, that to him the building was paramount. Steve agreed with her. And to his mind, Reverend Steele was less conservative a preacher. You could hear guitar music in his church. The Doudiets attended, and Nancy Dacus—now Nancy Greenfield since her divorce—was talking about joining. And that’s where they had met the Dodsons, who had just returned from Germany. Jerry was an army psychiatrist who had been stationed in Frankfurt.

“It was absolute hell over there,” he told Priscilla and Steve.

“I was the only child psychiatrist in the whole region. The pressure was unbelievable. And then when Sue got cancer, I thought I’d go off the deep end. You know the thing that attracted me to you was that you were the only people I could find who had had a worse year than I did!”

Sometimes it was hard being around the Dodsons, of course. Steve acknowledged that. Jerry and Sue had a daughter just Tia’s age—the memories were bitter. But their friendship was worth that because Jerry offered some invaluable reality testing. He hadn’t known Priscilla before her arrest; he didn’t have any preconceived notions about her. Yet within a few months he was telling her she wasn’t crazy, and she wasn’t a child abuser.

“Look, the more I get to know you, Priscilla, the more certain I am that you don’t have this Munchausen’s,” he said one day in his whispery Texas drawl.  “I've really started reading up on the syndrome. Frankly I’m intrigued. But nothing I’ve read leads me to conclude you’ve got it. The literature I’ve read indicates that once a Munchausen loses the proxy, she starts showing the symptoms herself—and you haven’t done that. You’re sound as a bell! The only thing I can possibly imagine is some sort of multiple personality, but there’s absolutely no evidence of that. And the people around you would know that even if you didn’t. There’s just no way to disguise that sort of a thing.”

It had been damn reassuring, Steve thought. For Pris, too. Dodson knew what he was talking about: he treated adults as well as children. And he was young and sensitive and kept assuring Priscilla that he wasn’t likely to be attracted to child killers. He had been a big help while Steve was in the hospital, too.

Dr. Werschky released Steve from Marin General the first week in April.

“Try not to put that weight back on, Steve. You’re right where you should be. And no more cigarettes.”

“Right, Doc. I don’t need the damn things anymore anyway. We’re gonna take care of business now.”

“You know I got a call from a doctor who had been asked to call me by a Detective Lindquist,” he said. “He just thought he’d fill me in on who you all were, in case it affected my diagnosis.”

Steve gave a bitter laugh. “Lindquist thought Pris was poisoning me, right?”

“I guess he thought it was a possibility. I told the doctor we had it under control.”

“Pris calls that sucker an avenging angel. Lindquist seems to have made us his personal little vendetta. He got what he wanted; you’d think he’d leave us alone to live our life—what’s left of it.”

“What’s the status of the appeal?”

“No news.”

“What about the Syntex thing? I saw
20/20
just had something on it.”

“Yeah. Our lawyer’s following up on it. The family that’s got our little girl now, the mother wrote in for a transcript of the program. Her older adopted boy was on that formula, too, and she thinks they may have some cause for a lawsuit. There’s some kind of class action suit being filed by a lawyer in Chicago. She’s investigating that for Mindy, too.”

“What about you? Did you ever consider a suit against Kaiser for malpractice?”

“Yeah, we talked about it once. But what do we sue them for? Failure to spot sodium poisoning? That would be admitting Pris had done it, and of course she didn’t. Our lawyer or somebody said they’d just turn around and countersue us for the money they spent on Tia and Mindy. I heard one estimate that Tia’s treatment cost Kaiser half a million dollars. He shook his head.

“And for what?” he added softly.

6

Nine and a half months later, on a cold and rainy January day, Priscilla’s case came up for oral argument at the state court of appeal in San Francisco.

Priscilla dressed carefully for the session. The judges would not know she was there, Ed had told her. It was unusual for the appellant to be in the courtroom; most convicted murders were in jail during the appellate process. They were to meet Ed there, but Al Collins would not attend. Ed had told Priscilla that the two attorneys were no longer on speaking terms: their friendship a casualty of the case. But he would never tell her the details of the schism.

Priscilla was shocked to see Josh Thomas and Ted Lindquist in the courtroom. The district attorney had no say at the appellate level, as it was the state attorney general who handled the respondent’s brief and court appearance. And the only reason for Lindquist’s appearance could be personal interest.

“They just can’t stay away,” Steve muttered when he saw the two seated in the rows of spectator seats. “They’ll be at our funerals if they live that long.”

Priscilla knew that the court’s request for oral argument was a positive sign. In most cases the panel relied solely on the briefs prepared by the attorneys for appellant and respondent. But if a case interested the justices—or if they were sharply divided in their initial impressions—they called for oral argument. At that time the two attorneys who had prepared the briefs appeared before the three-judge panel and were given strictly regimented periods of time to present and rebut arguments. In Priscilla’s case, the judges had requested that argument be focused on one of the three grounds of appeal: Judge Burke’s failure to present diminished capacity instructions to the jury
sua sponte,
even though the defense had not requested such instructions and had, in fact, actively opposed any motion that they be given. The defense, after all, had been based on the supposition that Priscilla was completely sane.

Ed had told Priscilla that he believed the best grounds for her appeal lay in another direction. Burke’s decision to allow Martin Blinder’s testimony on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
when the defense had not raised the issue of Priscilla’s mental state,
was unconscionable, Ed felt. And Jon Purver, in the appellant’s brief, had discussed this issue at length, as well as what he believed to be Juror Polizzi’s prejudicial experiment. But Purver had insisted—and apparently with some justification, as the panel had ordered argument on this issue—that Priscilla’s best ground for a new trial rested on the failure to give diminished capacity instructions. He had found some cases to support his opinion that the judge,
on his own,
should have issued such instructions.

In the months since her release on bail, Priscilla had regained some of the confidence she had lost at CIW. Jail infantilized prisoners and played on their helplessness and dependency; indeed this seemed to be a conscious method of control. But Priscilla’s understanding of this process had not shielded her from its effect, and when she emerged from five months of imprisonment, to some extent she had to relearn how to function independently and with her old assertiveness.

Her experience at Fotos ‘N’ Films had been significant. At the beginning of the summer, after six months with the company, she had been called in and offered the position of supervisor in the San Francisco office.

“I know you’ve had some legal problems, but we’re not concerned about that. What we’re looking at is your job performance,” Mr. Cossman said. “Are you interested?

Priscilla accepted the position. Although the salary was not high and she would incur the additional expense of commuting to the city, she had been offered the use of a company car during working hours. This would be invaluable as she was expected to travel to the various Bay Area stores. More than anything else, though, the promotion boosted Priscilla’s confidence. Now her job more nearly suited her background and knowledge. She would be on her own and expected to deal both with the public and with company employees. Management believed in her. At the end of sixty days, Cossman approved a raise. Then he offered her use of a car and gas money during nonworking hours. After another sixty days he raised her salary again. She began receiving discounts and then commission. What a change it was.

Steve’s illness had been hard on Priscilla, but even more difficult for the boys. Suddenly they lost the one person on whom they had been totally dependent. Erik was old enough to remember that members of their family who went into the hospital did not come home again. And to make matters worse for all of them, while Steve was in the hospital, the dishwasher collapsed and the roof began to leak. But Priscilla managed and Steve recovered, and now, suddenly, it looked as though nothing could go wrong.