A Writer's Life (50 page)

“What for?” Bobbitt asked.

“I want to see where you've been cut,” said Dr. Sharpe.

“That's not where I'm cut.”

“So, where
are
you cut?” asked Dr. Sharpe.

With several medical personnel peeking in and directing their attention toward him, John Bobbitt lowered the pants and heard sighs and murmurings from around the room. The scrotum was intact, but where the penis had been was now a clump of bloody flaps of skin.

“What
happened?”
Dr. Sharp asked.

“I don't know.”

“Did your wife do this?” asked Sharpe, who had heard what Robert Johnston had been yelling earlier.

“Guess so.”

“Do you need any pain medicine?”

“No, it doesn't hurt.”

Dr. Sharpe hastened to the registration desk and called the home number of the urological surgeon, Dr. James Sehn, who resided some thirty miles away, near Middleburg, Virginia.

“Jim,” said Dr. Sharpe, “I've got a guy here whose penis has been severed.”

There was a pause on Sehn's end of the line. Then he asked, “How much of it is gone?”

“As far as I can tell, all of it.”

“Where's the penis itself?”

“I honestly don't know.”

“I'll be right in,” said Dr. Sehn.

S
HORTLY AFTER 5:00 A.M., AS
P
OLICE
O
FFICER
D
AVID
S
AWYER WAS
slowly driving his patrol car through a wide street in the historic section of Old Town Manassas, passing a gazebo and a bronze plaque marking this as a Civil War battle area, he heard himself being summoned aloud by his identity number (169) on the police radio and was told to go at once to Prince William County hospital to interview and file a report on a “male assault victim” who was currently undergoing treatment there.

But after Officer Sawyer had arrived in the emergency room and then began looking around, expecting to find what he usually found when searching for an “assault victim”—a moaning patient with a lacerated face, puffy eyes, and a bandaged head—he saw instead a handsome and unmarked young man who, seated calmly with a white sheet draped over his shoulders and midsection, was chatting with a male medical assistant and a female nurse as they went about checking his blood pressure and pulse.

“Where's my victim?” Officer Sawyer asked them.

“This is him,” said the medical assistant, nodding toward Bobbitt.

“What's wrong with
him?”

“His wife cut off his penis,” the nurse said matter-of-factly.

Misunderstanding her—thinking she'd said “pinkie” instead of “penis”—Sawyer looked at Bobbitt's right hand, then his left, and replied, “His pinkie looks fine to me.”

“No,
penis,”
said the nurse.

Sawyer felt a sudden pang in his groin. Then, turning to the male assistant, he said, “Show me the injury.”

The assistant lifted up the sheet, and after Sawyer had gotten a mere glimpse of the damage, he turned away. “I nearly vomited,” he later told me. After the assistant had put the sheet back over Bobbitt's body, Sawyer asked him to remove it once more. Sawyer was not pleased by his instinctive
reaction a moment earlier. “I regrouped, looked at it again, was more professional this time.” He asked the nurse to let him borrow a Polaroid camera, and he proceeded to take eight photographs of Bobbitt's condition to be included in the police report. Then he looked squarely into the eyes of John Bobbitt, searching for some clue that might explain the latter's apparent calm in the aftermath of this unspeakable situation, and he asked softly, “What happened?”

“All I can remember is I woke up in pain, and saw my wife running out of the room,” Bobbitt said, “and I really can't believe this happened, can't believe this happened.…”

Sawyer saw this as a crime fraught with legal complications and pitfalls for those involved in the investigation. It was what the police called a “red ball” case. It was a “he said/she said” domestic donnybrook that the media would feed upon, that would swamp the police department with paperwork, that would demand courtroom testimony in the presence of competing attorneys, and that would surely threaten the careers of any law-enforcement officer who overlooked or misinterpreted even a tiny detail. Sawyer knew that a search warrant would be immediately necessary before the police could enter the victim's apartment, and so he took out his notepad and asked Bobbitt where the cutting had occurred. Bobbitt gave his address: 8174 Peakwood Court, Apartment 5, on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot. Sawyer knew exactly where this was, and he felt a sense of relief. The crime had
not
been committed in Sawyer's jurisdiction! Sawyer was with the Manassas
city
police department, whereas Bobbitt's apartment building was technically across the city line and was covered by the
county's
police department. While the city of Manassas was part of Prince William County, it nevertheless operated independently, and therefore Sawyer should not have been sent to the hospital in the first place.

Meanwhile, two other police officers from the city had arrived to join Sawyer at the hospital. Sawyer had already informed his superiors by radio that the crime had occurred in county territory, and had provided the address, but Sawyer and his two colleagues remained ready to drive to the apartment and begin searching for the penis
if
they were told to do so.

“Officers, we
need
that penis!” one of the nurses reminded them. “The surgeons will be here any minute to start operating.”

Moments later a radio message came to Sawyer and his fellow officers from city headquarters: “Do
not go
to the Bobbitt apartment; let the
county
police go—it's a
county
problem.” A police dispatcher within the city's headquarters (Robert Weaver) was at this time communicating via radio with the police dispatcher within county headquarters (Carolyn Walls):

Weaver:
“… Need an officer to respond ASAP to go out to pick up some property that [the patient] needs to have immediately.…It's pretty nasty.”

Walls:
“… Has he lost a part of his body?”

Weaver:
“Uh, you can't really say over the radio, but …”

Walls:
“Okay, but I mean, is it a thing?”

Weaver:
“Well … they have to get that once they get out there.”

Walls:
“Okay. All right. We have someone en route.”

Weaver:
“… How long for an officer to get there?”

Walls:
“… Fifteen minutes.”

Weaver:
“… You know how this thing about being in the city, being in the county …”

Walls:
“Yeah.”

Weaver:
“It's kind of crazy, but no problem.…”

Walls:
“Yeah.”

After Weaver had hung up, Walls received a second call from the city's police force, this time from Sgt. Beth Weden. “You might want to send out a couple [of officers to the apartment],” Sergeant Weden suggested, and she was less restrained than the dispatcher Robert Weaver had been in describing Bobbitt's injury. “This man's got his penis all cut off,” Weden told Carolyn Walls, “and the hospital needs it ASAP to try and salvage this man's dignity.”

As three county officers, plus a rescue squad with an ambulance, motored toward the Bobbitts' apartment, hoping to retrieve the penis, three other county officers arrived at Prince William County hospital to relieve from duty the three city officers who had arrived earlier. The city officers greeted them at the emergency entrance, and one city cop announced with a grin, “Oh, do we have a case for you guys! Yes, you've got a victim inside, a Mr. Less. His first name is Richard. You can call him Dick. Dick Less … ha-ha.”

One of the newly arrived county officers was Cecil Deane, who had been in the hospital a few hours earlier, interrogating the Laotian motorcycle rider Khone, who had sustained injuries in an accident. Cecil Deane was now here for the county police to take photographs of Bobbitt's diminished penis. After the medical assistant had lifted the sheet that Bobbitt had been wearing, and just before Deane had raised the 33-mm Canon color camera and focused it down toward the patient's groin area, he made eye contact with Bobbitt and then asked Bobbitt a question he knew was inane, but he asked it anyway: “How you doing?”

Shrugging and forcing a smile, Bobbitt replied, “Be careful who you date.”

While Cecil Deane was taking pictures, his fellow officer Dan Harris was getting permission from Bobbitt to investigate the apartment. Having obtained the key from Bobbitt's friend Robert Johnston, Dan Harris left the emergency room and went outside to hand the key over to Officer John Tillman, who was waiting in a patrol car. Tillman then drove with it a few miles to the Bobbitt apartment, where, joined by two other colleagues, who had been waiting for him in the parking lot, he unlocked the door and began the search for the missing part of the penis.

Stepping around the bloodstains on the beige carpet in the living room, and trying to avoid rubbing against the blood smears on the walls, Tillman led the way into the bedroom and began to shake out the sheets, thinking that this was the most likely place to find what he was looking for. But no such luck. Then he and the others looked under the bed, around the floor, and lifted up the nightstand. Then they went into the kitchenette, expecting, hoping, to find a little piece of flesh near the knife rack on the counter. One of the rescue workers, Mike Perry, ran his hand through the water in the bottom of the washing machine. The others were now in the bathroom, looking in the toilet, in the trash basket, under the sink.

“Find anything yet?” came the radio query from Sgt. William Hurley, who was downstairs in his car, parked below the porch.

“Not yet,” said Officer Tillman.

“Keep looking,” said Sergeant Hurley.

Tillman and the others continued for another five minutes, searching through the closet, the bureau drawers, under the sofa bed.

“It's just
not
here,” Tillman declared to Hurley.

“Okay, then,” said Hurley, “come on down and let's look around in the shrubs and parking lot.”

It was getting close to 6 a.m. as the men came running down the staircase and began exploring the grounds around the building with the aid of their flashlights. It was then that a seventy-year-old tenant named Ella Jones poked her head outside the front door of her ground-floor apartment and called out to Sergeant Hurley: “Good morning, Officer, what you looking for out there?”

“Oh, we're looking for something somebody might have thrown here,” said Hurley. Then he heard his car radio blaring forth with a message: Lorena Bobbitt had just turned herself in to the county police, and she told one of the lieutenants that she had thrown the penis into the grass near the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, across the street from a 7-Eleven store. This was only a quarter of a mile from where Sergeant Hurley's car was now parked, and so he and his men
were able to reassemble at the intersection within a few minutes. It was daylight now, and while the men wandered around in the fields with their heads down and their eyes intently focused on the ground around their feet—one man was reminded of his childhood days on Easter-egg hunts—Hurley stood somewhat aloof at roadside, trying to conceal the sense of ridiculousness that he felt, along with a certain personal discomfort, at being in charge of a search party that was trying to track down a wayward penis.

Sgt. William Hurley was a shortish, compactly built, dark-haired man in his forties. He had been a policeman for fifteen years, and he was also a born-again Christian and a proper and somewhat old-fashioned individual who disliked being around people who used blasphemous language or told dirty jokes or made smirking or mocking references to lovemaking or to sex organs. It was characteristic of him on this particular morning to refer to the missing body part as an “appendage,” and he was chagrined when he heard over his car radio the voice of Sgt. Beth Weden referring to Bobbitt's lost manhood in a jocular and blatant manner: “This man's got his penis all cut off.… [Let's] salvage this man's dignity.”

Hurley never expected to hear a cop, and certainly not a female cop, talking like this on the police radio network, perhaps broadcasting to hundreds of officers and employees of the department within the 348-square-mile radius of Prince William County. Although he had tried to make newly hired female officers feel welcome in what had once been an exclusively fraternal order, he suspected that some women believed that the best way to gain male acceptance was to emulate unacceptable male behavior. Sergeant Hurley thought otherwise. Which was not to say that in his younger days he had not occasionally been indiscreet and foul-mouthed, an admission that he made to me during one of our interviews. But his life had changed radically since he came to know God in 1976, he explained, and as a consequence he gradually stopped swearing, gambling, smoking, drinking, and otherwise acting in ways that had caused his wife, Cheryl, to pack her bags one day and tell him that she was leaving their marriage.

But he had persuaded her to give him one more chance to reform; and he
did
reform, he told me, after he had met a charismatic Christian preacher who recruited him into the Reston Bible Church and inspired within him a righteous vigor that eventually caused him to quit his job as a golf pro and apply for a position as a police officer within the Prince William County correctional system. As he might have expected, the hiring officer conducted a background check and discovered that William Hurley had been arrested six times for speeding and once for reckless driving.
But Hurley convinced the officer that whatever appeared on the computer screen was an out-of-date reflection of the born-again man he currently was; and so Hurley was tentatively accepted as a police recruit in July 1978. In the fifteen years since then, he had justified the faith that the officer had shown in hiring him.