Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell

HE WAS THEIR TRUSTED FAMILY DOCTOR...

THE MAN WHO DELIVERED

THEIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS.

HOW COULD THEY BELIEVE WHAT HE HAD DONE?

"A STAGGERING EXAMINATION OF TYRANNY, ABUSE AND BETRAYAL:'
—The Washington Post

"AN INTENSE BIZARRE TALE....

A disturbing, well-written book,

this will leave the reader feeling almost as involved in events as the Lovell citizens. Very highly recommended."

—Library Journal

"A TRUE STORY ABOUT A MODERN-DAY DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE"
—The Tribune
(Salt Lake City)

"REMARKABLE.
..'Doc'
becomes a traversal of evil, religious hypocrisy, sexism and pathological denial!'
—Chicago Tribune

"RIVETING...Readers will not be able to put the book down!'
—The Sunday Oklahoman

"A FASCINATING, thoroughly appalling true story, expertly chronicled by Olsen"
—Booklist

"Aficionadaos of true crime will be riveted. . . . Sensationalistic, yes, but . . . also a study of the power that ignorance and repression bring, and of the sanctity our society accords the guy in the white coat." —
New Women

"Olsen graphically depicts the stunned disbelief and shame of those who knew what had happened to them: Each thought she was the only victim, that [Dr.] Story would never do such a thing."

—The Washington Post

"DOC"

THE RAPE OF THE TOWN OF LOVELL

by best-selling author Jack Olsen

"[A] fascinating, disturbing, heart-wrenching document on the destruction of lifelong friendships, even blood kinships, as the pros and cons for the doctor lined up against each other in a bitter, burning conflict that in the end destroyed the little town."

—El Paso Times

"A true story filled with a dramatic Sadness somehow appropriate to the New West." —
Sunday Oregonian

BOOKS BY JACK OLSEN

"Doc": The Rape of the Town of Lovell
1989
Cold Kill
1987
Give a Boy a Gun
1985
"Son": A Psychopath and His Victims
1983
Have You Seen My Son?
1982
Missing Persons 1981 Night Watch
1979
The Secret of Fire Five
1977
Massy's Game
1976
Alphabet Jackson
1974
The Man with the Candy
1974
The Girls in the Office
1971
Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth
1971
The Bridge at Chappaquiddick
1970
Night of the Grizzlies
1969
Silence on Monte Sole
1968

QUANTITY SALES

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THE RAPE OF THE TOWN OF LOVELL

JACK OLSEN

A DELL BOOK

Published by Dell Publishing a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

666 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10103

Copyright © 1989 by Jack Olsen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Atheneum, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, New York.

The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. ISBN: 0-440-20668-5

Reprinted by arrangement with Atheneum Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada May 1990

10 987654321

RAD

For Su forever

Lovell, Cowley and Byron—we call it the devil's triangle. A few years ago a psychologist came here to practice. I met him and said, "Welcome to the twilight zone." He laughed and said that was a negative statement. Six months later he was gone.

—Cheryl Nebel

Sex is a topic so fraught with anxiety in the Mormon church that it is no surprise that countless distortions have arisen around it.

—Sonia Johnson,

From Housewife to Heretic

"There are very few acts of volition. I don't believe in individual guilt. . . . And yet I do believe that the intelligent person, the moral individual, must avoid evil and cruelty and dishonesties. I once wrote that the only crime is deliberate cruelty. I still believe that."

—Tennessee Williams,

quoted by Dotson Rader in
Tennessee: Cry of the Heart

CONTENTS

Prologue 1

BOOK ONE Love Among the Mormons

BOOK TWO The Law's Delays 153

BOOK THREE Justice and Denial 333

Epilogue 513

Author's Note 543

PROLOGUE

i.

Driving into town on State Highway 310, the motorist sees:

A railroad spur leading to a bulky brick building. A four-pack of thick white silos next to a towering smokestack. An aging maroon and gray boxcar,
brach's candy
faintly lettered on its side. Mottled brown sugar beets in mounds higher than houses. An oblong little park, accented by rosebushes. Block after block of one-story frame homes in need of paint. Heavy-limbed honey locusts, cotton-woods, maples; weeping birches drooping to the ground; tall stiff firs. Street-corner flower boxes, most of them displaying weeds. Broad avenues with deep gutters. One traffic light. Signs:

THE ROSE CITY
pop
2447
elev
3814 Minnows-crawlers Murphey Ford is still open! Hunter's welcome

And a low-slung red-brick edifice set back from the street on a manicured lawn a block long: "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." A deserted bank building, spiders spinning in cracked windows. The Hyart Theater, "open two nights a week, one show only, shorts repeated after feature." Empty storefronts with old signs—Montgomery Ward, Kids Are Special Clothes, Busy Corner Pharmacy, Williams Family Restaurant, John's Auto Clinic, Ponderosa Floral. Abandoned gas stations and souvenir shops and cafes. A ruined carwash, windows out, the smashed clock on the facade stopped at 2:14.

And a brace of mallards in a taxidermist's window. A Rexall Drug with soda fountain. Three bars, two restaurants, an IGA market, a few small shops, a secondhand store, vacant lots littered with rubble, earth-moving equipment with rusted gears, disused balers and tractors.

And older model Darts, Blazers, Dusters, Broncos, some with flapping fenders. Pickups bearing dogs. Tired drivers in faded cowboy clothes. Teenagers lounging in front of Pizza on the Run. Patriarchs under a tree.

Lovell, Wyoming. Dry, dusty, demoralized, dying. Even on sun-struck days when heat blisters the asphalt, the town seems to lie in shadow. Most drivers pass on through.

ii.

Less than a block from the thin gray-and-white steeple of the Mormon church, a Harvard alumnus named William Watts Horsley once practiced medicine on Park Avenue. The white frame sides of his two-story house seemed to blush from the glow of fifteen hundred rosebushes. For years he served as a director of the American Rose Society, and lie was renowned for his studies of the life cycle of the rose midge. Garden companies sent him their latest specimens to critique. He was known as the Rose Doctor.

A public-spirited man, Dr. Horsley made it a practice to present a selection of rosebushes to every home buyer. New mothers received offerings in their babies' honor. The gifts often included the

PROLOGUE

lovely pink-and-yellow Peace Rose, which Dr. Horsley and Jinx Falkenburg had officially named at a Rose Society ceremony in San Diego. As Lovell's volunteer parks director, he established public gardens that were dense with red, white, pink and yellow roses. He and his devoted sons planted bushes around the hospital, in front of stores, even in vacant lots. Because of Dr. Horsley, the community became known, first informally and then by edict of its leaders, as the Rose Town of Wyoming.

W.W. Horsley was a skilled surgeon, a balding near-genius with odd but formidable talents. He could shoot the eye out of a mudhen with a .22. With his slingshot of surgical tubing, he killed sage grouse at fifty yards. He was a mnemonics expert who could make twenty-five new friends at a convention and, a year or two later, recite the name and favorite rose of each.

He also had a dark side. In the final years of his practice, he was forced off the staff of the local hospital. The management leaked a cover story to the effect that he'd breached drug rules, but the truth was that he'd been caught flagrante delicto with another doctor's male patient.

Only a few insiders knew that the brilliant Horsley had indulged himself with boys and young men for years. After his resignation, he resumed his sexual practices in the privacy of his office. Thus the doctor who'd expected to be remembered for his love of roses left a different kind of legacy when he died in 1971. His home at 127 Park Avenue slipped into other hands and soon was barren of the bushes that he'd tended branch by branch and flower by flower.

Not everyone mourned. Some said that in his own way, the Rose Doctor was responsible for the disgrace that befell the town in the 1980s. But by then he'd been dead for years and didn't have to share the blame.

BOOK I

LOVE AMONG THE MORMONS

1

ARDEN McARTHUR

She liked to tell her friends that the first time she laid eyes on Dr. John Story he seemed like a pluperfect geek. That was back in 1958, shortly after he arrived in the small Wyoming town east of Yellowstone Park. At the time, Arden's regular physician was away, and the new man had set up his practice in a squat little building across the street from the town hall. Arden hated to leave her beet field—it was June, time for the first hoeing—but baby Minda was running a fever-

Right from the start (as she explained later) she was put off by the tight-lipped way this Dr. Story treated the three-month-old girl. Lovellites were used to folksy, friendly doctors, but the new man didn't have a shred of personality. He was just . . . blah. He reminded her of Mr. Peepers.

She warned herself to stop being judgmental. She disliked that particular fault and constantly fought against it. Like almost everyone else in this isolated outpost, she was deeply religious. She believed that judgment was for Father in Heaven, not for his children, even if the children were "LDS," members of the church of