Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (19 page)

No one in the Thompson family went undressed. Wanda avoided taking showers at school because she was embarrassed. One day the gym teacher forced her to disrobe; forty years later Wanda still considered it an act of unreasonable cruelty. She taught her own children to shut the bathroom door during potty training. "We LDS folks talk about our bodies being a temple," Wanda explained. "Nobody watches you naked. Nobody touches you . . . down there. That is your private parts."

She married Charles Hammond when she was eighteen. They rented a small farm three miles out in the country and contracted ten acres of river bottom in beets. Her life was still stoop labor, but with variations. Charles, as shy as his wife, worked on farms and repaired cars, and the two of them spelled each other driving the school bus for extra cash.

Dr. Story delivered the last two of their seven children. Wanda found him an odd duck but skilled. When she suggested that her infant son's diarrhea might be caused by teething, he said, "What gives you the authority to be the doctor? I'm the doctor here."

He kept good track of her plumbing, and her daughters', too. Right after she started seeing him around 1962, he began talking about doing a "full-length." She told Charles, "I don't know what he means by a full-length. He's checked down my throat as far as he can look. He's examined me in every way."

In those years Wanda was firm and tanned from her long workdays in the sun. Every time she went in for a pregnancy checkup, Dr. Story gave her a pelvic, and some of them lasted a half hour. "He sure watches closely," she told Charles. "The other doctors just felt around a little bit."

In the fall of 1969, she finally realized what the doctor was up to. She had a 1:45
p.m
. appointment for a sore throat. He let her wait till he'd treated the other patients, then ushered her into an examining room at 3
p.m
. After he looked at her throat, he said, "Now we'll do that full-length."

"I've got to run the school bus at four," she said. /

"We'll have time."

At three thirty she was still waiting, and she called Charles to take over the run. Dr. Story came in, arranged her knees in the stirrups, and stretched the sheet across as a drape. Then he inserted something that felt like Charles and started pushing it in and out.

She didn't know how to react. He said, "Would you like to help me guide it in?"

"No," she gulped.

"Well, it certainly would be easier if you did."

"No!"

When his pubic hair tickled her thigh, she exclaimed, "Dr. Story!"

He pulled away and she heard him zip his pants. "That'll be all," he said, and left the room.

She dressed and stepped into the hall. The waiting room was dark. She let herself out the front door. It was 5:30.

She thought about going to the police chief, LaMar Averett—a nice man, a retired farmer, strong LDS—but she realized it would be her word against the doctor's. She thought of telling Charles, but she didn't want him in prison for murder. She felt dirty, unworthy. She lay in bed and told herself, In our church, you do
not
commit adultery. I should go to my bishop.

For the first night of hundreds to come, she cried herself to sleep.

She never returned to the clinic, and when she saw Story on the street, she would cross to the other side. For a while, she vented her rage on Charles. He would look sad and she knew she'd hurt his feelings, especially after she pushed him away in bed.

After a few weeks she told herself, You can't do Charles that way. He's the finest man in the world. He's not the one who hurt you.

When one of their children fell ill, Charles said, "You better get him to the doctor. That croup don't sound good."

Wanda said, "Well, I guess I'll take him to Dr. Christensen in Powell."

"How come you're wanting to change doctors?"

She started to cry. "Because Dr. Story took liberties that he had no right to."

At last they had their talk. Charles said, "I oughta go up there and knock that little shit on his ass. I oughta black his goddamn eyes for him." Wanda had never heard her husband cuss. She patted his hand and begged him not to get himself in trouble. When Charles finally cooled down, she thought, I'm glad I waited.

Dr. Ray Christensen asked, "Who was your previous doctor?"

"Dr. Story," she said apprehensively.

"How come you're not doctoring with him anymore?"

She groped for the right words. "He was, uh—he was getting too personal."

Christensen shook his head and said, "That man needs help."

She still owed Story $407. The bills arrived with neatly scripted memos on the face: "This is long overdue." "Can this be paid in full?"

She paid the debt off in six months. She thought it would make her feel less ugly about herself, but it didn't. She'd never known anxiety, but now there were times when she was afraid she would never draw another breath.

She added the checking job at the Rose City Food Farm to her chores. She thought, Good hard work takes a person's mind off their troubles. As the years passed, she began to feel less unworthy. Then the McArthur woman knocked.

WANDA HAMMOND

« « »

She picked up the envelope. She wondered what the Wyoming State Board of Medical Examiners was up to. Whatever it was, she wanted no part of Dr. John H. Story. She ripped Arden's envelope to pieces.

21

ARDEN McARTHUR

Driving toward home, Arden remembered something that Story had said early in their showdown in the doctors' lounge. "Who started these rumors?" he'd asked. "Dr. Welch's office?"

The more she thought about it, the less sense the accusation made. John Welch was a devout Mormon descended from a pioneer who'd arrived with the first LDS contingent in 1900. A professional like Dr. Welch would never stoop to nasty rumors or backbiting, least of all in his own home town.

Arden wondered if Story might have had someone else in mind. She remembered that Caroline Shotwell, wife of a former LDS bishop, had once worked for Story and now worked for Welch. Like a detective scratching for leads, she made a short detour to the Shotwell home.

Caroline Shotwell gave the impression that she was holding something back. She haltingly recalled that a woman had come to her husband John when he'd held the bishopric and claimed that Dr. Story had abused her. She didn't know the details, and John was forbidden to talk about it.

ARDEN McARTHUR

"Would you be willing to write a letter about what you know yourself?" Arden asked.

Caroline whimpered and turned her head. Arden thought, There's something here. This is a bright, level-headed sister and she doesn't show emotion over nothing. "Well, it's confidential," Caroline said. "Will you let me think about it for a while?"

"Of course, Caroline," Arden answered. "But please—if you know something, don't wait too long. There could be more victims every day."

Caroline chewed her lower lip. "Okay," she said slowly. "Maybe I can do it without using the woman's name."

22

CAROLINE SHOTWELL

How can I use the woman's name, Caroline asked herself, when the woman is me?

She'd been one of Dr. Story's charter patients. He'd seemed competent enough except for a few quirks. He talked so softly that she had trouble hearing him. He always carried a clipboard or a towel in front of his open smock. He prescribed hormones and gave her a pelvic exam before each injection "to see if you still need your medication." He kept trying to talk religion and politics, but she steered him away; the pelvics took long enough. She was raising a family and working as a gray lady at the hospital, and she had no idle time.

His office staff seemed to have a high turnover, and in the spring of 1972 he offered her a job. Her Mormon sister Ina Welling warned, "He's really got problems." Caroline felt like saying, Ina, if you'd just left religion and politics alone, you'd probably still be working there.

She'd barely started work when the doctor grew fangs. While patients sat in the waiting room, he delivered instructional lectures to the slaves, then later denied his own words. He never admitted a mistake; it was always someone else's fault. His rules varied from day to day; only a mind reader could have followed them. No male patients were to be scheduled before 4
p.m
. Whiny children, ethnics and welfare cases were to be discouraged. Patients were never to approach him in the hall. "Caroline," he warned her in his gentle voice, "if you ever let a patient talk to me in the hall, I'll really be nasty to them, and it'll be your fault."

His examining room and office were out of bounds except by personal order. He conveyed the impression that she would be burned severely if she touched the controls on his automatic table. The trash can was to be left open all night to dry and the contents incinerated in the morning. Kleenex boxes were kept half full. The music wasn't turned off till he said so.

He had fits about the Mormon garment. One of his nurses warned, "He's got a hang-up there. He told me, 'I'm not gonna monkey around with someone's underwear.' He said if these people have an aversion to removing the garment, you tell them if they could remove the garments for a Mormon doctor, then they can remove them for me.' "

In front of his staff, he railed against blacks, Latins and what he called "Germans," although Caroline realized that he really meant German-Americans. When a longtime patient's wife spoke up to him, he said, "Oh, that damned German!" Caroline suspected that he felt the same about Mormons, but didn't dare alienate so many patients.

He made frequent cracks about the obese. When the florist Beverly Moody would leave, he would tell the others, "She's just fat!" When Caroline reached a well-proportioned 150 herself, he summoned her to his office. "Mrs. Shotwell," he said, his brown eyes half-closed behind his big glasses, "do you realize you now weigh more than me?"

He seemed to enjoy controlling and bullying women. He ordered Caroline's elderly mother-in-law to walk home and change her blouse because he couldn't roll her sleeve up for the sphygmomanometer. He dominated his wife and frowned when she fraternized with others. Caroline felt sorry for Marilyn. The sad-faced woman complained that her love life was limited "because Doctor's always tired when he gets home." She took his withering sarcasm with a smile, but there were times when she seemed jealous and forlorn. She paced outside the door during one of his lengthy premarital exams. No one dared knock, and he offered no explanation when he finally came out and strode briskly for the bathroom.

After three months on the job, Caroline prepped an especially big-busted LDS woman for an examination. "Please," the woman asked, "can I keep my bra and garment on?" Caroline didn't have the heart to say no.

Dr. Story took one look and snapped, "Mrs. Shotwell, this patient is supposed to be undressed. She'll have to come back tomorrow. You have wasted
her
money and
my
time." When Caroline began to cry, he led her to his private office and lectured her till she cried harder.

She staggered to the reception desk and wrote a note on a prescription blank: "Dr. Story, it's obvious I'm not doing this job the way you want it done. Here's my key."

He called her at home that night and asked her to return. She responded, "I don't have to eat that bad."

"But Mrs. Shotwell," he said, "we need you." She noticed that the situation turned on
his
needs, not on the hurt he'd done to her. It seemed to epitomize his employee relations.

"I told you," she said, trying not to lose her composure again. "I'm not that hungry."

He suggested that she wasn't being fair and asked her to sleep on her decision. "You're very valuable around here, you know." He called with the same message the next day, and the next. In all his importunings, there was no hint of apology.

She saw no reason to drop him as her doctor. Everyone agreed he was the best around. He'd been treating her for fifteen years and had all her records. When she arrived for an appointment, he greeted her with a big smile, and the succession of pelvics resumed.

In the winter of 1974, six months after she'd quit the job, she realized that he was dilating her with his penis and probably had been doing it from the beginning. She kept the secret to herself. Her husband John, the former bishop, had long experience in granting dispensations, but she was ashamed to tell him and worried about what he might do. She knew that sooner or later she would have to warn another Story patient, her married daughter Mae Shotwell Fischer, but she held off for a while. She assumed that Story raped only older women; maybe it was because they couldn't get pregnant.

Six weeks later, her daughter entered the Shotwell home, her face pale and drawn. Caroline made her sit down and brought her a glass of water. Mae said she'd just had a pregnancy test and Dr. Story had dilated her. The tube felt so much like her husband Bill that she pulled the sheet aside for a look and saw his erect penis. "Oh," Story said, "didn't you know?"

When John came home from work that night, fhe shaken Caroline stopped sobbing long enough to say, "Dr. Story took liberties with Mae. I think something should be done."