Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (34 page)

"He's got his own church, his clinic, his own fan club. He does almost all the surgery at the hospital. He's got a lot of funny ideas. When the migrant workers get hurt, we have a hell of a time getting him out of bed. It's always, 'Check 'em in the hospital and I'll see 'em in the morning.' Seems like he makes value judgments. He'll say, 'I've dealt with these people before.' That's his code for Mexicans: 'these people.'"

"Any evidence that he abuses women?" Tharp asked.

Wilcock drained his cup. "I heard a few rumors eight or ten years ago. Norm Doerr and some of the other policemen said it was hysterical bullshit. Then an old guy asked me in the cafe if I knew what Doc Story was doing to women, but he wouldn't go any further. He seemed upset, and I got the impression he might be talking about his own flesh and blood. I asked Chief Averett, and he said, 'I know Doc Story. It's gossip.'"

LaMar Averett's tenure had been before Terrill Tharp's time, but the county attorney had heard tales about the easygoing old Mormon. Other cops waded into barroom brawls; Averett negotiated. He was in the farmer-chief tradition of his predecessor, Solon Cozzens, who refused to carry a weapon on the grounds that guns were dangerous. Averett liked to take juvenile delinquents home for a good meal and "talk some sense into 'em."

The rumors about Story had resumed a year or so ago, Wilcock went on as Tharp leaned back to listen. "I asked Danny Anderson and he said it was just one of Arden's deals. Two weeks later Danny told me, 'The witnesses aren't supposed to talk about it and my wife's a witness.' Then Bud Owsley came through town for the State Division of Criminal Investigation and I asked him what was going on.

"He says, 'I can't tell ya.'

"I says, 'You can't tell we?'

"He says, 'Nope. This Medical Board stuff is secret. But you've gotta get into it later. There's a lot there.'

"I says, 'What are we talking about? Bad medical practices?'

"He says, 'We're talking about rape.'

"I says, 'Well, when you boys are finished, will you fill me in?' He promised he would. I'm still waiting."

The chief offered his cup for a refill. "A month ago I got a call from a woman in Colorado," he continued. "Said she'd heard that Story'd been cleared. I said the hearings were still going on. She said, 'Oh, that's good to know.' I says, 'Why?' She says, 'Because of what he did to me.' I tried to get her to talk, but she wouldn't give her name. I asked her to write me a letter."

Tharp wondered how he would ever get his teeth into such a twilight zone case. If he brought charges, who would testify for the state? An anonymous caller from Colorado? Burnt-out victims too nervous to talk?

And there was a more personal problem. Unlike many young prosecutors who viewed their jobs as stepping-stones to big-money careers as defense lawyers, Terrill Raymond Tharp intended to earn $45,000 a year as Big Horn County Attorney for the rest of his life. It was a perfect spot for someone who'd once raised bummer lambs for spending money. As all-state high school baritone saxophonist, he'd toyed with the idea of becoming another Gerry Mulligan, given up music for a journalism degree at the University of Wyoming, then abandoned journalism for law. In his first year of practice, he'd grossed $7,000 and lived on corn and beans. At last he'd found his niche in a county office that no one else seemed to want. He explained the charm of his job: "When it's dead here, you could sit all day and not have two phone calls. Then all of a sudden you're up to your ass in alligators." He enjoyed the peace and the alligators, and he also liked to catch rainbow trout and plunk rabbits and take his wife and baby daughter up to Devils Canyon in his new pickup truck.

His constituents were like members of his own family, tough old farmers and blue-collar folks who didn't like to waste their tax dollars. The whole Big Horn County government ran on nickels and dimes. If he lost a kamikaze action against the most prominent medical man in the northern half, two results were certain: (1) the evil doctor would come out of it stronger than ever, and (2) Terrill Raymond Tharp would be back on corn and beans after the next election, and so would his wife and daughter.

"There's a criminal case here, Terry," Dave Wilcock was saying. "I just wish I could figure out where to start."

TERRILL THARP

"Where to start," Tharp echoed in his nervous way. But on the
other
hand, he advised himself, this thing can't be ignored. The allegations were enough to make a man sick—sexual molestation, child abuse, even rape.

He decided to move ahead, but not fast enough to attract too much attention. "Miz McArthur's gonna set me up with a woman named Emma Lu Meeks," he told Wilcock. "Why don't you sit down with some of the other victims? Develop it as far as you can."

The chief stood up, nodding. He seemed pleased.

"We got one shot at this, Dave," Tharp warned as they walked outside to the chief's car. "If we blow it, we're both finished. It's like that old saying, If you try to kill the king, by god you better succeed."

50

EMMA LU MEEKS

The old woman had a clear memory of the pioneering days when her family first came into the country. She still lived on the plot where she'd been born in 1908, and yellowing pictures of her ancestors lined her walls so she could keep their memories fresh till they all joined hands in the Celestial Kingdom. She never tired of talking about the past. "My dad came here from southern Utah to work on the Lovell Canal. He brought cuttings from his favorite trees—cherries, oaks, apples, willows—and planted them in a little cove off the hill. Some of those other Mormons came up here to keep from being prosecuted for polygamy. One of my uncles had two wives, and he took good care of them. Each wife had a nice house.

"My dad burnt out thick patches of dead prickly pear that'd been here forever. He hitched a team of horses to a flat board called a slip and dragged it along the ground to clear his land. All of us kids rode on the slip. This was a rough country then: sagebrush and cactus, greasewood, mesquite, pretty little desert plants that would nip your hand. The river bottoms were full of wild roses and cottonwood and bullberry bushes. Most of the land wouldn't take up water. Mark my words, if you're ever gonna clear land, stay away from greasewood. It waterproofs the soil underneath, turns it hard and dry."

In her late seventies, Emma Lu Meeks had hazel green eyes, silver bangs, a pageboy haircut that swung from side to side as she walked, and a trim five-foot figure. She still tended her garden, took in sewing, painted in acrylics, and worked for her ward's Relief Society. As a young woman, she'd earned her teaching credential at a normal school in Laramie. "I taught over on Beaver Crick, fifty, sixty miles east of here. I had to board there 'cause we were snowed in all winter." She laughed. "One year cured me of teaching."

Emma Lu remembered how Lovell's first lots had been laid out with knotted ropes. She'd helped her late husband Ted, the town cop for fifteen years, to tear down her family's old log cabin and build their own two-story house in its place. "We used drystanding lodgepole pine from up on the Big Horns. We trucked it down, stained it with hot linseed oil, and chinked the walls with creosoted hemp. We traded our young milk cow for plastering. She died a month later." She giggled. "The plasterer was annoyed about that."

Fbr years the couple had taken in troubled children as part of their LDS program of compassionate services. Ted would spot them walking down a road, wandering, lost, maybe drunk or drugged, and bring them home for a year or two. "I had a very tenderhearted husband," the old woman explained. "His temper concealed a soft heart." She still enjoyed helping people, calling on fellow Saints with their monthly religious lessons. She hoped it did them some good.

On the morning of her scheduled meeting with the county attorney, Emma Lu was walking home from a teaching session when a pit bull had to be pried off her leg. Up at the hospital, she took more stitches than she could count. She winced but didn't complain.

Her niece Diana Harrison drove her to the meeting in Arden McArthur's house at the east end of town. A child let them into the empty living room and disappeared in back. The county attorney was waiting next to the upright piano. He was a spindly young man who didn't look very glad to make her acquaintance.

She stammered as she told him that Dr. Story had raped her during a pelvic exam in the fall of 1977. "I was in shock when I left the examining room. His wife was there and I made out a check for eight dollars. I always paid my bills and I knew I wasn't going back.

"After it happened, I walked around town for an hour. I kept thinking, 'Why did he do that to me? What did I do that let him do that to me?' I took it on myself, as though I was responsible. But I didn't cry. I was mad.

"It was still light out when I got home. My husband was dying of colitis and circulatory problems. I looked at him and I thought, I can't tell you. I can't do that to you. He'd been hurt in his first marriage. He didn't trust women. It had taken me all these years to gain his trust. I thought, He'll get his gun and kill Story. It's not worth going to jail. And I had no proof anyway. So I didn't tell Ted. I didn't tell a soul.

"After he died in seventy-nine, Julia Bradbury came over one day and banged on my door. 'I've been raped!' she said. 'Dr. Story raped me!'

"We were old friends, and I thought, Oh, Julia, why didn't I tell you about Story? You'd've warned
me.

"But all I said was, 'Oh, Julia!' I listened to her story, but I still didn't tell her mine. I felt sick that I'd let it happen to her. I felt responsible.

"She didn't cry either. She was just mad. I felt so bad about her, I could've crawled under the door."

Emma Lu was still upset by the pit bull's bite and didn't think she was making an impression on Mr. Tharp. She wished she could use all the words that it took to describe what Story had done to her, but some of them just weren't in the vocabulary of a Mormon lady. It hurt her feelings that the prosecutor hardly took notes.

Of course she couldn't tell him about seeing Story's thing. If she did, the nightmare would come back. It was a Technicolor dream about a tubular section of brown skin and some folds of clothes,

EMMA LU MEEKS

exactly what she'd seen when she'd looked down the examining table seven years before. All these years she'd been waking up at night yelling, "You dirty son of a bitch!" Then she would have to read herself back to sleep.

The county attorney asked a few questions and left.

51

MARILYN STOW

John decided to hire a new lawyer for the appeal, but in underpopulated Wyoming it was hard to find the right one. Marilyn hadn't realized that attorneys sometimes refused clients. On July 20, she wrote in her journal, "Annette's birthday. Another shock today to read the letter [Atty.] Speight wrote . . . and his analysis of us. He misunderstood me—thought we had a poor demeanor. ... He didn't believe John. Lord, you are closing all the doors in our faces!"

A few weeks later, after she received encouragement from a favorite source, she wrote: "It seems that all our prayer and efforts have been met with closed doors and deaf ears, but the Word met my need this morning with Heb. 12:1-4— . . . Jesus
endured
the cross—consider him who
endured
such hostility of sinners so you won't grow weary and lose heart. . . . You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood."

52

DAVID WILCOCK

Police chief David Welch Wilcock turned up the volume till his cubbyhole office resounded with the rich string passages of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Ever since he'd blown sousaphone in his high school band, good music had helped him relax and think. When his men griped that the chief was playing "that classical shit" again, he was pleased; it propelled them to the street, where good cops belonged. Wilcock kept a cassette player in his office. The only local radio station was down in Greybull, and its programmers considered Elvis Presley a singer.

The chief was still trying to figure out how to investigate John Story and retain his job at the same time. He'd had coffee at the Rose Bowl Cafe with Mayor Herman Fink, just recovering from bypass surgery. His Honor asked, "What do you think about this Story business?"

"What do you mean?"

"I can't believe it," the elderly mayor said. "I
won't
believe it. I owe that man my life."

Wilcock swallowed and left. This case was tough enough without bucking his boss.

He called the State Department of Criminal Investigation in Cheyenne and asked if the agency was still providing help to smalltown police departments. A spokesman said that the DCI had already worked the Story case for the Board of Medical Examiners and its reports were under lock and key. "That's okay," Wilcock insisted. "We'll ignore everything you got for the Medical Board and start together from scratch."

An assistant attorney general named Kathy Karpan called Wilcock a few hours later and informed him that Story's license revocation was under appeal and no state agency could become involved in the case till a final ruling, which might be a year away. Wilcock realized that the Lovell P.D.'s detective bureau was on its own—all one of him.

In his first interview, with R. Dee Cozzens, the former North Big Horn Hospital administrator, the chief learned that Story's offenses might date further back than he'd imagined. Cozzens recalled that a bishop named Lyle Nicholls had reported confidentially that a teenaged girl in his ward complained about "improprieties" by the doctor. The girl, now an adult, hadn't filed a complaint; her parents were still in the dark, and the bishop was dead.