Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (36 page)

Tired and frustrated, the chief cued up some Shostakovich just before dark on a Saturday evening in October. Across the room, his wife Judy pounded on the typewriter, transcribing his latest futile interview. He looked out the window of their rental house on Carmon Avenue and saw a parked car with a 17 prefix on its license plate. Wyoming licenses were numbered according to county population, and his cop's memory told him that 17 was the designation for Campbell County.

It was a long shot, but he phoned next door to Aletha Durtsche and scored a hit. Minda Brinkerhoff was visiting. Two months had passed since he'd first talked to Minda on the telephone, and she sounded as reluctant as ever. "I just don't want to go through this again," she insisted over the phone. "Criminy, Chief, try to understand."

"Look, Mrs. Brinkerhoff," Wilcock said, "all I need is five minutes of your time." He'd heard that Minda was a talker, so he didn't want to tell her too much about his investigation.

"If you guys are onto him, how come he's still doing pelvics?" she asked.

"The judge gave him a stay," the chief explained.

Minda asked how he could expect decent folks to take part in such a phony baloney operation for land's sakes; they were all just spinning their wheels, and why waste everybody's time, and oh shoot maybe she could see him Monday morning at her mother's house on Quebec Avenue. By the time he got off the phone, his ears rang.

* * *

On Monday, Minda put up some token resistance, but once the words started rolling off her tongue he knew he had a better chance of stopping the afternoon train to Casper.

He called Tharp. "This is solid," he burbled into the phone. "Story abused her for years, and she's not just going on some dark ugly feeling like her sister. Minda felt it, saw it, and—"

"That's great," Tharp interrupted. "Now get me a dozen more."

Wilcock's hopes rose when a woman from the little oil town of Deaver, fifteen miles north on the road to Billings, walked into the cramped police headquarters and told about a pelvic examination back in 1970, when she'd been seventeen. He dutifully reported:

She states her vagina was first penetrated by a cold instrument, described as metal, round at the top, flat at the bottom, and hinged. This instrument was withdrawn. Her vagina was then penetrated by a warm object. She recalls thinking, "It's about time something was warmed up around here." Dr. Story soon withdrew the object and stated, "I'm having trouble inserting you. Can you help me?" Dr. Story then asked for her hand. She placed her hand under the sheet between her legs, near her vagina, and grasped Dr. Story's penis. She said it felt like he had a rubber on. Wilcock asked if she could have mistaken any other object, such as a gloved finger, for Dr. Story's penis. She replied firmly, "No. I couldn't get my hand completely around it. It was round, warm and firm. ... It gave off its own heat." When she grasped Dr. Story's penis, she can't recall if she said or just thought, "Whoa, I'm not going to do this." She let go of Dr. Story . . . and [he] did not persist. . . .

When she got home, she did tell her husband. She states he became very upset and wanted to kill Dr. Story. Late that evening, they called Bishop Lyle Nicholls, who went to their home. . . . She states both she and her husband talked to Bishop Nicholls about filing a complaint, but the bishop advised against it.

The woman had a crippling liability as a complaining witness. Her husband had a police record for entering women's homes and stealing their underwear. Terry Tharp said he couldn't use her as a

"DOC"

complainant. A competent defense lawyer would destroy her credibility on the witness stand.

Wilcock was afraid he'd made all the progress he could make without assistance. He was thinking about shelving his investigation when the county attorney called from Basin and said he was scouting around for an outside investigator. A few days later, Tharp reported that help was on the way. Right now, he said, she was about halfway up the Wind River Gorge, driving a bright red Pontiac Fiero. He said Wilcock would know her by her hair color. It was a little lighter than her car.

55

JUDI CASHEL

She hadn't wanted to say good-bye to her kids and her husband to work an out-of-town case, but the challenge was irresistible. How many chances would a female cop get to investigate a doctor charged with sexually abusing his patients? There was a modish new name for that contemptible crime—"doctor rape"—and she'd read a few reports on the subject. It seemed about on a par with mugging nuns.

Her name was Judith Ann Gilmore Cashel. She stood five-two after a shampoo and five-six after she'd fluffed out her wedge-cut red hair. She combined an innocent face, a command voice that rattled windows, and an understated figure featuring 112 pounds of femininity and three pounds of .38. She liked to dance, didn't smoke, seldom drank, spent weekends biking on her Kawasaki 440, and sometimes shocked her friends by wearing Dolly Parton wigs. She'd been baptized Presbyterian, raised Methodist, and now attended the Assembly of God. At thirty-four, she'd been a housewife, mother, cosmetologist, firefighter, meter maid, street cop, and now a Casper police sergeant. As an undercover agent for WYCAP, the Wyoming crime-attack team, she'd worked a string of dope cases, but almost no sex crimes. Once she'd joined in a raid on a brothel, but only as a witness. The men had all the fun.

When Chief Edward Kenyon told her he was lending her to Lovell for an undercover job, she had only one question:

Where's Lovell?

The local chief of police had promised to meet her at the first restaurant on the left as she entered town. She parked her red Fiero in the rear lot and took a look inside. No one resembled a police officer. A roly-poly man in an ill-fitting gas station uniform took up two seats in a booth and blinked at her tentatively. She took a closer look and realized that he was the chief. She put on a smile and walked over and thought, Oh, my god, how can I work with
this?

They talked for an hour. David Wilcock turned out to be bright, articulate, and deeply concerned about the case. She couldn't remember when her mere presence had so disarmed a fellow officer. It usually took a long time to break through masculine doubts and distrust. Wilcock sat there beaming, refilling her coffee cup, already treating her as his peer.

He handed over a thin file of interview reports. She halfway expected to read a bunch of vague complaints about improper comments during Pap smears—sexual innuendoes, maybe even a few lewd suggestions, nothing prosecutable—but she was startled to see that this case involved full penetration and went back years, maybe even decades. She thought, This is the 1980s. How can this be possible?

By the third cup of coffee the two officers had discarded the idea of sending her up the hill for an undercover pelvic. That was a little more gung ho than she'd had in mind, although she'd certainly taken bigger risks. Wilcock told her about an out-of-state woman who'd been driving through Lovell with her husband, stopped at the Story clinic for a back spasm, and ended up being raped. But that had been a long time ago. The rape doctor figured to be much more cautious now.

Wilcock kept stressing the county attorney's stance about credible witnesses. "I doubt you'll be needing your gun," he said.

JUDI CASHEL

She pulled out a microcassette tape recorder. "I brought something more lethal," she said.

She checked into the new Super 8 motel next door and an hour later hit the street. Her first interview was with a woman named Meg Anderson, whose shoulder-length hair looked spun from silver. Her figure was full and her voice had a mellow, professional quality, as though she'd been trained.

The two women talked in a small room in the Town Hall, and in a few minutes Judi turned off the recorder and dropped it into her purse. The woman was obviously inhibited by the machine and was retreating into giggles and tears and silliness.

It proved to be an attack of nerves, and when Meg settled down she told a horrifying story. Judi thought, How could this happen? How could an educated lady just lie there and let him do his sick thing? She had a lot more investigating to do.

56

JAN HILLMAN

The double standard is the basis of the [Mormon] patriarchal order: men have privileges that women do not have. . . . Patriarchy is a sham. . . . Justice is never bestowed, but that it is always wrested by intelligence and courage out of the hands of fate. . . . [The Mormon Church] poses by far the greatest threat to equal rights for women in this country of any New Right group.

—Passages highlighted by Jan Hillman in her copy of Sonia Johnson's
From Housewife to Heretic

She'd never been able to sit idly by while others were being mistreated, and now it was happening in her own hometown. She heard from her mother La Vera at the Town Hall that a female police sergeant was already interviewing the so-called victims. The police office was a cramped brick afterthought tacked onto the furnace room of the Town Hall, and her mother was in position to see the comings and goings. Jan thought, It's those damned McArthurs again. Dr. Story is just their latest victim.

She remembered how Arden and Minda and a bunch of other prudes had run a good teacher out of town despite several letters of support to the editor, including a personal one from Jan herself. And Jan's disk jockey sister swore upside down that Arden phoned KMNZ to complain that the station's hard rock music helped make Minda pregnant (and Arden swore upside down that the story was false). Another McArthur woman was always griping that men made passes at her.

Jan thought, What a bunch of flakes. She'd met Arden at a recent social gathering and found her to be a typical Mormon. Her inflections, her voice, her manner, her righteous air—she was LDS from her galoshes up.

Janice Hillman knew exactly what ailed the Mormons. Their problem was that the^Jiad a monopoly on the truth. Women like Arden McArthur seemed to say, I'm perfect and my children are perfect and my church is perfect; join us and we'll make you perfect, too, you poor slobs. It took a hell of a lot of gall to be perfect. And some ignorance, too.

Jan had grown up as a Lutheran surrounded by Mormons, and she prided herself that her four closest schoolmates had been LDS and they'd never exchanged a harsh word. Of course when you made friends with Mormons you had to accept certain conditions, such as the fact that they went to Mutual on Wednesday nights and you couldn't, and they were always making weird "temple excursions" and missionary trips where they did off-the-wall things like baptizing the dead. Jan didn't profess to understand and didn't want to understand. It was Mormon murnbo jumbo.

She was a large, robust woman, given to jeans and loose-fitting athletic sweatshirts. Her neatly coiffed curly brown hair framed a handsome oval face behind big glasses. Her voice was husky, almost a whiskey alto, oddly befitting a woman who'd tended bar for years, now owned one, but seldom took a drink. Back at the old Cactus Bar, when she was twenty-one, she'd heard too many drunks shout, "Hey, nurse, bring the medicine!" She knew exactly how therapeutic those bourbons and gins were. But she and Jack Bischoff weren't ashamed of owning and operating the new Diamond J Bar together. The Mormons frowned on the place, but who could keep up with all the LDS prohibitions and restrictions? Those folks who wore funny underwear also disdained hot or cold drinks of any kind. Jan thought, Imagine a religion that would damn you for sipping ice water.

"The bishops think I must be a prostitute if I run a bar," she explained, "but that rubs right off me. I'm an arrogant person. That's my defense. When I think people look down on me, I hold my head that much higher." In a town
full of churches
and piety, she'd lived with Jack Bischoff for fifteen years and had no plans for marriage. The prigs chattered about that, too. Jack was a cattleman and fencemaker, descended from pioneers who'd faced down the Hole-in-the-Wall gang. The Bischoffs weren't famous for kissing backsides.

Jan seldom had need of her personal physician, nor had she undergone his pelvic examinations, but she knew Dr. Story and his methods. One black midnight in 1981 she'd rushed Jack to the hospital with a fever of 105 and an abdomen that made him look as though he'd swallowed a slot machine. There was no time to fly him to Billings, and there were no other surgeons on hand to assist. As the nurses wheeled him into the operating room, Jan was aghast to spot her family doctor sitting at the nurse's station reading a book on problems of the bowel. An aide explained that he studied up before every operation, even tonsillectomies.

At 3
a.m
. Dr. Story stepped from the operating room in a blood-spattered surgical smock and told her that Jack was unblocked and doing fine. She could have kissed the little man, but before she had a chance to offer thanks he sat her down, impaled her on his owlish brown eyes, and asked her why a fine woman like her persisted in living in sin. "You weren't raised like that," he admonished her.

"That's the way I want it," Jan assured him.

"I know your mother," Dr. Story went on. "I know your family." He'd treated her asthmatic mother and paraplegic father for years. "I'm not condemning you. I just want you to explain why."

"I
am
explaining why," she insisted. "That's the way I want it. And despite what you think, Dr. Story, it's
my
choice. Okay?"