Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (65 page)

"An excellent job!" she wrote in her journal. "So many saw the truth—know John is innocent! Sue and I feel it is a miracle! . . • Many who thought Doc was guilty have changed their minds after watching those women and their lies."

She began to join Jan on radio and TV interviews, defending her husband's honor and reputation. Every morning she drove the two blocks to the clinic, hoisted the flag, then rattled around the halls keeping busy. She studied the file on the case and pointed out flaws and inconsistencies. "Meg Anderson was a schoolteacher," she commented, "and yet in her letter to the Medical Board 'penis' is spelled 'p-e-n-u-s'! Jan and I laughed so hard when we read that. It's unreal!"

Once every month Marilyn made the six-hour drive south through the Wind River Canyon and across the mountains and gulches and sagelands to the sunny town of Rawlins. There she checked into a motel and tried to get a good night's sleep so she would look fresh and rested for John in the morning. Visiting hours began at 8
a.m
., and she always pulled up at the blocky guard tower on time.

The low-slung penitentiary was surrounded by sere hills, spotty clumps of sage, bare brown rocks and a few misshapen trees in a scrub-desert basin just south of Rip Griffin's Truck Stop off Interstate 80. Rabbits and ground squirrels nibbled on cheatgrass by the side of the road. The two-lane blacktop served only the prison, and a half mile from the gate a solitary sign warned:

property of wyoming state penitentiary.

you must have official business before entering.

no trespassing.

At each sight of the chain-link fences and glittering coils of razor wire, Marilyn felt nauseated. The prison seemed like a continuing test by the Lord. It was simply unimaginable that her gentle husband was living without her in the bowels of this awful place.

Inside, John's smile would show up in a window adjacent to the visiting room as a guard patted him down. He was allowed to carry a Bible and a pen, and sometimes his hymnal. After one trip, Marilyn wearily described the scene to Cheryl Nebel: "It's such a tiring place. And so noisy—
bang! crash!—
all the clanks and screeches, kids crying and running around, people going in and out to smoke, crashing the electric doors. Sometimes it's bitter cold. We sit on plastic chairs and shiver. All around us men and women try to see how far they can go, grunting, making animal sounds. John and I sing to shut them out."

Early in 1988, the warden ordered a crackdown on overaffec-tionate displays, and John and Marilyn were admonished for a simple hug. "You don't shake your head at
my
wife!" John told the guard through gritted teeth. He'd always been so overprotective. He threatened to make a personal complaint to the warden.

Marilyn was surprised at the ease of his adjustment and recalled Cal Taggart's strange remark that he didn't think John really wanted his freedom. He'd enjoyed his World War II service in the Navy Seabees and claimed that prison life wasn't much different.

"It's good for me," he told her and a tearful Susan at the end of a visit. "This is the place I've got to be, the best place for me to be right now." Of course he didn't cry. No one had ever seen him cry, even as a child. He admired stoic heroism, read books about prisoners of war, and considered himself one of their number. His anger was directed at the bureaucratic apparatus that had landed him here—the lawyers, the Medical Board, the Mormon hierarchy, all of them as united as a twisting of rattlesnakes. "Don't be too hard on the accusers," he advised Marilyn. "They're just pawns."

Except for the lunch hour, the Storys huddled together from 8
a.m
. till 5
p.m
. on four days of every month. As always, he was full of well-intended advice. "When you go downtown to shop," he instructed his wife, "dress up. Look your best. We're not criminals and we shouldn't carry ourselves like criminals."

Sometimes, after a visit, Marilyn drove on to Maxwell to see his mother, and John always reminded her to stop by Annette's grave in the family plot in Plainview Cemetery. Left to her own instincts, Marilyn would have avoided such painful side trips, but she obeyed her husband as always. John also urged her to visit the Fort Mc-Pherson Cemetery, scene of so many of his childhood joys and ceremonies. He was pleased when she brought back rubbings from the graves of Spotted Horse and another chief.

Visiting Maxwell, she still found herself uneasy about the Story family's attitude about death. They grieved, but in their own way. They talked animatedly about Annette and other lost children. At fourteen, John's youngest brother Tom had been killed by a swerving truck while hitchhiking to North Platte, and when the family discussed him, it was always in vivid, cheery tones—what a neat boy he'd been, his sense of humor, his imitations and jokes that had made the family laugh. You'd have thought old Tom was coming for dinner with the wife and kids.

Marilyn returned from one Nebraska trip and told a friend, "Inez's sister Lola died, and they talked and talked and
talked
about it. The day I got there, John's mom says, 'We're gonna eat, then we're gonna go up to the mortuary.' So we all pile into our cars and follow little banty hen Inez into this cold room. She says, 'Oh, doesn't Lola look
so
nice! She looks better than she did when she was teaching Latin!' And she pats Lola's hand and stands there looking at her and talking about her hair and her glasses. John's sister Gretchen and his brother Jerod came, too, and
nobody
cried. I'm standing back and kinda gulping and I just—
oooooh,
I thought I was gonna faint. It was about the only dead body I'd ever seen."

Every four months the penitentiary permitted a conjugal visit in one of the three mobile homes parked just inside the razor-wired perimeter. Marilyn's first visit was on Christmas Eve 1986, and she cried all the way down and back. Old friend Wes Meeker had loaded her car with a tree and gifts, but the guards wouldn't let them in. The parting was on Christmas morning. John tried to comfort her, but she was so upset she could hardly say good-bye.

She didn't fare much better on later overnight visits. The red tape drove her to tears. A guard would call out her personal possessions— "one nightgown, one underpants . . ."—while another checked them against a list of acceptables. She always brought John's favorite meal—meat loaf, baked potatoes and salad—and the guards removed each piece, unwrapping, sniffing, handling her creations. By the time they were finished, she wanted to dump the food in the dirt.

There was friction with the woman who presided over the conjugal area. Checking in, Marilyn insisted on writing "Dr. John Story" on the line marked "inmate's name," which invariably precipitated a brisk order: "Number and last name only!" At John's stern insistence, Marilyn refused to yield. After a few visits, the clerk began obliterating the word "Dr." with Liquid Paper.

Marilyn was happy to do her small part for her husband's dignity. But the partings never became any easier. She wrote in
The Real Story:

It seems like a bad dream as I walk away from there. It is especially hard to bear when they lead him away in handcuffs. . . . Our sustaining hope is that this "lifestyle" of ours will not go on much longer.

With each trip, the hope dimmed. She was living off borrowed money and handouts. The legal billings reached $200,OCX), wiping out their life savings after twenty-six years in medicine. The Defense Fund helped with legal fees, but the flow of contributions was down to a trickle.

After John's second full year of confinement, Marilyn still went to the clinic daily, but no longer raised the flag. "I won't fly it till he's home," she said. Nor did she put up Christmas trees or other ornaments.

One by one, friends accepted the status quo and lost a measure of their solicitude. She didn't expect them to grieve as she did. Ignoramuses gawked when she went downtown. She spent most of her time alone.

Sometimes the former cowgirl wondered what it would be like to move back to her home state of Colorado, but John kept insisting that he was going to resume his old practice. She couldn't bear to spoil his dream, even as it became less and less realistic. They'd married "till death do us part."

She still saw a heavenly hand in everything. She'd always known that God had taken Annette for some reason or other, and now the reason came clear. "Annette would have been a high school student when all this came down on us," she explained patiently. "It-would have been
so
hard on her. It was hard enough for Linda and Susan, and they weren't living here anymore. I don't think Annette could have taken it. God spared her. God's in control of everything."

With her husband in his third year at Rawlins, uncharacteristic hard touches crept into Marilyn's voice and manner. When a friend mentioned that some of the accusers had switched to a doctor in Powell, she snapped, "I hope they get raped up there."

Her friends knew it was the pain talking.

One cold winter night Inez Story told her daughter-in-law, "People ask me how we're getting along, what with John in prison. I say, 'I'm a-hangin' in. We're tough, our family.' I always tell 'em, 'We're gonna win. It may take time, but we're gonna win.' Maybe the Lord'll come before then and take us Christians. It could be.

anytime. I'm gonna be ready. The Scriptures tell us it'll happen in the twinkling of an eye."

The spry old woman still exchanged Bible verses with her son. To her, John was the victim of a Mormon plot. "They were afraid he was some kind of guru," she explained. "They thought, If we can convert a deacon in the Bible Church, that'll give us good points in Salt Lake City. But John stood as a Christian. So they had to put him away."

William Jerod Story, retired instructor in Germanic languages, considered himself the main defender of his younger brother and every other Story through the ages—their names, honor and reputations. He batted down any hints of a bad seed and bristled at suggestions that his father's cool detachment might have had a detrimental effect on John's personality.

"Dad was preoccupied with business, not mollycoddling me or John," the oldest brother recalled sixteen years after his father's 1971 death. "He got up early, made his own breakfast, and we wouldn't see him again except for lunch and dinner. Then he'd go back and work on the books till we were asleep. He was always in a hurry to get to the next customer. One day I heard a farmer say, 'Look at that young feller go up them stairs!' Dad was forty then.

"Of all the generations that ran our store, Dad was the most professional. It was like Thomas Mann's story of the Budden-brooks: the third generation is best. Of course, our business is down to a few customers a day now, folks that drive miles to get something like an old-fashioned castellated screw, but that's because Maxwell is on its last legs and everybody around here shops in North Platte.

"Whatever Dad did, he studied up on it. It wasn't enough for him to sell poultry medicines; he practically had to become a veterinarian so he could advise the farmers on the right medicines. He wouldn't stock a new brand of peas till he'd made a study of it. He was the most thorough man I ever knew. You might say John got that from him, but not much else. Dad was neat and John's sloppy. In most ways, John's like our mother. They're still so close they

EPILOGUE

finish each other's sentences." He paused and smiled. "But then she does that with nearly everybody."

One day the diminutive Jerod was photocopying a newspaper story about his brother's case in the University of Wyoming library when a retired state supreme court justice looked over his shoulder and said, "They should be a lot harder on those fellas."

"Some of them are unjustly accused," Jerod snapped back. "Dr. Story's not guilty of any crime."

The old judge looked surprised as Jerod continued, "Those wicked Mormon women told lies. They're guilty of slander."

Relating the story later, Jerod said, "I kinda felt as though we were about to get into a bout of fisticuffs, you know? I was pretty close to him, looking at his ugly nose. He says, 'Oh, well, that's a different point of view.'

"I said, 'That's a
true
point of view.' "

3

THE PRISONER

It is also characteristic for the real psychopath to resent punishment and protest indignantly against all efforts to curtail his activities. ... He is much less willing than the ordinary person to accept such penalties.

—Hervey Cleckley, M.D.,
The Mask of Sanity

At first John Story rebelled at a counselor's advice to "get off your ass and make something of yourself in here," but later he became law librarian in the penitentiary's medium-security unit so he could research his way to freedom. Once in a while he pecked out a contribution to
The Real Story
(e.g., "We have the power and capacity to correct this terrible injustice") on a Smith-Corona memory typewriter donated by his backers. He made a few jailhouse friends, gave advice, even counseled some of his fellows as he'd counseled his patients back in Lovell. He carried himself more like a guest than a prisoner. Unlike the others, he wore no number on the shirt that stretched tightly across his expanding physique. His weight climbed to 146.

He seemed put out that prison officials didn't utilize his medical abilities. "It's an old tradition in American prisons," he observed. "Dr. Mudd practiced. There's a lot to be done." But he had no intention of volunteering. "I wouldn't work without pay. Not after what the state's done to me."