Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (66 page)

He talked softly except on the subject of pet hates like the Mormon church or "liberals," a word he used as a pejorative long before the Bush Republicans. As he spoke, he rubbed his neck, fiddled with his collar or his hair, tapped a pen or rolled it in his fingers, shifted positions and tugged his trousers over his knees. His voice was flat, unstressed, his delivery devoid of spark or metaphor. He dropped his terminal g's and chirped dry little laughs at the absurdity of the charges against him.

"As a child I loved the outdoors and people," he told an inquiring visitor, dismissing his childhood with a wave of his small hand. He confirmed that he'd been the first "Christian" in his family and that his mother, brother and sister had followed his example. "My dad didn't go to church," he added.

Did he recall tagging behind Jerod when they were boys? "No," he said, adjusting silver-rimmed trifocals. "I don't remember things like that." In the same breath, he added, "Basically I'm the most private person anybody's ever known. I don't even want my name in the paper for good things. Once I was quoted as saying that prison life reminded me of the Army. But I was actually in the Navy. I said 'Army' instead of 'Navy' to throw people away from the truth about me. It depersonalizes me. I do that a lot."

He said he saw no point in discussing the influences that steered him toward medicine. "That's more of that man-worship," he said disdainfully. His mother had named him after a physician and he'd admired his namesake, but "I don't have anyone to thank for becoming a doctor except myself and God." He made it clear that humanism was the greatest vice and love of God the greatest virtue. In that context, he noted, there could be only one true hero.

After a silence, he offered a seeming non sequitur: "Do you have any idea what causes sexual perversion?" He shifted position on the straightbacked wooden chair. "Refusal to believe in God. It's in Romans, first chapter. People who refuse God and deny Him are at risk of becoming perverted. It's epidemic now."

He rattled off a bill of particulars against his accusers. One had been "a slut all her life." Another had sneaked off to Billings with a journalist during the trial. One attended orgies. One was a pornog-rapher. One smoked weed. One had been seen in Rock Springs with a woman. One of the husbands had been involved in bestiality. One of the older accusers had fornicated with her male class-

EPILOGUE

mates in high school. Hardly anyone on the other side was spared his soft invective.

When Story was told that Rex Nebel had spat on the bench after the verdict came in, he produced a rare grin and said, "Good for him. Good for him!"

His enemies list seemed to include half the citizens of Lovell, but he insisted that those evildoers paled into insignificance next to the most satanic force of all. "The state certifies that Doc Story is a liar and a rapist," he said as he drummed on his notebook. "And people believe the state. But there's nothing believable or trustworthy about it. If this experience has given me a mission, it's to pull the plug on the state."

His first parole hearing was scheduled for 1991, "but the state gets $17,000 per year per inmate from the federal government, so I'm not expecting to get out on my first attempt. Maybe the second, or more likely the third. If they make me do my bottom number of fifteen years, I'll have no life left. I'll get out just in time for the nursing home."

He was firm about resuming his practice in Lovell. "Where is there to go but a place where people know me and I have good friends and where Marilyn and I have love?" he asked as he stretched his pant legs over his kneecaps. "I figure I have maybe four hundred enemies in Lovell, but at least that many friends. No, I wouldn't allow any of my family to be buried there. Eventually we'll all go home to Maxwell.

"I'd like to be around my mother for a year or two before she dies. And I'd like to be with Marilyn for the rest of her life. She's the only hold the prison has on me—the way they treat her."

He beckoned toward the warden's office. "If she should suddenly die, these state and prison people couldn't do a thing to me. I wouldn't give in on anything." His brown eyes narrowed and his pen drummed faster. "I could live in the hole forever."

4

THE ACCUSERS

Alone of the women involved in the case, Aletha Durtsche felt improved by her ordeal. "Somebody said, 'I bet you just hate Story so badly.' I said, 'I don't have any feelings about him. The way he is—that's his problem. I'm too busy with my own life. And it's better than ever.' "

She mourned her Uncle LaMar Averett. The old farmer-chief had said that if Story were convicted he'd be the first to apologize to her, but they never spoke again. After he died, one of his relatives claimed that Dr. Story could have kept him alive and therefore the accusers were all murderers. Aletha found such thinking too convoluted to be taken seriously.

Most of the time she concentrated on better memories. "My LDS visiting teacher was in her eighties, a strong Story supporter, and after the trial she didn't want to come into my house," the letter carrier recalled. "She'd hand me a little card and say, 'I know you're busy, so I won't give you the lesson today. Have you read it?'

"I'd say, 'I'm
not
busy. I'm off work, ya know? Come on in!'

"She'd say, 'No, no, you're busy.' Then she'd run out to her husband's car.

"A year or so after Story was put away, she came to me and said she'd talked to Dr. Croft in Utah. He was old and nearly blind, but he told her, 'I knew years ago what Story was up to. He's right where he belongs.'

"She knew that Dr. Tom wouldn't lie. She said she was ashamed of the way she'd treated me. A few things like that have helped make me feel better about Uncle LaMar."

Emma Lu Meeks was shunned and insulted on the street, but she just grinned and called out "Hi!" as she'd done for years. She was proud that she hadn't shed a tear over that man—not when he'd abused her and certainly not later—but she did wish the nightmares would stop. She kept seeing him behind the drape, moving in and out of her body, smiling his dirty little smile. The dream made her feel ashamed all over again.

At eighty, she was glad she would never have to explain or apologize to her husband. Ted was waiting in the Celestial Kingdom, where all things were known. She said she doubted that the subject would come up.

Her friend and fellow victim, the widow Julia Bradbury, never discussed the case, and Emma Lu didn't press her. There wasn't much to be said, anyway. The two old friends knew the truth and the whole truth.

Whenever Annella St. Thomas mentioned Story, her small voice took on a halting stammer, as though she were short of breath. Fifteen tainted years had passed since she and her husband had made their first official complaints to Police Chief Averett and then to the Medical Board.

"I just feel lucky that Nelson stuck with me," she said. "Other husbands have disbelieved their wives. Some got divorced. Nelson, he's my strength. I'm sure glad he didn't use his double-barrel that night."

* * *

Hayla Fink Farwell hired on as a baker at the Big Horn Restaurant, grew a few petunias and roses at her old farmhouse out on the Emblem road, and tried not to feel too lonely when the coyotes howled or the diesel horns blared up from the tracks running south to Casper.

She didn't return to the Lutheran church for a long time and neither did fifteen or twenty other members of the big Fink clan. "I missed church real bad," she recalled. "I went into town for counseling one night and when I got home my husband had left me for another woman. I needed the Lord more than ever. I have such peace in church. It was awful hard, not going."

After the departure of Story's backer, the Reverend Sam Chris-tensen, Hayla slipped into a rear pew and was so overcome with emotion that she barely heard the new preacher's sermon. The first time she took Communion, "I kneeled up there and bawled." A few of her fellow worshipers slid away, and no one apologized for backing her rapist, but she drew her comfort from the cross.

Emma Briseno McNeil, the only Roman Catholic complainant, returned to Maine and wasn't heard from in Lovell again.

Terri Timmons couldn't seem to shake her powerful anger at males. Soon after Story was handcuffed and taken to Rawlins, she told her husband Loyd, "If they would leave it up to me, sex crimes wouldn't be a problem. They'd just take a gun and go up and down the line shooting those guys. That's how a lot of Indian tribes and Orientals rid themselves of diseases. Why was somebody like Ted Bundy on Death Row for ten years?
Why?"

She was proud that she'd stopped being a doormat, and she even talked back to her father and Loyd. One night her father said that he didn't want to hear another word about Story, and Terri put her hands on her hips and said, "Well, Dad, that's just too dang bad about you! I've lived with this for seventeen years, and I'll talk about it whenever I please."

She didn't understand the process, but somehow a therapeutic dream seemed to guide her back to the path of forgiveness and love, even toward the opposite sex. It opened as a nightmare. "Story was shopping at the fabric store in Powell and I was in the back where he couldn't see me. I shook and started to faint, but then I found a gun in my hand and I walked out and said, 'Okay, you little son of a bitch, strip!' I made him walk down Main Street naked. I yelled, 'Now everybody's gonna see what they think they've been missing!' A cop took me away, and I laughed and said, 'This has been worth it!'

"That dream helped. I needed to have that power over him, to control and humiliate. I began to feel better. My lymph gland stopped swelling, the headaches went away. But . . . I've still got my ulcer."

She took a part-time job cleaning the home of a Jewish couple who taught at the community college. "They are such neat people," she wrote in her journal. "I put a Book of Mormon under their tree at Christmas time. I have hoped and prayed they would use it."

Terri still believed that all truth was lodged in the four "sticks" of her religion: the Book of Mormon, the Bible,
The Pearl of Great Price,
and the
Doctrine and Covenants.
In the hours just before dawn, the Holy Spirit sometimes visited her in her room. She took note of the phenomenon in her journal:

The first time was last summer when Loyd's sister Diane was here. The Lord told me to help get Casey a blessing and he would be able to see. Satan really interferred. The second time was not too long ago, and he spoke two words to me
—food storage.
Then it happened just the other day, and he said one word
—Contrite.
I had to look it up in the dictionary. It means repentant. These experiences have really helped me.

Instead of doubting her qualifications, she began to relish her responsibilities in the Relief Society. "I have such a strong desire to tell others who don't know the truth all about why we live on Earth, where we came from, what we are to do while we are here and where we will go when we leave here," she wrote. "Sometimes I feel like I want to stand on the roof and shout, 'Listen, people, the truth about life is on the earth again. Won't you please listen to the gospel?' "

Wanda Hammond couldn't shake her melancholia. There was always some new torment, some reminder. In 1987 she received a Christmas card bearing a picture of the Christ child and a handprinted message: "Even tho a person is beautiful on the outside, that doesn't mean anything, cuz they're ugly on the inside. I hope you have a nice Christmas realizing that Doc is in prison because of the lies you told on the witness stand."

It made Wanda cry, but so did soap operas and phone calls from her children and almost anything else these days. At the Rose City Food Farm, owner Tom Cornwall finally had to let her go; he told her she could make the doughnut run to Powell each day, but she felt he was just being kind and refused his offer. Not long afterward, the market went under. Along with everyone else in town, Wanda now had to shop at the Big Horn IGA. It made her uncomfortable to patronize a merchant who treated her like a pariah but sent food baskets up the hill to Mrs. Story.

No one would ever convince her that she hadn't committed the sin of adultery. Counselors at the Behavioral Clinic stressed her innocence and Story's guilt, but to her it was just chatter. Another man's organ had soiled her. To Wanda, it was a wrong that could never be righted.

Diana Harrison received a Christmas card like Wanda's, but with an extra line of printing across the face: "To the ugliest woman in Lovell."

The former receptionist swore she would always love "Doctor," but she'd also begun to face certain realities. "I can see how he spent years manipulating me. He treated me like somebody special, lent me money to buy a car, told me how smart and pretty I was. It's all so obvious now. He knew that if he ever got in trouble, he'd need some LDS women to speak up for him. That's where Arden and I came in. We were his chief fools.

"He hated us Mormons from the beginning. When he dies, they ought to put on his tombstone, 'John Huntington Story. Loved God, hated people.'"

Ironically, Diana and her husband lost their chance at the Celestial Kingdom and the other divine rewards of their lifelong faith. In 1988 they were excommunicated for polygamy.

Terrill Tharp won easy reelection to the job that was all he'd ever asked of life. Sometimes it seemed he spent part of every day trying to answer the same question: What took the rape doctor's victims so long to stand up and be counted?