Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (67 page)

"Folks in these parts," he would explain, "are uncomfortable with change. They figure they can handle their own problems themselves. That's because they had no other choice back when the next ranch was twenty miles up a dirt road. A situation like that creates a feeling of insularity. 'What I do is my business, and I can handle it myself.' They'd rather be victimized than yell for help. They think it's a mark of weakness to run to cops or lawyers or social agencies. And Mormons are brought up to take their problems to the bishops, just like they did back in Joseph Smith's day. If the bishops don't do anything, that's the end of it.

"There's also the universal human reluctance to challenge authority figures. 'Who's gonna believe we?' Each victim was her own little island, and nobody knew there were other victims till Arden McArthur started keeping score. People have a misimpres-sion about small towns. They think that everybody knows everybody's business. That's only superficially true. They only know what they can see. They don't always see the deeper things."

The prosecutor heard from Story and his backers more frequently than he wished. "I get letters on his office stationery: 'John H. Story, M.D.' He's threatened to sue me and turn me in to the bar association. He's losing some of that smirky cool exterior now. He's mad as hell. Isn't that your typical rapist?"

Police Chief David Wilcock resigned, returned briefly to help clear a murder case, then took a security job west of the Cascade Mountains near Seattle, where his FM radio brought in classical music on two stations. He bought a bike and pedaled off a hundred pounds.

Despite her speeding ticket, Judi Cashel was promoted to lieutenant and placed in command of the Casper P.D.'s traffic division. She also taught sex crime investigation at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy.

The red-haired cop maintained her attitude of compassionate understanding, even toward the most rabid of Story's backers. "For all the hateful things they did," she reflected, "they thought they were protecting a wonderful, innocent man. He was an important figure to them, fatherly, almost saintly. He made them into victims, too."

Meg and Dan Anderson decided to tough it out in Lovell, their childhood "paradise on earth," and never wavered despite one test after another. Like so many other stores on Main Street, both Kids Are Special and the family's dry cleaners went under, and Meg stayed home with her husband and their four children.

The sisters' $3-million civil suit was settled for $3,000, barely enough to cover costs. Meg explained, "Our lawyers couldn't find Story's money. And with no money, there was no suit. So we had to settle."

One day Bob Asay knocked on the front door of the Andersons' small frame bungalow at 152 E. Eighth and asked if Meg intended to testify against him in his wife's threatened divorce action. Both Meg and Dan strongly recommended that the Asays settle any differences out of court. "I don't think you'd like what I might say under oath," Meg warned.

She stopped wearing makeup, and when she went downtown she wore loose, floppy clothes. She said she felt safer that way. Her commitment to her church remained absolute. She never missed a service or a meeting, and sometimes drove her children to the temple in Idaho Falls to perform the ordinance of baptism for the dead.
"We
do it for everybody that's ever lived," she explained. "If John
Story dies
tomorrow, his ordinance work will be done to get him into the Celestial Kingdom." She hesitated, then added, "But not by me."

After six years on the Lovell P.D., her husband Dan nursed hopes of making chief, but when he was passed over for the job, he redoubled his efforts toward a degree in psychology. In the first few months after the sentencing, Story supporters filed one petty complaint after another against him. Jan Hillman claimed that he'd been abusive to her customers while on a call to her bar. Her mother LaVera questioned his use of city-purchased fuel. Dan knew what was eating them, and he tried to forgive.

There was more than enough real crime to occupy him and the other Lovell policemen. Crack demoralized the little town and ruined lives. A "black Ninja" took to prowling at night in his pajamas. Dan had reason to believe that child abuse and incest were worse than ever, but sex offenses were still almost impossible to prosecute. The Story case, he knew, had been the rarest of exceptions.

Minda and Scott Brinkerhoff returned to Lovell, but not before a stern lecture to their two boys and two girls. "Lovell's a nice place to live," Minda said at her usual rapid pace, "but that doesn't mean it's completely safe. There are certain people you are to
absolutely
stay away from." She read off a short list. Number one was Bob Asay.

As always, she took on several jobs, including midnight-to-eight stints clerking at the new motel across Main Street from her house. In a Christmas newsletter, she told old friends:

My father used to say that work never killed anyone. I do not fully agree with that statement. My father was a work-aholic and we know where he is. But he was very happy working like he did. He felt good about Dean, and that is what work can do for all of us.

For
the middle child, labor
took
her mind
off
the Story case and the childhood sexual abuse and the physical problems that seemed to be worsening as she approached thirty. Scott worked just as

EPILOGUE

hard on an out-of-town computing job and flew home when he could. The Brinkerhoffs intended to buy a farm and bring up their children among cows and hogs and beets. It was not only their plan, Minda explained, but God's.

"We are not sure what the future brings to our little family," she wrote in her newsletter, "but we do know that we are loved. My Father in Heaven loves us dearly and is watching over us always."

5

ARDEN McARTHUR

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

—A. E. Housman

After two years of fleeing from her memories, Arden settled in with friends in the LDS town of Orem, Utah, long enough to fall in love for the second time in her fifty-three years. Blaine Brailsford was a retired steelworker, a widower and devout Mormon, tall and slim, white-haired, gentle of voice and manner. He courted her in the old-fashioned way, with flowers and moonlit walks and long conversations on the sofa.

"But gol, Mom," Minda said when she heard their plans by telephone, "you and Dad were sealed in the temple. What's gonna happen, uh . . . later?"

Arden told her not to bother her head. "Blaine and I'll only be marrying for time," she told her daughter. "Not for time and all eternity."

Just before the wedding, Arden listened as Meg described a disturbing dream: "We were all sitting in our front room—me and Minda and the kids and grandkids, and you and Blaine side by side. Dad walked in with that big smile of his and took your hand. 'C'mon, girlie,' he said. 'Let's go.' You and Dad walked away together, and the rest of us just sat there laughing."

"Meggie," Arden said, "that's just the way it'll be. I'll get up and go with your dad, and Blaine'll pick up his wife, and we'll each go on our journeys."

After the wedding, "Papa Blaine" and Arden visited Lovell occasionally, but she preferred that her children drive to Orem to visit her. "I love the folks in Lovell," she explained. "I walk downtown and see so many friends. But sooner or later there's a sour note. One day I dropped into the IGA, flitting from person to person, having a good time vizting, and the mayor's wife sees me and runs for the other aisle. It made me feel too bad."

On one of her trips back home, she was consulted by Uncle Bob Asay, now sixtyish and worried that his wife might try to gain custody of their little daughter. He wanted a preview of what Arden would say if she were called to testify against him. "Why, I'd tell the truth, Bob," Arden said. "What would you expect?"

As she looked at her old family friend, she still considered him more sick than evil. She might have been able to forgive him if he'd ever 'fessed up and sought treatment. But he never had, as far as she knew. And now he had the nerve to sit across from her and claim that he'd always loved her daughters.

"Don't give me that, Bob," Arden said. "You didn't love 'em."

He finally admitted what he'd done. "Oh, Ard," he said tearfully, "how do I make amends?"

"Bob, you know the process of repentance."

He looked down. "It's so . . . humiliating."

Arden said, "We have to be humiliated before we can be humbled."

When he left, she told Minda, "I'm afraid Bob hasn't learned a thing about truth. All he's ever wanted was immediate gratification. The Holy Ghost isn't with him in any way. He can't progress." His continuing prominence as a Mormon was another reason she tried to stay away from Lovell.

It also demoralized her to look across the highway from Minda's house and see the Super 8 Motel and the Big Horn Restaurant and a truck-parking lot, all carved from lost McArthur farmland. "Your dad helped grub that ground out," she reminded her children.

Nothing was harder on her than a stroll down Main Street. So many landmarks were now empty shells: the Busy Corner Pharmacy, Montgomery Ward's, the Rose City Food Farm, gas stations, the women's shop, the car wash, six or eight small shops. The fine old Horseshoe Bend Motel barely bothered to keep up appearances; its sign read
best roo s in to n
. The Beverly Motel, once a family hospital owned by the brothers-in-law Horsley and Croft, had been up for sale for months. The handsome proprietress, Eloise Benson, had become disenchanted with Lovell after Dr. Story made unseemly remarks about her breasts and twice approached her in public to suggest that she come in for an exam.

Arden always hurried across the street when she came to the Hyart Theater, so she wouldn't have to read the yellowing signs in the window next door—"Kids Are Special. Childrens to adults T-shirts transfers. Fashion finish. Food for fabrics." Story's backers had hauled their dry cleaning thirty miles south to Greybull or twenty miles west to Powell rather than patronize the McArthurs. Arden still owned the business, but the $100,000 investment was as valueless on the open market as a played-out drift of bentonite.

"Lovell's gone," said the handsome woman sadly. "The new hospital's full of empty beds. The rescue helicopters land someplace else. Folks just won't go to a place like that. Why, they've still got staff people up there that call us all liars!

"That's what's finishing Lovell off—the gutter stuff, the name-calling, the nastiness. It stifles spirituality. What's life without spirituality? The unjust and the just get caught up together. I got a call from my son Mel in Venezuela the other day. He said, 'You know, Mother, all us missionaries can feel what some of the Saints are doing back in Lovell—and they're not doing right.' "

Arden had always tried to avoid simplistic devil theories, but she couldn't help drawing certain conclusions about the men Dr. Henry Eskens had tagged "those dirty little doctors from Lovell."

"What I resent about Dr. Story," she explained, "is that he manipulated the whole town, every danged one of us. But he didn't set the tone—our 'Rose Doctor' did that. Bill Horsley was angry when he was put out of the hospital for perversion. He sure got his revenge. He put his curse on the whole community.

EPILOGUE

"Story knew what was going on behind the rosebushes when he first came here—everybody knew. Lovell must've looked like the perfect place to him. So one sick doctor begat another. The two of 'em sure changed a nice little town."

Whenever she walked west on Main from the old family house where Minda now lived, Arden passed a small park festooned with roses under tall pines. The Lovell Women's club had installed a plaque in 1970, the year before Horsley died. The message read:

The beauty of these gardens is our enduring tribute to Dr. W. W. Horsley, the Rose Doctor, whose enthusiasm, dedication and service to our community made Lovell The Rose Town of Wyoming.

THE END

"Doc"
is a true story, based on trial testimony, police reports, public documents, tape recordings, and the cross-checked memories of the people most intimately involved. It is neither a fictionalization, in which scenes are re-created from the author's imagination, nor a so-called "nonfiction novel," in which (to judge by various examples of the genre) time sequences are juggled and facts are altered to achieve a novelistic effect.

Nearly one hundred people were interviewed, many of them for days (and nights) on end. No author ever received more enthusiastic cooperation on both sides of an issue, or met advocates who were more honestly convinced of the righteousness of their position. On my first field trip to Lovell, eight of the rape victims assembled in a homey old parlor to grill me about my attitude and intentions. Over the next two years, these and other victims responded to the most personal questions with candor, sensitivity and insight. Through psychotherapy, they had cast off childhood mind-sets and reached the clear realization that the crime of rape casts neither guilt nor shame on its victims.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the Cowboy State (or elsewhere)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

has attained the same level of enlightened awareness. Because the subject of sexual abuse remains sensitive and misunderstood, I arbitrarily assigned pseudonyms to certain characters to spare them harassment or embarrassment. They include Margaret Anselm, Carol Beach, Julia Bradbury, Bettina Diaz, Mae Fischer, Juana Garcia, Rhea Jaffe, Alma Kent, Susan Moldowney, Irene Park, Dottie Parry and Molly Pratt.