Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (25 page)

Over the next five days, as I was being forcibly flushed of the presence of opium in my body, i.e., subjected unwillingly to another kind of hell than the one I'd faced inside the Langley mansion, I dutifully answered questions posed to me by a pair of city police detectives, who soon rewarded my cooperation with a short trip downtown in handcuffs to attend my own indictment for murder and arson and mayhem and, in short, all of the atrocities that I'd described to them as having occurred inside that foul building on that foul night. (Idiots, both of them!)

That I'd volunteered to answer police questioning does not mean that I was in a proper mental state to decide whether to volunteer, given the treatment I was undergoing at the same time for opium addiction, or what in lay parlance is termed as “going cold turkey.” Clearly, the Bellevue staff should never have allowed these official interviews with the police to take place. Hence, I believe there are grounds for a civil suit, if I decide that I am so inclined to pursue it.

Yours Sincerely,

Miles Trenowyth, Esq.

P.S. The accommodations here in the hospital's prison ward are even worse than on the psych ward. I wish to speak to you about them at your earliest convenience. I pray we can reach an understanding.

Bellevue Hospital

462 First Avenue

New York, New York

January 5th, 1920

To: Lunacy Commission members, Dr. Cyril Archer, Orson Parnell, Esq., and Mr. Homer Hadley

From: Dr. Horace Dunn, Forensic Alienist, Bellevue Hospital, Pavilion for the Alleged Insane

CC: Magistrate Thomas Hairston, New York County Court of General Sessions, State of New York

Subject: Lunacy Proceeding in the matter of Miles Trenowyth, Esq.

The prisoner has been indicted for arson, murder, mayhem, and making false statements to police in regard to an incident that took place on December 12
^th
through the early morning hours of the 13
^th
at 2078 Fifth Avenue in Harlem.

He is currently remanded to the Prison Ward at Bellevue, pending a lunacy determination. As a legally qualified examiner in lunacy, I have been tasked to conduct a thorough assessment of the prisoner and to make a recommendation to the Commission on whether to certify him as competent to stand trial.

Assessment

I commenced my assessment by taking psychiatric, medical, social, and family histories. Mr. Trenowyth is a much decorated veteran of the recent Great War, having earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the French Croix de Guerre, a Citation Star, and a purple heart. He lost his left arm in the fighting and, during his convalescence, was diagnosed with shell shock. At the same time, he developed an addiction to opium, initially through his pain treatment in the hospital with morphine. He was honorably discharged. Enclosed are copies of select pages from his US Army service and medical records.

Mr. Trenowyth is of exceptional intelligence, a summa cum laude graduate of Brown University with a law degree from Yale. About five months ago, upon being discharged from the Army and completing his convalescence, he resumed his career as a civil litigator at an Upper East Side law firm, where he is a partner.

His social, cultural, and political views tend to be conservative as well as rigid. Yet, he admits to dissolute habits, chief among them a predilection for liquor and his ongoing addiction to opium, two vices for which it has been, until his arrival at Bellevue, his penchant to combine in the form of laudanum and consume daily, often during business hours.

I examined Mr. Trenowyth's mental status in regard to physical appearance, general behavior, attention, orientation, psychomotor activity, mood, affect, speech, perceptions, form and content of thought, judgment, memory, insight, and lastly, intellectual functioning.

Mr. Trenowyth has demonstrated, and has admitted to, mild melancholia, which he attributes to the recent passing of his young wife, and to the war atrocities he'd witnessed in Europe. Intermittently, he has expressed hostility towards myself and other hospital staff. When my initial examination and clinical observations found no other behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes of an unsound mind, it remained to explore the possibility of deeply hidden psychiatric disturbance, or mental illness of a transitory type that somehow manifested on the night when this man allegedly committed the crimes for which he stands accused.

To that end, I persuaded Mr. Trenowyth, who'd been rendered mute, due to recent laryngeal trauma, to write down a full and detailed account of the night in question. His account proved revelatory when juxtaposed with his US Army medical records and with police investigative reports.

The New York City Police Department's assigned Homicide investigators, Detectives Christian Walcott and Brian McDonough, had initially believed Mr. Trenowyth's brief, written summary of the night in question: that an attempted robbery of some very rare coins by a band of robbers inside the Langley mansion had precipitated a night of human slaughter and ultimately the fire, which had burnt the structure until little remained beyond its shell. But then the police detectives discovered a number of discrepancies in Mr. Trenowyth's account with the coroner's report as well as with Metropolitan Fire Department reports.

One major discrepancy was in the number of dead. The fire department investigators had located the skeletal remains of eight human beings inside the building, whereas Mr. Trenowyth had reported ten deaths.

There had been no skeletal remains found of a pair of conjoined male twins, whom Mr. Trenowyth had stated in writing were responsible for three of the killings. He had described the twins as residents of the home, the illegitimate children of spinster Elizabeth Langley. (She has been verified as one of the residents and is the only other survivor besides Mr. Trenowyth from inside the building that night.)

On December 19
^th
, the police detectives interviewed Miss Langley in her room at Lenox Hill Hospital, where she is being treated for a heart condition. She adamantly denied ever having birthed children, much less having shared her residence with a pair of retarded, conjoined twin sons who, as Mr. Trenowyth has stated, lived in a huge, iron cage on the top floor and shared a propensity, when given the chance, for beheading mammals and consuming their brains.

An iron cage, according to fire department investigators, would have survived the fire intact; but no cage was ever found.

A last discrepancy identified by the police detectives concerned the condition of the skeletal remains. Mr. Trenowyth had stated to the detectives that precisely four people had been decapitated by the alleged twins: a Negro boy of twelve, who has been identified as Reginald Bluford, and who sold newspapers on the street corner near the house; a police officer, positively identified as Michael Cox; an alleged robber who, the detectives believe, was an Irish immigrant wanted for burglary by the name of Cormac O'Shea; and lastly, another alleged robber whose true identity is still in doubt, but who called herself Cora Buxton. Yet, according to the coroner's report, only one person had been beheaded, a female.

Thus, the police detectives came to believe, based on such grand falsehoods, that Miles Trenowyth was not the victim that he presented himself to be, but in fact the sole perpetrator of the horrifying events of that night.

Theirs is not an unreasonable theory, by any means. For it is indeed an all too common story whenever a war veteran returns home with psychological injuries that lead him, one day, often out of the blue, to “snap” mentally, as people often say, to use his military training and experience to perpetrate the kinds of extreme violence that had, only months earlier, won him medals.

Nonetheless, I judge the police detectives to be wrong in their theory. Mr. Trenowyth's US Army medical records contain a telling discharge report from the hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, where he convalesced for about six months. It is dated April 2nd, 1919, and written by his primary physician, Army Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hines, who laments that “the patient continues to be haunted by the same recurring visual image from the trenches that has haunted him since his initial diagnosis for shell shock in October of last year. That image is of a friend and fellow soldier from his unit, Sergeant Roger Whitcomb, moments after the man had been decapitated by his own helmet through the force of a concussive blast.”

Hence, I believe that the verifiably false portions of Mr. Trenowyth's story of what happened inside the Langley mansion on the night of December 12
^th
were not at all random, nor evasive, but deeply expressive of his own, documented history of mental illness, one that is ongoing, that yet includes a preoccupation with decapitated human beings, and that reflects an incomplete recovery from shell shock.

By this point in my assessment, I suspected that Mr. Trenowyth had, in order to believe his own falsehoods, developed an atypical psychosis as a result of the stress of the attempted robbery, or perhaps, for some unknown reason, even prior to that night. Thus, I conducted interviews with two of his law partners at their offices on Park Avenue, and with his domestic servants at his house on Carnegie Hill.

Mr. Trenowyth's live-in cook, an elderly widow by the name of Siobhan McGinty, and his cleaning woman, Mrs. Harriet Fraser, are immigrants from Ireland and Scotland, respectively. They have both been employed by Mr. Trenowyth for several years. I interviewed the two women jointly over tea in the kitchen. It was through them that I uncovered another discrepancy between the truth and what Mr. Trenowyth had written in his manuscript about the night in question. Several times within that document, he'd lamented the recent loss of his young wife, Annabel, to the ravages of the Spanish flu. Yet, his domestic servants related to me that his wife was, in fact, not dead, but quite alive, had not contracted the flu, but had “run off with another man” about ten days prior to the return of Mr. Trenowyth from Europe. (The whereabouts of Mrs. Trenowyth are currently unknown.)

Both servants admitted that they were cognizant of Mr. Trenowyth's strange delusion in regard to the disappearance of his wife. Neither woman being much educated, they'd agreed to humor their employer in his delusion, believing that it was what he needed, at least for the time being, in order to absorb the terrible shock of spousal betrayal.

Mr. Trenowyth's law partners, on the other hand, both maintained that they were unaware of this delusion. When Mr. Trenowyth returned to work, about two months after his return from Europe, they had simply taken him at his word that his wife had recently died of the flu.

My professional opinion, in sum, is that Mr. Trenowyth, prior to the night of his alleged crimes, was already suffering from partial insanity of a fairly uncommon variety, his illness likely engendered by shell shock.

It would require more observation and testing to classify his illness precisely, but I strongly suspect that he suffers from a form of paraphrenia, a chronic psychotic disorder first described by Kraepelin in 1913, though not to be confused with Kraepelin's dementia praecox, in which patients suffer,
inter alia
, from hallucinations as well as a host of bizarre delusions that could not possibly be true.

Patients with paraphrenia, by contrast, typically hold a small number of fixed and non-bizarre delusions that might be true, but are demonstrably false. It is a disease in which its sufferers are often able to live in general society for months, if not years, at a time before their unique form of insanity is first suspected.

Mr. Trenowyth's sole delusion until recently had been the death of his wife, Annabel; but, under the stress of the robbery attempt inside the Langley Mansion on the night of December 12
^th
, after he himself had—for whatever reason—decapitated the robber known as Cora Buxton, he was unable to face what he'd done to a woman, even one such as she, given his own views on gender and custom, which might be categorized as traditional, conservative, or even reactionary.

The act of murdering a woman in so violent a manner has prompted within him a second delusion, in psychic self defense: his belief in a two-headed monster who cuts off people's heads to eat their brains.

Recommendations

1. The prisoner should be deemed unfit to stand trial for the crimes of which he is accused.
   

2. He should be remanded to Bellevue hospital's general population in a long-term commitment of unspecified length.
   

3. He should be re-assigned to the Pavilion for the Alleged Insane to undergo further clinical assessment, observation, and treatment.