The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (30 page)

Many of these correspondents returned their comments—sometimes written at great length and with obvious care. But Kelley never published the paper he had planned. This failure to make use of the contributors’ work did not sit well with Loosli-Usteri, who complained to Kelley six years later and lamented that the window for such research had closed. “
Nobody will anymore be interested in the psychology of those seven men,” she wrote.

A separate effort to assess the Nazi psychiatric records had already begun among attendees of the First International Congress of the World Federation of Mental Health, held in London in 1947. The clinical psychologist and Rorschach expert Molly Harrower had invited ten fellow authorities to examine seventeen records gathered by Kelley and Gilbert for their assessment, along with eight unrelated control test results. (Gilbert was the source of these records.) Nothing came of the committee’s examination of the Rorschachs. Harrower was among those who did not provide the interpretation they had promised. In 1976 she explained this dropping of the ball by recalling that the tests “did not show what we expected to see, and what the pressure of public opinion demanded that we see—that these men were demented creatures, different from normal people as a scorpion is different from a puppy. What we saw was a wide range of personalities, from severely disturbed neurotics to the superbly well adjusted.” The members of the assessment team, she realized in retrospect, saw good and evil in black and white terms, with no room in their beliefs for more uncertain delineations of the personalities that could commit atrocious acts. So in the end Kelley remained the only investigator willing publicly to declare that people like the worst of the Nazis live among us.

Slowly, Kelley’s focus on clinical psychiatric work began to weaken. Outwardly he appeared devoted to his teaching at Bowman-Gray and his direction of the treatment of patients at Graylyn. But his months at Nuremberg and inability to discover psychiatric triggers in the Nazis, or even a common personality type, left him yearning to better understand the minds of criminals. If, after months studying the prisoners responsible for the worst horrors of modern history, he found that evil was contained within people who in other ways seemed normal, then what could the tools of psychiatry usefully uncover? Kelley turned to criminology to illuminate these men.

In embracing criminology, Kelley ran a risk. Searching for the seeds of badness in others would force him to confront his own sinister aspects. As it offered answers for aberrant behavior, criminology could stir up the dark, untrustworthy world, so stingy in its appreciation for a great man’s
accomplishments, that Kelley’s mother June had revealed to him years ago. When he turned to this new discipline, Kelley risked exposing his deepest fears.

Starting in 1947, for the first time in his career
Kelley accepted consulting work with a city police force, teaching psychiatric techniques to members of the Winston-Salem Police Department and helping the police investigate criminal cases. In the spring of 1947 he testified in court on behalf of an accused rapist, Ralph Vernon Litteral, and described his diagnosis of organic brain damage, probably indicated by Rorschach testing. Litteral was eventually convicted. In a development that captured headlines in North Carolina newspapers, Kelley publicly sparred with Governor R. Gregg Cherry over the politician’s denial of clemency for Litteral. After personally interviewing Litteral, Cherry rejected Kelley’s assertion that the convicted man was legally insane, and Kelley countered by suggesting that the governor should get a medical license if he wanted to practice psychiatry. “This business of being governor is not an exact science, and I think psychiatry is equally nebulous,” Cherry replied. To which Kelley responded: “
If he is competent to determine whether this man knew right from wrong, then we’ve solved the shortage of psychiatrists.” Litteral was executed in November 1947.

Kelley refined his use of narco-hypnotic drugs for application in criminal investigations, especially in cases of amnesia or hysterically repressed memory, by replacing sodium pentothal and sodium amytal with Somnoform, a commonly used dental anesthetic. He counted the drug’s subtle smell among its many advantages—it did not require hypodermic needles for administration, and in gaseous form it had a faint odor that often went unnoticed until it had intoxicated the patient. By that time the recipient was unlikely to worry about what it smelled like. Somnoform could take effect in ninety seconds and intoxicate the subject for ten minutes. “
Take a whiff,” Kelley once invited a reporter. “Well, come on and smell it. It won’t hurt you. Sometimes it makes you feel like you had one drink too
many.” Kelley was speaking from actual experience. He had experimented with all of the “truth serum” drugs on himself. “
After a few whiffs,” he said of Somnoform, “your body begins to feel numb except for a little tingling sensation. Then you get sleepy and imagine you are floating away. A bit later about everything in the world seems wonderful and you relax. There is a constant feeling that something or someone is dissolving before your eyes.” He hoped to discover a narco-hypnotic drug that could be delivered even more easily than Somnoform, either in small bottles or some other container, perhaps for on-location use at crime scenes.

Whether using traditional drugs or new ones, narco-hypnosis was experiencing a brief popularity in law enforcement. Evidence that police obtained using “truth serums” resulted in the release of murder suspects in California, Oklahoma, and elsewhere during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The drugs, Kelley and other proponents maintained, could elicit confessions, help rule out falsely accused suspects, and draw from witnesses details of crimes that their memories had suppressed. Even as Kelley acknowledged that people could lie while under the influence of the drugs, he emerged as perhaps the treatment’s most loquacious advocate, and he frequently regaled journalists with his own dramatic stories of success. One such case involved a teenaged girl who in a fit of hysteria had lost her memory of her parents. They were strangers to her. Kelley’s application of Somnoform wafted the girl into a suggestive state that allowed the psychiatrist to plant in her mind the imperative to remember all important events of her life, including experiences with her parents. Kelley asserted that the girl awoke from her narco-hypnosis, looked at her parents, and declared, “Hello, Mother and Daddy!” Kelley diagnosed her as suffering from “parental denial,” a rejection of her mother and father. That disorder still required treatment, but the narco-hypnosis had freed the patient from her worst symptoms.

For years a specialist in the study of psychiatry and criminals, Herman Morris Adler, had worked on plans at the University of California at Berkeley to start a new and groundbreaking academic program in a relatively new discipline: criminology. After Adler died suddenly in 1936, the
proposal became moribund. It regained momentum after the war, and university administrators cast about for candidates to lead the school, which would be the first academic program for the study of criminology on the West Coast and one of the first in the nation. With
22 Cells
published and attracting attention, Kelley’s name came up. In a dramatic turnaround from its offer of an instructorship with weak prospects for advancement only a few years earlier, the university now offered Kelley a full professorship in criminology, to begin in the fall term of 1949. Kelley admitted that he was “
seriously considering the offer” but would wait until he discussed it with Bowman-Gray’s administration before making a final decision.

The Kelleys had their first child, Doug, at the end of 1947. (Two more, Alicia and Allen, followed in 1951 and 1953, respectively.) But because Dukie had recently inherited $400,000, the couple could now afford Kelley’s changing the course of his career. A move to Berkeley would involve more money and prestige, but it also would alter Kelley’s long-cultivated national image as a clinical psychiatrist. “
It would be an exclusive teaching and research position,” Kelley said while he was considering the offer. “If I accept, I will retire from psychiatric practice and devote full time to research work.” He could not resist. He handed his Bowman-Gray supervisors his resignation, effective July 31, 1949, just two years after Graylyn had opened with him as its director.
He had supervised the care of more than 560 inpatients during his time there, and an additional 1,600 veterans had come for outpatient care.

22 Cells in Nuremberg
had gone out of print a few months earlier, and Greenberg sold the publication rights back to Kelley for $250. Tired of the war, its aftermath, and the trial, readers did not have much appetite for more information about Hitler and company. The book dropped from the limelight, although it continued to lend Kelley prestige. That prestige carried him a long way in Berkeley, until the day it changed to notoriety.

9

C
YANIDE

K
elley never lost his love of being the center of attention. A natural raconteur and entertainer, he adored teaching. His move to the School of Criminology at UC–Berkeley in 1949 gave him the chance to immerse himself in the field of study that had gripped him at Nuremberg. It placed him before law students, future law enforcers, and soon-to-be judges, those whose world he had increasingly inhabited as a consultant for the police department and attorneys in Winston-Salem. From the cigarette-littered police stations and coffee-scented law offices of North Carolina, he moved to the bell towers and landscaped lawns of California’s largest university (and to
a princely annual salary of about $9,000). He would quickly bur-row his way into the grimy dens of justice that he so liked. His switch to criminology intrigued many of his psychiatrist colleagues. “
Do you accept armchair detectives in your course?” wrote one physician. “If you get a chance some time, I would very much like to hear about this venture of yours, as what avid follower of Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, etc., would not?”

In his first semester at Berkeley,
Kelley taught courses in criminologic psychiatry and the detection of deception. Students could see that the physician-professor did not match the common picture of a psychiatrist. He joked in class, made dramatic pauses during lectures to let his authority and good looks sink in, and filled chalkboards with bubble-filled diagrams that resembled works of abstract art. He was developing a new collection of criminal paraphernalia, which included sharpened spoons and other
felon-crafted weapons that he acquired from the warden at San Quentin Prison.

In the course “The Detection of Deception,” Kelley taught the concept that different perspectives and points of view could rationally lead to different conclusions. And he was happy to resort to sleight of hand to teach those lessons. He often used what he called the “water trick” in the class-room. Kelley set up vessels of water that were hot, at room temperature, and cold and asked volunteers to plunge in their hands. Then, after they had acclimated to a temperature, he told them to withdraw their hands and immerse them in a bucket of cold water. The class was always amused to hear how the cold water felt frigid, medium cool, and warm to different students. Kelley’s point was that the perception of what was legal or criminal—not to mention what we perceive as just—varies according to the perspective our senses afford us.

He still enjoyed playing the magician, letting on that “by learning the techniques of the magician in deception one can recognize the same maneuver in the deliberate lying of the criminal.” As he had baffled the denizens of Berkeley two decades earlier by driving a car blindfolded and making his escape from locked boxes, he now produced simpler but no less effective tricks. He sometimes pulled out a deck of cards in class, surreptitiously drew the same card from the bottom of the deck time after time, and convinced his students that all of the cards were identical. He then let them examine the deck and discover that it held fifty-two different cards. The senses, he impressed upon them, can deceive us. “
All the students come to class,” he said, a point of pride for a teacher who hoped never to bore. He soon began planning to write a book on deception that would powerfully meld his experiences with Nazis, common crooks, and magic.

Now in his forties, Kelley had aged into a ruddy, solid, meat-slab sort of man, with a beer belly and fleshy thighs that supported his 165 pounds. Many mornings before going to campus, he stared at his face in the bathroom mirror and intoned the vowels a-e-i-o-u, exercising the voice that was such a commanding part of his presence. Before anyone (except Kelley) realized it, the newcomer was an international leader of his field, a
previously low-profile discipline populated by attention-shy academics that one criminologist noted “
contained nobody but us chickens.” Kelley took pleasure in pulling the study of criminology down to earth, and he assigned students such street-level texts as Joseph Mitchell’s
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
and David Maurer’s
The Big Con
. “He also picks up a tidy bit of scratch as a medico-legal expert, as a lecturer, etc.,” wrote friend and fellow criminologist Howard Fabing admiringly to a colleague.