By Reason of Insanity Read online

  BY REASON OF INSANITY

  by Shane Stevens

  Flyleaf:

  The shadow of the celebrated Caryl Chessman case looms over this gripping epic of mass murder, pursuit, and psychological terror.

  At the center of the novel are two men: Thomas Bishop, a psychotic young killer who believes he is the son of Caryl Chessman, the notorious “red light bandit” who was executed for rape in California amid intense controversy; and Adam Kenton, an investigative reporter who becomes obsessed with capturing Bishop.

  Subjected to unmerciful physical and mental torture from an early age by his mother, Thomas Bishop rebels against her at the age of ten and gains his first taste of the power to kill. Placed in an institution for the criminally insane, he grows to manhood knowing the outside world only through a television screen — a young man forever struggling with his demons. At twentyfive, he succeeds in a brilliant escape and change of identity and begins to move across the country, murdering women to avenge the death of his father. What follows is a harrowing descent into the mind of a mass murderer, so realistic that it will leave you believing that there is a little of Thomas Bishop in every one of us.

  It is Adam Kenton who writes the first cover story on Bishop’s astonishing crimes. Determined to stop the killer at any cost, Kenton soon becomes the spearhead of the greatest manhunt in U.S. history.

  Relentlessly, the two move closer and closer to one another: the reporter with a mission to destroy those who abuse power; the killer with a mission to destroy. The chilling denouement will hold you spellbound until the shattering, unforgettable conclusion.

  Shane Stevens is the legendary author of Dead City, Way Uptown in Another World, Rat Pack, and Go Down Dead.

  COPYRIGHT 1979 BY SHANE STEVENS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER

  A DIVISION OF GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BUILDING

  ROCKEFELLER CENTER

  1230 AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10020

  ISBN 0-671-24058-7

  For Dr. Cornelia Wilbur

  and for all the Sybils everywhere—

  and especially for all the other children

  who fought back and who lost

  History is the story of the world’s crime.

  —VOLTAIRE

  You ask me why you were born into a city of ghouls and murderers … I will tell you—it is because your beloved ancestors performed unspeakable crimes in secret and in silence, and now you must pay the hideous price!

  —HERMANN HESSE

  Prologue

  THE FLAMES ate at the body ravenously, searing, tearing through flesh and muscle. First flaking, then blackening and charring, the skin disintegrated swiftly. Soon arms, legs and trunk would become flame-flushed down to whitened bone. And in due time the head, stripped of facial features, would come to resemble a skull.

  Silent now but for a gurgling singsong moan from somewhere deep in his throat, his eyes maniacal in the red glow of the fire, the boy watched the body burn and burn and burn …

  BOOK ONE

  THOMAS BISHOP

  One

  IN THE spring of the year, the mist that rolls like silent thunder across the bay seems to bathe San Francisco in quicksilver. Mercurial, it passes through everything, changing nothing, leaving nothing. Yet it shrouds whatever it touches, raising the purely natural to the mystical, however temporarily. Nowhere is this more evident than north of the city, along the coastal fingers of land extending into San Francisco Bay. It is here that the primal mist best works its magic, covering the shimmering towns and fields and inlets. Here lie the threads of a thousand folktales. Here too, an eerie centerpiece, looms San Quentin Prison. Dark-rocked, forbidding, the prison rises out of the earth mist, a landscape in tortured stone. Oftentimes, in the early gloom, San Quentin looks like the lighthouse at the end of the world.

  On just such a day, to be exact, on May 2, 1960, a condemned man was led into the gas chamber at San Quentin. He was accompanied by four guards, two of whom quickly strapped him into the right-hand one of two metal chairs in the small steel room. The stethoscope was connected. The guard captain wished him good luck. His face showed no emotion as the guards left and the metal door was sealed from the outside, its spoked wheel given a final turn. He continued to stare at the sixty witnesses assembled outside the octagonal cell, watching him through five thick glass windows. The final prayers had already been said, the last words already spoken for Caryl Chessman. For twelve years he had fought the coming of this day in the courts of California and the Supreme Court of the United States. Now the fight was over. He had lost, and at age thirty-eight Caryl Chessman awaited the penalty of death.

  Behind the gas chamber, set into one side of a larger room on the first floor of the death house, a hand opened a valve at a signal from the warden. The time was 10:03 A.M. Instantly cyanide pellets dropped from a container under the death chair into a basin of sulfuric-acid solution. In a matter of seconds the lethal acid fumes reached the condemned man, soon filling the room with the odor of bitter almonds and peach blossoms. His body strained against the straps, his head jerked back. Slowly he slipped into unconsciousness and death, the brain denied oxygen. The official pronouncement, at 10:12, created no stir beyond the necessary clean-up details. And in the rest of San Quentin, above the gas chamber known as the Green Room because of its dark-green walls, life went on much as before.

  The killing of Caryl Chessman, the infamous “Red Light Bandit” who had committed a series of robbery-rapes in Los Angeles in the late 1940s—coming as it did in the pivotal year 1960—was thought by some to mark an end to an era of violence in America that stretched from the gangster lawlessness of the twenties, through the violent labor disputes of the thirties and bloodshed of World War II and the Korean war, to the indiscriminate mass killings of a Perry Smith or a Charles Starkweather in the late fifties. The leisurely Eisenhower days were over and soon Kennedy would begin the years of Camelot. The first major stirrings of protest over capital punishment were being heard. The country was in a scientific race with Russia that would create jobs and improve the economy. Everywhere new directions were opening that would require energy and dedication. It was thought to be an exciting time, for America was once again on the move.

  Instead, Caryl Chessman’s death at the start of the sixties marked the beginning of an age of bloodletting which is not yet over. And, by a strange twist of the fates, Chessman’s life and death were also the beginning of a bizarre and savage series of killings that would—more than a decade later—involve law-enforcement officials across the nation, and reach into the highest governmental and communications levels. To see why and how this came about, one must first go back to the early postwar years in Los Angeles. Uniforms were scarcer on the streets now that the war was over, and tract houses were being built by the thousands all over the valley. Food was more plentiful too. Upstate, Henry Kaiser was forming companies to make everything. In Washington the Truman administration was trying to save Europe from economic collapse. But as usual nobody did anything about the weather. It was hot and humid on this September 3, 1947, and people were glad to see the sun go down. Sometime during the evening a man with dark hair and bushy eyebrows decided that it might be a good night for rape and robbery.

  While most of the city played cards or drank beer or went to a movie or even to sleep, others could be found turning off roadways and streets, inching along without lights until a spot was reached where the occupants, usually two, could nuzzle in privacy. Lovers’ lanes were still plentiful, though the housing boom was already whittling them down. In these various secl
uded groves Fords and Chevies and an occasional Cadillac would form a loose daisy chain, with each car a respectful distance from the next, and every nose pointed toward the center so that leaving would cause no disturbance to others.

  Inside the cars people would fondle each other, and when the girl got disheveled enough to call a temporary halt the boy would pull out a pack of Camels and they would smoke and listen to the radio and talk in whispers. For those more seriously involved, the idle chatter would soon give way to the language of passion and pleas of eternal love.

  In less accessible areas cars would simply park as far from one another as possible. Often this meant virtual seclusion, and couples could then feel they were alone in the world. It was to this kind of lovers’ lane that the man came seeking victims. His search was soon rewarded.

  The car was a blue Plymouth sedan. The window on the driver’s side was down and murmuring could be heard from within. A pool of cigarette butts lay on the soft ground, deposited from a filled ashtray. There were no other parked automobiles to be seen as the man silently crept up, a gun in one hand and a light in the other. At the last step he stiffened and hurriedly flashed the light into the Plymouth.

  Behind the wheel the driver turned toward the light, startled. Someone asked him what he was doing there. Before he could answer he was ordered to open the door. Flustered, he did as he was told. Then he was ordered to step out with the car keys, and remove the contents of his pockets. When he saw the gun he quickly complied. He was marched to the rear and told to get in the trunk. “You’ll be out in a little while,” the voice said to him. “Don’t worry.” The driver obeyed and heard the trunk being locked.

  The next moment the man was beside the girl, flashing the light on her. She was pretty in a plain way, a little too plump perhaps, but rounded and soft. Her light-brown hair was short and done in the fashion of the day, curls framing the face. She wore a yellow dress and green sweater which she had unbuttoned. These the man ordered her to remove in the back seat as he got in after her. He was polite and told her that she would not be hurt if she didn’t resist. He asked her twice if she understood.

  Sara Bishop, age twenty-one, understood perfectly. At thirteen she had been seduced by her uncle, her dead mother’s brother, who had brought her to Oklahoma City from a small town to live with his family. He would sit her on his lap when his wife wasn’t home and his aged and cranky motherin-law was asleep upstairs. She would feel his hands on her, all over her body, until one day it was no longer just his hands. For three years she said nothing, suffering his attentions quietly. She had nowhere else to go. At sixteen she married an oil hand who left her after three months. At seventeen she was attacked by three high school boys behind a luncheonette where she worked. At eighteen she left Oklahoma City for Phoenix and a serviceman who got her a job as a B-girl and took all her money before leaving her one night with a black eye and a few loose teeth.

  By age twenty Sara Bishop hated men, all men, with a passion others usually reserved for love. Yet she was intelligent enough to know that they came in handy at times. She didn’t care much for sex, though it sometimes could be used to get what was needed. What amazed her was her inability to get pregnant all those years, a mystery for which she was thankful. The following year, after moving to Los Angeles, the mystery was cleared up by a doctor who repositioned her womb during a minor operation. For this she loudly cursed him. When the bill arrived she wrote two words on it and sent it back unpaid. She never received another. But to Sara it was just one more man in a long line that proved her hatred justified.

  Now, lying on the back seat of the blue Plymouth, Sara Bishop prayed. She didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to become pregnant. Yet here she was naked, with her legs open, and this stranger was on top of her having his fun. All because he was a man and had a gun. Goddam men, she thought, goddam them all to hell. Twice she asked him to please not come inside of her but he merely grunted.

  To escape the moment Sara thought of the young man in the trunk. She had been seeing him for a month, hoped that he would ask her to marry. She was broke and she was lonely. But mostly she was plain tired. It would be easier with a man, even if he was just a twentythree-year-old drifter. But he’s worked a lot of jobs, she thought grimly. He could work at something to take care of us. She hadn’t been intimate with him yet because she wanted to hold his interest until—

  The man was getting off her. It was over. She didn’t know if he had come inside of her or not. He probably did, she told herself, defeated. But at least one thing he didn’t get was feeling. She hadn’t moved a muscle, hadn’t moaned or groaned or begged or pleaded or even squirmed. All he got was a dead fish, she said to herself. Hope he liked dead fish. She corrected herself. Hope he didn’t like dead fish.

  He tossed her the car keys. “Let him out after I go,” he said softly. Then he thanked her. Just like that. “Thank you.” And he was gone.

  She lay there quietly in the dark, holding back tears. She felt used up, drained of all energy. What was the sense of fighting? Men always got what they wanted, the bastards. They made promises or gave a few dollars or took by force, it all came to the same thing. They got their fun and then they were gone. If she had her way she would kill every last one of them, the miserable bastards. Miserable bastards, she shrieked to herself. She opened her mouth to shout it, but nothing came out. Suppose he was still around? What did she know of him? He carried a gun and a funny kind of light. He had dark hair and bushy eyebrows. And a big nose. What else? The rest of him was small, she thought with grim satisfaction.

  A thump startled her. She quickly threw on her dress, shoving her brassiere and panties and slip under the cushion. She leaned over the front seat and fixed her face in the mirror. Tired or not, scared or mad, she knew what she had to do. Just in case.

  Fumbling with the key, she finally got the trunk open. He was wild with anger, running around, wanting to go after the man with a tire iron. But there was no one in sight. Embarrassed, mortified at the blow to his pride, his manhood, he cursed his enemy incessantly as he was slowly led back to the car. In his rage he didn’t notice that she had pulled him into the back seat.

  Now she snuggled tightly against him, cooing softly, murmuring words of encouragement. She stroked his cheek, his chest, calming his anger little by little. After a while she placed his hand on her ample breast. Her face was ecstatic, her eyes wide and limp with innocence. In her heart she was cursing him as just another bastard man, so wrapped up in his own feelings that he gave no thought to what she had just been through. Not a word of pity, not a gesture of sorrow, not even a look of interest to see if she had been hurt. Nothing but his own stupid pride, his own hurt feelings. You son of a bitch, she almost screamed at him.

  Her face showed nothing as she slid farther down the seat, pulling him on top of her. Her sexual whisperings became frenzied, her breathing heavier. She felt his hand beneath her dress as she wiggled it higher until it was above her hips. Her open mouth found his tongue and held it, working it between her teeth. Now his breathing became charged, his movements more frantic. He suddenly leaned to one side and began fumbling with his pants. As she heard the zipper she silently vowed to give an Academy Award performance right here, this night, on this deserted strip of road. She would, by God or the devil himself, give this bastard man the greatest sex he ever had, the greatest sex any man ever had. She would do it because she had to. She needed him.

  Two months later they were married in Las Vegas. The chapel cost twenty dollars, the other eighty they lost at the crap table. With return tickets in hand, they boarded the last bus back to Los Angeles. Sara didn’t tell her new husband that she was pregnant.

  True to her vow, Sara had given him all the sex he wanted and any way he wanted it. Shutting off her mind, she performed her act so well that he soon came to believe he couldn’t live without her, or at least shouldn’t. He hadn’t realized women could be so passionate— some women, anyway—so willing to satisfy his ever
y fantasy, yet never demanding anything of him. It was like having a wind-up toy, life-sized and eager to please. He decided that he would play along with it for a while.

  After the marriage Sara kept on with her act, though with somewhat diminished fervor, as befits a married woman. She had little use for sex herself since no man had ever brought her to satisfaction. But the emotional security of just being with someone was worth the effort, she believed. And the money helped too. His pay at the gas station was more than she could ever make in the bakery. With two paychecks they even had a bit to spare. Between the sex and the promised good times, she thought she could hold him. And so one day she decided that she would keep the baby when it came.

  A month later she told her husband that he would be a father. She was lying for in her heart Sara somehow knew, as only a woman could know, that the real father was a rapist with dark hair and a big nose and a funny light. But he wasn’t here and this man was, so of course he was the father. Poetic justice, Sara told herself. Here’s at least one time to get back at the bastards.

  Her husband was impressed. Dumb as only a twentythree-year-old can be dumb, he felt that fatherhood made him even more of a man. And when Sara promised him that a baby wouldn’t interfere in any way with the sex he was getting, he dropped his pants right there on the kitchen floor and had her make love to him where he stood. Afterward he went out for a few beers.

  On January 24, 1948, Sara Bishop, now Sara Owens, read in the Los Angeles papers of the capture of a robber-rapist who preyed on couples in lovers’ lanes. She looked at the picture. It was him! She looked again, more closely. Now she wasn’t so sure. He was only a man she had once been under for a few minutes, and the father of her child. She read the name of the rapist: Chessman. Caryl Chessman.