Caryl Chessman - The Kid Was a Killer

The Kid Was a Killer

Caryl Chessman

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Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Conclusion

For FUZZY

who, in another day, knew

another kid, who loved him,

and tried to make him whole.

Caryl Chessman

Introduction

by

H. Peter Laqueur, M.D.

(Dr. Laqueur is a member of the Psychiatric Staff of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, and a specialist in insulin treatment for schizophrenics at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens County, New York.)

Death is one of the fundamental phenomena of the universe. It comes to all creatures at the point where the external environmental forces exceed the powers of adaptation and adjustment built into the fragile miraculous microcosmos of cells and changeable protein molecules which we call the living organism.

The author of this book has been under a real threat of extinction for eleven years. He was condemned to die not only by the natural forces, which eventually bring an end to the life of each of us, but by an added large force of common public emotion (indignation) and thought (law) because he had at one point threatened the life of another human being.

Rarely are books written by criminals under prolonged threat of extermination, except the diaries of political rebels or the last statements and letters of those condemned to die in military conflict.

It is not my function as a psychiatrist to give a psychiatric diagnosis of the state of mind of the author, whom I have never met. My own thoughts about death have been deeply influenced by writers like Schopenhauer, who as a philosopher, and Thomas Mann, who as a poet, have taught me to see death with equanimity if not with detachment. As long as we are, death is not. When we are gone, our thoughts and memory and emotions are not; therefore there is no connection between life and death. We will never know or experience the moment of our extinction, no matter how much we fear it before it arrives.

Nietzsche went even further. He said: Of our death we are certain. Why should we not be cheerful?

In a brilliant after-dinner lecture at the Harvard Club in Boston, I recently heard the scientist, philosopher and poet Warren S. McCulloch say that death comes to an organism when there are no further possibilities to put its built-in capacities for adaptation to a good use.

The end of Caryl Chessman's life, which has caused so many people to think about threats of violent death and retaliation by capital punishment, is discussed here more as a philosophical problem than a moral one. To be for or against capital punishment is a question on the same psychiatric level as whether we are for war or peace; whether our rational minds permit us to allow violent death to be brought about by us and our fellow men, or whether we can resist the temptation to become so utterly and definitely violent.

The author of this book sees the hero of his story as a killer, a man who cannot refrain from maximal violence, and he explains that the forces of society around him have made him that way; in other words he has lost his ability and his willingness to control his destructive impulses when he is angry, or when an opportunity for killing arises. He indicates that, if society makes us furious enough, or exposes us to enough cruelty, we may become killers.

No one has ever measured how much torture and cruelty a growing child must be exposed to in order to convert it into a mad killer. Certain organisms can stand a lot of punishment over a long time before they become antisocial, while others under the same stress break early. What baffles me is the fact that Caryl Chessman has managed to stir people up to such an extent; that many people left the normal middle field of neutrals and chose to move into either the violently indignant group which is for capital punishment, or the equally vociferous and emotional group which exclaims against capital punishment as a social sin and crime equal to the ones it seeks to avenge.

We psychiatrists think often in terms of unconscious (irrational) forces which steer our mind into various types of behavior. Which unconscious motives make us choose so emphatically for or against death by capital punishment? Those who believe in the primary goodness of manthe modern humanists among whom belong Thomas Mann and the present Popeare powerfully motivated to believe that delaying violent action, holding and restraining the violent criminal without physically injuring him, leads to a better world because it gives the primary good in man a chance to develop further, rather than cutting him off from the world. These humanists must have experienced some good in their own young years which made them believe in the value of restraint and self-discipline. The other faction of our people, those who believe that criminal violence should be punished by death, have in their own lives experienced the consequences of hate and cruelty; they have learned to identify with the victims of violence and they wish vehemently to protect our community from aggression, not only from other external criminals, but also from the violence in their own hearts. Those who feel the need for capital punishment as a deterrent want not only to hold a threat over their aggressive fellow men, but also want to protect themselves from the possible temptation to break through their own capacity for reason and restraint, and commit major violence. It can be argued that there is nothing morally wrong with capital punishment. But it is an admission of our own inner weakness; in our need to protect ourselves, we realistically assume that sharp threats and acute danger of death are necessary to ward off man's sadistic impulses.

I do not know whether Caryl Chessman as a man has any merits. I cannot say anything more than this: he stirred us all to think about the violence in our own hearts, and that makes his impact on our society important.

Chapter One

There was a famine in local sports news, one of those dead periods that crop up.

Borden, our aging and irascible little dynamo of a sports editor, sent for me. When I barged into the cluttered cubicle he called his office, he was restlessly pacing the floor, a green eyeshade cocked on his bald head.

Evans, I was told brusquely, without preliminaries, your column's getting anemic. Hell, man, it's practically old-maidish!

I winced. But you didn't argue with Borden, the little man who could outshout Stentor. You heard him out. That way you saved a lot of wear and tear on your ears.

Borden continued, Get off the seat of your pants and go out and dig us up a story with sock and human interest; something that'll hit the reader between the eyes. It's out there, I know it.

Then came the punch line, some famous last words: All you gotta do is find it. The little devil smiled benignly.

Yeah, I said icily, all I have to do is find it. But where?

Borden pivoted around and shouted, How should I know? That's your job.

Sure, that was my job.

And didn't I have two eyes, two ears, two legs? Didn't I have the prescient Borden's ironclad assurance a Big Story was out there somewhere in our sprawling, sports-starved metropolis just waiting for Charley Evans, columnist and feature writer, to break it? What more did I need, a ouija board? The logic was perfect and, from Borden's standpoint, devastating.