"Marty"

For the average person it is difficult to know for sure if another person is truly mentally ill or, perhaps, just acting the part. Even professionals with walls full of PhD certificates can be fooled, and most of them will admit that. It is not an exact science, and there are so many levels of mental illness and personality disorders that overlap one another it becomes mind-boggling in and of itself.

Mental health professionals rely on self-reporting from their patients. There is no infallible blood test or x-ray that can tell if a person has schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or is antisocial. The only tests which psychologists and psychiatrists have all relied on are their patients answering of questions which are designed to provide insight into their mental condition.

In most cases this works well. The majority of people who are suffering from a mental or emotional disorder truly want to be helped and they do their best to interact with their doctor or counselor as candidly as they can. In these cases the doctor or counselor can generally make a pretty good diagnosis and is then able to treat the person with medications or counseling session or whatever is deemed necessary. It is the best system we have to date and it has helped countless thousands of people lead much better lives.

It does not, however, always work well within the criminal justice system. There are those in our society who commit crimes of every sort and then try to escape punishment for that crime by saying they are mentally ill and therefore not responsible for their actions. It comes down to whether or not the person knows, or knew, right from wrong. My opinion on that subject, though not professional, shall be reserved for the next chapter.

Marty came into the jail fresh from the emergency room at Yavapai Regional Medical Center. He had a glazed look on his face and his head was swathed with bandaging that seemed to cover some sort of protruding lump. It was not apparent if his zombie-like state was from medication or his current mental condition but he did attract a lot of attention from the jail staff. This, of course, was also due to the fact that he had just killed both his parents and his four-year-old son with a ball-peen hammer while his wife was out of town. Rumor had it that after slaughtering his immediate family, he then turned the hammer on himself and whacked himself in the head hard enough to necessitate a trip to the ER before taking him to jail. I might add, it was not hard enough to end his life, as it had his parents and son.

Marty was the first (and to my knowledge the only) inmate from which I ever took footprints as well as fingerprints. During and after the attack he had walked through the blood barefoot and left footprints at the scene so it was necessary to print his feet in ink. I’m not sure how necessary this was because Marty never denied committing the murders. His defense was insanity.

Before the killings he had driven himself to the ER that morning or afternoon, I do not recall which, and reported to the hospital staff he was hearing voices that were telling him to do terrible things, some of these were to kill his family. This was in order to “save” them from something even more horrendous, but I was never clear on what that might have been. The story began that the family contacted the local mental health facility and after a screening, Marty was given an antidepressant and then released. At that point he proceeded to drive home and kill his family, whose members were either demons themselves, or were going to be attacked by demons. This was a lot of years ago and I have forgotten some of the minute facts. The main point, which I remember well, were the photos I saw of his four-year-old son lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor...