Envious Moon(54)

I stand up from my desk. Outside my window the sun is coming up over the distant water. I take the notebook and I put it into a brown envelope. I write Dr. Mitchell on the front of it. Then I leave my room and walk those hallways that echo the sound of my shoes on the linoleum. I exit the building and walk across the green lawn to the administration building where Dr. Mitchell’s big office is. The campus is deserted at this hour. I don’t see anyone else except for a few orderlies over near the doorway to the farm smoking. They ignore me and I enter the administration building and at Dr. Mitchell’s office, I place the envelope into the plastic bin next to his heavy wooden door.





You can’t even understand how much I have hated you for what you did to my husband, and to my baby girl. During the trial it took all I had to look at you, and you looked so smug to me, like you didn’t have a care in the world. And yet you took two lives. They may have been imperfect, but who knows what could have come if they had continued to live?

It was very hard for me to write this letter. It took a number of years for me to draw the strength I needed. In the end, I did it for Hannah. I wanted you to know the type of person she was, the type of person she might have been. She was so much more than an object for your sickness. She was a beautiful girl, and more beautiful inside than out. She could have had an amazing life. Sometimes I think about her in her thirties, married with children, happy, living in the kind of marriage that I always wanted. She would have learned from my mistakes, I think, and avoided many of the pitfalls. She would have been a great mother.

I don’t hate you anymore. I haven’t forgiven you either. And I won’t ever try to understand what you did. But Hannah in her short life did not like hate. There was too much difficulty in her own home. She did everything she could do to bring light to the world.

My only hope is that somehow this letter gets through to you. That perhaps you can take something from it that will allow you to fully understand what you have done.





Dr. Mitchell and I sit across from one another. Between us is his leather-topped coffee table. This is October and outside the window I can see maintenance workers raking the bright yellow leaves of the great oak into big piles. On the table in front of us is my notebook.

“I want to give this back to you,” Dr. Mitchell says.

“What did you think of it?”

He pauses. “I read it as a doctor, you have to know that. I think what I want to do Anthony, is give you some reading. Something I wrote.”

“Oh?”

He leans over toward a side table and picks a big folder off the top of it. He puts it on the table in front of me.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Your file,” he says.

“My file?”

“Everything we have learned about since you have been here. All my notes, notes from the other doctors. Test results. A summary of our findings.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

“You’re right to ask. It’s unusual. There are conditions under state law where patients can petition to see parts of their file, but seldom all of it. I agonized over this, Anthony. But after reading your account I came to the conclusion that it was the right thing to do. I think you will find the summary particularly useful. But you are welcome to read all of it. For all the obvious reasons, you cannot take it with you. You can stay here and read as long as you like. I will give you some privacy and will check back to see if you have any questions. Does that sound okay?”

I look down at the fat file on the table. Papers spill out of it. “All right, Dr. Mitchell,” I say.

He stands up in front of me, smooths out the creases in his suit pants.

“I’ll check in, Anthony,” he says, and he leaves me alone.

I open the folder. There is a lot of paper, but of course I have been here a long time. In the back there are smaller, random pieces, handwritten, and as I flip through I also see charts and spreadsheets, no doubt the results of the dozens of tests I have taken over the years. In the front is the summary and as it turns out, it is all I need to read.

The subject, Anthony Lopes, came to Edgewood at eighteen years old after a successful insanity plea in the trial of a murder of another teen. With very little formal education, he had worked as a commercial fisherman before his arrest. Nevertheless, the subject is hyperintelligent, articulate, manipulative, and generally very lucid. He manifests all the obvious traits of narcissism. He can be very persuasive and charming. He will explain in great detail the nature of his crime though he shows very little outward emotion. There are no signs of auditory or visual hallucinations, as one would find in schizophrenia. It is difficult to ascertain, of course, but the subject may have had olfactory and tactile hallucinations.

It is the conclusion of this committee that the subject suffers from an acute, and rare, form of delusional disorder, erotomanic subtype. The subject has always maintained the victim of his murder had been in love with him, and that in fact, the two had been engaged in a loving relationship over the course of several months. While it is unusual for the erotomanic subtype to be present in males, some forensic samples do contain a preponderance of males. Many of these patients are associated with dangerous or assaultive behavior. There is no evidence to suggest that the victim was ever in love with the subject. In fact, the overwhelming evidence presented at the trial shows that the delusional disorder may have begun after the subject encountered the victim during a larceny. Following that event, the subject became convinced that the victim was in love with him and that he was in love with her. He developed elaborate rescue fantasies, consistent with erotomania. He then proceeded to act out these fantasies, abducting the victim at her family home and keeping her hostage for several weeks. After being apprehended, he managed to escape custody and reached the victim once again, abducting her a second time. This abduction resulted in her death, in what appeared to be an attempt at a murder/suicide.