Epilogue

WHENEVER I TELL PEOPLE I am writing about mental illness, they always ask about my connection to the subject. Unlike many other issues that have featured prominently in my work as a journalist, among them immigration and criminal justice, people tend to assume I must have a personal tie to mental illness. Sometimes it seems like the assumption is that only somebody who did would be interested in those people. Then again, as I’ve discovered, most of us do have some connection to mental illness—a distant aunt, a neighbor, an old friend. I am no exception.

It’s a story I don’t often tell, even when I’m asked that question, in part because it’s something of a conversation stopper. But I thought about it a great deal as I researched this book.

I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE IF my knees really buckled when I heard the news. Or if that’s just how I remember it now. In my sheltered world, parents didn’t die. They certainly didn’t get murdered. And especially not at the hands of their brilliant and much-loved college student son, home for Christmas break of his senior year. Matthew had been a year ahead of me at our public high school, a competitive suburban one where the question was not whether you’d go to college, but rather which of the country’s top institutions you’d end up in. His younger sister was in my class and was—and still is—a close friend. I knew their parents, too: their chemist father, who was a colleague of my own scientist father, and their mother, who sold antique prints.

Even in a place where many kids had special talents, Matthew stood out. He was not only exceptionally smart; he was also a precocious artist. While we were all still in high school, he was already selling his paintings: realist cityscapes, landscapes inspired by the countryside where the family had a rustic cabin, and impressions of the Atlantic coast, where they often went on vacation. He was creative in other ways, too: he once wrote and recorded an entire musical; he designed elaborate sets for school plays and the local summer stage. But Matthew was no brooding artist type. He was gregarious, funny, and poised, as comfortable talking to parents and teachers as he was to his friends. We all admired him and his unique sensibility; his sister adored him. Sweet-tempered and gentle, there was no indication that he used drugs or alcohol. After high school, he went on to a fancy liberal arts college where he majored in studio art and got A’s.

He had never shown any signs of mental illness before, nor had he been violent. In retrospect, though, maybe there were signs that he wasn’t himself that Christmas. He had spent the fall semester studying abroad in Paris, and in letters home—this was before e-mail and Skype—he’d complained of strange dreams. At home over winter break, he’d been moody, arguing with his family about the feminist academic Camille Paglia and being weirdly obsessed with the lyrics of the singer/songwriter Sting. At the time, it had seemed nothing more than irritating, the bombastic thoughts of a young man who’d been immersed in challenging new ideas and was, perhaps, trying to figure out what he would do when he graduated.

Then one morning in early January, Matthew took a hammer and bludgeoned his mother to death. He later told psychiatrists and his surviving family that he’d been in the thrall of terrifying delusions about an impending apocalypse. The only way to save his mother, he believed, was to kill her.

His father was at work; his sister was back at her own college. Matthew had had plans that day to visit a museum with our old high school art teacher, Mr. Johnson. When Mr. Johnson arrived at the modest house, he found Matthew’s mother unconscious and bleeding in the entryway and Matthew wandering around, speaking incoherently and seemingly oblivious to what he had just done. Mr. Johnson called 911. By the time Matthew’s father arrived home, the EMTs were attending his wife, and the police had surrounded Matthew, who was quoting lines from The Tempest. At the local hospital, Matthew’s mother was declared dead. He was taken to the state forensic hospital.

The next day, his father hired a criminal defense attorney to represent him. At a hearing before the judge, Matthew was asked if he understood the nature of the charges against him and was quickly declared “not criminally responsible,” that state’s version of not guilty by reason of insanity. (The state dropped the murder charge, but the judge did not acquit him completely.) Matthew was committed to the same forensic hospital where he had been sent immediately after the incident. It has been difficult for doctors to determine precisely what disorder would have caused him to become so psychotic. His diagnosis has shifted over the years, first from schizophrenia to schizoaffective disorder—which has symptoms of both schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorders, such as mania and depression. Later still, it was changed to bipolar disorder.

After he spent five years in the hospital, psychiatrists eventually decided Matthew was well, and he was released to live in the community, first in a halfway house and later on his own. Along the way, he finished the requirements for his degree and graduated from college. Today, some two decades later, he lives on his own, working various jobs to support his painting and showing his work in local galleries. He still sees a psychiatrist every month and takes medication to treat what is now believed to be bipolar disorder. He hasn’t been violent, nor has he been a threat to anyone. Apart from some nasty side effects from some of his medications, he’s been healthy.

Unlike so many other people with mental illness who commit horrific violent crimes or even far less awful nonviolent crimes, Matthew never went to prison. It is thanks, in no small measure, to his father, who, despite having lost so much, fought for him throughout his case and continues to this day to support him. His family’s relative wealth meant access to paid legal representation. (There are many excellent public defenders, but as with so many things, having money means more choices.)

The fact that Matthew did what he did in a very liberal county of a liberal state likely contributed to the favorable outcome as well. That he is white undoubtedly helped, as did his education and his clean-cut good looks. The result is that Matthew has been able to lead a fairly normal life since that terrible day.

Is this the right outcome? I think so—even though I continue to be haunted by what happened and disturbed by how much this story contrasts with the fate of so many others I have seen. And the outcome has not just helped Matthew but has also offered some measure of consolation to his father. I know a lot of people won’t agree. Maybe he shouldn’t be in prison, people have said to me, but is it really safe for him to be living in the community? And does he “deserve” to have a normal life after what he did? His father tells me he is “back to his old self.” (I haven’t seen him since before this happened; his father asked me not to contact Matthew about this book, and I haven’t.) It’s been more than twenty years, and he hasn’t given the slightest sign that he would ever do something like it again (although, as people have frequently pointed out to me, there was no indication the first time either).

But it is precisely the extremity of his case—and my complicated feelings about it—that suggest to me a different, perhaps more universal lesson. If such a path of rehabilitation is possible for a person with mental illness who commits an act so violent and so heinous, it gives me hope that one day we can also change the outcomes for the tens of thousands of others with mental illness, most of them charged with or convicted of far lesser crimes—people who are now stuck in our jails and prisons. If we do not try, we will not only have failed these people and their families. We will have failed ourselves.