As news crews flocked the steps of the Waukesha County Courthouse, rumors circulated that the Honorable Michael O. Bohren, the new judge on Morgan and Anissa’s case, had hired a professional stylist to do his hair before proceedings.
Sixty-seven-year-old Bohren loved martinis and the theater. He had white hair, a big white mustache, and donated to the Milwaukee Repertory, which had just produced the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’.
On August 1, 2014, Bohren entered the courtroom for Morgan’s competency hearing, wearing one of his signature bow ties. His hair looked thick, healthy, and symmetrical. Doctors that day testified that Morgan was incompetent to stand trial. They urged Judge Bohren to have her formally examined in a hospital setting, so that she might be officially diagnosed and receive medication. If Morgan was, as they suspected, living with schizophrenia, a degenerative illness that entailed a progressive decline, then they needed to act quickly. Psychosis was not good for the brain. Every day that passed without Morgan receiving medication put her at risk for permanent neurological damage.
The prosecution asked one psychologist, “What steps do you see that will need to be taken in order to return her to competence?”
She responded, “Certainly on some level she needs to grow up.”
On the stand, Washington County Jail correctional officers described Morgan talking to herself and pretending to be a cat. In general she struck them as shy, “a little quirky sometimes” (talking to herself) and “jumpy” (the cat claws), “a little socially awkward” (all of the above). When she wasn’t lost in her hallucinations, Morgan talked about cats or read cat books. Instead of eating, she crumbled up her food and fed it to the ants that infested the jail. Morgan considered them her pets and put them in her pocket. She threw them at other children in the jail’s recreation room, where kids quickly stopped asking her to play games like Uno, Monopoly, and Sorry! The Washington County Jail teaching staff had started pleading with the guards to make sure that Morgan did not bring ants with her into “school,” a portion of the day when one teacher corralled forty unruly boys and girls into a twenty-two-by-twenty-two-foot classroom from 8:00 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. and tried to keep them up to speed on homework from their various schools, and broke up the day with various mindfulness practices; owing to her “adult” status, Morgan did not receive mental health care, but yoga was offered to her three times a week, as well as “drumming.”
“I’m not a professional doctor or anything like that,” Bryan Hansen, a corrections officer of sixteen years, testified at Morgan’s competency hearing. “But I believe that she could benefit from some type of treatment or counseling.”
Bohren filed paperwork to have Morgan remanded to Winnebago Mental Health Institute for up to one year, or until she was restored to competency. He signed a document stating, “The defendant is incompetent to proceed at this time, but if provided with appropriate medication and treatment, is likely to become competent.”
Unfortunately, he failed to check a box that authorized Winnebago to administer medication.
Founded in 1870, Winnebago Mental Health Institute, located on the banks of Lake Winnebago in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was initially called “Northern State Hospital for the Insane.” Early on, the vast majority of its patients were women suffering from ailments like anger, menopause, promiscuity, and “going against the norm.” Treatments included “dances, cards, dominoes,” and “tonics, whiskey and brandy.” Patients grew flowers and strawberry bushes. They received biweekly massages. When reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel visited in 1896, they marveled at the luxury and freedom enjoyed by patients, describing them “stretched at full length” on the lawns, or “throwing a ball,” or being allowed to “frolic” after Turkish baths and do “devious things (“though attendants are always present in case anyone would overstep the bounds of liberty”).
But while they seemed to cure nonconformity, treatments such as gardening and dominoes could not ward off disease. The hospital experienced routine outbreaks of diphtheria, smallpox, and influenza. In 1873, a graveyard was built on the property overlooking Lake Winnebago. Woodwork proved expensive, so the hospital opted for wicker caskets—a widespread practice at poorhouses and insane asylums at the time that some say spawned the colloquialism “basket cases.”
It remains unknown how many bodies are buried in the hospital cemetery, because gravestones were marked with numbers instead of names, and multiple bodies may have been buried in a single plot. By the time the cemetery closed in 1972, the headstones counted up from one to nine hundred. But some of the numbers were missing. The cemetery lacked a security fence, inviting vandals. Broken pieces of grave markers could be found in the surrounding woods. The unmarked plots were soggy sinkholes. The mud sucked at your feet.