She only knew he was blind. That’s what the ad in the back of the newspaper had said. “Blind Child Slow Learner.” The word “autism” wasn’t mentioned. Not that it would have meant anything to Alice Barton, who also had no notion at all of adopting a child when she’d picked up the paper that morning to peruse over coffee. But the boy’s photo on the back page caught her eye.
“Blind Child Slow Learner.” On Alice, the headline worked like an incantation. Partly, it was the fluky fact that Alice knew Braille. In the late 1960s, for no reason other than the challenge of it, she’d set out to become a fluent reader of Braille. She took classes, acquired a Braille-imprinting machine, and joined a group of volunteers who translated whole chapters of schoolbooks into pages readable by fingertip.
Though her skills were only rudimentary, she could suddenly see herself teaching this young boy to read, opening his life to books and much more. But of course, when she phoned the number in the paper, she had some questions.
“So just how slow is this little boy?”
There was a pause. “Actually,” the agency woman finally puffed out, “he’s kind of retarded.”
Actually, it was more complicated than that, but the woman likely didn’t know that herself. Frankie was six years old already, with dark features that hinted at a Mexican heritage. He was, according to anyone who laid eyes on him, a gorgeous little boy. The orphanage he lived in was located in Santa Maria, California, some sixty miles away from the Bartons’ home in Santa Barbara. He was in school there, placed in a class with other “slow learners,” and given the label “TMR.” It stood for “trainable mentally retarded.”
Alice listened to all of this, uncertain what she was feeling. The social-services woman took that as a cue to push. “Just come up and meet him,” she urged, “and then we can talk about it.”
“I don’t think I can tackle a retarded child,” her husband, George, said when Alice had hung up.
“Well, we made the appointment,” she replied.
She and George drove up California 101 to Santa Maria on a June morning in 1970. While Alice went inside to meet Frankie’s caseworker, George, not wanting to encourage this process at all, remained outside, killing time by wandering around on the porch, then down the side of the building to the fenced-in play area out back. There, rocking on a swing, sat Frankie, all alone.
Inside, Alice was getting the full picture of Frankie’s situation. He was not blind, it turned out, but he had serious vision problems, though not so serious that he’d ever have to turn to reading with his fingertips. Then the caseworker began discussing the mental difficulties he faced, using over and over this unfamiliar term—autism. Alice, as she’d say later, “didn’t have the foggiest” when it came to understanding what the word meant. So the caseworker put it in terms of how much Frankie was unable to do: he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t learn, he’s violent at times. What’s more—it may never get better.
Alice was shaken. This didn’t sound like mental retardation as she understood it. It just sounded strange and a little scary. She was invited outside and around the back to see for herself what autism looked like, and then it hit her fully. George was right. They couldn’t tackle this. A graceful escape—that’s all she wanted now, to get George and get back to Santa Barbara as quickly as possible.
But George didn’t want to escape. To this day he can’t really explain it, but sitting out there that afternoon with Frankie, just the two of them—one a former marine, strong and able; the other a boy with autism, fragile and vulnerable—George just fell for the kid. And when Alice pulled her husband aside, the voice of pragmatism trying to talk her husband back to reality and back to their car parked out front, she could see it in his eyes, in how he kept looking back at the boy on the swing. They were about to become a family of three. “Let’s do it,” he said.
They took Frankie home on July 3, 1970, a date that, along with his birthday, they would celebrate with a cake and candles every year after that. But the first few months were an ordeal. “An endurance contest” was George’s judgment on it, as they learned for themselves what severe autism looks like up close.
Alice had the days alone with Frankie, so George wasn’t there the first time he put his head through the wall. When he came home and saw the damaged wall, and Alice told him how it got there, all he could say was: “You’re kidding!” But the implications were beginning to dawn on him. A six-year-old boy had mustered enough raw strength—along with a startling indifference to pain—to break an eight-inch opening in a plaster wall, using only his skull.
At the same time, Frankie had started wandering the house at night, scared to be left alone in his bedroom. But because he spoke not a word, there was no way they knew to reassure him with words. George announced that a line had to be drawn, otherwise the household would be at the mercy of an unspeaking child who, a few years on, could actually hurt them, even if only by accident. Starting that night, the ex-marine posted himself outside Frankie’s bedroom, seated on the carpet, to play sentry to a six-year-old.
“No, Frank, you can’t get up,” he’d repeat each time Frankie arose, gently leading him back to bed, settling him again under the blankets. Inevitably, as George turned his back to leave, Frankie would already be on his tail. “No, Frank, not during the night,” he’d whisper, “back you go.” This went on for weeks, exhausting all three of them, but in the end, Frankie finally learned to stay in bed.
George also won the battle of the nail clippers. The first time George brought them out, Frankie spiraled into a tantrum of pure fear. But George held that Frankie both had to be and could be taught to tolerate having his fingernails clipped. Little by little, George trained Frankie out of this particular phobia. At first, he’d just show Frankie the clippers, then put them away. After a while, he started using them only on himself. Next, he made brief passes at the little boy’s fingernails, making only the most minuscule clips. Finally, Frankie relaxed enough to have his nails clipped whenever necessary and without resistance. The process took eight months.
George, of course, had no idea that he was accomplishing the impossible. The overwhelming professional opinion of the time defined Frankie as a lost cause, not worth trying to educate. But unaware that he wasn’t supposed to try, he and Alice continued to operate on the principle that “kids will get away with whatever they want to get away with as long as you let them.”
George was improvising, more than anything else, falling back on the instincts that all parents in his situation had to work with. But he was trusting those instincts, and Alice could see that Frankie was making progress—painstakingly, but also unmistakably. Now it was both of them in love with Frankie—a kid who still never had spoken, nor ever would speak, a recognizable word. That was one of the hardest parts—the silence in between all the otherwise incomprehensible sounds that came out of Frankie’s mouth. Figuring out Frankie’s wants, his fears, his moods—it was like trying to read messages in a passing cloud. They could find it frustrating, exhausting, and all-consuming, feelings that would have been all too recognizable to Mary Triplett, Rita Tepper, or Audrey Flack.
Of course, as they were foster parents and he was a foster child, they had an escape available—an open path back to their old lives. They could send him back. “It’s not working out,” they could say. Or, “He needs more than we can give him.” That option dangled in the air they breathed every day. Yet they chose not to use it and did the opposite instead. They filed to adopt Frankie, and he became their son for good, loved and legal, and with a new last name—Barton.
In all of this, crucially, George and Alice were not alone—not in the all-encompassing way the preceding generation of parents had been. To be sure, in 1970, parents like them were still standing in a cold rain when it came to society understanding their children and what they needed. But in Santa Barbara, the Bartons knew they had company in the small circle of other parents living nearby who were also dealing with autism in their families.
These families had found one another and, by banding together and offering support, gave one another reasons to believe that something could change for their kids—and that maybe they could make the change happen. There were not many of them in the circle, a couple dozen parents at most. But for George and Alice, and many of the others, knowing they were part of a community gave them the energy to hang on and to fight. And that, in the story of autism, was something new.
IN THE MIDDLE of a California morning in 1971, the idle lawn sprinklers out front of the Santa Barbara County Education Building suddenly spit and gurgled and spun into action. Within seconds, they had soaked a couple of people who, up until that moment, had posted themselves near the front entrance, waving hand-drawn signs and grousing about school policy. When the water hit them, they scooped up their leaflets and wet cardboard and retreated down toward the street, beyond the spray’s reach, pausing there to pull themselves together.
Inside, the superintendent of schools, watching from his office window, turned back to his desk, satisfied. He had ordered the sprinklers switched on, just as a prank, of course. The two parents down there would never know that getting sprayed was no accident. Then too, perhaps this annoyingly relentless pair, George and Alice Barton, would finally get the message: Back off and stop wasting the school system’s time. Wouldn’t that be a relief?
It almost never occurs to people raising kids of “normal” health and abilities to ask where all the other children are. Unseen, they are not likely to be missed. It was true when George and Alice Barton were attending elementary school themselves in the 1930s: kids at their desks had no reason to wonder about the absence of children who were too far off the mark to be there—like the boy they would adopt decades later. It therefore came as a shock in the early 1970s when, as parents, they went to enroll Frankie in the Santa Barbara schools, only to learn that by law and long-standing practice, the schools could and would bar him. That realization instantly turned them into activists.
That, and a night listening to Bernard Rimland talk. These were the years when Rimland was going from town to town, spreading the gospel of autism parent power. By 1970, when he scheduled a meeting to talk with parents in Ventura, about thirty-five miles from Santa Barbara, the autism advocacy movement was on solid footing. But before that, for a time, he’d had to work at keeping the movement from foundering off course and possibly collapsing. During NSAC’s first year of existence, tensions had developed within the leadership over style as much as substance. Some of the founding members had come to see NSAC’s president, Mooza Grant, as overly bossy, disorganized, and of questionable accountability in her handling of the organization’s money.
Grant had grievances of her own, born of the belief that she alone was shouldering most of the day-to-day workload of the movement, without sufficient support from other parents. Plus, it was her husband, Leslie, who was doing the lion’s share of the fund-raising, which took him away from home more than she liked. She was, after all, also raising twin girls with autism, one of whom was severely self-injurious—a chronic head banger, constantly at risk of cracking open her own skull. After two years, with Grant’s term expiring, an election was held to replace her. The National Society for Autistic Children began 1968 with a new president—Ruth Sullivan.
But the schism was lasting. Even before the election, Mooza Grant had secretly been laying the groundwork to launch a competing organization, a rival for NSAC even in the name she chose for it—the American Foundation for Autistic Children, which she incorporated in Maryland. When NSAC learned of this, it threatened legal action to prevent Grant from taking the group’s mailing list with her. It was an early harbinger of the tragic tendency of autism advocacy groups, or the individuals in them, all supposedly dedicated to the same cause, to turn against one another. It had been there at the beginning, and it would flare up, again and again, to the detriment of the greater cause, in every decade to follow.
Rimland himself would also be drawn into this unfortunate sport as years passed, but on that night in Ventura, with the Bartons and a handful of other area families gathered to hear him speak, Rimland was still living up to his saintly reputation, a defender of mothers and the lead architect of a better future for their kids. He urged parents there to organize, to agitate, to learn how to make demands. He talked them through the steps of organizing their own chapter of NSAC and urged them not to take no for an answer. When they started to deal with the important issues—getting their children both treated and educated, which NSAC argued were usually one and the same thing—they needed to push back against the authorities. He encouraged them to bring pressure to bear on the schools and on state legislatures, not to mention on public opinion.
These were not born revolutionaries Rimland was addressing. They were middle-class Californians in their thirties or forties—people who had grown up trusting authority and its representatives—presidents, priests, school superintendents, bankers, doctors, and policemen—and decent, ordinary people usually did not put themselves in the position of challenging that authority.
Rimland had been the same way until he lost his trust in psychiatry. Coincidentally, around this time, psychiatry had also been losing trust in itself. One reason Rimland received such a warm embrace at Stanford during his fellowship there was the fact that his book had dealt psychiatry—and its cousin, psychology—a satisfying punch in the nose. While the Freudians still ruled in the plush settings of private practice, a younger generation of psychiatrists and psychologists, at Stanford and elsewhere, were pushing back against the authoritarian certainty of their elders. Psychology departments had caught the rebellious spirit of the day and were impatient to have their work actually benefit society, broadly and urgently. In this pursuit, experimentation boomed, and the walls began crumbling that had kept apart fields like neurology and computer science, biochemistry and genetics. The time was ripe for iconoclasts.
And here was Rimland persuasively daring families to challenge authority alongside him. Shortly after his speech, some of those families established the Santa Barbara Society for Autistic Children, a chapter of NSAC. The women took the lead, with mothers elected to the posts of president, vice president, and so on. At first, they embarked onto more familiar ground, holding yard sales to raise funds for the group. But soon they moved on to demanding meetings with school officials and making the rounds of pediatricians’ offices in town, seeking support and understanding, and leaving behind leaflets to explain autism to other parents.
Among the dads, George became perhaps the most active, launching a letter-writing campaign he wouldn’t give up for years. He wrote the board of education, the newspaper, even the governor, Ronald Reagan. And he went along with Alice when she came up with the idea of picketing the school superintendent’s office. The superintendent had, after all, received them in his office, more than once, and heard them out as they presented their pleas for some kind of educational support for Frankie. But nothing had changed for Frankie. He was still stuck at home. And so Alice had decided it was time to experiment with some political theater.
Maybe, to passersby, they looked comical out there, with their mini-protest in the sunshine—especially when the sprinkler came on and sent them hightailing it for dry ground. But to Alice and George, and the other parents who were also getting nowhere with the schools, there wasn’t much about the fight for their kids that they found humorous. Unfortunately, before their desperate pleas on behalf of their children’s need for education received a fair hearing, tragedy would ensue.
ALICE BARTON REMEMBERS precisely the moment she heard that Alec Gibson, her friend Velna’s husband, had snapped. Alice was up on a stepladder in the living room, one ear on the television as she set about taking down the Christmas tree. It was the first week of January 1971, and Frankie had been with Alice and George for six months. Then the news came—an urgent story about a man named Gibson and a shooting in the neighborhood. She turned to look and then began shrieking. “Oh my God, George! Look at this! It’s Alec Gibson!” As they stared, overcome, at the TV, Alice still perched on the ladder, George could only breathe out the obvious: “My God, what’s he done?”
Perhaps only Velna Gibson, secretary of the Santa Barbara chapter of NSAC, had been aware of the darkness that had been gathering inside her husband. Alec Gibson had once been a content man, confident in his ability to provide for his family, competent in his career as a machinist in the aerospace industry. In 1958, Alec and Velna had relocated from Cape Canaveral to Lompoc, California, along with their girls, Junie and Sandy—who were thirteen and eleven—and the baby, Dougie, who’d been born the previous November. There was a job connected to the nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, and a new home, where Alec himself, who was good at these things, set to work putting in a new yard.
It was his first heart attack—the first of several—that seemed to change Alec Gibson forever. It was a severe episode, and it meant abandoning not just the yard project but also his job at the plant. Gibson, practically overnight, went from feeling robust and confident to seeing himself, in his mid-fifties, as a near invalid. Then Dougie was diagnosed with autism.
By the age of three, their son was displaying classic symptoms. Before that, Velna had thought that Dougie, if anything, was ahead of most other children his age. He climbed out of his playpen at six months. At twenty months, he had toilet-trained himself. At twenty-four months, he knew how to work the dials on the washing machine.
His way with toys, however, was strange from the start. He’d have them spread out on the floor, and then, methodically, he would pick each one up in turn, play with it awhile, and then move on to the next toy in line. Eventually, he abandoned conventional toys altogether and started spinning things—pot lids and so forth. This became his new, all-consuming pastime—that, and banging his head against the wall.
Language never came. He had a phrase—coolacoolacoola—that he recited singsong to himself on and off—and a single word he reserved to address the rest of the world: “muh.” It was his answer to any question or statement from his mother and father. “Are you cold?” “Muh.” “We’re putting on your socks now.” “Muh.” “Come over here, Dougie.” “Muh.”
That sharp intelligence Velna thought she saw early on was still there. It showed in his beautiful eyes, which were alert and inquisitive. Still a toddler, he developed a taste for recorded music, and he figured out the complicated stereo system his father had built from parts out in the garage. When the overture from The Sound of Music could be heard through the kitchen window, Velna knew where Dougie had disappeared to. He also managed to overcome the sliding bolt system Alec had installed high up on his daughter Junie’s bedroom door, supposedly out of Dougie’s reach, to keep him away from her record collection.
Another specific like: Coke and French fries. A specific dislike: the sight of airplanes, which set off tantrums. This mysterious blend of strong likes and stronger dislikes instilled in his mother the belief that there was a “normal” Dougie trapped somewhere beyond the strange behaviors, operating inside his body but just out of her reach. To Velna, Dougie became a boy waiting to be rescued, or perhaps healed by God. She had, shortly after his diagnosis, converted to Christian Science, and spent a good deal of time in prayer for her son.
But Velna wasn’t just waiting for a miracle. She threw herself into getting whatever professional help she could find in and around Lompoc. There were some promising leads in the beginning. Now and then, in one special-ed program or another, a space would become available, and she would pack Dougie into the car for the obligatory trial day in the classroom. But it never worked out. Some places rejected Dougie outright as beyond help. Others agreed to give him a chance, but it wouldn’t be long before Velna, arriving for pickup in the afternoon, would be pulled aside, and gently but firmly informed that a mistake had been made and that Dougie should not come back.
His sister Junie moved out in 1964, marrying young and not at all selectively, to escape the sorrow at home. Dougie had moved past his toddler years, showing almost no improvement, while the search for help and the cost of programs ate through the family savings. Alec sold the Pepsi stock he’d held for years to guarantee his retirement. Then he sold his beloved homemade stereo system. Then, one at a time, the family parted with their better pieces of furniture.
Ultimately, when Velna finally found a program that would take Dougie, the household itself had to be broken up. The Kennedy Institute, three hours away in Los Angeles, specialized in educating the mentally retarded. Again, it was an imperfect fit for a boy with autism, but the institute had committed to taking Dougie when no other place would. The Gibsons had to sell the house to pay for it. It was a day program, and Dougie would need someplace to spend nights. So Velna and Dougie moved to Los Angeles, where she found part-time work in day care, while Alec and his younger daughter, Sandy, stayed behind in Lompoc in a rented apartment. The goal was to give Dougie language, but two years later, he still only said “Muh.” Alec was discouraged. “This isn’t working,” he said to Velna during one of their few weekend visits together. “We have to try something else.”
Velna wasn’t ready to give up, but when Alec suffered another heart attack, she and Dougie came home. Not long after that, with little to hold them in Lompoc, they all moved north to Santa Barbara, where they had relatives. The city’s then progressive reputation also gave them hope that Dougie might have a shot in the public school system. Instead, they found themselves beating the same path George and Alice had traveled with Frankie. Meetings with the Santa Barbara schools were followed by vague promises, then rejections from one classroom after another.
Finally, they took the step they’d been trying to avoid all along and placed their now eleven-year-old son in the one institution they knew would never turn him down—the state mental hospital in Camarillo. There would be no bills to pay, at least. It was the only place they could afford.
It was Alec who cut this experiment short. Since driving Dougie to Camarillo for his initial commitment there, he and Velna had been making two round-trips there each week, taking Dougie home on Fridays, and then back to the institution on Sunday afternoons. The pickups went fine. Dougie always rushed into their arms to give them hugs, evidence all by itself that he was making the type of connection to them that autism was supposed to hinder. Velna took it as a sign that Camarillo was doing him some good.
But then came Sunday, and the return trip, which was torture for everyone involved. Without fail, the moment the institution walls came into view, Dougie would explode. Screaming and flailing, he had to be dragged into the building by white-jacketed attendants. It ripped into Alec’s already weak heart to see this, week after week, and after nearly three months of it, he called a halt. One Friday, he and Velna picked Dougie up from Camarillo and never brought him back.
Their home life settled down into an immutable pattern. Dougie needed twenty-four-hour supervision, and since only Velna could work, Alec looked after him during the days. The two of them apparently grew quite close in this period, as they would have to, given that playdates with other children were not an option, and that Alec, now nearly penniless, had also turned rather reclusive. When he and Dougie weren’t alone together for hours in the upstairs apartment of the two-family home they rented on East Figueroa Street, they were out on walks together, just the two of them. Neighbors noticed them but didn’t interact much with the lonely-looking pair—the unusually good-looking boy, somewhat tall for his age, who made strange sounds as he passed by; and the lean, gray-haired man who was always by his side, saying little.
It was sometime during this period that Alec got hold of a Beretta .45. Exactly when and how has never been clear. Alec took his last walk with Dougie on January 4, 1971. They went to McDonald’s, Dougie’s favorite place, for his favorite meal, which, at age thirteen, was still French fries and Coke. It was around one thirty p.m. when they returned home. The street outside was quiet, as the neighborhood children had just gone back to school after Christmas break. Dougie lay down for a nap on a small cot in the dayroom, and Alec went into the kitchen and wrote a note:
I have done a terrible thing. I know that I cannot be forgiven. Don’t want to see you or anyone.
He left the note standing up against the telephone on the kitchen counter and went in to look at his sleeping son. It is not known how long he stood there, but at some point, Alec lifted the Beretta and shot Dougie in the head.
Dougie did not die right away. That would happen later, in the ambulance. When the ambulance team first saw him, they reported that he was still gurgling for breath on the daybed.
Alec likely didn’t see any of that. Immediately after firing, he’d returned to the kitchen, placed the gun in its original box next to the note, and then called the police. Then he stepped outside and sat down on the front steps, waiting for the first sound of sirens to carry in on the afternoon breeze.
“RETARDED SON IS DEAD,” the Santa Barbara Press reported the next morning on an inside page. The day after that, school officials gave interviews attempting to correct the record, but they also got it wrong. “Douglas was not mentally retarded,” one of them informed the paper; he “had been diagnosed as emotionally disturbed.” A source at the Camarillo State Hospital, where he’d spent three months, came up with yet a third variant: “schizophrenic reaction, childhood type,” someone told the reporter who called.
Finally, a letter to the editor appeared in the Press that clarified the nature of Dougie’s condition. The woman who wrote it, Mary Ellen Nava, identified herself “as the parent of an autistic child like Dougie.” Actually, she and Alice Barton had worked on the letter together, but only Mary Ellen’s name appeared in print. She opened her letter by posing a question about the father who had shot his son: “What went through the mind of this man?”
It was the obvious thing to ask. Nava was president of the Santa Barbara Society for Autistic Children and one of the mothers who had attended that Ventura meeting with Bernard Rimland. Her son Eddie, three years younger than Velna’s Dougie, was almost as disabled as Dougie. He didn’t speak and had a tendency to attack his own skin with his fingernails, scratching himself raw till bleeding, which often led to infections. He had been luckier, though, in finding placement in a special-education class where his behaviors were just barely tolerated. Dougie’s, on the other hand, were always just too extreme, and Mary Ellen could see what Velna, now a good friend, had to go through each time another school expelled him.
What went through the mind of this man?
Mary Ellen phrased her response carefully. Velna had told her that Alec had convinced himself that killing Dougie was the only way to spare him. One of the police officers who made the arrest had quickly formed the same impression. After sizing up the situation at the house and taking Alec’s statement, he told a reporter that the suspect had intended a “mercy killing.”
At the trial, a sympathetic psychiatrist corroborated this account of the defendant’s thought process, noting that it fed darkly on the strangling depression that had seized on Alec as his own health problems worsened. Alec had become certain his heart would soon fail for good, and he had become obsessed with thoughts of the cruelty the world would visit upon his son when he was no longer there to protect him, as well as with the burden that would shift fully onto Velna. The harsh indifference of the schools toward Dougie already served to confirm these fears, but it was an incident some weeks before the shooting that may have triggered Alec’s final lunge toward despair.
It was the day Dougie, who had just turned thirteen, had suddenly dropped his pants and begun playing with his genitals, out in the open, in front of a group of children in their own backyard. It caused a momentary uproar among the kids, who reported it immediately to their mother, a friend of the Gibsons named Aggie. If anyone in the Gibsons’ world was capable of avoiding an all-out panic over this turn of events, it was Aggie. She was one of the few mothers around who was not put off by seeing Dougie walk up her front path with his parents. When the Gibsons came over, her kids always included Dougie in their games, because Aggie encouraged it. Perhaps she didn’t know much about autism, but she knew enough never to hold Alec or Velna at fault when Dougie did something that crossed the boundaries of what was considered socially acceptable.
When he started masturbating in the sunlight that day, Alec was on Dougie in an instant, jerking his pants back up to his waist, embarrassed for him, scolding him, while making apologies to Aggie, who in fact didn’t require any. She understood: Dougie, just entering puberty, was only doing what came naturally. Coolacoolacoola. That was all this tall, handsome young man had to say for himself, then and always. It was hard to imagine his indiscretion was a deliberate attempt to create a scandal by the sandbox—not when these physical feelings were so new to him, and “the rules” about them so far past his comprehension.
Someone like Aggie could forgive and forget the awkward episode. But Alec couldn’t let it go. It began to haunt him—the realization that sex represented a thousand new ways Dougie could find himself dangerously out of sync with the world. More of this kind of thing, and his boy could easily be branded something he wasn’t: a deviant, a threat. People like that get arrested or beaten to death. And he was only thirteen. Adolescence still stretched in front of Dougie, followed by manhood. The social complexities he would need to negotiate seemed overwhelming. Alec could not conceive of Dougie ever being able to learn to observe the boundaries set by concepts like privacy or modesty. Instead, he foresaw the thicket of autism, sex, and etiquette as a wilderness that would swallow his son whole. It would only get worse, he had to assume, as Dougie got older, bolder, and stronger. The world was cruel. He was convinced of that.
Alec killed Dougie to put him out of a misery he believed to be inevitable, following a distorted logic he developed while profoundly depressed. That, at least, was his legal defense. Charged with murder in the first degree, he entered a plea of not guilty, and his lawyer argued temporary insanity. The district attorney never bought the story, and neither, in the end, did the jury. The DA’s competing story—that Alec Gibson was a father who killed his mentally disabled son because he was tired of the sacrifices required and just wanted his freedom back—appealed more to a common sense that knew nothing of raising a child with severe autism. No members of the jury had such experience. Alec was found guilty and given a life sentence.
Mary Ellen Nava, on the other hand, understood what Alec had been up against and why he had snapped. That’s how she saw it: her friend’s husband had, indeed, done a terrible thing, something that could never be justified. But she doubted he did it out of selfishness. Other autism parents, when they heard about the murder, reacted the same way. They were horrified by it, but at the same time, they recognized something familiar in the despair Alec surrendered to. At times, they too had felt chipped down almost to nothing by their inability to find a safe place for their kids—whether in a school now, or out in the world after they were gone. Nava was speaking for many of them when she tried to explain this world without options to readers of the Santa Barbara Press.
“This…boy was home on a Monday afternoon,” she wrote, “because the doors of public education were closed to him. Why?
“Probably,” she wrote, Alec looked at his son, “his own flesh and blood,” and asked, “what future does my boy have?” Then, to a world who still had little notion of autism, she appealed for understanding—not just of Alec, but of all of them: “Won’t you PLEASE help before our small group of children gets smaller? Ask—WHY?—WHO?—WHAT?—of your Special Education Department, your Mental Health Center, your doctor, wherever your voice will be heard. The next autistic baby could be yours.”
THOUGH FORGOTTEN OVER time, Dougie’s death did shake something loose in the edifice of official indifference that the Santa Barbara families had been facing. Mary Ellen Nava may have been the first to get the phone call, because she had written that letter to the editor, but soon, it was all the parents in her group. Within days of Alec’s trial starting, people in the state capital, officials from the California Department of Education, were asking to meet with them, the sooner the better, to discuss urgently the needs of Santa Barbara families dealing with autism. Soon a delegation from Sacramento had arrived in the city, shuttling from family to family in a small somber convoy of black cars, sitting down in living rooms and at kitchen tables, pulling out notepads to write down the answers to the questions they had brought. They had a lot of questions: about autism, about what these kids could learn, about what had already been tried, about what the parents would want to see if the school system committed to coming up with something better.
The sudden spotlight on their struggles was startling for Mary Ellen and the others. They had no doubt that it was because of what had happened to their friends, the Gibsons. At the trial, Alec’s lawyer had laid out the long, dreary story of Dougie’s rejection by one school after another. It must have tweaked somebody’s conscience up in Sacramento, or embarrassed somebody in charge, because all of a sudden, instead of turning sprinklers on the parents, these state people were sipping coffee with them, leafing through their photo albums, and smiling appreciatively when it was pointed out how glowingly beautiful the kids had been as babies. The officials left vowing that something would be done in response to the absence of support that had driven Alec Gibson over the edge.
It was not an empty promise. A year later, the Los Angeles Times could report: “Partly because of what happened,” the University of California at Santa Barbara and the County of Santa Barbara school system “are cooperating on a model program for autistic children financed by a $200,000 federal grant.” Overseen by a young UCLA-trained psychologist named Robert Koegel, who showed up with a willingness to experiment, it was a model that persisted, evolved, and expanded. Today the UCSB Koegel Autism Center dominates the West Coast of the United States in autism treatment, assessment, and research, and sees children by the thousands, from all around the world.
In that first year, it took in twenty children, mostly Santa Barbara kids, Mary Ellen’s Eddie among them. The year after that, a Los Angeles TV station reported in a documentary that more than half of those children (not including Eddie) had progressed to where they were able to attend regular public school classes. “But for the tragic circumstances,” explained the documentary’s narrator—autism parent and Hollywood actor Lloyd Nolan—the program “probably would not have been.”
It was the last time the Dougie story would be broached in public, and then the world moved on. But the wheels had been set in motion; the battle for education reform had begun.