6

THE TRUTH THAT NEVER HAPPENED

When you lose someone you love—that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more, maybe less, ten thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination—and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

—Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife

My memory is the thing I forget with.

—a child’s definition

In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien distinguishes between two kinds of truth: story-truth and happening-truth. Happening-truth is the indisputable black-and-white reality of “at such and such a time this happened, and then this, and then that.” Story-truth is the colorized version, breathing luminous life into the inert shell of the past, waking up the dead, sparking emotion, inspiring a search for meaning.

Making up stories about the past is “a way of bringing body and soul back together or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit,” O’Brien explains. Writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, he offers two versions, both “true,” of his past.

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

Stories make the past come alive. We can reimagine our younger selves, feel the emotions we once felt (or were afraid to feel), battle the demons we could only run from because we were too frightened, too young, or too helpless, dream a new ending, even bring the dead back to life.

But there is a hitch. As we put meat and muscle on the bare bones of the happening-truth, we can get caught up—captured, if you will—within our own stories. We become confused about where the happening-truth leaves off and the story-truth begins, because the story-truth, which is so much more vivid, detailed and real than the happening-truth, becomes our reality. We begin to live our own stories.

I remember a summer many years ago. I was fourteen years old. My mother, my aunt Pearl, and I were on vacation, visiting my uncle Joe in Pennsylvania. One bright sunny morning I woke up and my mother was dead, drowned in the swimming pool.

That is the happening-truth. The story-truth is something quite different. In my mind I’ve returned to that scene many times, and each time the memory gains weight and substance. I can see the cool pine trees, smell their fresh tarry breath, feel the lake’s algae-green water on my skin, taste Uncle Joe’s iced tea with fresh-squeezed lemon. But the death itself was always vague and unfocused. I never saw my mother’s body, and I could not imagine her dead. The last memory I have of my mother was her tiptoed visit the evening before her death, the quick hug, the whispered “I love you.”

Thirty years later, at Uncle Joe’s ninetieth birthday party, a relative informed me that I was the one who found my mother in the pool. After the initial shock—No, it was Aunt Pearl, I was asleep, I have no memory—the memories began to drift back, slow and unpredictable like the crisp, piney smoke from the evening campfires. I could see myself, a thin, dark-haired girl, looking into the flickering blue-and-white pool. My mother, dressed in her nightgown, is floating face down. “Mom? Mom?” I ask the question several times, my voice rising in terror. I start screaming. I remember the police cars, their lights flashing, and the stretcher with the clean, white blanket tucked in around the edges of the body.

Of course. It all made sense. No wonder I was always haunted by the circumstances of my mother’s death … the memory had been there all along, but I just couldn’t reach it. Now, with this new information, everything fit together. Perhaps this memory, dead and now revived, could explain my obsession with memory distortion, my compulsive workaholism, my unfulfilled yearning for security and unconditional love.

For three days my memory expanded and swelled. Then, early one morning, my brother called to tell me that my uncle had checked his facts and realized he’d made a mistake: His memory, it turned out, had temporarily failed him. Now he remembered (and other relatives confirmed) that Aunt Pearl found my mother’s body in the swimming pool.

After that phone call I was left with my shrunken memory, pinpricked and deflated, and a sense of wonder at the inherent credulity of even a skeptical mind. All it took was a suggestion, casually planted, and off I went on an internal snipe-hunt, eagerly searching for supporting information. When my memory was revealed as a false creation, I experienced a strange yearning for the crisp colors and narrative drive of my invented story-truth. That elaborate but completely fabricated memory comforted me with its detail and precision, its utter lack of ambiguity. At least I knew what happened that day; at least my memory had a beginning, a middle, and an end; at least it all hung together. When it was gone, all I had left were a few somber details, a lot of empty spaces, and an aching, endless grief.

*   *   *

Eileen Franklin, a red-headed, freckle-faced fourth-grader, and her best friend, Susan Nason, lived in Foster City, a middle-class suburb eighteen miles south of San Francisco. On September 22, 1969, five days before her ninth birthday, Susan disappeared. Two months later her body was discovered in a wooded area near Half Moon Bay Road, approximately five miles west of Foster City; her skull had been crushed by a heavy object.

For two decades the murder remained a mystery. Then, in a case that made “repression” a household word and Eileen Franklin an overnight celebrity, the police charged George Franklin, fifty-one, with Susan Nason’s murder. The only evidence against him was the testimony of his daughter, who claimed that she witnessed the murder but had repressed the memory for more than twenty years.

That is the happening-truth of the Eileen Franklin story. Other facts, also indisputable, will be discovered in this story of sexual abuse, murder, and repressed memories, but they are so skillfully woven within the tapestry of a once-upon-a-time story that no one, not even Eileen Franklin, can say for sure what really happened. The “real truth” is buried with a little girl who was murdered a long time ago.

*   *   *

It all began in a room bright with sunshine. Eileen Franklin, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman with long red hair, cuddled her two-year-old son in her arms and watched as he contentedly sucked at his bottle. Her daughter and two playmates sat on the carpeted floor at her feet, surrounded by crayons and coloring books. Every once in a while they would hum along with Raffi on the stereo system. It was a warm, sunny day in a California winter, and as Eileen looked out the window of the family room, it occurred to her that it might be warm enough to let the children swim in the pool.

“Isn’t that right, Mommy?” Six-year-old Jessica’s sweet, freckled face turned up to her mother for confirmation. The sunlight filtered through the curtains, highlighting Jessica’s strawberry-blond hair and creating intricate patterns of light and shadow on the floor. In that moment, as she looked into her daughter’s eyes, the memory returned, and Eileen Franklin’s carefully ordered world plunged into chaos.

In the vivid, visual scene that flashed into her mind,1 Eileen saw her best friend, eight-year-old Susan Nason, sitting on a rock in a wooded setting. Behind her, silhouetted by the sun, a man held a heavy rock above his head. Lifting her hands to protect herself as the man moved toward her, Susan glanced at Eileen, her wide eyes conveying her terror and helplessness. Seconds later the man’s arms came down with tremendous force. The rock crushed Susan’s skull, and Eileen covered her ears against the sound of flesh tearing and bones shattering.

In that burning flash of memory Eileen believed she had made contact with the forgotten past. A memory she had buried for two decades, almost two thirds of her life, had returned without warning or premonition to reveal the shocking truth: She had witnessed her best friend’s murder. But the flashback disclosed another shocking fact: The man who murdered Susan Nason was George Franklin, Eileen’s father.

*   *   *

For months Eileen tried to avoid the memory, but despite her efforts to push it back beneath consciousness, it kept returning and gaining detail and precision. Terrified of the emerging memories, Eileen was even more afraid that she was going crazy. She finally divulged her secret to her therapist, who assured her that she was not insane; eventually she confided in her brother, her three sisters, and her mother. In November 1989, ten months after her memory first returned, Eileen decided to tell her husband, who insisted that they call the police. After several conversations with the San Mateo County District Attorney’s office, in which Eileen revealed a detailed knowledge of the murder, assistant district attorney Marty Murray decided her story was sufficiently credible to begin an investigation. Detectives Robert Morse and Bryan Cassandro were assigned to the case.

On November 25, 1989, Eileen Franklin sat down in her living room with Morse and Cassandro to relate the astonishing details of a playful outing that ended in rape and murder. Her memory was perfectly formed, filled with colors, sounds, textures, emotions, and word-for-word conversations. As she added detail to detail, faltering only occasionally, the detectives exchanged looks. As amazing as it seemed, this woman seemed to be telling the truth.

Her story began early on a Monday morning—September 22, 1969—when she was in the fourth grade. George Franklin was driving Eileen and her sister Janice to school in the family’s beige Volkswagen van when Eileen spotted Susan Nason. She asked her father if they could give Susan a ride. Eileen recalled that when Susan jumped into the van, her father asked Janice to get out.

George Franklin drove Eileen and Susan around for a while, and at one point pulled up to the front of their elementary school as if to drop them off. But instead he announced that they were going to play hooky. They continued driving around, eventually heading up into the hills on Half Moon Bay Road and pulling off the highway to stop in a wooded area. Eileen and Susan played outside in the brush and trees for a while and then climbed back into the van. They ran back and forth from the bucket seats in the front to the back of the van, where they bounced on a plywood platform bed covered with a mattress.

George Franklin climbed into the van and started playing with them on the bed. Eileen was in the front seat when she saw her father climb on top of Susan. “My dad pinned Susan down,” Eileen told the detectives, “with her legs hanging off the edge of the bed, up toward the front seat, and he held her two arms up with both of his hands and with his elbows straddling either side of … her body, he began to, um … to rub back and forth on her, in a humping motion … and, um, he continued to do this, and I walked from the front seat back to where they were, and I got really scared when I looked directly at Susan.” When her father pulled up Susan’s dress, Eileen saw “something white underneath,” perhaps a slip or an undershirt.

Eileen rolled herself up into a ball next to the bed until her father was finished with Susan. Then she and Susan, who was crying now, got out of the van. Susan walked over to “a point or a peak,” where she sat down. Eileen stayed next to the car and picked up a leaf that had fallen off a tree. When she looked up, she saw the sun streaming through the trees and her father standing above Susan, holding a rock above his head, his right arm and leg forward. Susan looked up, then quickly glanced at Eileen and brought both hands to her head. The rock came crashing down. Eileen screamed when she heard the sound of rock crushing bone.

Then her father grabbed her and knocked her to the ground, pushing her face into the leaves, telling her that he would kill her if she ever told anyone, that no one would believe her anyway—they would take her away and put her in a mental home. When she stopped screaming, he pulled her up and sat her on his knee. He told her to forget all about it; it was over. He took a spade or shovel out of the van and began digging. With Eileen’s help, he pulled the mattress out of the car, swearing at her for her clumsiness. She climbed into the van, put her head down, and curled up next to the seat. The sliding door closed, and they drove off. She begged her father not to leave Susan because she would be afraid, and she would get cold. But he kept driving, ignoring her frantic pleas. When they got home, Eileen went straight to her room and climbed into bed.

After she finished telling her story, the detectives questioned her closely, and she answered with more astonishing details. Were there a lot of trees around? It was “moderately dense,” she answered, with three narrow trees in a “zig-zagged row” and more trees over to her right. What kind of a road had they been driving on? A dirt road, unpaved. Hadn’t she mentioned something about a ring in one of her phone calls to the police? Yes, Susan wore a “silver ring with a stone in it … she had her hands up to her head” when the rock came crashing down.

How far away was Eileen from Susan when her father approached Susan with the rock? About twenty feet. When he was molesting Susan, did he say anything? He said “Susie.” Not “Susan,” Eileen added, but “Susie.” Was he drinking? Yes, he was drinking a beer from “a metal can that was silver and tan and white, and had a mountain on it.” What was he wearing? Tan Levi corduroy pants and a wool Pendleton shirt with a short-sleeved white crew-neck T-shirt underneath. What color was his hair? “Red going toward brown, with a little bit of gray.” Did Susan say anything while George Franklin was molesting her? She said, “No”; then she said “Stop.”

The interview concluded at 3:22 P.M., three hours after it began. When the tape recording was transcribed, it covered thirty-three double-spaced typewritten pages.

The detectives left Eileen Franklin’s house convinced that she was telling the truth. The ring, the rock, the mattress, the wooded setting, even Susan’s hands raised above her head to protect herself matched the evidence discovered at the murder scene.

“Do you believe her?” Cassandro asked Morse as they drove away.

“Yeah,” Morse answered.

“I do, too,” Cassandro said.

Three days later the detectives drove to George Franklin’s apartment in Sacramento and informed him that they were reviewing the unsolved Susan Nason case.

“Am I a suspect?” Franklin asked. Cassandro told him he was.

“Do I need an attorney?” was his second question.

But it was Franklin’s third question that cinched the matter for the detectives. “Have you talked to my daughter?” Franklin asked.

The detectives figured that an innocent man would not have asked, just like that, if he was a suspect in a murder case. Nor would Franklin have mentioned his daughter unless he feared that she might have told them something.2 An innocent man would have been confused, upset, frightened. But George Franklin just stood there, looking unperturbed, almost as if he had been expecting them.

On November 28, 1989, George Franklin was placed under arrest for the murder of Susan Nason. The only evidence against him was his daughter’s memory.

*   *   *

When Doug Horngrad, George Franklin’s defense attorney, called me in the summer of 1990 and asked if I would be willing to testify as an expert witness in the case, I remember thinking: This is the most bizarre story I have ever encountered. Where was the evidence? In murder cases you can usually depend on some kind of hard evidence—a bloodstain, a semen smear, the murder weapon—or on a damning array of “soft” circumstantial evidence. But this case rested solely on the credibility of a woman’s memory for an event she had witnessed twenty years earlier, when she was just eight years old—a memory that had apparently been buried without a trace and was only recently unearthed. How reliable could such a memory be? How could prosecutors build a case against a man with this twenty-year-old uncorroborated memory as the only evidence?

The prosecution and defense teams would argue the two basic possibilities, Horngrad explained. Prosecutors would present their case, based on the theory that the memory was authentic; this, if accepted by the jury, meant that George Franklin was guilty. Defense attorneys would try to prove that the memory was inauthentic, a confusion of fact (Susan Nason was murdered) and fantasy (Eileen Franklin witnessed the murder). My job as an expert witness would be to explain the basic processes of memory formation and distortion. If Eileen’s memory was false, where did those colorful and essentially accurate details come from? How did Eileen know all those facts about the murder scene and why was she so confident and convincing when she described what happened that day?

“Did she reveal facts to the police that could only have been known to an eyewitness?” I asked Horngrad.

“Every detail she gave the detectives can be found in the newspaper articles that appeared at the time of Susan’s disappearance and two months later when her body was discovered,” he said. He agreed to send me the newspaper clippings and Eileen’s preliminary statement so that I could compare the details in her statement with the facts reported in the local media.

The prosecutors were arguing that Eileen knew details about the murder that she could not possibly have known unless she was an eyewitness. If the defense could prove that the critical details in her story—specifically, the rock, the ring, and the mattress—were widely reported in the media and thus available to anyone who read the papers, watched television, or listened to others who knew about the murder, then Eileen wasn’t giving the police anything they didn’t already know. The case against George Franklin would rest solely on the inferences and implications contained in “memories” that Eileen admitted she didn’t remember until the moment she looked into her daughter’s eyes and “saw” the murder scene vividly recreated. If all the details in her memory could also be found in published reports about the murder, then no solid evidence existed proving that George Franklin was the murderer … and how could you convict a man of murder without any proof?

The newspaper articles were revealing. The details Eileen described in her preliminary statement matched almost perfectly with the facts reported about the murder. Three months after Susan disappeared, her body was discovered under a mattress in dense underbrush at the bottom of a steep embankment on a highway pulloff above Crystal Springs Reservoir. Her skull had been crushed, and traces of blood appeared on a three-pound rock found at the site. She wore a blue print dress, white socks, and brown saddle shoes. A silver brocade ring that Susan wore on her right hand was smashed, and the stone was missing; it was later discovered by a search team.

These facts were reported in newspaper articles published when Susan’s body was discovered. But several of these widely reported details were not completely accurate. Susan actually wore two rings: a silver Indian ring on her right hand and a gold ring with a topaz on her left. One newspaper account confused the two rings, stating that the silver ring contained the stone; twenty years later, in her preliminary statement to detectives Morse and Cassandro, Eileen made the same error, recalling a crushed ring containing a small stone on Susan’s right hand.

Another point of confusion was the mattress covering the body. One newspaper report mentioned a mattress, while another correctly identified it as a box spring (which, it turned out, was too big to fit in the back of George Franklin’s van). By the time of the preliminary hearing, six months after her original statement to detectives Morse and Cassandro, Eileen changed her description from a “mattress” to a “thing”: “He was crouched over Susan’s body, putting rocks on her. I thought I saw him put this thing over her body.”

“Putting rocks on her” was another detail that fit the known and published facts about the murder scene. A rock was discovered in the folds of Susan’s dress and a larger rock was discovered next to the body. According to pathologists, either rock could have been used as a murder weapon. Why didn’t Eileen mention “putting rocks on her” earlier, when she gave her detailed statement to Detectives Morse and Cassandro?

In the preliminary hearing Eileen also changed the time of the murder from mid-morning to late-afternoon. George Franklin could not have picked up Susan Nason in the morning, as Eileen first reported, because Susan had gone to school that morning. She came home from school sometime after three P.M., said hello to her mother, who was sewing a dress for her upcoming birthday party, and asked if she could walk to a classmate’s house to return some tennis shoes she had left at school. Susan left her home around three-fifteen P.M. Several neighbors remember seeing her walking along on the sidewalk.

About four or four-thirty P.M. Margaret Nason began to worry about her daughter, who was always so responsible and careful to inform her mother about her whereabouts (and who never missed her afternoon snack). Margaret rode her bike around the neighborhood, looking for Susan, and as time slipped by and her daughter was nowhere to be found, she became frantic. Around eight P.M. the Nasons called the police.

Sometime after her initial interview with Detectives Morse and Cassandro, Eileen altered the time of day to fit with the known facts about the murder. The more she thought about her father’s silhouette with the sun behind him, she explained, the more she realized that the murder could not have taken place in the morning. Susan must have been murdered late in the afternoon, Eileen decided, because in her mind she could see the sun slanting through the trees at a low angle. While she claimed later that her memory was modified in late November or December 1989, she didn’t inform the prosecutor about the alteration until May 9, 1990 just two weeks before the preliminary hearing.

Eileen also changed her mind about Janice being in the van. She originally told the detectives that Janice was in the Volkswagen van when her father stopped to pick up Susan, and that when Susan climbed in, George Franklin made Janice get out. But in her May 9 statement to the prosecutor, Eileen against revised her memory, claiming that she remembered seeing Janice in an open field near the place where her father stopped to pick up Susan.

“The more I concentrated on it and tried to be certain of how the event exactly happened,” Eileen testified in the preliminary hearing, “the less certain I felt about whether Janice had been in the van or out of the van. And the less certain I felt about it, the more I tried to concentrate on it and remember it. After—over a period, I would say several weeks, that I just—it seemed more and more clear to me that I remembered seeing her outside the van, and that I am just unclear of—as to whether she was inside first or what. I tend to think she was outside. And I don’t know why I thought she was inside before.”

*   *   *

All these additions and subtractions in Eileen’s account of the murder confirm what researchers know to be true about the malleability of memory. Over time, memory changes, and the more time that passes, the more changes and distortions one can expect. As new events intervene, the mind incorporates the additional facts and details, and the original memory gradually metamorphoses.

Eileen’s memory seemed absolutely normal to me. She clearly remembered her best friend, and she never forgot that Susan had been brutally murdered. But what happened over the next twenty years to those two basic, unforgettable facts? It is at least plausible that Eileen incorporated into her memory facts gleaned from newspaper and television reports and added more details picked up from casual conversations, creating a story that made sense. According to this theory, Eileen’s mind took the scattered facts of a senseless murder, mixed them with her fantasies and fears, tossed in rumors and innuendo, and arrived at the mistaken conclusion that she had been in the woods watching when her father raped and then murdered her best friend. Her mind adorned the happening-truth with the vivid details, narrative flow, and moral clarity of the story-truth.

The prosecutors argued that this elaborate “memory” was an accurate version of the past, and they invoked the mechanism of repression to explain why Eileen forgot about her part in the murder and then twenty years later recalled exactly what happened. Changes and inconsistencies in Eileen’s story should not be construed as evidence that the memory itself was flawed, they reasoned, but taken as simple proof that this was an old but reliable memory in need of a few repairs.

When did this whole idea of repression first come up? In November 1989, when Eileen called the police and gave her preliminary statement to Detectives Morse and Cassandro, she never mentioned a “repressed” memory. In fact, when the detectives asked her why she was coming forward to accuse her father now, twenty years after the murder, she explained that her memory had recently become more vivid, that it was “not as vague.” On the phone with prosecutor Marty Murray a few weeks later, she claimed that the details of the murder had come back to her in the course of intensive therapy. In taped telephone conversations she mentioned several times that she had kept the memory a secret because her father had threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the murder.

But at the end of December 1989, Eileen told prosecutor Murray that the memory had only recently returned to consciousness. Soon after that conversation she gave two newspaper interviews in which she explained that the memory of the murder had been “blocked out” and came back to her suddenly in a “flashback.” She told a reporter from the San Jose Mercury that she had forgotten the crime just a few days after Susan Nason was murdered and didn’t remember anything about the murder until she began having these flashbacks. She recalled that as a child she would walk past the Nason house and feel her body suddenly veer away (a “body memory”); that peculiar physical reaction, she explained, didn’t make any sense to her until the entire contents of the repressed memory returned to consciousness.

Eileen told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the memory of the murder had been “blocked out” immediately after it happened; only after she started having flashbacks of the murder, including an image of her father standing above Susan Nason with a rock in his hands, did she decide to call the police.

What triggered the flashbacks? Eileen’s brother, George Junior, had an interesting story to tell. Eileen called her brother in August 1989, inviting him to visit. Soon after he arrived, Eileen confided that she was in therapy and had been hypnotized. The next day she told her brother that while she was under hypnosis she had visualized her father killing Susan Nason. In September 1989, Eileen told her mother about the memory, confiding that it had come back to her during a hypnotherapy session.

Just a few months later, Eileen had a different story to tell. After her father was arrested and charged with the murder, Eileen called her brother to ask if he had talked to the defense team. When he admitted that he had, she quickly changed her story about being hypnotized and asked for his help in confirming the new version. The memory had come back to her in a regular therapy session, she explained; she had never been hypnotized. Please, she begged her brother, if the police call, don’t mention anything about hypnosis.

Horngrad believed that sometime in the fall of 1990 Eileen had learned that her memory would not be admissible in court if it had been elicited while she was under hypnosis. He figured that either Eileen’s mother, who was a practicing attorney, or a Los Angeles lawyer she had consulted before calling the police, filled her in on the legalities. California, like many other states, will not permit testimony based on memories recovered under hypnosis because of the overwhelmingly persuasive research evidence showing that hypnosis creates a highly suggestible state in which memories can be enhanced, solidified, or even implanted in a person’s mind.

In the preliminary hearing, held in May 1990, Eileen admitted that she lied to her brother and her mother about being hypnotized. She had never been hypnotized, she said, and only told her family that hypnosis was involved because she wanted them to believe her. Apparently she had believed at the time that hypnosis would add credibility to the story. Eileen also denied a story told by her older sister, Kate. Kate testified that Eileen had called her one day early in November 1989, just weeks before Eileen contacted the police, and told her that the memory of Susan’s murder came to her in a dream. She had been having nightmares, she told Kate, and had decided to go back into therapy. Soon afterward she had a dream in which she saw her father murder Susan Nason.

Was Eileen’s mental picture of the murder a flashback, a dream, or a hypnotically induced memory? None of the above, the prosecution insisted. It was a repressed memory, pure and simple. “Repressed” means that the memory was not simply forgotten, nor was it deliberately kept secret. Because of the traumatic nature of the murder, Eileen’s mind reacted by removing the memory from her conscious mind. The memory disappeared without a trace and was sealed off from consciousness for two decades. If someone had said to her at any time in those twenty years, “Eileen, is there any chance you were there when Susan was killed?” or more pointedly, “Did your father murder your best friend?” she would have reacted with shock and disbelief, denying the possibility without even a flicker of memory disturbing her conviction. The memory was gone, as good as dead, all vital signs expired; there was not even a weak heartbeat to send up shivers of potential life.

*   *   *

“Repression” … The word whispers of dark secrets and buried treasures, of rooms filled with cobwebs and dust, with a strange unearthly rustling in the corners. Repression is the most haunting and romantic of concepts in the psychology of memory: Something happens, something so shocking and frightful that the mind short-circuits and the normal workings of memory go seriously awry. An entire memory, or perhaps a jagged piece of a memory, is split off and hidden away. Where? No one knows, but we can imagine the crackle of electricity and the blue sparks of neurons firing as a memory is pushed underground, into the furthest and most inaccessible corners of consciousness. There it stays for years, decades, perhaps forever, isolated and protected in a near-dead, dormant state. Removed from the fever of consciousness, it sleeps.

Time passes. And then something happens. Sunlight slices through trees. A black leather belt lies curled up, snakelike, on the floor. A word or a phrase is dropped, or a strange but familiar silence falls. And suddenly the memory rises from the deep, a perfectly preserved entity drifting up from the still waters of a once-frozen pond.

What causes the glaciated surface of a mind to melt, permitting a buried memory to emerge into consciousness? Where had the memory been hiding all those years? And how do we know that this resuscitated memory, while it looks real, sounds real, and feels real, is not some contaminated mixture of fact and fiction, dream and imagination, fear and desire?

When I began to search through journal articles and textbooks for answers to these questions, I was confronted with an eerie silence. It was as if repression itself had gone to sleep in the nearly 100 years since Freud first proposed the theory of a defense mechanism that protects the conscious mind from painful feelings and experiences. I looked through the second edition of Roberta Klatzky’s Human Memory and found no entry in the index for repression. Eugene Zeckmeister and Stanley Nyberg’s textbook on human memory also failed to mention repression in the index.

I finally found some information about repression in Alan Baddeley’s book on human memory. Baddeley, one of Britain’s most distinguished memory researchers, discusses Sigmund Freud’s conviction that emotions have the power to block memory. He cites the case of a twenty-year-old woman (treated by Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Freud’s) who suffered from memory disturbances caused by her mother’s long illness and eventual death. The question of choice and deliberate avoidance seems crucial to Baddeley, who concludes that “the extent to which the patient is totally unable to access the stressful memories, and to what extent he/she chooses not to is very hard to ascertain.”

Baddeley argues that while there is evidence for the powerful effect of emotion on memory, the evidence for repression in everyday life is “rather less strong,” and that “attempts to demonstrate repression under experimental conditions … have been surprisingly difficult to produce.” While many clinicians insist that repression is a valid phenomenon, “such exhortations tell us more about the beliefs of the exhorter than the validity of the claim. If [someone] sees evidence of repression all around him, then perhaps like beauty it is in the eye of the beholder?”

I turned to the scholarly clinical field and searched through several well-known books on incest and trauma. In psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman’s highly acclaimed Father-Daughter Incest the term “repression” wasn’t anywhere to be found in either the index or the text. I did find some references to repression in Alice Miller’s classic work on the effects of childhood trauma, The Drama of the Gifted Child. Miller focuses on the need to discover the truth about our lives, which “remains hidden in the darkness of the past.” However, Miller strongly implies that we discover this truth not by searching for literal, historical memories but by uncovering the intense needs and emotions that traumatized children block off from consciousness because they live in an unsympathetic and uncaring environment. In the introduction to her book, she writes: “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.” And in the final pages she concludes: “When the patient has truly emotionally worked through the history of his childhood and thus regained his sense of being alive, then the goal of the analysis has been reached.”

It seemed fair to conclude from Alice Miller’s writings that whatever “truth” we discover in our repressed or unconscious memories is inherently and subjectively emotional. Sigmund Freud, who introduced the idea of repression into the psychoanalytical literature, also emphasized the emotional content of the repressed material. Freud viewed repression as a defense mechanism that serves to repudiate or suppress emotions, needs, feelings or intentions in order to prevent psychic “pain” (variously experienced as trauma, anxiety, guilt, or shame). In a paper published in 1915, Freud described the phenomenon of repression clearly and concisely: “The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.”

Elizabeth von R., one of Freud’s most famous patients, has been cited as a classic example of repression. In her sessions with Freud, Elizabeth experienced excruciating physical pain whenever she came close to expressing an unconscious desire (eventually retrieved into consciousness) that her beloved sister would die so that she could marry her brother-in-law. Freud compared the process of uncovering the repressed ideas and desires to a “layer by layer” excavation of a “buried city.” But such psychological “digs” into the territory of repressed memories were destined to proceed slowly, for with each shovelful of earth that Freud removed, his patients would struggle desperately to fill the hole back up again. The buried feelings and experiences, in Freud’s imagery, were “stratified concentrically around the pathogenic nucleus … the deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them.”

Dreams and forbidden desires were viewed as signals of the impending arrival of repressed emotional material. The Wolfman, another of Freud’s famous cases, suddenly remembered being seduced by his sister after some premonitory dreams. And Miss Lucy R.’s repressed sexual feelings for her employer apparently contributed to her hysterical symptoms. In a paper published in 1893 Freud described a conversation with Miss Lucy:

“But if you knew you loved your employer why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know—or rather I didn’t want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again, and I believe latterly I have succeeded.”

Freud used the case of Lucy R. to demonstrate his hypothesis that “an idea must be intentionally repressed from consciousness” for hysterical symptoms to develop. Thus, according to the original Freudian definition, repression can be an intentional, deliberate process of pushing emotions, ideas, or thoughts out of the conscious mind.

I wondered what Freud would have to say about Eileen Franklin, who claimed a different sort of repressed memory—one that was driven from her mind by completely unconscious mechanisms. Did her reports of a twenty-year memory loss for a severely traumatic event fit logically into Freud’s theory, or did her case represent a modern-day deviation from his speculative musings on the workings of the unconscious mind? As I continued searching for information on repression, I found a fascinating article titled “Let’s Not Sweep Repression Under the Rug: Toward a Cognitive Psychology of Repression,” by Matthew Erdelyi. Erdelyi claims that the original Freudian conception of repression as a potentially deliberate, intentional act has been completely neglected by modern-day theorists and clinicians who insist that repression always operates as an unconscious mechanism of defense.

“An almost universal consensus has emerged on this issue.… It is believed that the mechanisms of defense, without exception, operate unconsciously. So widespread is this belief, that by now most theorists treat the notion not as a hypothesis but as an integral component of the definition of the phenomenon.”

Erdelyi conducted an informal survey of undergraduates to find out how common the experience of repression (conscious or unconscious) is perceived to be. Eighty-five of eighty-six college-age subjects reported using “conscious repression,” defined as “excluding painful memories or thoughts from consciousness for the purpose of avoiding psychological discomfort.” Furthermore, most of these subjects could recall the specific unconscious mechanisms used to reject the material from consciousness; in Erdelyi’s words, “they were now conscious of previous unconscious use of defense techniques.” Erdelyi concluded that there is “almost universal support for repression.”

So, I thought, what have we got here? It seemed to me that what Freud intended as a free-ranging metaphor (the poetic notion of emotions and experiences buried in a secret, inaccessible compartment of the mind) had been captured and literalized. Freud used repression as an allegory, a fanciful story used to illustrate the unknowable and unfathomable reaches of the human mind. We moderns, confused perhaps by the metaphorical comparison and inclined to take things literally, imagined we could hold the unconscious and its contents in our hands. Whole memories, some argued, could be buried for years and then exhumed without any aging or decay of the original material.

While Freud was fascinated by the complex interactions of sexual and aggressive feelings, wishes, fantasies, and impulses of childhood and their ability to exert a pathogenic effect in adulthood (always emphasizing the repressed emotional content of the earlier experiences), modern-day analysts had gone on an expedition for literal, historical truth. We had captured a butterfly of an idea, pinned it to the wall, and analyzed it to death. No wonder some of us were wondering why it wouldn’t fly.

But the serious problems began when scholarly speculation about repression was reformatted and reinterpreted by clinicians writing for a mass market audience. Thus, in E. Sue Blume’s Secret Survivors, repression is confidently defined as a stockroom of unconscious behaviors common to all incest survivors:

The incest survivor develops a repertoire of behaviors designed to preserve the secret … these behaviors are not calculated or even conscious. They become automatic and, over the years, almost part of her personality. She denies that she was abused by repressing the memory of her trauma. This is the primary manifestation of “the secret”: incest becomes the secret she keeps even from herself. Repression in some form is virtually universal among survivors.

More than half a million copies have been sold of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (called the bible of the incest-recovery movement). In the preface co-author Ellen Bass notifies readers that she is not “academically educated as a psychologist” and “none of what is presented here is based on psychological theories.” Having offered that caveat the authors go on to give specific advice regarding repressed memories. “If you are unable to remember any specific instances [of abuse] … but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did.” This gross generalization is followed by a section titled “But I Don’t Remember,” in which the reader is told that her feelings can be taken as proof that “something happened” even if the memories have not yet surfaced.

You may think you don’t have memories, but often as you begin to talk about what you do remember, there emerges a constellation of feelings, reactions and recollections that add up to substantial information. To say “I was abused,” you don’t need the kind of recall that would stand up in a court of law.…

The idea that memories of incest begin with vague feelings or images that eventually coalesce into full-fledged reminiscences is repeated in another popular book for incest survivors, Reclaiming Our Lives: Hope for Adult Survivors of Incest. Authors Carol Poston and Karen Lison describe the experience of a woman with “repressed memories” of incest who dreamed about a little girl ice-skating on a frozen river. In her dream, the woman tried desperately to warn the child that monsters and snakes were making their way through the ice to devour the little girl. But, as often happens in dreams, she was powerless to warn her. A few days later the client began to remember incestuous experiences from her own childhood. Now that she had “a trusted relationship with a therapist and a survivors’ group that would understand and accept her,” the memories began to flow. “Women usually do not make an immediate incest connection,” the authors conclude this story. “They may not recall for years that the incest occurred: memories have an uncanny way of coming only when the survivor can deal with them.”

In Adult Children of Abusive Parents, Steven Farmer links the severity of the earlier abuse with the ability to repress the memory. “The more severe the abuse, the more likely you were to repress any conscious recollection of it.” He offers several exercises designed to help readers “lift the lid of repression.”

As I read through these popular incest-recovery books, I found it difficult to escape the conclusion that if something feels real, it is real, and hang the fact that you don’t have any memories (let alone proof). As with Freud, feelings and emotions are what count, but in this new twist on an old theme the feelings are important because they function as symptoms indicating that somewhere in the unconscious a memory of abuse lies dormant, waiting to be discovered. If you (the reader of these books) think you might have been abused and you feel the rage and grief that so often accompany memories of abuse, then you are encouraged to blindly feel your way along the rope hold of these emotions, rappelling down the slippery slope of the unconscious in search of hidden and long-forgotten memories.

If a patient persists in not remembering, therapists suggest numerous creative techniques to jog their memories. The Courage to Heal Workbook, for example, includes a written exercise for people who think they might have been abused but have not been able to locate the memories. Feelings of shame or humiliation are accessed in an attempt to trigger the forgotten memories of abuse.

If you don’t remember what happened to you, write about what you do remember. Or write about whatever you can remember that comes closest to sexual abuse—the first time you felt ashamed or humiliated, for instance … Start with what you have. When you utilize that fully, you usually get more.

Even scholarly writers suggest “guessing” as a means of accessing buried memories. “When the client does not remember what happened to her, the therapist’s encouragement to ‘guess’ or ‘tell a story’ will help the survivor regain access to the lost material,” writes therapist Karen Olio. Olio describes the experience of one of her clients who suspected that she had been sexually abused but could not recall any specific incidents. At a social gathering she became extremely anxious in the presence of a three-year-old child. She didn’t know why she was so upset although she was conscious of a desire to tell the little girl to keep her dress down. When encouraged in therapy to tell a story about what was going to happen to the child, the client ultimately related with tears and trembling her first memories of abuse. She used the story, in her therapist’s words, to “bypass her cognitive inhibitions and express the content of the memory.” Later she “integrated the awareness that she was indeed the little girl in the story.”

The curative power of memory is often emphasized in these cases of repressed memories. In one remarkable case, Betsey, a thirty-eight-year-old woman with a history of bulimia, alcohol abuse, and episodes of self-mutilation, was hospitalized after a drunken rampage. At first she denied that she had been abused as a child, but after six months of therapy, she began to “recall” her father pushing her to her knees to perform oral sex. She also remembered her father’s threats to “cut her arms off” if she ever told anyone about the abuse. Her therapist believed the self-mutilation was an enactment of past trauma; as her abuse memories pushed their way into consciousness. Betsey gradually recovered and stopped mutilating herself. “Regaining the memories of her childhood incest and discussing them with another human being has improved this woman’s capacity of intimately knowing and relating,” the therapist concluded.

Some therapists seem willing to believe in the authenticity of recently unlocked memories, no matter how bizarre they may appear on the surface. In the nonfiction best-seller Michelle Remembers, Michelle Smith recounts her psychotherapy sessions in which she was regularly hypnotized; after several months she began to have “memories” of being imprisoned at age five by her mother and a fiendish assemblage of satanists. Michelle remembered bloody rituals led by a man called “Malachi,” a sadistic nurse dressed in black, and dozens of chanting and dancing adults who tore live kittens apart with their teeth, cut fetuses in half and then rubbed the dismembered bodies on her stomach, penetrated her with a crucifix, and forced her to urinate and defecate on the Bible. When Michelle recalled these and other incidents of ritual abuse, she developed physical symptoms called “body memories,” including a rash on her neck that she and her therapist interpreted as the imprint of Satan’s tail. A black-and-white close-up photograph of Michelle’s rash is included in the book, along with this graphic description: “Whenever she relived the moments when Satan had his burning tail wrapped around her neck, a sharply defined rash appeared in the shape of the spade-like tip of his tail.”

These popular books rarely warn the reader that it might be advisable to seek verification or outside corroboration of de-repressed memories. In fact, the strong theme that emerges in the popular literature is that requests for proof only revictimize the patient. If the patient expresses doubts about her memories, the therapist is encouraged to identify the events as real and convince the patient of the historical reality of the abuse. No matter how outlandish the memories or how serious and potentially damaging the accusations arising from these memories, the survivor is told that she is not responsible for providing proof or validation of her memories. As Bass and Davis write in The Courage to Heal:

If your memories of the abuse are still fuzzy, it is important to realize that you may be grilled for details … You are not responsible for proving that you were abused.

The problem for both the accuser and the accused is how to determine whether a recovered memory is a reasonably accurate representation of past reality, a mixture of fact and fiction, or a complete fabrication. Psychology, despite its many accomplishments in the last hundred years or so, has not devised a method for reading minds; in the absence of hard evidence, we simply do not know how to ascertain absolute “truth.” Perhaps that is why Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller, and other theoretical psychologists forcefully and repeatedly emphasize the emotional story-truth of repressed memories rather than their historical happening-truth.

But in the incest-sensitive climate of the 1970s and 1980s, well-meaning clinicians began to advocate a “leap of faith” approach, presuming the accuracy of a recovered memory in order to foster the all-important therapeutic atmosphere of trust. In one scholarly paper published in 1979, for example, authors Alvin Rosenfeld et al. acknowledge the difficulty of assessing whether a patient’s report of incest is fantasy or reality but suggest that therapists err on the side of belief because disbelief may drive some patients out of therapy and possibly into psychosis. While “it is difficult to know whether a report of molestation is a memory, a fantasy, or a memory of a fantasy,” the authors write, therapists should be “open-minded,” for “there may be more danger of dismissing reality as fantasy than vice-versa.” By presuming the accuracy of a patient’s report of incest, the therapist fosters “an atmosphere of trust in which the accusation can be explored thoroughly and renounced if untrue.”

In clinical situations, when a patient talks privately and confidentially with a therapist, determining whether a memory is real or imagined may be relatively unimportant. If patients are cured, many therapists would argue, it doesn’t really matter whether they have worked through traumatic realities or traumatic fantasies. If a memory is not real but seems real to the person remembering it, then who can say that it is not, in some basic and critical sense, real? Every personally felt experience has its emotional story-truth, which cannot and should not be denied or minimized.

But when a memory suddenly and explosively resurfaces after nearly two decades, with colors, textures, sounds, smells, and emotions remarkably preserved, and a man is charged with murder based on the details thus revealed, then the clinical import of that memory must at least share the stage with its legal ramifications. Eileen Franklin, overwhelmed by uncontrollable reminiscences, kept “seeing” the rape and murder of her best friend, reliving the horror over and over again in her mind. With the case fast approaching the courtroom and a man’s freedom hanging in the balance, it became imperative that someone ask the skeptic’s question: Was this abundant and terrifying memory a nightmare, was it madness, or was it a genuine breakthrough from the remote past?

*   *   *

Dr. Lenore Terr was scheduled to testify as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Franklin trial. I was curious to see how this psychiatrist and clinical professor who works with traumatized children (she became famous for her work with the kidnapped children of Chowchilla, California) would explain the concept of repression. I ordered her recently published book Too Scared to Cry and read it from cover to cover. What I found surprised me.

While I couldn’t find a definition or description of the term “repression” anywhere in the book (as is the case with most scholarly publications on trauma and incest, the term didn’t even appear in the index), I did find a definition for “suppression,” which Terr characterized as “entirely conscious and thus not a defense mechanism.” By implication, then, was repression (defined by Freud and accepted by most modern clinicians as a defense mechanism) entirely unconscious? It didn’t seem that way. Terr clearly and consistently stated that sudden, fast events overwhelm a child’s defenses and create “brilliant, overly clear verbal memories” that are “far clearer, more detailed, and more long-lasting than … ordinary memory.” Only when a child is subjected to continuing trauma or terror are the defense mechanisms stimulated, interfering with memory formation, storage, and retrieval.

How did this trauma theory apply to Eileen Franklin’s memory? It seemed clear to me that Eileen’s experience would fall in the “sudden, fast event” category of trauma which, according to Terr, would leave a permanent and indelible imprint in her mind. Terr had quite a lot to say about the nature of traumatic memory, and her theories seemed to confirm that if Eileen Franklin had witnessed her best friend’s murder, she would have remembered it. “Horrible experience creates permanent mental pictures,” Terr writes.

… traumatic remembrance is far clearer, more detailed, and more long-lasting than is ordinary memory … Traumatized children do not ordinarily deny the single, shocking event …

I was particularly struck by Terr’s comparison of the traumatized mind to a camera fitted up with expensive lenses and corrosion-resistant film:

The memory of trauma is shot with higher intensity light than is ordinary memory. And the film doesn’t seem to disintegrate with the usual half-life of ordinary film. Only the best lenses are used, lenses that will pick up every last detail, every line, every wrinkle, and every fleck.

This analysis of memory didn’t square at all with my work in the laboratory on the corrosive effects of stress and trauma. I’ve conducted more than twenty of these studies, most of which support the theory that stressful experiences eat away at memory. Borrowing Terr’s camera analogy, let’s assume that our memory system operates like an expensive camera with high-performance lenses and nondisintegrating film. Let’s further assume that lighting conditions are always optimum. What happens when we are under stress? Maybe we forget to close the film compartment, and as a result the entire roll is fogged. Or perhaps we rewind the film and forget to remove it, shooting the roll all over again and creating double exposures. Or we neglect to remove the lens cap. Or our hands tremble so violently that the images appear blurred and indistinct. Or we focus in on a central detail—a gun, for example—retaining that memory while forgetting many other aspects of the experience. My point is that no matter how good your memory equipment is, if you’re under stress you often forget how to use it properly.

The prosecution would argue that my laboratory findings have little to say about real-life occurrences. In a psychology experiment we can’t kidnap or torture our subjects. We can’t point a loaded gun at them or ask them to lift a two-thousand-pound car that is crushing the life out of their child. We can’t threaten them with loss of love or subject them to constant, unrelieved fear for their lives. The traumatic situations we induce in the laboratory are mild when compared to many real life traumas.

But experimental psychologists can and do study the basic processes of memory formation, storage, and retrieval, and our documented, replicable findings can be generalized to real-life situations. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that no matter which side you chose to believe in—my experimental studies showing that stress can reduce the accuracy and detail of memories, or Terr’s clinical cases showing that traumatic events create “permanent mental pictures”—both argued against the validity and accuracy of Eileen Franklin’s repressed memory. If stress (and, of course, time) cause memory to decay and deteriorate, why did Eileen Franklin’s memory come back to her twenty years later in such astonishing, full-color detail? If, as Lenore Terr argued, traumatic events create clear, detailed, and long-lasting memories and if, as she also argued, traumatized children do not “deny-away” their memories, how was Eileen able to push the memory of Susan Nason’s murder out of her conscious mind for nearly twenty years?

*   *   *

More confused than ever, I called defense attorney Doug Horngrad. “Do you have any idea how Dr. Terr plans to explain away her own recently published theories about permanent, indelible memories in traumatized children?” I asked.

He did have an idea, for Dr. Terr had recently refined her theory. In a soon-to-be-published scholarly paper she delineated two distinct types of psychic traumas: Type I trauma and Type II trauma. Type I trauma was a short, single event or experience; this allegedly led to brilliant, accurate, and indelible memories. Type II trauma was caused by multiple incidents or continuing, ongoing events. Repressed memory entered the picture in this second type of traumatic experience for, Terr theorizes, children subjected to repeated abuses would learn to anticipate the abuse and defend themselves by dissociating and repressing the memory. In this way they avoided the pain of remembering the ongoing trauma and discovered a way to function “normally” in a perpetually stressful and abusive environment.

The prosecution, Horngrad continued, would attempt to match these theories to Eileen Franklin’s story. They would argue that the single traumatic event in Eileen’s life (witnessing Susan Nason’s murder) took place within an ongoing, everyday series of traumatic events involving physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in the Franklin household. Prosecutors were lining up witnesses who would testify that George Franklin had abused his wife and children; this evidence would create a plausible scenario to explain why Eileen had repressed the memory of her best friend’s murder.

The Type I and Type II theories were certainly intriguing as hypothetical material, but I was not aware of any formal study to support the idea that one type of traumatic memory could be encased and subsumed within another type so that the normal mechanisms of memory for the first type are superseded by the mechanisms commonly used in the second type. As I tried to reason through this theoretical maze, I began to understand that there was no logical way to win this particular argument. My laboratory studies and experimental findings were a thin paper shield against the twin-headed dragon of traumatic memory. How could anyone hope to fight such a creature?

I was even more disturbed by the prosecution’s plan to link the alleged physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in the Franklin household with Susan Nason’s murder. Not one piece of forensic or scientific evidence connected George Franklin to Susan Nason’s murder. But if the prosecution could inject the idea into the jury’s collective mind that George Franklin was a monster who abused his own daughters, then it was not that great a leap to imagine that he could have sexually abused Susan Nason, murdered her in order to protect himself, and then threatened to kill the only eyewitness, his own daughter, if she breathed a word of what had happened.

Was George Franklin a wife beater, a child abuser, and a general brute? In the context of this trial, the answer to that question didn’t matter, because Franklin had not been accused of emotional, sexual, or physical abuse. He was charged with murdering an eight-year-old girl. A pedophile may be a monster—but that doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer.

*   *   *

More disturbed than ever, I went back to Terr’s book. Searching for the logic underlying her argument, I was diverted by some fascinating remarks about the horror writer Stephen King. After reading King’s books and analyzing his interviews, Dr. Terr identified two major traumas in his life: the disappearance of his father when he was two years old and a train accident that occurred when he was just four. She believes that these traumas continue to affect him (“Steven King still suffers from the effects of a traumatic event in his childhood”) as evidenced by his continuing symptoms: nightmares, fears, a “sense of futurelessness,” and “active denial.”

The denial is inferred from King’s repeated insistence that he doesn’t remember anything about the train accident. Here is his version of the trauma from his book, Danse Macabre:

The event occurred when I was barely four, so perhaps I can be excused for remembering [my mother’s] story of it but not the actual event.

According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor’s house—a house that was near a railroad line. About an hour after I left I came back (she said), as white as a ghost. I would not speak for the rest of that day; I would not tell her why I’d not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum’s mom hadn’t walked me back but had allowed me to come alone.

It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me that they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket). My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, or if it had occurred before I even arrived, of if I had wandered away after it happened. Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I’ve said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact.

King insists that he has no memory of his friend being run over by a train, but Lenore Terr believes he repressed the memory. To bolster her argument she claims that the age of four is “slightly old for total amnesia on the basis of developmental immaturity.” Terr is referring to childhood amnesia, the inability of adults to remember events that occur before the age of two or three. Since King was four when his friend was killed, and childhood amnesia generally ends by the age of three, Terr was arguing that he must have remembered something. Furthermore, she continued, King displays several telltale symptoms of having witnessed the accident—all those years ago he came home white as a ghost and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the day, and now, in the present, he continually reenacts the original trauma in his terror-laden novels featuring runaway trains, murderous cars, and exploding fire hydrants. She gathers more supporting evidence from King’s fictional characters in It and Pet Semetary, who have “on-again, off again” amnesias, partial memories which perhaps are “closer to the author’s actual life experiences than his autobiographical claim to total amnesia.”

In other words (if I was interpreting this correctly, and I was more than willing to admit that I was somewhat confused), even though Stephen King claims he has no memory of this exceedingly traumatic event, it’s clear that he was watching when his friend was run over by a train, because he displays the symptoms common to trauma survivors and he continually acts out his memories (which are too painful for him to express or to admit that he remembers) through his fictional characters, who can face the trauma for him.

Terr’s theory made wonderful sense, it tied up all the loose ends, and no one could prove her wrong. Who could document that Stephen King wasn’t there when his friend was killed? Even if King doesn’t remember the event, how can he prove that he didn’t witness it? The same line of reasoning could easily be invoked in the Eileen Franklin case. If Terr could state with full confidence that Stephen King saw his friend run over by a train (even though he doesn’t remember it) because he has certain significant symptoms, then how much more would she have to say (and with how much more confidence) about Eileen Franklin, who not only accepted Terr’s theories but requested her expertise in order to authenticate her story of a repressed memory?

*   *   *

Terr actually discussed Stephen King during her testimony in the Franklin trial. She told the jury about a real-life encounter: She happened to overhear a conversation at a nearby table in a hotel coffee shop. A man was explaining his need to kill lots of people in his books and movies “because it’s really part of me.” The man, of course, was Stephen King. Terr summed up the meaning of the anecdote for the courtroom: “The person who has been traumatized can’t stop this kind of behavior; it’s a behavior that has to be. And the person may not be aware of why the behavior is linked to the trauma, but it’s there, and it has to be repeated.”

With that entertaining anecdote, Lenore Terr made it clear that Eileen Franklin’s repressed memory was not such an oddity after all. Because he hadn’t yet recovered the memory, Stephen King wasn’t aware that his repetitive behavior was shaped by his childhood trauma; but Eileen Franklin, who had recovered her traumatic memories, was able to see how deeply she had been affected. The writer and housewife were linked by tragic events that occurred in early childhood, experiences that were so painful that their minds shut down, pushing the memories into the unconscious. For years only the symptoms remained, obsessive behaviors that would mark them forever after with the diagnosis of “trauma victim.”

With that diagnosis all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Eileen Franklin’s personality could be explained away. Yes, she lied about being hypnotized … but that’s understandable because she is a trauma victim. Yes, she used drugs and was arrested for prostitution … but her behavior makes sense given that she is a trauma victim. Yes, she repressed the memory for twenty years … but that’s a defensive reaction common to trauma victims. Anything the defense might say in an attempt to undermine Eileen’s credibility as a witness could be turned around and presented as an ongoing symptom of the original trauma that left a deep and indelible scar on her psyche.

*   *   *

I took the stand on Tuesday, November 20, 1990, and for two hours discussed my experiments investigating memory distortion. I explained to the court that memory fades with time, losing detail and accuracy; as time goes by, the weakened memories are increasingly vulnerable to “post-event information”—facts, ideas, inferences, and opinions that become available to a witness after an event is completely over. I told the jury about a series of experiments I conducted featuring a shocking film simulation of a robbery. At the end of the short film, a child is shot in the face. Subjects who watched the film with the shocking ending were able to recall details with significantly less accuracy than subjects who watched a similar film without the violent ending.

This study, I explained, tells us about the distortions that can occur in the acquisition stage of memory, when an event occurs and information is laid down in the memory system. Other studies tell us about the retention and retrieval stages of memory, after a period of time goes by and we are asked to recall a particular event or experience. Hundreds of experiments involving tens of thousands of individuals have shown that post-event information can become incorporated into memory and contaminate, supplement, or distort the original memory.

I described a study I’d conducted in which subjects watched a film of a robbery involving a shooting and were then exposed to a television account of the event which contained erroneous details. When asked to recall what happened during the robbery, many subjects incorporated the erroneous details from the television report into their account. Once these details were inserted into a person’s mind through the technique of exposure to post-event information, they were adopted as the truth and protected as fiercely as the “real,” original details. Subjects typically resisted any suggestion that their richly detailed memories might have been flawed or contaminated and asserted with great confidence that they saw what their revised and adapted memories told them they saw.

Elaine Tipton, the prosecutor, attempted to persuade the jury that my studies on memory distortion had little or nothing to do with Eileen Franklin’s repressed memory. You study normal memory and forgetting, but so what? her questions implied. What does that have to do with this extraordinary memory?

“You’ve never been asked to render an opinion that a person might not be able to accurately recognize or identify their own father, have you?” Tipton asked me.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case with that as the precise issue,” I answered.

“You have conducted no study, have you,” she continued, “in which you tested a person’s ability to retrieve and describe an event that they witnessed twenty years later. Isn’t that true?”

“I don’t recall personally doing such a study, and there aren’t very many studies with that long an interval of time in the literature,” I said.

“And, in fact, none of the studies that you have done involved the subject’s having repressed the memory of the event that they witnessed prior to the retrieval; isn’t that true?”

I admitted that in my experiments I studied distortions of memories that were not repressed. I was tempted to ask, How can I study a memory that doesn’t exist, or at least isn’t available to consciousness? But I restrained myself.

Tipton kept hammering at the point that repressed memories don’t fly by the same rules as ordinary memories. “Based on the fact that none of these studies have involved the effect of, for instance, post-event information on a memory that is not in the conscious mind—that is, one that is repressed—you would agree, wouldn’t you, that these findings don’t necessarily apply to repressed memory?”

I explained that I could only hypothesize about the effects. But it was my scientific prediction that post-event information would have the same distorting and contaminating impact on a repressed memory that it has on a nonrepressed memory.

Tipton shifted her focus to the types of distortions that occur in the experiments I conduct. My studies generally deal with the details of a given event; they do not question whether or not the event occurred at all. The details might include, for example, “Which hand was the gun in?” or “Did the robber have a mustache?” or “Was the robber wearing gloves or not wearing gloves?”

“But you’ve never had a response indicating that the subject thought that the man was in a baseball game rather than committing a robbery in a market, have you?” Tipton asked.

“I don’t think that’s ever happened, to my knowledge, in my studies,” I answered.

“So your studies really focus on a person’s ability to perceive more discrete details of the event, not the actual subject matter—the broad subject matter of the event. Correct?”

“That would be the primary focus of these studies, recollections of specific aspects of the event,” I answered.

Once again Tipton made the point that this extraordinary memory didn’t have to abide by the rules of ordinary memory. Because Eileen Franklin’s memory was repressed, apparently it could do whatever it wanted to do. Scientists couldn’t study it or understand it because repression is too complex and mysterious, part of the unconscious and unknowable processes of the human mind.

I was getting frustrated. In science everything hinges on proof and evidence. We call this the scientific method. Scientists can’t just pronounce that the earth is round or the force of gravity keeps our feet on the ground without offering evidence in support of their theories (not, at least, if they want to call themselves scientists.) A scientific theory has to be falsifiable, which means that, in principle at least, some other scientist can come along and create an experiment designed to prove that the earth isn’t round or that gravity doesn’t keep us grounded.

But how does a scientist search for evidence to prove or disprove an unconscious mental process involving a series of internal events that occur spontaneously, without warning and with no external signs to indicate that something is about to happen, is happening, or has already happened? And how can a scientist prove or disprove that a spontaneously recovered memory represents the whole truth and nothing but the truth rather than some creative blending of reality and imagination or, perhaps, just plain and pure invention?

As I sat in the witness box answering the prosecutor’s questions, I began to sense the power of this thing called repression. I felt as if I were in a church arguing with the minister about the existence of God.

“You have conducted no study, have you, in which you were able to prove or disprove the existence of God?”

“No, I have not conducted such a study.”

“Your findings, which deal with the real and verifiable, do not apply to the unknowable and unverifiable. Would you agree?”

“I would have to agree.”

“Your studies focus on discrete details, not the larger picture, the grand idea. Correct?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

I was beginning to realize that repression was a philosophical entity, requiring a leap of faith in order to believe. For those willing to take that leap, no amount of “scientific” discussion would persuade them otherwise. Science, with its innate need to quantify and substantiate, stood helpless next to the mythic powers of repression. The courtroom was awash in credulity, the jurors’ and spectators’ opinions seemed predetermined, and my carefully researched scientific studies were just an old-fashioned irritation, a necessary but inconsequential detour on the road to confirming Eileen Franklin’s memory and finding George Franklin guilty of murder.

Nine days later, on November 29, 1990, jury deliberations began. The jury reached a verdict the next day: George Franklin was guilty of the crime of first-degree murder.

*   *   *

I have little doubt that Eileen Franklin believes with every cell of her being that her father murdered Susan Nason. The images of the murder were so vivid and finely detailed that she couldn’t imagine they portrayed anything but the truth. Over time the strange, flickering flashbacks settled into a coherent almost tangible picture. As additional bits and pieces of memory came floating back they were grafted onto the original nucleus, and a complex, interconnected system of image, emotions, experiences, and beliefs was created.

But I believe there is a very real possibility that the whole concoction was spun not from solid facts but from the vaporous breezes of wishes, dreams, fears, desires. Eileen’s mind, operating independently of reality, went about its business of collecting ambiguities and inconsistencies and wrapping them up into a sensible package, revealing to her in one blinding moment of insight a coherent picture of the past that was nevertheless completely and utterly false. Eileen’s story is her truth, but it is a truth that never happened.

Dr. David Spiegel, who also testified for the defense in the Franklin case, agrees with this scenario. A professor of psychiatry at Stanford Medical School, Spiegel believes that it is possible to lose conscious awareness of traumatic memories through the defense mechanism known as “dissociation,” which works to control painful feelings by limiting the person’s access to the memory. But even if a traumatic memory is lost from consciousness, certain symptoms universally occur. As Spiegel wrote in a scholarly paper published after the trial:

Research indicates that children exposed to violent trauma almost uniformly identify the event as a stressor (87% in one sample), suffer intrusive imagery [and] fear of recurrence of the trauma, lose interest in ordinary activities, avoid reminders of the event, and are upset by thoughts of it. The lack of evidence of any of these symptoms in Eileen after the murder does little to support the idea that she witnessed it.

Spiegel concludes that “a combination of fantasy and guilt about her friend’s death, coupled with images of her father’s cruelty could have led her to construct a false memory which she believed.”

If Eileen’s memory is false (and, of course, we have to accept the unpleasant reality that in this and other cases of repressed memory we will never know for sure what really happened), what does that tell us about her psyche? Is she somehow “sick” in the sense of mentally unstable or deranged? I don’t think so, unless most of the rest of us could also be labeled sick. Consider the fact that thousands of sane and intelligent people with no evidence of psychopathology speak in terror-stricken voices about their experience aboard flying saucers. They remember, clearly and vividly, being abducted by aliens. Or consider the fact that thousands of reasonable, normally functioning human beings relate in calm voices and with deeply felt conviction their past-life experiences. They remember having lived before.

Thousands more are vulnerable to spontaneous misfirings of the limbic system (the part of the brain comprising the cortex and related nuclei that is thought to relate to emotional response). When the neurons in their brains backfire, they report seeing loved ones long since dead or, even more frightening, images of God, the Virgin Mary, or Satan. These perceptions may be imprinted as memories, which are recalled with profound emotion.

The twelfth-century mystic nun Hildegard of Bingen glimpsed the city of God in her dazzling visions of flashing lights, angelic hosts, and brilliant halos. Was she really permitted a pre-death look at heaven? Modern-day observers believe that Hildegard’s celestial revelations were induced by migraine headaches. As clinical neurologist Oliver Sacks writes in Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder:

[Hildegard’s visions] provide a unique example of the manner in which a physiological event, banal, hateful, or meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a privileged consciousness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic vision.

The Seventh-Day Adventist prophet Ellen White would suddenly fall into trances in which her eyes rolled upward as she monotonously repeated certain phrases and gestures. Her “visions” revealed to her that masturbation is fatal, wigs cause insanity, and certain races evolved from intercourse with lower species of animals. Was White insane? Was she feigning her visions in order to win converts to her religion? While the faithful accept her visions as divinely inspired, her “spells” are now believed to have been caused by epileptic seizures, possibly originating from a head injury that occurred when she was nine years old.

Strange visions, bizarre apparitions, and otherworldly hallucinations do not have to be apocalyptic. An estimated 10 percent to 25 percent of normally functioning human beings have experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination—hearing a voice, smelling nonexistent flowers, or seeing a vision of a loved one, dead for many years. Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, claims that he has heard his mother and father calling out his name perhaps a dozen times since their deaths. “I still miss them so much that it doesn’t seem strange to me that my brain will occasionally retrieve a kind of lucid recollection of their voices,” Sagan writes.

Hallucinations are simply part of being human. What are dreams but hallucinations of the sleeping mind? Children imagine monsters and fairies; grown-ups insist they have been visited by aliens; and roughly 10 percent of Americans report having seen a ghost or two. These people are not lying. They saw, heard, felt and experienced something. But was that “something” real?

When patients describe scenes from their childhood in rich and realistic detail, with powerful emotions that are appropriate to the event being relived, therapists (and any others who happen to be listening) are understandably impressed. The intense emotional expressions, the physical indications of fear and panic, and the abundance of vivid detail convince the listener that something did, in fact, happen. How could anyone invent a memory and then feign such rage, fear, horror, and grief? we ask ourselves. Why would people put themselves through that kind of emotional anguish?

But even if therapists are willing to accept the possibility of a fabricated memory, they are faced with a distressing double bind. Compassionate and conscientious clinicians work hard to create a safe and trusting atmosphere for patients to express their emotions and tell the truth about their past. In fact, a therapist’s skill and sagacity can be measured by his or her ability to elicit painful, deeply buried material. How can clinicians then betray their patients’ confidence and trust (and call into question their own interrogation methods) by questioning whether the memories and emotions being elicited are verifiably true?

It is not difficult to understand why therapists are so impressed by the emotional anguish expressed by their patients when they recall memories of abuse, nor is it hard to deduce why they are reluctant to disbelieve, question, or seek outside corroboration for repressed memories of sexual abuse. They fear destroying trust, impairing the therapeutic relationship, and perhaps even driving the patient out of therapy or, as some therapists fear, into psychosis.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to believe these stories of recovered memories is that not believing is edged with painful complexities and ambiguities. Not believing shakes up our sense of our own self. In the case of Eileen Franklin we want to believe, as she clearly and persuasively believed, and as her richly detailed memory would compel us to believe, that the story she relates is both accurate and truthful. We want to believe—in fact we need to believe—her story because the belief in her memory affirms that our own minds work in an orderly, efficient way, taking in information, sorting it, filing it, and calling it back later in full and vivid detail. In a chaotic world, where so much is out of control, we need to believe that our minds, at least, are under our command. We need to believe that our memories, inherently trustworthy and reliable, can reach back into the past and make sense of our lives. As social psychologist Carol Tavris writes, our memories are the table of contents of our lives. Who has the energy or the emotional resources to rewrite the entire book?

The idea that our minds can play tricks on us, leading us to believe in a distorted reality, even in fantasy and confabulation, is deeply disturbing. If we can’t trust our own minds to tell us the truth, what is left to trust? If our minds are capable of feeding us tall tales from the past with such intense, hallucinatory detail that it never occurs to us to question them, where is the boundary between truth and lie, reality and fantasy, sanity and madness?

The boundary, I believe, is permeable and unguarded, and we cross it all the time in our dreams, desires, and imaginations. Memory is the vehicle by which we transport ourselves from reality to fantasy and back again, as many times as it takes to spin coherent and colorful stories from the dry straw of real life. Our memories tell us stories, and we listen, enthralled. We want to know what happened in our past, we need our questions answered, we seek to resolve our uncertainty and ambiguity. Memory, our most loyal and faithful servant, complies with our wishes.

Why did Eileen Franklin come to believe that she saw her father murder her best friend? How did her mind construct a memory out of bits of fact and pieces of fantasy and then come to believe that that it was absolutely, one hundred percent true? On a more practical level, what possible motivation would she have for sending her father to jail for a murder he didn’t commit?

In her book, Sins of the Father, Eileen provides some answers to these questions. She describes her childhood as extremely violent. “My father’s beatings and the mean way in which he spoke to us were terrifying,” Eileen wrote. She remembered that her younger brother, George, Jr., told her that he feared his father so much that he kept a baseball bat under his bed for protection. Her mother endured both physical and emotional abuse, and her sister Janice claimed that she was repeatedly sexually abused by their father.

For most of her childhood and adolescence Eileen denied that her father abused her, but after years of therapy she eventually recalled several specific incidents of abuse. In one particularly disturbing recollection, she remembered being physically and sexually abused by her father in the bathtub when she was five. As Eileen discussed her emerging memories with her therapist, he explained that the human mind is, indeed, capable of burying a painful or traumatic event in the unconscious. When the time is right the memory will surface; as the memory emerges into consciousness, it will gradually lose its power to hurt. The ability to bring back to consciousness long-buried memories, Eileen learned in therapy, is a crucial step in healing and recovery.

A few weeks after the bathtub memory returned, Eileen recovered another memory of an event that occurred when she was eight or nine years old. She was in a strange house with her father and another man. “I was on something like a table. My father was holding down my left shoulder with one hand, his other hand over my mouth. I saw the face of a black man. I heard laughing. I felt a horrible, searing pain in my lower body. I tried to scream but couldn’t because of my father’s hand.”

For six months Eileen believed she had been raped by an unknown black man. Only when her mother suggested to her that the rapist might have been a family friend did Eileen’s mind begin to reconstruct the scene, changing the assailant from a black man she did not know to a white man she knew very well.

But no matter how these memories were originally pieced together, taken apart, and reassembled, they are emotionally devastating, full of the grief and rage of an adult woman looking back at her childhood and remembering unspeakable tortures suffered at the hands of her own father. The memory most important to Eileen, however, may have been created in her adulthood. Her daughter, Jessica, was two years old. George Franklin came to visit, and Eileen left him alone in the living room with her daughter. When she returned, she found her father holding her child on the coffee table, “carefully scrutinizing her sexual organs, pushing the labia open with his finger. I was stunned. ‘What are you doing?’ was all I could say.”

What was going on in Eileen’s mind at that moment, and afterward, as the memory of her father touching the genitals of her two-year-old daughter returned again and again to haunt her? Perhaps other images began to flash into her mind, pictures of her father molesting her sister, slapping her mother, kicking her little brother. Perhaps her imagination began to draw hallucinatory future pictures in which she visualized her adolescent daughter, beautiful as she was sure to become, shy, perhaps, and ever anxious to please her adoring grandfather. Did Eileen’s mind project the remembered past into the imagined future, intensifying her fears for her daughter’s safety?

Certainly her pain was intense, her anxiety overwhelming. For years she had struggled to make sense of a violent and unhappy childhood that included the senseless murder of her best friend. As an adolescent, she was troubled and depressed, dropping out of high school, experimenting with drugs and prostitution, attempting suicide. In her twenties she married a controlling and domineering man, and for many years she endured a loveless marriage. The pattern, it seemed, had established itself, and she could not escape the intolerable and relentless anguish of victimhood.

Her rage and grief, so amorphous and scattered, sought a focus and an outlet. In therapy she learned that her symptoms—her recurring fears, the flashing images, the returning memories—were clear indications of post-traumatic stress. She was told that she had every right to her feelings of victimhood, for she was simply repeating the self-destructive patterns laid down in her childhood. She learned that her confusion, anger, grief, and depression could be taken as further evidence that she had been traumatized and victimized sometime in her past.

Her therapist’s oft-repeated words echoed in her mind: She had every right to feel angry and grief-stricken. Only when she accepted her emotions as real and valid would she be free, finally, to express herself, to let go of her childhood hurts, to become her true self. This search for the genuine self must not be impeded, and anyone who had mistreated her in the past was a legitimate target of her rage. Anyone who questioned her memories or asked for corroboration or proof was an impediment to the healing process. Eileen was a trauma victim, but somehow she had emerged whole and intact. She had endured. She was a survivor.

Given Eileen’s rage and grief, perhaps we can begin to understand the culminating scene that took place in her living room, when Jessica was six years old and suddenly turned to her mother, her expression quizzical. As Eileen remembered the event, she looked into her daughter’s eyes and was struck by the child’s startling resemblance to eight-year-old Susan Nason. The two girls, one dead for twenty years and the other very much alive, could have been sisters.

One brutal image overlapped another, and in that shocking instant of recognition, flesh began to creep over the skeletal remains, and Susan briefly came back to life. Eileen could see in her mind the silhouette of her father with one leg forward, his hands raised above his head, and the look of terror on her friend’s face. She could hear the scream, the rock cutting into bone and flesh, the dreadful silence. She could feel the never-ending horror.

The adhesive connecting one image to another was supplied by Eileen’s guilt, anger, fear, and—perhaps most important—her desperate need to protect her own children. She was not able to protect her best friend—“I could not protect her, I could not stop him. I did not know that it was going to happen”—but as a twenty-nine-year-old mother, she could, at the very least, save her own children. Her guilt and helplessness over Susan’s death fueled the fire of her maternal protectiveness: “Each day when I looked into the faces of Jessica and Aaron, I knew that I had my children and that the Nasons did not have Susan. This made me feel guilty and partly responsible for the Nasons’ pain. It was my fault that the murder had never been solved.”

Easing the pain, ending the torment, doing the “right” thing, protecting her children … were these sufficient motivations to weld the horrors of the past and fears for the future into a false memory? Or did Eileen Franklin’s desire for justice and revenge spring from a more personal source? Was it possible that her mind created this memory in a desperate attempt to control an uncontrollable past and give some meaning to her troubled life?

In the final two pages of her book, Eileen described the anguish created by the unearthed memory. “I look in the mirror and compare the face I see with photos taken of me before the recollection … All the joy has left my eyes.”

“All the joy has left,” but in its place, Eileen has gained a sense of control and power over her father.

He had the power to close down a big part of my mind.… If I don’t achieve mastery over all he has done to me, if I allow part of my memory to remain repressed, my father wins. I must bring out and successfully put to rest all kinds of horror before I can truly say I have beaten him. If I live my life terrified of remembering more, he has won.

And so, perhaps, Eileen’s mind created the memory in an attempt to destroy her father’s power over her and live the remainder of her life free of fear. With the inventive powers of memory as her weapon, she was able to punish her father for his cruel, abusive treatment of her family and achieve mastery over her past. But not without cost. For once the floodgates were opened, the terrifying images rushed forth, a nonstop deluge. No safe haven presented itself; no end was in sight. “I want to flee, to lose the memory, but my mind runs as fast as I do. There is nowhere to go that I can leave my mind behind.”

Eileen Franklin’s “memories” have claimed her, body and soul.

*   *   *

I have one more story to tell. I came face to face with Eileen Franklin only once, in New York City on NBC’s daytime talk show “A Closer Look.” After Eileen described her repressed memory of her best friend’s murder, host Faith Daniels turned to me and in a disbelieving tone said, “Do you really think that what Eileen remembered is not what happened?”

“I think there is at least a plausible alternative theory that Eileen may have believed that she really saw this but it could be a created memory,” I said.

Members of the audience were fidgeting in their seats and shaking their heads at me. Daniels turned to the audience and said, “I don’t think you’re buying that!” She pushed the microphone up to a middle-aged woman’s mouth. “Why don’t you buy it?”

“I just can’t believe that you would have such feelings and lose moments from your life,” the woman said. “Why would you want to suffer if you didn’t have to? Why would you want to put yourself through it? There’s no logic behind it.”

Eileen, who wore an elegant black dress with pink and blue stripes on the shoulders, nodded her head, a pained expression on her face. I wore a beige suit with a long string of pearls. As the audience continued to vent their hostility toward my skeptical viewpoint, I kept what I can only call a stoic smile plastered on my face.

After the taping, I took the elevator to the first floor. In the lobby I caught a glimpse of a striking woman with long red hair walking into the NBC souvenir shop. I edged a little closer (I wasn’t looking for a direct confrontation) and watched as Eileen browsed through the narrow aisles stocked with keychains, mugs, T-shirts, and other memorabilia imprinted with the NBC logo. At one point she picked up a mug, turned it upside down to look at the price tag, and then replaced it on the shelf. Then she walked over to the T-shirts and unfolded an adult-size shirt bearing the network’s logo. She held it up, trying to imagine if it would fit. Too big? Too little? Just right?

I watched, fascinated by her beauty and composure. I suppose I hoped to get some sense of who she was and what made her tick, now that she was away from the television cameras and microphones. At one point she glanced out toward the lobby, as if she were expecting someone to meet her. She looked right at me but gave no sign that she knew who I was. A few minutes later I picked up my briefcase and walked outside to hail a taxi and head for home.

That is the story-truth of my encounter with Eileen Franklin. The happening-truth is not nearly so interesting. I was in New York City in January 1992, and I appeared with Eileen Franklin on NBC’s “A Closer Look.” I was dressed in a beige suit, and Eileen wore a black dress. The audience felt much more comfortable with Eileen’s version of the story than they did with mine. They frowned and fidgeted when I attempted to explain the ways in which memory can be distorted, and I squirmed and tried to smile my way through their expressions of disbelief and outright hostility.

I can confirm all those facts because I have a videotape of the show. But the rest of the story, while clear and vivid in my mind, can’t be corroborated. Did I stand outside the souvenir shop watching as Eileen Franklin picked up a mug and looked at the price tag? (Is there even a souvenir shop in the NBC building? Could it have been a magazine stand?) Did she unfold a T-shirt? (Was it, perhaps, a child-size shirt?) Did I watch her for a few minutes from the lobby, or did I catch a glimpse of her (or someone else with long red hair?) in the lobby as I rushed outside to hail a taxi? Did she look right at me and not recognize me? Could I have imagined the whole scene?

Even in this relatively insignificant encounter with my past, I’m not sure where the happening-truth ends and the story-truth begins.