With Malice Aforethought

For three decades, a highly regarded Berkeley professor has stood accused of America’s most notorious serial murders. Why won’t he fight back?

By Michael J. Martin
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Between 1966 and 1981, U.C. Berkeley public policy professor Michael Henry O’Hare (left), a Harvard-educated architect who regularly holds court at an Edge-style intellectual blog called The Reality Based Community, committed first degree murder with malice aforethought on seven separate occasions.

On or around Nov. 28, 1981, he bludgeoned to death 25-year-old Harvard architecture student Joan Lucinda Webster, dumping her body in a Massachusetts field, where it was found in 1990.

Twelve years earlier, on October 11, 1969, O’Hare fired a point-blank shot into the head of 29-year-old cab driver Paul Lee Stine. Stine was found in his cab on a dark San Francisco street, slumped, bleeding, and dead.

On September 27, 1969, Michael Henry O’Hare, then 26 years old, did stab Cecelia Ann Shepard (below), age 22, five times each in the front and back. Turning the knife on her companion, O’Hare did stab 20-year-old Bryan Calvin Hartnell six times in the back. She died in a Napa hospital. He survived.

On Independence Day, July 4, 1969 at approximately 11:55 p.m., Michael O’Hare used a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to shoot Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, age 22, five times. Turning the gun on Michael Renault Mageau, age 19, O’Hare fired four more rounds. Mageau, like Hartnell, lived. Ferrin died in a Vallejo, Calif. hospital.

Five days before Christmas, on Friday, Dec. 20, 1968, Michael O’Hare, supposedly on assignment in San Francisco for consulting giant Arthur D. Little and Company, did shoot David Arthur Faraday, age 17, once in the head at point blank range with a .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol. O’Hare turned the gun on 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen and shot her five times in the back. Both Faraday and Jensen died instantly, on a Vallejo lovers’ lane.

Finally, on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1966, Michael Henry O’Hare did beat and stab to death 18-year-old Cheri Josephine Bates in a dark alleyway on the campus of Riverside City College in Riverside, Calif.


These are the accusations that Dr. O’Hare has let stand without legal challenge for nearly 30 years: That he murdered Joan Webster and before that, was a homicidal maniac with a penchant for devilish taunts in letters, cryptograms, and postcards known only as the Zodiac killer.

They are the same allegations that his long-time accuser, a retired NOAA librarian and true crime author named Gareth Sewell Penn (right), repeated in a March 2008 interview with a daily news magazine called Boston Now.

Prompted by the pending publication of this story, O'Hare broke a mysterious near-30-year silence to respond, in the May/June 2009 of the well-known political magazine, The Washington Monthly.

The Professor and the Polymath


An intellectual version of The Most Dangerous Game—Richard Connell’s famous tale of man as predator and prey—the odyssey of Gareth Penn, the Mensa polymath, and Michael O’Hare, the ascendant academic, is one of the most confounding, disturbing, and bizarre in the annals of contemporary crime.

Inspector Javert to O'Hare's Jean Valjean, Penn has chased the professor from Cambridge to Berkeley, combining a non-stop media blitz with a Zodiac-style personal harassment campaign that started as the very first public allegation in the Zodiac case and goes on to this day.

“To my mind, their relationship—or whatever it was—is the most fascinating subplot in the whole of the Zodiac story,” says Suffolk County (Mass.) District Attorney press secretary Jake Wark, who authored several articles on the crimes and spoke as a private citizen for this story. “It deserves big treatment.”

Penn—a Berkeley-educated linguistics scholar and retired research editor for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—may be the Zodiac killer’s biggest fan.

Through a compelling combination of absurdity and brilliance, his many pronouncements on the 20th century’s most famous unsolved homicides have held legions of investigators in thrall for decades.

Esquire Magazine film critic Mike D’Angelo acknowledged Penn’s allure in his review of the 2007 David Fincher film Zodiac, based on the Robert Graysmith book of the same name. “I think the movie erred in selecting Graysmith as its source and nominal protagonist,” D’Angelo wrote. “Zodiac buffs know well that the true obsessive is a fellow named Gareth Penn.”
 
Born and raised in New York City, Michael O’Hare represents the mainstream academy to Penn’s fringe infamy. With faculty appointments at MIT and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, O’Hare’s career was rising fast when Penn took his first shot at derailing it.

Now an expert in art and environmental policy at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, O’Hare is a respected teacher whose friends defend his honor.

“Gareth Penn is full of crap,” wrote an ally on the Zodiackiller.com blog, in answer to a question about a Harvard University police investigation that supposedly drove O’Hare from that campus shortly after Joan Webster’s murder. “Penn spent the better part of three decades researching and writing books about a suspect he can’t place in the state of California during the Zodiac crimes, and at no time has that even given him pause.”
 

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Weekly Scientist story leads to major turning point in Army homicide case

Russell

TACOMA, Wa. 11/17/13 (Weekly Scientist) --  Our series Unfriendly Fire, about a mass murder in Iraq, led to a major turning point in the Army's case against Sgt. John Russell, say prosecutors involved in the case. 

Russell pled guilty to the 2009 crimes this spring and -- despite a vigorous and dramatic defense -- received life in prison with no possibility of parole. 

Exclusive to Weekly Scientist, Unfriendly Fire tells the story of the homicides -- during which Russell shot and killed five Army soldiers at a base psychiatric clinic in Iraq -- from the viewpoint of the Army psychologist, Lt. Col. Michael Jones, Russell had come to kill.  Jones had briefly treated Russell just before the attacks, which he survived.  

Prior to our story, defense attorneys had been trying to paint Jones -- and Russell's treatment -- in a negative light, using the media, press releases, and a concerted PR campaign.   After the story ran, a mythology the defense team had been building about Russell's motives and state of mind fell apart. 
Read the series starting here. 

True crime author defends serial killer in little-known essay about Zodiac case

A Unabomber-style manifesto for the Zodiac Killer

 

SEATTLE, 11/17/13 (Weekly Scientist) -- To stop bombing attacks that killed three people and injured over a dozen others between 1978-95, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski famously demanded the New York Times and other periodicals publish a 35,000-word essay -- dubbed the "Unabomber manifesto" -- that laid out his case for killing.

Now, a similarly-themed, 3,500 word "manifesto" has turned up in a hard-to-find book about California's infamous Zodiac serial killings. Both the Zodiac and Unabomber manifestoes blame society to justify the homicides, while praising the criminals.

"The failure of law enforcement to deal with this criminal isn't due to his manifestly superior intelligence," insists Zodiac Manifesto author Gareth Penn.  "It is due to major failings of our society."

An appendix, the Zodiac Manifesto starts on pg. 347 of Penn's nearly 400-page book, a densely-written analysis of the Zodiac murders entitled Times 17.   It's been hiding in plain sight since the book's publication nearly 30 years ago.

Best known for ciphers, mathematical puzzles, and literary clues he used to taunt police and local newspapers, the Zodiac Killer is blamed for at least 5 murders in the Vallejo-San Francisco area.  The case remains unsolved 45 years later.

Considered the second most well-known book on the Zodiac case -- next to Robert Graysmith's Zodiac -- Times 17 is also among the least read.  Penn, 72, a retired NOAA librarian and Seattle resident, self-published the book in the mid-1980's, printing copies he distributed mostly by mail order.   At the time, he lived in Napa, Calif.

Times 17 has become an underground "cult" favorite, partly because it is the only book that pins the murders on a living person by name, a UC Berkeley public policy professor named Michael Henry O'Hare.   Today, copies are so rare they fetch as much as $200 on eBay and Amazon.

The Zodiac Manifesto -- which Penn titled "What Went Wrong" -- departs remarkably from the rest of the book, much of which is notoriously hard to follow.   Clear and pointed, the manifesto praises the killer while chastising enemies he attacked in his own letters, including law enforcement officials and the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.

Society's "first major defect is a widespread and profound contempt for humanistic education, particularly prominent in law enforcement," Penn writes.  Dumb cops, he says, couldn't solve the case because they knew nothing about literature, while "nearly all the evidence in the Zodiac case is literary."

The Zodiac's famous letters referenced literary classics such as The Mikado, a comic opera, and The Most Dangerous Game, a short story.

Penn has even harsher words for the media, which he calls society's "second major

Penn

defect."

"The function of the free press is supposed to be rooting out corruption.  But how can it perform this task when it is fundamentally corrupt itself?    In the interest of keeping hefty revenues flowing, newspapers, magazines, and electronic media pander to the lowest common denominator."

The Zodiac Killer famously sparred with Chronicle editors and reporters, for which the Zodiac Manifesto reserves its harshest criticism.

"In the particular case of the Zodiac, false reporting...has characterized media coverage, especially that of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is surely one of the ethically and intellectually most corrupt newspapers in the world," Penn writes.

"The Zodiac was perfectly aware of the Chronicle's penchant for sensationalism...And so he played the newspaper the way Yizhak Perlman plays the fiddle."

"I, meanwhile, have suggested that the most important evidence related to the detection of the Zodiac's identity is his literary legacy," the Times 17 author explains in the manifesto. "How can that legacy be evaluated intelligently when it has been trivialized and bowdlerized by the Chronicle?  How can anyone form an intelligent opinion about the facts when the Chronicle consistently reports them wrong?"

Publication of the Unabomber's manifesto ultimately led to his identification and capture.  So is Gareth Penn the Zodiac Killer?   His suggestive writings and long-time relationship with the case -- which he describes at length in Times 17 -- have led some armchair gumshoes to that conclusion.

Unfriendly Fire

A U.S. Army psychiatrist remembers a notorious mass murder on the front lines in Iraq

Houseal

Russell

by Michael J. Martin

Before Friday, May 8, 2009, Michael Jones had never heard of John Russell.   

A U.S. Army sergeant growing old without promotion, Russell, charges allege, killed five fellow soldiers with an M-16 rifle just 30 hours later.  Cries of “oh god, oh my god,” echoed with the bullets, testimony reads, throughout a small mental health clinic in Baghdad, Iraq. 

Springle

The dead (left):  psychiatrist Matthew Houseal, 54; psychiatric social worker Charles “Keith”  Springle, 52; engineering specialist Jacob Barton, 20; and two infantrymen, Christian Bueno-Galdos, 25, and Michael Yates, Jr., 19. 

Among the survivors:  Matthew Keener, a U.S. Navy psychologist who wrote a 2012 journal article on combat psychology ethics;  and Lt. Col. Jones, then an Army reserve psychiatrist at the Camp Liberty Combat Stress Center and the last mental health professional John Russell saw before he went berserk.  

Russell will face the death penalty, military prosecutors announced in May.  His defense team—led by a bombastic, high-profile Texas lawyer named James Culp—has floated a narrative their client was not to blame and may be innocent by reason of insanity.    

“Sgt. John Russell is facing death because the Army's mental health system failed him,” Culp wrote in a March 2012 memorandum about the case.    

Barton

With three military defense attorneys, the U.S. Army veteran and former paratrooper has publicly branded Russell’s care “mental health mistreatment” and “a significant causal factor” in the massacre, which occurred as a long offensive against the Iraqi regime was winding down, and a mundane march toward peacetime realities began.

Among caregivers Culp has labeled “borderline criminal,” Dr. Jones, who believes the peacetime reality John Russell saw looming contributed more to the massacre than anything else:  discharge just shy of retirement pay; and loss of health care, and other Veteran's benefits, from base shopping privileges to military discounts.  

Yates

Russell wanted another way out that would preserve his benefits, believes Jones, who counseled the sergeant for all of one hour “and change.”  The sergeant grew enraged when Jones and the other mental health professionals couldn't deliver a one-way ticket back home.

Pre-trial defense posturing, meanwhile, has made the psychiatrist—already reeling from survivor’s guilt and the loss of his friends—the prime target of a blame game that includes allegations meant to discredit his 30-year career and accusations of negligence.

Houseal and Springle were close friends, Jones explains.   He roomed with Houseal and returned to an empty bunk a few feet away the night of the murders.   He has survived the shootings only to see his named splashed across the media as the “real reason” Russell shot his good friends and three other soldiers in cold blood.    

Buenos Galdos

Jones first saw Russell’s name on an appointment calendar late Friday afternoon.  Russell had seen Springle earlier that week, and the psychiatric social worker wanted a second opinion from a psychiatrist who could prescribe medication if needed.   He scheduled Russell for an appointment with Jones on Sunday, May 10. 

An “astute clinician who called a spade a spade,” Springle—a career Navy commander—left minimal comments in his progress notes about what, if anything, troubled Russell, Jones explains. 

“Had Charlie thought anything was seriously wrong, his notes would have been a detailed mix of clinical algorithms and gut instincts,” explains Jones. 

“If Charlie thought Sgt. Russell was a danger to himself or anyone else, we all would have known about it.   He would have notified Russell’s commander, recommended a buddy watch, and insisted on continual disarmament.”

Instead, Springle wrote a “brief, unalarming note” after his session with Russell, Jones says.  It followed an earlier session Russell had with psychologist Hrysso Fernbach, a major at nearby Camp Stryker, the sergeant's home base.   

Jones never had the opportunity to review Fernbach’s notes:  they were locked down permanently after the massacre. 

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Matthew Houseal

Often the earliest of Camp Liberty’s four senior mental health professionals at work each morning, Jones walked over from his sleeping quarters—ten-by-10 foot mobile bunkers called “cans”—around 6:30 am on May 10, Mothers’ Day.     

He remembers cool air warming toward a “typical hot-season day”; the “young, wonderful” Sgt. Dominic Morales, a reception clerk with a “big smile and great people skills”; and a patient-centered routine that started at the front door. 

“Everyone had to disarm,” Jones explains.  “Our firearms stayed in a locked room until we left the building.” 

He also prefers “soldier-client centered” to “patient-centered.”   

“Part of our duty was to preserve the soldier’s identity, as a person of strength in a difficult setting doing an important and dangerous job,” Jones says.  “We tried to stay clear of any suggestion that a soldier was ceding his or her uniform to a hospital gown, and his or her identity to patient-hood.” 

Mental health staff was also mindful of confidentiality.   Had Jones not already testified in a widely-reported hearing about Russell’s condition, he would not be speaking now. 

Typical Camp Liberty "can," Dave Kluck photo

“We had to create a confidentiality environment to be effective,” he explains.  “No one was supposed to be considered less fit for duty as a result of visiting the combat stress unit.  We believed it should be considered a strength—not a weakness—that a soldier sought help for an issue that might affect his or her job.” 

Jones saw up to 10 soldier-clients daily, quietly calling only a first name in the waiting room, exchanging a greeting, and inviting the client back to his office and a chair next to the door.

“I set the chairs there for a reason,” Jones explains.  “We wanted the experience to feel as non-threatening as possible.  This wasn’t a locked ward; it wasn’t a mental institute.  It was a clinic dealing with workplace stress, first and foremost designed to get our soldiers back to their units and back in the saddle.”

This was the middle of Baghdad, after all, in the middle of war.   The consequences of falling off the saddle and staying on the ground could be life threatening for everyone.   

 

John Russell

Russell arrived for his Sunday appointment from Camp Stryker with a single escort, 1st Lt. David Vasquez.  Protocol normally called for two escorts whenever a soldier was deemed dangerous or oppositional.  “I made a mental note of it,” Jones says.  “I don’t think he was under formal escort that day.”  Russell also told Jones he had come voluntarily, not under orders from his command. 

Then began what Jones describes as a “20-questions style of analysis” that sought to get at whatever was bothering the soldier.   In a “low tone, deliberate and grumbling,” Russell spoke with “utter contempt” for his previous clinical contacts between Springle and Fernbach.   Based on Russell’s description, Jones suggested he might have had a panic attack in Fernbach’s office. 

“Sgt. Russell then said he had no history of panic attacks, but that he thought he’d been ‘mildly depressed’ all his life,” Jones explains.  “He also said someone told him he had PTSD.”

On further questioning, Russell exhibited no compelling picture of either depression or PTSD—post traumatic stress disorder.   “His complaint came across as situational.” 

Camp Stryker, OSE photo

Jones spoke to Russell about how to use adversity for personal growth.   He suggested anger management and relaxation techniques—forms of occupational therapy.

“I told him how to approach situational stress, and how a normal person can be dissatisfied with their job,” Jones says.  “I told him I thought he was essentially a normal person.”  

Russell seemed disinterested in these suggestions, waving them aside one by one.  It became clear to Jones he wanted out of the Army, period.

“You’re not showing signs that would justify such a drastic response,” Jones told Russell.  “Despite what he was saying, he had shown no signs of self-harm.”

The process of discharge from the front lines -- evacuation -- was serious business, Jones explained, reserved for only the most dire circumstances.   He now worries Russell took the admonition as a kind of road map: create a dire circumstance; get a discharge.

After the hour-long interview, Jones prescribed a mild anti-depressant, “a small dose of Paxil,” walked Russell back to the waiting room, and scheduled a follow-up for the next afternoon.  “I told him I looked forward to seeing him again,” Jones says.  “He grumblingly agreed.” 

Vasquez drove Russell back to Camp Stryker, about 30 minutes away.  

“I fully expected to speak with Charlie [Springle] before Sgt. Russell’s follow up,” Jones says.  “I wanted to find out if he had seen as little as I saw.”  

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With so little to go on, Jones says he has questioned himself repeatedly during the last three years.  “What   What did we miss?  Five people are dead.  Why didn’t I prevent it?” 

did I miss?

And yet, when he returns to John Russell the soldier-client, Jones—a psychiatrist with 30 years experience including five tours of duty, four in Iraq and one in Bosnia—sees nothing more than “job dissatisfaction, boredom, and anger over repeated deployments.”

No wife or girlfriend back home who announced she’s pregnant with another man’s child in a Dear John letter; no business going bankrupt in the absence of its owner; no humanitarian leave issues like the sudden death of a beloved parent or sibling. 

“When those things hit a soldier in the field, they’re left reeling.  They feel like they’ve lost all control of their lives,” Dr. Jones explains.   Sergeant Russell, on the other hand, “sat upright, didn’t raise his voice, and spoke deliberately, logically.  He was organized and self-possessed.  He seemed like a mature soldier with no evidence of any thought disorders.”  

In other words, a soldier in need of return to his unit equipped with sound ways to cope with stress.  “He had just a few months left,” Jones says.  “He didn’t want another unit.  He didn’t want a transfer.”

But Russell didn’t want to return to Camp Stryker, either.  “I want out of the Army,” he told Jones.  “I want to get out.”

Hrysso Fernbach, Psy. D.

Camp Liberty occupied part of miles-wide Baghdad airport secured with barriers to prevent truck bombs and surprise attacks.  A one-story, basic frame structure with steel doors, the combat stress clinic was suitably mundane—a few flags adorned wood paneling, and only a few offices had land-line telephones (security prohibited cell phones).

Russell’s unit at nearby Camp Stryker had a comparatively miniscule clinic, where he presented Dr. Fernbach—a board certified forensic and clinical psychologist who consulted to family and criminal courts and directed a prison psychology unit in New Jersey—with a mostly neutral demeanor.  

His unit leaders weren’t treating him well, he told Fernbach.  They had reprimanded him after he had dressed down a female subordinate over a 13-minute tardiness.  

But a reprimand shouldn’t cause depression or post-traumatic stress, and a tardy subordinate would hardly wound a person’s psyche.  Reports say Russell himself was late after “oversleeping” for his Sunday appointment with Lt. Col. Jones.  Relatives of Russell's victims aren't buying his claims either.  “PTSD and premeditated murder of five people are completely different,” Jacob Barton's sister Hannah writes in an online petition urging Russell's prosecution.   

Absent a definitive diagnosis, Fernbach was instead asked to consider hypotheticals.    What if Sgt. Russell was chronically depressed or post-traumatically stressed?  lawyers wondered at a 2011 pre-trial hearing in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas—home of the infamous military prison.  Could an angry comment from a superior set him off?

“I guess it could,” she said.   

But 22 months in theaters of war taught Jones that Fernbach was right not to have guessed at Camp Stryker.  Guessing about wartime psychological issues can get people killed.   His voice cracks with restrained emotion as he describes soldiers who were talked down in the field, soldiers forcing rifles up their mouths, soaked in perspiration. 

There was that soldier everyone thought was firing into a crowd, Jones recalls.   After he was subdued, the psychiatric team triaged him.   He wasn’t aiming at people, they learned.  He was firing into the sand. 

Jones examined him, listened to his story, watched the soldier cross himself, with no eye contact, as he talked about speaking with his dead grandmother. 

Jones asked the soldier’s fellow troops to find out what was going on.  He had been upset on the phone with his mother, they reported back.  His mother told the soldier his wife was leaving him for her ex-convict ex-husband back home.  

The psychiatric team evacuated the soldier to a combat support hospital.  Jones watched as two Blackhawk helicopters that had braved the possibility of rocket launchers and rifle fire descended from the sky—one to transport the soldier on a secure litter, the other to fly escort.  “He smiled at me on the way out,” Jones recalls, later learning the man was treated, returned to duty, and one of the last troops to leave theater with his unit. 

Cases like these made John Russell seem well-adjusted.   

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Unfriendly Fire-4

Michael Yates and son Kamren

Though Jones resists comparisons to a detective, psychological care involves detection from the client’s first words.  “We try to ascertain clues in their demeanor,” Jones explains.   “We look at past reports if they are available.  We try to get a sense of what kind of risk the soldier might pose, to himself, herself, or anyone else.” 

Why are you here?  the psychiatrist asks.   What is the presenting problem?   What can I—what can we—do to help?

Almost weekly, Camp Liberty’s combat stress unit faced a volatile situation, Jones says.  Somebody overdosed.   Someone else threatened to kill their commander.

Serious as it sounds, however, “most of these crises were not due to mental illness,” he explains.  “Most were situational.  Almost always, we were able to return the soldiers to duty.”

Jones is back to choking up, especially when he describes the weight of the consolidating force, as the Iraq conflict wound down, base fields scattered in country folded up, and reassigned personnel descended, en masse, on whatever and whomever was left.   

Part of pushing back on that weight, and keeping his own gyroscope balanced, meant assuring that soldiers with situational crises not flee.  

“We were so consumed working with troops who were so hot, so volatile, people might wonder how we could keep them in a theater of war,” Jones explains.  “But when it came down to it, we dealt well with most issues: people facing criminal charges;  people at the boiling point with co-workers in their command; people with serious, harmful ideations.” 

Russell’s defense team claims he fell into the latter category.   

Medical evacuation helicopter

But Jones saw no symptomatic evidence of suicidal or homicidal ideations.  “Some ideations are intense and acute, others fleeting.  But most have real, verifiable symptoms.  Someone might slit his wrists or take pills.  Someone else might fire a weapon.”

Until the massacre, John Russell did nothing.  He only said.

“You can’t just say ‘I’m suicidal’ and expect to be evacuated,” Jones says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Evacuation,” as the name implies, is a big deal:  a retreat in the face of an oncoming storm;  a pullback of arms and troops;  and the backward—as opposed to forward—movement of a single soldier, from the frontlines to a unit clinic; from his or her unit to the combat support hospital (CSH);  from the CSH to a base hospital in Germany; from Germany to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Each successive move backward changes the soldier and places the unit in harm's way, Jones explains.  

A soldier’s diagnosis tends to get amplified, even exaggerated, as he or she moves farther and farther back from the front.  “A kind of diagnostic fog sets in,” Jones says.  

The original diagnosis is based on charts, notes, personnel, communications, and observations that are harder to retrieve and review with each successive step away from the soldier's original location.   People are constantly on the move, and communications—electronic, written, and otherwise —is in continual FUBAR flux.  

The subsequent diagnosis (away from the front) is based on this uncertain communication and a changing sense of self, from soldier in uniform to patient in hospital gown.   

The foggy upshot:  a situational stress diagnosis in the field can morph into a psychosis diagnosis in a hospital back home. 

Evacuations—even of single soldiers—also involve risk and coordination, of vehicles, helicopters, and troops.  Jones recalls hearing about evacuations in so-called “soft shelled Hummers”—Humvee military trucks with canvas tops trundling across blowing sand and enemy eyes.

“They drive through towns with all the doors off, each soldier with a firearm facing a potential sniper—behind clotheslines, through windows, up in balconies where they can’t see anything but shadows,” Jones explains.  “Any movement in a theater of war exposes people to attack.   It’s just not something you do without serious justification.”

You can’t just say you need to be evacuated out of the Army, in other words, so caregiver deception can become a high and dangerous art.   Soldiers seeking exits will go to the mat with physicians, psychiatrists, and anyone else they think can write the magic prescription:  a medical or psychiatric discharge. 

Russell wanted out of the Army, but he was calm in comparison to most discharge seekers.  “Other than minor incidents of heated words exchanged, there was nothing,” Jones says.  “No trouble.  No administrative actions.”

At the end of Russell’s Sunday appointment, no screaming, yelling, or untoward behavior.  “He was almost casual,” Jones says. 

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Monday morning began much as Sunday for Jones, who walked from the cans to his office around 6:30.  

Camp Stryker Chaplain Peter Keough telephoned, records say around 7:50 a.m.  “Dr. Jones, I have Sergeant Russell in with me,” Jones quoted the Army captain.  “He’s distraught.  He’s talking about harming himself.  We’ve disarmed him and consoled him, but I think you need to see him.”

“I have an opening at noon,” Jones told Keough.   The sudden turn of events prompted Jones to insist on a “command referral,” a formal order approved by the soldier’s commander.  Capt. Keough had little familiarity with it, so Jones emailed him the referral package at 8:34 am.  

“This will save time...and be better for the soldier,” Jones wrote.  “He should come with an escort who will carry the paperwork.”  And to preserve the soldier’s identity:  “It’s okay for Sgt. Russell to have his weapon, as long as it has been disabled by removing the firing pin or bolt.” 

After a “concerted effort” to make sure his other work was done, Jones again met Russell in the waiting room, where he was sitting disarmed next to another one-person escort, Staff Sgt. Enos Richards.  “I took his command referral paperwork and brought him back to my office,” Jones says. 

Before they started the session, Jones read the referral, looking for comments from Russell’s commander. 

“Usually they’re fairly explicit, but this one was sketchy,” Jones explains.  “It was only a sentence or two, mentioning that Sgt. Russell was talking about harming himself.   There was nothing I can remember about the unit climate or anything else that indicated what was motivating him.”

Sgt. Russell took the chair by the door again.  “What’s going on?” Jones asked. 

Chaplain Peter Keough

“Now do you believe I’m abnormal?” Jones remembers Russell responding.  “You need to help me get out of here!”

But discharging Sgt. Russell from the United States Army was not in Jones power.  “He seemed incredulous that I could not just wave him through,” Jones explains. 

The stress clinic could help Russell if he would let them, Jones said, at which point Russell raised his eyebrows and assumed an “oh no, here we go again,” posture.   “This is bullshit!” Russell exclaimed.  He stood up abruptly, walked out of the office and down the hallway.

“Sgt. Russell, please come back to my office,” Jones said.

“I was done with the Army two years ago,” Russell shot back.   He went through the waiting room, past the receptionist, into the parking lot.  Jones followed.  The escort, Sgt. Richards, got to his feet. 

“Call his unit,” Jones told the receptionist.   He motioned to the escort, explaining the stress clinic had a “zero tolerance policy” for soldiers eloping from the clinic under circumstances like these, which included a formal command referral.  

Jones and Richards went out to find Russell.  Barriers separated the parking lot from the clinic, so it wasn’t simply a matter of looking across an empty expanse.   A person could crouch behind a barrier, or collapse and remain unseen. 

Fortunately, Russell was in plain sight, walking around the SUV that brought him, “sputtering with anger and disgust,” Jones says.   He approached, using his best “command voice.” 

“Sgt. Russell—you’re just going to make your situation worse.  This isn’t going to help you.” 

At a solid 6’4”, Russell was a big man, outweighing Jones by two or three dozen pounds, and towering over his 5’11” frame.  “I stayed about 10 feet back,” Jones says.  “I felt there was a danger he would attack me, but I also had to control the situation.  I gave him some room.”

Russell opened the car door and sat.  “I’ve been to three different doctors,” he said.  “One mocked me.”  He paused.  “Enough of this suicide game!”  He looked at Jones.  “Just send me back to my unit.  I want to go back to my unit.”

Two staff sergeants—Kathryn Pollock and Leah Gates—arrived.  Jones told them to work with MPs who would soon arrive and keep Russell at the clinic.  He went inside.  “I wanted to talk to Russell’s command, but I didn’t want to force him back into the clinic.” 

With phone numbers constantly changing for security and logistical reasons, calling another command was no easy feat.  Though Jones had requested one for some time, his office didn’t have a phone, so he went to make the calls in a different office near the staff lounge, where a small crowd gathered toward the end of lunch was talking about the commotion in the parking lot. 

While Jones was dialing, he overheard Charlie Springle tell Matthew Houseal in the lounge that Russell was the “guy I was telling you about who was looking for a diagnosis.”

“He who was looking for a diagnosis,” Springle said again. 

“It was the first I had seen Springle that day,” Jones says. 

A 2009 Mother's Day greeting from Leah Gates

Sgt. Pollock returned momentarily to tell Jones they let Russell return to his unit with his escort and that he was gone.  She didn't explain why Russell was allowed to leave, but before Jones could react, an MP approached him about a different case Houseal was handling.

Jones sent the MP to Houseal and returned to the phones, calling Camp Stryker’s chaplain.

“Glad you called,” Capt. Keough said.  Russell just commandeered a vehicle and took his escort’s weapon, Keough explained. 

“I told him we needed to use all resources possible to find Russell,” Jones says.  Then a phone rang in the OIC’s office next door.  The OIC—Officer in Charge—was out.   The receiver from Keough still in his hand, Jones reached through the connecting door and answered.

“Sir:  I just wanted you to know that Sgt. Russell has commandeered a weapon,” said a man who identified himself as Capt. Ake.  “We think he may be going back to hurt the people who were trying to help....” 

Jones heard a single shot mid-sentence.  “I froze,” he says.  “The report was unbelievably jolting.”    Then more shots.   He moved away from the sound, through office connecting doors that kept him out of the hallway.   He came to a small recreation room at the other end of the building where people were crouched.  He kept going. 

“I went out a window in the occupational therapy office,” Jones says.  “I saw Lt. Keener and another soldier ahead of me.   I followed the barriers around to the next building and told people there a shooting was going on and to call the MPs.”

Keener had done something Jones considered heroic:  gunfire and splinters bursting through wood panel walls, the Navy psychologist jammed a chair against the door, slowing Russell just long enough so that he and his soldier-client could slip out his office window.  

Matt Houseal (center), Palmer Station physician, South Pole

Jones did not set foot in the Camp Liberty Combat Stress Center again.  For hours after the shootings, he stood with other survivors in 110° desert heat giving statements and waiting for a debriefing that never came. 

"I thought they'd do a lengthy psychiatric forensics analysis, go through everything with a fine toothed comb," Jones says.  "But that never happened." 

That night, Jones returned to the can that he shared with Matthew Houseal, who had served as a physician from the freezing Antarctic to the deserts of the Middle East.    Surrounded by Houseal’s personal effects—his clothes, his family pictures, faint smells that prompt powerful memories—Jones crashed, contemplating suicide himself. 

A black Army chaplain from a Christian church in Wisconsin prayed with him and helped him through.

“Houseal and Springle were my friends,” Jones says.  “Charlie and I had gotten very close—we had a tremendous amount of respect for each other.  Matt Houseal was a man I lived with, day and night.  He left a huge, loving family behind, his wife and lots of children.”   

Jones stops here, in tears.  He’s a stoic man, and it’s the first time during our eight hours of interviews that he breaks down.   He finishes with something about not killing himself because he didn’t want John Russell to claim yet one more victim. 

Investigators cordoned off the stress center as a crime scene and split the staff into different groups.  To get himself back on the horse, Jones—whose three month tour was up in a few days—re-upped for another three months.  

“Staffing was short until August.  I felt my unit needed me and I needed them,” he says.  “I also thought it would have sent a terrible signal had I left so soon after the killings.” 

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Unfriendly Fire-6

Charlie Springle

Messages suggesting Jones was about to find himself on trial in the court of public opinion started darkening his digital doorstep in late May.   A reporter for Bloomberg, Elliot Blair Smith, took an almost passive-aggressive approach to get Jones to talk. 

Though he sounded sympathetic, Smith’s questions were anything but.   He led with comments about a 2008 stateside DWI (driving while intoxicated) arrest, mentioned something about Jones “lying to the police,” and then expressed concern about how difficult everything must have been.

“He sounded like he had a pre-determined angle he was pushing,” says Jones, who refrained from commenting. 

Smith’s August 1 Bloomberg/Business Week story bears out Jones’ concerns.   With little personal context and even less indication how it affected his military duties, Smith drops in a few ad hominem paragraphs about that DWI.   His story calls it a second offense, but court records to which the story links show a complaint amended to reflect a first offense only.

While bemoaning the combat stress that befell Sgt. Russell after three tours of duty, the story never mentions Jones’ five tours, or anything about the dozens of soldiers he helped on the front lines.

Hannah Barton

About Jones, the Bloomberg story is negative.  About Russell, it equivocates, justifies, and points the finger at everyone but the shooter.   That approach has left Hannah Barton scratching her head.   

Sgt. Russell “was in the right state of mind to drive 30 mph across the post (20-30 minute drive) without speeding, and to sit outside the Combat Stress Center (CSC) and smoke a cigarette,” she writes in her online petition.  “He also had the presence of mind to take his name tapes off of his uniform and hat.  He shot five innocent people in the head, one of them being my little brother, who didn't even have a weapon.   None of the soldiers there had weapons, since the CSC requires you to sign them over at the front desk to prevent things like this.”   

A person who seemed even more benevolent than Elliot Smith showed up on Jones’ physical doorstep this month, three years after the killings:  a kindly gray-haired man with quick eyes, a gentle tone, and a disheveled, Columbo-esque demeanor.   

“We know all about you, Dr. Jones,” the man—who introduced himself as “David Fechheimer”—said, in so many words.

James Culp

No doubt.   As one of the nation’s foremost private investigators, Fechheimer—a 70-something San Francisco-based former literature scholar the San Francisco Times likened to Jerry Garcia (for his shocks of white hair)—makes $350/hour digging the dirt that discredits:  about witnesses for the prosecution, on behalf of defense attorneys like James Culp.   

“The strong shouldn't prey on the weak,” Fechheimer told San Francisco Weekly, about why he helps criminal defendants facing government prosecutors.

Culp, meanwhile, continues orchestrating behind the curtain, stepping out for an occasional comment, or for Elliot Smith, a video that features Jones’ DWI mugshot next to Russell’s mass-murder mugshot.

David Fechheimer

With its exhausting, multiple deployments, the Iraq War, Culp tells Smith, was “an experiment with consequences.” 

“The citizens of the United States will learn shortly, whether they want to or not, a psychiatric truth,” Culp says.   Mostly, soldiers like John Russell are just going to kill themselves.  “But sometimes, other people are gonna die, too.” 

Mike Jones tells a story about a different kind of evacuation back home, as a widower between deployments.

In the last days of an 8-month struggle with pancreatic cancer, his wife’s mother Margurete needed transport from a small summer home in Minnesota to family in the Kansas City area. 

With his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Jones carefully loaded the frail eighty-something woman into the long rear section of a station wagon, making the six hundred mile drive, slow and careful to avoid pain and bumps.   

Coupled with everything that has happened since, it seems a journey with Faulknerian overtones, As I Lay Dying for modern times.

With Margurete relocated to her children’s home, Jones returned to Colorado, his base for a five-state region of locum tenens assignments—temporary psychiatry jobs in inpatient and outpatient clinics—while he awaited word from the Army about where he would be going next.

He got that word—a possible emergency deployment to Afghanistan—just as Marguerite died.  For her August 29, 2008 funeral, he drove 700 miles at night from Colorado to Missouri, knowing that at any moment his deployment orders could arrive.

He was pulled over for the DWI during that trip, and has since found the lapse Exhibit A in Sgt. John Russell’s defense claim that his psychiatric care was so flawed, it led him to kill five people. 

After his wife Karen passed from longstanding complications of lupus, Jones was alone for the first time in 18 years.   A U.S. Marine during Vietnam, he returned to the military’s structure and discipline to reset his inner compass. 

His 7-year series of overseas tours started with a 2002 stint in war-torn Bosnia.  He was fifty two years old, and a rare commodity the Army called up time and time again—a psychiatrist on the front lines.      

Now, three years after John Russell, Dr. Jones can no longer sit across from a soldier, a client, or a patient.   His long career has quietly disappeared.   

The aching grief, the survivor’s guilt, and the tragedy of that Mother’s Day weekend:   What to make of it all?  

In the heat, the sorrow, and the weariness, Jones is left with no answers.  Instead, he has only memories—of the competent, well-trained, empathetic team he left behind and the man who took their lives.  

“John Russell shot five people in the head, and they weren't even armed,” Hannah Barton reminds.  “Worse still, he had been to meetings with a few of them, and they were U.S. Soldiers -- just like him.”

Dr. Michael Jones is the author’s wife’s uncle.

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