The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [29]
After that, the sex was more sadistic than loving. It seemed to Molly like Ronald enjoyed when she came home with other men’s semen still inside her—at night, while she slept, he would sometimes ejaculate on her face. She got pregnant again in 1987, hoping the second kid would solve the problems of the first, but by then all they really felt for each other was hostility. Robbie was born the next spring, a normal, healthy baby, but during his fragile first months—the period when the infant nervous system soaks up every stimulus—he got wired to violence as his parents’ marriage devolved into a cage fight. “Mom and Dad were on the floor slugging it out,” Molly recalls. Before long, Rob’s childhood became even more traumatic; several doctors would later conclude that at some point during these first years, Rob was molested. Once, when Molly was changing Rob’s diapers, his older sister, Cynthia, then six, leaned forward and put her mouth on his privates. Molly pulled her off. She stared at her husband, but he said nothing. On another occasion, Rob was left alone with a relative who, Rob would later say, “tickled” him in a way that made him feel odd.
Infants are imitative: They learn by copying what they see. And by the time he was four years old, Rob had grown into an attack machine. He was a menace on the playground, punching other kids or kicking them in the groin whenever he got upset. When teachers disciplined him, he bit their hands. And he held grudges; he once came up to a teacher he disliked and slammed her head in a door. He did this when he was a preschooler, only three and a half feet tall and 34 pounds.
In 1992, after Ronald was posted to an Air Force base in Omaha, he brought his four-year-old son to the Methodist Richard Young Hospital and asked the psychiatrists what to do with the violent boy. The doctors asked Robbie why he kept hurting other kids. He lowered his eyes to the floor.
“Because I’m stupid and bad,” he mumbled.
Committed to the hospital for observation, Rob behaved erratically. One minute he was playing peacefully with Matchbox cars; the next he was desperately throwing his arms around a nurse, as if asking for protection. He was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder—the condition usually found in battle-weary veterans—caused by his hellish family life. After a month of heavy medication, the doctors sent him home with a warning that his recovery depended on continued therapy, and more important, on having a stable, nurturing family environment.
But stability was not his fate. Robbie returned instead to a chaotic custody battle between his parents, who were now divorced and waging a Jerry Springer-style campaign against each other that culminated in Molly being dragged away in handcuffs and threatening Ronald’s new wife, Candace. Molly herself had quickly remarried—hooking up with an Air Force friend of Ronald’s named Mark Dotson—and she was anxious to start a new family that didn’t have the drama and the burdens of her first big relationship. So after Candace had repeatedly called the police on Molly with charges of child endangerment, Molly gave up and surrendered her visitation rights to Rob, hoping to cut ties with the past and start fresh.
She called her son into her room to explain the situation. By then Rob had been on regular doses of Thioridazine, the antipsychotic drug, and Ritalin, to treat attention-deficit disorder. Molly hugged him and said that she was going away. “He didn’t really understand it,” she recalls. “He was so young.”
WHEN MOLLY’S ABANDONMENT finally sunk in, Rob turned his