The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [30]
Growing up on a steady diet of psychiatric medication and corporal punishment, Rob became more violent and withdrawn. When he was 13, his ongoing battle with Candace went nuclear. She searched his backpack for cigarettes, and Rob flipped out on her. In response, she slapped him across the face so hard that her ring cut his forehead. He balled up his fist and said quietly, “I’m going to kill you.”
Candace believed he was capable of making good on the threat: For his 14th birthday, Rob got another hospital admission and another fistful of pills. This time he sat in the doctor’s office and stared blankly, refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The doctor insisted he apologize to Candace. But Rob was in no mood to make amends with his family. “I hope they get into a car accident,” he told the doctor. By now, he no longer regretted his outbursts. The four-year-old kid who thought of himself as stupid and bad for hitting people was now a teenager deep in the throes of mental illness. If the doctors returned him to his stepmother, he said, he “knew where the knives were located, and she would leave the house in a body bag.” On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones, Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.
Not long after, his father drove to juvenile court and asked the judge to take over: His health insurance had run out, he told the court, and he couldn’t afford to pay Rob’s medical bills. Molly, Rob’s biological mother, wasn’t at the hearing—she wasn’t even informed of the court date, although she lived 12 miles away—but in any case she was out of the picture by then, off raising her new family. After a hearing that lasted just eight minutes by the stenographer’s clock, Judge Robert O’Neal rapped his gavel and the state department of Health and Human Services became Rob’s legal guardian.
TWO YEARS LATER, the angry young man waiting in his therapist’s office for his father and stepmother to show up for a counseling session looked more like a refugee from a Dickens tale than a kid from Omaha. At 16, Rob was now a veteran of institutions, having spent the last 24 months of his childhood in group homes because he resisted the reconciliation with Candace that would have allowed him to rejoin his family. He looked the part of a miserable ward of the state: painfully thin from years of undereating, nails chewed to gnarled stubs. He wore his hair long, in a thick curtain that hid much of his face and obscured his eyes. He had been molested by another resident, and was prone to suicidal despair. None of it matters, he would tell his therapists: “We’re basically just numbers.”
In some ways, he was even more traumatized than when he’d entered the system. He had done nine months at the Piney Ridge Center, a residential treatment center in Missouri (where he got into physical fights with other residents), before being transferred at the judge’s behest to Cooper Village, a home for boys in Nebraska (where he lived under strict isolation, rarely allowed to leave the campus or make phone calls). Over the years he kept trying to buck the rules and talk to his biological mother, with whom he held out hope of a reunion, but he was never allowed to call her.
By now, his psychological profile included the darker, more exotic ailment that would lie behind his future crimes: anti-social personality disorder, a condition that makes it difficult, if not impossible,