A Writer's Life (51 page)

Sergeant Hurley was now standing next to his car radio at roadside, listening to the repeated calls from the hospital staff to the dispatcher:
What's the latest report from the search party in the field? How close are they to finding the penis? WHERE IS IT? Time is running out.… The doctors are in the operating room. The patient is waiting. The operation will soon begin!

Hurley watched with his own sense of urgency as his three-man crew rummaged through the grassy intersection, searching without success for the missing appendage. So far, John Bobbitt had been separated from his penis for at least an hour and a half. Hurley wondered how much more time was available before the doctors would have to sew up John Bobbitt without it. Hurley had thought that his men would have found it easily. Bobbitt's wife had said that she had thrown it into the grassy patch at the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, an area of only fifty square feet, and Hurley could not understand why his men had not already recovered it—unless the wife's information was inaccurate, or unless a rodent had run off with it prior to the arrival of the police.

It was now close to 6:15 a.m., and, as Hurley's radio continued to resound with the chatter being transmitted between the hospital and police headquarters, he decided to scrutinize the area himself, and so he slowly made his way through the grassy stretch of land with his head bent low and his eyes trained downward, assuming the posture of his golf-playing days when searching for a ball that he had hit into the rough. Within a few seconds, he had spotted it, poking up through the weeds—a curl of white flesh with a reddish tip.

“Phew,”
he yelled out, holding his nose,
“here it is!”

As his group hurried over to get a look at it, a female officer named Sindi Leo arrived at the intersection in her patrol car. She was a ten-year veteran of the police department, a short, robust, and round-faced brunette in her thirties, known for her efficiency and self-assurance on the job, and also for her forthrightness in chiding her male colleagues whenever she believed they were behaving in a chauvinistic manner. While she respected Sergeant Hurley's refined and right-minded disposition, Sindi Leo often felt when in his presence that she was being privately judged, and now, as she headed in his direction, she noticed that he was frowning at her. He really doesn't want me here, she told herself
(and later repeated to me in an interview); she also overheard him complaining in a low voice to his men: “This is why I don't like women police officers.…” She was not entirely sure what he meant, but as she joined him and the others in the field—they were circled around the spot where the penis lay, saying nothing to one another as they gazed down upon this helpless little piece of masculine pride that had proven to be so vulnerable to a woman's vengence—she could well understand it if her fellow officers regarded her arrival to be ill-timed. She had intruded upon a male moment.

But she also had orders to take pictures of the penis as soon as it had been found, and so, without objection from the blushing Sergeant Hurley, she held up her 35-mm Nikon camera and snapped a few pictures of him pointing a finger toward the place where it had landed. After she had finished, Hurley asked that she go to the Bobbitts' apartment and photograph the bloodstained interior, and then deliver the pictures, along with the key to the apartment, to Detective Weintz at the hospital. When she did so, she saw the detective talking to Lorena Bobbitt in the presence of Janna Biscutti. Weintz then directed Sindi Leo to retrieve the knife that Lorena had thrown into the refuse container in front of Janna Biscutti's nail salon in Centreville.

“You'd better hurry,” Janna called out to Sindi Leo as the latter walked toward her patrol car. “It's Wednesday. It's trash-collection day.”

The penis had by this time been lifted out of the grass by one of the rescue workers, Mike Perry (an off-duty cop who had served in the Marine Corps during the mid-1980s); Perry, accompanied by two other rescue volunteers, hopped into their ambulance and, with sirens wailing and lights whirling, drove swiftly through the early Washington-bound commuter traffic toward the hospital. Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the trio burst through the swinging doors of the rear entrance and one of the men, pointing to the penis contained in a clear plastic bag that was held high by a partner, asked the ER doctor on duty, Dr. David M. Corcoran, who had relieved Dr. Sharpe, “Is
this it?”

“I guess so,” said Dr. Corcoran. Two nurses came forward through the corridor toward Dr. Corcoran, wanting to get a glimpse of the penis, but the rescue men pushed past them into the room where John Bobbitt lay waiting, flanked by his two surgeons. One of them, Dr. James Sehn, had been there for more than a half hour, while Dr. David E. Berman had just arrived. He had gotten there as quickly as he could, but, since his wife was then vacationing with their child at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, it had been Dr. Berman's duty to feed and walk the two family dogs before
departing for the hospital. At approximately 7:30 a.m., Dr. Berman and Dr. Sehn concentrated their attentions on John Bobbitt, beginning what would be a nine-and-a-half-hour-long operation.

Sergeant Hurley was now back in his office, where someone had placed near his desk an ersatz plaque made of silver foil, bearing the inscription “Awarded to Sgt. Hurley—1st Place Winner of the PRT (Penis Recognition Technician) Award.” Ignoring it, Hurley sat down and wrote out his report for the daily police files. He had thought about referring to John Bobbitt's injured body part as an “appendage” but then changed his mind, and so in his report of Wednesday, June 23, 1993, he wrote:

T
HE ABOVE STATEMENT WAS COMPOSED FOR
L
ORENA
B
OBBITT BY
a relatively obscure California-based screenwriter and director who was temporarily serving as her media consultant—Alan Hauge, a stocky, blue-eyed, sandy-haired individual who looked much younger than his fifty years and who flew into Virginia to attend meetings and press conferences with Lorena, dressed in the fashion adopted by many who dwell along the fringe of fame in the entertainment industry: cowboy boots, jeans, a baseball cap, and a leather jacket, in a pocket of which was a regularly ringing cellular phone that Hauge invariably
answered in an upbeat voice and with a smile on his face. No matter what he heard on the other end, Hauge's facial expression suggested that he was receiving good news.

He had been introduced to Lorena through an ex-colleague in film production who had become a friend of Janna Biscutti's in Virginia, and in the course of planning Lorena's dealings with the press, Hauge persuaded Lorena to cooperate with him in the writing of a screenplay about her life. Although he had never before written or directed a successful feature, Hauge owned the movie rights to the story of James Dean, the Hollywood star who died at twenty-four in an auto accident in 1955 after being in three notable films—
East of Eden, Giant
, and
Rebel Without a Cause
. It was in 1988 that James Dean's heirs sold the film rights to Hauge because the latter's script presented a more positive image than that of other prospective writers, who tended to focus upon the late actor's alleged drug problems, his rumored intimacies with men, and his natural kinship with the rebellious and lonely characters that he portrayed on screen. But when I first met Hauge in Manassas during the summer of 1993, shortly after Lorena Bobbitt's appearance at her preliminary hearing—and
five years
after Hauge had first won approval from Dean's relatives—he conceded to me that the Dean project was not yet ready for production, although he insisted that it would one day become a major motion picture, and he felt similarly about his future film based on the life and times of Lorena. He further explained that both of these would be shot within a commodious building that he owned just west of Los Angeles, in Culver City. He called his building “GMT Studios,” adding that the letters stood for “Great and Mighty Things” and had been drawn from his reading of the Prophet Jeremiah (“Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not”).

Alan Hauge was a devout Bible-quoting Christian, a man whose statements and comments often aroused my skepticism, although my opinion of him was probably influenced by the fact that he consistently refused to support my designs on Lorena. He did not mind talking to me about his own career, but he had insisted that Lorena stay away from me while she adhered to his plan that she grant early interviews only to
20/20
and
Vanity Fair
, both of which would go public with her comments shortly before her first court appearance in the fall. Displeased with this arrangement, I did everything I could to make contact with her behind Hauge's back, timing my initiatives to those days when I knew he was not in Virginia. I appealed in person to Lorena's main attorney, James Lowe, seeing him on three occasions after showing up at his office unannounced. I tried to pursuade
Janna Biscutti to allow me to speak with Lorena in Janna's home, where Lorena had been staying since the incident. I sent letters directly to Lorena and mailed her inscribed copies of my books. But these and similar efforts on my part were unavailing, and moreover, whether Alan Hauge was in Los Angeles or elsewhere, he quickly learned about what I was up to, and when he returned to Manassas, I would hear about it. “I understand you're adding to Lorena's reading list,” he said to me one afternoon as we crossed paths near the courthouse. He was smiling, as usual.

I was not sure what to make of him, nor how to deal with him effectively. Quite apart from his wrangler style of dress, he was smoothly cosmopolitan and also indiscriminately congenial, in the manner that many ministers exhibit when greeting their parishioners after Sunday services. And yet with all his tactfulness and bonhomie, Hauge remained stubbornly unpersuadable as far as I was concerned, and his attitude contrasted greatly with the cooperation I was receiving from the gentleman who was handling John Bobbitt's publicity. With John Bobbitt, I had as much access as I desired—a privilege that I appreciated, though it was very time-consuming due to Bobbitt's tendency to repeat himself.

John Bobbitt's media consultant, Paul Erickson, was a lean and loquacious bachelor of thirty-two, who dressed conservatively and had earned a degree in economics from Yale University in 1984. Erickson stood six feet four inches and had curly dark hair receding at the crown and deep-set brown eyes that seemed to reflect intensity whether he was devoting himself to his professional responsibilities or to such favorite pastimes as skydiving, downhill skiing, swimming, and playing jazz on his saxophone. Among his businesses was a real estate development firm that he operated out of his office in Washington, D.C., and, on a short-term basis, he participated in a variety of other endeavors, sometimes assisting political candidates who shared his views as a Republican. During the first five months of 1992, Erickson served as the campaign manager for Pat Buchanan as the latter sought the party's presidential nomination. In the summer of 1993, much to Erickson's surprise but soon with the realization that this was another kind of politically driven event, Erickson was working to enhance the public image of John Bobbitt.

Erickson first became involved with John through a business associate who was friendly with one of Bobbitt's surgeons and had asked Erickson to recommend a law firm that might defend the recuperating ex-marine against the charge of sexual abuse being instituted by Lorena. Erickson knew many attorneys in and around Washington (he himself, though he
had never practiced law, had received a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1988), but he did not begin to solicit counsel for Bobbitt until he had gone to Manassas and queried Bobbitt extensively about what would most likely be debated in court. Erickson had not been predisposed toward John Bobbitt prior to their meeting; on the contrary, the pretrial media coverage had inclined Erickson toward Lorena's perspective. Her life with John Bobbitt must have been intolerable, Erickson had thought; she was married to a dangerous man and had little choice but to defend herself.