The Crime of Huey Dunstan (15 page)

I HAD HIT on the diagnosis of PTSD. PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder. Today the acronym PTSD is almost as familiar as WMD, weapons of mass destruction—and rather more relevant. Yet although post-traumatic stress disorder had been recognised as a combat neurosis for a hundred years, at the time of Huey’s trial it was relatively new and virtually unknown to the public at large. A syndrome or disorder like this had not before been argued in the criminal courts as a defence to murder. Even within psychiatry itself the disorder had been formally recognised for only a few years, since about 1980. This was significant, I told the court when I took the stand on Friday, because it followed a wealth of reports from research with Vietnam war veterans.

And also, I said, reports from victims of the Jewish Holocaust.

“Just remind the court, professor, of your own experience,” Lawrence said. “I believe you have some personal experience.” Lawrence and I had rehearsed this part before I went into the box.

It wasn’t personal exactly, I said. But I described my visits to Auschwitz and Dachau, my meetings in Israel and elsewhere with Jewish resistance fighters and survivors of the extermination camps in Europe. I spoke about Lisbeth’s family, an entire branch of which had been wiped out in the Holocaust, and the unconscious memories associated with trauma that extended to the second and third generations. I mentioned the Bain murders then in the news—a twenty-two-year-old university student who sang in a choir was about to go on trial in New Zealand charged with murdering his father, mother, sisters and young brother, and, nearly twelve months after the initial investigation, policemen and women who had been at the scene were still experiencing nightmares in flashback, it was reported. I described a young man I met at a clinic in England who had served as a para-military in Northern Ireland. He suffered an unconscious flashback in the night, got up, dressed in combat kit, armed himself with his private rifle and drove a hundred-and-fifty miles before stopping in a lay-by with a puncture. When two passing motorists pulled up offering to help, he threatened them with the gun before hijacking their car and driving off. Later when apprehended
he was unable to account for his actions.

I said, “Firemen know about this sort of psychological distress, they see it all the time, so do rescue workers. Climbers who went to the Erebus site have told me that after having been at the site of the crash, it was the whiff of aviation gas that brought back all the horrors of that scene. There is no dialogue for this process. As I said before, it skips the normal paths of reasoning. It is involuntary.”

“Are there no warning lights?” Lawrence said.

“Usually none. In the case of Mr Dunstan, none at all.”

“This phenomenon you describe, professor. You say it is relevant to Mr Dunstan. Can we be sure?”

“Yes. The diagnostic standard is very strict.” I listed the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder relevant in Huey’s case. There were four main points:

“It’s clear,” I said.

“And the activating factor, you say, the cue or
instantaneous shock that triggered this flood of memories, was the hand on the thigh?”

“Yes. An exact replay of what happened in the caravan before the abuse took place. That, and the facial similarity to the other man. We heard Mr Dunstan say he was seeing the other man and he thought he was hitting the other man. Also the physical space was very similar. The room in the cottage contracted before his eyes, he said. It got smaller. It shrank. He was back in the caravan.”

“Professor, from your experience and from the literature, can you draw any conclusions about the similarities between this sort of flashback and those experienced by war veterans?”

“They’re very close.”

“And all this time the memory is dormant, waiting to be reactivated.”

“Except,” I said, “with Mr Dunstan it never went away. The memory was always with him.”

“It is not buried?” the judge said.

He spoke softly. The voice came out of nowhere, with a jolt. It was the first time the judge had interrupted me. I had been on the stand for forty minutes, perhaps an hour, and I paused, wetting my lips and reaching for a glass of water that I knew was not there. When the water came, I drank it quickly yet I still paused. I knew the answer to the judge’s question, the answer was “yes”. But to agree with the statement was to put myself at risk of playing into the debate on fabricated memory surrounding the Peter Ellis
case, and I had somehow to distance Huey from that debate. What was in the judge’s mind? Perhaps he was asking the question in all innocence. But I knew that if I gave him an unconditional “yes”, the prosecutor would seize on it in his cross-examination and try to make mischief.

This was something Lawrence and I had not rehearsed—we had skirted the issue without reaching a conclusion.

There was a further danger. Huey’s memory of other events such as the time he had spent in isolation recovering from his burns was far from exact and the prosecutor had made play with this, seeking to undermine Huey’s reliability. He had done this repeatedly. The only way to respond was to reinforce Huey’s natural honesty by reminding the court of his admissions to the police—putting out the light, drawing the curtains to avoid discovery—once the flashback was over. The danger here was of appearing to confirm the Crown’s claim of “a masterly cover-up”. Either way there was a risk.

In the event I parried the judge’s question. I reminded the court of Huey’s nightmares as evidence, after fourteen years, that the memories had never gone away.

“Would ‘stored’ be a better word?” Lawrence said, hopefully.

“Stored yet accessible,” I said, keeping my gaze fixed on the bench through closed lids. “The memory is banished but not wiped.” I left it at that.

In a sense my work was done. I had my diagnosis, I was comfortable with it. All I had to do was defend it. I told myself it wasn’t my job to second-guess the prosecutor or try to sabotage his line of reasoning, yet when the moment came something, call it cussedness, call it stupidity, impelled me to do just that. In the first trial Mr Sparrow had attacked my credibility. That still rankled. Looking ahead, at the back of my mind was a niggle about the witness Glen. What if, when the moment came, the witness denied everything? I consoled myself with the thought that the prosecutor was probably just as worried the witness would do the opposite and corroborate Huey’s story.

There was a lot of technical talk during my cross-examination, and some sparring which I would have enjoyed more if I had been able to fix where Mr Sparrow was standing. Once again his voice moved about.

“What about this question of flashback?” he said. “You told my learned friend that it is of short duration.”

“Relatively short.”

“Let’s see if we can put this together, shall we? Here we have a ferocious attack, professor. The accused went into frenzy, he says. He ‘snapped’. He killed a man. Flashback, you say. But he snapped out of it again in a very short time, didn’t he? ‘Short’? ‘Relatively short’? What are we meant to understand by that, professor?”

The cross-examination began after lunch on the Friday and lasted for most of the afternoon. At first I thought the prosecutor was merely repeating his basic argument—how
disproportionate the attack was to the provocation that preceded it. I was prepared for this and when he tried to present Huey as a scheming and duplicitous lout, I quoted a Salvation Army visitor to the Cornford jail to whom Huey “stood out a mile” from the other inmates. And why did he stand out? I asked the Army man. “Because of his babiness. He was just a country boy. He’d never even had a traffic ticket.”

“That’s hearsay. That’s completely inadmissible.” The prosecutor rounded on me. “And you know it, professor.” I agreed and ventured, even as the judge was warning the jury to disregard what I had just said, that the Salvation Army officer was present in court if Mr Sparrow wished to question him directly. At this the judge rebuked me severely and the prosecutor made a joke. He knew the answers to his questions before he asked them, and he knew I knew that he knew, and was sparring with me, and even when he began to question the validity of my notes, which he had obtained under disclosure, I had a feeling that he was marking time, merely going through the motions.

“What about this phrase, professor? ‘He knew it was him he was hitting.’ I’m going back to your interview in the hospital. That means the victim. The deceased.”

“No. That means Glen, the original abuser.”

Once again I was having trouble with the voice. It floated. Even when the prosecutor was standing almost beside me, his voice seemed to come from somewhere else,
with a consequent loss of body image. To a blind person this is unsettling. It meant I had nowhere to focus my replies. Lawrence told me afterwards that Sparrow seldom looked at me during his cross-examination, that his questions, his body language, his smiles were directed away from me to a point in the wall over my right shoulder, towards the bench, although sometimes he would swivel round to face the jury on the opposite side of the room, as if he could not bear to look at my eyes which I kept closed from habit, making it seem I was asleep. In fact I was concentrating hard on what I had to say. I suppose there was a kind of poetic justice in this, a kind of reciprocity—because I was unable to see him, the result was he was unable to see me. The unsettling effect was mutual.

“Are you sure about that, professor?”

“Oh yes, he meant Glen. I asked him whether he just felt the deceased looked like the man Glen or whether he felt it was actually Glen he was hitting. He said he felt it was Glen.”

“But earlier you used the word ‘thought’. Why didn’t you say, ‘He
thought
it was him he was hitting’?”

“Because he said he was sure. He also switched the two names without realising—he sometimes said ‘Glen’ when he was talking about the deceased.”

“These notes of yours. They formed the basis of your report?”

“Yes.”

“And what about this part. It comes later. Where you
say, ‘Even though he now realised he was
not
attacking his previous abuser but rather the deceased…’ That isn’t in your notes.”

“No. It’s in my report.”

“And this part: ‘He wasn’t going to let
any of that happen
again
.’ This is after the touch on the thigh, or the look the man gave him. That’s not in your report.”

“It’s in the notes.”

“Exactly. Don’t you think that’s an extremely important explanation as to why—”

“I think you may be trying to read too much into my notes, Mr Sparrow. I think I have summarised the events adequately in my conclusion where I say his responses were those of a hurt and abused child, such was the strength of his feelings which were totally beyond his control.”

“That’s you putting forward your own explanation again, isn’t it? Where, professor, in your notes is there a reference to Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome?”

“There is no reference to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Stress Syndrome in my notes.”

“No. Perhaps you might tell the court when this particular diagnosis dawned on you.”

On and on we laboured. At one point I quoted Jung. This seemed to infuriate the prosecutor who accused me of “Jungian psycho-babble”, and appealed to the judge. The judge remarked that in his youth he had been a Freudian but didn’t understand what either of us were getting at. I thought that was extremely even-handed of him. Finally
we came to the school report card and I breathed more freely. Here at last was something irrefutable which gave me a chance if not to clinch things, at least to end them. There was no dispute about the report card. Mr Sparrow appeared to accept it at face value. His questions stopped. Instinctively, in the silence that followed, I reached for my cane. I turned my body towards the point where I had last heard his voice and waited for the words, “Thank you, professor”, so I could step down.

Instead I heard a little cough. Mr Sparrow had not finished. His question when it came took me unawares.

“And the street lamp, professor?”

He had moved closer, and dropped his voice. He repeated the question.

The street lamp had been discussed on the first day. It was part of the Crown case of “a prolonged cover-up”. According to the police, who claimed to have combed the cottage and its grounds, Huey had first appropriated the deceased’s car, then smashed the lamp before driving off so he wouldn’t be seen leaving the property. On the video interview played to the court, Huey had neither denied nor admitted smashing the light. “I don’t remember,” he said on the tape.

But if true, if he
had
smashed the lamp deliberately, it was a most incriminating piece of evidence.

“Yes?” I waited for Mr Sparrow to elaborate.

“When you interviewed him in the hospital, professor, did Mr Dunstan mention the light on the street?”

“No.”

“He did not tell you that he had smashed the street lamp before driving off?”

“No. He didn’t mention the street lamp at all.”

“How strange. He seems to have admitted everything else he did before making his getaway. You are quite sure, professor?”

“Quite sure.”

“No more questions.”

“Good try, I thought,” Lawrence said to me afterwards on our way to the bus station. “I had a feeling he might play the lamp card, but I thought of it too late to warn you. Sorry about that, Ches.”

It was the end of the day. I had checked out of the hotel and brought my bags to the court after lunch; there had just been time after I stepped down to grab my things and for Lawrence to drive me to the station before the bus went at five.

I said to Lawrence, “
Did
he smash it?”