Empty Promises

will bring them back. Now another life hangs in the balance. It is in your hands. You’ve heard the statements. Nine pages. Six pages. Three pages. In human misery, hopelessness and despair …
    “You have heard that Gary Grant was gripped with unconscious rage, that he had no more control over his actions than you do over a dream at night. These crimes were not thought out or premeditated, because he was emotionally ill.”
    The Grant jury retired at 5:00 P.M. on Monday, August 23. Almost forty-eight hours later, and after eighteen hours of steady deliberation, the jurors sent word that they had reached a verdict. They found Gary Grant guilty of murder in the first degree on all four counts. They did not, however, recommend the death penalty. Instead, they recommended that on each count, Gary Grant was to serve a minimum of thirteen years and eight months and a maximum of his natural life. Judge Soukup ruled that the four sentences were to run consecutively.

    Almost three decades later, Gary Grant still resides in the Washington State Prison at Walla Walla. His parents have died, and he has little connection to the world outside. He is fifty and his first parole hearing will be in 2048. At that time, should he still be alive, he will be ninety-eight years old.
    Carole Adele Erickson would be fifty now. Joann Zulauf would be forty-seven. Scott Andrews and Brad Lyons would be thirty-five.
    Three decades later, we are still a long way from understanding the psychopathology of the sexual predator. We know only that they are desperately dangerous and almost impossible to rehabilitate. Gary Grant and Arnold Brown both seemed to be gentle people. Their actions and demeanor instilled trust in the people they met. The only promises they ever kept were to the animals they loved so devotedly. When it came to human beings, they were the animals.

The Stockholm Syndrome
    There is a time-worn belief among lay people that murder will out—that all homicides will eventually be solved and that killers will eventually be prosecuted and found guilty. That is perhaps a comforting thought, but it isn’t true.
    Two bizarre and inexplicable deaths in an isolated forest in Oregon were almost written off as accidental. It was only through the efforts of some of Oregon’s top criminal investigators and prosecutors that the killer was found and convicted.
    The investigation began with a paucity of physical evidence, a witness who had been brainwashed, and two deaths that certainly appeared to be tragic accidents. But when it was over, a team from the Oregon attorney general’s office uncovered a story of horror and violence that made even the most experienced detective’s flesh crawl.

U ntil the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the mass suicides of Reverend Jim Jones’s followers in Guyana, and, more recently, the cult deaths in Waco and southern California, people thought of brainwashing as something that happened only in Korean or Vietnamese prison camps. It’s easy to be smug and confident in the safety of one’s own living room or at a cocktail party and say, “I could never be programmed to do something like that. There are just some things I would never do.”
    But the mind is an incredibly complex entity and, given the right circumstances, virtually any mind will crack and begin to believe that black is white, that wrong is right, and that reality no longer has any validity. Brainwashing can take place in an hour or over many days. It is a strategy used in many hostage situations. When ordinary people are held prisoner in banks or planes, some of them will eventually begin to think their captors are good and kind people simply because they haven’t killed them . When their plans are interrupted, captives move from outrage to fear to passivity and finally to a belief that their captors must possess at least a few tender places in their hearts. When they survive, many hostages feel they owe their lives to the bank robbers or skyjackers. This curious phenomenon is known as the Stockholm Syndrome.
    For brainwashing to occur, a human being must be exposed to four basic elements:

1.A severe traumatic shock
2.Isolation—being taken away from the people and surroundings where the person feels secure
3.Programming—hearing what the mind controller wants the subject to believe, over and over and over and over
4.The promise of a reward—often the subject’s very life

    When all four of these components come into play, the stage is set.