Last Dance, Last Chance

Tuohmy had spent his next seven years working sporadically and getting into minor skirmishes with the law that landed him behind bars from time to time.
    The winter rains were long gone on May 28 when Tuohmy talked with Dr. Richard B. Jarvis, a Seattle psychiatrist who testified frequently in criminal cases. Jarvis made a startlingly accurate prediction in his summary of that interview.
    “It is quite possible that during the course of the trial, Mr. Tuohmy may become angry and lose his temper. This is not evidence of mental disease but of his inability to hold his temper.”
    Days later, Denny Tuohmy appeared in King County Superior Court Judge Eugene Wright’s courtroom for a preliminary hearing. Although he had an attorney to represent him, Tuohmy rose and asked to address the court. He insisted upon a change of venue, demanded that witnesses be kept in the hallway before testimony, and refused the judge’s request that he sit down and remain quiet.
    All witnesses were routinely required to stay outside the courtroom until they had testified, and there hadn’t been enough publicity to warrant a change of venue. Tuohmy seemed to enjoy hearing himself talk.
    When admonished by the judge again, he shouted that he would not sit still for what he considered a “travesty of justice” and announced that he was going back to jail. And then, the slight, wiry Tuohmy launched an attack that has not been forgotten by either those present in that courtroom or by King County sheriff’s deputies. Screaming like an animal, Denny Tuohmy picked up the heavy tables in front of the bar and threw them across the room at the judge as if they were toothpicks.
    Deputies—many weighing over 200 pounds—rushed to subdue him. In the words of a witness, “He bounced them off the wall. Blood was drawn, but it wasn’t Tuohmy’s.”
    While women spectators screamed and raced for the comparative safety of the hallway, more and more deputies ran into the courtroom. They threw shoulder blocks on Tuohmy, trying to stop him without hurting him, but he continued his rampage. The court reporter, hunched over his machine in an attempt to avoid the flying debris, recorded the incredible melee.
    Eventually, it took eleven deputies to pin down Denny Lee Tuohmy.
    As a result of his display in Judge Wright’s court, Tuohmy was found incompetent to stand trial and was committed to the Eastern Washington State Hospital.
    Throughout his stay at the facility, located in Medical Lake, Tuohmy continued to perplex psychiatric personnel. Some found him to be a psychopathic personality, sane but without the normal restraints of conscience of the average person. Some speculated that he was indeed schizophrenic. Twice, he walked away from the grounds but returned without incident. Whatever his state of mind, patients and attendants alike feared him.
    On two occasions, Tuohmy repeated his familiar pattern of violence and held off a score of hospital attendants with weapons fashioned from a floor mop and his own dismantled steel bed. He attempted to strangle fellow patients and threatened them with homosexual attacks.
    Eventually, the day came when psychiatrists in the state mental hospital declared that Denny Tuohmy was no longer insane—if he ever had been insane—and was competent to stand trial. Almost eight years had gone by, and it wasn’t at all difficult to pick a jury. Nobody in Seattle remembered him—except, perhaps, for Cherie Mullins, Fritz Donohue’s relatives and friends, and, of course, Pat Jacque, who would never forget him.
    King County deputies who had worked courtroom security remembered him, too. They double-staffed the trial in Superior Court Judge George Stuntz’s courtroom.
    Denny Tuohmy seemed calm enough. The short, almost frail-looking defendant smiled benignly at the jury.
    On that sunny, crisp morning of January 11, court habitués who had heard this might be an interesting trial filed in. Some of the old-timers who lived in drab hotels around the courthouse had attended so many trials that prosecutors and defense attorneys alike valued their perspective and occasionally asked, “How do you think it’s going?” in one trial or another. The “expert” legal advisers in the gallery had learned to bring cushions, since the wooden benches became hard as rock by the afternoon sessions.
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    Judge George Stuntz had a reputation for being peppery and taking no nonsense, so his trials always drew extra