Practice to Deceive

and somehow he managed to convince recruiters that he was eighteen.
    When he reoffended, the army quickly gave him an honorable discharge for “fraudulent enlistment,” and turned him over to juvenile authorities in California.
    There were more cases where he had been a suspect, but Gilbert Thompson had apparently avoided being in trouble with the law in San Jose County. If he was, he wasn’t caught.
    Or he was passed on to other agencies.
    The salient factor, as far as Captain McKenzie and Sergeant Mattern were concerned, was that Gilbert Thompson had never submitted to any psychiatric counseling, or been placed in an institution.
    And that was appalling.
    If his attack on a fellow elementary school student when he was eight had happened in Santa Clara County—the county where he killed Mary Ellen Stackhouse—he would have been automatically referred to the Santa Clara County Juvenile Probation Department. There, he would have been seen by a psychiatrist and been given a battery of psychological tests.
    In almost any case involving bizarre sexual acting out, a child like Gilbert would surely have been remanded for treatment to the children’s section of Napa State Hospital.
    Most sociopathic boys act out by the time they are five, usually by torturing animals or setting fires. Whether Gilbert would have been treatable at the age of eight, no one can say. It might well have been too late. But at least someone would have noticed a burgeoning social predator.
    His parents had felt that he “was just going through a stage” in his early attacks. Moreover, they couldn’t begin to afford the twenty-five dollars an hour that was the going rate for psychiatric treatment in the fifties and sixties.
    With Mary Ellen Stackhouse’s shocking murder, there were cries from the public, who blamed authorities, his parents, and the buck passing of different law-enforcement agencies for failing to treat Gilbert.
    (Fifty years later, nothing much has changed. Blame for violent atrocities is still at the top of the news, with much finger-pointing and little definitive action.)
    * * *
    W HEN BILL MCKENZIE AND John Mattern joined Gilbert Thompson himself for an interview, they were surprised at how nondangerous he appeared. He wasn’t all that big, and looked smaller as he slumped in a chair in the interview room. Gilbert wasn’t a bad-looking kid—he had wavy brown hair, a sprinkling of freckles, and slight acne.
    When he opened his mouth, however, Gilbert began to describe the fantasies that filled his world. He said he’d had some homosexual encounters, but that he also thought a lot lately of what it would be like to have forcible sex with several women in his neighborhood. One of them was Mary Ellen Stackhouse.
    The teenager said he’d gone to bed in the garage behind the family home. From there, a path led through tall weeds about seventy-five feet to the Stackhouse property. He wasn’t able to fall asleep, and he got up around 10:30, dressed, and crept over to his potential victim’s backyard.
    When he tested the back door on the ground level, he found it wasn’t locked. He walked in, moving silently past the two older boys—Tom and Mike—who were sound asleep. Gilbert hadn’t brought any weapon with him, but he saw a hammer on a work bench on his way to the stairs that led up to the living room.
    He grabbed it.
    As he reached the top of the stairs, he could see Mary Ellen sitting in an armchair, watching television, but she had her back to him and wasn’t aware he was behind her—not at first.
    And then there was some slight sound as he turned into the living room itself, maybe a creaking floor or even his own harsh breathing. Mary Ellen turned around, startled to see him inside her house.
    “What are you doing here?” she shouted. “Get out!”
    But he didn’t leave. Thompson estimated that he then struck her on the head with the hammer at least seven times.
    In his mind, there was no turning back. One of the women he’d assaulted in Monterey had identified him, gotten him into so much trouble that he was kicked out of the army. He didn’t want any more trouble, so he went to the kitchen and found a steak knife.
    “I cut her throat,” he confessed to the detectives.
    Then he carried out the rest of the obsession that had made him leave his bed and creep into the Stackhouse home. He ripped Mary Ellen’s slacks off and raped her.
    “I was very careful not to get any blood on my clothes,” Gilbert