Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,69

far off course, he would go the same way as Donald and Jim and Brian.

Peter might always have been contrary, but his father’s stroke—which he’d been present for, had witnessed, helplessly, from just a few feet away—seemed to shake loose whatever self-regulating mechanism he once had. He was caught stealing things and even setting a small fire. Then came the morning in his ninth grade algebra class, not long after Don’s stroke, when he started talking gibberish to the students around him. When Peter’s teacher tried to get him to stop, he wandered over to her, sat on the edge of her desk, and kept talking. After she got Peter back into his seat, the principal and dean of students came to the classroom. They brought along a third man, a gym teacher, in case Peter got violent.

Peter was admitted to Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, but only briefly—just long enough for the doctors to stabilize him. Once he was home, Mimi, her hands full with her husband’s hospitalization, decided to send him off to hockey camp as scheduled. It was there that Peter fell apart completely, wetting his bed, spitting on the floor, hitting the other campers. He left the camp for Brady Hospital, a private psychiatric clinic in Colorado Springs, where the doctors prevented anyone from visiting Peter for weeks.

In early September, Mimi finally visited and saw Peter wearing only underpants, strapped to a bed with no sheets on it. The whole room reeked of urine. Mimi pulled him out right away. Before leaving, Peter was prescribed a small dose of Compazine, a drug usually used for nausea and vomiting.

Mimi was running out of options. The state mental hospital in Pueblo that treated Donald seemed like too much, too extreme, for a boy of his age. So Peter’s next stop, late on a Saturday night in September 1975, was the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. Peter was in the waiting room for so long that he started urinating. Once admitted, his speech was too slurred to be understood.

“It was sad to note that when the patient did become more provocative,” the doctor wrote, “his family thought this was his normal level of functioning.”

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IT WASN’T LOST on the doctor that both Mimi and Don, when he was well enough to visit, referred to Peter as the latest of their sons to have lost his mind. Before long, the staff of the hospital learned about the others.

They learned about Donald, and a troubling dynamic he seemed locked in with Peter—how the more strangely Donald behaved, the more heat Peter seemed to catch for it at school, and the more Peter came to resent Donald at home. “It is easy to be number one,” Peter used to say, “but not everyone can be number ten.”

They learned about Jim, who happened to have been admitted as a patient in the adult psychiatry ward of the same hospital, after experiencing what the staff identified as “an acute schizophrenic state highlighted by severe paranoid ideation.”

They learned about Brian and the murder-suicide. And they saw for themselves that something was off about Joe, the introspective seventh son. When Joe visited Peter on the ward, one doctor wrote, he “was able to tell the patient’s therapist that at times in the past he has had symptomatology similar to Peter’s.”

Here was what appeared to be case number five, coming down the pike. There was nothing in the medical file that suggested there was anything to be done about Joe other than to watch carefully for signs of the same psychosis that took command of the others. All this confirmed everything Don and Mimi feared. Something was happening to all the boys, one by one—first Donald and Jim, then Brian, and now Peter and soon maybe Joe—and they had no idea how to stop it, or even if it could be stopped.

Casting about for clues, Mimi and Don wondered if each brother had been set off by some sort of heartbreak: Donald’s and Jim’s marital woes, Brian’s breakup with Noni, Peter seeing his father collapse with a stroke. Mimi also searched for something in their family histories—a precursor in some distant relative that could have warned them about this. Don’s mother