Tightfisted in every other regard, Starkweather campaigned relentlessly for mental-health funding and pushed through construction of scores of community treatment centers throughout the state. Some said living with and caring for a psychotic sister had made him a one-issue humanist. The sister died five months before Starkweather’s massive nocturnal coronary. Soon after her burial,
Starkweather’s health seemed to rot away.
Not long after his funeral, state auditors discovered that the veteran senator had systematically embezzled four decades of campaign funds for personal use. Some of the money had been spent on the sister’s twenty-four-hour nursing care and medical bills, but most went into real estate: Starkweather had amassed an empire of over eleven thousand California acres, primarily vacant lots in run-down neighborhoods that he never developed.
No racehorses, no Swiss accounts, no secret mistresses. No apparent profit motive of any kind. People started questioning Emil Starkweather’s mental health.
The rumors intensified when the will was made public. Starkweather had bequeathed everything to the State of California, with one proviso: at least one hundred acres of “his” land was to be used for construction of a “major mental hygiene facility that takes into account the latest research and progress in psychiatry and allied disciplines.”
Legal experts opined that the document was probably worthless, but the knots
Starkweather had tied might take years to unravel in court. Yet, in one sense, the timing was perfect for the newly elected governor. No admirer of Starkweather-whom he’d long considered an annoying, eccentric old fart-he’d campaigned as a crime-crusher, condemning revolving-door justice that spat dangerous maniacs back onto the street. Frenzied consultations with legislative bosses produced a plan that cut through the morass, and aides were dispatched from Sacramento to search for worthless publicly owned real estate. The perfect solution emerged quickly: a long-unused parcel of county land well east of the L. A. city line, once a gas company fuel station, then a garbage dump, now a toxic swamp. Poisoned soil, pollutants seeping past bedrock. Only eighty-nine acres, but who was counting?
Through a combination of executive order and rammed-through legislation,
Starkweather’s purloined plots reverted to the state, and construction of a “major mental hygiene facility” for criminals judged incompetent to stand trial was authorized. Secure housing for spree murderers, blood drinkers, cannibals,
sodomizers, child-rapers, chanting zombies. Anyone too crazy and too dangerous for
San Quentin or Folsom or Pelican Bay.
It was an odd time to build a new hospital. State asylums for the retarded and the harmlessly psychotic were being closed down in rapid succession, courtesy of an odd, cold-hearted alliance between right-wing misers who didn’t want to spend the money and left-wing ignoramuses who believed psychotics were political prisoners and deserved to be liberated. A few years later, a “homeless problem” would appear, shocking the deacons of thrift and the social engineers, but at the time, dismantling an entire inpatient system seemed a clever thing to do.
Still, the governor’s storage bin for maniacs went up in two years.
He stuck the old fart’s name on it.
Starkweather State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was one main building-a five-story cement-block and gray stucco tower hemmed by twenty-foot-high electrified barbed-wire chain link, streaked with mineral deposits and etched by pol-lutive grime. Punitively ugly.
We’d gotten off the 10 Freeway, sped past Boyle Heights and several miles of industrial park, traversed a series of dormant oil wells frozen like giant mantis specimens, greasy-gray slaughterhouses and packing plants, abandoned freight yards, several more empty miles that stank of stillborn enterprise.
“Here we go,” said Milo, pointing to a narrow tongue of asphalt labeled Starkweather
Drive. Another sign said STATE FACILITY AHEAD.
The road drew the unmarked into a gray-green fringe of eucalyptus maybe seventy trees deep that blessed us with mentholated shade before we reemerged into the
August sun and a white glare so piercing it rendered my sunglasses useless.
Up ahead was the high fencing. Electric cables thick and black as water snakes. A collection of English and Spanish warning signs in approved state colors presaged a glassed-in booth and a steel gate arm. The guard was a chunky young man of indeterminate mood who slid open a window, listened to Milo’s explanation, took his time coming out. He examined our I.D. with what seemed like pain, took all the papers back to his glass closet, returned, asked how many firearms or knives we were carrying, and confiscated Milo’s service revolver and my Swiss Army knife.