by Robyn Carr
That was when I had to look at Jason Devalian through my own eyes.
16
While I researched, Tom’s voice rang in my ears. “There’s proof, dammit!” There was. It didn’t take long to be convinced that Tom was right: Jason Devalian had threatened Tom and his family, then killed Janet Lawler and little Lisa. He probably meant to kill them all.
A good attorney or law clerk gets what she needs right away and doesn’t get absorbed in meaningless detail. So, I went directly to the Department of Motor Vehicles... or should I say I took my buddy the badge with me. Mike and I looked for the address of Jason Devalian at the time of the slaying in March of 1978, twelve years before. We found that he had been issued a notice of a driver’s license suspension due to unpaid fines, and his mail had been sent to the maximum-security hospital, which, according to court records, was his residence. The next notice was sent to a minimum-security facility because the first had been returned. This immediately made me wonder where he had been held.
I had time and I was suffering from an obsessive desire to know everything. So, knowing I was frittering away time I could spend with my friends, I started at the beginning. I read the court records from the coroner’s inquest in the death of one Pauline Renee Zappalla. It seemed she was picked up at a bar by the accused, moved in with him, spent three short months in cohabitation, and died from injuries sustained in a beating. Jason Devalian was picked up, booked and charged; he retained the services of a public defender who requested an evaluation from a psychiatrist.
The state also produced an expert: Tom Lawler.
When the two experts disagreed on the disposition of the defendant, the court required a third. The defendant’s expert said the accused was a multiple personality; the defendant required hospitalization, medication, and long-term therapy. He estimated that the defendant was only lucid and responsible fifteen percent of the time. Devalian’s “other” personality was psychotic — hallucinating a good share of the time and helpless to control his mind or know right from wrong. This personality heard voices and orders from God and could not be controlled. He was not responsible by reason of insanity.
Dr. Lawler also examined, tested, and interviewed the defendant. He found Devalian to be lucid, highly intelligent, manipulative, and sociopathic. Lawler’s intake information pointed to substantial early-childhood sexual abuse, lack of formal education, and an unsupervised adolescence, as the defendant had fled his abusive parents at the age of thirteen.
I saw the similarity between this description and one that Tom had given me of one of his clients. Either he had evaluated many sociopaths with similar case histories or he had been describing Devalian without naming him.
Devalian had a long list of priors ranging from assault to petty theft to vandalism and destruction of property. And, while he put on a show of hearing voices and changing personalities, Dr. Lawler was convinced it was an act. Whether Devalian wrote his tests as himself or as his alleged alter-personality, the results were either identical or comparable. That was not in keeping with what is routinely understood about multiple personalities, Lawler testified. All personalities have individual traits, histories, and abilities. If, as an example, a thirty-eight year old man is experiencing the personality of a ten-year old, that ten-year old writes the test. In some cases alter-personalities are blind, deaf, or in some other way incapacitated.
Dr. Lawler’s recommendation was that the defendant was competent to stand trial and that any court-ordered psychotherapeutic intervention could be accomplished either privately or in a state penal institution. Dr. Lawler said that Mr. Devalian admitted to slaying the deceased woman, that he knew what he had done and had a reason if not a motive, and that he was a dangerous man.
A third expert witness was called into camp. Even from my distance, years and miles removed from this case, I could see the critical flaws. By the time the court ordered a third evaluation, Jason Devalian had heard the previous testimony. In his new tests he functioned as a multiple personality who was psychotic. Tom Lawler had given Devalian a diagram in his own testimony on how that could be done.
I needed a court order to examine the records at the hospital; fortunately, I have an acquaintance among the judiciary in Los Angeles. I went to His Honor Sy Resselman, explained the whole situation in ten minutes or less, and got not only a court order but an invitation to dinner. Sy was a fifty-five year old widower whom I’d seen in Family Court many times over the years; while there never was anything romantic between us, we liked each other. Dinner and the court order were both gratefully accepted.
The reading I did at the hospital was both intriguing and upsetting. I hadn’t seen any photos of Jason Devalian yet. Considering them illustrated how drastically a judgment can change with appearance. When arrested for the murder of Pauline Renee Zappalla, Jason Devalian was an awful-looking character. His arrest photo showed a long, thin nose, thin lips, masses of stringy, oily hair, a disheveled appearance, and a narrow mustache; they caused him to look sinister, like a character out of a comic-strip lineup. His cheeks were sunken; his chin jutted out; he had a sickly pallor and wild-looking blue eyes. His hospital admission records included an improved photo, because he had been cleaned up by his public defender. There never had been any newspaper photos of him; the case of a poor woman killed by her boyfriend in a poor neighborhood didn’t get any press attention. When I looked at the photo of the new, improved Devalian, even I hesitated to see him in such a criminal light. His hair was styled, he had shaved, his eyes were calm; his face didn’t look as long or grim. And, unmistakably, there was a small smile on his lips.
I read through his intake information. He’d been raised by his father after his mother abandoned them both and he had suffered through sexual abuse by his father. He told the intake counselor that his mother conspired in the abuse; she didn’t protect him. She was likewise severely abused by Devalian’s father.
His father isolated him from society, kept him a prisoner. He lived on a large farm in Nebraska at which there were a number of hired hands. Most of them were transient in nature and no one got close enough to the family for any intervention. There was no family life, school life, or spiritual life.
Jason Devalian was educated only to the fourth grade, but had somehow developed his reading and math skills beyond that level. Though they were simple skills, not to include things like training in linguistics, algebra, or the like, he could still hold his own in a written test. He had been on his own since the age of thirteen, earning money in a variety of ways both legal and illegal. He had escaped his father’s abuse by running away with a transient farm laborer.
There was no longer any doubt that I was reading about one of the cases that Tom had described. I knew that Tom would have remembered who he was talking about and so had withheld the identity from me, saying he couldn’t remember how the man came to be in counseling. But I excused his duplicity: On the night we had the discussion, I had been firm in telling him I didn’t want to hear any more about his traumatic past but was interested in knowing more about his life, his profession, his family. His unemotional description of this particular case history continued to confuse me, however. I wondered how he could do it, so coolly narrate the psychological history of the man who had killed his family.
I read on. Devalian was heavily medicated during the first weeks of his stay in the hospital, but judging by his attendance in group therapy, in the dining room, in card games and chess games, it appeared that he was functional. The nurses, counselors, and psychiatrist wrote rather glowing attributes to his behavior while he was there. He was said to be remorseful, penitent, and determined to turn his life around. He was recommended early for transfer to a minimum-security facility.
And that’s where the evidence lay.
The Lawler murders took place on the fifteenth of March. The documentation of Jason Devalian’s transfer to a minimum-security facility was officially dated the eighteenth of March. It looked certain to me that the
document was originally printed with the number thirteen and corrected, or altered, to become an eighteen. This could mean that Jason Devalian had been housed in a minimum-security unit on the night Lawler’s family was killed.
“Tom Lawler didn’t do it,” I told Sy at dinner that night. “Tom, who is impossible for me to understand anyway, did have a psychopath on his hands.”
“What about the alleged threats?” he asked.
“On the message tapes? According to the police report, after the Lawler murders there was one tape preserved for the police department. Lawler claims that when you work exclusively in criminal courts and the prison system, it isn’t unusual to get threatening stuff over the phone. That was his explanation for not doing more than he did at the time. For instance, he said he didn’t warn his wife or stay close to home.”
“And what did he do at the time?”
“He telephoned the police, made a complaint, and was told what he was told at other times — there wasn’t too much they could do about it. He said he’d had threats from prison inmates; it isn’t as though you should put them under surveillance if they’re already incarcerated.”
“Did you track down the transfer record?”
“Oh, it was signed by the attending psychiatrist, that’s for sure. When the date was altered and by whom remains a mystery. It could have been a staff member — or the doctor himself, when he realized there was a crime and he could be held responsible. Besides that, there are medical notes on him right up to the eighteenth, but that could be a fancy deed, you know. Like how we list our car expenses after the taxes are filed. Maybe someone went back in after he was transferred and made a few notes about his behavior, his medication, that sort of thing. There hadn’t been a visit with the doctor during that questionable five-day period. I thought about the possibility of Devalian himself altering the date and adding to the daily reports up to the eighteenth, but patients are locked in wards and have no access to the nurses’ station.
“Devalian was an animal, a wild man, when he was picked up by police after the death of his girlfriend. He had to be subdued by four officers to get him handcuffed. To read the staff reports on the same guy while he was an inmate, you’d think he was Prince Charming. It’s possible he manipulated some staff member and managed to get his transfer out early.”
“All things being equal, when should he have been transferred?”
“Sy, you’re a judge, you know the beauty of indeterminate sentencing. After his thirty-day intake and diagnosis, he was left to the discretion of the attending physician. If they thought he was crazy and dangerous, they kept him. If they thought he was mentally deficient yet manageable, they could do anything at all with him. They could have let him go unless the court tagged a specific time commitment on him, which wasn’t done.”
“And wasn’t done,” Sy said, “because it was a domestic crime and the couple were dangerous only to each other. With one of them dead, the state of overcrowding...”
“Happens every day,” I said, knowing only too well. There was no one to file a civil suit on behalf of the dead woman, no one interested enough to press for prosecution. Nobody was involved in his case; nobody cared.
“And then,” I told Sy, “the frosting here is that from minimum security he did a crime. He put an orderly’s jacket on over his jeans and walked out of the hospital, went to a bar and had a couple of beers, chatted with some of the patrons and the bartender, took a bus to a residential area, broke into a middle-class house, stole some jewelry and money, and lit a fire in the family room to cover the theft. The arrival of the fire department created enough of a scene to allow him to wait for the bus four blocks away without arousing suspicion. The house was badly damaged. The staff found the stuff on him and the police found witnesses who had talked to him while he was out on this little self-oriented leave. He was supposed to be in ceramics. Ceramics. He had signed out of his ward to go to ceramics.” I drank my wine. “Whatever happened to basket weaving?”
“What are you going to do about this, Jackie?”
“I went after this information to reassure myself. I started to date this guy, Tom Lawler. Then this stuff from his past began to complicate and confuse the relationship. By the time we stopped seeing each other, I thought he was a madman. He seemed to have personality shifts and mood swings; bizarre things were happening to me.
“To give you an example, we had a pleasant evening together, shared personal things, talked of how neither of us was interested in a serious or committed relationship... and then I discovered someone had been in my house while I was asleep — a glass of cranberry juice, which I’d been drinking that evening, was spilled on my tablecloth. Next, he’d call and put the pressure on me to go somewhere with him. He’d tell me he understood and respected my desire to remain unattached, then become hostile if I declined an invitation. He saw me at the local town fair with Mike and became jealous and agitated. Later, when I took the trouble to try to explain myself, he turned the whole thing back on me and accused me of playing games with him and trying to ruin his reputation. I’m through with this guy. It comes as a relief to know that Tom Lawler didn’t kill his wife and child; I was praying I hadn’t been involved with a murderer. I won’t mention this to him, however. It might make him want to resume the friendship. He may be an innocent victim, but he’s also screwed up. Strange.”
Sy chewed thoughtfully before commenting. “Crime victims can have long-term psychological and emotional problems; surely you know that.”
“Of course.”
“Paranoia, phobic reactions, anger, all sorts of things. If the guy is innocent and was a respected professional before his family was killed and is now strange, it doesn’t strike me as improbable. Perhaps it’s taken its toll on his ability to socialize. That certainly doesn’t obligate you to any friendship.”
“Sy, the guy has me so confused that I can’t risk friendship with him. I felt justified in asking Mike to get me some police stuff, then I felt guilty as though I’d purposely set out to ruin an innocent man, then back to anger and defensiveness... I’m too confused to think clearly. I just wanted to settle this one thing in my mind.”
“Then don’t say anything to anyone. Take your proof in your head back to your little practice in Colorado and write this guy off. It’s not as though he’s facing a prison sentence and you’re the only one who can save him.”
“And if this is following him around and he’s still, as he claims, being blamed for, if not charged with, some awful crime that he didn’t commit? Shouldn’t this be brought to someone’s attention in the interest of justice if nothing else?”
“You could write an anonymous letter, but you know how much attention that gets. You could try to track down his lawyer. You could go to the police here and try to give them the information without giving your name. You could maybe have Mike take care of it for you.”
In the end, that’s what I did do. Before I got to that point, however, I did a little more looking into Jason Devalian’s records following the arrest for breaking and entering, theft, and arson. He was paroled after serving two years in prison, broke parole, and drifted off.
While he was in prison, he was again the model inmate. He was only in the infirmary twice: once when he’d been beaten and once for appendicitis. Either his recovery on both occasions was miraculous or he hadn’t been very sick. In prison he had suffered from severe peritonitis associated with his appendectomy, and must have been one sick puppy. He was treated with heavy antibiotics and large doses of Demerol and Valium. Yet he went back to the cell block four days after surgery and the results of his postsurgical checkups were noted as favorable. In the battering he suffered a broken nose and jaw, two lost teeth, two fractured fingers, and marked bruising. He was not hospitalized and was treated with aspirin for the pain. This pattern had an interesting parallel in his earlier hospitalization. These reports attested to the fact that Devalian could withstand severe pain, just as the earlier hospital reports sugges
ted he could function physically and mentally while heavily medicated.
The model prisoner was an incredible physical specimen and an intellectual anomaly. Although he was lacking in formal education, he studied everything from astronomy to law while he was in prison. He wrote long letters to experts and received answers to all his questions. He ordered books and taught himself to speed-read. In a work program he learned how to operate a computer and how to repair air conditioners, refrigerators, and small appliances. He read copious fiction as well. To do all he did he must have been a paragon of concentration, dedication, and endurance. He also must not have slept more than two hours a night.
He was reported in one evaluation as being manic sans depression. He behaved as though he couldn’t manage inactivity. He resorted to body building on the recommendation of the visiting psychiatrist. That physician noted that tranquilizers had little effect on him; barbiturates did not help him sleep.
And they all loved him. He had many privileges while he was in prison; he got soft jobs and plenty of time off. As the hospital had reported, the man was cooperative and determined to turn his life around. Reading all this, of course, put it into perspective for me: He was intelligent and a manipulator. When he came up for parole he had a job lined up, a parole officer waiting to take over, and a deep and sincere goal of making something of himself. He walked out of jail and walked right out of the state, perhaps out of the country. That’s where they lost him.
His multiple personality, incidentally, was never treated or mentioned again.
I felt compelled to speak to Dake Ramsey, the detective who had worked on the Lawler murders. We arranged to meet in a coffee shop near the police department. I got the impression he was going to turn me down until I mentioned that my ex-husband was Mike Alexander. He was reluctant and irritable.