Demented

“Demented” is a story of crime, punishment and getting away with it. Three young men lure a woman into a room and rape her. Two of the rapists get away with misdemeanor assault charges. The third man is given a 15-year sentence and sent off to prison. The woman must deal with the aftermath of the attack on her own.

Sixteen years later the four lives collide in Washington DC. The woman, Cindy (Smith) Foster and one of her rapists, Adan Jackson, are working in the same office. He has begun harassing her. His brother works in the company’s New York office. The third man, Troy Mondale, has been released from prison and is working to build a new life.

Cindy has secrets, and she fights to keep those secrets. When the PI she hires to deal with Jackson confronts him, things get out of control. He escalates his harassment and drags Mondale back into the mess.

The final kick in the butt that pushed me into writing this story was feedback from my last novel, “The Walshes.” I was castigated for not sending a character to prison because of a date rape. I understand the anger over my handling of the situation even though the way I wrote the arc accurately depicts what goes on in real life. I don’t believe my critics understand the seriousness of their proposed remedy. They may be thinking in terms of a TV cop drama where the bad guy is arrested and sent off to serve his time. That fantasy skips over the trauma of a real-life trial and the horror of actual life in prison.

I spent a year as a member of a group that visited with prisoners in a Berks County Pennsylvania jail when I was 19. On one occasion, I was allowed to go back in the cell block and talk with one of my contacts. His cell was much like those shown on TV. It was an 8 by 8 by 8 cage with a bunk bed for two inmates, but it had a sink and a toilet that seemed to be out of order. That visit was enough to convince me that I never wanted to go to jail for any reason. Staying one day in a situation like that is more than I want to think about. Surviving years of incarceration under those conditions would be an unimaginable challenge.

“Demented” is my attempt to put these issues and my feelings into words. The novel focuses on a character who spends time in jail for a serious crime and then faces life after prison. It shows how bad the situation can be. His jail time is not spent visiting with lawyers and police in relatively pristine settings. He has been dumped into a prison system designed to break a man’s spirit. He experiences prison the way Andy Dufresne did in “Shawshank Redemption.” Perhaps his experience is worse. He does not emerge from prison rich and unscathed. My prisoner comes to believe that the day he was released from jail was the worst day of his life. He comes out of prison facing a life of survival as a convicted felon and a violent sex offender.

The second motivator for “Demented” was an episode of “Law and Order SVU.” I watch the show intermittently, but my wife watches it religiously. The particular episode that inspired events in my novel started with two college men raping a female classmate who had starred in gang rape videos to get money for college expenses. One of the attackers is a rich kid. The other is not. He admits his guilt, apologizes for his misdeeds and goes off to prison. Then he drops out of sight.

At the end of the story, the young woman has been kicked out of school. She goes back to making porn videos. The rich kid is awaiting resolution of his case. It looks like he might get away with his crime. Detective Benson goes to the Dean of the College and berates her because the porn star coed has been expelled while the rich kid rapist has been allowed to continue his education.

The young man who went to prison is the character who sticks in my mind. His story is as exciting and as important as the woman’s story. In “Demented,” he becomes Troy Mondale. The rich kid becomes Adan Jackson. Cindy (Smith) Foster is the young woman. Adan’s brother Beau is added in the novel because I liked having a third member of the gang. Beau turns out to be an excellent counterweight in the story. Lydia Bennett is a thinly disguised stand-in for Olivia Benson.

The third motivator was an article that appeared in the Washington Post some time ago. A woman walks out of the Senate Office building and runs into a man who got away with raping her and trying to kill her. The man was on his way to work as an aide for one of the senators. This story provides the central conflict and the setting for “Demented.” Cindy and her attackers find themselves thrown together years after the rape – sixteen years to give Troy time to complete his prison sentence. Adan, Beau, and Cindy work for the same company. It is a large accounting and financial consulting firm with offices across the United States and around the globe. Cindy and Adan are both working in the DC office.

Several books helped me get a handle on prison life. “Earning Freedom” by Michael Santos (@michaelgsantos on Twitter) was the most important. Santos became an inspiration for my realization of Troy Mondale. When I write dialog for Troy, I hear Michael Santos’ voice in my head. Santos was charged and convicted as a drug kingpin because he had put together a small drug operation aimed at servicing the needs of white-collar customers in the Seattle area. He was sentenced to 40 years but got out in 25 by focusing on good behavior. “Earning Freedom” is a memoir of his time in prison and his return to civil society. Santos is founder and head of Prison Professors which can be found online. Mondale Legal Consulting Services was inspired by Prison Professors (prisonprofessors.com).

“Inside” also by Michael Santos is an earlier version of his prison memoir written while he was still serving time. In this edition, Santos provides more details about the people he met in prison and talks about incidents that illuminate facets of prison life. The two books are complementary but “Earning Freedom” was more helpful to me as a resource for “Demented.”

“Lockdown on Rikers: Shocking Stories of Abuse and Injustice at New York’s Notorious Jail” describes the prison experience from a completely different perspective. The author, Mary Buser (@busermary on Twitter), started as an intern in the Mental Health Department at Rikers and worked her way up to Chief Assistant. She talks about trying to provide required counseling sessions in spite of staff shortages and about medicating men in solitary confinement to keep them from killing themselves. She is the one who wrote about men being imprisoned while waiting for a court hearing – not a trial but a hearing to get a date for a trial – because they could not afford bail. She also complained that many of these men eventually plead guilty without a trial because they lose hope of ever getting one. Buser is also the writer who pointed out that Rikers was used as a dumping ground for the mentally ill because there was nowhere else to put them.

Finally, “Derailed” by Mark Roseman is the memoir of a lawyer who went to prison for two years because he misappropriated funds entrusted to him as a settlement for his clients. His benign experience provided some crucial details for Troy’s imprisonment.

I completed an outline of the story in October 2017. I wrote the first version over November and December. The first rewrite was completed by May of 2018. Over that period Adan Jackson developed into the central character. Nickey Arnold, the PI hired by Cindy to confront her tormentor, emerged as the villain’s obsession and primary foe.

Jackson disintegrates into madness over the course of the novel. Nickey becomes locked in a struggle with him to save herself and the world. She gets a lot of help, especially from DC police sergeant Jack Edwards. He is eager to get Jackson, but his hands are tied because the villain’s behavior does not become clearly illegal until the end.