Police Sergeant Michele Williams made news in January
2014 when the Santa Fe Police Department reopened an unsolved 1992 rape
case. Sgt. Williams had frozen DNA
evidence tested by the state crime lab. The
DNA profile developed from the evidence matched the DNA of a 52-year-old Santa
Fe man, who is now the prime suspect in the rape of a sixteen year old girl.
“Sally” is not her real name.
In three years of an on-again-off-again love affair, I was either her one true love or every man she ever hated. Her only emotions were pure love or absolute hate. But the hatred would always pass, usually in a matter of hours, and her love would return stronger than ever. Her bouts of rage were no different in my mind from an asthma attack or other symptom of illness. Her illness just happened to be an emotional illness and not a physical one. Her temporary rages are not a reflection of her real self; they are an unpleasant symptom of her borderline personality organization.
She has a long history of accusing the people she loves of wanting to murder her. She has made such accusations against her parents and both former husbands.
She filed police reports charging her father with murdering her five-year-old brother. She said he shot him to death in their basement. Sally claims she gave birth to her father’s baby when she was ten; her mother killed the newborn baby by roasting it in a turkey pan. When her brakes failed in Houston she told the police her father was trying to have her killed. He had sent men to tamper with her car. A traffic accident here in Santa Fe was also attempted murder. The German driver was a Nazi working for the CIA.
She divorced her first husband, a doctor with the CDC, because he planned to poison her. She spent a month in a mental hospital after she came to believe that her second husband intended to murder her unless she killed him first. In her eighth month of pregnancy, she told hospital workers she had been impregnated by space aliens and homicidal monsters were growing in her belly. When she said she planned to kill herself to prevent the monsters from being born, the hospital had to hold her under restraints in the psychiatric ward until a local psychiatrist accepted responsibility for her care.
Stress can induce psychosis and Sally’s trips to Argentina were always stressful. Even before we left the states for her tenth trip to South America, she had shown signs of instability. She saw visions of disaster in California and telephoned the Mayor with the date and time of the next earthquake. The mayor’s secretary thanked her for calling. She telephoned the New Mexico State Police with advice on a murder case. Sally said the victim had been murdered by his daughter. The detective said he would look into it.
Her trip to Argentina was a litany of fears and failures.
She wanted to report her story to the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Organization, but she is well known to the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and the head of the Organization refused to see her. Years earlier, when she told her story to the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Buenos Aires, he told her with great kindness that she needed a psychiatrist, not a Rabbi.
While in Argentina, she wanted to visit someone in distant city, but became convinced that the CIA would take out the small commuter airplane if she was on board.
I accompanied her when she tried to hire an attorney. The attorney began taking careful notes, but put down her pen when Sally began talking about being kidnapped by Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and being subjected to medical experiments by Mengele, her father, and other doctors working for the CIA. The attorney declined to take her case.
She reported to the Federal Police that she had been kidnapped from Argentina in the 1950s by a doctor. Sally said the doctor also kidnapped her mother and her nine brothers and sisters. She gave the police a list of their names. She could not explain why the kidnappings had not been reported earlier. The police officer thanked her for coming in.
In eleven years of searching, Sally has not found a shred of evidence that she was born in Argentina. There is no record that her Argentine family ever existed. In her disordered mind, the lack of evidence proves that her beliefs are true. She is the victim of a vast international conspiracy. How else could all evidence of her family’s existence have been wiped off the face of the earth? Only a secret omnipotent organization like the CIA and the Nazi Shadow Government could have such power.
In Argentina she paid a local con man a substantial sum of money to find her father. He located a deceased army doctor who was similar to the “father” who visited Sally one morning in her bedroom in Santa Fe—a rare visual hallucination. Army officers in Argentina were bribed and the doctor’s military records were stolen. The doctor looks nothing like Sally or her children. His own wife and children are accounted for. Nobody remembers a missing second wife or ten missing children. The officer’s children keep Sally at arms length, but some distant relatives will talk to her in exchange for money. She paid one cousin a thousand pesos to hunt for her childhood home.
We visited the apartment building he found. She pointed to a door on the ground floor and said it led to the basement where Josef Mengele and her father performed medical experiments on her when she was four years old. She said they injected her with Ampliactil, a powerful antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia. The building is a famous landmark in Buenos Aires, so I contacted the resident who has written a definitive history of the structure and its many celebrated occupants. He said there is no record that a family like the one she imagines has ever lived in the building. The building has never had a basement and the door she pointed out is a broom closet.
Arriving in Albuquerque after her tenth unsuccessful visit to South America, we went to Walmart. Inside the front door she froze at the bulletin board to stare at photographs of missing children. “They have all been kidnapped by the CIA,” she said softly, in a trance-like state. “They use them for the same medical experiments they performed on me.” She found a poster for a missing child who disappeared with his mother. “Whenever they claim that missing children have been kidnapped by the mothers, it really means the CIA kidnapped them both. They use the mothers as breeders. That’s what happened to my mother.”
Back in Santa Fe, she learned that the son of a neighbor, a doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was traveling to Greece with his wife and children. She called the wife repeatedly and begged her not to get on the plane. Sally told the woman that the doctor and his mother planned to murder the wife in Greece to save the expense of a divorce. The wife thanked Sally for the warning and flew off with her husband and children.
I remember the first time I saw Sally in a psychotic state. She came to my house in a state of panic. She insisted we turn off our cell phones and leave them inside. Then she led us to the center of my backyard.
“It is worse than I thought,” she whispered, scanning the perimeter as she talked. “I am under surveillance by the CIA and the Nazis.” She thrust a hundred dollar bill into my hand and begged me to buy her a new cell phone, activate it on computers at the public library, and hide it in the storage shed in her back yard. “Never speak to me about it,” she warned. “They spy on me in my house and car. Your house is bugged, too.”
I knew she had stopped taking her meds. I gently coaxed her into seeing her doctor, who told her that most women in her condition spend their lives in psychiatric hospitals. He warned her that she must take medicine for the rest of her life. It was a message she had heard many times before.
She tries to stay on her meds, but they have challenging side effects, including weight gain, tremors, and sexual dysfunction. When we were a couple, she lit up like a Hanukiah. She was blissfully happy and did not feel sick. I was her angel. I was her cure. She said she felt better than at any other time in her life. Since she was feeling good, she reduced the dosages, and eventually she stopped taking her meds altogether.
Everything would be fine for a while, until a voice, a sign, or an irrational fear would plunge her back into psychosis. Each new psychotic break would be worse than the last one.
I may have triggered her last psychotic break when I suggested that her DNA held the answer to all of her questions about her identity.
I told her about a forensic case where DNA evidence from an unidentified serial rapist had been compared to the DNA of men incarcerated in California prisons. The police found a partial match and forensic scientists determined that the matching prisoner, while not the rapist himself, was a close relative of the rapist. A police investigation of the prisoner’s family identified a suspect; the suspect’s DNA turned out to be an exact match.
The same forensic science was used to identify children kidnapped during the Dirty War in Argentina. The bodies of mothers tortured and murdered by the government were never recovered, but DNA from the parents and siblings of the murdered mothers has been used to identify their kidnapped children.
I told Sally her DNA could be compared to the known children of the man she claims as her biological father. If he is her father, her DNA will match the DNA of his children. Her DNA could also be compared to the woman who raised her in the United States. If the woman is not her birth mother, their mitochondrial DNA will not match.
She must know in her subconscious mind that the couple who raised her in the United States are her birth parents. Her belief that she is at the center of an international Nazi conspiracy is a delusion, no different from her belief eighteen years ago that she had been impregnated by space aliens and was about to give birth to monsters. When I suggested she have a DNA test, I pushed her over the edge. The DNA tests would have proved that her beliefs are a paranoid delusion.
Just after midnight she slipped out of bed and said she was going to take a shower.
“I love you,” she said. “You are my Angel.”
We kissed. “I love you to pieces,” I said.
Ten minutes later she emerged from the shower in rage. She hated me. Her voices had just explained the real meaning of my last words to her. I was a serial killer and I planned to make her my next victim.
“You’re going to cut me up into little pieces and bury me under the floorboards,” she screamed repeatedly.
She said I murdered the women on the West Mesa. “That is why you know so much about forensic science. You study DNA so you will not be caught.”
I dialed 911 but she refused to take the phone. She said I was gaslighting her. I was trying to make her look crazy. I was plotting to have her committed, just like her ex-husband.
She would talk to the police when she was ready. She would tell them all about me and who I really was.
On Monday she made her report to the Santa Fe Police. That’s how I got to talk with Sgt. Williams, who warned me that I should say away from Sally for my own safety. “She is capable of anything,” Sgt. Williams said.
I also got a message from Sally. Sally left me a voicemail. She assured me that I would be going to jail. “They are coming for you now,” she screamed. “I can hear the sirens.”
She hears sirens no one else can hear.
