They Call Him Crazy

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
Mental patient Rodney Yoder is taking on the psychiatry establishment

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Less than a month after the original ruling against Hardy, the warden sought another way to keep Yoder from going free: he petitioned the court to commit Yoder to a mental hospital. The court was provided with a copy of another foul letter signed with Yoder's name. Addressed to a state judge, it describes, quite graphically, how the writer would rape His Honor.

But Hardy's petition omitted less colorful details. It said Yoder was "hostile and delusional in that he believes he is the victim of a conspiracy"--but failed to mention the lost-credit incident that had made Yoder hostile or the courtroom evidence that Yoder had been the victim of a conspiracy. Hardy checked a box on the petition saying he was "not involved in litigation" with Yoder, when in fact he had just appealed Yoder's victory. Hardy now says such errors were unintentional and "didn't really make any difference in the validity and justification for him being committed." But there is no record that the court knew the whole story before ordering Yoder to the hospital. He was held there three months, until the feds sought to prosecute him for threatening President Ronald Reagan. That prosecution collapsed on thin evidence, and he was finally let go in 1983.

Yoder's life approached normalcy in the '80s. Not long after leaving Chester, he met Shirley Peters, a plainspoken woman who lived in the apartment under his mother's place. He and Shirley married and moved to Tacoma, Wash., and had two kids, Jennifer and Loren. Yoder attended Fort Steilacoom College and got straight A's in political science. He also sold real estate. "He was a pretty normal guy, really, except when he drank," says Shirley. They eventually moved back to Illinois, and the relationship unraveled. "There were times I ran around with black eyes," she says. They divorced in 1989.

On Jan. 12, 1990, Yoder had his second terrible fight with a woman he had loved. Monumentally drunk, he argued with Shirley about whether a man who baby-sat was molesting the children. "I went berserk and...hit my ex-wife in the head with a table leg," he later wrote. Shirley says she had nine stitches. Yoder pleaded guilty and went to prison, where a psychiatrist examined him. The doctor said Yoder was hostile and negative but didn't meet the standard for involuntary hospitalization. He wasn't a danger, the doctor wrote, and there was "no indication of acute psychopathology."

Always vigorous even frenetic in his own defense, Yoder spent the next year initiating court proceedings. Saying his guilty plea had been coached out of him, he tried to change it. The court blocked the move. Yoder also sued prison administrators, alleging various mistreatments. That won him a reputation as a problem inmate who couldn't manage his rage. It didn't help that he wrote "file my motherf_____ pleadings NOW" to a court clerk. In June 1991, Mary Flannigan, one of the administrators Yoder was suing, sought to have him involuntarily committed for a second time. On her petition, she also checked a box saying she was "not involved in litigation with the respondent," which wasn't true.

In support of Flannigan's effort, a new psychiatrist, Dr. Nageswararao Vallabhaneni, wrote two damaging reports about Yoder. One said Yoder was having "paranoid delusions" but gave only sketchy examples: "[Yoder] named several people as his political enemies," the doctor wrote, specifying three individuals, including Hardy. Yoder had defeated Hardy in two courts and was involved in lawsuits with the other two people none of which Vallabhaneni mentioned. On the very day he was to be released for hitting his ex-wife, Yoder was handcuffed and driven to the Chester center.

Yoder didn't have a trial until the following month. Judge William Schuwerk Jr. heard the case. An ill-prepared public defender represented Yoder, and he allowed Vallabhaneni to assert without proof that Yoder had committed "several" assaults in prison. Schuwerk, who failed to mention that he himself had prosecuted Yoder's first commitment in 1982, ruled from the bench that Yoder should go to the asylum again.

Yoder filed his own appeal. The appellate judges noted a series of government mistakes in the case and overturned the commitment order, which should have freed Yoder. But their ruling came too late: commitment orders expire after six months, and another judge had already signed a new one, based on the original evidence that Yoder was ill and dangerous, along with new charges that Yoder had been an irascible, uncooperative patient at Chester. Ironically, Stephen Hardy, the warden Yoder had beaten in court, had become the director of Chester in 1986. Yoder hasn't left the facility since he returned.

If someone as ill-tempered as Rodney Yoder lived in a different place say, New York City his life might have followed a different path. He might be the loud guy who bugs you on the subway or one of the city's wearisome politicians. Instead, he lives in rural Illinois, and it is the citizens of Randolph County who form the juries that decide every year or two whether he should stay at the institution. Randolph is a place where the newspaper lists the Parish Hall's Sunday chicken dinners on page 2. The creator of the cartoon character Popeye was born in the town of Chester in 1894, and its major annual event is a picnic next to a 900-lb. bronze statue of the sailor man. Popeye's innocent charm somehow coexists with Chester's other landmarks, the Menard prison and the Chester Mental Health Center next door. Of the town's 8,400 residents, more than 3,000 are incarcerated. Some of the mental hospital's residents are quite disturbed: one patient was recently convicted of murder for slicing up his mother and two sisters in 1996.