(4 of 10)
The letters promise garish violence: "I'll...pump about 3 boxes of shells into her from a 12-guage [sic]," says one that is signed with Yoder's name and prison-register number. His warden, Stephen Hardy, heard about at least nine alarming letters and initiated an investigation that led to Yoder's losing two years of credit earned for good behavior. Yoder then sued Hardy and won; Yoder presented evidence that several state officials had ignored the rules for revoking good-time credit in order to keep him incarcerated. The officials were plainly worried that Yoder would act on his threats, but--as an appellate court later agreed--they had trampled his due-process rights.
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."