Havoc-on-Hudson Read Online Free Page B

Hills.”
    After the meeting everyone was gung-ho, adjourning to the bar not so much for planning as for avid speculation. Many of my colleagues, however, focused only on the incident involving Grace Chung. Since the more serious attack had occurred across the river in another community, some agents dismissed the attacks as isolated incidents, the kind of thing that happened over there, not in safe places like the Westchester river villages. Despite the grimness of the facts on both occasions, we all seemed to be in denial.

8
    A correctional psychiatrist’s primary mission is to assist offenders with rehabilitation and reintegration. Dr. Jane Hill had invested her time and energy working with Daniel Joseph Farrell in the Juvenile Detention facility where he was incarcerated. Her diagnosis, an anti-social personality disorder, was characterized by a complete lack of empathy and remorse for others. Since psychopathy was evident in a large percentage of all offenders in the American prison system, Dr. Hill did not find Daniel’s condition to be all that surprising, considering his early life experi ence.
    The young inmate was intelligent and appealing, but his childhood had been marked by severe, brain-altering abuse. Dr. Hill hoped the intensive therapy he was receiving would at least grant him the ability to control his demons. This vulnerable young man desperately needed to experience friendship and affection once he left the prison sy stem.
    Initially, Danny Joe’s hostility towards women interfered with Dr. Hill’s therapy. At one point, because of his obscene, misogynistic rantings, she seriously considered referring him to a male colleague. However, as he opened up more about his father’s mental instability and the sexual abuse he’d suffered at his father’s hands, she changed her mind. Dr. Hill’s patience and maternal warmth might allow Danny Joe to connect positively with her despite his pent-up a nger.
    Understandably, when his mother abandoned him, Danny Joe had experienced a sense of grievous loss. It was Dr. Hill’s hope that she could bring the boy to forgive Mother for abandoning him; that she could bring him to a therapeutic realization that fear and suffering, not lack of love, had driven Mother to leave him behind as she boarded that megasized bus to an uncertain fu ture.
    As far as Dr. Jane Hill was concerned, this boy was a victim, and she yearned to set him free. As she developed an unprofessional bond with the handsome youth, the compassion she felt for her patient became seriously misdirected. With a deeply-felt passion, she quoted Dr. Michael Fogel’s analysis on criminology to the Parole Board on Danny Joe’s behalf. “When you understand where this individual came from, what he was exposed to, and the environment in which he grew up, you can understand why he engaged in the behavior that he did.”
    She was not unaware of tipping the balance between Danny Joe’s rights and public safety, but she believed he could make it on the outside. Before Danny Joe Farrell was truly capable of coping in society, she declared him to be fully rehabilitated—and he was f reed.

9
    Days, weeks, and finally months passed in the villages along the Hudson without incident. It being spring and the green buds bursting, many of us relaxed into our old careless routines, ignoring police warnings and continuing to hold open houses the way we always had. Several also told me they felt awkward asking for identification from potential customers. “Gotta do it,” I said, receiving only shrugs in response. After all, spring was the real-estate-brokers’ busy season.
    Betsy confided that the perpetrator’s DNA matched previous attacks on brokers in other jurisdictions, and that the violence of the attacks on agents was escalating from one incident to the next. But, she’d said, the older files were still active and now police in several states were trying to connect the dots between attacks. They now knew this