August 21, 2023 • 40 mins
When Dr. Benjamin Gilmer takes over a small clinic in North Carolina, he was told that he is actually the second Dr. Gilmer to practice there. The first “Dr. Gilmer” had murdered his father in 2004. The book: The Other Dr. Gilmer details the lives of both Dr. Gilmers and how their lives intersected.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
They were hurt by what happened as well, so there
was an opportunity for them to heal and for me
to try to begin to understand what happened to this
man that I was beginning to perceive as as a
good doctor who had done this horrific crime.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold war Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:54):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. When doctor Benjamin Gilmer takes over a
small clinic in North Carolina, he's told that he is
(01:17):
actually the second doctor Gilmer to practice there, and the
first doctor Gilmer had murdered his own father in two
thousand and four. The book The Other Doctor Gilmer details
the lives of both doctor Gilmers and how their lives intersected.
Take me back to the beginning. How did you even
(01:37):
come across this story? What were your life circumstances.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This is a story that found me. I didn't look
for it. It's a story just back to the very
beginning that began with me starting as a fledgeling doctor
in my first job, really just trying to find myself
as a physician, and then realizing that my predecessor had
brutally killed his father. And then I realized that we
shared the same last name, which was a crazy way
(02:02):
to start my journey as a first year out transitional doctor.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
This is rural North Carolina, which makes it even more
odd that the two of you shared a last name.
Were you both general practitioners? Is that what your role
was in this area?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
We're both family doctors. So he started this clinic and
then I later sort of inherited it.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Is it a relatively small town, Fletcher? What was it
like when you were there and then when he was there.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It's a small place that's outside of Ashville, small community
sits in a valley. The clinic serves the people of
the valley and the hollers beyond it. It's a very
tight knit community that's made up of a lot of
different people, mostly rural, but now that Ashville is sort
of spreading into the communities around it, it's a diverse
group of people. But he was the only doctor during
(02:49):
that time, like in the valley, so he was a
big part of that community. He was really tied to
the schools like he did lots of things in the community,
and everybody was racked when this happened because they were like,
what the hell happened?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You know, let's talk about him as a doctor and
what everyone found so appealing about him. How long had
he been practicing in Fletcher before all of this sort
of fell apart in two thousand and four, for about
four years.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
He was also young in his career. It was in
his fourth year that the event happened. This is the
interesting part of Vince Gilmer, or any person who's branded
as a criminal or as branded as a murderer. You
know what makes a murder, you know, And for him,
you can go way back to his early childhood and
see the vast amount of trauma that affected him. You know,
(03:37):
the bizarre things that he was starting to do like
that people didn't quite understand or you know what formed
his personality that people thought was just a little quirky.
But you know, for me, the process was kind of
going back retrospectively in dissecting his brain in a way
that was my previous life was a neurobiologist and I
studied psychology, So it was really interesting to go back
and just think about, what are the thousand hits took
(04:00):
him down, the aspects of his life that really contributed
to his mind going awry, And they're almost infinite when
you think about it, But there are five primary things
that really affected his demidse that contributed to his brain
that was beginning to come.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Apart with his childhood. He has a sister, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
He has one sister, So tell.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Me what happens. He's a young boy and he has
a sister, and his father is very troubled from the war.
It sounds like just from the beginning, Yeah, his.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Father was a troubled soul who had many struggles. They
moved around for work. He went to Vietnam and at
that point something really changed. His wife his name is Gloria,
as she recognized that something was very different with him,
that he was becoming a different person and didn't understand
why he would be violent at times or erratic and
(04:53):
impulsive and really demonstrated in a ray of emotions that
he didn't have before. And it was that time too
that like the abuse that he was exerting on the
family worsened, and that included Vince and his sister. So
there were moments of sexual abuse with the children as
they were growing up, and that was something that was
(05:13):
unfortunately a consistent threat in their lives growing up. It
was something that he's hid from Vince's mother often, but
was it really defined his childhood childhood of living with
uncertainty with his father, the childhood of experiencing sexual abuse
from their father and also physical abuse towards their mother.
So it was both ways.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
But he seems to overcome this. Does it sound like
he's having a backlash, you know, as he gets older,
as in he's taking this out on society or he
is seemingly troubled to other people. He goes to medical
school and becomes a successful doctor.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It's remarkable. Yeah, like that this man is a survivor.
You know, we talk in medicine about like what defines
a person, Like why are there people who succeed and
why are there people that you know, have a life
that's committed towards you know, PTSD, anxiety, etc. And Vince
Gilmer was clearly in the former category. He was a survivor.
(06:10):
You know, he ran away from home when he was
seventeen years old because he felt like his life was threatened,
finished high school on his own, went to the military,
succeeded there, came back and miraculously got into medical school.
He was never a great student and struggled with attention deficit,
but he made it through. He survived medical school, he
survived residency, was challenged by exam taking, which was very
(06:34):
hard for him. And you know, he was a unique
student and a unique resident. In family medicine, he would
do things that people didn't often understand, but now it's
easy to kind of understand. He was running from his past,
like his whole life, he was running from his family.
He was running from his father and really wanted to
make up I think for the behavior that he had
(06:54):
received from his father. And so when he was a resident,
he designed a project, you know, to help people who
were associated with sexual abuse, and committed himself to taking
care of children in adolescents to in his practice. So
he was not looking back. He was really just looking forward.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Was he speaking to his parents, because it seems clear
with what happens with his father they reconnect. Is it
happening at all as he's going through medical school or
is he completely estranged from his family?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
He was mostly estranged from his father. He and his
mother maintained relations, but their relationship was at times strained too.
So he got married married another doctor, and the two
of them founded this clinic together. And it was during
those first days that his father was really really coming
off the rails and was living in the streets and
(07:43):
doing drugs like he was not safe to live by himself,
having delusional behavior, very promiscuous at the time. And so
he eventually got his father placed in a mental hospital
in North Carolina called Broughton Hospital, which is our big
public hospital in western with and that's where he stayed.
That's where he stayed for a couple of years. You know.
(08:05):
One of the ironies is the beginning of the story
for me actually started back in two thousand and five
when I was doing one of my first clinical rotations
and it was at Broughton Hospital. It was at the
psychiatric hospital, and I got to know all the patients
and I got to know this man, Donald Gilmer, Donald
Dalton Gilmer. Oh wow, who was at the Jerry psych Unit.
I didn't know his story, but I, you know, I
(08:27):
spoke to him, and you know, knew his first name,
but didn't know much about him. Didn't know much about
me other than I was a medical student. That was
the summer before he was killed. Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So many intersections with this story and with your story.
What was his official diagnosis? Was it schizophrenia?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Don's diagnosis was thought to be schizophrenia.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Okay, so he's in a mental health facility. His wife,
who is Vince's mom, is are they divorced or are
they still married?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
They were divorced at that time.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay. Vince has been in contact with his mother and
he's been in contact with his sister. What ends up
changing between the summer that you meet down the father
and when all of this happens.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
What changed is that Vince's life started becoming more difficult,
and then the summer of that next year, he was
driving to take his medical boards and he had a
profound anxiety around test taking, and while driving to his boards,
he had an accident in his truck and his truck
flipped over hit a telephone pole. He was taken to
(09:30):
the hospital. He was a trauma patient. He was unconscious,
didn't know his own name at that time. And it
was after that summer that he started doing more poorly.
Getting through clinic was more difficult. He would have to
run next door during lunch to load up on caffeine
and chocolate just to make it through the afternoons. He
and his wife struggled more in their relationship, and it
(09:53):
was that winter that he and his wife decided to separate,
and throughout the spring, he found it more difficult to
run the practice by himself, to stay organized, to stay
well groomed. He was just like really struggling in his
life at that point. And it was the summer that
following summer in June that he drove to the mental
(10:15):
hospital to retrieve his dad, and he wanted to bring
his dad back to Ashville so that he could be
closer to him and have, you know, keep an eye
on him just down the street. There was an assisted
living facility, so he was going to watch him work
closely there.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
There are a couple of things that I need to
untangle first, So before we talk about why and the
hell that would ever happen, why would you go retrieve
a man who systematically abused you for a very long time.
Is Vince at this point also diagnosed with schizophrenia? Is
that what we're getting to is that there is a
similar diagnosis with the son as there was with the father.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Now, people thought Vince was just having midlife crisis. He
wasn't having symptoms of schizophrenia. And you know, I've always wondered,
like why did he go get his father? Being around
his father was the most stressful part of his life,
and he had done a good job like sort of
evaiding him over the several years. But it really speaks
to who he is as a person. The key despite
(11:11):
all the trauma, despite the stress and the tension, he
still wanted to care for his father. It was a
remarkable decision in my mind that he actively went to
pick him up. His intention was to bring him home.
He had made a contact with the assistant living facility there.
Everyone who was expecting them to arrive at six o'clock
that evening. He had a bed that was waiting for him,
the nurses were waiting for him. Everything was planned and
(11:34):
ready to go. But that's not what happened.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Do we have a sense for what did happen from
the time that he picked him up at the facility
to the time he was supposed to go to the
assisted living facility. Did doctor Gilmer before he was arrested
or during trial or any of this, did he say
what the conversation was like that might have triggered this.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
He writes about it very clearly. But what happened was
he en route back home, he wanted to give his
his dad a little outdoor outing, so he wanted to
take him to a lake that he could experience before
moving into this permanent assisted living facility. And during that
time he kept hearing voices in his head. And for
days leading up to this, he recognized that he was
(12:17):
hearing voices, voices that he couldn't control. And this was
also during a time that he stopped so precipitously stopped
his antidepressant, his SSRI. A lot of people have problems
when they stopped their SSRIs, and so he was realizing
that he couldn't stop these voices, and then his father
was there. They drove to in Arby's. His father started
(12:41):
humming a song that he used to hum when he
was a child, and this was an indication to him
that his father was going to had sexual abuse interest.
And that's what happened that day, and so he tried
to resist his father. Of course, he was stronger than
his father, and his father kept pushing it, according to him,
and at that point he couldn't resist the voices any
(13:02):
longer that we're telling him to kill his father. So
in that moment, he was purely delusional and did not
have control over his external voices.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Is doctor Gilmore saying that he believed that this was
going to happen, that his father was indicating that he
wanted to sexually abuse him as an adult at this lake.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, well, I know what Vince indicated, and that's his
father tried to aggress him. Wow that night.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, so there at the lake and he has these
voices in his head and he acts, so he strangles
his father. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That's correct?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
And what is his thinking after this, because he does
some planning that is a little surprising. And I'm sure
this is what made reporting for you complicated, is you've
got someone who clearly has a mental illness, but who
also is clearly thinking of a way to cover up
what he just did.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
You know, this is like part of any any of
these stories, right, like we want to know, like what
did happen in the moment? And you know, I don't
think Vince really knew what was happening in the moment,
like everything turned dark for him. He was resorting to
these sort of instincts of what to do. And you know,
I don't think the cover up was something that it
was certainly not an intentional process. I think it was
(14:13):
something he was just doing, just trying to react in
the moment. And it's easy to imagine in that moment
that he was completely disassociated, that he as most children
or people of abuse who when they are being abused,
they disassociated as a primal like defense mechanism. I think
that was happening for him too, And I think he
(14:33):
probably freaked out and was like, oh my gosh, what happened?
Who am I? What happened? And then you know, trying
to cover it up. But it clearly wasn't very well
thought through plan because he just put the body on
the side of the road and drove back home. He
didn't try to hide the body per se. He just
drove back home.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
But he did cut off his fingertips. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That is true? Well yeah, but he also left the
tag on its clothes that had its name and ID
number from in hospital. So yeah, a thinking person wouldn't
have done the act that way. Like that was an
act of desperation, an active delusion, and an active utter frustration.
And you know, it was also the culmination of his
(15:13):
whole life, Like his whole life had culminated in this
moment where he had escaped his past in large part
and then it all came back crashing upon him. In
that moment.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He has bloody rags also in his vehicle. I mean,
you're right, he's not doing a great job at a
cover up. It sounds like this is the one thing
that he thought of in his head that maybe could
help at that point, and the rest it was just panic, Yes,
I think. So what is the series of events that
happens after that? Someone obviously finds Don Gilmer on the
side of the road at some point.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So he was quickly found after this tragic event happened,
Like within minutes he was found. Somebody drove by and
spoted the body, and then you know, I think Vents
even like passed the police as he was driving out.
And so Vince came home and tried to clean himself
up and then went and saw patients for the next
three days in clinic as if nothing had ever happened.
(16:06):
I mean, this was a confusing part for a lot
of people to understand. It was confusing for the sheriff
and the judge and the jury, and for me to reconcile.
How could this have happened? How could a man have
committed this tragic killing and then gone to see patients
without them realizing that anything had happened. What does it
take to pull that off? And did he pull it
(16:27):
off because he really didn't know what happened, like he
had completely dissociated from it. Yeah, Or was it like
the final act of him trying to save himself after
practicing for a whole lifetime, trying to save himself from
his parents? You know, I guess it must have been
a really complex time for him during those first hours
of days after this happened, and then eventually the detective
(16:47):
caught up with him pretty quickly and was convinced that
the events was responsible.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Would the psychiatrist who evaluated vents say, this is a
hallmark of what he's suffering from with schizophrenia, where he
is able to disassociate himself, and it does not mean
that this was done even particularly out of malice. This
was just a part of what he was feeling based
on what happened to him as a child, and something
(17:14):
that his dad did clearly triggered it. Whether it was
attempted sexual assault or the song or just something being
in the same presence with him.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
The aggression that is directed towards him was I think
the trigger, you know, when you think about I mean,
we see patients, their threshold for buffering stress anxiety is
so so narrow, whether it be you know, their perpetual
state of PTSD or generalized anxiety. You know, for events
like he had just also had a traumatic brain injury
(17:43):
that can trigger a lot of people. You know, it's
very common for people to have emotional libility to be
easily triggered, irritable, agitated following a traumatic brain injury that
happened just a few months before this happened and.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
The divorce he was relatively newly separated and divorced from
his wife Truemic.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
The abrupt cessation of his medications was traumatic. We see
people all the time who have symptoms of withdrawal after
stopping SSRI. It's more commonplace than people realize, and we
see profound symptoms just from that. You know that on
top of history of PTSD, but also on top of
what we were beginning to see as another bizarre neurologic
(18:22):
process that later became clear and that no one knew
about at the time of the trial. When he showed
up for trial, he had these sort of bizarre symptoms.
Like he was it was difficult for him to put
words together. His posture and his gesticulations and his fingers
just like these sort of shaking movements that he had
was a little bit bizarre. They were triggered by the
(18:43):
police being close to him, triggered by his lawyer. They like,
they were easily triggered during that time, so much so
that he fired his lawyers. And what would be the
kind of craziest thing for someone to do for their
own murder trial, Who would be to fire your lawyer
and actually believe that you could do a better job,
and he did believe that he could do a better
job than his lawyer. People thought that in mostly this
(19:05):
was dictated by the actions of a forensic psychologist who
bought the diagnosis that Vince was a malingerer.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Now, what is that? Can you explain that malingering?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, malingering is simply that you're baking symptoms, okay, symptomology
for secondary gain. And so people thought that like he was,
he was playing crazy. He was like smart enough to
do so because he knew the symptoms as a doctor
and that he could pull it off, okay, with his history.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So this first forensic psychologist says, he's faking it. Obviously
this is cold blood and murder. Did anyone did detectives
or did the attorneys? Did his former defense attorneys bring
people to the stand at some point to say this
is what happened with his father, this is his family history,
this is his own erratic behavior that points to a
(19:55):
mental illness.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
None of it came up.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
What do you think the reason is, Well, the reason.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Is because he fired his lawyer, Yeah, and was representing
himself and was incapable of highlighting. Oh you know as
a clinician, in particular highlighting, Oh, maybe I had a
traumatic brain injury from the crash. Maybe I have underlying
mental illness because of my lifelong history of trauma. None
of that was clearly brought up, and he didn't have
a witness on his behalf. His witness was to be
(20:21):
his sister, who was to corroborate the lifelong history of abuse.
But his sister never made it. She never made it
to trial, and it was later believed that she was
actually murdered herself during the trial, and she has never been.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Seen again by who who would have done that?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
His mother thinks that she knows who did it. It
was a domestic abuse issue.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
So not related to the case. This is just a
really terrible coincidence. I wonder even if this came out
and was presented that he had been sexually abused by
(21:09):
his father when he was younger, do you think that
would have made any kind of a difference in the trial.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Well, I think if it had been corroborated, it certainly
would have been part of the equation. But because they
believed that he was cold blooded, they believed that he
was a malingerer, and so they didn't believe it. I
don't think the jury or the judge believed it. And
in the end, the judge condemned him as a cold
blooded murderer and offered the worst punishment that he could
(21:36):
for the Commonwealth of Virginia in that moment, which was
life without parole. He wasn't being tried for a capital crime.
You know, the witnesses that he called to the stand,
or people like his mother, his previous girlfriend who was
traumatized by this whole thing. So he really didn't have
a credible professional source to say he even asked the
right questions.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Now, in other trials, when a defendant says I want
to find everybody and I don't need representation, I have
often read that the judge will still assign them a
defense attorney for reference, because otherwise it leaves them wide
open for a fantastic appeal. Did that not happen? He
didn't even have somebody sitting there with legal expertise in
(22:17):
case he needed something.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
You he did the lawyer there he fired. The judge
did ask him to sit in the courtroom, okay, but
he wasn't very helpful.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So he is found guilty and he has been sentenced
to life and he begins serving his sentence. Do you
have an idea of what life was like for him
or has been in a penitentiary. I mean, this must
just be incredible. I'm sure there are a lot of
details about the lack of treatment that he's had for
his mental illness, so.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
That you know, this was like the big discovery for
me because when I started becoming curious about him, and
eventually when I went to visit him in person, which
was something I felt like I had to do. I
had to see him. My life was becoming complicated and
full of paranoi at times, and a patient told me
that the defense was getting out and that of course
he would come find me like that I would be
(23:08):
like a potential victim for him. And you know, I
didn't really take that so seriously, but it started making
me think about, gosh, what you know, I inherited his life,
like I took his practice. I took the joy that
he had as a physician. I was continuing in the
life that he had dreamed about his whole life, and
(23:28):
so you know, it made sense that if he got out,
he would you know, I didn't know what he would do,
but I decided that I needed to know. I needed
to visit him, and I also wanted to tell him
that his patients loved him. He was still revered even
after all these years, he was still revered as their
good doctor. And I felt compelled to tell him. And
I also started feeling a great a connection with him
(23:51):
from the stories of his patients and wanted to know
the truth. And so Sarahcane of this American life, the
two of us went to the prison to visit him,
which is prison called Wallace Ridge, which is a supermax
prison in Virginia. And that was the first prison I'd
ever witnessed. It was the first time had set foot
in the prison. So it was a big trigger, you know,
for me to see what the inside of a prison
(24:11):
looks like and to begin hearing stories from vents which
were horrific. At that point, he you know, he was
like emaciated. He was only fifty years old at that point,
but he looked like he was maybe seventy. He didn't
have any teeth because they had all been beaten out
of his head. He had spent countless weeks months in
solitary confinement at that point, no treatment. I'm assuming, well,
(24:35):
no treatment. I mean they this was like ten years
into his incarceration, and they still believed that he was
faking these symptoms. And the symptoms at this point were
he was like shuffling to walk, he had these uncontrollable
movements in his hands, and so people just kind of
wrote it off like he's still faking, or maybe he's
depressed and anxious. But he wasn't being treated with anything.
(24:56):
He wasn't being treated with therapy, he wasn't being treated
with medications. It was an animal trying to survive in prison.
And that was what I saw for the very first time,
and it was striking. I mean, it was traumatizing to
witness that.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
What is Sarah's role? Did you all produce an episode
of this American life for this case?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah? So Sarah and I worked together for six months.
At some point I realized that I needed some guardrails
and some mentoring to try to dig into what happened
to him. So I got connected with Sarah and we
did the deep dive together, and she gave me an
introduction to journalism and really helped push the process much
faster than that I would have ever done on my own.
(25:36):
Like we blazed through six months of investigation that would
have taken me years to do probably, So that was
her role. And then we put together a piece for
this American life called Doctor Gilmer and mister Hyde.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
What is the takeaway? Do you think from the majority
of listeners to that episode and people who read your
book that there is just a tragedy with mental illness
and in the criminal justice system and the intersection between
the two, that we are just failing people who were
in prison for very very complex issues.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Well, the takeaway for me was was defined by a
later event. After seeing him for the first time, I
realized like there's something wrong with him, either deeply psychiatric
or neurologic process. And so I went back and dragged
a psychiatrist kind of bandido into the prison so he
could observe him with me. And it was clear watching
him that he had a neurologic process. So as we
(26:25):
exited the prison, the other doctor, doctor Bowie, brought up
and said it possibly as Huntington's disease. Walk into the car.
We put the diagnosis together and then you know, check, check, check.
All these things they all lined up with Huntington's disease,
which is a rare genetic disorder. So for me, like,
you know, what is the story about, Like the story was,
(26:46):
you know, how do you get a man out of prison?
And the first step was making the official diagnosis, which
meant finding an ally in prison who later became the
psychiatrist in a different prison. Because Vince threatened to kill
himself in the week after after I saw him, they
moved him to a different prison and there was an
amazing psychiatrist there named doctor Colin Angelicer who was able
(27:09):
to peer through all of these previous biases that had
been made about Bence Gilmer and it was like, that's bullshit,
and started seeing him as you know, as a tabula
raza and trying to look at him for who he
was and making sense of his history, and together we
were able to get the genetic testing which confirmed that
he had Huntington's disease. And then Sarah left me to
(27:31):
continue with her life because she was starting the serial
podcast at that point. She discovered the Anon case through
one of the lawyers that we were working with, so
the serial podcast was actually born from Provitz's case, and
she asked me, what what are you going to do now?
And so that was also kind of what the book
is about, Like what am I supposed to do? We
have this terminally ill, mentally ill, neurologically ill patient who's
(27:54):
in prison now, who never should have stepped one foot
in prison. Yet the diagnosis had been made before, including
the abuse, including the TBI, including the Huntingdon's disease, it
would have been clear that he needed to be in
a mental hospital. And so then of course I jumped
into becoming a student of law, trying to figure out, well,
what what does it take? You know, is this a
habeas corpus problem? Is this a clemency problem? Trying to
(28:17):
put together a legal team that would would come together
for free with me to help save this man. Thereafter
was the next ten years, still leading up to today,
like trying to liberate him, learning about the politics of Virginia.
How do you grant clemency for someone who's committed murder?
And being disappointed at every turn, learning that the process
(28:38):
is like almost impossible, like to get someone out of prison,
even when the stars are lining up. Because now Vince,
you know, had millions of people who listened to the story.
We had all the pr that we needed. We had
Ira Glass advocating for us. We had teams of people
who were lining up. We had lawyers coming out of
the woodworks who wanted to help support our case, and
(28:59):
we eventually had a formidable team with help from the
Innocence Project of Virginia to help work on this case.
So we did, and then we had rejection after rejection.
We had clemency rejection by the next two governors.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Based on what grounds though, I mean, what was the
reason given.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
They don't give you a reason. Our assumption or you know,
through the grapevine, was that he wasn't sick enough, that
he wasn't sick enough to be released. I mean, even
after this American life story came out, there were a
series of people, including the judge who inspired the release
of the psychiatrists who represent events who took care events
(29:38):
in prison. That psychiatrist was eventually let go after a
forty you know, plus year career in forensic psychology. This
was what we were fighting. We were fighting also a
governor who was being indicted himself. We were fighting against
another governor who wanted to be president of the United States,
and so you know, we were learning that being granted. See,
(30:00):
it's not about it's not a clinical decision. It's not
always a humanistic decision. It's oftentimes grounded in politics.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
So what ultimately ends up happening with Vince Gilmer.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So, well, ultimately I become so disillusioned and angered by
this process that I thought would take us weeks to
get him out of prison. And after the first rejection,
that's when I decided, well, I'm going to write this story.
I'm going to tell this in a book in a
way that a lot of people can understand, Like, what
actually did happen to him? Like? What are all the
(30:32):
insults that contribute to someone's mental capacity to be compromised?
And I wanted people to see that. I wanted people
to see events for the good person he was, and
not this one horrific event that happened in his life.
Like I wanted the whole story to be born out.
I wanted people to see the politics of it. I
wanted people to realize that rehabilitation doesn't take place in prison.
(30:53):
I mean, I wanted people to understand, like, this isn't
a problem that's just defined by a bad trial or
you know, dirty politics, Like this is a problem that's
defined by overall the lack of mental health resources in
our country, And as a primary care doctor, I see
this every day, trying to get someone into one of
our mental health facilities. So playing the lottery, you know,
(31:15):
realizing that, you know, the scarcity of psychiatrists in our country,
especially in reural places, is tremendous. I wanted people to
see that. I wanted people to understand that humans are
all vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Is doctor Gilmer still in the penitentiary or has anything
happened with politics?
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Now?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
There's a new governor writing in Virginia, relatively new in Virginia.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
So the Governor northumb rejected our clemency petition. This was
eighteen months ago, and I was furiously writing, writing, writing,
The publication of the book wasn't going to come out
until after the governor's term. But Valentine Penguin ran the
mouse enabled me to get some pre release copies that
I flooded the office with. And you know, we were
(31:57):
at this point grasping for every string to get pulled,
trying to build relationships within the governor's circle. And you know,
I have no idea what pushed it across the line.
You know, I know there were people that read this story,
read Vince's story, in my book. But on his last
day in office, he reversed his clency rejection decision, which
is kind of unprecedented. So I thought at that point,
(32:20):
oh wow, we were rejoicing. We did it. You know,
we spent ten years working on this, and now he
was going to finally find a hospital, which was the
only thing we were asking for the entire time was
just to get him to a hospital. We weren't asking
for freedom, complete freedom. We were asking for a hospital.
And this next act of the story is like, oh
(32:41):
my god, it has been impossible to get him into
a hospital. Virginia has closed their doors to him universally.
We received no support from the Department of Mental Health
nor the Department of Corrections to get him to a hospital.
And the tragedy is that there's a mental hospital that
shares the parking lot with the prison where he's at.
(33:01):
You can literally throw a stone from the front porch
of the prison into the mental health center. They wouldn't
help negotiate us getting him there, which I saw is
absolutely inhumane.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
But he has clemency. I mean, can't you just go
what happens now?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Clemency is you have to play by the rules of
the clemency is determined by the governor. In this clemency
which like he sorted out and literally the last hours
of his governorship. It wasn't very detailed or clear, but
it's simply stated that Vince was responsible to get himself
into a hospital, which is impossible. You can't do that
without internal help from the Department of Mental Health. So
(33:39):
we've been looking for places in North Carolina to get
him into as a transitional place to eventually get him
to a place actually brought in hospital where he was,
where his father was, it would be a place that
would be ideal to take care of his needs. We've
been rejected by five different private hospitals, and many of
whom maybe don't have the resources to take We have
(34:00):
a patient like Bence, but he's been surviving in prison
basically alone, just fine, Like any place will be better
than prison. But there you know, a lot of hospitals
don't want any risk of negative pr or they don't
want any risk of having a quote unquote dangerous patient
on their wards, and so that's made it an uphill
(34:21):
battle to get him out. So we did a fundraiser
and raised one hundred thousand dollars a month or two go,
and we're trying to use that money to help leverage
opening the doors, which it's been very helpful because the
Attorney General wants to know that we have money to
be able to pay for a hospital. They want to
have assurance that he will actually make it in. And
so thanks to Quentin Quarantino and others, Trudy Styler and
(34:45):
Sting like, you know, some people really contributed to Bence's cause.
That has enabled us to be able to have other conversations.
So we were just rejected by another hospital this week,
and I think we have another option that I can't
speak of yet that's coming up, but fingers crossed that
in the next few weeks we're gonna have him out.
But he's he's the only clemency granted person I can
(35:07):
only imagine who has spent more than a year in
prison still after his clemency freedom, and he still continues
to be put in solitary confinement.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
From time to time because of behavior.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Because of they don't understand him, like they don't understand
why he can sometimes like blurt out things that maybe inappropriate.
But he's a man who's struggling for his life with
mental illness. Who's you know, what's the worst thing you
could do to a patient like that is put them
in solitaire confinement?
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Does he understand what's happening? Does he understand what you've
done over the past decade and Sarah and all of
these advocates and the Innocence Project, and does he comprehend
any of that based on what you know?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
He comprehends all of it. I saw him two weeks
ago in the prison. The warden graciously let me into
to see him. You know, all prisoners you probably know
have been essentially in soult or confinement throughout COVID because
they haven't allowed visitors. So this was the first time
for me to see him since the beginning of COVID,
and he just inspires me. He holds on to like this,
(36:12):
this optimism of getting out. He still has this optimism
of being able to give back in some way to students,
to teach them about Huntington's. Huntington's which of course did
not like make him kill his father. Huntington's is not,
I want to be clear, it's not a killer disease.
He was compromised by all these other things too. But yeah,
(36:32):
he's so grateful and humble and can't wait to get out.
But you know, I feel guilty. I feel extremely guilty
because I haven't gotten him out. It's taken over a
year and we've had these failures, and I keep telling him,
one more week, one more a month, it's going to
happen for Thanksgiving, It's going to happen at Christmas. Oh
(36:54):
that's it's going to happen in New Years. Like, you know,
like it's hard for him to even believe what I
tell him. More and each of these junctures, like we've
had like great confidence that he was going to get
at Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, it's hard to not give him hope when he's
struggling so much. But boy, that hurts when it doesn't
work out. It hurts both of you.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, yeah, well it sort of contributes to the kind
of learned helplessness. I think that all incarcerated people experienced
at some point when they no longer have hope, they
no longer have anything to dream about. And you know,
it's like just another failure for him, like one more
failure after failure, And of course he's wondering, what, why
don't these hospitals want to take me? Like what I
(37:35):
don't understand that I'm a doctor who's committed myself to service.
This thing happened. I'm cleared, I'm clemency granted, why would
these hospitals not want to take me? So, you know,
trying to explain that kind of thing to him is
so hard.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Also, Yeah, I think it's remarkable your story that you
come to this town. You're a young doctor, you hear
this story and it has very clearly affected you changed
your whole life, sort of a career change trajectory, you
become an author. To me, it really just shows it's
an illustration of how one person, one event, one crime,
(38:13):
can shift the lives of so many people. It's remarkable.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Well, it's true. You know when you look at how
illness affects a family too, where you look at how
one incarcerated person in a family that may have been
a result of, you know, one episode of methom betaine
use that led to a tragic event. You know that
that affects everybody. It affects the person, the family, It
trickles down, you know, throughout the community. Even Yeah, so Vince,
(38:39):
the story is that like his family has been, it's
just had a series of tragedies, you know, for that began,
you know, from his great grandfather and his grandfather who
also had hunting tents, because if you have Huntington's, then
you have a fifty to fifty chance of getting it yourself.
And so it's it's been this endless cycle of abuse
and trauma that that's contributed, you know, ultimately to the fence.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
He's lucky to have you.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Well, what am I supposed to do? I mean, this
is what we're supposed to do as doctors, is to advocate,
you know, we think of family medicine in one of
our four days as advocacy. And I mean obviously, like
what does it take for me to understand that the
stars like aligned for me to be in this place.
I'm not a super religious guy, but it feels like
(39:23):
that this was supposed to happen and that was put
in his path.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
white production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John
Bradley Curtis Heath is our composer. Our work by Nick Toga,
(40:01):
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions
(40:23):
for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
They were hurt by what happened as well, so there
was an opportunity for them to heal and for me
to try to begin to understand what happened to this
man that I was beginning to perceive as as a
good doctor who had done this horrific crime.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold war Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:54):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. When doctor Benjamin Gilmer takes over a
small clinic in North Carolina, he's told that he is
(01:17):
actually the second doctor Gilmer to practice there, and the
first doctor Gilmer had murdered his own father in two
thousand and four. The book The Other Doctor Gilmer details
the lives of both doctor Gilmers and how their lives intersected.
Take me back to the beginning. How did you even
(01:37):
come across this story? What were your life circumstances.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This is a story that found me. I didn't look
for it. It's a story just back to the very
beginning that began with me starting as a fledgeling doctor
in my first job, really just trying to find myself
as a physician, and then realizing that my predecessor had
brutally killed his father. And then I realized that we
shared the same last name, which was a crazy way
(02:02):
to start my journey as a first year out transitional doctor.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
This is rural North Carolina, which makes it even more
odd that the two of you shared a last name.
Were you both general practitioners? Is that what your role
was in this area?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
We're both family doctors. So he started this clinic and
then I later sort of inherited it.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Is it a relatively small town, Fletcher? What was it
like when you were there and then when he was there.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It's a small place that's outside of Ashville, small community
sits in a valley. The clinic serves the people of
the valley and the hollers beyond it. It's a very
tight knit community that's made up of a lot of
different people, mostly rural, but now that Ashville is sort
of spreading into the communities around it, it's a diverse
group of people. But he was the only doctor during
(02:49):
that time, like in the valley, so he was a
big part of that community. He was really tied to
the schools like he did lots of things in the community,
and everybody was racked when this happened because they were like,
what the hell happened?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You know, let's talk about him as a doctor and
what everyone found so appealing about him. How long had
he been practicing in Fletcher before all of this sort
of fell apart in two thousand and four, for about
four years.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
He was also young in his career. It was in
his fourth year that the event happened. This is the
interesting part of Vince Gilmer, or any person who's branded
as a criminal or as branded as a murderer. You
know what makes a murder, you know, And for him,
you can go way back to his early childhood and
see the vast amount of trauma that affected him. You know,
(03:37):
the bizarre things that he was starting to do like
that people didn't quite understand or you know what formed
his personality that people thought was just a little quirky.
But you know, for me, the process was kind of
going back retrospectively in dissecting his brain in a way
that was my previous life was a neurobiologist and I
studied psychology, So it was really interesting to go back
and just think about, what are the thousand hits took
(04:00):
him down, the aspects of his life that really contributed
to his mind going awry, And they're almost infinite when
you think about it, But there are five primary things
that really affected his demidse that contributed to his brain
that was beginning to come.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Apart with his childhood. He has a sister, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
He has one sister, So tell.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Me what happens. He's a young boy and he has
a sister, and his father is very troubled from the war.
It sounds like just from the beginning, Yeah, his.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Father was a troubled soul who had many struggles. They
moved around for work. He went to Vietnam and at
that point something really changed. His wife his name is Gloria,
as she recognized that something was very different with him,
that he was becoming a different person and didn't understand
why he would be violent at times or erratic and
(04:53):
impulsive and really demonstrated in a ray of emotions that
he didn't have before. And it was that time too
that like the abuse that he was exerting on the
family worsened, and that included Vince and his sister. So
there were moments of sexual abuse with the children as
they were growing up, and that was something that was
(05:13):
unfortunately a consistent threat in their lives growing up. It
was something that he's hid from Vince's mother often, but
was it really defined his childhood childhood of living with
uncertainty with his father, the childhood of experiencing sexual abuse
from their father and also physical abuse towards their mother.
So it was both ways.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
But he seems to overcome this. Does it sound like
he's having a backlash, you know, as he gets older,
as in he's taking this out on society or he
is seemingly troubled to other people. He goes to medical
school and becomes a successful doctor.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It's remarkable. Yeah, like that this man is a survivor.
You know, we talk in medicine about like what defines
a person, Like why are there people who succeed and
why are there people that you know, have a life
that's committed towards you know, PTSD, anxiety, etc. And Vince
Gilmer was clearly in the former category. He was a survivor.
(06:10):
You know, he ran away from home when he was
seventeen years old because he felt like his life was threatened,
finished high school on his own, went to the military,
succeeded there, came back and miraculously got into medical school.
He was never a great student and struggled with attention deficit,
but he made it through. He survived medical school, he
survived residency, was challenged by exam taking, which was very
(06:34):
hard for him. And you know, he was a unique
student and a unique resident. In family medicine, he would
do things that people didn't often understand, but now it's
easy to kind of understand. He was running from his past,
like his whole life, he was running from his family.
He was running from his father and really wanted to
make up I think for the behavior that he had
(06:54):
received from his father. And so when he was a resident,
he designed a project, you know, to help people who
were associated with sexual abuse, and committed himself to taking
care of children in adolescents to in his practice. So
he was not looking back. He was really just looking forward.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Was he speaking to his parents, because it seems clear
with what happens with his father they reconnect. Is it
happening at all as he's going through medical school or
is he completely estranged from his family?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
He was mostly estranged from his father. He and his
mother maintained relations, but their relationship was at times strained too.
So he got married married another doctor, and the two
of them founded this clinic together. And it was during
those first days that his father was really really coming
off the rails and was living in the streets and
(07:43):
doing drugs like he was not safe to live by himself,
having delusional behavior, very promiscuous at the time. And so
he eventually got his father placed in a mental hospital
in North Carolina called Broughton Hospital, which is our big
public hospital in western with and that's where he stayed.
That's where he stayed for a couple of years. You know.
(08:05):
One of the ironies is the beginning of the story
for me actually started back in two thousand and five
when I was doing one of my first clinical rotations
and it was at Broughton Hospital. It was at the
psychiatric hospital, and I got to know all the patients
and I got to know this man, Donald Gilmer, Donald
Dalton Gilmer. Oh wow, who was at the Jerry psych Unit.
I didn't know his story, but I, you know, I
(08:27):
spoke to him, and you know, knew his first name,
but didn't know much about him. Didn't know much about
me other than I was a medical student. That was
the summer before he was killed. Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So many intersections with this story and with your story.
What was his official diagnosis? Was it schizophrenia?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Don's diagnosis was thought to be schizophrenia.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Okay, so he's in a mental health facility. His wife,
who is Vince's mom, is are they divorced or are
they still married?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
They were divorced at that time.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay. Vince has been in contact with his mother and
he's been in contact with his sister. What ends up
changing between the summer that you meet down the father
and when all of this happens.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
What changed is that Vince's life started becoming more difficult,
and then the summer of that next year, he was
driving to take his medical boards and he had a
profound anxiety around test taking, and while driving to his boards,
he had an accident in his truck and his truck
flipped over hit a telephone pole. He was taken to
(09:30):
the hospital. He was a trauma patient. He was unconscious,
didn't know his own name at that time. And it
was after that summer that he started doing more poorly.
Getting through clinic was more difficult. He would have to
run next door during lunch to load up on caffeine
and chocolate just to make it through the afternoons. He
and his wife struggled more in their relationship, and it
(09:53):
was that winter that he and his wife decided to separate,
and throughout the spring, he found it more difficult to
run the practice by himself, to stay organized, to stay
well groomed. He was just like really struggling in his
life at that point. And it was the summer that
following summer in June that he drove to the mental
(10:15):
hospital to retrieve his dad, and he wanted to bring
his dad back to Ashville so that he could be
closer to him and have, you know, keep an eye
on him just down the street. There was an assisted
living facility, so he was going to watch him work
closely there.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
There are a couple of things that I need to
untangle first, So before we talk about why and the
hell that would ever happen, why would you go retrieve
a man who systematically abused you for a very long time.
Is Vince at this point also diagnosed with schizophrenia? Is
that what we're getting to is that there is a
similar diagnosis with the son as there was with the father.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Now, people thought Vince was just having midlife crisis. He
wasn't having symptoms of schizophrenia. And you know, I've always wondered,
like why did he go get his father? Being around
his father was the most stressful part of his life,
and he had done a good job like sort of
evaiding him over the several years. But it really speaks
to who he is as a person. The key despite
(11:11):
all the trauma, despite the stress and the tension, he
still wanted to care for his father. It was a
remarkable decision in my mind that he actively went to
pick him up. His intention was to bring him home.
He had made a contact with the assistant living facility there.
Everyone who was expecting them to arrive at six o'clock
that evening. He had a bed that was waiting for him,
the nurses were waiting for him. Everything was planned and
(11:34):
ready to go. But that's not what happened.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Do we have a sense for what did happen from
the time that he picked him up at the facility
to the time he was supposed to go to the
assisted living facility. Did doctor Gilmer before he was arrested
or during trial or any of this, did he say
what the conversation was like that might have triggered this.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
He writes about it very clearly. But what happened was
he en route back home, he wanted to give his
his dad a little outdoor outing, so he wanted to
take him to a lake that he could experience before
moving into this permanent assisted living facility. And during that
time he kept hearing voices in his head. And for
days leading up to this, he recognized that he was
(12:17):
hearing voices, voices that he couldn't control. And this was
also during a time that he stopped so precipitously stopped
his antidepressant, his SSRI. A lot of people have problems
when they stopped their SSRIs, and so he was realizing
that he couldn't stop these voices, and then his father
was there. They drove to in Arby's. His father started
(12:41):
humming a song that he used to hum when he
was a child, and this was an indication to him
that his father was going to had sexual abuse interest.
And that's what happened that day, and so he tried
to resist his father. Of course, he was stronger than
his father, and his father kept pushing it, according to him,
and at that point he couldn't resist the voices any
(13:02):
longer that we're telling him to kill his father. So
in that moment, he was purely delusional and did not
have control over his external voices.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Is doctor Gilmore saying that he believed that this was
going to happen, that his father was indicating that he
wanted to sexually abuse him as an adult at this lake.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, well, I know what Vince indicated, and that's his
father tried to aggress him. Wow that night.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, so there at the lake and he has these
voices in his head and he acts, so he strangles
his father. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That's correct?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
And what is his thinking after this, because he does
some planning that is a little surprising. And I'm sure
this is what made reporting for you complicated, is you've
got someone who clearly has a mental illness, but who
also is clearly thinking of a way to cover up
what he just did.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
You know, this is like part of any any of
these stories, right, like we want to know, like what
did happen in the moment? And you know, I don't
think Vince really knew what was happening in the moment,
like everything turned dark for him. He was resorting to
these sort of instincts of what to do. And you know,
I don't think the cover up was something that it
was certainly not an intentional process. I think it was
(14:13):
something he was just doing, just trying to react in
the moment. And it's easy to imagine in that moment
that he was completely disassociated, that he as most children
or people of abuse who when they are being abused,
they disassociated as a primal like defense mechanism. I think
that was happening for him too, And I think he
(14:33):
probably freaked out and was like, oh my gosh, what happened?
Who am I? What happened? And then you know, trying
to cover it up. But it clearly wasn't very well
thought through plan because he just put the body on
the side of the road and drove back home. He
didn't try to hide the body per se. He just
drove back home.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
But he did cut off his fingertips. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That is true? Well yeah, but he also left the
tag on its clothes that had its name and ID
number from in hospital. So yeah, a thinking person wouldn't
have done the act that way. Like that was an
act of desperation, an active delusion, and an active utter frustration.
And you know, it was also the culmination of his
(15:13):
whole life, Like his whole life had culminated in this
moment where he had escaped his past in large part
and then it all came back crashing upon him. In
that moment.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He has bloody rags also in his vehicle. I mean,
you're right, he's not doing a great job at a
cover up. It sounds like this is the one thing
that he thought of in his head that maybe could
help at that point, and the rest it was just panic, Yes,
I think. So what is the series of events that
happens after that? Someone obviously finds Don Gilmer on the
side of the road at some point.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So he was quickly found after this tragic event happened,
Like within minutes he was found. Somebody drove by and
spoted the body, and then you know, I think Vents
even like passed the police as he was driving out.
And so Vince came home and tried to clean himself
up and then went and saw patients for the next
three days in clinic as if nothing had ever happened.
(16:06):
I mean, this was a confusing part for a lot
of people to understand. It was confusing for the sheriff
and the judge and the jury, and for me to reconcile.
How could this have happened? How could a man have
committed this tragic killing and then gone to see patients
without them realizing that anything had happened. What does it
take to pull that off? And did he pull it
(16:27):
off because he really didn't know what happened, like he
had completely dissociated from it. Yeah, Or was it like
the final act of him trying to save himself after
practicing for a whole lifetime, trying to save himself from
his parents? You know, I guess it must have been
a really complex time for him during those first hours
of days after this happened, and then eventually the detective
(16:47):
caught up with him pretty quickly and was convinced that
the events was responsible.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Would the psychiatrist who evaluated vents say, this is a
hallmark of what he's suffering from with schizophrenia, where he
is able to disassociate himself, and it does not mean
that this was done even particularly out of malice. This
was just a part of what he was feeling based
on what happened to him as a child, and something
(17:14):
that his dad did clearly triggered it. Whether it was
attempted sexual assault or the song or just something being
in the same presence with him.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
The aggression that is directed towards him was I think
the trigger, you know, when you think about I mean,
we see patients, their threshold for buffering stress anxiety is
so so narrow, whether it be you know, their perpetual
state of PTSD or generalized anxiety. You know, for events
like he had just also had a traumatic brain injury
(17:43):
that can trigger a lot of people. You know, it's
very common for people to have emotional libility to be
easily triggered, irritable, agitated following a traumatic brain injury that
happened just a few months before this happened and.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
The divorce he was relatively newly separated and divorced from
his wife Truemic.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
The abrupt cessation of his medications was traumatic. We see
people all the time who have symptoms of withdrawal after
stopping SSRI. It's more commonplace than people realize, and we
see profound symptoms just from that. You know that on
top of history of PTSD, but also on top of
what we were beginning to see as another bizarre neurologic
(18:22):
process that later became clear and that no one knew
about at the time of the trial. When he showed
up for trial, he had these sort of bizarre symptoms.
Like he was it was difficult for him to put
words together. His posture and his gesticulations and his fingers
just like these sort of shaking movements that he had
was a little bit bizarre. They were triggered by the
(18:43):
police being close to him, triggered by his lawyer. They like,
they were easily triggered during that time, so much so
that he fired his lawyers. And what would be the
kind of craziest thing for someone to do for their
own murder trial, Who would be to fire your lawyer
and actually believe that you could do a better job,
and he did believe that he could do a better
job than his lawyer. People thought that in mostly this
(19:05):
was dictated by the actions of a forensic psychologist who
bought the diagnosis that Vince was a malingerer.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Now, what is that? Can you explain that malingering?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, malingering is simply that you're baking symptoms, okay, symptomology
for secondary gain. And so people thought that like he was,
he was playing crazy. He was like smart enough to
do so because he knew the symptoms as a doctor
and that he could pull it off, okay, with his history.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So this first forensic psychologist says, he's faking it. Obviously
this is cold blood and murder. Did anyone did detectives
or did the attorneys? Did his former defense attorneys bring
people to the stand at some point to say this
is what happened with his father, this is his family history,
this is his own erratic behavior that points to a
(19:55):
mental illness.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
None of it came up.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
What do you think the reason is, Well, the reason.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Is because he fired his lawyer, Yeah, and was representing
himself and was incapable of highlighting. Oh you know as
a clinician, in particular highlighting, Oh, maybe I had a
traumatic brain injury from the crash. Maybe I have underlying
mental illness because of my lifelong history of trauma. None
of that was clearly brought up, and he didn't have
a witness on his behalf. His witness was to be
(20:21):
his sister, who was to corroborate the lifelong history of abuse.
But his sister never made it. She never made it
to trial, and it was later believed that she was
actually murdered herself during the trial, and she has never been.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Seen again by who who would have done that?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
His mother thinks that she knows who did it. It
was a domestic abuse issue.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
So not related to the case. This is just a
really terrible coincidence. I wonder even if this came out
and was presented that he had been sexually abused by
(21:09):
his father when he was younger, do you think that
would have made any kind of a difference in the trial.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Well, I think if it had been corroborated, it certainly
would have been part of the equation. But because they
believed that he was cold blooded, they believed that he
was a malingerer, and so they didn't believe it. I
don't think the jury or the judge believed it. And
in the end, the judge condemned him as a cold
blooded murderer and offered the worst punishment that he could
(21:36):
for the Commonwealth of Virginia in that moment, which was
life without parole. He wasn't being tried for a capital crime.
You know, the witnesses that he called to the stand,
or people like his mother, his previous girlfriend who was
traumatized by this whole thing. So he really didn't have
a credible professional source to say he even asked the
right questions.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Now, in other trials, when a defendant says I want
to find everybody and I don't need representation, I have
often read that the judge will still assign them a
defense attorney for reference, because otherwise it leaves them wide
open for a fantastic appeal. Did that not happen? He
didn't even have somebody sitting there with legal expertise in
(22:17):
case he needed something.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
You he did the lawyer there he fired. The judge
did ask him to sit in the courtroom, okay, but
he wasn't very helpful.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So he is found guilty and he has been sentenced
to life and he begins serving his sentence. Do you
have an idea of what life was like for him
or has been in a penitentiary. I mean, this must
just be incredible. I'm sure there are a lot of
details about the lack of treatment that he's had for
his mental illness, so.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
That you know, this was like the big discovery for
me because when I started becoming curious about him, and
eventually when I went to visit him in person, which
was something I felt like I had to do. I
had to see him. My life was becoming complicated and
full of paranoi at times, and a patient told me
that the defense was getting out and that of course
he would come find me like that I would be
(23:08):
like a potential victim for him. And you know, I
didn't really take that so seriously, but it started making
me think about, gosh, what you know, I inherited his life,
like I took his practice. I took the joy that
he had as a physician. I was continuing in the
life that he had dreamed about his whole life, and
(23:28):
so you know, it made sense that if he got out,
he would you know, I didn't know what he would do,
but I decided that I needed to know. I needed
to visit him, and I also wanted to tell him
that his patients loved him. He was still revered even
after all these years, he was still revered as their
good doctor. And I felt compelled to tell him. And
I also started feeling a great a connection with him
(23:51):
from the stories of his patients and wanted to know
the truth. And so Sarahcane of this American life, the
two of us went to the prison to visit him,
which is prison called Wallace Ridge, which is a supermax
prison in Virginia. And that was the first prison I'd
ever witnessed. It was the first time had set foot
in the prison. So it was a big trigger, you know,
for me to see what the inside of a prison
(24:11):
looks like and to begin hearing stories from vents which
were horrific. At that point, he you know, he was
like emaciated. He was only fifty years old at that point,
but he looked like he was maybe seventy. He didn't
have any teeth because they had all been beaten out
of his head. He had spent countless weeks months in
solitary confinement at that point, no treatment. I'm assuming, well,
(24:35):
no treatment. I mean they this was like ten years
into his incarceration, and they still believed that he was
faking these symptoms. And the symptoms at this point were
he was like shuffling to walk, he had these uncontrollable
movements in his hands, and so people just kind of
wrote it off like he's still faking, or maybe he's
depressed and anxious. But he wasn't being treated with anything.
(24:56):
He wasn't being treated with therapy, he wasn't being treated
with medications. It was an animal trying to survive in prison.
And that was what I saw for the very first time,
and it was striking. I mean, it was traumatizing to
witness that.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
What is Sarah's role? Did you all produce an episode
of this American life for this case?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah? So Sarah and I worked together for six months.
At some point I realized that I needed some guardrails
and some mentoring to try to dig into what happened
to him. So I got connected with Sarah and we
did the deep dive together, and she gave me an
introduction to journalism and really helped push the process much
faster than that I would have ever done on my own.
(25:36):
Like we blazed through six months of investigation that would
have taken me years to do probably, So that was
her role. And then we put together a piece for
this American life called Doctor Gilmer and mister Hyde.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
What is the takeaway? Do you think from the majority
of listeners to that episode and people who read your
book that there is just a tragedy with mental illness
and in the criminal justice system and the intersection between
the two, that we are just failing people who were
in prison for very very complex issues.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Well, the takeaway for me was was defined by a
later event. After seeing him for the first time, I
realized like there's something wrong with him, either deeply psychiatric
or neurologic process. And so I went back and dragged
a psychiatrist kind of bandido into the prison so he
could observe him with me. And it was clear watching
him that he had a neurologic process. So as we
(26:25):
exited the prison, the other doctor, doctor Bowie, brought up
and said it possibly as Huntington's disease. Walk into the car.
We put the diagnosis together and then you know, check, check, check.
All these things they all lined up with Huntington's disease,
which is a rare genetic disorder. So for me, like,
you know, what is the story about, Like the story was,
(26:46):
you know, how do you get a man out of prison?
And the first step was making the official diagnosis, which
meant finding an ally in prison who later became the
psychiatrist in a different prison. Because Vince threatened to kill
himself in the week after after I saw him, they
moved him to a different prison and there was an
amazing psychiatrist there named doctor Colin Angelicer who was able
(27:09):
to peer through all of these previous biases that had
been made about Bence Gilmer and it was like, that's bullshit,
and started seeing him as you know, as a tabula
raza and trying to look at him for who he
was and making sense of his history, and together we
were able to get the genetic testing which confirmed that
he had Huntington's disease. And then Sarah left me to
(27:31):
continue with her life because she was starting the serial
podcast at that point. She discovered the Anon case through
one of the lawyers that we were working with, so
the serial podcast was actually born from Provitz's case, and
she asked me, what what are you going to do now?
And so that was also kind of what the book
is about, Like what am I supposed to do? We
have this terminally ill, mentally ill, neurologically ill patient who's
(27:54):
in prison now, who never should have stepped one foot
in prison. Yet the diagnosis had been made before, including
the abuse, including the TBI, including the Huntingdon's disease, it
would have been clear that he needed to be in
a mental hospital. And so then of course I jumped
into becoming a student of law, trying to figure out, well,
what what does it take? You know, is this a
habeas corpus problem? Is this a clemency problem? Trying to
(28:17):
put together a legal team that would would come together
for free with me to help save this man. Thereafter
was the next ten years, still leading up to today,
like trying to liberate him, learning about the politics of Virginia.
How do you grant clemency for someone who's committed murder?
And being disappointed at every turn, learning that the process
(28:38):
is like almost impossible, like to get someone out of prison,
even when the stars are lining up. Because now Vince,
you know, had millions of people who listened to the story.
We had all the pr that we needed. We had
Ira Glass advocating for us. We had teams of people
who were lining up. We had lawyers coming out of
the woodworks who wanted to help support our case, and
(28:59):
we eventually had a formidable team with help from the
Innocence Project of Virginia to help work on this case.
So we did, and then we had rejection after rejection.
We had clemency rejection by the next two governors.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Based on what grounds though, I mean, what was the
reason given.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
They don't give you a reason. Our assumption or you know,
through the grapevine, was that he wasn't sick enough, that
he wasn't sick enough to be released. I mean, even
after this American life story came out, there were a
series of people, including the judge who inspired the release
of the psychiatrists who represent events who took care events
(29:38):
in prison. That psychiatrist was eventually let go after a
forty you know, plus year career in forensic psychology. This
was what we were fighting. We were fighting also a
governor who was being indicted himself. We were fighting against
another governor who wanted to be president of the United States,
and so you know, we were learning that being granted. See,
(30:00):
it's not about it's not a clinical decision. It's not
always a humanistic decision. It's oftentimes grounded in politics.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
So what ultimately ends up happening with Vince Gilmer.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So, well, ultimately I become so disillusioned and angered by
this process that I thought would take us weeks to
get him out of prison. And after the first rejection,
that's when I decided, well, I'm going to write this story.
I'm going to tell this in a book in a
way that a lot of people can understand, Like, what
actually did happen to him? Like? What are all the
(30:32):
insults that contribute to someone's mental capacity to be compromised?
And I wanted people to see that. I wanted people
to see events for the good person he was, and
not this one horrific event that happened in his life.
Like I wanted the whole story to be born out.
I wanted people to see the politics of it. I
wanted people to realize that rehabilitation doesn't take place in prison.
(30:53):
I mean, I wanted people to understand, like, this isn't
a problem that's just defined by a bad trial or
you know, dirty politics, Like this is a problem that's
defined by overall the lack of mental health resources in
our country, And as a primary care doctor, I see
this every day, trying to get someone into one of
our mental health facilities. So playing the lottery, you know,
(31:15):
realizing that, you know, the scarcity of psychiatrists in our country,
especially in reural places, is tremendous. I wanted people to
see that. I wanted people to understand that humans are
all vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Is doctor Gilmer still in the penitentiary or has anything
happened with politics?
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Now?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
There's a new governor writing in Virginia, relatively new in Virginia.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
So the Governor northumb rejected our clemency petition. This was
eighteen months ago, and I was furiously writing, writing, writing,
The publication of the book wasn't going to come out
until after the governor's term. But Valentine Penguin ran the
mouse enabled me to get some pre release copies that
I flooded the office with. And you know, we were
(31:57):
at this point grasping for every string to get pulled,
trying to build relationships within the governor's circle. And you know,
I have no idea what pushed it across the line.
You know, I know there were people that read this story,
read Vince's story, in my book. But on his last
day in office, he reversed his clency rejection decision, which
is kind of unprecedented. So I thought at that point,
(32:20):
oh wow, we were rejoicing. We did it. You know,
we spent ten years working on this, and now he
was going to finally find a hospital, which was the
only thing we were asking for the entire time was
just to get him to a hospital. We weren't asking
for freedom, complete freedom. We were asking for a hospital.
And this next act of the story is like, oh
(32:41):
my god, it has been impossible to get him into
a hospital. Virginia has closed their doors to him universally.
We received no support from the Department of Mental Health
nor the Department of Corrections to get him to a hospital.
And the tragedy is that there's a mental hospital that
shares the parking lot with the prison where he's at.
(33:01):
You can literally throw a stone from the front porch
of the prison into the mental health center. They wouldn't
help negotiate us getting him there, which I saw is
absolutely inhumane.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
But he has clemency. I mean, can't you just go
what happens now?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Clemency is you have to play by the rules of
the clemency is determined by the governor. In this clemency
which like he sorted out and literally the last hours
of his governorship. It wasn't very detailed or clear, but
it's simply stated that Vince was responsible to get himself
into a hospital, which is impossible. You can't do that
without internal help from the Department of Mental Health. So
(33:39):
we've been looking for places in North Carolina to get
him into as a transitional place to eventually get him
to a place actually brought in hospital where he was,
where his father was, it would be a place that
would be ideal to take care of his needs. We've
been rejected by five different private hospitals, and many of
whom maybe don't have the resources to take We have
(34:00):
a patient like Bence, but he's been surviving in prison
basically alone, just fine, Like any place will be better
than prison. But there you know, a lot of hospitals
don't want any risk of negative pr or they don't
want any risk of having a quote unquote dangerous patient
on their wards, and so that's made it an uphill
(34:21):
battle to get him out. So we did a fundraiser
and raised one hundred thousand dollars a month or two go,
and we're trying to use that money to help leverage
opening the doors, which it's been very helpful because the
Attorney General wants to know that we have money to
be able to pay for a hospital. They want to
have assurance that he will actually make it in. And
so thanks to Quentin Quarantino and others, Trudy Styler and
(34:45):
Sting like, you know, some people really contributed to Bence's cause.
That has enabled us to be able to have other conversations.
So we were just rejected by another hospital this week,
and I think we have another option that I can't
speak of yet that's coming up, but fingers crossed that
in the next few weeks we're gonna have him out.
But he's he's the only clemency granted person I can
(35:07):
only imagine who has spent more than a year in
prison still after his clemency freedom, and he still continues
to be put in solitary confinement.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
From time to time because of behavior.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Because of they don't understand him, like they don't understand
why he can sometimes like blurt out things that maybe inappropriate.
But he's a man who's struggling for his life with
mental illness. Who's you know, what's the worst thing you
could do to a patient like that is put them
in solitaire confinement?
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Does he understand what's happening? Does he understand what you've
done over the past decade and Sarah and all of
these advocates and the Innocence Project, and does he comprehend
any of that based on what you know?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
He comprehends all of it. I saw him two weeks
ago in the prison. The warden graciously let me into
to see him. You know, all prisoners you probably know
have been essentially in soult or confinement throughout COVID because
they haven't allowed visitors. So this was the first time
for me to see him since the beginning of COVID,
and he just inspires me. He holds on to like this,
(36:12):
this optimism of getting out. He still has this optimism
of being able to give back in some way to students,
to teach them about Huntington's. Huntington's which of course did
not like make him kill his father. Huntington's is not,
I want to be clear, it's not a killer disease.
He was compromised by all these other things too. But yeah,
(36:32):
he's so grateful and humble and can't wait to get out.
But you know, I feel guilty. I feel extremely guilty
because I haven't gotten him out. It's taken over a
year and we've had these failures, and I keep telling him,
one more week, one more a month, it's going to
happen for Thanksgiving, It's going to happen at Christmas. Oh
(36:54):
that's it's going to happen in New Years. Like, you know,
like it's hard for him to even believe what I
tell him. More and each of these junctures, like we've
had like great confidence that he was going to get
at Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, it's hard to not give him hope when he's
struggling so much. But boy, that hurts when it doesn't
work out. It hurts both of you.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, yeah, well it sort of contributes to the kind
of learned helplessness. I think that all incarcerated people experienced
at some point when they no longer have hope, they
no longer have anything to dream about. And you know,
it's like just another failure for him, like one more
failure after failure, And of course he's wondering, what, why
don't these hospitals want to take me? Like what I
(37:35):
don't understand that I'm a doctor who's committed myself to service.
This thing happened. I'm cleared, I'm clemency granted, why would
these hospitals not want to take me? So, you know,
trying to explain that kind of thing to him is
so hard.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Also, Yeah, I think it's remarkable your story that you
come to this town. You're a young doctor, you hear
this story and it has very clearly affected you changed
your whole life, sort of a career change trajectory, you
become an author. To me, it really just shows it's
an illustration of how one person, one event, one crime,
(38:13):
can shift the lives of so many people. It's remarkable.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Well, it's true. You know when you look at how
illness affects a family too, where you look at how
one incarcerated person in a family that may have been
a result of, you know, one episode of methom betaine
use that led to a tragic event. You know that
that affects everybody. It affects the person, the family, It
trickles down, you know, throughout the community. Even Yeah, so Vince,
(38:39):
the story is that like his family has been, it's
just had a series of tragedies, you know, for that began,
you know, from his great grandfather and his grandfather who
also had hunting tents, because if you have Huntington's, then
you have a fifty to fifty chance of getting it yourself.
And so it's it's been this endless cycle of abuse
and trauma that that's contributed, you know, ultimately to the fence.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
He's lucky to have you.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Well, what am I supposed to do? I mean, this
is what we're supposed to do as doctors, is to advocate,
you know, we think of family medicine in one of
our four days as advocacy. And I mean obviously, like
what does it take for me to understand that the
stars like aligned for me to be in this place.
I'm not a super religious guy, but it feels like
(39:23):
that this was supposed to happen and that was put
in his path.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
white production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John
Bradley Curtis Heath is our composer. Our work by Nick Toga,
(40:01):
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions
(40:23):
for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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