Word: chestere
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...sign of our nation's benevolence or its laxity that Yoder is not in prison for these offenses but is instead hospitalized? Since 1991, Yoder has been involuntarily committed to a Chester, Ill., asylum, the Chester Mental Health Center. Yoder, it may surprise you to learn, would rather be in prison. He fought a long legal battle during the 1990s to get himself prosecuted for sending menacing letters to people like Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and the late M&M tycoon Forrest Mars Sr. because he wanted to be sentenced to a fixed term rather than remain committed indefinitely...
Will Yoder ever get out? One could imagine a treacly Patch Adams and a fiery Thomas Szasz swaying a jury. But state officials will argue that everyone else is better off with Yoder behind Chester's 14-ft. fence. They will say his failure to cooperate with treatment is evidence of his illness, which, even if misdiagnosed in the past, still exists. "The system is not perfect," says Vallabhaneni, the psychiatrist who wrote Yoder's incomplete commitment evaluation in 1991. "But that doesn't change the real picture of what Rodney Yoder is: he is very, very ill." Even Hardy...
Largely because of his legal prowess, Yoder has endured nothing so extreme. But even though some of his fellow residents at the Chester hospital committed murders of breathtaking brutality, he has lived at the state's only maximum-security facility for the criminally insane more than twice as long as the average patient. His advocates say it was a suspicious chain of events that got Yoder committed in the first place, and there is evidence to support them. The tale of his arrival at Chester is long and winding, but it reveals some startling lapses in the legal system designed...
...real-life Hannibal Lecter. And some do believe he is profoundly sick. Three years ago, state psychologist Cuneo said in court, "I can only think of a handful of individuals that I would consider more dangerous than Mr. Yoder at the hospital." But those who run Chester seem to have a more mundane view. Except that you pass through sliding steel doors before you get to the wards, visiting Chester isn't so different from visiting an ordinary hospital. On the day of my interview, I offered my bag for searching, but Bob Poole, the administrator who greeted me, declined...
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...