Word: yoder
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Smiling and wearing a tweed jacket and well-polished shoes, Yoder shook my hand and introduced himself. Earlier, Poole had asked if I wanted a guard present, and I had said, "I don't know, do I?" A former guard himself, Poole had only shrugged, though he did ask an unarmed man to sit outside in the hall. Poole closed the door...
Talking to Yoder is frustrating. He interrupts. He often finishes a thought and then asks insistently, "Do you understand?" or "Are you listening?" He launches into prolix harangues against Illinois or psychiatrists or his ex-wife. He seems to treat all but two or three people in the world as if they are irretrievably stupid. It would be folly to try to diagnose Yoder--over the years, mental-health professionals have offered several different diagnoses, including bipolar disorder for a time and delusional disorder now. But to a layperson, Yoder seems more petulant than demented. He banged the table...
When you talk with him, Yoder leaves out the worst parts of his bio, but one consequence of his litigiousness is that his life is written in court files. Born in 1958, he ended up in foster care at 15 because, he says, his home "was a violent hellhole." Like his parents, he had volatile relationships. In 1979, he hit his girlfriend, an older divorce named Toni Herring. Yoder says he gave her "a garden-variety black eye," but prosecutors said he broke her orbital bone. After confronting her with a knife while on probation, Yoder got four years...
...psychiatrist's report portrays Yoder as a heartsick young man who "desperately wanted to re-establish his relationship" at the time of the crime. The report says Yoder had been guzzling Canadian Club and tripping on two hits of acid when he went to Herring's house with the knife. The psychiatrist noted that after his arrest, Yoder was sexually assaulted in jail and twice tried to commit suicide--once by drinking Clorox. And the report says Yoder wrote threatening letters as "an expression of his despair...
...letters promise garish violence: "I'll...pump about 3 boxes of shells into her from a 12-guage [sic]," says one that is signed with Yoder's name and prison-register number. His warden, Stephen Hardy, heard about at least nine alarming letters and initiated an investigation that led to Yoder's losing two years of credit earned for good behavior. Yoder then sued Hardy and won; Yoder presented evidence that several state officials had ignored the rules for revoking good-time credit in order to keep him incarcerated. The officials were plainly worried that Yoder would...