Disordered Minds: Insanity, Automatism, and Intoxication
| Author | David M. Paciocco |
| Pages | 325-350 |
CHAPTER
15
Disordered
Minds:
Insanity,
Automatism,
and
Intoxication
remain
our
ultimate last
frontier.
We
will never know
it
well
because
we
cannot
be its
conscious witness. When
we
sleep,
voli-
tion
is
paralyzed.
Reflexes
are not
only dulled
but
unplugged. When
we
sleep,
we are
without defence, without control. That
is why it is so
outra-
geous
for
someone
to be
attacked
in
bed,
a
crime
that
is
universally rec-
ognized
as
heinous, unforgivable, unspeakable.
And
that
is why we are not
responsible
for
what
we do
when
we
sleep.
On 24 May
1987
Denis
and
Barbara
Woods climbed into
their
bed
in
Scarborough, Ontario. Like
any
other night, they
let
sleep come
to
them.
And
there they lay, their thoughts stilled, their arms
and
legs
pinned
by the
swaddling
of
their blankets, their bodies
all but
motionless.
Meanwhile,
23
kilometres
away,
their son-in-law
Ken
Parks prayed
for
sleep
to
come
to
him. Dressed
in
track pants
and a
T-shirt,
his
large
body
lay on the
couch
in his
Pickering home while
the
television strobed
light around
the
darkened room.
Its
volume
was low so as not to
wake
his
wife,
who
slept
in
their bedroom above.
He was not
welcome
in the
mar-
ital bed,
but
there would have been
no
sensevin
going
up
there even
if he
was.
His
mind
was
overloaded,
a
scrambled network
of
torturous
thoughts
that
were speaking
so
loudly
and
incessantly that they were
bound
to
keep
him
awake.
His
problems,
difficult
enough
to
bear
in the
light
of
day,
had
undergone
the
nocturnal transformation that converts
even niggling trouble into matters
of
urgency. When your problems
are of
great
urgency
to
start with,
as
Ken's
were,
the
night time
has a way of
E
ven if we conquer all other worlds, the dimension of sleep will
326
JUSTIFIABLE
HOMICIDE
turning them
into
pending calamity.
Ken
Parks
lay
there,
pondering
his
pending calamity.
It
seemed
that
things could
not
have been worse
for the
twenty-
three-year-old.
His
recent addiction
to the
horses
had
cost
him his
self-
respect,
his
job,
and was
threatening
his
marriage.
His
savings were gone.
And
while
his
wife
seemed ready
to
forgive
him for it, he had
gambled
away
her
money
as
well.
But
worst
of
all,
he had
embezzled
$30,000
from
his
employer
and had
been arrested.
He had
felt
the
pinch
of
handcuffs
on
his
wrists,
and he
faced
fraud
and
theft charges.
He was a
criminal.
He
would probably
be
going
to
jail.
How
could
he
possibly sleep?
He lay
there
staring
blankly
at the
television,
his
eyes burning,
his
mind racing.
If
sleep
was
to
come,
it
would have
to
pull
him in
when
he
least
expected
it.
Sometime
after
2:00 a.m., Parks
got off the
couch.
He
grabbed
his
car
keys
and
pulled
on a
jacket. Then
he
took
his
wife's keys
and
headed
out, leaving
the
front
door open. Opening
the
garage
door,
he
climbed
into
his car and
eased
it
onto
the
road. Some twenty
minutes,
six
turns,
eight sets
of
traffic
lights,
and a
stretch down
the
401
later,
he
arrived
at
the
Woods' townhouse complex
in
Scarborough.
He
rolled
the car
into
a
tight parking space. There
he
reached under
his
seat, taking
his
tire iron
in
hand. Dangling
it at his
side,
he
walked past
the
other townhouse doors
and
slipped
a key
into
his
in-laws'
front
lock, entering into
the
dark
and
sleeping
refuge
of
Denis
and
Barbara
Woods
and
their youngest children.
Denis Woods
was
wrapped
in the
protective
mantle
of
sleep when
he was
suddenly torn awake
by the
sound
of his own
rattling
and
gasping.
Someone
was on
him!
He
instinctively grabbed
at the
large wrists
of the
man
whose hands were encircling
his
neck. Those huge hands pressed
ferociously,
collapsing
his
windpipe
and
closing
off
the
blood
to his
brain.
Denis could
feel
his
face
growing hot,
his
eyes bulging,
and he
could sense
his
head pulling uselessly
from
side
to
side. Through
the
cloud
of
tears,
he
could make
out
some hulking, unrecognized form straddling him.
Before
long,
the
blurred image
gave
way to
blackness
as
Denis slipped back into
unconsciousness. This
time
it was not the
gentle slide
of
sleep
that
took
him
there; rather,
his
brain could
not do its job
without blood
and
air.
Perhaps
mercifully,
Denis
was
unconscious when
his
son-in-law,
whom
he had
always
liked, thrust
a
kitehen
knife
into
his
chest
and
then
tried
to
stab
him
several times
in the
head.
And he was
unconscious when
the man who
slept with
his
daughter
and
gave
him his
only grandchild
brutally
murdered
his
wife,
Barbara.
At
some point while Denis
lay
help-
less,
Ken
drove
his
tire
iron against Barbara's skull
with
sufficient force
to
fracture
it and to
cause enough bleeding into
her
brain
to end her
life.
He
plunged
a
kitchen
knife
deep into
her
right chest,
slicing
her
lungs,
her
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