The Haunting of Julian Grey 6
The concluding sixth part of the Haunting of Julian Grey.
Patroclus76.
Any thoughts let me know Patroclus76@hotmail.co.uk
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Confidential Report by Professor David Samuels
Consultant Psychiatrist.
Prepared for the PD office.
March 2009.
Dear Linda.
I enclose my summary of the events leading to the arrest of Professor Julian Grey and the subsequent recovery of several bodies from the basement of a former house in Hartford, Connecticut. The property was owned by Grey from 1979 until 1984. As you will no doubt be aware, it has been recently confirmed that one of the bodies is definitely that of a Daniel Ciano, a 19 year old student who was reported missing in 1983 and declared officially dead in 1999. As yet there is no evidence that any of the remains are those of Max Lennox, 23, who was reported missing on a trip to Naples, Italy in 1983 and has never been found. Professor Grey taught both of these students. He has wavered his rights to doctor-client confidentiality, and also refused to take the fifth in subsequent discussions with the police team and his attorney. He confessed everything to me and indeed led the forensic team to the site of the graves.
I have been asked, to provide data for the inquiry and I do so with the full co-operation of the patient. Some of the details of our sessions - five in all, if I include the one held in his house on the day that he recovered his memory - I have withheld, although they are written up in the case notes and these could well be ruled as evidence. This remains a shocking case of selective amnesia following a traumatic incident with some possible elements of schizophrenia. I have to add that, in twenty years of my professional life, I have never quite come across anything quite so extraordinary, or indeed as disturbing as this particular case. Julian Grey is - was - a colleague of mine for ten years and was an outstanding therapist and theorist. His fall leaves me quite shattered.
DS
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Some time after Christmas I was approached by one of my senior colleagues who asked me if I would act as his therapist. He stated that he was distressed by a series of dreams about a supposed former lover - identified at the outset as Max Lennox. These dreams were intense, and seemed to take on actual physical manifestations in the real world, involving an actual break-in into his bedroom, and several appearances of a young man at his house. Grey was quite convinced that this someone was Max Lennox - although the affair ended, obviously, with Max's disappearance in Italy in 1983. In several subsequent conversations, Grey remained convinced that Max had literally returned to the US and was stalking him. He insisted on this despite a series of quite remarkable inconsistencies, the main one being that had the youth indeed been Max, he would have been substantially older than described by Grey and others. Julian allegedly had an affair when he was 33 and Max 23, starting in 1983 until Max's disappearance. Yet the youth he consistently claimed to have seen was between 23-26.
Grey is an internationally recognised consultant-psychologist, and before we began our sessions, he handed over to me a series of dream diaries and a provisional diagnosis he had made himself of his possible psychosis. The manifestation of Max in his dreams were hypersexual and involved sexual and SM acts between Julian and Max. Grey is a homosexual perfectly open and at ease with his sexual orientation, and he was perfectly clear as to the erotic significance the dreams held out to him. He stated that on several occasions he awoke to find he had ejaculated during the night or that on awaking he felt the need to masturbate. Moreover Grey was disturbed by the significance of the dreams given that Max had disappeared, and the fact that for over twenty years he had never dreamed of Max or even recalled him.
In all the dreams that Grey recorded, there was no mention of Daniel Ciano, although in the very first one I noted an incident in which Max called Julian by the wrong name: `Daniel' - an incident that Grey seemed not to have noticed in his own notes. There were other inconsistencies in dates and places, (Max was 23 when they met, not 19) and other significant lapses in Grey's memory. At the first session Grey referred to Max's `abduction' and not disappearance. A later investigation into Max's trip to Naples implied that he had drowned while swimming near Capri. He was a good swimmer, but the weather had turned suddenly and he had not returned to his parents villa. More revealingly was Grey's belief that Max's father was Italian, and after an unsuccessful attempt to sue Grey, that Mr Lennox had killed himself. Here - in an act I can only describe as wilful congruence, I added to Grey's confusion by stating that I had heard something of the story myself. I had - but the suicidal father I had read about had been Philip Ciano, the father of Daniel - not Max. My memory had been at fault, because Ciano had been a much more prominent story at the time, given Philip's business links and his fund raising for the Republican Party. Yet once I had discovered my error, Grey's ready concurrence with my version of events immediately implied to me that Grey had compounded the identity of the two young men into one, or that he was subliminally disguising a relationship between the two boys, or between them and himself that he was otherwise consciously avoiding.
Subsequent investigations showed that Max and Daniel had both been contemporaries at Hartford, although Max was older and appears - inconclusively - given the state of Hartford's records - to have been repeating some of his credit bearing units for the third (?) time. It also appears to be the case that they were lovers. Both had attended Grey's introductory course on Psychology, although Grey never recounted meeting Daniel in any dream or in any conversation. He did recall Max, obviously, and in extraordinary detail and he had a series of photos of Max that he handed over to me at our first session. Max was without doubt a youth of exceptional beauty. He was black haired, blue eyed, well defined and around six foot four inches tall. From subsequent testimonials he was extremely confident in his own homosexuality, pleasant but slightly arrogant, and some thing of a flirt - especially with Julian. In none of the photographs did Julian and Max appear together, although they clearly were photographed separately at the same location: on a veranda at villa on Capri.
By the third session, it was clear to me that Grey's narratives of a passionate, bestial affair with Max were fake, that they had been in part constructed by the dreams and not vice versa. Grey's particular psychosis has inverted the usual reference between dreams and reality, and powerfully so. He had wanted to be Max's lover and he had subsequently become it in his fantasy, a fantasy in turn authenticated by dreams. In reality, Grey never progressed in his relationship with Max beyond one of an obsessive fantasist, stalking him, watching him, even collecting some of his clothes from the gym. Grey certainly never made any lasting impression on the family, although they knew of him. In fact he only met them once. Grey had never been `driven' out of Hartford but had suddenly and mysteriously left several months after Philip Ciano died. From a professional point of view, Grey; jealous of Daniel, had merely substituted himself for Daniel in his dreams of Max. Yet the level of sexual violence in the dreams was itself disturbing. The dreams were heavy with fantasies in which young men were shaved, oiled, and surgically modified by older men or crated and shipped to `camps.' Grey was clearly turned on by defecation and urination by young men. Moreover in one dream, vividly recounted by Grey, Max refers to Grey as Tiberius - making not only a connection with Capri, where the Emperor of course lived, but with Suetonius' account of Tiberius' indulgence with young men and boys.
As we neared Easter, I was clear in my own mind that Julian had been deeply and profoundly jealous of Daniel and deeply in love or lust with Max. It was also clear to me that Grey knew details of Daniel's disappearance although they had been disguised as part of Max's. Grey now confesses to having stalked, trapped and tortured Daniel once Max was away: he used a cage to keep the young man in hiding only removing him to rape and abuse him. Other young men had suffered the same fate, but over significant lapses of time. He claims to have done it out of rage. When Daniel died, Grey hid him in a large basement with a loose casement floor. By Easter it also became clear to me - as it increasingly became clear to Julian - that he had travelled to Italy around the time of Max's disastrous holiday on Capri in 1983, probably just after the murder of Max's boyfriend . It is not clear what he intended to do. Although he was clearly at Max's villa (viz the photo on the veranda) the family had returned to the US. Grey's claims to have been in Hartford supervising the internment of his mother were wrong: the date for this was November of the previous year - 1982. It remains to be seen how his visit relates to this particular tragedy, but all the evidence still points to the fact that Max died from an unfortunate accident. Perhaps Julian had gone to confront Max with the murder of Daniel or to murder him as well? Perhaps he had hoped to groom Max for eventual destruction? We shall never know. All I can conclude is that the dreams led Julian to expose himself in ways as honest and as determined as any man I know. The day he telephoned me to come to his house, the complex illusion sustained by the dream and his own narrative had completely collapsed. He confessed to killing Daniel immediately. It was an extraordinary case of successful self therapy!
There are, however, aspects to this case that do not fit well into the canon of psychotherapy. Alex Whitehead, a tenant of Grey's, has given clear testimony to the fact that an attractive young man called to see the Professor the night before Grey finally remembered his heinous crimes. The description of the youth sounded very much like Max, and indeed when shown a photograph of Max (taken allegedly by Grey but in effect taken by Daniel) Alex Whiteman showed no hesitation in identifying them as the same. There are also several eye witness reports of a young man calling on the house the same day that fit's the same description. Cigarette butts were retrieved of Italian make and not easily supplied locally, and there is compelling evidence that someone did indeed break-in to Julian`s bedroom and leave an SM dvd playing. Without a doubt this is the same guy that Grey claims to have seen near the café after our first meeting; but who it could be we shall never know. I confess to being completely at a loss. Whoever he was or is, he compelled Julian to push on with his own investigations to the point at which he uncovered his own guilt.