Free God's Spy by Juan Gómez-Jurado Page B

the priesthood who lived alongside him at the institute,
Karosky turned into something much worse. He became cold and
ironic. The remorse disappeared. As you can see, he had blocked
out the most painful memories of his childhood. That alone turned
him into a pederast. But then came the disastrous regression
therapy . . .’
‘Why disastrous?’
‘It would have been better if the objective of this treatment had
been to give him some peace of mind. But I fear that Doctor Conroy
had a morbid, almost immoral curiosity for Karosky’s case. In similar
cases, the person doing the regression therapy normally attempts,
through hypnosis, to implant positive events in the memory of the
patient, urging them to let go of the worst things that happened.
Conroy prohibited this line of action. And not only did he record
Karosky; he forced him to listen to the tapes in which he begged his
mother, in a child’s voice, to leave him in peace.’
‘What sort of Mengele did they have running that place?’ Paola
was in shock.
‘Conroy was convinced that Karosky had to accept himself.
According to him, it was the only solution. He said Karosky had to
recognise that he’d had a difficult childhood and that he was a homosexual. As I told you before, Conroy used to decide his diagnosis
in advance and was then determined to squeeze the patient into it,
with a shoehorn if necessary. To top it all off, he subjected Karosky
to a cocktail of hormones, some of which were experimental, like
the variant of the contraceptive Depo-Covetan. Using this drug,
injected in abnormal doses, Conroy reduced Karosky’s level of
sexual response; but in doing so he increased his aggression. The
therapy went on and on, with no positive results. There were periods
in which Karosky did calm down, and Conroy interpreted this as
a sign that his therapy was succeeding – but they were just that:
periods. In the end it was nothing short of a chemical castration.
    60 Karosky is now incapable of having an erection, and the frustration is destroying him.’
    ‘When did you first come into contact with him?’
‘I spoke with him frequently when I arrived at the institute in 99. Between us we established a relationship with a certain level of trust, but it collapsed later on. I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Fifteen days after his arrival at the institute, the powers that be decided to give Karosky a penile plethysmograph – that’s a test where the penis is connected to a measuring device by means of electrodes in order to measure the sexual response to various stimuli.’
‘I’m familiar with that test,’ Paola said, like someone who had just heard about an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
‘Anyway, he took it very badly. During the session he was shown terrible images; they really went too far.’
‘Meaning . . .?’
‘Images of paedophilia.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Karosky reacted violently, and seriously wounded the specialist running the machine. The attendants finally managed to restrain him; otherwise he would have killed the guy. In the wake of that episode Conroy should have recognised that Karosky was beyond treatment and sent him off to a mental hospital. But he didn’t do it. Instead he hired two security guards, and ordered them not to take their eyes off Karosky; then he started subjecting him to the regression therapy. That coincided with my arrival at the institute. As the months went by, Karosky gradually withdrew into himself. His outbursts of anger disappeared. Conroy attributed this to a significant change in his personality and decided to reduce the watch on him. Then, one night, Karosky forced the lock on his room - they used to lock him in at certain times, as a precautionary measure - and he lopped off the hands of a priest who slept in the same wing. He told everyone that the priest was an impure man and that he had seen him touching another priest in an “improper” manner. While the guards ran