Free Bestial by Harold Schechter Page B

and daily living were so radical and complete that, for someone like Earle Leonard Ferral—buried alive for the bulk of that era—reemerging into the world must have been akin to the experience of Rip Van Winkle, who awakens to find his sleepy, pre-Revolutionary village transformed into a bustling part of a new, independent nation.
    There was another way in which Earle resembled Washington Irving’s mythic sleeper. Though Rip awakens after twenty years to find himself gray-bearded and arthritic, he is essentially the same man—older but in no way wiser or more mature. Something similar was true of Earle Leonard Ferral. Though a decade had passed since his first incarceration, he was, in every meaningful way, unchanged. Dr. Roger’s assessment of his patient as “improved” was not just wrong. As events would soon prove, it was dangerously wrong.
    The paper trail documenting Earle’s public life during the year following his discharge from Napa is very sparse. We know from her testimony that he spent some of this time helping his Aunt Lillian paint the interior of her new house. He wasn’t staying with her, however, but rooming at an unknown place. Even she wasn’t sure where he was living. He would show up in the morning, work for as long as he liked, then abruptly disappear, usually returning the next morning but sometimes staying away for days at a time.
    Some months later, at the tail end of 1925, he left San Francisco and returned to Palo Alto, where—after making a tearful appeal to his long-suffering wife—he finally persuaded her to take him back.
    For several months, they lived together in relative serenity. Then, on a warm day in mid-February, he abruptly announced that he had decided to go to Halfmoon Bay in search of work. Mary didn’t see him again until June 25, when he showed up unexpectedly at her door. Less than two months later, he took off again, headed—so he said—for Redwood City.
    Mary didn’t raise any objections. Though he no longerthreatened her with violence, he was still a burden to have around. Besides, she knew that the poor man was possessed by forces beyond his control. The doctors at the mental hospital had explained to her that, among his other disorders, Earle suffered from “nomadic dementia,” an irresistible urge to wander.
    The only eyewitness accounts of Earle’s activities from this particular period of his life are those of Frank J. Arnold—the sales manager for a printing company called the Walter Brunt Press—and one of Arnold’s acquaintances, a Mrs. L. J. Casey of Los Angeles. Sometime in the spring of 1926, Earle found work with Arnold, who needed a handyman, gardener, and groundskeeper for his premises at 1927 Alma Street in Palo Alto.
    Though Earle’s habits were, as always, highly erratic, he could work hard when he wanted to. Arnold seems to have felt some patronizing affection for his oddball employee, perceiving him as a “simple fool” and even deriving amusement from Earle’s peculiarities. Several years later, when Arnold was asked to describe those peculiarities, he recalled the way Earle would “repeatedly go to work with his tools in one hand and a Bible in the other and, laying down the Bible, proceed to work with his tools for a short time, when he would suddenly cease, stand fixed as a statue, gaze upward at the sky and remain in that posture.” Interrupting his work to stare at “nothing in particular” was, in fact, a habitual practice of the eccentric handyman.
    Arnold recalled another instance when Earle shaved his head “in such a way that the hair was not altogether taken off in one place and the head completely denuded in another.” Earle had saved his shaven hair, offering it to Mrs. Arnold as pillow stuffing.
    One occasion stood out with particular force in Arnold’s recollections—the time that Earle “took a wheelbarrow and slowly walked around the road for a distance of about five miles, picking up small pebbles.”