October 10, 1998

Killer Sues His Therapist and Wins $500,000

By WILLIAM GLABERSON
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- The last time Wendell Williamson drew national attention, it was one January day in 1995. He seemed to come out of nowhere, firing an M-1 rifle on a busy street near the campus of the University of North Carolina, where he was a law student, and killing two men he had never met.
The story of the Chapel Hill shootings made headlines for a few days. But at Williamson's trial, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity, accepting his lawyer's argument that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had believed he was saving the world with his random killings.
What happened next turned the case into one that has captured the attention of lawyers and mental health experts across the country. From his room in a state psychiatric ward, Williamson sued a psychiatrist who had seen him just half a dozen times, the last occasion eight months before the killings. Williamson contended that the doctor, Myron B. Liptzin, had not made a correct diagnosis, had not explained how seriously ill Williamson was and had not followed up after their sessions ended.
Last month Williamson won a jury verdict of $500,000. Dr. Liptzin says that the facts do not support the verdict and that he will appeal. In the meantime, the judgment has provoked a furor in North Carolina and beyond.
Although violent criminals have won malpractice cases against their therapists before, critics of this verdict say its size and Williamson's notoriety send a destructive message: that the legal system is willing to let people hold someone else accountable for their actions.
"This is part of the attempt to shift responsibility in our society," said Bruce W. Berger, a Raleigh lawyer who represents Dr. Liptzin. "Nobody's responsible for their own actions anymore. It's always somebody else's fault."
Newspapers across the state have called the verdict "another tragedy" that "bodes ill for society, " and psychiatrists here and around the country say the verdict may discourage therapists from treating psychotic patients.
The verdict's supporters, including lawyers' groups and advocates for the mentally ill, say it stands for nothing more than that two categories of people are entitled to appropriate care of the psychologically disturbed: the disturbed people themselves and those they may injure.
In an interview this week at the state hospital where, under the verdict in the criminal case, he is required to live in a locked psychiatric ward until he can prove he is no longer a danger, Williamson, now 30, said the verdict in the civil case showed that he and the people he killed were all victims of Dr. Liptzin's failure.
"The murders would not have happened if Dr. Liptzin had done his job properly," Williamson said.
Williamson testified at trial of his suit last month, telling the jurors that Dr. Liptzin "had more control over the situation than I did."
Dr. Liptzin, who also testified, said in an interview that the verdict "makes no sense." Part of the rationale for his appeal, he said, is that the verdict seems to establish a rule that psychiatrists should police their patients.
"How can I be responsible," he said, "for something that is not predictable?"
Dr. Liptzin acknowledges that he did not find Williamson to be a paranoid schizophrenic. But his reports show that he did diagnose psychosis with "delusional disorder grandiose." Dr. Liptzin says the treatments for the two conditions would be identical, while Williamson's lawyers say Dr. Liptzin's diagnosis significantly understated the patient's problems.
At trial, held in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough, expert witnesses hired by Williamson's lawyer told the jurors that Dr. Liptzin had not given Williamson the care other psychiatrists typically provide. Dr. Liptzin's experts said he had done all that any reasonable psychiatrist could.
In an interview, four of the jurors said the panel had been most troubled by the fact that Dr. Liptzin had not appeared to stress to Williamson how ill he was and had not given him a specific referral to another psychiatrist at the end of their six sessions. (Dr. Liptzin, now 64, was then about to retire.)
Williamson says Dr. Liptzin was "wishy-washy" about how sick he was. Dr. Liptzin says that if he was gentle in his talks with Williamson, it was because he had learned that such highly intelligent but disturbed patients respond better to invitations to cooperate in their treatment than to orders from psychiatrists.
Dr. Liptzin and Williamson were first brought together in 1994, when a dean at the law school persuaded Williamson to go to the student health service. Williamson had disrupted a class by insisting that he had telepathic powers, and Dr. Liptzin was then director of psychiatric services for the student health service.
Dr. Liptzin soon learned that Williamson had been suffering from psychological problems for several years. Williamson had been an Eagle Scout, swimming team captain and student body president in high school. He had graduated with honors from the university here. But by the time they met, the young man talked incessantly about being "the world's first telepath." He described how other people could inflict excruciating pain in his shoulder with their thoughts.
Two years earlier, the doctor learned, Williamson had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward after the campus police had picked him up for screaming at students in a busy campus gathering place and hitting himself in the face until he cried.
He told doctors then that a voice from "the thing" tormented him with grotesque images. After a short hospitalization, a judge released him because there was no evidence that he was a danger to anyone, although doctors had noted in their records that he kept a gun in his apartment.
Lawyers in the civil case agreed that Williamson improved while seeing Dr. Liptzin. The patient began taking antipsychotic medication and was able to finish the semester. By then, the gun was back at his family's home in the mountains of western North Carolina.
Exactly what happened as Williamson and Dr. Liptzin parted after the six visits is a matter of dispute. Dr. Liptzin testified that Williamson had understood that he was seriously ill and would have to seek out a different psychiatrist if he needed to continue treatment because Dr. Liptzin was retiring that summer. Dr. Liptzin acknowledged that he had not given Williamson a specific referral to another doctor.
But Williamson testified that he had not understood that he was seriously ill. Indeed, he said, Dr. Liptzin gave him the impression that he could experiment with going off his medication if he told someone like his mother that he was doing so. He stopped taking the drugs.
"He seemed O.K.," his mother, Fonda Williamson, said as she waited outside Broughton State Hospital in the town of Morganton, to the west, for a visit this week with her heavily medicated son.
"The parents aren't in control of a grown man with a delusional mental illness," Mrs. Williamson said. "All we had to go on was what he told us."
Neither Dr. Liptzin nor anyone else, she said, ever told her or her husband the details of their son's problems.
After the summer at home in 1994, Williamson returned to Chapel Hill that fall. His psychological deterioration resumed. In January, he carefully gathered hundreds of rounds of ammunition and prepared a backpack with items like rope and condoms to deal with any hostages he might end up with. Later he walked down Henderson Street here in Chapel Hill with the rifle he had brought back to school.
Since the verdict on Sept. 21, state officials have said they will try to seize any award Williamson might one day receive from Dr. Liptzin's insurance company. The officials say the state is entitled to be compensated for the costs of Williamson's hospitalization.
In any event, the families of Williamson's victims say his $500,000 victory is a fresh assault. Carol Reichardt's son Kevin was 20 that January afternoon, when he was bicycling down Henderson Street on his way to a college class. Williamson, having already killed Ralph W. Walker, a 42-year-old restaurant worker who had just opened his front door on his way to work, blew Reichardt off the bicycle with one shot, then pursued him at close range as he tried to crawl to safety, and killed him.
Now, Mrs. Reichardt says, her family feels it has twice been denied justice while Williamson has been rewarded.
"He knows," she said, "how to work the system."