“Hold your water, Sybil.” The notorious line from Sybil’s mother.
Sybil, the film, is a disturbing piece produced in 1976. It starred the brilliant Sally Field. It is a story about a young woman who had an absolutely horrible childhood. As a result, she developed sixteen different personalities and was treated by a doctor, the good Joanne Woodward.
I thought about the movie because, on this date, January 7, 1946, a case of split personality came forward in a series of puzzling Chicago murders.
It started when six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was kidnapped from her home in a wealthy Chicago neighborhood. The girl was gone, and her father found a note on the floor asking for a $20,000 ransom. James Degnan — that’s the dad — went on the radio pleading for his daughter’s safety. But for whatever reason, the kidnapper never made any contact or further demands.
Sadly, oh so sadly, a short while later, the police, while searching the neighborhood, found the girl’s body. The details are gruesome. She had been strangled to death, then dismembered with a hunting knife. Her remains were left in five different sewers and catch basins.
It gets a little more intense. At the scene of the initial kidnapping, the killer had written a message in lipstick on the victim’s wall, “For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.”
That $20,000 ransom note at the Degnan house. It was the best clue that investigators had in finding the killer. I won’t go into all the investigation details, but it led them to a University of Chicago restaurant.
That lead dead-ended. But at the same time, a 17-year-old student named William Heirens was arrested during a nearby burglary. When police searched his dorm room, they found suitcases full of stolen goods, pictures of Hitler and other Nazis, and a letter to Heirens signed “George M.”
The police deduced that the stolen items had come from the Deanna home as well as other victims’ homes. A serial killer. However, they couldn’t track down Heirens’ apparent partner. “George.”
They gave Heirens sodium pentothol and interrogated him. During the session, Heirens claimed that George Murman had killed Suzanne Degnan. However, it quickly became evident that George wasn’t a real person but an alter ego of Heirens himself.
A split personality.
Heirens pled guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He died there in 2012.
We see it in the movies every so often, like Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve, and Primal Fear. Those split personalities.
Officially, it is called dissociative identity disorder (DID). It is a psychiatric disorder diagnosed in about 1.5% of the global population. This mental disorder is where a person has two or more distinct personalities. The person’s thoughts, actions, and behaviors of each personality may be completely different.
Anyway, the thing I found astounding is the figure. That number, 1.5% of the population, has this disorder. That means nearly 2 out of 100 people. That’s 1 out of 50 folks. So. The next time you sit in a half-full movie theatre, at a restaurant on any given night, or even at the grocery store on a busy day, there is a good chance that there are 50 people there. And by this statistic, one of them has a split personality.
How’s that for duality? I don’t know about you, but it gave me the willies.
You may think you know who you are talking to. But do you?
Now. What were we saying?
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“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain
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“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
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Two, three, four of you? Really?
