The atmosphere of fear and paranoia that characterized America in 1950s gave the sex crime panics of that decade a particular flavor and intensity. The Cold War was at its height, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was engaged in his campaign against domestic subversion, and national attention was focused on the "enemy within." At the same time, much of the anxiety of the period centered around the most vulnerable of souls: children. The polio epidemic was a major source of concern for parents, and the most commonplace locales — public swimming pools, for instance — took on a menacing quality. The 953 cases in Woodbury County (Sioux City) in 1952 — out of 60,000 in the entire nation that year — underscored how widespread the epidemic was, particularly in the Midwest.
At the same time, to even the most casual reader of the Sioux City Journal, America was a country characterized by almost daily incidents of missing children, child kidnappings, and child murders....
Iowa Governor Leo Hoegh moved quickly to respond to the public clamor.... At [a] July 23 meeting, the governor announced that the state was establishing a special ward for criminal sexual psychopaths. The ward would be set up at the state mental hospital at Mount Pleasant, in the southeast corner of the state. Mount Pleasant was selected because of its proximity to the University of Iowa hospitals in Iowa City, where psychiatrists were available. Dr. Charles C. Graves, director of mental health services for the Board of Control, [the state agency that governed Iowa’s mental hospitals] suggested the ward could also be used for a "personality research" project, in cooperation with state colleges.
Some at the meeting expressed skepticism, which wasn’t entirely surprising because the Board of Control had originally opposed the sexual psychopath bill at the time it was introduced. When the board’s chairman asked how many people he and his colleagues should prepare for in the new ward, Hoegh randomly picked the number 25. "When we get 15, we’ll start thinking of the next 25," the governor said.... "The guy I want to treat," he said, is the sex deviate "who is now roaming the street but never committed a crime." This statement would have enormous consequences....
By the end of September 1955, two and a half months after Donna Sue’s murder, a total of 22 men had been arrested for morals offenses, almost all from Sioux City and nearby towns. Seventeen pled guilty to "conspiracy to commit a felony," the lesser version of a sodomy charge. Another four pled guilty to "lascivious acts with a child." Still another pled guilty to possession of obscene books and pictures. And if there remains some question as to whether County Attorney O’Brien authorized the roundup, one thing is clear: he did petition the court to certify the men as sexual psychopaths.
Within days of the arrests, Woodbury County District Court judges George W. Prichard and L.B. Forsling acceded to the county attorney’s request, sentencing the men to Mount Pleasant Hospital for an indefinite period. All but two eventually went to the mental hospital....
For Harold McBride, perhaps more than any of the rest of the 20 men, incarceration was extremely difficult. A hairdresser from the town of Kingsley who had admitted to Sioux City police that he had sex with other men, Harold worried about his wife Glenda and their three children. He had lost his license to cut hair, a consequence of pleading guilty to a felony. He watched despairingly as his wife was forced to sell his business, put their furniture in storage, and moved herself and the children out of their Kingsley apartment to stay with his family in Woodward, near Des Moines. And, in his darkest moments he was convinced he would never get out of Mount Pleasant. "My life was shattered," Harold said 40 years later. "It was gone. I was devastated and scared to death. I didn’t know what was going to happen." ...
As time passed, even Harold McBride began to adapt to Mount Pleasant. Once the doors locked behind the men and the immediate shock of being there passed, more than anything, life at the hospital was boring. Like the regular mental patients, they would march through the tunnels to breakfast every morning. They’d clean their ward and do some assigned work. On some days, there would be group therapy. They’d go to lunch. In the afternoon, there would be more work to do or, for some, a couple of hours of occupational therapy — leathercraft or woodworking. Evenings were mostly given over to writing letters or playing cards or reading two-year-old magazines.
Harold and his friend Gene Bergstrom passed the hours discussing what they would do once they got out, conversations that cemented a friendship that would endure until Gene’s death many years later. Gene talked about moving to California. Harold indulged him in this idea but really wasn’t sure about it for himself. Glenda and the kids had just moved to Woodward, and he was reluctant to uproot them yet again. And the question remained, hovering over every conversation: would they ever get out of Mount Pleasant at all? Unlike most of the prisoners at the state penitentiary at Fort Madison, just down the road, they didn’t have a release date to look forward to. And, for the moment, Harold and Gene didn’t even have their driver’s licenses, since those had been revoked when they were sentenced.
In the day room, Doug Thorson and Duane Wheeler played bridge. For Doug, bridge playing was partly a matter of pride; he thought that it "threw the attendants clear off" that men labeled as sexual psychopaths had the intelligence to play such a cerebral and complicated game. It was a small consolation, but then all the consolations at Mount Pleasant were small ones.
At mealtimes, the men from 15 East ate with the regular mental patients at large round oak tables in the first-floor dining room. Everyone stood in line waiting for their portions, cafeteria style. Some of the patients threw food or had fits or convulsions; sometimes fights broke out. One day, while waiting in line for his lunch, one of the mental patients unzipped his trousers and began to masturbate; the attendants took him away. Except for the occasional argument, there was little conversation in the dining room.
One morning after breakfast, the men in 15 East were marched to a ward on another floor, where the hospital had a special work assignment for them. They were given buckets and paint brushes. Their job, they were told, was to paint the wards on the men’s side of the hospital. So began their major task at Mount Pleasant. Each day they would paint a different ward until they had completed them all. They’d start at one end and proceed down the ward, room by room, leaving the corridor for last. The color was an institutional beige or gray. In the "untidy" ward, prep work consisted of scraping feces off the walls. While each ward was being painted, the patients who lived there were removed for the day. The painting was very much in line with Mount Pleasant’s policy of using patients to perform menial tasks; it also reflected the hospital’s uncertainty about what to do with the men from the special ward. There was another motive too: it kept the men in 15 East isolated and away from the other patients.
Some of the men were happy for the occupation. In Harold’s case, the painting helped take his mind off his worries and it made time pass. Others felt exploited. "Therapy, they called it," sneered Doug. "It was cheap labor."
The attendants watched them closely. The men were never alone; they couldn’t go anywhere in the hospital without an attendant to accompany them. The head of the painting crew never left two of them alone in a room. In later years, Doug was surprised to see a photograph of [psychologist] Roy Yamahiro’s therapy group outdoors on the grounds; Doug and the others who weren’t in Roy’s group never had the opportunity to go out of the main building....
