(BIRDS CHIRPING)
I grew up here on Hidden Valley Road
on the outskirts of Colorado Springs.
It looks like such a peaceful place,
but things aren't always as they seem.
I was the youngest of 12 children.
From the outside, our family looked picture-perfect,
and that's just how our parents wanted it.
But behind closed doors, it was another story,
and it tore our family apart.
My brothers were turning into something none of us understood.
As a child, I thought... I thought they'd been taken over by demons.
The violence they unleashed was terrifying.
Murder, rape, suicide.
For those of us that survived,
we had to watch
as six of my brothers were consumed by madness.
In the end, the consequences would consume us all.
Where schizophrenia is diagnosed, between age 17 and 24,
it's a tragic story.
To be part of the Galvin family is to be part of a tragedy.
This mutation was present in every person in that family
who had schizophrenia.
They might hear voices.
They can command them to do things.
Command them to do things.
Throwing a cat into a bonfire, dismembered a dog in the bathtub.
This family gave us hope
that there might be a chance to cure schizophrenia.
He shot her first and then he shot himself.
Well, it started to fall apart.
My brothers were falling ill.
They were losing their minds.
These are all the family photos.
There's boxes and boxes of them,
and they're quite heavy.
I'm Mary Christine Galvin,
which my mother always said was named after Mary,
the mother of Christ.
I was born into this large Irish-Catholic family.
I was the youngest of 12 children, 10 boys and two girls.
Don, Jim, John, Brian, Michael, Richard,
Joseph, Mark, Mathew, Peter, Margaret and Mary.
Six of my brothers diagnosed schizophrenics.
My mom describes that she saw signs but couldn't really identify
in her heart and mind what was going on.
There was something going on with Jim.
Peter breaking all the windows in the house.
Donald, he dismembered a dog in the bathtub at home.
It was like a snowball effect. My parents blaming themselves.
There was so much despair and so much hopelessness,
and so much confusion.
I didn't find out until much later as an adult, maybe in my 20s.
Brian had murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide.
I remember my mother just being distraught.
My parents, I don't think they knew what to make of it.
Never in their worst nightmares
would they have believed such a thing could happen.
Their children, young men that are so promising,
to end up in a mental hospital.
After Don was born...
These are early pictures of my parents' relationship.
They met at a swim meet.
She jumped the gun and he had to go in the water after her.
Then he asked her out on their first date
they went to see "The Wizard of Oz".
And she said they skipped all the way home singing,
"We're off to see the wizard".
This is their wedding day. They eloped.
But my parents never told us they had eloped.
They told us about the grand wedding they had in New York at The Rectory,
but these are from Southern California,
when they eloped because my mom was pregnant.
It was a family secret, yes,
and he was going to war,
so they took the train
from New York to Southern California,
where he was getting ready to ship off for World War II.
So, he's in his whites, his Navy whites.
(REEL LOADING)
Neither set of families were terribly happy because she was,
you know, Irish Protestant and he was Irish Catholic.
And then at some point she converted to Catholicism,
and it was because my father said it would help their marriage,
that they could then bring their children up in the same religion,
it would make them closer as a family.
John, come and take a seat.
My mother was a wonderful woman.
She always had our interests at heart,
made sure we had piano lessons.
The house was always full of music.
(CLASSICAL MUSIC)
We would listen to classical music all the time,
and she would point out how to listen to the music.
She'd say, "Oh, do you hear the French horns?"
Or "Do you hear the oboe?"
She liked to listen to Verdi operas, Mozart operas,
and she loved to be involved and she loved to sing.
She grew up in New York,
and her mother took her to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City
and she fell in love with it.
When my father joined the Air Force,
we moved to Colorado Springs from New York.
I think my mother was probably very anxious about
what kind of culture she would find in Colorado Springs.
The Air Force base was supposed to be on Long Island,
and then they suddenly changed it to Colorado Springs.
My dad had signed on, thinking they were going to stay in New York,
and then they ended up in Colorado Springs.
My mother hated it.
This was their first home.
She said it was a dump.
Here's four boys, so young Don,
and that would have been Jim, John and Brian was a baby here.
September, 1951, baby Brian's approximately three weeks old here.
The Catholic Church believed
in large families to keep the faith going,
and so I think my parents just embraced that.
They were doing their Catholic duty.
Don and Jim and John and Brian,
and... Richard and Robert, Michael and Joseph as a baby,
and my dad's in his uniform there.
I was always called "Number Six."
Occasionally, they would call me by my name,
but I was Number Six. I was right in the middle of 12.
Hello!
(SIGHS)
How are you?
I was a little boy growing up with older brothers,
we'd play baseball and did our things together,
and hockey and tennis and swam and hiked and camped
and lived a normal life, but it started to fall apart.
I mean people were getting sick.
The boys, my brothers, were falling ill.
They were losing their minds to schizophrenia.
Mark was the peacekeeper.
If anyone can de-escalate a situation, it was Mark,
because he was a mathematician and a great chess player,
and he always got excellent grades.
He was one of the better students in our family.
I'm in the middle of the youngest five boys.
Richard and Joseph are the older two,
and Matthew and Peter are the younger two.
I lived on the Air Force Academy base until I was five years old,
so I attended kindergarten there.
Dad was a brilliant guy.
As a political science professor, he taught Soviet foreign policy
to the cadets back in the Cold War era.
Among the more significant achievements
of our recent national history,
is the establishment of this leadership laboratory in Colorado.
It is called the United States Air Force Academy.
When my father started teaching at the Academy
we moved out onto the base.
They house you by rank,
so you get your colonels are up on one end,
and then they go down to the majors who are in the middle,
and then you have the non-commissioned officers
down south further.
The Officers Club had swimming pools and tennis courts.
In the summertime, we would spend the whole day
at the swimming pool and playing tennis.
But all the kids went to school together.
I think my parents were a little dismayed
that I spent so much time with non-commissioned officers' kids.
(LAUGHS)
But they were my friends,
and so we did a lot of things together.
Back then it was, you know, military officer,
and they were trying to get a leg up
in the military hierarchy of the ladder system.
They were climbing the ladder,
and Dad was just a looked-upon figure by the Academy staff
because he was in charge of the falconry programme,
and that was their mascot.
That was a big deal.
We had to go train falcons with him,
and feed them beef heart and chop it up
and clean the newspapers and clean up the pen.
We went through training.
Dad would set one on my head
and then he'd walk back so many paces,
and bait his glove and have the bird fly to his glove,
and we did that endlessly for hours.
I think the falconry at the Air Force Academy
made my mother feel special,
something they were known for.
I think that's what my mom liked about it.
It was unusual,
and for my dad it was just a fun sport
that he got to do with his boys.
Arnold Hall was the concert venue for the Air Force Academy.
You know, that was a photo taken right after our 10th boy was born.
It was the Von Trapp family, that's what they used to call us.
"The Sound of Music" came out.
I'll never forget Mom getting us all on the Volkswagen van,
and I bet if we didn't see it 10 times we saw it 20,
and that's what she wanted us to be is that Von Trapp family.
We all booed when Margaret came home from the hospital!
(LAUGHS)
All 10 of us boys sent my mom to tears.
Our quarterback turned out to be a cheerleader.
Margaret?
Beautiful little girl growing up, the pride and joy of mother,
and she was very smart, very talented, a good kid.
Didn't know anything was going on until later in life,
when I heard about the stories of brother Jim.
Mary was the second fiddle to Margaret.
She was, you know, "Okay, I got my pride and joy in Margaret,"
and then along came Mary.
People would say, "Why do you have so many children?"
And my parents would say, "Well, we wouldn't have the girls."
(UNINTELLIGIBLE) always said it was mean,
but my mom used to say, "The roses after all the thorns."
So, she called the boys the thorns and Margaret and I the roses.
There were three acres of land, trees and shrubs,
and things surrounding the property.
It's a beautiful setting.
Not a lot of privacy with so many siblings living in the same house.
Four bedrooms upstairs and two baths.
Downstairs, you had a bathroom and a bedroom off of the stairway,
but that was an open room, there was no door.
And then the garage got turned into another bedroom.
Chaotic, but to me it was just normal.
"Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom! Peter hit me! Mom!
Margaret's not being nice to me. Mom!"
Guess she got that from everybody.
She would always go, "Tattle-tale tit, your tongue will be split,
and all the dogs in town will have a little bit,"
because she just hated tattle-telling,
because how could you keep up with it?
You couldn't possibly be interfering in every conflict 12 children had.
She'd say, "Go resolve it."
Mom was definitely a perfectionist when it came to house cleaning.
All the boys were assigned tasks,
whether it was sweeping the floor one day
or doing the dishes the next day,
or cleaning the bathrooms another day, or vacuuming.
It was the white glove test, you know? (LAUGHS)
If it wasn't clean, she would let you know and you'd do it over.
To my mother, social status was important.
I don't think so much to my father, but I think he went along with it.
She always liked to rub elbows or rub shoulders with famous people,
famous artists, musicians, dancers, anyone in the arts.
She didn't like the military wives. They didn't listen to opera.
(LAUGHS) Military wives!
And she, she had trouble finding the culture
that she was looking for.
The Church became a place
where there were levels of importance,
kind of a caste system in and of itself.
The people that were more ingratiated with the priests
were elevated in some way.
It gave my mother some level of importance
that the priest would come to our home,
and I vaguely remember the priest coming.
It was a big to-do.
"Oh, Father Frudenstein is coming.
We need to get everything tidied up and make sure she had her tea on.
He would show up at the door with records for her.
He would bring her opera records to listen to
and, as a gift, you know, to her.
I was not particularly fond of him,
and I kind of distanced myself from it.
It's like an instinct.
The only thing I have now is
what I heard from my brothers about him,
the fact that he became physically or sexually abusive
towards my oldest brother, Don.
Everything seemed so picture-perfect,
and then this other thing was happening at the same time.
I mean, it just unravelled so fast.
It was, "How could this possibly be happening to them?
They'd done everything right."
Donald, he was my father's favourite, for sure.
He was a great athlete.
Their football team took state in the senior year,
Got into the state finals in wrestling.
He played hockey. He was an all-round athlete,
and I, I kind of admired that
when I was younger, looking up to him.
So, these are pictures of Donald.
My parents sort of elevated him in our family status.
He was sort of the "could do no wrong,
perfect boy, who, you know, got good grades,
handsome and dated the General's daughter."
And there he is in high school, track and field.
It seems like everybody in the family followed suit.
Jim was an athlete.
I remember him playing football,
highlight moment, blocked a punt and scored a touchdown.
Jim, he was always in competition with Don
from the time they were little,
you know, who was better at baseball,
who was a better swimmer?
Who could run faster, who could jump higher?
Who-- You know, and I think, and Donald was always superior,
He was older.
That really bothered Jim,
that he always sort of felt slighted or...
...that he wasn't good enough, that my parents loved Don more.
The first I recognised that Donald was my father's favourite,
I was about 12 years old,
and he would have been, you know, five years older,
and he became violent.
I became his punching bag.
He would have a couple of my brothers hold me,
so he could take swings at me,
you know, and I had no way to defend myself,
and so I was terrified of him after that.
I told my parents about it,
and my father ceased to believe anything I said, it seemed like,
about Donald.
If I would talk about Donald,
it was like, it just got shoved to the side.
It was not believable.
So, you endured what you could and then you avoided what you could.
And I'm not the only one in the family that suffered that way.
When I was a child,
I would wait on top of the hill opposite my home
for my mother to come home.
I would wait for her until her car pulled up.
I was afraid of being beaten by my brothers.
That was not something that's normal for a child to experience.
You know, they would make me hold encyclopaedias in my arms
and hit me in the stomach and tell me not to drop them,
or even sometimes they would pour Tabasco sauce on my tongue,
make me eat cat food.
It's like the fear of this,
you know, was always something that was with me every day.
I was always breaking up the fights
between the older brothers and the younger ones.
Dad used to call me "Kissinger, the diplomatic one,"
because I was always trying to make peace in the family.
There was a lot of tension between John and Jim and Don.
Always fighting.
The one I'll never forget is at Woodman Valley.
Don and Jim started fighting in the house.
Of course, Mother said, "Get out of the house if you're gonna fight."
Donald started running after Jim down the road, Hidden Valley Road,
and I'll never forget looking down the road with my mom
and watching them.
Donald took a swing and lifted my brother up off the ground.
I've never seen anybody get hit so hard in my life.
You know, I don't know if some of this had anything to do
with Donald's mental health issues already,
even though they weren't diagnosed yet.
It could be that, even as a younger boy
he had some mental issues
that caused him to behave towards us like he did.
Donald met Jean in college and brought her home
and told the family that he's going to get married,
so we were all happy for him.
They know they're getting married, they're in college.
Donald was a straight A student, I understood.
Everybody was happy.
Jean was just a very nice lady, big, tall, strong woman.
She was a rancher's daughter, you know, very tough-minded.
I can only tell you, what is hearsay.
Again, I didn't know them very well,
but...
Don wanted to have a family, Jean didn't.
Jean wanted to pursue her doctoral degree.
Don wanted to start a family.
I think that was a huge rift between them.
It might have tipped the scaled on Donald as far as his mental illness.
I'm not sure it made any difference, but probably did.
Donald, he went away to college when I was six.
Didn't really see him much in the next several years
until he came home
and by then he was very much in psychotic states
from time to time.
My first memory of Donald is his coming home from college,
and being very, very upset and crying.
And my bedroom being adjacent to my parents,
and there being a lot of yelling and screaming and commotion,
and him on his knees
saying, "What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?
Help me, please, help me."
Everyone was awake in the house,
and "What's going on? What's going on?"
Donald was screaming and yelling at everybody in the house
to please get down,
that there's somebody outside that's trying to hurt us.
My mother, you know, was saying, "Oh, dear God, what is going on?
Is he on drugs?"
Get the younger children out of the environment
where my father was trying to, to calm him down.
(POLICE SIRENS BLARING) (DOG BARKING)
This is Donald's records
from Colorado State University Student Health Services.
"This student is the oldest of 12 children, 10 boys, two girls.
He has been self-supporting in school.
He gave up an apartment to save expenses
and is living in an old fruit cellar,
which he described as large enough to hold his mattress.
He has no water.
In past two weeks has run through bonfire,
put cord around his neck,
turned on gas and even gone to a funeral home
to price caskets."
As a psychiatrist, a psychologist or a social worker,
trying to interview, evaluate an individual
who appears to have a mental illness,
the health care worker is trying to understand
what's going on in their head.
So, people develop tools that they thought would give them
a view inside the mental apparatus of a person.
The classic tool was the Rorschach Test.
The Rorschach test was a series of ink blots,
literally just non-discriminate forms,
and they looked a little bit like something you'd seen before.
One might look like an eagle because it had spread wings.
And the psychologist,
the psychiatrist would ask the patient,
"What do you see here?"
Yeah, so here they're showing him a picture,
and Don would say, "I could say it's the back haunches of a cow,
and faces at each other, young children.
The whole thing, a modern drawing of it.
Thigh, knee, foot.
The number of segments going in either direction.
Two kids fit in it."
What could she possibly glean about his deep inner psychology
by looking at pictures that look like the back of a cow
or two children?
They were often used to conclude that somebody was psychotic,
because the person, if, would sometimes say very wild things.
You know, like, "I see, you know, an eagle devouring a child."
Obviously, they're not in the ink blot,
that's why they were called projective tests.
They asked you to project your own inner ideas onto the ink blot.
Oh, so, here we are, November 29th, 1966.
"Very sadistic killing of a cat
and fantasies of killing a person at a football game.
Fear, realistic at the time, that he had killed an instructor."
Dr. Oxman, a psychiatrist,
predicted he was dangerous to others,
and then it says, "Possible schizophrenic reaction.
Recommendation immediate hospitalisation
for evaluation and prescription."
Being admitted to a state mental hospital
when your child is... However old he is, 20, 21.
I mean I think of that now, my son is 22,
and what would that emotionally feel like to be told
that your son is schizophrenic
and that he needs to be sent to a place
that everyone knew was horrific.
"For years what was called 'insanity' was regarded as a problem
for each state to solve as best it could.
In nearly all state mental hospitals,
little more than custodial care was provided.
Few who were committed could hope to return to society.
Many whose illnesses were comparatively mild at the start
became increasingly worse, until all hope of recovery vanished."
There were dark chapters
in the history of treatment of psychiatric patients.
Castration was common. Taking out people's pancreas.
Lobotomy was a way of cutting into the brain
and breaking up fibres that connect cells in the brain to each other.
"Operations can be performed under local anaesthesia
if the patient is sufficiently cooperative."
Surgeons would cut a hole in your skull,
introduce a knife into that hole
and then go like this with the knife to cut the fibres
in the frontal lobe of your brain,
and that became a very popular procedure in certain institutions.
And the frontal lobe is the part of your brain
that learns from experience, that uses judgment.
It's the executive of your brain.
When you break up the frontal lobe's connection to the rest of the brain,
you obviously reduce somebody's capacity
to exercise all those frontal lobe functions,
but you've made them much more docile.
For Don's mom, I just can't imagine, just the shock,
the shame and the fear that Mimi experienced
and, and her husband as well, that to have a son
whom you love and you've seen this very handsome, beautiful son,
and now, you're having to have him in an institution.
I, I think it would have been horrifying.
Well, here, I mean, he's being diagnosed with schizophrenia
and he's been recommended immediate hospitalisation,
and I can't read the date, but I'm assuming--
Oh, it's a different handwriting, so "Patient was not admitted...
...per instructions but is being treated as an outpatient
at the Air Force Academy Hospital."
So, this is the letter from the Department of the Air Force.
"Our findings show no evidence of serious thinking disorder,
nor of symptoms secondary to a psychotic process.
It is my considered opinion that Mr. Galvin can function
in the academic setting at CSU."
That's unbelievable! (LAUGHS)
My father was probably trying to use his influence to keep Don in school.
I think my parents were, like, "Shape up and get on with it."
Somehow, I think they were wishing or hoping and praying,
that this would be a temporary situation,
that he would somehow outgrow,
and if he just stuck with his studies, that he would be okay.
Certainly, sending him to Pueblo, to a, a psychiatric hospital,
would have admitted defeat.
They would have had to accept
the diagnosis that he was, in fact, schizophrenic.
Were my parents so blind to what was going on with him?
Were they so trying to ignore it, or pray it away?
Whatever they were doing with this information
was putting somebody else in danger.
You know, when Donald first came home from college,
they weren't seeking treatments for him at the time, I don't believe
they were just trying to keep him home
and take care of him the best they could
and hopefully that,
that wouldn't disrupt the rest of the family too much.
They did the best they could under the circumstances.
What else were they gonna do
but just try to minimise the exposure of the illness
so they could maintain their status, if you will, with the...
The governors and people they were dealing with.
They were dealing at a very high level in our society.
My father, he was a, what I call an over-achiever
and doing too many, too many--
Too much for most people to even comprehend.
He actually wrote a book about American politics,
and he got his doctorate degree.
That was a proud moment, I suppose,
and I was proud of him for doing that,
having a big family and going to school
and doing your doctoral degree.
That doesn't happen very often. That's pretty rare, I think.
We ordered Kentucky Fried Chicken. (LAUGHS)
Had a picnic out on the lawn in front of the Boulder Library.
Yeah, I can remember that day. It was a nice day.
It was a good day.
But probably no more family gatherings
that were as nice after that.
After Dad's graduation, this is 1969,
so I would say shortly after that
was when Donald really became seriously ill.
(VOICES WHISPERING)
I was maybe three or four years old.
I remember Don being psychotic and it being scary.
He paced constantly,
constantly paced and paced and paced and paced,
and spoke-- Talked to himself, just...
(VOICES WHISPERING)
Hours and hours and hours on end he paced and talked to himself.
He, I think, believed himself to be a prophet.
He was dressed in these robes, this brown sheet.
He created these rituals around his life.
(WHISPERING)
"The Biblical babbling," I called it.
It was just always relating everything to the Bible.
Everything that went on in the world was related to the Bible somehow.
He was just trying to stay in a reality of some sort.
I can remember Dad lecturing him.
He would take him up into his bedroom and lecture him,
but you could hear it through the house, you know.
"Why are you doing this?
Why are you going to the school in a priest robe?
What are you doing? You're embarrassing this family."
I certainly wouldn't want to be seen in public with him
at the time, you know.
We were afraid he would do something crazy.
None of my friends knew that I had a mentally ill brother.
It was not something that we talked about.
It was my dad's philosophy
that you don't air your dirty linen in public.
Mom felt the same way.
To me, this would be the family's shame, you know.
My father was always about trying to keep a family reputation,
and you're known by the company you keep,
and so I think he was afraid that the stigma of schizophrenia,
anybody finding out about it would affect what he did.
Don was the bad guy now, in the family.
He was the one that was causing so much trouble,
and my mother relied on Jim
to get the younger children out of the house,
so then while we were with him
Jim would just go on and on.
He even gave him a name, "Gookoid".
"Oh, it's Gookoid again." Jim was very cruel, very cruel.
I was unaware, as a child, Jim was mentally ill.
I had no understanding or indication that he had sought treatment
and that my parents had helped him get treatment.
And, in retrospect, of course, you know, he was quite ill.
The dynamics started changing in the family.
I remember Dad and Donald getting into fisticuffs.
Nobody ever challenged Dad up until Donald,
and Donald was stronger.
I don't know how long they fought for,
but it was a serious fight.
Bodies crashing to the ground, wrestling, and fists being thrown.
My brother Donald won.
And I do remember Donald coming after my mother
physically a few times,
and it always was probably around
her being the one that told him to take his medications.
"Have you taken your medications?"
And Donald would say, "---- you, I'm not taking that stuff."
And my mother would say, "Yes, you are,"
and he'd say, "No, I'm not." And so a, a conflict would ensure.
There was a lot of bad times for Mom and I don't know how she did it,
come to think about it and just how Donald stayed in that home with her,
just so he wouldn't have to spend his life in a mental hospital.
I remember one in particular where my father and Donald were wrestling,
and I remember there was this mushroom,
it was crystal, and I remember that being picked up
and used as-- And that could kill someone, easily.
It was a heavy object.
And I remember being terrified
that Donald was gonna kill my father,
because my father was trying to protect my mother from Donald.
(VOICES WHISPERING)
"Why did you hurt them?"
Often, Donald's anguish was centred around his wife having left him,
and he was... obsessed,
absolutely obsessed with finding Jean,
and I would guess she probably had to find a way
to get away from him where he couldn't necessarily find her.
I remember my parents getting a phone call from the police.
"10.20 a.m., Donald Kenyon Galvin, 24,
was booked for protective custody in connection
with an alleged homicide attempt.
He mixed acid and cyanide and held his wife and himself in the room.
He had little insight and gave little feeling
about the seriousness of his actions.
He is psychotic and he is losing control and insight.
He is dangerous to himself and the community."
(DOOR CLOSES)
I feel sorry for my parents.
(SNIFFS)
I mean, they were...
...brilliant people.
They seem to have really had a pretty picture-perfect
thing going from the outside,
and then they had this beautiful family that,
you know, my mom put on her white gloves
and off to church we went with our beautiful outfits
all perfectly pressed.
If you look at the first incident, which is really Donald,
it took ten years before we really started to know
that something was really wrong.
Nobody knew who had what or what was going on.
I don't think they knew what to make of it all.
I think my parents were so dumbstruck,
how could this possibly be happening to them?
It's a tragic story,
to be part of the Galvin family is to be part of a tragedy.
What's your relationship with Donald today?
I don't have one. I never see him.
I don't think he cares.
It's very difficult to be around people that are mentally ill
like my brother, Donald.
Because they're so harmful and they get into your psyche.
-Don, hey, you comfortable? -Mm-hmm.
Okay.
And if there's anything you don't wanna answer,
just say, "Move on."