Two chapters focus on Justice, Shrubsall
By Gene Warner
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
The first time he fielded the question, Charles Patrick Ewing was a Harvard Law School student, working in a Boston-area district attorney’s office some 25 years ago.
A secretary pulled Ewing aside and whispered to him:
“I know this may sound stupid. But I’ve heard that you are a forensic psychologist. What does psychology have to do with dead bodies?”
“Forensic” actually means legal, Ewing replied. So forensic psychologists evaluate the mental state of people involved in legal matters.
That’s what Ewing, a University at Buffalo Law School professor, has done for about 30 years, testifying in more than 600 trials. Those experiences led him to write “Trials of a Forensic Psychologist,” a casebook with a Western New York flavor.
Three of the 10 chapters in this highly readable book deal with cases that have snared headlines in the Buffalo area over the last 25 years:
William Shrubsall beat his mother to death with a baseball bat in June 1988, less than 12 hours before he was to give the valedictory address at his high school graduation in Niagara Falls.
John Justice killed his parents, younger brother and a neighbor in Kenmore in September 1985.
And Rudolph Manzella shot and killed one Erie County sheriff’s deputy and seriously wounded another in Clarence in October 1989.
Despite the hundreds of hours examining them and their files, Ewing admits he doesn’t have definitive answers about why such killers, especially Shrubsall and Justice, lashed out, and whether they’re likely to act out in violence again.
That’s one reason Ewing wrote this book, to present an honest view of what forensic psychologists can — and can’t — do.
“I think there’s a kind of romantic or Hollywood view of forensic psychologists, that we’re mind readers or lie detectors or savants,” he said in an interview in his Clarence home. “None of that is true. We’re trained in the study of the mind and the study of behavior, and many of us have legal training, but we’re not what a lot of people think we are.”
Ewing is quick to point out the limitations — even the mistakes — of his profession, sounding modest and humble about his work in these cases.
“What you call modesty, I would call honesty,” he said. “I want to present an honest view of the pluses and minuses of what we do, and let people see what forensic psychologists really do.”
Ewing, 59, emphasized in the interview that as trained and educated as forensic psychologists are, they deal in opinion, not absolute fact.
“They’re educated opinions, informed opinions,” he said. “They’re better opinions than a police officer or a lay person on the street could give, but it’s still an opinion.”
High marks for credibility there.
The most interesting of these cases, from the view of a forensic psychologist, may be Shrubsall’s.
The fatal beating of his mother stemmed from the psychological and physical abuse she had heaped on him over the years.
“Beating [his] mother’s head in was 16 years of pent-up emotion exploding at the end of a baseball bat,” Ewing testified in court. “The floodgate broke.”
Ewing found no evidence of any mental illness, testifying that, at the time of the killing, Shrubsall was in a state of “extreme emotional disturbance” that had a reasonable cause — the abuse he had suffered at his mother’s hands.
Shrubsall pleaded guilty to manslaughter, was later granted youthful-offender status and sentenced to 1x to 4 years in prison. He served the minimum sentence, went on to get an Ivy League education at the University of Pennsylvania and even worked on Wall Street.
But this story had no happy ending. Shrubsall began harassing and sexually abusing young women in the 1990s. He faked suicide, leaving a note about going over Niagara Falls, before fleeing to Nova Scotia, where he went by the name of Ian Thor Greene and engaged in a reign of terror against women.
Canadian doctors have labeled Shrubsall a “sexual psychopath,” a diagnosis that no one made after he killed his mother.
What happened?
For one thing, authorities never knew, in the late 1980s, that Shrubsall, in the two years before killing his mother, had attempted to sodomize a 14- year-old girl, stalked two older women and beaten a teenage boy, Ewing wrote. None of those cases had become public.
“This case, I think, exposes a lot of problems with our field,” Ewing admitted in the interview. “We are acting with incomplete information. We are asked to give opinions to a reasonable degree of certainty when we know we don’t have all the information.”
Forensic psychologists often are asked to make predictions about the likelihood of a subject committing future crimes. Ewing said he’s lucky he wasn’t asked to make such a prediction about Shrubsall after his mother’s killing.
“Based on the information I had at the time, if I had been asked to make a prediction, the prediction would have been wrong,” he said.
Although their crimes were vastly different, Shrubsall and John Justice had one thing in common. Both were brilliant students who finished at the top of their classes and had designs on Ivy League educations.
Justice, though, had a mental illness, schizophrenia, a diagnosis later agreed to by 13 doctors. The jury at his first trial, torn between conviction and an insanity acquittal, convicted him of two murders and acquitted him of the other two because of his mental illness.
Yet, when Justice was released to a halfway house years later, in 2005, Ewing examined him and found no sign of schizophrenia.
“John may be one of those rare individuals who suffers from schizophrenia but is able to maintain a lengthy, even permanent, remission,” Ewing wrote.
“I hope that is the case. Better yet, though it would call into question the diagnostic accuracy of 13 psychologists and psychiatrists, including me, I hope that we were all wrong and that, despite his very real symptoms of mental illness in his teens and early 20s, John never suffered from schizophrenia.”
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