At Swallowing the Camel: "Anthony Godby Johnson: The Invisible Boy Behind The Night Listener".

I saw the movie tonight and highly recommend it (along with the novel). Not only does it show the heartbreak that hoaxes involving serious illness and abuse can cause, it really delves into the questions of what motivates people to invent such horror stories (and, in this case, the children to go along with them). The short answer, in this case, is: Factitious disorder. As Sandra Oh's character sums it up in the movie, people suffering from these conditions (mostly women) feel unworthy of love, and creating stories or personas that inspire sympathy gets them the attention they need. Factitious disorders include Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy syndromes, which typically involve seeking attention from health professionals and friends by faking illness/injury or causing/inventing illness in a child. Unlike your average hoaxer, these people are not primarily after money, nor are they out to prove themselves intellectually superior to the rest of us. They're just ill. (I'm guessing the women who've been caught faking cancer for cash donations don't have disorders, unless "crazy evil bitch syndrome" counts.) I wonder if some or all of these people who come out with bizarre stories of CIA mind control and abuse (Neil Brick, K. Sullivan, Cathy O'Brien) have these disorders; at first I thought they were after money and fame, but there doesn't seem to much of that on the Christian Patriot/conspiranoid lecture circuit (maybe I'm wrong). As much as literary fraud annoys me, I have to constantly remind myself that it's not always the result of greed. Some of these hoaxers are in desperate need of help.

One weird case in the news recently involved, tangentially, the "mysterious deaths" of microbiologists that seemed to start with the beating of Dr. Benito Que in Miami in 2001.
Harvard microbiologist Don C. Wiley disappeared on a business trip to Memphis that November, his vehicle abandoned on a bridge. Invesigators theorized that he fell off the bridge accidentally, but didn't rule out suicide. His body was found on the shore of the Mississippi in Lousiana the following February. Around the same time, Katherine Smith of Memphis was due to appear in court on charges of helping 5 Muslim terrorists obtain illegal drivers' licenses. One day before her court date, she died in a one-car accident that turned out to be a murder disguised as a suicide.
Confused yet? Me too. I don't know much else about these "Memphis mysteries", except that the Shelby County, Tennessee, medical examiner who worked on the Don Wiley and Katherine Smith cases also had his share of problems. One month after Smith's murder, a bomb and explosives were found and defused in a stairwell of the forensic center where Dr. O.C. Smith worked. Three months after that, Dr. Smith was attacked by a strange man who bound him with barbed wire and strapped a bomb to his chest. He was rescued, suffering only minor cuts and bruises. But investigators found his story suspicious, and gradually realized that O.C. Smith could have - and probably did - stage the attack. Smith denies this, even though he has a history of making up outrageous stories about himself. He was dismissed from his post.

The problem is, it's often nearly impossible to discern if people who invent these stories are truly mentally ill, or have some ulterior motive. At first glance, the "Mars and Venus" case that occurred in New Zealand in 1995 was exactly like the case of O.C. Smith: Police detective Brent "Venus" Garner was found bound, gagged, and soaked in gasoline in the yard of his flaming house just two months after he started receiving threatening, anonymous letters. Psychologist Ian Miller sparked a nation-wide Satanic panic by announcing that the culprit was probably an occultist acting out a "Satanic fantasy". (Blame was also heaped on Quentin Tarantino, since the torture of Venus Garner was somewhat similar to the ear-lopping scene in Reservoir Dogs.)
Only Detective Senior Sergeant Grant Nicholls was skeptical of Garner's story. He set up a secret parallel investigation, code-named "Mars", and quickly discovered that Garner had purchased gasoline, duct tape, and a timer right before the attack.
Garner confessed to staging the whole thing. He had cut himself with a scalpel attached to a board to simulate slab/slash wounds all over his body, set his own house on fire, doused himself with gas, and tied himself up. But he wasn't suffering a Factitious disorder. He penned the threatening letters so he'd have an excuse to send his wife and kids out of town, then faked the attack and the arson so he could collect insurance money and leave his wife for a girlfriend.

Other possible cases of Factitious disorder are unresolved. Here in Canada, there was Cindy James, a beautiful Vancouver nurse who appeared to be the victim of a sadistic stalker throughout the '80s. She was subjected to obscene phone calls, Molotov cocktails, arson, three incidents of kidnapping/torture, break-ins, and other harassment that a P.I. and the Vancouver police were helpless to stop. A few police officers and co-workers were convinced Cindy was staging the incidents. Then, in 1989, she disappeared and was found dead two weeks later near a vacant house. She was hogtied but fully clothed. Cause of death was a combination of drugs administered intravenously... yet no needles were found in the area. To this day, no one really knows if Cindy James stalked and killed herself or not. The diary she left behind was written as though she really was being harassed, and had no idea who her tormentor was. Did she have a dissociative disorder that allowed her to stalk herself without consciously realizing it, like Ruth Finley? Sadly, we'll never know. Help came way too late.

If Vicki Zackheim is still around, I hope she somehow gets the treatment she needs and is able to live without her lies. As for Laura Albert, Timothy Barrus, and James Frey? I think they're just a-holes surrounded by sycophantic enablers.