I MET JACKIE YAMAHIRO in 2005, when I was hired along with my husband, David A. Lee, to write the feature-film adaption of historian Neil Miller’s Sex-Crime Panic. Jackie is a central figure in the award-winning 2002 nonfiction book, which details how twenty innocent gay men were locked up in an Iowa mental hospital in 1955. Following a research trip to the Hawkeye State in early 2005, David and I hosted a dinner party at our Los Angeles home for the film’s producers, Jackie, and Bernie McMorris, the only survivor of the incarceration then known to be alive. The old friends—Jackie was then 73, Bernie 85—hadn’t seen each other in years. “This woman saved my life,” the frail former hairdresser told us through tears. He died a year later. Our movie was never made. But Jackie—now 94 and a dear friend—is alive and well, residing in a retirement community condominium near her daughters and grandchildren in San Mateo, California. She remembers the events of 1955 as if they had happened yesterday.
That autumn, twenty sex offenders were delivered to Ward 15 East of the Mental Health Institute at Mount Pleasant, a town of 8,000 in southeastern Iowa. The men ranged in age from eighteen to 58, hailing from Sioux City and its environs. All had been arrested weeks before on morals charges, coerced into pleading guilty, and sentenced to three years’ hard labor. But instead of being sent to the state penitentiary in nearby Fort Madison, each had been adjudged to be a “criminal sexual psychopath” and committed by court order “until cured.” And yet, just a few months earlier, on July 23rd, The Des Moines Register had reported that, at a recent national psychiatric conference, Mount Pleasant’s superintendent, Dr. W. B. Brown, had heard experts claim there existed “no specific and adequate treatment after which it can be said that a deviate has been cured.”
The task of overseeing these depraved souls would fall to two hastily promoted interns: 27-year-old Roy Yamahiro and 25-year-old Dick Gundersen. Jackie (née Paulson) was Roy’s 24-year-old wife.
The couple, pegged as “young and idealistic” by the hospital staff, were clearly different—not only from their colleagues but from each other. Tall Oregon native Roy towered over his petite, Wisconsin-born mate. But it was another distinction—he was Japanese-American, her origins were European—that endlessly intrigued the people they encountered. Interracial marriage was not only rare in the mid-1950s; it was illegal in more than a dozen states, though not in Iowa.
The two had met as psychology majors at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and married soon after graduation. They had then relocated to Des Moines, where Roy completed his master’s degree at Drake University while Jackie supported them by working as a proofreader for Better Homes & Gardens. In spring 1955, the pair had scored internships at Mount Pleasant—opened in 1865 as the first of four sanatoriums in the state, and at the time housing some 1,500 patients within dozens of winding wards (men’s to the east, women’s to the west) connected to the central structure by a complex network of long staircases and tunnels. Since June, the duo, plus Dick Gundersen, had been living, like most employees, in third-floor staff apartments at the asylum. In agreeing to stay on and take charge of these degenerates, Roy would have to postpone his doctoral studies, but the sacrifice was worth it to earn much-needed extra money and invaluable experience. But rather than managing violent rapists, pedophiles, and peeping Toms, she and Roy were about to become lifesaving guardians to a harmless group of terrified, closeted gay men.
Entrapment
Two sadistic child murders perpetrated ten months apart in the Sioux City area had precipitated the men’s dispatch to Mount Pleasant. On September 29, 1954, the mutilated and decomposing body of an eight-year-old boy was found in a pasture nearly a month after he’d vanished from a neighbor’s front yard. On July 10, 1955, a two-year-old girl was abducted from her crib through her bedroom window. She was found dead in a cornfield the next day—battered, burned by a cigarette or lighter, raped, and sodomized.
In the months between the killings—spurred by a panicked populace—the Iowa state legislature had unanimously passed its criminal sexual psychopath law (akin to statutes in 25 other states), which permitted the involuntary commitment of anyone who exhibited “criminal propensities toward the commission of sex offenses.” Signed by Republican Governor Leo A. Hoegh, it had taken effect on April 14th. In the aftermath of the second murder three months later, the community demanded that Hoegh make use of his new weapon. It was determined at a July 22nd meeting between him, members of the Board of Control (the body presiding over the state’s mental hospitals), and other officials that Mount Pleasant would prepare 15 East to accommodate approximately 25 inmates.
Since ferreting out fiends would be challenging, Hoegh—in concert with Woodbury County Attorney Donald E. O’Brien—authorized Sioux City police officers to entrap harmless, unsuspecting gay men. The operation was an open secret. Sioux City Police Chief James O’Keefe handpicked handsome young cops Richard Burke and Edward Verbeski for the job. This government-sanctioned “fruit-picking” expedition began over Labor Day weekend, with the undercover patrolmen descending upon the Tom Tom Room, a bar within the stately downtown Warrior Hotel, where discreet gay men were known to stealthily assemble. It was in the hotel’s cruisy men’s room that the gay patrons were “pinched” by Burke and Verbeski. At that point each unfortunate fellow was threatened with harsh punishment unless he named names.
In Iowa at that time, consensual sodomy was a felony punishable by ten years in prison. Being gay was also classified as a sexual deviation in the inaugural edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1952). Authorities never claimed any of the men snared were connected to the child homicides. They were scapegoated to appease mass hysteria.
On September 8th, a LeMars Globe-Post front-page headline blared “Crackdown on ‘Queers’ Has Begun.” The article stated: “Sioux City police yesterday arrested 19 men and a 14-year-old boy following a raid on a Sioux City tavern.” The next day, The Sioux City Journal identified Bernie McMorris, then 36, as the first person committed to Mount Pleasant after pleading guilty to lascivious acts with a child. With a wife and three young children, he was the only married man snagged in the roundup. The September 19th Globe-Post cover story revealed the names of five more men. Looking back, Jackie asked: “What craziness is that? I think we felt for them before they ever arrived,” adding that she and Roy somehow knew these men weren’t sexual psychopaths but were “just human beings.”
Kinship and Release
It wasn’t just innate decency that made the couple empathize with those under their watch. Upon their arrival at Mount Pleasant, they’d immediately experienced discrimination. The woman in charge of assigning staff quarters had given the single Gundersen an apartment with a double bed, then lodged Roy and Jackie in one with two twins. “[She was] kind of our Nurse Ratched,” Jackie recalled with a chuckle.
Roy, orphaned early in life, had been imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center, an Idaho internment camp that held thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In Jackie’s words” “He looked back on his camp experience in a lot of different ways. He kind of had fun there because they had no parents.” But later, as an adult, her husband saw himself in his detainees. “He knew what it was like, and felt there was probably no reason for any of them to be there.”
Contrary to their fellow intern’s views, neither Roy nor Jackie felt the men could or should be cured of their sexual orientation. “Gundersen was going to convert them, so Dick and my husband argued about that all the time,” she remembered, adding that Roy felt their job was “to help them survive through all of this … and be comfortable with themselves as they were.” Since their higher-ups didn’t feel compelled to prescribe any remedy, Roy’s approach prevailed. When it was nice out, they would take the men to play baseball against a team of female patients. In inclement weather, they’d play ping-pong inside. Jackie and Roy also chaperoned the men at weekly movie and dance nights attended by staff and patients. “Roy never asked permission,” Jackie recalled. “He just did it.” The residents of 15 East, many of whom were musically inclined, greatly improved the dances by forming a band and performing.
While Roy and Gundersen led regular, separate group therapy sessions, Jackie became the guys’ confidante, seeing them individually in her office and feeling valued when she could brighten their day. “Sometimes they would come talk to me if they were having a problem on the ward where somebody was moving in on their territory,” she said, admitting to feeling woefully inadequate counseling gay men on romantic matters. “It was just being accepting of them, listening, understanding, and making small suggestions here and there.” Jackie routinely bent the rules for the youngest in her care. “He was really traumatized by this—not only being brought in by the police but being in a group of people he didn’t really know,” she said. “He used to come down to see me every once in a while. We’d close the door, I’d call his mom, and he got to talk with her. He really missed his mother.”
The riskiest move the pair made was on behalf of Bernie—with whom they shared the closest bond—and his wife Doreen. To give them time alone, Jackie once sneaked Doreen onto the elevator and up to the Yamahiros’ apartment for an hour of private conversation away from prying eyes and ears. “Roy could have gotten in a lot of trouble if they’d ever figured that one out,” Jackie said. “We’d probably [have been]out in the street.”
Late that fall, the men of 15 East enjoyed a reversal of fortune. On November 2, The Sioux City Journal reported that it was costing Woodbury County “$1,500 a month to pay for the keep of 15 of the 21 criminal sexual psychopaths sent to Mount Pleasant mental hospital.” That seemed money squandered, especially when, in the November 25th edition of The Des Moines Register, Superintendent Brown repeated that no treatment or cure existed. “The only thing we can do is to try to accomplish something by talking to them. If a cure is going to come it has to be something that comes from within them.” It was a prime time for the men to individually submit to discharge hearings.
Bernie was the first to go before the parole board. “He was the one everybody looked at because he was married,” Jackie explained. “I know Roy spent a lot of time with him talking about potential questions that would be asked of him, what people were looking for, and what they were not looking for.” In addition to coaching each man, Roy vouched for them in preliminary written reports, then sat in on proceedings. Afterward, he’d discuss the merits of each case with the powers that be. In his December 29 parole consideration note recommending release, Klodnycky wrote that Bernie was “beginning to understand his own condition and he will keep away from such practices in the future.” On January 1, 1956, Dr. Brown signed Bernie’s certificate of discharge, which stated he was “Recovered (Cured).” He was released to Doreen’s custody.
With Bernie’s hairdresser’s license revoked, he and Doreen were penniless and had to take their children to live with relatives. They then relocated to Southern California, where their marriage buckled under the strain of his public shaming. Both later had frequent indiscretions with other men. In 1960 one of Doreen’s affairs led to the birth of a daughter, whom Bernie raised as his own after Doreen died by suicide five years later. He eventually found love with a man four decades younger, who died in 2001 of complications from AIDS. Bernie’s shame remained so great throughout their 21-year relationship that he never mentioned Mount Pleasant.
Epilogue
Ward 15 East was shut down in fall 1956. Two decades to the day after Bernie’s release, Iowa’s sexual psychopath law was repealed. Both child murders remain unsolved.
Roy eventually completed his doctorate at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where the couple had their two daughters, Mary and Nancy, and Jackie worked as a social worker at Eastern State Hospital, a psychiatric institute. Roy’s first post-doctoral employment was in consumer behavior research for General Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Subsequent opportunities would bring the Yamahiros to other cities. In 1990, at age 62, Roy died in Denver of complications from diabetes.
After retiring from a career in social services, childhood education, and finance, Jackie volunteered for the Colorado AIDS Project, which brought back memories of Mount Pleasant. “It just hurt me so much that gay guys weren’t accepted,” she said. “I felt that was so wrong—so terribly wrong.” In 2004 she relocated to the Bay Area to be closer to her daughters and Mary’s young children. Today, she looks back on her and Roy’s Mount Pleasant period with great fondness. Does she look back at herself and Roy in 1955 and realize how far ahead of their time they were—how groundbreaking it was for them to be allies decades before that term was coined? “No,” she replied solemnly. “I look back and think we were pretty smart.”
Daniel Vaillancourt is a freelance journalist based in Southern California. A regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times, he has also written for AARP, HuffPost, and The Advocate, among others.
