Carol A. Wool was Co-Director of Primary Care Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She treated me between 1976 and 1985. When the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston demanded proof from me, I wrote to Dr. Wool asking if she would corroborate the fact that, during treatment, I disclosed to her that I was having thoughts that I had been raped at the Charlestown Boys Club when I was a child. And she did that. In fact, she remembered much more than what I had remembered telling her. In response, Judith A. Malone of Palmer and Dodge dismissed the letter out of hand as vague.
July 3, 1997
Dear Dr. Wool:
You treated me for Borderline Personality Disorder at various times between 1976 and 1985. Previous to that, I had been treated by Dr. Bruno Scherz of Boston, and I spent a month in the psychiatric unit of MGH. Regrettably, I was a very difficult patient, and I suspect you remember me well for that reason.
Please understand that I am not writing you to ask for professional care, nor am I seeking it from anyone else, but that I am contacting both you and Dr. Scherz, as the two physicians who treated me.
After my visits with you ended, I persisted on my own to resolve my psychological problems. I finally succeeded in isolating my most fundamental problem to recurrent and uncontrollable feelings of overwhelming humiliation, fear, self-abomination, and pain. With that, I also discovered within myself a profound antipathy toward these haunting emotions. Eventually, I overcame this antipathy and then worked very hard to allow myself to be moved by these terrible feelings, in a gradual but eventual fashion. In doing that, during several days in May of 1996, I very suddenly became transported into the horrifying reality from which these emotions had originally arisen, and I learned that I had been the victim of a brutal and vicious assault by two men who worked as counselors at a Boys’ Club day camp that I attended in July of 1963, when I was eleven. The assault included torture, rape, and the threat of imminent death (being pushed out of a high-rise window).
Obviously, I am very happy to have made such great headway in my lifelong efforts to recover from these wounds. However, as you might imagine, success was slow in coming because my work required concentrated efforts lasting months at a time, and funds for such an opportunity were scarce. Beginning in 1990, when my efforts began paying off and I devoted more and more time to my work, I endured considerable poverty in order to move ahead. Then, in January of 1996, I came into a sum of money which afforded me an opportunity to work full-time for six months, and it was this opportunity that yielded me the breakthrough which I have just told you about.
I wrote to the Boys’ Club in October of 1996, told them what had happened to me, and asked for their help with the funding I need in order to continue my work and finally put my demons to rest, a job which might require up to three years of full-time work. In reply, they asked for proof of the crime. I spent the next two months attempting to determine the identity of the assailant whose face I vividly remembered, and I succeeded. At the end of December, I found him living on the South Shore. Since I could not rely on his cooperation, I had to find the other boys who had been subjected alongside me to different measures of the same brutal treatment for their corroboration. There were sixty-five boys at that camp in July of 1963; I have identified more than half of them, and I have begun to look for them as well. I have done all of this work without any help whatsoever from the Boys’ Club.
In addition to proof of the crime, the Boys’ Club is also asking for documentation of the effect which this crime had upon me.
I am writing you to ask if you would please come forward to speak on my behalf as one of the physicians who treated me for the deep wounds I suffered as a result of this crime. My success in beginning a new life that is free of the pain and terror I have endured for the last three decades hangs wholly on my persuading the Boys’ Club to come forward with the funds I need to complete the last leg of my journey.
I would be very grateful for an opportunity to meet with you personally to discuss this possibility, and I will telephone your office in the next few days and ask to speak with you. If you are unavailable at the time, I will ask for a return call through my pager [telephone number redacted].
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
James Chester