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Blogfest 2005 - Dec 27, 2004 - Printable Version
- A Tale of Two Psychos
by Mark Faulk
This is the story of two emotionally disturbed children, and how circumstance and society led two people who shared a similar childhood obsession down very different paths. Freddy Wishon lived next door to me. As children, we used to go down to a small pond a few blocks north of our homes. We would catch frogs and crawdads, using the crawdads for bait to go fishing with. It wasn't long, however, before Freddy exposed another, darker side to his personality. One day, he brought a large supply of firecrackers with him, which we first threw into the water, timing our throws so that the firecrackers would explode just as they hit the water, sending water flying into the air. This harmless activity apparently wasn't enough for Freddy, however, and he soon turned his energies to catching frogs. To my horror, he would place the firecrackers in the frogs' mouths, light them, throw the frogs into the air, and laugh this sinister laugh as they exploded in mid-air. I was shocked, but in my mind I began to think back to the other things that Freddy had told me he did for "fun", including skinning frogs alive and watching them try to jump away, clinging to life. After they crawled away, he would then follow them and watch, just for fun, eventually "finishing the job". I didn't hang out with Freddy after that, and years later, I had almost forgotten the disturbing episodes, or maybe I had subconsciously buried them in the back of my mind. Some things are best forgotten.
Then, in January of 1974, I heard one of the most disturbing (there's that word again) news reports I had ever heard. A boy, about my age (I was 17 at the time), had talked another boy, age 13, into going with him to a vacant lot with him, and had cut the boy's throat. The Oklahoma District Court records described it like this:
"Autopsy established that death was caused by a large incised wound of the throat and neck which had been cut more than once. The wound was seven inches in length from the front of the throat around the right side of the neck and gaped open three and one-half to four inches wide. The wound extended back almost to the spine with the trachea, or windpipe, being cut completely in half and only a small bit of tissue was not severed at the back of the esophagus, the tube through which food passes. Although the wound extended around only somewhat more than half of the circumference of the neck, of all the major arteries and veins connecting the head and body only one major artery and the spinal cord with its enclosing bond were left functionally intact."
However, the victim, Tommy Mantooth, didn't die immediately. Instead, he crawled 96 feet from where his throat had been brutally slashed, until finally, the killer returned to "finish the job", slitting his throat again. Then, I heard the killer's name for the first time: Frederick Hamilton Wishon, or, as I had known him years earlier, Freddy Wishon. It made me realize that the twisted sense of right and wrong that allows someone to commit an act as heinous as taking the life of another human being was not something that just happened overnight. No, it was the culmination of a darker, more sinister force that finds it's way into the psyche of the murderer over years and years of abusive behavior. It's a story that has haunted me to this day, but again, I had mostly put the memory to rest in a dark corner of my mind.....until now, that is.
What reminded me of the demented acts of a ten year old child that happened almost forty years ago? It was this passage, taken from a May 21, 2000 New York Times article, quoting someone named Terry Throckmorton, who was describing HIS childhood friend: "' We were terrible to animals', recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the house turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. 'Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them, or we would put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'"
"We would put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up." The words sent a chill down my spine. Who was Mr. Throckmorton talking about? Who was the person whose house was the scene of these childhood atrocities, who was the "we" in "We would put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."?
This person was never convicted of a murder, he didn't end up on death row like Freddy Wishon back in 1976. He didn't personally graduate from torturing frogs to slitting teenagers' throats. However, this person put more people to death than Freddy Wishon would have ever hoped to kill. This person took a very different path than Freddy did, a path that led him through a stint as the Governor of Texas, where he signed the death warrants for 154 prisoners in six years. In fact, he authorized more executions than any other governor in the history of the United States. They do have one thing in common - both are reformed Christians, since Freddy "found God" while in prison. But that's where the similarities end. While Freddy Wishon sits in a jail cell, his death sentence changed to life in prison (which most certainly wouldn't have happened had he been convicted in Texas during this governor's term), this person sits in the White House....George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States.
Freddy's Story:
http://wyomcases.courts.state.wy.us/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?citeID=744
The latest on Freddy:
http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/844/public/news417314.html
George's story:
http://www.bushkills.com/
(Editor's note: This is an entry from The Faulking Truth blog, ingeniously entitled "Blogfest 2005". If you'd like to spend more of your valuable time blogging, go to www.faulkingtruth.com/blog/ )
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