"Mrs. Saddler stands in loco parentis to Knox, and she is a very sane and sensible woman. With her help, he does all right. Of course she is about twenty years older than he (that is my guess; I did not ask her age) and it is statistically probable that she will predecease him, but even this may not lead to his becoming a public charge. Mrs. Saddler is aware of the problem and has in mind solving it when the time comes, in other words, if and when she finds herself getting too old to run her boarding house any longer. She knows other rooming and boarding house keepers, some younger than herself, and believes she will have no difficulty in finding one willing to take over Benny. She says he is pleasant, tractable and easy to get along with, and his earnings are sufficient that he will represent a profit and not a burden to whoever takes care of him. The biggest problem, in fact, will be to find someone sufficiently honest not to make too much of a profit on him.
"So much for his adjustment to society despite his subnormality and now to what you've been waiting for me to discuss, his abnormality, his fantasy of believing that he has committed crimes of which he is innocent and wishing to be punished for them. From what I can learn he seems to have been a wonderfully 'good' boy and probably did nothing that, even in his own mind, merited the punishment he now seeks. I would say that his guilt feelings were given to him by his father. His father—who raised Benny alone after his mother died in childbirth—was a fiery fundamentalist minister. He taught his son what he himself believed—a good but vengeful God, original sin, a very literal brimstone Hell, eternal damnation for the sinner. These are very heady and frightening doctrines even for a person of normal mentality.
"He feels himself guilty of unnameable sins and since he cannot name them—and thereby obtain punishment and through punishment forgiveness—he builds the fantasy of having committed a real sin, one for which he can be punished. A nameable real sin becomes surrogate for an unnameable one.
"The prognosis? Incurable. He may 'grow out of it' or its symptoms may become worse or at any rate more frequent.
"Does this mean he should be put in an institution? I personally do not think so. He will probably again—and possibly again and again—become a mild thorn in your side by confessing to other crimes. As a matter of police routine you'll have to check his story out, and thereby run into a little extra work and expense. But—at his present rate of two years having elapsed between his last confession and his current one—the cost of this slight amount of police work once in a while will be a minute fraction of the cost to society of institutionalizing him and supporting him for the rest of his life. So my recommendation is that you give society a break by letting Benny support himself as long as he can.
"I don't think there's any chance of his becoming dangerously insane. I can't guarantee that, of course—but neither can I guarantee it in your case or mine. And I can say for him what I can say for you or me: at present none of the three of us shows signs or inclination toward any dangerous aberration.
"I do suggest one precaution, however. Any time he again comes in with a confession, whether or not it's one you can immediately rule out without investigation, hold him until I can talk to him again and determine whether his degree and kind of mental disturbance is at that time such that I might want to change my recommendation."
That had been a year ago. Now Benny Knox was disturbed again. Not suddenly, not just tonight; his realization that he was the man who had murdered the two women, the man the police were looking for, had come to him gradually over the past week. At first he hadn't been sure, he couldn't really remember. But that wasn't surprising; from time to time there were so many things that he couldn't remember. Even now he couldn't remember why he had killed them—it must have been just because he was bad, evil. People were born evil and only through God and Jesus could they become good and even then before they could get into Heaven they must confess to the evil things they had done and be punished before they could be forgiven.
He closed his eyes and had a mental picture of his father and his father was holding out a hand to him and saying, "You've done wrong, Benjamin. Confess and let them punish you so you can be forgiven, or I'll never see you again. You'll go to hell and burn forever." His father's face was really his father's face, for there was a picture of his father's face on Benny's bureau and he saw it every day and couldn't forget what his father had looked like. But his father's body was clad in shimmering robes and seated on a throne. Benny often got his father in Heaven and his Heavenly Father mixed up and was as likely to pray to one as to the other.
He said, "Yes, Father, I will," aloud and opened his eyes. They fell upon his hands lying in front of him on a pile of newspapers. Big, strong hands. Strangler's hands. Hands that could kill easily, and had killed.