What begins as the exploration of an urban legend evolves into a glimpse at how society needs to manufacture visible boogey men to alleviate internal guilt and disassociate from that which is labeled “evil,” despite our tendencies to walk a thin line between what makes us comfortable and what makes us squirm.
Cropsey, the impetus of the urban legend, was a mental patient on Staten Island who escaped through the various tunnels underneath the sanatorium, only to wile his time away by snatching children off the streets in broad daylight and under the cover of night. In turn, Cropsey also serves as a means of control for parents over their children:
“Don’t go past the mall, or Cropsey will get you … Make sure to come home straight after school, or … Don’t go down to the lake …,” which is the purpose that any urban legend or fictional character like Santa Clause does: creates the illusion that an omniscient, preternatural being can wreak havoc on those who choose not to obey their parents.
And, as with any urban legend or murderous spree that takes place in suburbia, the facts and events go a bit wonky: Cropsey began as a mental patient who killed his wife and then his doctor, but soon evolved to Jason Voorhies-like status, wielding a knife “about this big,” which he eventually trades in for an ax until one of his hands turns into a rusty “bloody hook” to easier gut his victims.
However, the Cropsey legend took a bit of a turn in the summer of 1987 when little Jennifer Schwegert, a young girl with Down syndrome, disappeared. And while there is no way to minimize the tragedy of Schwegert’s disappearance, or the disappearance of Holly Ann Higgins, Schwegert’s death is, in a way, a method of whitewashing the past by incarcerating Andre Rand, the man who has been convicted of her murder and stands on trial for other murders, despite the lack of “physical evidence tying” him to the girls’ disappearance. The only circumstantial evidence is verbal testimony, which is often dismissed because of its inaccuracy. At the same time, Rand has a former “sexual misconduct” charge on his record; he’s a “drifter,” and a nomadic resident of the woods surrounding the former Willowbrook State School, an institution strictly for the mentally ill, where he used to be one of the orderlies.
The Willowbrook State School in itself is a point of controversy because it was a dumping ground for mentally ill children until it was closed in 1987, fifteen years after Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, an expose by Geraldo Rivera, in which he entered with a camera crew and caught rather atrocious images on film: one orderly was tasked with taking care of “fifty severely retarded children,” many of whom were covered in their own feces, others were gnawing and biting on themselves as if they were animals trapped in a cage. And, as Rivera narrates “this is what is looked like; this is what is sounded like; […] but, it smelled of death and disease.”
As a former orderly at Willowbrook, Rand also has these visceral images of its conditions following him around, which stigmatizes him more and more as the boogey man incarnate. My intention here is not to defend Rand, but rather to examine how our tendency to sweep the less aesthetically pleasing members of society under the rug culminates in our need to find – or manufacture – a villain to atone for our sins. Up through 1975, most of the mentally ill in and around Staten Island resided at Willowbrook, surrounded by trees, hundreds of yards from any main road and transported from wing to wing through underground tunnels, thus avoiding any public exposure, and avoiding any public squeamishness. But in all honestly, squirming is necessary: it offers a glimpse at reality untainted. By moving these children to a peripheral location, much like the homeless in early 1990’s New York City who were involuntarily hospitalized in Bellevue, protecting us “from an awareness of rags with voices that make no sense and scream forth in inarticulate rage,”these children free us from our need to learn compassion and empathy, keeping us further and further away from an awareness of the “tentative state of our own well-being and sanity.”1
In addition, Willowbrook also functioned as a Hepatitis Petri dish between 1963 and 1966, when “Healthy children were intentionally inoculated, orally and by injection, with the virus that causes the disease, then monitored to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating it,”2 relegating children to pawns, ensuring the survival of “healthy,” “normal” adults, despite the majority of condoning, blind eyes that were turned to the treatment of the children at Willowbrook.
And while Willowbrook has been closed for some years now, and functions as an additional campus for The College of Staten Island, I can’t help but think that the pillorying of Rand for unsolved kidnappings and murders is a form of repentance for the existence of this modern day leper colony, fashioning Rand into a “martyr for the safety of children.”
Most powerfully, Cropsey exposes the inherent irony to how we categorize our own actions as separate to those that we acquiesce: the majority’s indifference to Willowbrook, and the subsequent diseases, deaths, and exacerbated illnesses that sprung forth from it, is not more humane than Rand allegedly snatching a mentally ill child and having his way with him or her. Clearly, there is no way to condone the murder of a child, mentally ill or otherwise, but condoning to the imprisonment of a child who shudders to think each and every day that life might be long is just as cruel and torturous.
1Ascher, “On Compassion” 2005.
2 source: Museumstuff.com
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