A Toxic Trio

By Rick and Jacqueline Metz

Before you read this story you need to know that everyone mentioned here is deceased. The purpose of this story is to shed some light on how mental illness, drugs, and finally, the computer, destroyed a woman and, along the way wreaked havoc to her family and the many others she came into contact within the community.

Where do you start to tell the story of a woman whose life was troubled, her entire adult years, with drugs and mental illness? It all started for me from the very first time we met in 1973. I was naive to many of life’s issues – up until then I had focused almost entirely on hitting a little white ball around the golf course. The problems were there from the very beginning of that relationship, I just didn’t have a clue. She caught up with me after she had been through a failed first marriage, and it turned out that drugs and mental illness ruined her first marriage. That, of course, is not the story I was told in the beginning of the relationship. So before I knew what had hit me – we were married.

Besides being addicted to cigarettes, I knew pretty early on that she was taking Valium, She said it was for anxiety and to help her deal with her recent failings. Again in my naivety, this didn’t seem like a problem. She did manage back then to get a pretty good job. My construction business began to take off, and success came early to the marriage, making it easy to just disregard the use of drugs. At the same time, her serious mental illness was wreaking havoc with her mother and an older brother, so most of our family focus was on them and not on her. Years after all this was exposed, and then professionally diagnosed, we realized this mental illness, “manic depressive,” was hereditary. Her mother and older brother had it, but one younger brother and, of course, her father did not have this mental illness. As stated earlier, all these folks are now deceased.

With each of life’s achievements I expected her challenges – drug-use and mental illness – would improve, but she found ways to lead an almost secret life. I was running a business with fifty employees, so I just couldn’t play detective. By 1981, things worsened when some events she had orchestrated came crashing in on her. These events caused her first voluntary, long-term hospital stay, to escape the consequences of a major, vicious deed she perpetrated on the community.

It happened that summer in 1981 when she was in charge of the local fund raiser for the American Cancer Society golf outing. The previous year in Bowling Green, Coach Woody Hayes was the guest speaker and the event was a big success. Somehow in the following year during the lead-up to this event, she was able to concoct a story that former President Gerald Ford was going to come and play in the event and be the guest speaker at the dinner banquet. This was believable, since the former President was playing in many of the PGA Tour Pro-Ams around the Country during his retirement years to help raise money for charity.

The event was a huge success from a fundraising point of view; however, when the honorary foursome was left standing on the first tee waiting for President Ford to arrive, it became evident that there was some sort of scam about the President’s participation. This was the same day she checked into the local hospital and the crisis blew over in time. Since all the money raised was for charity, no one was damaged financially, and an attorney advised me that no one could make a legal claim against her. The magnitude and scope of this hoax on the entire community shows how the actions of a mentally ill person are hard to comprehend.

Once she was released, things seemed better for a while. Surprisingly, the landline phone was her outlet, yet you could almost describe the phone as her weapon. Before the internet, the phone was the only available outlet to her world. When ‘900’ numbers came out with connections to psychics and fortunetellers on television, in the very first month, she ran up over $4,000 in ‘900’ number phone charges!

Our children came along, but somehow most of their mother’s problems were a secret to them as well. Even though her behavior wasn’t like that of a normal, healthy mother during their younger years, that was all they knew growing up. During these years I even resorted to having our phone line tapped in an effort to head off these unexplained schemes she would conjure up, via the phone, with people in the community. Individual hoaxes happened frequently. It was all I could do to try and uncover something brewing and try to intervene.

Several times she perpetrated adoption schemes on people. She claimed to have connections to a pregnant girl and could arrange a private adoption for a childless couple desperate to have a child. These events, too, ended in tragedy for everyone involved when the actual birth date of this non-existent child exposed the fraud. In these cases, never was there any sort of written evidence that could be used to bring charges against her – it was just her leading some desperate couple down a fantasy-land trail for a few months over the telephone so she could be at the center of attention! Who knows? What explanation is there for these kinds of sick acts?

The drug issues during these years continued too, as she built up a tolerance to Valium and sought out stronger drugs like Percocet and Percodan, which seemed to be easily obtained. During this time, she was also involved with a group of women that were sharing prescription medications and obtaining them in any manner possible. Once, on a Florida vacation, she left the family for what was supposed to be a shopping trip. I later learned she went to a local doctor and concocted a story about kidney stones, and the doctor gave her a prescription for fifty Percodan. Many doctors contributed over the years to the drug abuse problems in our country, as new protocols for pain management had been established.

Up until 1990, I still didn’t have a real handle on her mental illness. As much as I tried to have her committed or get a court-appointed guardian, she wouldn’t have any part of that. The fact is – you can’t do much if the person in question has not committed a crime, and you can’t be chained to them 24 hours a day to keep them from getting into trouble.

Things became much clearer and began to unravel in the early ’90’s as we befriended a young couple that came to our church to pastor. This couple would show up at our house, unannounced, and most of the time find her on the couch in her pajamas in the middle of the day, almost non-functional. The pastor’s wife was a mental health professional. It was during some recreational time with my close friend, the pastor, when he had the courage to ask me about the unusual behavior both he and his wife had observed on many occasions. During these same years she developed a new physician relationship in Toledo, and this doctor took her off the Percocet and Percodan and onto a new, supposedly non-addictive drug, Xanax. The last three years of the marriage, she was under this doctor’s care and taking an average of 11 mg of Xanax per day (a normal dosage was 3 mg).

With caring hearts, the pastor and his wife told us that we must confront these problems of the manic depressive diagnosis and drug dependence, once and for all. As the mid-90’s were upon us and the oldest was leaving for college, a new challenge hit — the home computer connected to the internet. For a person with mental illness, who could create a disaster with a telephone, the computer was an explosive mind-blower of opportunities. Back in those years, I didn’t even know how to power-up the computer.

Within a few months, she had made contact with people all across this country in “chat rooms” where you could be anybody and act out any fantasy. Within a few months these “chat rooms” turned into “bashes” where these people met up in some city on weekends. Carelessness led to discovery, and it was this ugly, adulterous behavior that brought the marriage to a quick and decisive end. On her own, without family and structure, the drugs and a reckless lifestyle finally ended her life.

Why am I telling this story now? It is my hope to shed some light on some of the biggest issues facing our society today: mental illness, drugs, the com- puter/internet, and guns. It is very hard, if not impossible, to restrain a person for mental illness until they have violated the law. And it is very hard, if not impossible, to get someone off drugs unless they have the will to quit and a strong support structure around them. The computer/internet – for someone with mental illness, opens up the world to them — to be radicalized, influenced, famous, threatening, or to concoct a manifesto. The old days of long distance charges on a landline phone never had that reach. Maybe the best decision I made during these tumultuous times was to never have a firearm in the house where she could access it. Who knows what might have happened?

Lastly, some of the best advice I got through all this came from the director of Behavioral Connections at the time when he said in describing the acts of a mentally ill person, “You can’t make sense out of non-sense.” When heinous crimes are committed around our nation and we look for a motive, remember, “You just can’t make sense out of non-sense!