Original subtitles

My first memories of sexual abuse are

maybe three or four years old?

It was my brother Jim,

coming in the middle of the night

and putting his hands on me.

And my curling up in a ball tighter and tighter, trying to get away from it,

and not really understanding what was going on.

You know, I'm a little child and I'm trying to stop

whatever it is that he's doing.

Only because I think I probably knew somehow that it was wrong.

And I didn't like it.

But I also was terrified to try to stop it.

I didn't know what to say.

You just pretend it's not happening.

And you think that,

maybe it's love.

Maybe this is love.

Him having his hands all over me, is love.

And I think he was very good at making sure

it was only one child in that room when it was happening.

Whether it was Margaret or me or Matthew or Peter.

Where schizophrenia is diagnosed between age 17 and 24.

It's a tragic story.

To be part of the Galvin family is to be part of a tragedy.

This mutation was present in every person

in that family who had schizophrenia.

They might hear voices.

They can command them to do things.

Command them to do things.

Thrown a cat into a bonfire,

dismembered a dog in a bathtub.

This family gave us hope that there might be a chance to cure schizophrenia.

He shot her first and then he shot himself.

Well, it started to fall apart.

My brothers were falling ill.

They were losing their minds.

They were losing their minds.

I remember my father coming in and waking us up in the night

to tell us that Brian had had an accident and had been killed.

I remember a general silence over the house.

I remember my mother crying a lot in her bedroom

with the door shut.

I remember a lot of tears.

Complete disbelief in the family.

How could such a tragedy happen?

I was devastated. My my parents were totally devastated.

Life is supposed to be

your kids outlive you.

You know, not something that happens before...

You know, to die before you do.

And so, everyone was shocked.

They said that he had committed suicide.

Murder suicide with his girlfriend.

He was the first of my siblings to die.

You don't think that's gonna happen when you're a 14-year-old boy,

that any of your brothers are gonna die.

When Brian committed suicide,

I think things in the families changed.

It was a lot more somber,

I know, especially for my parents, it was dark.

You tend to tiptoe around a lot more.

I knew something was wrong in my house.

My house was burning, as I would say, and I knew it.

And so I started spending a lot more time with my friends.

Going out and being with others outside of the house.

Kathy and Jim became my father and mother figure.

Their child, Jim, was born, and he and I became fast friends

and I think because Kathy had this small child and I was a small child,

I'm wondering if my mother didn't rely on them to babysit.

I loved Kathy.

She was really a mother figure to me.

She had beautiful blond hair that she would let me brush.

Jim was probably the most highly functioning of my schizophrenic brothers.

I mean, he held a career as a bartender for a lot of years.

I really didn't know that Jim was schizophrenic while I was growing up.

I mean, we spent a fair amount of time at his home,

even on sleepovers from time to time.

Jim, I think the disease affected him differently than Don.

And, of course, you hear of the sexual abuse of my sisters from my older brother, Jim.

The abuse was chronic.

You know, I'm going from like, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

You know, this is continuing on a regular basis.

I don't know how often.

I'm thinking it was maybe most weekends.

But it was either be there with that or be at home with Donald,

which was terrifying too.

I mean, 'cause Donald had his outbursts.

He was not without us having to call the police.

And him having to go to the hospital.

Whether it was attempted suicide

or whether he was getting in a fight with my father.

I remember dad and Donald getting into fisticuffs.

They had a very big brawl.

I mean, there were some moments that I've heard about

with Donald trying to strangle my mother and kill her.

That had to be frightening.

My sister, Mary, she had a very difficult position

in the family, being the youngest.

She saw it all.

Physical violence, uh, in the house.

It was like choosing the lesser of two evils.

It was like you could be at home with Donald,

or you could be at Jim and Kathy's

and endure his sexual abuse.

And you also keep it a secret.

One, no one's gonna believe me.

Like, if I was to go to my mother,

she was emotionally, probably unavailable, at this time.

So I'm not sure I felt safe going to her.

And you want to go to the zoo and go ice skating

so you don't wanna upturn the apple cart.

Because that's the one place you feel like you're getting some normalcy.

Getting to be around what felt like

a more normal environment than schizophrenia.

And so it's almost like you were willing to tolerate it.

Sort of like, the price you had to pay.

So I don't know which was worse.

I probably would have been better off at home with Donald, for sure.

I would not have had endured sexual abuse at the hands of Jim.

Of course, athletes are in a competitive situation,

but so are most teenagers these days.

They compete for approval and acceptance

and then they compete pretty well.

My younger brothers were all good athletes, as the older ones were.

But we all played hoops together at the gym, or swan together.

We were all on the swim teams.

I was really the one that was in the forefront of hockey.

My brothers were coming up in the ranks.

Where I was much older, so I was doing my own thing.

Those four, the younger ones, Joseph, Mark, Matthew and Peter,

they were more collectively, a group.

Very competitive.

I was the best.

Each of us, we were all selected to the city All Star teams.

We were very good players, the whole family.

My youngest brother, Peter,

was a silky smooth kind of player. Just glided on the ice.

He was effortless in the way he played the game.

Where Matt was a little, uh, rough and tumble kind of hockey player.

He would go and get in front of the net and dig for the pucks.

Joe's defense.

Don't try to skate around him. He's gonna knock you in the boards.

We did have some goals where Joe scored

and both Matthew and I had both the assists on the goal.

They're special moments when all three of you get a point for the goal.

You know, the times of our lives, you know.

You play hockey and you go out for a pizza and a beer afterwards.

A lot of nice, wonderful times growing up

until the boys started to lose their minds.

One day somebody had to go to soccer practice.

And I think Joseph was supposed to take Matthew.

And there was some basic disagreement around Joe having to take him

or Joe being in a hurry

or something very, very simple.

And Joe just took Matt and threw him down.

And cracked his skull open.

And ended up having brain surgery.

He had a hemorrhage on the brain that was bleeding

and he was in the hospital for a long time

and came home with his head shaved and a huge scissor scar

over the course of his head.

We thought they were just being mean.

Uh, we thought they were, um, just a little odd, initially,

and then it just progressively got worse over time.

Dad's political prowess in Washington and elsewhere

enabled him to have great contacts

with some of the wealthiest people in the country.

So he wrote to these wealthy people all over the country

for grants to help out and they did.

Like the modern day Robin Hood.

Getting money from the wealthy to give to the poor.

You know, what my mother loved about it was of course,

that it gave us access to the arts.

And the federal funds that were coming to the States for the arts and humanities

to include the Santa Fe Opera and Ballet West and the Symphony

and all these things were suddenly at my mother's fingertips.

They enjoyed the people that were involved in that community.

They had a music festival up in Aspen, Colorado,

and I think one summer they even brought the New York Ballet in

to participate with Ballet West.

My dad was on the cusp of really having a lifelong career

that would have been so lovely for both of them.

And then they've got this suicide murder

and this schizophrenic son at home, Donald.

And then the chaos of the ambulance and the police coming

and them taking him away all the time.

I think the strain was just too great for him.

Because he would get up and take Peter to hockey practice

in the morning on his way to Denver.

So, here he's getting up at whatever godly hour to get Peter to hockey.

I think he just... It was all too much for him.

He had a massive stroke in front of my brother Peter.

The ambulance was called, but he couldn't speak.

He couldn't talk, he couldn't respond to my mother.

And so the ambulance came and took him

and my understanding was that he was in the hospital

for six months after a massive stroke.

And then when he came home,

he was quite diminished.

He wasn't himself.

Because suddenly our income was cut...

enormously.

So suddenly they were having to figure out how to rub nickels together.

And so I think that my parents went under enormous financial duress at that time.

There were no more trips to go to Aspen

or to Salt Lake or Santa Fe for the opera.

The Social Security replaced the income from the foundation.

It took away the sails of the winds of the family,

because dad was the leader, he was leading us into greatness

and riches beyond imagination.

For Peter, having witnessed my father's stroke,

I'm sure that was a pretty big impact.

And they say schizophrenia, while maybe it's genetic,

perhaps it's a traumatic event that triggers it.

Peter was a little troublemaker.

Talk about mischievous, I mean, look at that.

That is so Peter.

He was always trying to keep up with his big brothers, you know.

You know, he was the one that would put

the whoopee cushion on someone's seat.

Or he would short sheet a bed.

Or he would put cellophane on the toilet,

so when you peed, it came back on you, you know.

He was sort of the trickster.

He was always the one trying to get you somehow.

And it drove my mom nuts.

She just found it annoying.

You know, he was just annoying to her.

Mother and Peter did not get along unfortunately,

for whatever reason.

Those two just butted heads all the time.

But he fell ill early.

I think he was probably stricken with one of the worst cases.

Don, Jim, Brian, now Peter.

He became ill at a much younger age.

You know, 14 years old.

This is September 13th, 1975.

And this is Peter Eugene Galvin.

Age 14.

He was admitted in September

and went home two and a half months later, in November.

That would have been four months after my father had had a massive stroke.

"The behavior increased markedly since the early summer period.

After a brief improvement, the patient went to hockey camp

and again suffered a serious decompensation.

Wetting his bed, spitting on the floor.

And a general increase of aggressive and bizarre behavior."

Peter just was severe right off the bat.

Every time I turned around, it was Peter's doing this, Peter's doing that.

It was always something that Peter did that was not right.

Mother and he got into an argument,

so he I broke out every window in the house.

He just would not abide by what the doctors were asking him to do.

He was in and out of the hospital,

I have no idea how many times.

And this was just this repetitive revolving door with Peter.

In and out and in and out and in and out.

Stopping taking the medications.

And he would run away and get in trouble

and my parents just had such a difficult time managing him and his illness.

My initial interactions with Peter were very frustrating.

He could be a very difficult patient

and he was very unpleasant.

And, uh, not all people had very fond memories of Peter

when you brought him up or you discussed him uh, with other colleagues.

I've seen both sides of Peter.

I've seen the angry, irritable, paranoid,

accusatory side of Peter and, um, he can be violent.

He can be very intimidating and very physically threatening.

Mom and dad would call the police to come get him.

We can't handle him anymore.

And that's with all the boys.

I know Margaret,

she's number 11, I guess you'd call her,

had her life threatened.

She told me that.

But didn't say who threatened her.

And she has probably a very extreme difficult time

to, uh, confront and look people in the eye of her own family members.

I know my sister, Margaret, was afraid of Donald.

Always afraid of him.

Margaret and Donald had a pretty serious conflict that I witnessed

where Donald pulled the phone out of the wall.

And I remember it quite clearly.

And it scared her, horribly.

Margaret told me that at one point, and I didn't witness this,

that Donald threatened her life.

And 'cause I think there was maybe more to Margaret

being the choice to go to the Gary's.

Sam and Nancy Gary were good friends

of my parents before the schizophrenia struck.

I've heard stories, I don't know them all, but I've heard a lot of them.

How they forged their relationship because of the arts.

Dad had gone to Sam and asked him for money for Ballet West.

I think it was $10 million.

They did a lot of parties at Sam Gary's home.

They had a beautiful home in Cherry Hills.

We'd go visit. We got to swim in the pool and jump on the trampoline.

And there was a big gymnasium and you know, we loved going there as kids.

After the disease got a hold of my brothers,

the house was not suitable for my sister to live in any more

because of the violence and things that went on.

The Garys stepped in and took Margaret

and, uh, we were all very grateful for that.

The same time that they took Margaret, Mary was devastated.

My mother has described the story as that Nancy just called to check on her

because of Don.

And I think my mom just lost it 'cause somebody asked.

It wasn't like my mother to break down in tears to anybody.

And she did.

And Nancy said, "What can I do to help?"

My mother said, "I have no idea."

And she said, "Well, send me Margaret.

I'll take Margaret off your hands."

And that was that. It was decided.

I saw it as, "Oh, my God. She gets to go live in this gorgeous home

in Denver with all the fancy people."

I didn't understand why Margaret got to be there...

...and I didn't.

I did not understand that.

Why was I left to live with three schizophrenics?

I was angry.

I was furious.

But I couldn't show it.

Because being angry meant that maybe you were becoming mentally ill.

Raising your voice, yelling and screaming,

or crying was what people with mental illness did.

I was away to college when Matt became ill.

When he was becoming psychotic.

And we were hockey teammates and soccer teammates, uh,

on a regular basis through our young years.

Matthew and Peter, the last two siblings,

when they became mentally ill,

they were different people than I could have imagined.

Matt was definitely my protector.

He hung out with me, he was willing to give me the time of day,

even though he was in high school.

And we drove to soccer practice every day together

and played The Beatles on the cassette and sang songs.

He was somebody else that I could spend time with that was not Jim.

I remember Matt becoming ill.

Peter was pestering me, as Peter liked to do.

I remember saying, "Matt, Peter's teasing me."

And Matt asking him to please stop.

And Matt got on top of Peter

and started choking him.

And I became extremely afraid

of him killing him.

And I ran up to my parent's room and locked the door.

Matt pounded on the door, tried to break it down. I was terrified.

But I remember being alone in my parent's room

having called the police and the police having come and taken Matt.

And then he was hospitalized for 40 years at Pueblo.

Good to see you.

Who are you? What's your name?

Paul McCartney, Wings Over America.

I have a record in my record collection that proves this.

It's in a storage unit over on Bethune Academy.

You name is Paul McCartney?

Yeah, Paul McCartney Wings. It's her real name.

Like I said, I got a picture right here.

I got the tapes right here in my pocket.

Let It Be, 1968.

Have you got schizophrenia?

They say that I have schizophrenia.

I'm not schizophrenic, but I have something called schizophrenia,

which is a synapses of the brain functioning

in a proper way because of brain damage.

I might have been a little schizophrenic

because I was with a lot of people who were schizophrenic.

But it doesn't make me a schizophrenic.

How do you feel schizophrenia has a affected your life?

Well, schizophrenia was used by the doctors as an excuse to abuse me.

They would actually drug me with the needle for 20 years.

They put me on Clozaril for 36 years.

And over the years, I was just getting tired of it.

I got tired of the whole scene.

The whole scene was just a nightmare.

Because it really didn't do anything for me.

It just makes me think that psychiatric medication is not needed in my life.

I just want to express myself.

But what do you do when, uh,

when your friend, John Lennon gets shot by Mark Chapman. I'm no Mark Chapman.

"Throughout the family sessions, it became apparent that

the mother was unwilling or unable to hear unpleasant news.

There is a feeling of emotional distancing

exhibited by many siblings in the family.

The family structure appears to be dominated

by a powerful and controlling mother.

The patient's father is undoubtedly handicapped by his recent stroke.

However, it is not quite clear how much more of a force he was before this incident.

The family is extremely religious and rigid in their style.

They are not given permission to disagree

with their parents, especially mother.

Nor are they able to tell her anything

which she would find disapproving."

When these guys were falling,

one at a time,

I felt that John's mother,

she might have had a role in it.

I don't know why I thought that at the time.

But I think that's all the way the research was pointing at the time.

They talked about the schizophrenic mother,

the mother who raises schizophrenics.

And we wondered who was gonna be next.

We never thought Peter would go.

Matthew. - Matthew. No.

Never thought that-- They were normal kids.

They were just normal people, normal kids.

What happens to you early in life,

is a critical imprint on how your behavior goes.

The schizophrenogenic mother was this idea that somehow a mother's behavior

towards the newborn infant and early child

was the cause of schizophrenia.

Became a very popular way of thinking.

There's no question that many people

who took their children to caregivers,

whether it be hospital or psychiatrists,

felt blamed.

The fact that psychology at that time and before

blamed a mother,

infuriates me.

And I remember going to the University of Colorado in Denver,

with our entire family.

And we were going for therapy.

And I remember the psychologist in the room

turning the conversation to it being my mother's fault.

And I remember my mother getting up and walking out.

Good for her for saying, "Absolutely not.

I will have nothing to do with this."

They're like, "We're not gonna have any of that hocus pocus."

They turned their efforts to science and research.

Well, I remember the days we were thinking

it was the iron in the water did it to us all.

And when we originally got into Woodmen Valley, it came out orange.

And mom and dad, they got a big softener machines

and, you know, we were loading salt

to clean the water up that we were bathing in.

And I was a little girl going to get my blood tested for vitamin deficiencies.

So my mom was on to this whole,

"Oh, it must have been not enough B-vitamins in the diet."

That somehow there was something to do with nutrition

and linking nutrition to brain development.

She was searching for answers everywhere

of what could possibly have caused this.

I think all of her close friends knew

it was something that wasn't her fault.

It wasn't dad's fault. It just happened.

They were just trying to keep him home

and take care of him the best they could

and hopefully that that wouldn't disrupt the rest of the family too much.

Can you remember when you were younger and you lived

on Hidden Valley Road with your brothers and sisters?

Yeah, I remember all that, but it's like, I don't want to go back to it

because it's just a nightmare to remember everything that happened there.

It was so violent of a home.

Donald Kenyon Galvin would smash my teeth in.

Knock my teeth in, I had jaws broken.

My the jawbones were slammed back behind my ears.

I am half deaf in both ears because of this.

He made my life a living nightmare.

You know, being beaten as child,

carrying a cross into a graveyard,

being crucified and resurrected

and I got the scars to prove it.

From a nail, there's holes right in my wrist here.

There's a hole right in that wrist

and on both sides of my body.

If it weren't for my mother, these boys would probably

be in mental hospitals, with the key thrown away.

She saw to it that they got the care

to help make them better.

She always felt there was going to be a cure

and believed me, she knew more about it

by the time it was done than most doctors.

She could speak the same language

as any doctor anywhere in the world.

She was very well-educated on it.

Sometimes I wish my mom, she would have put them in the hospital.

I didn't really know what was best for them

and perhaps she knew better than I

what those boys needed.

And so she decided to keep 'em home.

I don't think my sisters would agree with that decision.

So Donald, Matthew and Peter were not well

and were living at home...

with me.

One big, happy family.

But Jimmy and Kathy were still there for me.

And Jim would take Matthew and Peter and me to do things.

Jim was working at the Manitou Incline, which at that time, used to be

a little train that goes up this mountainside, straight up.

And it was fun. You know, Jim worked there.

He was the general manager of the Manitou Incline

and there were cabins up at the top

where he stayed when he was working.

Matthew, Jim and myself went and played cards.

You know, I'm 12 or 13 years old

and they're including me in a grown up party.

It was so cool.

I got to play poker.

Do probably a few shots of whiskey

and drink beer and...

I remember it being kind of a gross place.

Like mattresses on the floor and kind of camping out almost.

And I remember Matthew passing out in the other room.

And Jim coming to me and I had my period.

He did the same thing he always did,

forcing himself upon me.

And my being very tiny, you know, all of 90 pounds, maybe 80 pounds.

Tiny. And he was a full grown man.

And he would force me,

my body to open up.

And he was a big guy and he pulled the tampon out of me.

And then penetrated.

And I yelled...

for him to stop.

I yelled.

"Please stop. Please stop."

And you know the biggest reason I yelled?

My fear of getting pregnant.

I was terrified of being impregnated by my brother.

I laid there.

He, you know, went off and went to bed or whatever.

And I laid there in a ball, just sick.

And I remember the next morning wanting to get out of there.

I wanted to go home.

"Take me home. I want to go home."

When I got the courage to tell my mother

that this had happened with Jim,

I just remember saying, "Mom, I need to talk to you about something."

She was very dismissive.

Like it was no big deal.

She wasn't horrified.

Because it had happened to her.

That her stepfather had sexually abused her when she was a child.

It was like, "Yeah. Welcome to being a woman. Welcome to life."

Joseph was a wonderful person.

Growing up, we always I played baseball

and we went fishing and hiking and rode bikes together.

When he graduated from high school,

my father really complimented Joseph

on leaving the house and getting a job and working.

He got out and he started working for the airlines.

My dad was really proud of the way he handled himself

and the way he got into life.

And then it just seems like, overnight out of the blue,

all of a sudden he was hearing voices in his head.

Wow. It was just a big surprise.

When Joe became ill,

I think that was really the last straw.

I mean, that was just like, "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

Joseph knew of the problems Matthew, Peter, Don, Jim were having.

He probably felt it was happening to him.

Maybe depressed, being alone triggered it?

And then he came home and then he followed the suit

of the rest of the boys who were ill.

He always complained about hearing voices in his head...

...when he came home.

He didn't really say what they were saying, he just said that he had 'em.

And they would never leave him alone.

Like it was something that drove him to distraction.

"God was telling me to do this."

You know, that's what he was saying.

"Can't you hear it? God's telling me to do this.

I'm hearing these voices in my ears

telling me to do this and it's bad and it's not good.

I don't want to do this."

So he was always fighting it.

He couldn't handle the, um...

His schizophrenic state of being.

You know, he was able to just say,

"Oh, Mary, I wish they would just stop.

I just want them to stop."

And he would often wear headphones and listen to music

to try to drown them out.

I went out in the car with him to try to understand this disease

and I listened to him go on about the voices in his head

and that he couldn't get rid of 'em.

And, uh, it was just constant.

Joseph was the last of them.

And then it was just managing five boys that were not well.

At 20 years old, I think I was,

I confronted Jim face to face.

And told him what I thought of him.

And he told me I was a liar, that it never happened.

Every time I went home and he was there for a family function,

I avoided him like the plague.

And he knew why.

And then he started to become more and more ill.

Course of time when I was away at college

and every time I would go back,

his schizophrenia was worse.

And it became, he was no longer cool.

He was fat and his wife had left him

and Jimmy had left.

The two of them had both run away to California.

I never saw them again.

Jim's breakdowns came when the divorce was happening.

And so he's becoming very weird and saying weird things

and doing stupid things like running around The Broadmoor naked.

I remember him coming into the house, irritated,

yelling and screaming at mother

for being, you know, in his terms, a bad woman.

And looking at me and says, "Don't you see this hole right here in my chest?"

I said, "No, Jim, I don't.

I don't see any hole in your chest."

"I've been shot. I've been shot."

I said, "Oh, well.

I don't see it. I'm sorry."

Though I just brushed it off as another illusion of his mental illness.

Call it schizophrenia, call it whatever but he just had illusions.

Then just went about my life.

Next day, he was passed away. He's dead. He had left us.

Do you miss him?

Jim? No.

He was nasty, mean. He was a bad influence all my life.

He was totally disruptive.

I-- No.

I remember the night I really felt like I forgave him.

I got a phone call that he had died

from, I think my father.

And I remember, at that moment,

thinking, "That poor soul.

That tortured, tortured soul."

Yeah, I think Jimmy probably was one of the worst.

Peter and Jimmy, I think, were stricken with the worst violent tendencies.

And unruly tendencies.

Peter was just tearing up the house.

My mother would call me first, for whatever reason.

"Can you please come help me to get rid of Peter or take him to the hospital?"

"This 18-year-old single, Caucasian unemployed male

was admitted on January 25th, 1979.

He had been behaving in a bizarre, hyperactive manner,

which was intolerable to his family.

Upon admission, he was irrational and hyperactive.

His behavior was irritating to others

because of the intrusive, demanding manner.

During formal staffing, he would stand up, walk around the room,

pointing his finger and banging on the table.

He'd also mimic the interviewer and the others in the room

as well as smile and laugh inappropriately."

They would evaluate him and then he would be better

and he would come back, so it became that revolving door.

They would give him some medicines

and he would get better, come back home.

"Oh, I'm fine. I don't need to take those medicines."

As soon as he'd get off the medicines, he'd get worse.

March, 1980.

"Upon admission, Peter was orientated,

and was able to recall names of nursing staff.

However, he was delusional and grandiose

with a great deal of religiosity and agitation.

It was necessary to seclude and restrain him

soon after admission because of his behavior.

Agitation, a psychotic state.

He was felt to be somewhat homicidal."

Peter at times, was in denial about being ill.

I've heard that he would rather punch out his nurse than take his meds.

November 18th, 1985.

"Peter Eugene Galvin is a 25-year-old white single, unemployed Catholic male,

eighth admission.

Charges of second-degree assault on a police officer.

Mr. Galvin was previously found praying in downtown Colorado Springs

when the police approached him.

He became upset and began to get hostile with a police officer.

Be highly agitated and experiencing paranoid ideation.

He was then sent to Colorado State Hospital for further evaluation."

♪ The hills are alive

♪ With the sound of music

♪ The songs have been sung

♪ For a thousand years

♪ The hills are alive

♪ With the sound of music

What is your name?

Peter Eugene Galvin.

Son of Dr. D. W Galvin.

Do you feel that you've got a mental illness?

No.

I'm all healed up with all the doctors and nurses.

I'm all healed up.

And I'm St. Peter who works at the state hospital.