A Psychotic Killer Sues His Psychiatrist

By Timothy Roche/Chapel Hill

Everybody you meet in this lovely college town can tell you all about the bloody rampage on Henderson Street. They either witnessed it or know somebody who did. And they hold strong opinions about the deeply disturbed law student at the center of the story who shot two strangers to death, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity--and who then successfully sued his psychiatrist for $500,000 for not taking his psychosis seriously enough.

Though the shootings took place four years ago, they still stir passionate argument at the University of North Carolina and in Chapel Hill, in part because it seems the case won't go away. Just last week a judge upheld the $500,000 jury award to the killer, Wendell Williamson, now 30. But that decision will be appealed, and other lawsuits are pending. And this week the case will be examined in Santa Rosa, Calif., at a conference of psychiatrists alarmed at the prospect of being held liable for crimes their patients commit.

Most folks in and around Chapel Hill are outraged that Williamson may collect a quarter of a million dollars for each person he killed. "Is there any crime you can commit these days and manage to be blamed for?" Wanda Jackson wrote in a scathing letter to the Raleigh News & Observer. But several jurors in the civil trial have become ardent advocates for better treatment of the mentally ill and visit Williamson at the mental hospital where he is confined. And other townspeople sympathize with Williamson as a promising young man who somehow spiraled into madness.

Williamson was an eagle scout and student-body president in high school and won a scholarship to U.N.C. After graduation he spent an aimless year in New Orleans, where he played guitar in a rock band, smoked marijuana and drank too much. He returned to U.N.C. for law school in 1992 but had trouble concentrating. He also began talking, his mother recalls, "about how he could read people's minds, and they could read his." One day, walking near the law school, he started screaming and slapping himself.

He was taken to a hospital psychiatric ward for 10 days of evaluation. During that time, the staff learned that he had his father's M-1 rifle in his apartment and asked a judge to commit him. But Williamson convinced the judge that he would be fine if he could return to classes. He continued, though, to be haunted by voices, and stalked the campus with a video camera, trying to prove that people were manipulating him with psychic messages. "It occurred to me that I was losing my mind, but it was only a fleeting thought," Williamson recalls. "I thought the whole mental-illness line of thought was just a trick designed to mislead and oppress me."

In early 1994 Williamson began seeing Dr. Myron Liptzin, a U.N.C. psychiatrist, who found Williamson to be delusional but not schizophrenic. He prescribed antipsychotic medication, and Williamson stopped hearing voices. Liptzin planned to retire in the summer, and says he encouraged Williamson to find a new doctor but admits he didn't make a specific referral.

Had Liptzin made clear how sick Williamson was and that he had a "moral obligation" to stay on his medication, Williamson says, he never would have stopped taking the drugs--and never would have found himself on Henderson Street with his father's M-1 and 600 rounds of ammunition.

On the mild winter afternoon of Jan. 26, 1995, Williamson shot to death, at random, a McDonald's manager and a popular lacrosse player bicycling home from an accounting class. As pedestrians crouched behind magnolia trees and cars, Williamson exchanged heavy fire with police, until they eventually wounded him in the legs and were finally able to subdue him.

Few were surprised that Williamson was judged insane and acquitted of murder. But when he won his lawsuit against his psychiatrist, much of the state turned against him and the jurors who favored him. Not that Williamson will get much enjoyment from the money. It is unlikely that any doctor will ever release him from the hospital, for fear of liability.