Never Released, Yet Often Missing
St. Elizabeths Patient Fled 12 Times
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 10, 2003; Page B01
On a morning in mid-December, a man moving his truck found a dismembered
body behind a dingy boardinghouse on Kennedy Street NW.
There were 262 homicides in Washington last year, but this one stood
out as among the most gruesome. The victim had been beaten about the
head and body and slashed in the throat. Both his legs had been severed.
Three weeks later, police charged 60-year-old Joseph D. Hilliard, a former
tenant of the boardinghouse, in the slaying and moved him to St. Elizabeths
Hospital, the psychiatric facility in Southeast Washington.
For Hilliard, the hospital was a very familiar place.
Hilliard was first admitted to St. Elizabeths in 1974, when he pleaded
not guilty by reason of insanity to another murder charge. A paranoid
schizophrenic with the gift of charm, he has never been released. But
he has escaped a dozen times.
All told, Hilliard has spent more than eight of the past 29 years away
from St. Elizabeths. Once, he went to California and got married. After
another escape, he went to Pennsylvania and was convicted of throwing
a woman from a window.
Despite his history, Hilliard was allowed by St. Elizabeths staff to walk
around the hospital grounds alone in 2001. In December of that year,
he escaped again. Then he allegedly did something he had never done in
the previous 11 escapes: kill.
Police found Hilliard in blood-stained clothing three days after the slaying
at the boardinghouse. The victim, 51-year-old David E. Edwards, had just
moved into the basement of the house. At the time Edwards was slain,
Hilliard had been on his own for one year and four days.
St. Elizabeths officials said that when treating the mentally ill -- including
the criminally insane -- it is necessary to extend patients small freedoms
in the hope that they will adjust and eventually be able to reenter society.
They said that unaccompanied grounds privileges, like the ones Hilliard
had the 12th time he escaped, are considered a valuable part of therapy,
a step toward the real world, if the patients are ready for them.
Hilliard is by no means the only person to escape from St. Elizabeths,
which has about 500 patients. Roughly 200 of its patients are people
who were committed because of criminal cases, known as forensic patients,
including John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan and
three others in 1981.
D.C. police files indicate that 22 patients were reported missing from
the hospital in the last four months of 2002. That's as many as went
missing in all of 2002 from Virginia's Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg,
which is about the same size.
Some city officials and mental health specialists questioned how St. Elizabeths
let Hilliard get away again.
"Wow. It's hard to believe that after [the] escapes, he was given
an unaccompanied grounds privilege," said Harold J. Bursztajn, a
professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "If you leave
someone unaccompanied when there's a potential of escape, you're not
providing the most adequate care."
"This," said D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), "is
egregious incompetence."
The first killing tied to Hilliard took place more than 30 years ago.
Court records say that Hilliard, who is originally from Fayetteville,
N.C., pulled a knife on Billy Boy Everette there in December 1972, and
then took Everette's wife, Estherine, with him to Washington. Hilliard
and Estherine Everette lived in the 200 block of N Street NW for much
of the next few weeks. On Jan. 19, 1973, they had a fight, and 12 days
later, Estherine Everette was found dead in an abandoned house nearby,
with a stab wound to her chest, court records say.
Hilliard fled to Florida, where he was arrested and subsequently entered
a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The court accepted his plea.
In 1974, he was sent to St. Elizabeths, whose sprawling campus was then
run by the federal government.
His first escape in 1976 lasted less than a month; Hilliard returned to
St. Elizabeths voluntarily, court records say. Later that year, he escaped
again. The back-and-forth continued in 1977, when Hilliard left the grounds
two more times. In 1978, Hilliard escaped yet again and went to Pennsylvania,
where court records say he was charged with aggravated assault and served
about three years of a prison sentence. He was returned to St. Elizabeths
upon his parole from Pennsylvania in 1982.
He didn't stay long. In 1983, he escaped again. This time he was gone
eight months, during which he met and married a Nicaraguan woman in California.
Court records indicate that St. Elizabeths officials were concerned about
the problem of his escaping. "He has resided on every level of security
. . . [and] has held grounds privileges, only to escape or be found in
possession of drugs and thereby return to maximum security and restart
the cycle," Department of Health and Human Services officials wrote
in 1987.
The D.C. government took over St. Elizabeths in 1987 but was unable to
break the pattern. Hilliard's escapes continued: 1988, 1994, another
in 1994, 1995 and 1999.
Hilliard's cousin Catherine Johnson expressed surprise when told that
he had been at St. Elizabeths for a 1973 slaying. He had told her he
was in St. Elizabeths for having too many traffic tickets and fake identification
papers, she said.
"He didn't ever [say] anything about murder," Johnson said of
the 1973 killing.
She said Hilliard often called her from such places as Las Vegas, and
she sometimes saw him in their home town of Fayetteville. Once, she said,
he came home with a Cadillac and said he had become a car salesman.
"He's been out of St. Elizabeths probably more than in it," said
Johnson, a schoolteacher in Fayetteville. "He kept leaving, and
I don't think they do any looking for him when he leaves."
She said Hilliard, whose criminal record dates to 1959, started to show
signs of being erratic before he dropped out of high school. Still, she
said, he can be quite charming and usually has no trouble convincing
people to help him.
About two years after Hilliard returned from his 11th escape in 1999,
court files say he had unaccompanied grounds privileges at the hospital.
Hospital officials declined to say what led the Inpatient Services Division
Review Board to approve those privileges.
On Dec. 9, 2001, Hilliard set out for the chapel by himself at 9 a.m.
He did not return.
That afternoon, Hilliard was reported missing to D.C. police. A warrant
was issued for his arrest, and his case was referred to the U.S. Marshals
Service based at D.C. Superior Court. Marshals declined to comment on
the case. An official said that marshals look for St. Elizabeths escapees
as they would for other fugitives.
St. Elizabeths officials said Hilliard was deemed ready for another chance,
despite his escapes.
"If you elope, we don't hold it against you for the next 20 or 30
years," said Joy Holland, chief executive officer of the hospital,
using the mental health system's term for escapes: "elopements."
"You have no choice but to look at how an individual is progressing," Holland
said.
St. Elizabeths officials said they were required to give Hilliard an opportunity
to progress. They said the law requires they move patients to the least
restrictive setting under which they can be safely and effectively treated.
Other mental health specialists talked about the difficulty of finding
the right balance for treating -- and securing -- the criminally insane.
If all hospitals simply locked up their forensic patients, "you'd
have thousands and thousands of prison forensic beds" for criminally
insane patients, said professor Joel Dvoskin of the University of Arizona
medical college. "And somebody's got to pay for that."
Robert Keisling, a former D.C. mental health official, said that St. Elizabeths
patients often escape after they are allowed "on-grounds" privileges,
since guards don't stop them from walking out the gate.
"Once they get privileges to get out of the ward, there's basically
nothing keeping them on the grounds," said Keisling, former director
of the emergency psychiatric center, who left the government in 1999.
Linda Grant, a spokeswoman for the department of mental health, declined
to say if Keisling's description was accurate. She pointed out that forensic
patients accounted for 12 escapes in all of 2002. That's down from 27
four years ago, she said.
Sometime last year, Hilliard began living in the basement of the unlicensed
boardinghouse in the 600 block of Kennedy Street. Though the house's
owner declined to comment, two tenants said they believed Hilliard was
not paying rent.
Hilliard sometimes threatened them and told them he had escaped from St.
Elizabeths and had killed before, the tenants said.
The tenants, who asked not to be identified because they are witnesses
in the criminal investigation, said David Edwards -- whom they called "painter
man" because he worked on painting jobs -- was supposed to move
into the basement Dec. 12. That evening, one of the tenants said she
heard Hilliard talking outside.
"If I can't live in the basement, whoever lives there, I'll kill
the [expletive]," she recalled Hilliard saying. Later that night,
one of the tenants said she heard sawing.
The next morning, Edwards's body was found in the back yard. A few days
later, police found Hilliard back at the house, wearing clothes covered
in blood, according to charging documents.
City mental health officials would not comment on Hilliard's current
security arrangements at St. Elizabeths. He is awaiting a preliminary
hearing in D.C. Superior Court.
Tenants on Kennedy Street NW said last month they were frightened he would
escape yet again and return to their home. "He said he was going
to come back and kill everybody in here," one of the tenants said. "You
got people walking the halls with hammers and sticks."