Head Games

"All I did there was fight and try to escape," he recalls. "It was horrible. I cut a nurse's throat with a soup-can lid trying to escape. Their solution was to give me Thorazine and lock me in a room. I was tied down for days. I spent most of my time there locked in a room with nothing but my books. Made me hate the world."

One doctor at BPI believed Anderson was suffering from severe depression. Another thought he was probably psychotic. Another suspected he was bipolar and suggested lithium. They threw in a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder for good measure. The whole experience, Darrel Anderson agrees, did little to help his son.

"It increased his anger immensely," he says. "Toward us, because we were the ones who put him there, but generally, too. He stayed there until my insurance ran out, and then they cut him loose."

He wasn't out long. By 1987 Anderson considered himself a hard-core skinhead and superbad speed dealer. Someone broke into his apartment and ripped off a lot of dope and money, so he went looking for the thief with a gun, busting into other dealers' houses, and caught an aggravated-robbery charge. This was on top of an involuntary-manslaughter case, the result of a fight that left the other combatant with a subdural hematoma; he died the next day.

Anderson fled to California and got into even deeper trouble there. A car chase with the cops ended in a gun battle. Anderson was wounded; his best friend was killed. Although he was looking at six years in a California youth camp, a deal was worked out to bring him back to Colorado on the earlier charges.

Questions about his mental competency prompted a trip to Fort Logan. The shrinks there decided he was a fine case of a mixed personality disorder with anti-social and borderline features: "A great deal of his identity seems to be related to rebellion," one remarked. He was practically an adult now, but he caught one last break, a sentence of three years in a closed adolescent treatment center. Subsequent escapes and suicide attempts led to additional trips to Fort Logan. A doctor warned that he seemed unable to function in a correctional setting and would probably become psychotic if sent to prison.

In 1990, Anderson walked away from a drug rehab center and returned to his own street meds, including methamphetamine. A few months later he picked up his first prison sentence -- eight years for attempted burglary -- but the charge doesn't quite do justice to the strangeness of the crime, as detailed in the prisoner's file:

"Mr. Anderson entered a house, and after being confronted by the occupant and told to leave, was found to be standing at the front door starting to pull a long knife from his pants. Mr. Anderson then entered another home, where the occupant found Mr. Anderson hiding behind a door with a knife over his head in an 'Alfred Hitchcock' position and a can of mace in one hand. This occupant, who had a gun, ordered Mr. Anderson into the study and then called the police."

You might think that Anderson -- 5'7", 130 pounds and all of twenty years old -- would be easy prey in the state prison system. You would be wrong. "I came to prison a scared kid," he recalls. "Yeah, I could be violent. Didn't follow the rules. Too tough to do any kind of mental-health treatment. So I got ad-segged. And was even worse in ad-seg. All I did was fight, stab people."

Records show that Anderson racked up numerous serious assaults against other inmates and staff during his first few years in the DOC. At one point, he was charged with twenty assaults in as many months. He was sent to Pueblo or San Carlos several times for evaluation; some doctors believed he was faking or exaggerating symptoms, but others suspected a schizotypal personality. He spent almost his entire sentence in administrative segregation. He was released from CSP right to the street on October 30, 1997, twelve days before his 28th birthday.

"We begged him to come home," Carol Anderson recalls. "We thought that after eight years, maybe he will want to be out. He always says, 'I'll never go back.' But what he means is he would rather die than go back."

Darrel had a job lined up for his son, but Troy was ill-prepared for the hurdles of life on the outside. "It was like he'd just woken up from a long sleep and found out the world had changed around him," Darrel says. "He was confused about how to get along, how to go to the mall and find things."