Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
Most people know of aversion therapy through Anthony Burgess’s book, or Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie by the same name, A Clockwork Orange. In both, the leader of a gang of violent thugs is conditioned to become physically ill at the sight, or even the thought, of violence. Although the process didn’t work very well in Burgess’s imagining, it is still used extensively in the treatment of sexual criminals.
The first part of the treatment attempts to determine a male offender’s specific sexual deviancy. That is done by placing a small cuplike device called a plethysmograph over the person’s penis. Electronic sensors gauge what arouses him by measuring the penis’s reaction to a series of pornographic pictures flashed on a large slide screen. When he was tested in Boise, he recalls, Spencer’s results indicated “that I was attracted to young boys, mainly, and a little to girls my age or younger.”
Next, he says, he was required to create a sort of personal scrapbook out of pornographic magazines. He pasted pictures of inappropriate images–naked boys, young girls–next to other, appropriate images of young women.
Finally, he recalls sitting in a small room and being asked to look through the book. He’d wear headphones. When he saw the pictures of young women, pleasant radio music would flow through the headphones.
Suddenly, the music would stop and be replaced by a prerecorded tape of Spencer narrating very specific details of one of his past sexual offenses. When that happened, he was required to turn to the pornographic photos of young boys. At the same time, electrodes taped to his forearm would deliver an intense electric shock.
He remembers, “I felt what I was supposed to feel, I guess–fear.” The psychologist “would turn on the electricity and it would get so you couldn’t stand it. It was kind of a burn, a shock and a pinch at the same time.”
Unfortunately, says Spencer, it didn’t work. “See, my mind shut off the pain,” he explains. “It wouldn’t carry over. The point was for the pain to come up when I saw a kid or something inappropriate. But I’d go back to Northwest Passages, where I was attracted to my roommates, and it didn’t do anything. The attraction was still there.”
In addition to the aversion therapy, Spencer says, he participated in group counseling. And Susan flew up to Idaho once a month for family counseling sessions. “I’d talk to her about my attractions–what I was thinking and when,” Spencer says. “I think that she was used to hearing about it, though.”
Despite what he describes as a failure of aversion therapy, Spencer says he thought Northwest Passages did some good. He says, “I thought the program was working. I was being attracted to girls at the time. We were writing letters, hanging out. I still had feelings for kids, but I seemed to be concentrating on girls when they were around.”
He left Idaho in the fall of 1991, after about four months. According to court testimony, Northwest Passages released Spencer with an explicit and chillingly prophetic warning. “They indicated to me that they were not successful in their treatment,” Mulcahy, the probation officer, later recalled. “In fact, his plethysmograph scores were indeed higher, and they considered him a risk, a high risk, to the community.”
In light of the warning, especially, Lookout Mountain again seemed to be the next obvious step. But Spencer says his mother and her lawyer again convinced counselors to release him from custody with an ankle monitor and an agreement to begin seeing a counselor specializing in sex offenders. (The counselor, a Fort Collins psychologist named Mike Kehl, declines to be interviewed.)
Spencer also returned to the public schools. Although he had not spent much time there, he still had managed to impress his teachers. “In terms of academic achievement, he’s missed a lot of school,” recalls Bill Baker, who taught Spencer in junior high and then later in high school. “But in terms of his ability, he’s a brilliant guy, absolutely gifted. He reads and picks up complex ideas very quickly.” Baker still remembers one of Spencer’s ninth-grade projects: directing a video documentary about child-labor laws.
Even so, Spencer’s behavior was still very much out of control. In early December 1991, while riding the bus to school, he pulled a lighter out of his pocket, held it to the head of the boy in front of him and lit his hair on fire. (He says that it was a practical joke, and that he was egged on by his classmates.) He was charged with reckless endangerment.
After additional evaluations, he finally was sent to the Division of Youth’s Lookout Mountain facility, outside of Golden. He was fifteen years old.
He spent a year and a half there. “At first I was getting into a lot of trouble, throwing things, breaking things,” he recalls. But he claims that his behavior improved. He entered the facility’s food-prep program, studying to become a cook.
It is unclear whether Spencer received treatment specific to his sexual offenses while at Lookout Mountain: He says he didn’t, but court testimony suggests that he did. What seems more certain is that while he was there, his sexual fantasies started becoming laced more and more with scenes of violence.
Friedman, the Denver psychologist who evaluated Spencer’s history and who served as a witness for his defense, later testified that “it was at that point in time where Mr. Day began to experience what we would call aggressive sexualized fantasies of a nature similar to” the incidents for which he eventually was arrested. Spencer himself admits that while he was at Lookout Mountain, he began hanging out with a small group of boys who talked about forming “a cult for kidnapping and sexual assault.”
He also began acting on the old urges while at Lookout. He says, “Toward the end of my time there, one of the kids I went to school with in fifth and sixth grade showed up. He’d been transferred from another facility for sexually acting out. There were three or four other kids that we began to get involved with. Most of the time the guards weren’t even watching; we’d just go into somebody else’s room…
“That brought back all the feelings from the past. I didn’t even remember the aversion therapy.”
In May 1993 he appeared before the parole board for the first time and sailed through. “I just explained to them what I’d been doing in the program,” he says, adding, however, that “I didn’t tell them about the sexual things I’d been doing.”
After being released from Lookout Mountain, Spencer returned to school, in an eleventh-grade EBD program in Fort Collins. Thanks to his culinary training, he also found a job working in the kitchen of the local Holiday Inn. From most outward appearances, he seemed to be maintaining the semblance of a normal life, complete with sexual behavior that any teenage boy would recognize.
Chris Buchta worked with Spencer at the Holiday Inn, as a dishwasher. Buchta recalls, “We used to cruise up and down the streets. We’d yell at girls–You know, `Hey, baby!’–and try and get their phone numbers and stuff.” He says Spencer had a girlfriend at the time and that they appeared to have gotten along well.
Yet by early summer, Spencer says, his life began falling apart. Edward and Susan Day began their divorce proceedings in June. Susan says it was the stress brought on by Spencer’s persistent problems that forced the couple apart.
In August Spencer was fired from his job at the Holiday Inn (he says he had a kidney stone that slowed him down). His girlfriend became pregnant, and they broke up. He says he began drinking heavily and dabbling in drugs. He intentionally overdosed on his medication, an antidepressant called Elavil, and had to have his stomach pumped in the emergency room. In early October he stopped attending school regularly.
“All this stuff was falling out from under me, but it wasn’t my fault,” he says. “And that’s when the sexual stuff started coming up again. The attractions started coming up again, and the fantasies, kids catching my eye. The kids in the [nearby] trailer park started appearing attractive to me.
“The old demons came back. It went on for a while like that. I’d drive home and see kids and become aroused. It got worse and worse and worse. Finally, it just got to the point where I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t stop.”
Although at the time Chris Buchta was unaware of the reasons, he recalls the change: “I remember, he just told me he was a bad kid. I said, `What do you mean?’ And then he said, `I can’t control my destiny.'”
Spencer Day recalls October 19, 1993.
“I had left school that day, because we weren’t allowed to smoke there. I was on my bike, and I rode down to Old Town, sat down and began to smoke my cigarette. That’s when the old thoughts started coming up. I knew it was wrong. I left and went down the bike trail. It was in the morning, so everybody was in school. I rode around town for a while.
“Suddenly, school let out. And all these kids just sort of flocked out into the street. I was already with the attitude that I was going to offend somebody. I was pissed off, and I didn’t care. I hated people. And I saw this kid and just grabbed him.
“I took the kid behind a pile of dirt. I remember he asked me, `Are you going to rape me?’ I said, `Yeah.’ Then he didn’t say anything else.”
According to police reports and follow-up interviews with the ten-year-old boy, Spencer made him perform fellatio and then tried unsuccessfully to rape him anally. Afterwards, Spencer recalls, “I choked him till he passed out and threw him in the pile of dirt.”
He says he and his friends at Lookout Mountain had discussed the idea of choking a sexual victim when they were playing the fantasy board game Dungeons and Dragons. “We’d talk about what we would do after we got out,” he recalls. “So I basically tried what I’d been thinking about. “There’s kind of a thrill in it. Other people talk about robbing a bank or skydiving as a kind of thrill. And there’s standing out in the street with a knife and the sexual pleasure.
“I’d never done that to anyone before,” he concludes. “I don’t know why the violence came, but I could’ve almost killed him. I came close. I just didn’t care about anything. There was all this rage. I was hateful and angry, and I didn’t want him to say anything. I was just wishing he’d pass out. When he woke up, I told him to count to 200. He was in shock, I guess.
“Afterwards, I started drinking and doing drugs again. I figured, well, I messed up, now I can’t tell anyone, and that made me mad. I just gave up. I thought, `If I get locked up, I don’t care.'”
Six days later, on October 25, Spencer and a friend hopped in Spencer’s red Jeep pickup and drove down to Boulder. He recalls:
“I had cut school and I was drunk by the time we got there, and we were smoking weed. We drank two forty-ounce bottles of beer and a bottle of tequila and a bottle of Mad Dog. I still had the urges. I dropped my friend off.
“I had started listening to death-metal music. I still remember–I had Metallica’s “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” cranked when I saw the two kids. The song talked perfectly about what was going on; it says, `Myself is after me.’ It just fit everything perfect. I was just crazy, out of control.”
According to police reports and interviews with the eight-year-old victim and his sister, the two children were playing near their house in Boulder when Spencer pulled up at about 4:45 p.m. He told them he was looking for a golden retriever named Barney, who was wearing a red collar.
As the sister began looking about for the dog, Spencer pulled out a knife and told them not to move or he’d kill them. He then forced the boy to perform oral sex on him, threatened the two children with the knife again, and drove away.
“Afterwards,” Spencer recalls, “I just drove around. I didn’t feel guilty. Just hate and anger and rage. I drove to Wendy’s and got a hamburger. Then I drove home and went to bed. I didn’t think anything of it. I just got up the next morning and started looking again.” He says he spent the next several mornings tracing school-bus routes in Fort Collins before the buses came around, so he could watch the kids waiting for their rides.
At four o’clock on the evening of October 29, Spencer was driving through Fort Collins when he pulled up at a traffic light next to a school-bus driver he knew. Several minutes later he met her at the bus garage. According to a subsequent taped interview with an investigator for the Larimer County District Attorney’s office, Mary Cropp recalled her conversation with Spencer, whom she had known since she began driving him to school when he was in the fifth and sixth grades.
“Spencer and I always got along really well; he was disruptive at times, [but] I always thought he was a pretty neat kid, a bright kid,” she told the investigator. The two talked about what Spencer had been up to recently. “He said he had been keeping out of trouble all summer, he had been really well,” she remembered.
After about thirty minutes, Cropp said, “`Well, Spencer, I guess I had better go, I got to get home.’ And he said, `OK,’ and I gave him a hug and he left. He wasn’t nervous, he wasn’t agitated, he didn’t seem to be upset or excited. He just seemed to be very calm. The next morning I opened up the paper and I saw a picture of his truck on the front page, and I just couldn’t believe it.”
At 6:20 p.m., according to police, two boys, ages nine and ten, were playing tag on the playground of a local elementary school when Spencer pulled up in his truck. Spencer himself recalls: “I drove by once. There were some older high school students there, but they were walking away, so I drove around the block. [The boy] was there with his friend, but he was on the other side of the playground. Also, there was a janitor there. I said hi to him, and he walked back inside.”
Spencer approached the boy from behind with a knife (it was the boning knife he’d earned for good performance at his Lookout Mountain cooking class) and forced him into his truck. “I don’t know why I didn’t take his friend,” he says. “If I would have, I wouldn’t have ever been caught.”
He continues: “When I got in the truck, I made him get down on the floor. I drove up Rist Canyon looking for a place to assault him. It wasn’t planned or anything. I made him do oral sex; we took off our clothes. That was the whole of the assault.
“What ran through my head was that if he bit me I was going to stab him. There was the temptation to kill him so there wouldn’t be any evidence. Up by Horsetooth Reservoir there was a drainage ditch I knew of nearby. I thought I could throw him in there.”
Instead, the two got dressed and began heading back toward Fort Collins. Spencer says his plan was to drop the boy back off at the playground. But the boy’s friend had already called the police and described Spencer’s truck. When an unmarked patrol car pulled up behind the truck, Spencer panicked and floored it. The chase lasted only several minutes, ending when he slammed into a car at an intersection. He tried to back away from the scene and ran into a police car.
He was taken to the sheriff’s department, where he was interviewed by an investigator from the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department named John Toppenberg. Within hours, and with minimum police effort, Spencer had confessed to all three sexual assaults. “I did interpret this as an indicator that he, on some level, did wish to be apprehended,” Toppenberg wrote in his report.
Dr. Spencer Friedman has flowing and wavy dark hair that cascades to the top of his shoulders. He also has a goatee. Today he is wearing thick metal jewelry and a dark flannel shirt. He is sitting in his tenth-floor office downtown. He has been practicing clinical psychology in Colorado since 1979, ever since he moved here from California.
Pedophilia, he explains, “is kind of like other addictive behavior. The goal is to control it, not cure it.” He adds that it’s possible that Spencer’s powerful attraction to young boys was learned at Cleo Wallace but that it is impossible to say for sure, particularly when so little is known about his biological parents.
Spencer, too, insists that his pedophilia was learned, although he may simply be repeating his courtroom defense: that the behavior was picked up through mimicking the actions of boys with whom he was institutionalized and that it was allowed to persist because of inadequate counseling. “If I hadn’t been caught,” he says, “I might’ve just stopped offending. It might have tapered off, I guess. I don’t know.”
Last July, Friedman, as a paid witness for the defense, testified in Spencer Day’s behalf. After interviewing Spencer for several hours and reviewing his treatment history, Friedman said he was struck by how Spencer was permitted to float from facility to facility. “Spencer Day has received bits and pieces of what he’s needed,” he told the judge. “Long enough, consistent enough, intensive enough, no, I don’t think he’s received what he needed.”
Friedman say he was particularly surprised when he read that Spencer was released from Lookout Mountain without any intensive attention paid to his increasingly hostile sexual fantasies. “It seems almost unbelievable that he was discharged on parole without being in treatment, particularly in view of the history,” he said then.
He continued: “His access to children should have been restricted. He should have been monitored closely. I think, minimally, he should have been involved in some kind of psychotherapy, minimally, on a couple, three-times-a-week basis. I’m just shocked by the history and the lack of follow-up in terms of treatment.”
Adds Din Tuttle, Spencer’s attorney at the time, “The Department of Institutions dropped the ball on this kid. When they released him, it was sink or swim. It was like putting an alcoholic in a liquor store and saying, `Okay, but don’t drink.'”
Spencer Day pleaded guilty to all three crimes. On Tuesday, July 26, Larimer District Court Judge Arnaud Newton sentenced him to 32 years in prison for first-degree sexual assault in connection with the October 19 assault and an additional 32 years for second-degree kidnapping in connection with the October 29 attack. Because of what he described as the aggravated circumstances of the attacks, Newton ordered that the sentences be served consecutively.
Two weeks later Boulder District Judge Richard McLean, struggling with how to respond to Spencer’s guilty plea to first-degree sexual assault and felony menacing of the eight-year-old Boulder boy, brought up the idea of castration. Instead, he sentenced Spencer to 40 years in prison, to run concurrently with his 64-year sentence.
The prospect of their son getting out of prison at an age when most people are thinking of retirement is only one of the Day family’s problems. Last April Edward and Susan Day were sued by the family of their son’s first victim in a civil negligence lawsuit.
“As parents of Spencer Day, they had a duty to supervise and control their child,” the complaint says. According to the suit, the Fort Collins boy “suffered physical and mental damage” as a result of the assault. His parents had experienced psychological stress, the complaint continued, and expect to incur substantial expenses in the future as their son goes through counseling.
Edward Day has responded that he left the family in June and so had no direct parental control. Susan contends that she is not to blame, either.
Susan Day “did not have the duty to supervise or control Spencer McKay Day nor did she have the power or the ability to do so,” her legal response reads. “Spencer was a ward of the state, in the custody of the state, and the state had all the duties of control and supervision. Because of the extensive efforts taken by [Susan] in years past to provide assistance via medical expenses, therapy and requests to therapists and the state to provide help and control of Spencer McKay Day, all of the allegations against her are frivolous and groundless.”
In the meantime, Spencer’s attorneys say they will appeal the sentences and try to get him into treatment sooner. Yet even if they succeed, Spencer will be approaching his thirties before it is known if the additional counseling has stuck. Friedman estimates that it would take six to eight years of intensive therapy before he could even say whether or not Spencer might reoffend.
Other people familiar with Spencer’s case who said they would prefer to remain anonymous aren’t so sure that additional therapy will change anything. They note that he has been through good, solid programs and that he was taught what was necessary to control his behavior and chose not to do it. One health professional recalled that Spencer knew as much about pedophilia as some therapists. Another labeled him a sociopath.
As assistant DA Reidel completed his questioning of Friedman at the July 1994 hearing, the prosecutor argued that the only place left for Spencer Day was prison.
Reidel: Based upon his history and the violent nature he’s displayed in his sexual acting out, if he does reoffend, the results of that reoffending could be tragic.
Friedman: Yes.
Reidel: Could be deadly.
Friedman: Yes.
Reidel: Thank you.
end of part 2
