The other Dr. Gilmer Two men, a murder, and an unlikely fight for justice

Benjamin Gilmer

Book - 2022

"A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system--a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time. When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community--right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. He'd been in prison for nearly a decade by the time Benjamin arr...ived, but Vince's patients would still tell Benjamin they couldn't believe the other Dr. Gilmer was capable of such violence. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong. Vince knew, too. He complained from the time he was arrested of his 'SSRI brain,' referring to withdrawal from his anti-depressant medication. When Benjamin visited Vince in prison, he met a man who was obviously fighting his own mind, constantly twitching and veering off into nonsensical tangents. Enlisting This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig, Benjamin resolved to get Vince the help he needed. But time and again, the pair would come up against a prison system that cared little about the mental health of its inmates--despite an estimated one third of them suffering from an untreated mental illness. In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime. Rather than get treatment, Vince Gilmer was sentenced to life in prison--a life made all the worse by his untrustworthy brain and prison and government officials who dismissed his situation. A large percentage of imprisoned Americans are suffering from mental illness when they commit their crimes and continue to suffer, untreated, in prison. In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer argues that some crimes need to be healed rather than punished"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Ballantine Books [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Benjamin Gilmer (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
292 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-292).
ISBN
9780593355169
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Two family doctors, unrelated in spite of having the same last name, establish medical practices in the same North Carolina rural community. In 2004, an increasingly impulsive Dr. Vince Gilmer strangles his mentally ill 60-year-old father and cuts off all his fingers. He's sentenced to life in prison without parole. Years later, Benjamin Gilmer is hired to work in the same clinic Vince did. This weird intersection of their lives generates consternation and challenges for Benjamin, but also compassion. After visiting Vince in prison, Benjamin embarks on a quest to elucidate Vince's motive for patricide and possibly procure justice for him. Is Vince a troubled soul who did a terrible deed? Or a calculating manipulator? Did discontinuing his SSRI medication trigger violent behavior? Might he have an undiagnosed genetic illness that explains his moral and physical decline? Antitheses abound--mercy versus punishment, intuition versus preconceptions, coincidence versus destiny--in this unsettling combination of murder mystery, medical detective tale, and plea for criminal-justice reform. With more than one-third of prison inmates suffering from severe mental illness, greater awareness and better treatment would reduce that number.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Family physician Gilmer's gripping debut starts out as a murder tale, morphs into a medical mystery, and lands as a heartbreaking account of how poorly the American prison system treats the mentally ill. When the author joined a rural North Carolina clinic, he became fascinated with the clinic's founder, Vince Gilmer--no relation--who was in prison for murdering his mentally ill father in 2004. At first, after hearing an unfounded rumor that the other Gilmer was being released, he was fearful the man would come after him for taking his practice, but he soon set out to reconcile the murderer with the person the clinic's patients revered. Working with a radio journalist, the author discovered Gilmer had a number of medical problems, including antidepressant withdrawal and head trauma from a car accident, that could have made him violent enough to kill his father. In the process, the two Gilmers became friends, and after the radio journalist aired a story about the other Gilmer languishing in prison with various neurological disorders, the author fought to have him released on a clemency plea while becoming an advocate for prison reform for the mentally ill. (The other Gilmer remains in prison.) The author does a fine job humanizing everyone involved. This painful look at a terrible social injustice deserves a wide audience. Agent: Lara Love Hardin, Idea Architects. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

When family physician Gilmer joined a rural North Carolina clinic, he was shocked to discover that his predecessor--who coincidentally had the same last name--got up one morning and strangled his father before coming to work. Visiting the "other Dr. Gilmer" in prison, the author immediately recognized a case of untreated mental illness (he was ultimately diagnosed with Huntington's disease), launching often frustrated efforts to secure his colleague the help he needed. Gilmer here expands his story to discuss the high incidence of mental illness in the U.S. prison population and to argue for better treatment--healing rather than punishment.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Good Hope Road On June 28, 2004, in rural Appalachia, a man with my name and my profession strangled his father in the passenger seat of his Toyota Tacoma. The other Dr. Gilmer was a family medicine physician in North Carolina, at a small clinic he'd founded with his wife near the tiny town of Fletcher. He was recently divorced, living alone in a house on the hill above his office. In the weeks and months before that night, he'd been drinking more than usual, going out to bars during the week. He'd also been making some impulsive decisions--­like buying the brand-­new truck he was driving that night, even though he was massively in debt. After a full morning of seeing patients, Dr. Vince Gilmer left his practice on the afternoon of June 28 to drive to Broughton Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Morganton, North Carolina, where his father had lived for the previous two years. Vince's father, Dalton, was sixty years old, a diagnosed schizophrenic, and had landed at Broughton after a time of delusional behavior, drug abuse, and intermittent homelessness. Now, though, he was being released. His son was getting him out. Dr. Vince Gilmer wasn't particularly close to his father, but he had arranged for Dalton to be cared for at a facility called Flesher's Fairview Health and Retirement Center, a five-­minute drive from his house, so he could keep a closer eye on his care. Vince told his co-­workers that he was going to take his father into the outdoors before taking him to his new home, that the two of them were going canoeing on Watauga Lake in Tennessee. It was a place Vince knew well. He had often escaped there to relax during his residency after medical school. If anyone thought it was strange for Vince to drive two hours in the wrong direction so that he could take his schizophrenic father on a quick evening boat outing, they didn't mention it. This was the sort of thing he did often. Vince's nurses and co-­workers would not have been surprised that he thought a trip to the lake might be therapeutic. Dr. Vince Gilmer was well known for his unconventional, friendly, and personal approach to life and medicine. He was a big believer in the power of the outdoors, the sort of doctor who had been known to take depressive patients on walks to help them clear their minds rather than just give them medicine. Patients and nurses called him "Bear" because of his hulking presence and warm hugs. None of Vince's co-­workers knew how much his father had deteriorated while at Broughton. If any of them had, they would have realized how difficult canoeing would have been for him. Dalton Gilmer was a frail man, heavily medicated, barely able to stand on his own. He would have needed to be lifted into the boat and certainly could not swim. Still, along with the usual lawn care tools--­garden shears, gloves, clippers--­that Vince used to maintain the landscaping at his clinic, there was a poorly tied-­down canoe rattling in the bed of the truck that afternoon, throughout the hour-­long drive from Cane Creek Family Health Center to Broughton. Vince made good time. At five-­thirty p.m. an orderly wheeled Dalton out in a wheelchair and loaded his meager possessions into the rear cab. He lifted Dalton into the front passenger seat after Vince moved aside a dog leash, suspending it from the headrest. Then father and son headed north, toward the North Carolina-­Tennessee border. What happened next has never been fully explained. Sometime that night, they stopped at an Arby's for dinner, Dalton's first meal out in over a year. Sometime that night, Dalton turned to Vince and began to hum the song "Baa Baa Black Sheep." Sometime that night, Vince wrapped the dog leash around Dalton's neck. Just before midnight, Thomas Browning, coming home from a late movie in Abingdon, Virginia, an hour north of Watauga Lake, saw what he thought was a drunk man sleeping in a ditch on Good Hope Road. He and his wife pulled over and called the cops. When the police arrived, they found Dalton Gilmer's body, still warm, with contusions and a bruised ring around his neck. He had soiled himself. He was missing all of his fingers. By the time a report was filed with the Washington County Sheriff Department, Dr. Vince Gilmer was already back in North Carolina, over a hundred miles away. He'd driven south in the predawn, on the winding two-­lane country roads and slightly straighter highways that penetrate the heart of Appalachia. He'd passed through the moonlit shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, through fog-filled hollers and sleeping mountain communities, crossing the North Carolina state line through the Cherokee National Forest. Ask Vince how he got home that night, and he probably wouldn't be able to tell you. The precise route is lost to time, lost to the shadows, lost to darkness. The night only comes back into focus again at three-­thirty a.m., this time bathed in fluorescent, twenty-­four-­hour light. That's when a receipt from a Walmart outside of Asheville shows a ten-­dollar purchase of hydrogen peroxide, paper towels, and a pair of gloves. Vince used the hydrogen peroxide on his hands, and to wash the blood from the bed of his truck. Back at his house on Ivy Lane, he took an Ambien but couldn't sleep. The next morning, he showed up on time at Cane Creek Clinic, ready to greet his patients. The day after killing his father, Dr. Vince Gilmer worked a full day, eight in the morning to six in the evening, and no one--­not his nurse, not his receptionist, not a single one of the fifteen or so patients he saw that day--­noticed anything different about him. I now work in that same clinic. I know some of the previous staff. I see Dr. Vince Gilmer's patients. I use his exam rooms. I am Dr. Benjamin Gilmer. Though we are not related, for the last ten years, I've lived in the other Dr. Gilmer's shadow. I know his story better than anyone except Vince himself. It's a complex, twisting, and often frightening tale. To many people, it doesn't make much sense. But there are a few facts about the night of June 28, 2004, that everyone--­detectives, a judge, a jury, and Dr. Vince Gilmer himself--­can agree on: Dalton Gilmer was strangled with a dog leash. His son, Vince Gilmer, was holding it. Using a pair of garden shears, Vince Gilmer amputated all of the fingers from his father's hands, then laid the body on the side of Good Hope Road and drove home. The detectives had lots of questions--­the most critical one was Why? Why did Vince Gilmer kill his own father? Why did he leave the body in an easily discoverable place, on the side of a busy road, when there were so many other secluded spots--­including Watauga Lake--­only five minutes away? Why did he want to take his frail, mentally impaired father canoeing at night, two hours north of the facility where his new caretakers were anxiously awaiting his arrival? Why did he wait almost two days to file a missing-­person report? Why did he tell everyone that his father had wandered off, an easily disprovable lie? Why didn't he run? Why did he cut off his father's fingers, and what did he do with them? Why did a caring doctor become a brutal murderer? A few weeks after Vince killed his father, mine officiated my wedding on a North Carolina mountaintop a short drive from Watauga Lake, where the murder occurred. I was looking forward to starting a family and my professional life as Dr. Gilmer. Back then, I had no idea there was another Dr. Gilmer. I had no idea what the other Dr. Gilmer had done. And I had no idea that it would change both of our lives forever. Excerpted from The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice by Benjamin Gilmer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.