Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 5, 1995 TAG: 9506050002
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT LITTLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CARROLLTON LENGTH: Long
Not $500,000. Not a rewrite of the state lawbooks, or a refund on five years of her life, or even an apology. Certainly not a second life for her dead husband.
A sign. On the side of the road, with her husband's name on it, right next to one of the bridges he built.
Barbara Jacobs says she wants one as a commemoration from the state government, which, because of a series of actions, inactions and misjudgments, she blames for her husband's slaying and his killer's escape.
``There are a lot of things I wish I could get - that I feel like I should get,'' said Jacobs, legs crossed and hands folded, leaning on the arm of a living room chair.
``That would be nice, though. Maybe just a sign. Something that would last, to acknowledge what happened. Something people won't forget.''
Jacobs has been trying to forget what happened Feb. 2, 1990, off a gravel side road in rural Chesapeake. Her husband, Mike Jacobs, was killed while working as a construction foreman.
But the family's grief only started with Mike's death. Next came a bungled trial for the killer, a medical decision that let him escape, a nationwide manhunt. The family fled nervously around the state - television cameras at the heel - terror-stricken that the killer might come for them next.
It was a tortuous misadventure, wracked with police missteps, security breaches and portentous bungling by the media. It ended a year ago Thursday, only because the governor, the head of the state police and more than 50 special agents got involved.
Jacobs says she wants compensation. Or justice. Maybe just some answers.
``Am I asking too much? That the state admit what it's done?'' asked Jacobs, 47, at her Isle of Wight County home last week. Quiet and polite, she sat nearly motionless in a corner chair for the three-hour interview. To questions, she leaned in with slow, whispery, yet somehow forceful responses. To the camera, she protested with a meek shudder.
``I don't want much,'' she said, softly as always. ``I just blame the state government for Mike's death.''
She doesn't blame the state for pulling the trigger that shot the bullet into his head - the shooter was a man named John Thomas Midgette, a deranged co-worker suffering from paranoid delusions.
But state officials knew Midgette was trying to kill Jacobs two weeks before the slaying. And they never intervened.
Police quickly captured Midgette and charged him with murder. His trial, though, was another blunder.
Prosecutors didn't bring evidence because they expected Midgette to plead insanity. When he refused, they tried to get a mistrial, but the judge wouldn't allow it. He ruled that Midgette committed the crime, then found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
So Midgette didn't go to prison, as Jacobs had hoped, but to the maximum security ward at Central State Hospital in Petersburg. And for no specific time - just until the doctors said he could leave.
Every doctor who examined him agreed Midgette was certifiably insane. He claimed his infant child was actually the illegitimate child of a black man - that his wife took the man's sperm to a doctor and had herself impregnated. When a friend commented that the baby was white and looked just like him, Midgette said: ``The doctor did a heck of a job.''
For a time, Midgette refused to eat, thinking the hospital food was poisoned. He lost some 50 pounds in the first few months. Once, when he tried to shake hands before an interview with a court psychologist, his pants fell to the floor.
Midgette suffered from delusional disorder, showing all the classic signs: a stark change in behavior in middle age, bizarre fantasies masked by an otherwise normal lifestyle. The illness is generally considered incurable.
Still, two years after the trial, Midgette's psychological reviews started to improve. He was adjusting well to the hospital setting, doctors said, his lurid tales of conspiracy reduced to just a flicker.
After two years, Midgette got a job on the hospital grounds, and permission to go outside by himself. Only two other criminally insane patients at the hospital, neither of them murderers, had such privileges.
On April 23, 1994, at 11 a.m., he left his job at the patient canteen and didn't come back.
Security guards searched the hospital grounds for two hours before calling police. A dispatch was sent to police departments throughout Hampton Roads. Some tacked it on bulletin boards or read it at meetings. Others threw it away.
Jacobs learned of Midgette's escape at 9 that night in a call from her attorney, who had been told by area police. Hospital officials have a policy of notifying relatives of victims when patients escape or are to be released, but Jacobs' case was different: Midgette was coming after her.
Or so she feared. During Midgette's trial, prosecutors announced that he had prepared a six-person hit list of people he wanted dead, with Mike Jacobs at the top of the list. Barbara Jacobs, Midgette's mother and some other co-workers were also targets, each part of Midgette's delusional conspiracy theory that acquaintances were trying to fire him or kill him.
Jacobs packed a bag and left home, staying in Smithfield with her daughter, Lisa Noel, or with other friends in the area.
``They said my name was on the list. My name,'' Jacobs stammered. ``I didn't even know the man until he was charged with killing Mike.
``But I had to assume he was on his way to get me, and I wasn't going to sit around waiting.''
She, Lisa Noel and Lisa's husband, Greg, called police every few hours for updates. They watched the news and read the papers, hoping to find at least some word that the search was progressing.
After three days without a word in the press, Lisa Noel called the Hampton Roads television stations and also talked to a reporter for one area newspaper. When a state police spokeswoman was asked why the media were never notified of Midgette's escape, the spokeswoman said, ``They told us he wasn't dangerous.'' When asked who ``they'' were, she wouldn't say.
When Midgette's picture appeared on the news that night and in the paper the next morning, one of Barbara Jacobs' co-workers announced she had seen him at her office the day before. State police gave Jacobs the word: Leave town and keep moving. And stay in touch. She took paid leave from work and went to Clarksville to stay with relatives.
By then, the story of the deranged man who was loose with a hit list had made national headlines. Syndicated television shows including ``Inside Edition,'' ``American Journal,'' ``America's Most Wanted'' and ``48 Hours'' aired reports.
Jacobs and her family talked with the media at first, often getting more information from them than from police. But the relationship quickly soured.
``They called all the time, followed us. There were so many,'' said Lisa Noel, 28, a paramedic. Reporters called family members or showed up at their doors, many making brash attempts to get in.
When the press started reporting where the family was hiding, they became part of the problem. And the Jacobses again had to run.
``We were so terrified all the time, and then that. It's like they wanted him to find us,'' Jacobs said. ``I kept wondering, `Isn't anybody on my side?'''
After about two weeks, the furor died down. Barbara Jacobs and Lisa Noel had to return to work. The press lost interest. For four weeks, Jacobs lived at home with her fiance and a gun, pleading with police not to stop their regular patrols.
State police, meanwhile, widened their search, calling it a top priority. It cost some $75,000 in overtime before it ended. More than 400 sightings came in.
Midgette was captured June 1 near Washington, N.C., a few miles from where he grew up, after a passer-by spotted him walking a stretch of rural highway. He was carrying a small bag with some toiletries and gave up without a struggle. ``I just needed a vacation,'' he said. He said he had been to Washington, D.C.
Midgette was returned to Central State, where he continues serving an indefinite sentence.
``I can't tell you what it felt like running like that,'' Jacobs said, ``and I can't tell you what it felt like to finally feel safe.''
People in the state government sure didn't know, she said. She decided they should pay.
Two weeks before Mike Jacobs' slaying, two men reported to the state police that Midgette was trying to get Jacobs killed - a detail the Jacobs family didn't learn until after Midgette's escape.
Central State Hospital was guilty of ``major, systemic deficiencies in security,'' according to Gov. George Allen. Jacobs decided to sue the state.
But no lawyer would take the case. The statute of limitations had likely expired, and none thought the state would allow itself to be sued.
Allen, who met with Jacobs, recommended she seek compensation through the General Assembly. So, she took a bill before the legislature asking for $500,000. After a hearing, a House committee killed it, 9-0.
One criticism was that she asked for too much money, but Jacobs says the money never mattered. She turned down offers from studios and television shows. ``I just couldn't do that,'' she said.
During the hearing, the state police offered evidence that Barbara Jacobs was never actually on Midgette's hit list. The prosecutor who had said so in court was wrong.
``If they knew that then, why did they tell us to run?'' she asked. ``That hearing [before the House Claims Committee] was almost as Mickey Mouse as that courtroom in Chesapeake. They just talked and laughed and walked around like we weren't even there - like they didn't want to be there.
``I don't think they cared how important it was to me.''
Jacobs lobbied for changes in the law governing mentally ill criminals, hoping for a new ``guilty but insane'' classification, or making people acquitted because of insanity serve sentences once they are cured.
But after consideration by Allen and Attorney General Jim Gilmore, the state's policy remained the same: criminals need punishment, but mentally ill criminals need help.
For state officials, Jacobs' case was a difficult one. Most were sympathetic but said bad luck was as much to blame as anything.
For instance, when the state police got the tip from Midgette's friends, they tapped one of the friends' phones. They never investigated Midgette's mental problems - stories about 7-Elevens poisoning his coffee or thugs injecting him with serum - because they thought he was trying to hire a killer, not kill someone himself.
They didn't warn Mike Jacobs, because they weren't convinced he was in danger. And state police procedures never said they should.
Also, Central State Hospital is a mental health facility, not a prison. State law says criminally insane patients shall be confined only if they pose a threat to others.
Midgette's doctors may have made a questionable decision to lift some of his restrictions, but it was a medical decision, not a security decision. And judgment calls are part of treating people with mental illnesses.
Still, some things have changed.
Patients in Central State's maximum security ward are no longer allowed outside, even if doctors think their condition has improved.
The hospital added 70 employees to the staff at the hospital's 150-patient forensic unit, bringing employment there to 202. Of the new positions, 30 were for clinical work, 40 for security.
And new procedures in the hospital's forensic unit are overseen by a new director - the old one was replaced shortly after Midgette's capture.
``I think it indeed served as our wake-up call,'' said Dr. Timothy A. Kelly, state director of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services. ``The forensic unit right now is very, very secure. If you're not supposed to get out, you won't.''
The state police have a new policy requiring that any potential crime victim be warned immediately, even if it interferes with an investigation. Superintendent Col. M. Wayne Huggins said, ``We knew we couldn't let this happen again.''
And the governor's office, which ordered three separate investigations into the Midgette case, is trying to help Jacobs name a bridge in Chesterfield County - one that her husband built - in his memory.
Like most other things she has encountered in government, it will be a process: going before the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors and the Commonwealth Transportation Board. The family will wait.
``A lot of people came to Clarksville when we buried Daddy,'' Lisa Noel said. ``They came to the funeral, they came to the viewing from all over the state.''
``He had a lot of friends - a lot of people who cared about him,'' Barbara Jacobs added.
``I don't care how ludicrous it sounded, somebody should have warned him when they knew he was in danger,'' she said. ``And now that he's gone, they should do something about it.
``A sign on the road. That's not too much to ask, is it?''
by CNB