GLR January-February 2026

ESSAY

20 Landed in the Cuckoo’s Nest D ANIEL V AILLANCOURT

I MET JACKIE YAMAHIRO in 2005, when I was hired along with my husband, David A. Lee, to write the fea ture-film adaption of historian Neil Miller’s Sex-Crime Panic . Jackie is a central figure in the award-winning 2002 nonfiction book, which details how twenty inno cent gay men were locked up in an Iowa mental hospi tal in 1955. Following a research trip to the Hawkeye State in early 2005, David and I hosted a dinner party at our Los Ange les home for the film’s producers, Jackie, and Bernie McMor ris, the only survivor of the incarceration then known to be alive. The old friends—Jackie was then 73, Bernie 85—hadn’t seen each other in years. “This woman saved my life,” the frail former hairdresser told us through tears. He died a year later. Our movie was never made. But Jackie—now 94 and a dear friend—is alive and well, residing in a retirement community condominium near her daughters and grandchildren in San Mateo, California. She remembers the events of 1955 as if they had happened yesterday. in nearby Fort Madison, each had been adjudged to be a “crim inal sexual psychopath” and committed by court order “until cured.” And yet, just a few months earlier, on July 23rd, The Des Moines Register had reported that, at a recent national psy chiatric conference, Mount Pleasant’s superintendent, Dr. W. B. Brown, had heard experts claim there existed “no specific and adequate treatment after which it can be said that a deviate has been cured.” The task of overseeing these depraved souls would fall to two hastily promoted interns: 27-year-old Roy Yamahiro and 25 year-old Dick Gundersen. Jackie ( née Paulson) was Roy’s 24 year-old wife. A front desk receptionist since the pair’s arrival, she’d similarly been granted an obligatory status upgrade. Since no husband of the social workers then on staff at Mount Pleas ant would allow his spouse near these dangerous criminals, would she be interested? Realizing it would be more rewarding than answering the switchboard and greeting visitors—and rel ishing the prospect of working closely with her beloved Roy— Daniel Vaillancourt is a freelance journalist based in Southern Cali fornia. A regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times , he has also written for AARP, HuffPost , and The Advocate , among others. That autumn, twenty sex offenders were delivered to Ward 15 East of the Mental Health Institute at Mount Pleasant, a town of 8,000 in southeastern Iowa. The men ranged in age from eighteen to 58, hailing from Sioux City and its environs. All had been arrested weeks before on morals charges, coerced into pleading guilty, and sentenced to three years’ hard labor. But in stead of being sent to the state penitentiary

she agreed. The couple, pegged as “young and idealistic” by the hospi tal staff, were clearly different—not only from their colleagues but from each other. Tall Oregon native Roy towered over his petite, Wisconsin-born mate. But it was another distinction— he was Japanese-American, her origins were European—that endlessly intrigued the people they encountered. Interracial mar riage was not only rare in the mid-1950s; it was illegal in more than a dozen states, though not in Iowa. The two had met as psychology majors at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and married soon after graduation. They had then relocated to Des Moines, where Roy completed his master’s degree at Drake University while Jackie supported them by working as a proofreader for Better Homes & Gardens . In spring 1955, the pair had scored internships at Mount Pleas ant—opened in 1865 as the first of four sanatoriums in the state, and at the time housing some 1,500 patients within dozens of winding wards (men’s to the east, women’s to the west) con

nected to the central structure by a complex network of long staircases and tunnels. Since June, the duo, plus Dick Gundersen, had been living, like most employees, in third floor staff apartments at the asylum. In agreeing to stay on and take charge of these degenerates, Roy would have to postpone his doctoral studies, but the sacrifice was worth it to earn much-needed extra money and in valuable experience. But rather than manag

In autumn 1955, twenty sexo ff enders were delivered to Ward 15 East of the Mental Health Ins ti tute at Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

ing violent rapists, pedophiles, and peeping Toms, she and Roy were about to become lifesaving guardians to a harmless group of terrified, closeted gay men. E NTRAPMENT T WO SADISTIC CHILD MURDERS perpetrated ten months apart in the Sioux City area had precipitated the men’s dispatch to Mount Pleasant. On September 29, 1954, the mutilated and de composing body of an eight-year-old boy was found in a pasture nearly a month after he’d vanished from a neighbor’s front yard. On July 10, 1955, a two-year-old girl was abducted from her crib through her bedroom window. She was found dead in a cornfield the next day—battered, burned by a cigarette or lighter, raped, and sodomized. In the months between the killings—spurred by a panicked populace—the Iowa state legislature had unanimously passed its criminal sexual psychopath law (akin to statutes in 25 other states), which permitted the involuntary commitment of anyone who exhibited “criminal propensities toward the commission of sex offenses.” Signed by Republican Governor Leo A. Hoegh, it had taken effect on April 14th. In the aftermath of the second murder three months later, the community demanded that

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