GLR January-February 2026

individually submit to discharge hearings. Bernie was the first to go before the parole board. “He was the one everybody looked at because he was married,” Jackie explained. “I know Roy spent a lot of time with him talking about potential questions that would be asked of him, what people were looking for, and what they were not looking for.” In addition to coaching each man, Roy vouched for them in prelimi nary written reports, then sat in on proceedings. After ward, he’d discuss the merits of each case with the powers that be. In his December 29 parole considera tion note recommending release, Klodnycky wrote that Bernie was “beginning to understand his own condition and he will keep away from such practices in the fu ture.” On January 1, 1956, Dr. Brown signed Bernie’s certificate of discharge, which stated he was “Recov ered (Cured).” He was released to Doreen’s custody. With Bernie’s hairdresser’s license revoked, he and Doreen were penniless and had to take their chil dren to live with relatives. They then relocated to Southern California, where their marriage buckled under the strain of his public shaming. Both later had frequent indiscretions with other men. In 1960 one of Doreen’s affairs led to the birth of a daughter, whom Bernie raised as his own after Doreen died by suicide five years later. He eventually found love with a man four decades younger, who died in 2001 of complica tions from AIDS. Bernie’s shame remained so great throughout their 21-year relationship that he never mentioned Mount Pleasant. E PILOGUE W ARD 15 E AST was shut down in fall 1956. Two decades to the day after Bernie’s release, Iowa’s sex ual psychopath law was repealed. Both child murders remain unsolved. Roy eventually completed his doctorate at the Uni versity of Kentucky in Lexington, where the couple had their two daughters, Mary and Nancy, and Jackie worked as a social worker at Eastern State Hospital, a psychiatric institute. Roy’s first post-doctoral em ployment was in consumer behavior research for Gen eral Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Subsequent opportunities would bring the Yamahiros to other cities. In 1990, at age 62, Roy died in Denver of com plications from diabetes. After retiring from a career in social services, childhood education, and finance, Jackie volunteered for the Colorado AIDS Project, which brought back memories of Mount Pleasant. “It just hurt me so much that gay guys weren’t accepted,” she said. “I felt that was so wrong—so terribly wrong.” In 2004 she relocated to the Bay Area to be closer to her daughters and Mary’s young chil dren. Today, she looks back on her and Roy’s Mount Pleasant period with great fondness. Does she look back at herself and Roy in 1955 and realize how far ahead of their time they were— how groundbreaking it was for them to be allies decades before that term was coined? “No,” she replied solemnly. “I look back and think we were pretty smart.”

costing Woodbury County “$1,500 a month to pay for the keep of 15 of the 21 criminal sexual psychopaths sent to Mount Pleas ant mental hospital.” That seemed money squandered, especially when, in the November 25th edition of The Des Moines Register , Superintendent Brown repeated that no treatment or cure existed. “The only thing we can do is to try to accomplish something by talking to them. If a cure is going to come it has to be something that comes from within them.” It was a prime time for the men to 32 In his car, cold after trying a drug That would keep you high for days— He’d been dead less than one. I imagined for a while, after hearing about it, That it wasn’t really him they’d found, but someone else instead, And that I could dream him back into his parents’ garage, Or the stable where we worked, Wearing a T-shirt that hadn’t been washed, Waiting for me to wake up, So we could let the horses out again. N ICK G ALINAITIS DreamBoy In the yards where we outgrew our childhood together And fought each other every summer, I can see him laughing at me with a bloody nose. He was so skinny he could barely hit me As I threatened to knock him out by the fence And bury him, since he always ditched me To hang with girls that got too clingy, Or spend all the money he owed me on uppers. Two summers we worked at a private stable together Where he kept forgetting to lock the gate— Once a horse bolted and nearly killed me. Later, the owner cursed him out and fired him, Leaving me to shovel stalls alone. We had our underage fun— Got sloshed in basements, garages, on rooftops. We drove his parents’ truck without permission, And shoplifted, if we felt like it, never getting caught. On a dare, once, he kissed me, and pretended to hate it. One morning, I woke from a dream: I’d gotten so mad at him That I killed him. I’d always told him I would Whenever he did anything outrageous. And later that day, his parents called To say he’d disappeared. They couldn’t find him, and begged me To tell them where he was. I didn’t say it, but I surmised some creep, Some junkie had seduced him, or stolen him, Since he had such a pretty neck. Or maybe he ran off, Found a job that would eventually let him go, And then he’d have to come back—he always came back. A slow week passed before they found him

TheG & LR