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Publishers Review | San Jose Mercury News | FMSF Review | Kirkus Review N E W Y O R K L A W J O U R N A L Did Gary Ramona rape his daughter Holly? That is the central and ultimately unanswerable question of Moira Johnston's fascinating non-fiction book, Spectral Evidence. Part mystery, part sociological treatise, part courtroom drama, Spectral Evidence delves into the tangled history behind a California civil case and lays bare the resulting tragedy: the disintegration of a seemingly perfect American family. Ms. Johnston, an experienced journalist from the Napa Valley, the affluent area where the Ramonas lived, has done meticulous research to bring the milieu of her subjects convincingly to life. Gary and Stephanie Ramona, who grew up during California's post- World War II boom years, were a couple who seemed to have it all -- financial security, a stable, long-term marriage, three beautiful daughters -- until their lives were permanently shattered in 1990. That year their eldest daughter, Holly, a 19-year-old college student in California's well-to-do Orange County, announced she had recovered repressed memories of repeated acts of incest committed by her father during her childhood, horrific incidents of abuse never previously suspected by her mother or younger sisters. Devastated, Stephanie Ramona sided with her daughter (answering all questions regarding Holly's veracity with the silencing reply, "A mother knows") and began divorce proceedings against her husband. Gary Ramona, who had worked hard all his life to achieve financial and social success, finds himself suddenly deprived of family, reputation, and eventually, his top sales and marketing position at the Robert Mondavi Winery, one of the most prestigious vineyards in Napa Valley. Believing his troubles to have originated from the implantation of false memories in his susceptible daughter's mind, Gary Ramona brought suit against her therapists, counselor Marche Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose, who together made the decision to administer the supposed "truth serum" drug, sodium amytal, to Holly in order to "confirm" the girl's admittedly confused and fragmentary flashbacks of molestation. The case was allowed to proceed by Napa Valley Judge Scott Snowden, who cited an earlier case, Molien v. Kaiser Foundation Hospital (1980), as a precedent for a malpractice suit brought by a third party. Ramona v. Isabella became the first third-party suit against therapists treating psychological disorders, and as such sent waves of shock and panic through California's sizable population of mental health care professionals. Spectral Evidence enhances its recounting of the Ramonas' legal difficulties by linking them to historical events. The book's title comes from a term for a certain kind of evidence allowed at the notorious Salem witch trials, evidence of demonic spirits seen only by the agitated girls accusing their neighbors of witchcraft. When spectral evidence was finally barred from court, the cases against the remaining defendants swiftly broke down, but not before irreversible damage had been done -- 25 people died as a result of Salem's witch hysteria. The parallel between occurrences in 17th century Massachusetts and modern cases of child sex abuse (the McMartin Preschool trial is a prime example) is not just pointed out by the author; Gary Ramona himself independently made the connection and actively identified with those falsely accused of witchcraft, even going so far as to visit Salem in 1993. On the human front, Spectral Evidence does a good job of capturing the personalities involved in the case, particularly Bruce Miroglio, the Napa Valley attorney hired to represent Dr. Rose. Mr. Miroglio is portrayed as a happily married family man disturbed by the case's incest allegations, adamant in his belief that Gary Ramona is undeserving of a penny in damages from the therapists' insurance carriers, and anxious to balance his commitment to the case with his obligations to his wife and children. Prosecution lawyer Richard Harrington is well evoked as a flamboyant and dogged advocate entirely convinced of the injustice done to his client. The expert witnesses on both sides are also fleshed out. Lenore Terr, a noted clinician involved in dozens of recovered-memory cases -- including the famous Franklin case in which a California housewife claimed to have blocked out for 20 years the knowledge that her own father, George Franklin, had murdered her best friend -- offers an impassioned defense of "robust" repression of traumatic childhood experiences. Elizabeth Loftus, a leading researcher of false memories, is a somewhat more detached, but equally sincere, believer in the inherent unreliability of memory. Ms. Johnston vividly depicts the "memory wars" fought by Doctors Terr, Loftus and their respective factions to try to solve the riddle of memory. Interesting information is provided in layman's terms about recent discoveries by those in the forefront of memory science, but the frustrating fact remains that any real progress in this field is years away -- too late to save the Ramona family. The trial is related by Ms. Johnston with a journalist's eye for detail and a suspense writer's sense of pacing. The buildup to such events as Holly's testimony and the reading of the verdict is executed with finesse, and the payoff in both instances lives up to expectations. Betrayal is the theme that surfaces throughout the course of the trial, from Holly's story of Gary Ramona's violation of the father-daughter bond, to Michael and Tim Mondavi's explanation of why Mr. Ramona was abruptly terminated from the place where he was once thought of as a "son" by winery founder Robert Mondavi. The book tends to focus too much on the relationship between Gary and Stephanie Ramona, relegating Holly and her psychological problems (clinical depression, bulimia) to secondary status, an effect Ms. Johnston could not have intended. The Ramonas' legal wrangles, consisting of suits and countersuits, are frequently hard to follow, even with the author's patient attempts to present the events in as coherent a manner as possible. Her examination of how the jury arrived at its verdict, while often gripping, suffers from the surfeit of background information provided about the jurors, which tends to divert attention from the main action of the trial. The impression made is of a thorough reporter eager to use every bit of her carefully collected research, even when it isn't really essential to her story. Despite such quibbles, Moira Johnston has written a formidable book, intelligent, fair-minded, well grounded in its subject matter and undeniably a page-turner. Like a good novelist, Ms. Johnston has the ability to select the perfect symbol to encapsulate the experience of her characters. In Spectral Evidence that symbol is the "dream house" Gary and Stephanie Ramona were building at the time of Holly's accusation and the collapse of their marriage. The opulent structure in the hills above Napa Valley, destined never to be the home of those who planned it, makes a statement more eloquent than any words about the lasting sense of loss felt by everyone touched by the landmark case of Ramona v. Isabella. |
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