Still trying to make sense of the senseless
by Jack Neely
It was 23 years ago this week that a tall, lean man walked into the big Sears department store on North Central. The Korean War veteran kept his hair swept back off his forehead and peered at the world with large eyes, around which you could see the outline of his eye sockets. With sunken cheeks, he looked as if maybe he'd missed a few meals, and maybe he had. He wasn't employed. But for months he had mounted a one-man letter-writing campaign to get to the bottom of a mysterious device called the "nerve retrieval system." He'd sent letters to politicians inquiring about the device's patent and specifications.
Shopping at Sears that first Monday of May, he picked out a rifle, a 30-30 lever-action model on sale for $89.88, and a box of 20 soft-point shells for $5.49. The sales clerk put the rifle in a long cardboard box and asked the man to fill out a form. Robert Daniel Patty, he wrote, and checked NO in a series of boxes that asked whether he'd ever been addicted to drugs or suffered mental problems. That was all it took to buy a rifle, and he walked out the door with it.
The sales clerk couldn't have known that some of the NO's on that form were lies.
Mr. Patty went home to his second-floor walkup in the Elliot, the apartment building on Church Street right across the street from the News-Sentinel building. It was a simple one-room place for which he paid weekly, just $15. He'd been there for about four months, but the landlady rarely heard from him except when he paid his bills every week and when he appeared in the lobby to take a drink from the water fountain. The only one who knew him well was his mother, the widow who lived around the corner on State Street, in the Glencoe. She talked about her son with regret.
He'd gone to old Knoxville High back in the late '40s, but dropped out, wound up in Detroit, working for the Cadillac plant. Then he was drafted to fight in the Korean War. "He didn't want to go," his mother said, but he went. After suffering tuberculosis and what they called "battle fatigue," he came home. The young veteran drifted around the country. In California in the '60s, he took LSD, and told his mother he was "tricked" into his drug addictions. He went to the hospital for both physical and mental problems. In at least one mental hospital, he'd gotten electroshock therapy. "He's been in and out of the hospital ever since that stupid war," his mother would say.
"I think the fact that he was suffering from a drug problem when he got those shock treatments combined to cook his brain," she'd later say. "Sometimes I could be talking to him and you could tell he was having some kind of spell and his mind wasn't hearing anything I was saying."
Back home in his apartment, Mr. Patty added his new rifle and shells to a modest collection of belongings: a deck of cards, some photographs, a couple of bottles of pills labeled Stelazine and Thorazine, and a book called The Complete Illustrated Book of Divination and Prophecy.
Gay Street in the spring of 1976 maybe wasn't quite as busy as it had been a decade earlier. The attempts to make it look somehow suburban, with sidewalk awnings and modernist wraps that blocked the old Victorian buildings wasn't working. Miller's had already closed, but on the 400 block was still a wig shop, the Revco, and Kress's five and ten, and J.C. Penney across the street. People still crowded the sidewalk on a Tuesday morning, especially this close to lunchtime. In front of Kress's was a bus stop bench with a sign on the back rest for Royal Crown Cola, and some women, tired shoppers, were sitting there.
When the manager at Kress's heard the first bang, he thought someone had had a blowout. But when he heard it again, he shouted to his employees to hit the floor. As they lay there, a distinguished-looking gray-haired man walked in the front door. He stood in the doorway for maybe 30 seconds, asked that someone call an ambulance. Then Bruce Brown, retired TVA auditor, fell on the floor. He had been shot in the back.
Officer James Lewis was on the east end of Union Avenue, where it dog-legs toward Central. He heard the shots—six, in all—and sprinted up the sidewalk. He saw two women lying motionless in front of the bus stop where they'd been sitting. Two other women, one elderly, the other only 19, had been wounded. Nearby was this tall, lean man with a rifle to his shoulder. The Sears gun box was lying on the sidewalk.
When Mr. Patty saw Officer Lewis, he dropped his rifle and put out his hands. Not over his head, but stretched out in front of him, as if he expected to be handcuffed, and he was. He went quietly. Almost 100 witnesses on the crowded street volunteered to identify him.
When newspaper photographers approached him, he only looked at them calmly but not curiously, with his strange wide-eyed gaze. One interrogating officer commented that he was cooperative and "made more sense than most people" they arrested.
Mr. Patty signed a confession. He told one investigator that he'd gotten the rifle to shoot bottles and just found himself shooting people instead.
For the next several months, in prison and later in the mental institution, Mr. Patty discussed his experiences in a California hospital bringing all conversations around to his favorite subject, the Nerve Retrieval System. He also discussed electromagnetic frequencies and a device he called the "double side-band radio."
Today, the space where it happened is mostly vacant, maybe the quietest spot on Gay Street.
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