For Love of Audrey Rose

Prologue

Article from THE AMERICAN INQUIRER, reprinted in its entirety, dated February 3, 1976.

by Shawn Tyneham

Exactly one year ago today, the trial concluded which shocked New York and sent ripples of horror and dismay throughout the nation. On December 5, 1974, Judge Harmon T. Langley, presiding over The People of New York versus Elliot Suggins Hoover, opened session for the first time in the Criminal Courts Building, Part Seven, in downtown Manhattan. The charge: kidnapping. The victim: 10-year-old Ivy Templeton, daughter of a rising young executive in the advertising world. But in less than two months, Ivy was dead. Not from her ordeal at the hands of the suspect, Elliot Hoover, but as a result of the bizarre and inexorable machinations of Judge Langley’s own court.

Where are they now? What happened to the defendant, Elliot Hoover, to the aggrieved parents, William and Janice Templeton, since that tragic day that Ivy strangled to death in front of a horrified jury? What happened to old Judge Langley, or to the prosecutor, Scott Velie, or the defense counsel, Brice Mack?

Readers of this column will remember the trial, the crowds that made entrance and exit impossible at the doors of the Criminal Courts building. For days New York was treated to the spectacle of orange-robed Hindus wrestling with blue coated cops, impassioned and unorthodox oratory from attorney Brice Mack, and the celebrities who marched in and out of Judge Langley’s court to testify for Elliot Hoover. But many weeks of arduous research and investigation have unearthed the bizarre circumstances that led to the trial and to Ivy’s tragic death.

It began early in October, 1974, when Elliot Hoover appeared outside the Ethical Culture School. He was forty-six years old, recently returned from seven years in India, and he was waiting. Waiting for Ivy Templeton.

During the next weeks, he shadowed William Templeton, a junior partner of the Pel Simmons Advertising Agency. He sent obscene notes, gifts to Ivy, gifts to Janice Templeton, and began telephoning. He insisted on seeing them. And day after day, like a shadow that would not fade, he waited for Ivy outside the school.

Finally the Templetons agreed to see him. The following account is based on trial records and recollections of the staff of the bar and restaurant at the Hotel Des Artistes, where the meeting took place.

• DEMANDS DAUGHTER

The meeting began in an atmosphere of hostility and tension. Hoover appeared very nervous, fumbling with his tea cup, swallowing his words, unable to control his trembling fingers. At length, his incredible and uncanny story began to emerge.

He had been, he claimed, a successful Pittsburgh steel executive until, on August 4, 1964, his wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident south of Pittsburgh. The daughter’s name was Audrey Rose. Then, according to Marie Kronstadt, waitress at the restaurant, Hoover launched into a long and incoherent account of his travels through India. When Bill Templeton angrily demanded he come to the point, a strange and seductive expression came to Hoover’s face. Audrey Rose, he said quietly, had been reincarnated and her name now was Ivy Templeton. To prove it, he continued, Ivy was born within minutes of Audrey Rose’s death.

• THE NIGHTMARE

Unable to procure police protection, the Templetons sought legal advice. Their attorney advised a second meeting to determine precisely whether Hoover’s demands were financial or sexual in nature. Accordingly, Hoover came to the Templeton apartment.

Trial records indicate a tranquil and surprisingly affable meeting. Hoover rambled at length about certain experiences in India. In particular, he displayed an extensive technical knowledge of the doctrines of reincarnation. And once again, he demanded certain rights over Ivy.

Before the Templetons could clarify Hoover’s needs, however, the telephone rang with astounding news.

Ivy had been sleeping downstairs with a neighbor, Carole Federico, in order to leave the Templeton apartment clear for the meeting with Hoover. Shortly after Hoover arrived at the apartment, however, Ivy began to display symptoms of frenzied anxiety, delirium, and generalized fear. The Templetons entered her room to find the girl sleepwalking, her arms flailing, knocking over the furniture and painfully oblivious of chairs, desk, and dresser in her way.

She called “Mommydaddymommydaddymommydaddyhothothot!!” in a voice Mrs. Federico described as “unearthly and like a prayer caused by unbearable pain.”

But the worst was yet to come.

Unable to subdue the savage nightmare of his daughter, Bill Templeton turned to see Elliot Hoover standing in the doorway. A look of “inexpressible sadness” mixed with love appeared on the intruder’s face. Then, slowly, with confidence and authority, Hoover stepped toward the girl and called to her. And gradually, she grew quiet and fell asleep in his arms.

He had called her Audrey Rose.

• ESCALATION

Hoover continued to bombard the Templetons with gifts, mostly books on the subject of reincarnation. He demanded to speak with them again. He telephoned Bill Templeton at work. All to no avail.

Within the week, Ivy was subjected to a second nightmare, worse than the first.

Possessed with alarming strength, she seemed unstoppable, smashing through her bedroom, crying in pain, calling over and over for her “daddy,” yet completely unresponsive to Bill Templeton’s frantic efforts to calm her. By now it was evident that the child was in serious danger of harming herself.

In fact, that night she suffered first and second degree burns over her hands, mostly along the palms. During the trial, Bill Templeton related that she had grasped the hot radiator during her frenzy and could not let go. Mrs. Templeton, however, contradicted that testimony. Ivy’s hands had been burned, she said, when they beat against the ice-cold windows of the bedroom.

As the trial wore on, it became clear that Audrey Rose had died slowly and painfully, trapped within the overturned automobile, beating her hands in vain against the glass of the burning wreck.

• THE THIRD NIGHTMARE

The third, and most intense, convulsive nightmare occurred when Bill Templeton was overseas on business.

This time there seemed no doubt that the child was in desperate straits, in a state of panic, and insane with suffocation and fear. She broke free of her bedroom where Mrs. Templeton had tried to sequester her, and ran into the living room, beating at the cold, dark windows, crying “HOTHOTHOTHOTHOTHOT!!”

Unable to get her family physician on the telephone, Janice Templeton allowed Elliot Hoover to enter her apartment. Her reasons, according to the trial testimony, were unambiguous: to secure the immediate safety of the child and to end the danger of grievous self-inflicted injury.

For the second time, Hoover calmed her, and the exhausted girl fell asleep against his chest, her hands bloody and her face bruised from her hour-long fight with unimaginable terrors.

And for the second time, Hoover had soothed her by calling her Audrey Rose.

What followed then is difficult to make out, yet it was the critical point in the entire sequence of events. According to the doorman, desk clerk, and elevator operator, all of whom had by now taken note of the strange, intense man frequenting the lobby of the building and demanding access to the Templeton apartment, Elliot Hoover did not leave the residence for nearly an hour, and when he did, his steps were “jaunty, like he’d just done something terrific.”

Mrs. Templeton denied that anything improper had transpired between her and Elliot Hoover. Rather, he had spent the time trying to persuade her more forcibly of the truth of his philosophy. Whatever happened, dawn found Janice Templeton and Ivy fleeing New York by special limousine for the isolation and security of a cabin resort in Westport, Connecticut.

• CALM BEFORE THE STORM

Over a month had passed since Elliot Hoover had intruded into their lives. The strain was beginning to tell, not only on Janice Templeton, but on Ivy as well. Though she had no memory of what happened during the onslaughts, she knew that the night brought on dangers that the waking self did not know. Exhausted, her hands still painfully bandaged, Ivy began to muse aloud on the shores of Westport, vaguely aware that things had altered forever in her young life. Her relationship with her mother remained warm, yet, an intolerable tension seemed to follow them wherever they went.

It was also clear that the Templeton marriage was beginning to crack and crumble under the stress.

On November 13, 1974, Janice and Ivy returned to New York

• THE KIDNAP

Almost before Ivy was asleep, the most violent nightmare of all seized her. Bill Templeton, returned from overseas, called the doctor. But the seizure exceeded his wildest expectations. She bit, kicked, and screamed and, sweating freely, he was barely able to subdue her by tying her to the bed. The doorbell rang and, thinking it was the doctor, Bill ran down to admit him.

It was Hoover.

He lived in Des Artistes now, he explained. He had just moved in. Now he wanted to help Ivy. Bill and Elliot Hoover struggled violently at the door, but Hoover was able to force his entry into the apartment. Janice, fearing for Bill’s life, came to his aid in the corridor. Hoover locked them out of their own apartment.

In the violence that followed, the stories from the score of onlookers are remarkably consistent. Bill Templeton, in a fury of rage, tried to break down the door. A house key was produced just as two police officers appeared in the corridor. Shouting, cursing, Bill led the officers back into the apartment and into Ivy’s room.

Both Hoover and the girl were gone.

They had gone down the rear exit and were ensconced, behind locked doors, in Hoover’s new apartment. There under threat of drawn revolvers, Hoover reluctantly and silently opened his door. He was immediately seized and wrestled into handcuffs.

Not far away was Ivy, calm and breathing easily, and only a bit sleepy for all her ordeal.

Subsequent medical examination revealed the girl had not been molested. Elliot Hoover was arraigned on a single count of first degree kidnapping, bail denied.

• THE GREAT CIRCUS

Which brings the case to December 5, 1974.

Jury selection proceeded slowly. Only the Enquirer covered any of the trial opening, and that with a single reporter. The prosecutor, Scott Velie, was a tough, battle-scarred veteran of almost three decades of legal jousting, and it was widely assumed that he would wrap up the case within a few weeks.

Elliot Hoover’s attorney was Brice Mack, a public defender without notable prior experience.

It was not until the opening remarks that Brice Mack revealed the strategy of defense.

Not guilty by proven reincarnation.

Judge Langley immediately suspended proceedings and conferred over two hours in his chamber with both attorneys. Whatever arguments Mack produced, they were effective, for a subdued Judge Langley overruled the prosecution and the trial proper began.

As the days dragged on, the seats in Part Seven of the Criminal Court Building began filling up. First with news reporters, then with spectators, and finally with orange-robed supporters of Hoover’s, who chanted and swayed when the major bulwark of Hoover’s case, the venerable Gupta Pradesh of India, took the stand to explain the mechanics of reincarnation to a bewildered, skeptical and often amused jury.

Whatever dignity the court may have salvaged from the opening remarks was clearly destroyed when a small riot broke out between courtroom guards and the Hindus.

By now the trial was international news. Mystics and psychics paraded into Courtroom Two, testified for Hoover, and the atmosphere of the court took on the flavor of a county fair viewed through delirium tremens.

The delirium escalated into hallucination when Janice Templeton testified for the defense.

• “YES, I BELIEVE HIM!”

The reasons behind Janice Templeton’s surprising and dramatic testimony are now clear, though in the superheated atmosphere of the courtroom it came like an electric spark into a chamber of volatile gases.

Ivy had been removed to a girls’ parochial school in the countryside not far from Darien, Connecticut. There she participated in a winter pageant, traditional to the school, of the burning of a large and decorated snowman to herald the coming spring.

Hypnotized by the flames, she had broken from the chorus of girls and slowly, irresistibly, had entered the roaring mass of logs and straw, flame, and smoke. Ivy suffered minor burns to her face and scalp, singed hair, and some effects from smoke inhalation. The Templetons interrupted their vigil at the trial and raced to the hospital in Darien.

It was there, apparently, that the great transformation in Janice Templeton’s thinking solidified. She recalled Hoover’s words, spoken so fiercely to her once before. That not only was Ivy the reincarnation of Audrey Rose, but that the struggle of a soul in torment would lead Ivy back to danger, back into the fire and smoke from which she had come.

Fearing for Ivy’s life, and believing that Hoover possessed the key to safeguarding the child’s future, Janice testified on Hoover’s behalf. It was the final break between the Templetons.

• THE DEATH OF IVY TEMPLETON

It was at this point that the prosecution inaugurated the test which led so tragically to the death of Ivy Templeton. Incensed at the antics of the defense, and the malleability of Judge Langley, Scott Velie proposed to put to rest once and for all the question of reincarnation.

Since the child was alleged to be recalling states of mind prior to her birth, it was incumbent upon the court to regress Ivy, hypnotically, and try to show whether that was in fact the case, or whether Hoover had been able to put his own convenient interpretation on a simple case of delirium.

Judge Langley, having agreed to much more for the defense, reluctantly ordered the test.

In a small laboratory at the Darien Hospital, the jury, Judge Langley, Hoover, Bill Templeton, and the officers of the court were sequestered behind a mirrorized window stretching the width of the room. Behind the mirror, visible to the court but able to see nothing of them, was Dr. Steven Lipscomb, doctor of psychiatry. Ivy, pale and still weak from the ordeal by fire, entered the room, the lights were lowered, and she was easily and swiftly placed under hypnosis.

Janice Templeton did not attend the court, but watched through television monitors installed in an adjacent hall for the benefit of visiting newsmen and spectators.

At first the hypnosis went smoothly. Ivy was brought backwards in time to her eighth birthday, then to her fourth, then to her third. The girl not only remembered in exact detail all the events of the birthday parties, but her voice underwent a dramatic change, growing younger and younger, more and more like an infant’s.

Finally, nervously, Dr. Lipscomb instructed Ivy to go back to a time before she was born.

Ivy curled into the prenatal position.

Then, as Dr. Lipscomb’s voice droned on, urging her backward, ever backward in time, she suddenly bolted upright, eyes open.

She seemed to look happily ahead, but then her face clouded over. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened in a terrible scream. Unable to bring her out of the trance, Dr. Lipscomb tried to comfort the girl, who rocked pitiably on her couch.

Suddenly, Ivy threw herself — or seemed to be catapulted — onto the floor. Screaming in pain, she ran the length and width of the room, her lip bleeding from the fall.

The litany, which the Templetons had heard all too often, now poured out of the twisted mouth of their daughter: “Mommydaddymommydaddyhothothothot!!” Dr. Lipscomb wrestled vainly with Ivy, unable to stop the frenzied delirium.

Then, as she had repeatedly done in the Templetons’ apartment, she threw herself at the long glass in front of her. Her face reddened to an alarming degree, her nostrils flared, as though she were suffocating. She began writhing in convulsions that signified a disintegrating nervous coordination.

Hoover rose against the opposite side of the great mirror and tried to shout to her, but the hypnosis chamber was soundproofed. In the melee of screaming and fainting jurors, it was Hoover who had the presence of mind to hurl a chair through the glass, and the officers of the court tumbled into the chamber just as doctors rushed in through a side door to relieve the panic-stricken Dr. Lipscomb.

Despite the administration of oxygen and injections of adrenalin, Ivy’s respiratory system had failed for too long. The brain had gone almost five minutes without oxygen. At 10:43 A.M. she was declared dead by physician R.F. Shad. Cause of death: laryngospasm, or convulsive closing of the larynx, obstructing the intake of air into the trachea.

• WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

The tragedy at Darien Hospital will not be quickly forgotten, even for those who only knew of the events through the news media.

But for those who were there, the Templetons, the attorneys, Judge Langley, what thoughts must have gone through their minds since that day? And what has happened to each of them? It has taken months to piece together the whole picture, and finally the denouement for the major participants can be revealed:

Elliot Hoover: Acquitted of the charge of first degree kidnapping. Spent two weeks in New York City, praying at the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple at Christopher Place. Known to have purchased a one-way ticket to India. Presumed to have retreated to a temple in the central plains. Precise destination unknown.

Judge Harmon T. Langley: Under attack from all quarters of the legal profession, Judge Langley retired early. He lives with his sister in Brooklyn Heights and refuses to see reporters. Suffered a mild stroke in early June, 1975.

Scott Velie, prosecutor: Successfully fought to retain his license to practice in the State of New York. He is known, however, to have lost the more difficult battle against alcoholism. He has not appeared in court since The People of New York versus Elliot Suggins Hoover.

Brice Mack, public defender: Now president of well-known firm of Mack, Lowenstein, and Fischbein. Author of moderately successful book on the trial of Elliot Hoover.

William Templeton: Collapsed after being forcibly restrained during the final moments of the fatal test. Was treated for symptoms of dislocation, severe paranoia, and a morbid, guilt-ridden depression. Released, he returned to his apartment at the Hotel Des Artistes. He has subsequently been institutionalized and at this writing is confined to a sanitarium in Ossining.

Janice Templeton: Supervised the cremation of Ivy Templeton. Known to have sent the ashes to India for dispersal. Now works as assistant designer for Christine Daler, Ltd., firm that specializes in women’s sport and casual wear. According to those who know her at Des Artistes, she no longer accepts the beliefs which she once, under the influence of Elliot Hoover, publicly embraced.

No other event presented in this column has been so obliterated by time. Even Brice Mack has grown wary of public comment and no longer will speak about the trial. Nor have any of the participants, including the staff of the Darien Hospital, been willing to discuss what happened. Perhaps it can never be known: exactly what Janice Templeton believed when she testified. What did her husband believe before he collapsed and reason fled?

What has life been like, the apartment empty, with not even an echo of the smiling blond child who once shared their lives, and not a trace of the intruder who waited so calmly, so omnisciently, outside of Ivy’s school? All unresolved, unsolved, waiting for time to work its slow but certain cure, to transform the violence and pain to a tender acceptance.

But perhaps the list of actors in this tragedy is not complete. Perhaps, in memory of the quiet girl whose courage could not in the end save her, we must add:

Audrey Rose: Born September 5, 1959. Died August 4, 1964, thirty seconds before the birth of Ivy Templeton. Death due to smoke inhalation.

Ivy Templeton: Born August 4, 1964. Died February 3, 1975, 10:43 A.M. Death due to convulsive closure of the larynx.

Did Audrey Rose return August 4, 1964? And, if so, who died February 3, 1975, 10:43 A.M.?