Case History: “Z” Kantor
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No controllable force for good ever existed that was not used, at times, for evil, simply because man has a free will. – (Melvin Powers’ Foreword to Hammerschlag’s Hypnotism and Crime, 1957 edition, p. 5)
“Zebediah” Kantor sat in jail, in shock, his life in tatters (his left elbow also in fragments), trying to comprehend why he had “confessed.” A jail guard, killing time on the other side of the bars, was chatting with the depressed former school teacher. The guard was talking about Zebediah’s friend and next-door-neighbor, Adam. He said Adam had told police that he robbed Zebediah’s house and set it on fire because Zebediah had caused him to do so using hypnosis. Zebediah, puzzled, insisted to the guard that he had never hypnotized anybody in his life; he did not know how and never had any interest in learning. The officer left to tend to duties.
Zebediah sat and thought about hypnosis. He remembered that one night the hands of the big old clock in his living room had suddenly, inexplicably leaped forward several hours. He recalled the times he had met with Adam and let him empty his wallet—and afterwards he couldn’t understand why he had allowed it. He remembered other mysterious events. As Zebediah reviewed the past seven years of his life, inserting hypnosis as the missing piece, all those formerly inexplicable incidents made sense. Now Zebediah knew: Adam had victimized him using hypnosis!
Zebediah Kantor
At college, Zebediah had been a conscientious student. He enjoyed sports and was popular with the other students. After graduation, he took a teaching job in the German province of Thuringia. He looked forward to a secure, comfortable, respectable life as their village school teacher. As was the custom, he lived in the school house.
It was the best time of his life. He liked his job; his students liked their teacher; the community respected him. He gave piano lessons on the side and soon fell in love with one of his students, the station master’s young daughter. She cared for him also, and they became engaged. In the meantime, he had inherited a little house and a general-goods store, which provided additional income from house rental and sale of merchandise in the store. He handled his money well and invested spare income in stock.
Being sensible, practical, happy, friendly, and in love, Zebediah seemed to have a good life ahead. He made one big mistake, however, that destroyed his life. The mistake was his friendship with Adam.
Missing Time
Two early European research hypnotists considered the missing time of amnesic hypnotic subjects and said:
The subject is unable to measure the length of time she has slept, and if she attempts to do so she makes the gravest mistakes…The hypnotic subject has no land-marks by which to measure the void which this sleep produces… (Binet and Fere, Animal Magnetism, p. 365
Years later, an experimental subject in the U.S., like Zebediah, figured out he was missing time. He also reasoned from his discovered circumstances something of what had been done to him during that missing time:
When I sat down for you to hypnotize me I pulled out my watch and it said 6 o’clock. I started to put it back, and then I took a second look at it and it said 10 o’clock. But before I could figure that out, I noticed that it was dark outside, my coat and tie were off, my sleeves rolled up, and I was just about exhausted, and it really was 10 o’clock…I could lose consciousness like that, and it’s happened lots of times… (In M.H. Erickson, 1938, “A Study of Clinical and Experimental Findings on Hypnotic Deafness: I,” p. 144)
Adam Begins the Hypnosis
Adam was Zebediah’s next-door neighbor. Adam was a 38-year-old groundskeeper for an adjacent estate. He had no formal education, no wealth, and no morals. He was “a primitive, vulgar criminal type from a low social level” (Reiter, 1958, p. 60). He had been in prison several times, and he was on his second marriage. Unknown to Zebediah, one of Adam’s areas of criminal expertise was hypnotism.
Adam started out with small acts of seeming kindness. He began to drop by Zebediah’s house, on some pretext or other, almost every evening. The bachelor schoolteacher always welcomed him, treated him like a prince, and shared the best he had (wine, cigars, liqueurs). Zebediah lived alone, but he kept his home neat, and he enjoyed company. It helped to pass the time after work in that era before radio, television, and tapes. Zebediah was also a gentleman, and, as such, did his best to enjoy and to respond politely to the older man’s conversation.
To Zebediah, Adam seemed only to be a rather long-winded and boring speaker who droned for hours on obscure and confusing subjects. The teacher, weary after his hard day’s work, and sated with dinner and wine, tended to fall asleep during his guest’s monotonous, meandering monologues.
Adam noted Zebediah’s developing habit of falling asleep while he talked. Every time Zebediah fell asleep in his presence, he began to murmur specific suggestions designed to further transform the teacher’s normal sleep into an operator-managed hypnotic trance. Adam had combined two methods of disguised induction. One was his typical boring, confusing monologue, a conversational induction, which would literally put Zebediah to sleep. The other technique took advantage of the natural light hypnotic state all people pass through when in transition from waking to sleeping, a sleep induction.
Zebediah happened to have inborn susceptibility to suggestion. His unconscious responded to Adam’s persistence and coaxing and it became ever more trained and more vulnerable to further training. Adam suggested that Zebediah would have amnesia for all time under hypnosis. Each time that Adam hypnotized Zebediah, he reinforced the amnesia by repeating that suggestion.
When he tired of giving suggestions, Adam would go home, leaving Zebediah asleep, and/or hypnotized, in his chair. Zebediah would wake up later, alone in the house, with no idea that anything unusual had happened.
After the fourth successful sleep induction, Adam gave Zebediah a posthypnotic suggestion that he would wake up the next time his clock struck the hour. Zebediah did that. He did not remember falling “asleep.” He had no awareness of missing time. It seemed to him as it the hands of the clock had simply leaped ahead several hours. He saw that Adam had gone home.
Zebediah now was Adam’s unknowing hypnotic subject. He was a trained somnambulist. Adam no longer had to go to the trouble to bore him to sleep. Now Adam could instantly drop Zebediah into an amnesic trance, at any time, simply by presenting a pre-determined cue.
Exploitation
Adam’s hypnotic exploitation of Zebediah began in 1921. It continued for 12 years, until 1933. When Adam first exploited his secret power over Zebediah, he started with small things. If Zebediah noticed, it probably did not seem very strange to him to be giving, or “lending,” money, wine, cigars, and so forth, to his neighbor. Adam never paid Zebediah back. The hypnotist demanded ever harder and crueler amounts of money from his subject. Once Adam got his hook into Zebediah’s unconscious, he extracted every possible dollar from him.
Adam also made Zebediah shoot himself using posthypnotic suggestion. The hypnotic instruction was: if Zebediah heard Adam say “Herr Kantor: Machen Sie keine Dummheiten!” (“Mr. Kantor, don’t do anything stupid!”), then Zebediah was to rush home, get his gun, and shoot himself in the left hand. Ten days later, Adam actually spoke that cue sentence to Zebediah.
It was a Sunday. Zebediah was happily strolling through the town streets, with his sweetheart on his arm, when he happened to encounter Adam. We all have cues we respond to. In Adam’s case, perhaps it was the sight of Zebediah being respectable, successful in his occupation, and happily in love–despite all Adam’s predations so far. The sight led to the thought, and the thought is parent of the deed. In a joking tone, Adam called out to Zebediah as they passed, “Herr Kantor: Machen Sie keine Dummheiten!”
When Zebediah heard the cue phrase, his response was automatic. The reflexive level of his mind began to carry out the sequence of tasks as specified (go home immediately, get the gun, and shoot himself in the left hand). Zebediah told his fiancee that he needed to change clothes (a rationalization). He then he rushed home, leaving her standing, bewildered and alone, in the middle of the road.
When he got home, however, Zebediah did not change clothes, because getting home cued the next step in his unconscious instructions. Instead, he searched for his revolver, found it, and took it out of the drawer. Then “the gun went off and he was hit in the left elbow joint.” (Reiter, p. 61) The bullet shattered his elbow. From then on, Zebediah’s left arm was crippled.
After the incident, Zebediah again rationalized. He said that his hand cramped, and that the cramp had caused him to release the safety and pull the trigger. He believed it was just an accident.
Zebediah’s unconscious, however, knew the whole story. It was becoming overburdened with painful experiences repressed by Adam’s amnesia suggestions. As a result, Zebediah “became nervous and irritable and carried out his work absentmindedly and automatically.” (Reiter, 1958, p. 62) All the teachers had to take—and pass—a standard examination given by school authorities every year in order to keep their job. In the spring of 1925, Zebediah, unable to concentrate, failed the test. He now had no teaching job. He could not do manual work because of his crippled left arm.
The next time Adam visited Zebediah, he suggested that Zebediah sell his home (Zebediah still owned the house and store) and share the money with him. Adam made that suggestion to Zebediah without first hypnotizing him.
Zebediah said “No.” He was not consciously aware of his hypnotic victimization by Adam, but he sensed intuitively that there was a problem. He felt controlled by him, and had tried, unsuccessfully, to end their relationship.
Again without hypnotizing Zebediah, Adam next proposed that they should together set fire to his house and collect the insurance money. Despite his financial problems, Zebediah also indignantly rejected this proposal.
Adam then hypnotized Zebediah. He compelled him to draw a house plan to be used as proof to the insurance company of the house’s interior design and its valuable contents. Later, Adam set Zebediah’s house on fire. Zebediah did not know that Adam had done that. When Zebediah received his insurance payment, Adam used his hypnocontrol to acquire the larger part of the money from Zebediah. He let Zebediah have just enough cash to repair his scorched house.
It is the nature of things that greed is never satisfied. Adam hypnotized Zebediah and caused him to write a household inventory which included non-existant possessions and which greatly over-estimated the values of his real household goods. Then Adam gave Zebediah a posthypnotic suggestion to take a vacation trip.
When Zebediah returned, he discovered that his house had been burglarized and some belongings stolen. He reported the thefts to the police. He gave the false inventory to the insurance company. He had no conscious knowledge that the information was false. He did not know that Adam had committed the thefts. The insurance company paid and Adam ended up with the money.
Adam decided to repeat the scam. He again hypnotized Zebediah, caused him to write an inflated, false inventory of his household possessions., and gave a posthypnotic suggestion for an out-of-town trip. While Zebediah was gone, Adam again broke into his house. Zebediah came back, saw what had happened, and again called the police and the insurance company. The insurance company again paid out a large sum. Again the money ended up in Adam’s pocket.
Arrests and Jail
It came to the attention of the police that Adam had much unexplained prosperity–and goods stolen from Zebediah’s house in his house. The police accused Adam of the two burglaries of Zebediah’s house, arrested him, scheduled a court date, and then turned him loose until the trial. Adam then went to Zebediah’s house, hypnotized him, and gave a very complex posthypnotic suggestion.
The cue for enactment would be Adam saying, “Herr Kantor! It’s no use any longer—tell them everything!” Upon hearing that cue, Zebediah was to “confess” that he, himself, had thought up all the criminal schemes. He was instructed to declare that he was the guilty one. And he should be the one on trial. Zebediah was to explain that his criminal idea was caused by money problems and that he had persuaded Adam to help him carry out his plans.
Adam figured that, after Zebediah confessed to setting up the whole thing, and to tempting and entangling his poor, ignorant neighbor with money to commit the burglary–the law would come down hard on Zebediah and lightly on him.
Mr. Kantor (amnesic, as usual, for the hypnosis), knowing nothing of the self-incriminating posthypnotic suggestions awaiting cue in his unconscious, went to visit his fiancee’s parents. They told him of Adam’s arrest and court date. Zebediah believed the police were mistaken. He told his hosts that he hoped the real thief would soon be identified and arrested.
While Zebediah was visiting with his in-laws-to-be, Adam returned to the police station. There he announced that he had decided to confess the whole story. He said they were right: he committed the burglary–but only because Herr Kantor had persuaded him to do it. The police then found and arrested Zebediah. They said that his accomplice, Adam, had fully confessed. Zebediah, now with a felony charge against him, was astonished. He indignantly protested to the police that he was innocent.
The police then brought Adam into the room to confront Zebediah, as Adam (having experience with the judicial system) knew they would. Adam then…
…confidently, almost triumphantly, brought out the cue. It caused a lightning change in Zebediah, as if he received a shock. He collapsed completely and confessed, exactly as he had been ordered to do under hypnosis. (Reiter, 1958, p. 62).
Zebediah was held in jail. Adam was allowed to return home. Before he left, Adam thought of a way to make Zebediah look even worse and himself look even better. He told police that Zebediah had been hypnotizing him and had used hypnosis to make him commit the crimes.
After the jail guard passed that information on to Zebediah, he finally recognized what his problem really was. From his jail cell, Zebediah then wrote letter after letter to both the authorities and to his defense attorney. He passionately begged for a careful investigation of his case in the light of his new understanding. He obtained an examination by a medical doctor with some training in hypnosis, hoping that the doctor would offer the court proof of his victimization by Adam, but the doctor refused to get involved.
Karl du Prel
Karl du Prel was a German hypnosis researcher. In an 1889 book (Das hypnotische Verbrechen und seine Entdeckung), he predicted that the developing technology of hypnosis might create a new and very dangerous type of criminal. He said it, in such a case, it might be very hard to find evidence because of hypnotically-suggested amnesia, suggested false memories, and/or hypnotic manipulation of the testimony of witnesses. He said that suggested amnesia for events under hypnosis would be the biggest problem for criminal investigators. Du Prel also worried about the possibility of sealing suggestions, which would prevent easy rehypnotization of the victim.
Du Prel felt that the growth of hypnotic technology required a parallel increase in knowledgeability on the part of lawyers and jurists. He suggested that police authorities should be prepared to use hypnotism to detect crimes involving hypnotism. He urged that the public be warned that anybody who allows himself to be hypnotized takes a chance. He wanted to prohibit hypnotism, except with clear safeguards.
Trial
Zebediah went bravely to his trial, secure in the knowledge that he was innocent. He now knew what had really happened and he felt that he could explain it. He trusted that the truth would be enough.
But the judge did not believe him. Even his own defense lawyer did not find Zebediah’s version of the facts credible.
It was unthinkable that a primitive and uncultivated type of person such as Adam would be able to hypnotize an intelligent, educated man such as he and, what is more, turn him into a slave and automaton for his own criminal ends. (Reiter, 1958, p. 63).
Furthermore, even if it were true that Adam had hypnotized Zebediah, everybody in that courtroom believed in the “dogma of moral integrity.” According to that legal concept, it was the subject’s fault if he obeyed a self-injurious or criminal suggestion given by a hypnotist because only an evil person obeys an evil suggestion. Not all hypnotists believed the dogma of moral integrity, but no disbelievers testified at Zebediah’s trial.
Losing on the dogma issue, Zebediah then pinned his hopes on his legal right to confront the accuser. He demanded a face-to-face confrontation with Adam in court. He was sure that he, now knowing the truth, could force Adam to tell the truth to the court.
He did not realize that conscious awareness of being a hypnotic subject and conscious profound determination to never again be hypnotized are easily overpowered by unconscious hypnotic conditioning. He did not know that a conditioned hypnotic subject–who has realized his situation–tends to respond to the hypnotist’s presence with fear, guilt, and confusion.
…though his existence was at stake, as soon as Adam was brought in, he was so influenced by his presence that his manner became uncertain and confused, and when he saw Adam’s mocking look and self-confident bearing he began to stammer. Nobody believed what he said. (Reiter, 1958, p. 63)
Adam whined to the judge during his testimony that he was just “an ordinary fellow.” He said that he had no idea what hypnotism was, but that he had been persuaded, by the cunning and deceit use of it by Zebediah, to assist in those criminal projects. The court rejected Zebediah’s statement and believed Adam’s.
Zebediah did not give up. He proved that the insurance money from both burglaries ended up in Adam’s pocket. The court, however, still refused to believe his statements about hypnosis. At the trial’s end, Zebediah was sentenced to thirteen months in jail. Adam got eight months, and everybody’s sympathy, for being the ignorant, honest man who was deceived and taken advantage of by Zebediah, using hypnosis.
While in jail, Adam pursued a new money-making scheme. He attempted to blackmail Zebediah’s family, threatening to tell police about Zebediah’s house being torched and the old insurance swindle based on that (which had not come up during the previous trial)–unless they paid him hush money.
Confident of their son’s innocence, however, Zebediah’s family refused to pay Adam. Instead, they found a better lawyer to defend Zebediah. His new lawyer took Zebediah’s version of the case history more seriously than the previous one had. He obtained a ruling from the judge that Zebediah and Adam should not again be in the courtroom at the same time. He asked the judge to have both imprisoned men “put under mental observation.”
Showing their prejudices, the police kept Adam in a regular facility, but sent Zebediah to a mental hospital for the evaluation. The hospital’s director had no experience with hypnotism, and he firmly believed that a hypnotic subject could not be made to do anything against his will. The psychiatrist stated that Zebediah was “weakwilled and vacillating, a psychopath and a neurotic who had no understandable motive for his criminal actions.”1 He interviewed Adam in jail and described him as “purposeful, energetic, and resourceful, a typically brutal and callous blackmailer…” (Reiter, 1958, p. 63)
Dr. Kroener Learns the Truth
The lawyer could not get Zebediah out of jail. After his client served the time and was released, the attorney sent Zebediah to be evaluated by the skilled psychiatrist and experienced hypnotist, Dr. Kroener. In the beginning, the doctor assumed that Zebediah was lying. However, as he worked with Zebediah, session after session, under hypnosis, during two months of 1927, the doctor gradually changed his mind. He concluded that Zebediah’s crimes actually had been caused by Adam’s hypnotic suggestions.
Perhaps Kroener also implanted a suggestion that blocked Adam from ever hypnotizing Zebediah again. For, either by that blocking, or by total avoidance of Adam, Zebediah managed to never be victimized by his neighbor again. The doctor’s belief in Zebediah’s story must have been a precious comfort in this difficult era of that unfortunate man’s life. For, his fiance had rejected him and the school district would not hire anybody with a criminal record, even if he could pass their test.
But Zebediah’s lawyer and Dr. Kroener were working on a plan which they hoped would exonerate the school teacher. In 1929, Kroener hypnotized Zebediah again. This time, seven witnesses and a stenographer (who recorded 126 typed pages) were present. One of the witnesses was Professor Arthur Kronfeld, another noted German hypnosis expert. Both Kroener and Kronfeld wrote reports stating their professional opinion, that Zebediah had been victimized by Adam using hypnosis. The lawyer enclosed those reports when he applied to reopen the case.
The court of appeal agreed that new facts had come out, but refused to allow a full-process appeal. They based that verdict entirely on the dogma of moral integrity: if Adam could cause Zebediah, by means of hypnosis, to do immoral things, it proved that Zebediah was an immoral person.
Kroener’s Book
Dr. Kroener wrote a book about Zebediah’s case, seeking to present the case to the higher court of public opinion. His manuscript would have been the first modern psychiatric study of a victim of unethical hypnosis, and the first recorded memory recovery, by rehypnotization, of a survivor of unethical hypnosis. However, nobody read it because, immediately after its printing, the German government banned it. Whoever put up the substantial money for his publishing venture lost it all.
In 1936, another case of unethical hypnosis went on trial in Germany. That time, two hypnotists went to jail, not their victim. After the trial, Dr. Kroener contacted Dr. Ludwig Mayer, the psychiatrist who had managed to discover the truth and cause the hypnotists to be the losers in court. Dr. Kroener told Dr. Mayer about Zebediah’s case. When Mayer wrote a book about his client (published in 1937), he included in it a summary of Zebediah’s case history.
Post-War Events When Germany sank into the dark maelstrom of Naziism. Dr. Kroener, a Jew, emigrated. When he returned, 17 years later in 1952, he searched for Zebediah and his lawyer. He learned that both still lived, and contacted them. Zebediah soon traveled to Berlin (it was the summer school holiday) to, once again, be hypnotized by Dr. Kroener. Zebediahwas now age 56. He long since had been working again as a school teacher. His current job was in a large city school in the province of Franconia. His behavior record, since release from jail in 1928, was spotless.
Zebediah had 15 more sessions with Kroener—all tape-recorded, transcribed, and annotated. Although Zebediah’s conscious memory of those old happenings was now fuzzy, but under hypnosis he remembered it all clearly. His story, remembered twenty years later, was unchanged.
During the Christmas holiday that year, Kroener visited Zebediah in Franconia. The psychiatrist asked Zebediah’s permission to publish the book about him. Zebediah hesitated. He knew that publicity could compromise his job, yet he deeply yearned for the truth to be known and his innocence to be, at last, firmly established. He said, “Yes.” A few days later, somebody circulated printed matter referring to the old charges against Zebediah. The old teacher immediately was fired from his job.
Then Dr. Kroener heard of another successful prosecution (in the Danish court system) of a hypnotist who had given a subject criminal suggestions. The court psychiatrist was an old friend of his, Dr. Reiter . Reiter told Kroener that he was working on a book about his case. It would be published in the United States as well as Europe. Aging and unwell, Dr. Kroener delivered his manuscript, tape recordings, and notes on Zebediah’s case to Reiter.
Dr. Reiter added Zebediah’s case to his book about Palle Hardwick. The detailed synopses of Zebediah’s case history made by Dr. Mayer and Dr. Reiter provide the only remaining public record of Zebediah’s sufferings and the struggle of good Dr. Kroener to make public the truth about his case.
