Derek Simmons’s Hospital Attack and Amnesia

Derek Simmons’s hospital attack and amnesia transformed a disputed diagnosis into a lasting rupture in his identity: after another patient inflicted a serious head wound, Simmons could form new memories but could no longer recover his past. The attack followed Joseph Wieder’s effort to secure treatment for a patient he believed had been wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and its consequences extended well beyond the hospital.

Diagnosis and Commitment

After examining Simmons repeatedly, Joseph Wieder concluded that he had a rare dissociative disorder rather than schizophrenia, the diagnosis he had received as a young man. Wieder believed Simmons experienced episodes of dissociative fugue, in which a person could lose self-awareness, memory, and identity. In extreme cases, someone in such a state might disappear and resurface years later in another place, living under a new identity without recollection of the former life. Wieder considered it possible that Simmons had not remembered his actions on the night in question: stress and the altered consciousness of a sudden transition from sleep to waking might have left him reacting as though he were another person.

Wieder’s report persuaded the court to commit Simmons to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. With the institution’s agreement and the patient’s lawyer’s consent, Wieder continued treating him there, combining hypnosis with an experimental regimen of anticonvulsant drugs. After several months, however, another patient attacked Simmons and caused a serious head injury. The wound substantially worsened his condition: Simmons lost his previous memories and never recovered them. He retained the ability to form and store new memories, but his life before the attack became inaccessible, a condition Laura Baines identified as retrograde amnesia.

Reconstructing a Life After the Injury

A year after the attack, at Joseph Wieder’s insistence, Simmons was transferred to Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, where the regime was less restrictive. Wieder helped him rebuild a workable personality, but the apparent recovery concealed a fundamental discontinuity. Simmons again had his former name and physical appearance, yet he could not retrieve the autobiographical memories that had made those features part of a lived identity. He knew how to write without remembering school, and could work as an electrician without knowing how he had learned the trade. The capacities endured; the personal history that explained them did not.

In spring 1985, a judge approved Simmons’s lawyer’s request for his discharge, citing the complexity of the case and Simmons’s complete lack of violent tendencies. Release did not mean he could manage independently. He had no employment prospects and, without support, was likely to end up in an institution again. His mother had died of cancer when he was a toddler, while his father, with whom he had never been close, had moved away after the tragedy without leaving a forwarding address or showing interest in his son’s fate. Simmons’s freedom therefore depended on the practical care Wieder arranged for him.

Wieder rented Simmons a small one-bedroom apartment near his own house and paid him a monthly wage to maintain the property. Simmons lived alone, and neighbors regarded him as a freak. At times he shut himself in for days or weeks; Wieder brought him food and made sure he took his medication. The arrangement offered a life outside the hospital, but its independence was conditional and closely tied to Wieder’s continuing attention. Simmons could perform useful work and inhabit a familiar identity while remaining unable to remember the experiences through which he had acquired either.

Care, Memory, and the Return of the Past

Outside the hospital, Joseph Wieder’s support extended beyond housing and paid repair work. He kept Derek Simmons on his medication, took him fishing, and spent an evening with him at least once a week. On one occasion he brought Simmons to the university and hypnotized him, but did not tell him what the session had revealed. Simmons regarded Wieder as a saint; their routine offered companionship as well as practical care, even while the lost years remained beyond his reach.

Simmons also built small habits of his own. He adopted a shelter puppy, Jack, and took him for an evening walk in the nearby park. When Richard Flynn visited Wieder’s house during the first snows, he found Simmons doing minor repairs; they chatted and smoked while looking across the lake. To Flynn, Simmons seemed shy and reclusive but gentle, a person whose ordinary manner made the scale of his memory loss difficult to see. Such encounters show a life continuing around the blank in his past, not a recovery of that past.

In March 1987, a news item on NY1 unexpectedly unsettled that division. Seeing a photograph of Stan Marini, Simmons recognized him as a former member of the maintenance crew at Siemens, where Simmons himself had once worked. The recognition mattered because nobody had told him about Marini’s death and he had not read about it; it seemed to come from a memory of his own. Simmons described the buried material as suddenly rising, like oil breaking through the ground, and compared the experience to watching a film at extraordinary speed. The moment did not establish that his former life had returned intact, but it suggested that what had seemed irretrievably sealed away could surface under an unanticipated cue.

That history also shaped how others received Simmons’s account of Joseph Wieder’s murder. When, years later, Simmons told Roy Freeman that he knew who had killed the professor, he said that his earlier statement had been discounted because he had been accused of murder, hospitalized, and taking medication. A former investigator likewise treated his testimony as unusable, citing his illness and amnesia; during the conversation, the investigator stopped, took a prescription pill, and struggled to remember Simmons’s name and statement. Simmons, for his part, maintained that he knew what he had seen. His damaged memory thus became more than a private loss: it affected whether his testimony could be heard as knowledge, even as later recollection offered a reason not to equate memory’s gaps with the absence of experience.

A Witness Under Suspicion

Years later, Derek Simmons gave Roy Freeman a specific account of the night Joseph Wieder was killed. Simmons said he had seen Richard Flynn argue with Wieder, and believed Flynn had not really left but had hidden nearby before returning to kill the professor. He recalled seeing Laura Baines’s car parked near the house again and inferred that she had returned; he suspected she had either witnessed the killing or helped Flynn. Simmons said he had withheld her name from the police because he feared the newspapers would tarnish Wieder’s reputation. The next morning, he returned to check on Wieder, let himself in with his keys, and found the body in the living room. These were Simmons’s claims and deductions, not independently established facts.

His account also conflicted with Frank Spoel’s. Simmons said he and Spoel had both been hiding in the backyard around nine o’clock, yet Spoel described being there with Flynn and Wieder, reported no argument, and did not mention Laura. When Freeman confronted Simmons with the discrepancies, Simmons suggested that Spoel might have forgotten or lied, and challenged Freeman’s preference for the other man’s testimony. The dispute sharpened the problem already attached to Simmons’s evidence: his hospital attack and amnesia had made investigators doubt his reliability, while the differing accounts left the past itself unsettled. His certainty that he knew what he had seen could not, on its own, resolve which version was true.