The Leonard Kille Case: A Complete Research Record

This document is the TFRi comprehensive research record for the case of Leonard Arthur Kille (1933-1993), designated “Thomas R.” in the published medical literature. Every claim is sourced to a specific document. The primary source is the Kille Case Chronology compiled by Professor Stephan L. Chorover of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, published through MIT OpenCourseWare as Lecture 9 material for Course 9.68: Affect: Neurobiological, Psychological, and Sociocultural Counterparts of Feelings. This document is supplemented by investigative reporting, published medical literature, court records, and documentary evidence. The companion dispatch is: They Put Electrodes in His Brain. He Put Metal on His Head.

I. The Subject

Leonard Arthur Kille was born on June 7, 1933, at Cambridge City Hospital, Massachusetts. He weighed 7.5 pounds. His parents were second-generation native-born Irish Catholic working class. His father was a stone mason, unemployed for most of the Depression, physically abusive to his mother when drunk. The family lived in a small apartment on Pleasant Street in Cambridge. (Chorover, MIT OCW)

In 1934, the family moved from Cambridge to Schenectady, New York, in an unsuccessful search for work. They returned to Cambridge in 1935, eventually settling at 199 Harvard Street in 1937. (Chorover)

In 1940, Leonard’s parents’ marriage dissolved. His mother told the children their father had joined the Air Force, later that he was dead. In 1942, Leonard (age 9) and his brother were enrolled in a Catholic boarding school they called “the orphan asylum.” Both boys remained there for years while their mother worked full-time doing war-related work in an East Cambridge machine shop and part-time in a Central Square coffee shop. (Chorover)

The boarding school was later identified as a place where boys “were not uncommonly abused by priests.” During this period, Leonard was befriended by, and spent significant time alone in the company of, one of the institution’s priests. (Chorover)

In 1947, Leonard (age 14) graduated from the boarding school and returned to Cambridge to live with his mother, brother, and stepfather. He began attending Rindge Technical High School, hoping to become an engineer. (Chorover)

In 1948, at the age of 16 years and 3 months, Leonard dropped out of high school and joined the United States Air Force. (Chorover)

II. Military Service and Medical Crisis

In spring 1951, Leonard (age 18) was serving as a ballistic missile defense radar monitor at a remote and isolated early warning outpost during the Korean War. He suddenly suffered acute abdominal distress, diagnosed as apparent perforated peptic ulcer with systemic infection. He sustained severe blood loss and a prolonged drop in blood pressure accompanied by several days of coma, stupor, and cardiovascular shock. He nearly died. After a prolonged convalescence, he was mustered out of the service. (Chorover)

In November 1951, shortly after returning to Cambridge, Leonard (18) and his girlfriend Janice (17) eloped to New Hampshire and married. (Chorover)

III. The Engineer

The MIT chronology documents the following career progression:

1955: Employed as a photographic instrumentation engineer at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California. (Chorover)

1958: Transferred to Somerville, Massachusetts, employed as a draftsman at Polaroid Corporation. (Chorover)

1959 (Spring): Promoted to senior draftsman at Polaroid. Bought a house on Winthrop Street in Stoneham. (Chorover)

1959 (Fall): Promoted to assistant engineer, responsible for developing parts for the Polaroid Land Camera. (Chorover)

1960 (November): Resigned from Polaroid, having been awarded several US patents as co-inventor. Started employment at Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier (EG&G), an MIT spinoff, at $194 per week. (Chorover)

1961 (March): Salary raised to $205/week at EG&G. (Chorover)

1961 (May): Salary raised to $220/week, promoted to Senior Engineer at EG&G. (Chorover)

1963: Promoted again at EG&G. (Chorover)

1964 (May): Left EG&G, began working at Honeywell Corporation at approximately $12,000/year. (Chorover)

1965 (August): Salary raised to $12,600/year at Honeywell, title upgraded to Design Engineer. (Chorover)

1966 (February): Left Honeywell, accepted position as senior engineer at Block Engineering in Cambridge at $13,500/year. (Chorover)

The Polaroid Land Camera was named for Edwin Land, co-founder and CEO of Polaroid. Land was also the first president of the Scientific Engineering Institute, founded on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. The SEI conducted classified research including electrode implantation in animal brains for behavioral control, and, according to BBC producer Gordon Thomas, implanted electrodes in the brains of three Vietcong prisoners at Bien Hoa Hospital in South Vietnam in July 1968. (BINJ/Riley 2017, Thomas 1989)

EG&G, where Kille worked from 1960-1964, was described by investigative historian Annie Jacobsen as “the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of.” The company was an MIT spinoff deeply involved in classified government programs including nuclear weapons testing. (BINJ/Riley 2017, Jacobsen 2014)

IV. The Marriage

The MIT chronology documents escalating domestic trouble beginning in 1961, when Janice Kille obtained a restraining order against her husband in Middlesex County Probate Court. (Chorover)

In December 1965, concerned about the financial burden of their newly purchased Cedar Avenue house, Leonard consulted his parish priest, Father Paul Shanley. Learning that there was an unoccupied top-floor apartment, Shanley suggested renting it to Robert Dirkman, a recently divorced fellow parishioner. Dirkman moved in in January 1966. (Chorover)

The MIT chronology describes what followed: Dirkman “frequently takes his meals with the family, helps Leonard with chores around the house and engages in long conversations with Janice late into the evenings.” (Chorover)

On Father Paul Shanley: In the 1990s, Shanley was charged with predatory sexual behavior involving children. The priest who recommended Robert Dirkman to the Kille household, whose presence would ultimately contribute to the destruction of Leonard’s marriage and his referral for brain surgery, was later exposed as a child predator. (Chorover)

In fall 1964, Leonard began seeing a psychiatrist, the same one who had been treating his wife. The psychiatrist attributed the marital problems to Leonard’s anger and presumed it to have a biological basis. (Chorover)

The escalation between Leonard and Janice intensified through early 1966. On March 1, 1966, Leonard borrowed Dirkman’s car, was rear-ended at a stoplight and pushed into a truck, sustained a head injury, and was taken by ambulance to Cambridge City Hospital. After release, escalating domestic tension led Leonard to voluntarily check himself into the Boston VA Hospital. (Chorover)

On April 5, 1966, Leonard signed himself out of the VA hospital against medical advice. The psychiatrist, a neurobiologically oriented practitioner, referred him to Dr. Frank Ervin, director of the “violence research unit” at Massachusetts General Hospital. (Chorover)

V. The Violence Research Unit

Dr. Frank Ervin collaborated with Dr. Vernon H. Mark, a neurosurgeon. Together they were conducting clinical research aimed at demonstrating that violent and assaultive action “is an expression of the functioning brain.” In their formulation, the abnormal brain functions responsible for “episodic dyscontrol” could and should be treated by surgical or electrophysiological destruction of brain regions in the limbic system. The unit operated under the supervision of neurosurgery department chairman and Harvard Medical School professor William H. Sweet. (Chorover)

Although officially admitted to MGH as a patient, Leonard was admitted to the violence research unit as a research subject and placed on a locked ward. (Chorover)

The diagnosis: Kille was diagnosed with mild psychomotor epilepsy. Dr. George Bach-y-Rita, a former colleague of Mark and Ervin who met Kille after the operation, confirmed that Kille “genuinely suffered from a form of epilepsy, and needed brain surgery,” but specified: “He didn’t entirely need that procedure; he could’ve had a temporal lobectomy, which was the standard procedure at the time. Was [the operation he received] standard procedure? No. It was an experimental procedure. It was the cutting edge.” (BINJ/Riley 2017)

The characterization of violence: Secondary sources consistently report that Kille’s most violent act consisted of throwing tin cans toward his wife and missing. Mark and Ervin characterized him as exhibiting “episodic dyscontrol” with “uncontrollable outbursts of unprovoked rage.” (Multiple sources; Mark & Ervin 1970)

The wife’s affair: Janice Kille was having an affair with Robert Dirkman. This was real, not paranoid ideation. She would later divorce Leonard after the surgery and marry Dirkman. (Chorover, multiple secondary sources)

The funding: Mark and Ervin received funding through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have served as a conduit for the CIA at the time. They also received funding through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a Justice Department agency established in 1968. The LEAA stopped funding psychosurgery in 1974 because “LEAA personnel generally do not possess the technical and professional skills required to evaluate and monitor projects employing such procedures.” In 1973, Congress banned the LEAA from accepting further CIA funding. (BINJ/Riley 2017, government documents)

In 1967, Mark, Ervin, and Sweet published a letter in JAMA suggesting a link between “brain disease and urban violence,” calling for “intensive research and clinical studies of individuals committing the violence to pinpoint, diagnose and treat people with low violence thresholds before they contribute to further tragedies.” (Chorover)

Bach-y-Rita, on the CIA question: “They might have been working for CIA, but the CIA wasn’t considered bad. People hadn’t learned to mistrust the Dulles brothers yet. They didn’t know how horrible the Dulles brothers were.” (BINJ/Riley 2017)

VI. The Electrodes

Over a period of many months in 1966-67, Leonard underwent “pretreatment testing.” His head was shaved, sedated, and locally anesthetized. His head was positioned and fixed in the frame of a stereotactic instrument. Multiple stranded electrodes were implanted in his brain bilaterally, with their tips arrayed in the vicinity of his amygdalae. (Chorover)

After a brief recovery period, a long series of electrophysiological recording, stimulation, and lesioning trials began. Each implanted electrode contact was tested. Some produced feelings of losing control. Others produced a sensation of floating. Some produced euphoria. Some produced terror. The doctors documented the responses at each point. (Chorover, Dykes 2018, multiple sources)

The remote stimulation utilized technology developed by Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado of Yale Medical School, who in 1965 demonstrated and advocated the use of brain stimulation as a means of social control. Delgado had famously stopped a charging bull by activating an electrode implanted in its brain. His 1969 book was titled Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. (Chorover, Delgado 1969)

Several times, Leonard protested, refused further treatments, and absconded from the hospital. Each time he returned. (Chorover)

VII. The Consent

The physicians decided to proceed to the final phase: selectively and progressively destroying brain tissue in the targeted areas bilaterally. This was done by passing high-frequency (microwave) currents into limbic loci via the previously implanted electrodes. (Chorover)

The BINJ investigative report, drawing on medical records and documentary sources, states that Kille had “consented” to the operation “under the influence of the stimoceiver,” the remote-controlled brain stimulation device. When Kille emerged from this altered state, he had “turned wild and unmanageable” at the idea of further surgery. The doctors found the electrode that produced euphoria, activated it, and presented the consent form while Kille was in a stimulation-induced state of calm. (BINJ/Riley 2017)

From the medical records obtained by Dr. Peter Breggin: when Leonard expressed a desire to leave the ward, the progress note by Dr. Frank Ervin read: “Take his pants away.” (Dykes 2018, Breggin)

A handwritten note by Kille himself, scrawled on the hospital wall, was documented in the progress notes. The word was: “murder.” (Dykes 2018, Breggin)

VIII. The Surgery and Publication

The electrodes were used to burn lesions into both amygdalae. A second surgery in 1971 resulted in further brain tissue destruction and left Kille with grotesque facial movements and stiffened limbs. (Multiple sources)

In 1967, with the electrodes withdrawn and the damage done, Leonard was discharged from MGH. Janice filed for divorce. She later married Robert Dirkman. Leonard drove across the country to Long Beach, California, to be near his mother and stepfather. (Chorover)

The MIT chronology describes what happened immediately: “He is patently deranged. His deterioration accelerates in weeks and months after release. At one point he is found wandering aimlessly around a supermarket parking lot late at night. He is picked up by police, taken into custody and forcibly hospitalized. At the hospital, he is soon assigned the diagnosis of ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ – largely on the basis of an incredible and fantastic story that he tells, in great procedural and technical detail, about having been a patient and research subject at Boston’s MGH; of doctors operating on his brain; implanting electrodes, remotely recording depth electroencephalograms and applying occasional electrical brain stimulation, and finally, using radio frequency currents to destroy portions of his limbic system; destroying his mind and life and work and family.” (Chorover)

In 1970, Mark and Ervin published Violence and the Brain (Harper & Row). The book presented Kille under the pseudonym “Thomas R.” and described him as “a brilliant 34-year-old engineer with several important patents to his credit.” The book described the treatment as successful, claiming effective cure of the presenting complaint. The foreword stated that their project “holds out the hope that knowledge gained about emotional brain function in violent persons with brain disease can be applied to combat the violence-triggering mechanisms in the brains of the non-diseased.” (Mark & Ervin 1970, Chorover)

The MIT chronology states: “By all other accounts, however, this picture of his condition is simply false. In fact, Leonard’s personal and social condition has been worsening. Now he is severely disturbed, severely brain-damaged, a socially incompetent, psychologically impaired man in his late 30s who has become, since the operation, increasingly episodically violent.” (Chorover)

IX. The Investigation

In 1971, Dr. Peter Breggin, a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and well-known critic of psychosurgery, read Violence and the Brain. He located “Thomas R.” at his mother’s and stepfather’s home in Long Beach, California. After interviewing Leonard Kille and his family, Breggin published his conclusion that the brain surgery performed at MGH had rendered Kille incurably incompetent. (Chorover)

In 1973, a medical malpractice suit was filed on behalf of Leonard Kille by his mother and legal guardian in Boston Superior Court. Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin were the defendants. The plaintiff’s attorney was from a large and prestigious Washington, D.C. law firm. (Chorover)

From 1973 to 1978, lawyers for both sides prepared their cases. Leonard Kille was deposed under oath, describing his treatment and its effects. In the fall of 1978, after a six-week trial, the proceedings ended in acquittal of the defendants on all charges. (Chorover)

X. The Helmet

After the second surgery in 1971, Kille was transferred to hospital facilities where the staff had not been informed of his history. Multiple sources document that a hospital attendant discovered Kille holding a metal wastebasket over his head. He said he was trying to stop the microwaves. He was diagnosed as delusional. A sympathetic doctor ordered nursing staff to bring Kille a large sheet of aluminum foil so he could fashion himself a protective helmet. (Multiple sources including Constantine 1995, reported in BINJ 2017 context)

On March 21, 1979, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner published an article titled “Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him.” The subject was Leonard Kille. He told the reporter: “They turn me up or turn me down.” (LA Herald Examiner 1979)

XI. Bedford

Leonard Kille became a chronic patient at the Bedford VA Hospital in Massachusetts. His periodic hospitalizations for disruptive behavior became routine. At one point in the late 1960s, he absconded from a California VA hospital, was apprehended by police outside Las Vegas, held at a Nevada VA, and returned to California. (Chorover)

Leonard Arthur Kille died in 1993, age 60, at the Bedford VA Hospital. (Chorover, 2013 chronology. Note: the 2009 version of the same MIT lecture notes gives the date range as 1933-1996. Secondary sources vary. TFRi uses the 2013 chronology as the more detailed primary source.)

XII. The Institutional Web

The following institutional connections are documented in the sources cited:

Edwin Land was co-founder and CEO of Polaroid, Leonard Kille’s employer, where Kille earned his patents. Land was also the first president of the Scientific Engineering Institute, founded on behalf of the CIA. Along with MIT President James Killian, Land was a “prime mover” behind the establishment of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, according to National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson. (BINJ/Riley 2017, Richelson 2002)

The Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) was spun off from MIT Lincoln Laboratories at Hanscom Air Force Base, which had close relationships with Harvard and MIT. The SEI conducted “life sciences” research for the CIA’s Office of Research and Development, including electrode implantation in animal brains for remote behavioral control. In July 1968, according to Gordon Thomas, an SEI team implanted electrodes in three Vietcong prisoners at Bien Hoa Hospital in South Vietnam, spent a week attempting to instigate a knife fight among them by remote stimulation, failed, and flew home. “As previously arranged in the case of failure, while the physicians were still in the air the prisoners were shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned.” (BINJ/Riley 2017, Thomas 1989, Marks 1979)

EG&G (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier), where Kille worked from 1960-1964, was an MIT spinoff involved in classified defense work. Reports suggest the SEI itself was spun off from a team at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories (AFCRL) at Hanscom, the same institutional ecosystem as EG&G. (BINJ/Riley 2017, Jacobsen 2014)

Kille’s patents were willed to MIT. MIT’s Course 9.68, taught by Professor Stephan Chorover (who authored From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control, MIT Press, 1979), teaches the Kille case as Lecture 9 material. The detailed chronology is publicly available through MIT OpenCourseWare.

In 2005, MIT researchers Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter published “On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study,” testing aluminum foil helmets on human subjects and finding that while most frequencies were attenuated, specific frequencies (1.2 GHz, 2.6 GHz) were amplified by up to 30 dB (1,000x). The study is universally presented as comedy. It was conducted at the same institution that inherited the intellectual property of the man who put metal on his head because doctors had manipulated his brain with electronic signals.

The SEI eventually morphed into Searle Medidata Inc., a subsidiary of G.D. Searle, a pharmaceutical company later chaired by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In 1985, Rumsfeld helped arrange Searle’s sale to Monsanto. (BINJ/Riley 2017)

XIII. The Wider Program

The Kille case exists within the broader context of government behavioral control research:

MK-Ultra was authorized in April 1953 by CIA Director Allen Dulles. It encompassed hundreds of projects involving drugs, electroshock, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and other methods of behavioral manipulation. By the 1970s, the CIA was destroying its own MK-Ultra files. CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified in 1977 that the experiments were “abhorrent.” Of the hundreds of experimental subjects, only 14 were ever notified and only one was compensated, for $15,000. (Multiple sources, congressional testimony)

Mark and Ervin’s broader ambitions: Following the Kille case, Mark “applied for a $2 million grant to resurrect the Violence Clinic at Boston City Hospital but was turned down due to pressure from black groups and radical scientists at the National Institutes of Health.” Ervin attempted to start a Violence Center at UCLA but funding was blocked by political and legal opposition. Their 1970 book and their 1967 JAMA letter explicitly proposed applying brain surgery techniques developed on individuals with diagnosed brain disease to the broader population. (Harvard Crimson 1974, BINJ/Riley 2017)

The JAMA letter (1967) by Mark, Ervin, and Sweet called for programs to “pinpoint, diagnose and treat people with low violence thresholds before they contribute to further tragedies.” This was published in the context of urban riots, and, as Scientific American noted, “suggested that brain stimulation or psychosurgery might quell the violent tendencies of blacks rioting in inner cities.” (BINJ/Riley 2017)

XIV. What the Record Shows

1. Leonard Kille was a working-class veteran, a self-taught electronics engineer, a patent holder, and a father of at least five children.

2. His referral for brain surgery originated with a psychiatrist who attributed marital conflict (caused in part by an actual affair) to a brain disorder.

3. The experimental procedure performed on him was not the standard treatment for his diagnosed condition. A temporal lobectomy was standard. What was done to him was experimental.

4. His consent for the destructive phase of the procedure was obtained while his brain was being stimulated by the apparatus that would perform the procedure.

5. He was published as a success story in a book that was reviewed favorably in professional journals. The published account contradicted the reality of his condition.

6. The doctors who performed the procedure had funding connections to the CIA through the NIMH and the LEAA.

7. His employer’s CEO founded the CIA institute that conducted the same category of research.

8. The malpractice suit failed. The doctors were acquitted.

9. He spent twenty-six years in institutional care.

10. He independently constructed a metal shielding device for his head, the same countermeasure described in fiction by Julian Huxley in 1926, four decades before Kille’s surgery.

11. He was diagnosed as delusional for this act. He had electrodes in his brain.

12. He died in 1993, age 60, at the Bedford VA Hospital.

Sources

This research record is maintained by the Tinfoil Research Institute. Corrections and additional sourced information may be submitted to signal@tinfoil.wtf. TFRi is committed to obtaining primary documents including Kille’s deposition testimony and the malpractice trial record if they remain accessible.