Despite being a highly evolved species, the human race is still marred by a history of throwing away its own physi-cally and psychologically weak. For centuries, we have either imprisoned the mentally ill or sent them off alone to weather their own storms rather than inconvenience anyone else.

Robert Johnson was given up for adoption as a baby. Not many months later, he was discovered in a Boston orphan-age by Charles Johnson and his wife Auminda, better known as “Minnie”, of Mystic, Conn. A carriage-maker, Charles raised Robert until 1892 when Minnie died of heart disease at the age of 43. Fourteen-year-old Robert was then sent to live with Minnie’s father, John Carpenter, a 67-year-old coal dealer who resided with his wife Hulda (Blanchard) in Warwick.

This arrangement was not a comfortable one for anybody involved. Robert liked to leave home and wander. Some-times he would be gone for long periods of time, which caused John a great deal of worry and anxiety. One day in 1896, Robert took John’s revolver when he left the house. He traveled as far as Conn. before he was arrested and convicted of stealing a bicycle. It was noticed by authorities at the time that Robert’s general behavior seemed ab-normal so he was sent for a medical exam. The doctor who performed the exam diagnosed him as being mentally incompetent and he was admitted to the Conn. Asylum for the Insane.

The following year, he was released from that institution and, that Sept., made his way back to his adoptive grandfa-ther’s house. John refused to let him stay so Robert made a small fire in front of the house and attempted to burn up his own clothing. John contacted the police but when they arrived, Robert was gone.

Earlier that day, someone noticed that an act of vandalism had been committed in Brayton Cemetery. The desecrated graves lay along the driveway that stretched across the recent extension of the cemetery. The five burials had only been laid out within the last few months. Now their fairly new grave markers were overturned, broken off their bases.

Police had no suspects until they learned that Robert was back in town. The following afternoon, they arrested him on Cowesett Road and transported him to the jail cell kept at the town hall. He admitted that he had been at the cem-etery.

“What were you doing in the graveyard Friday night?” a police officer asked Robert.

“I was looking for a friend who has gone to another world,” he answered.

“Why do you act this way?” the officer asked.

“I can’t help it,” Robert allegedly replied. “The inclination seizes me and I can’t resist. If I was going along the street and had a revolver, an inclination would be liable to take hold of me to shoot a man and I would do so just to keep things moving.”

“Where did you go on Saturday after making the fire?” the officer asked.

 Robert told him that he took a team of horses which were hitched up near the home of 52-year-old Warwick attor-ney Albert Greene and drove them to Wickford where he left them. The following day, he said, he returned to War-wick.

Robert rambled through his answers in a way that caused the police officers to suspect he had mental health issues. Due to their observations and the allegation of Carpenter that Robert had threatened to burn down his house if he wasn’t allowed to come back home, a physician was called to examine him. Once again the 18-year-old was diagnosed as being insane and was taken to the Rhode Island State Hospital.

A few years earlier, following other concerning behavior and another medical exam, he had been sentenced to an asylum in Bridgewater, Mass. Once his time there had been served, the asylum authorities drove him into Rhode Island and dropped him off in Providence, handing him a quarter and making it clear that he now needed to fend for himself.     

After his release from the Rhode Island State Hospital, Robert relocated to Conn. He was arrested in Mystic in 1898 and charged with two counts of arson. During the trial, he was allowed to speak on his own behalf and attempted to make the court understand why he did such things. He explained that, many years earlier, he had gone to New York and experienced a head injury there. Since that time, he reported, he had felt an overwhelming need for excitement. He admitted to starting the two fires and told the jury that his plan that day was to have six of them raging at the same time. As the mentally ill young man continued to ramble on, he described how he had once planned to wreck a train but then changed his mind.

The jury found Robert not guilty of the charges against him due to “insanity.” Instead of being sent to prison, he was sentenced to the Conn. State Hospital for the Insane. By the age of 20, Robert Johnson had been placed in psychiat-ric institutions in three different states – released back out into the world, alone, each time his stay expired. His trail becomes lost after 1900.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.