Jodi Routh first started to worry about her son, Eddie, during a trip to Colorado in July 2010. Almost every summer since Eddie was three, the family had vacationed at Parry Peak Campground, near Independence Pass. Convoys of aunts, uncles, and cousins would follow US 287 out of the Texas heat, then pitch tents under ponderosa pines and cast their fishing lines into the water.
That July three years ago, Eddie had just left the Marines as a corporal, ending a four-year military career. He'd arrived in San Diego for basic training less than two weeks after his high school graduation, but following tours in Iraq and post-earthquake Haiti, Eddie had seen enough of active duty. Soon after he returned home, he told his mom he longed for Parry Peak, a source of the uncomplicated joy he'd known as a kid.
Along on the trip were Eddie's parents, his sister's family, and an aunt and uncle and their 12-year-old son, who worshipped his Marine cousin. The campsite sat near a postcard-perfect bridge spanning a river swollen by fresh snowmelt. One afternoon, the group posed for photographs on the bridge.
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Eddie had spent the day communing with a case of beer. He'd been a drinker since his teens; yet some days now he washed down his breakfast with a cold one. Jodi nagged him about it but figured alcohol cushioned her son's reentry into civilian life. During the photo session, someone passed Eddie's niece to his young cousin. Seeing the baby against the backdrop of dangerous current, Eddie exploded, screaming at he boy, accusing him of nearly dropping her.
"We were saying, 'Eddie, we're all right here. Stop it. We're fine. She's fine. We're all okay,'" Jodi says. Still, the outbursts continued to flare all evening, until finally Eddie fell to the ground in heaving sobs.
This was the deflection point in Jodi Routh's life. As the following months and years passed, Eddie's family carted him to and from the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he amassed a medical record that would reach almost 500 pages. Still, his symptoms only worsened.
His mother's desperation grew, and that's what eventually led her to Chris Kyle, the legendary Navy SEAL and best-selling author of American Sniper, who had two children attending the school where Jodi worked as an aide. It was Kyle's mission to help rebuild wounded soldiers, working with FITCO to provide gym equipment to disabled vets. One morning last January in the kid drop-off line, Jodi leaned in through the door of Kyle's souped-up black Ford F-350, introduced herself, and asked if her son might be eligible for the FITCO program. He told her to put Eddie's name and number in one of his children's backpacks.
To her surprise, Kyle, concerned, showed up at the school a few hours later. "I'll do everything in my power to help your son," he told her. She wept in relief. It was the first time she'd heard anyone other than family say they truly wanted to help Eddie.
For more than two years after the incident at Parry Peak, his family sought help through the Veterans Health Administration. They found themselves adrift in a system struggling to meet the demands spurred by a decade of war and the aging veterans of past conflicts. A U.S. Senate committee reported in 2011 that 40 percent of VA mental health care providers couldn't schedule an appointment for a new patient within the mandated two-week window; 70 percent said they did not have enough staff or space to do their jobs. In Dallas, the VA psychiatric ward was briefly closed to admissions in 2008, after too many veterans in its care committed suicide.
Each day, 22 veterans take their own lives. But here is the paradox: The U.S. government is, in fact, pouring record funding into post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD--$423 million projected this year, up 36 percent just from 2009. To help explain why the system still fails a disturbing number of veterans, some experts offer an answer as unpopular as it is politically radioactive: Clinics are clogged with too many veterans who don't need to be there and are siphoning resources from those like Eddie, who do.
Michelle Washington, Ph.D., coordinator for PTSD services at the Wilmington, Delaware, VA Medical Center, testified to the U.S. Senate in 2011 that she was "frequently assigned patients with only minor forms of PTSD or only a history of PTSD with no current symptoms; and I have no means of referring them back to general mental health because they are booked solid. So those patients stay with me indefinitely."
Other veterans may not have a motivation to get better because their income depends on being sick, says Michael Archuleta, M.D., J.D., a physician who now works as an attorney in Austin. He makes his living off the VA's failings, suing on behalf of injured and neglected veterans. "When someone is being paid to have a disability, that disability is less likely to go away," he says. He adds that the VA is striving to bring mental health care to every veteran who needs it, but when a system "incentivizes sickness," as he calls it, the overload from veterans who should be getting better, or who shouldn't be there at all, can place the entire operation at risk.
The Eddies become lost.
No one saw Eddie's mental illness coming.He grew up in a 1940s-era frame house in Lancaster, just south of Dallas. His father had spent his adult life earning a workingman's living on the strength of his back and hands. Jodi's universe was her children. Now 52, she has a sandpaper voice and a face weathered from worry and nicotine. "When people say, 'What did you want to be when you grew up?' I wanted to be a mom," Jodi says. Her daughter, Laura, was born in 1984. Eddie followed in 1987, arriving prematurely; for many anxious days he remained in the hospital with bleeding in his brain.
Eddie was reared the way Texas boys tend to be--a junior outdoorsman joining his dad at deer stands and fishing holes. He had a knack, Jodi says, for catching the tiniest fish in the lake and then grinning for trophy photographs as if he'd just hooked a 6-pound bass. He developed a biting sense of humor that others found either endearing or irritating. Once, walking past a relative and sniffing a trace of alcohol, he quipped, "What kind of perfume is that, Bud or Bud Light?" Another time, after giving his shorter, plumper sister a hug, he stepped back and smirked, "I see you've been hitting those burritos."
Tall and dark-haired with piercing green eyes, Eddie was a bright but unmotivated student. "His grades would be pretty low," Jodi says, "but at the last minute he would pull it out and make a good C." As a teenager he fell to partying, rejecting his parents' strictness. Sometime after his junior year he flipped back to self-control and decided to enlist. He told his mom he chose the Marines because "they were the best of the best."
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The military transformed Eddie. Laura recalls the first time she saw her brother after boot camp. "He held himself higher," she says. He had the carriage of someone who had accomplished something. When the family arrived for his graduation weekend, Jodi scanned the crowd to find her son, one green jacket in an ocean of green jackets. When her eyes finally landed on him, she spotted a chevron on his sleeve. "When I saw that stripe, I was really proud of Eddie. I knew he did what he needed to do."
Always adept with anything mechanical, Eddie trained as an armorer, repairing and maintaining weapons. He earned a chestful of honors during his service, among them a medal for good conduct, a bronze service star, and a sharpshooter badge. When he was bound for Iraq, he reassured his worried mother that he was eager to do what he'd been trained for. The only reservation he ever voiced was during a conversation with his father, Raymond, just before deployment. "He said, 'Dad, how are you going to feel about me if I have to kill somebody?'" Jodi recalls. "Our response was, of course, 'Eddie, this is a war. You kill them before they can kill you.'" Months later he called his dad from Iraq, revisiting that conversation. He said he'd been out with a patrol when a boy charged from around a corner and opened fire. "How would you feel if I shot a kid?"
Eddie did his duty but had a hard time adapting to the moral playbook of war. Assigned to be a prison guard, he told his dad he allowed inmates three squares of toilet paper a day, fed them something that "looked like dog food," and stripped male inmates in view of female guards. The humiliation bothered him, Raymond says.
But it was his service in Haiti that tormented Eddie, his family and friends say. Marines were sent to assist with security and cleanup after that nation's catastrophic earthquake in January 2010. He told a friend that one of the first things that startled him when he stepped ashore was the stench. Haiti was a brew of filth, rot, and human wreckage. His mother says that one day a raggedy, skin-and-bones boy came up and asked Eddie for his lunch. It was his entire ration until he returned to his ship, so under instructions from his commanding officer, he did not share. He never stopped regretting that. "I was strong," he told Jodi. "I could have done without it, but I kept it."
The Marines had prepared him for the kind of death that comes in bloody bursts of gunfire. In Haiti, he told his father, he dropped a grappling hook into the putrid waters and fished out the floating body of a baby. Some images, once seen, cannot be unseen.
Jodi believes that if it weren't for Haiti, Eddie would have stayed on active duty. Instead he returned home for good in June 2010. His weapons skills landed him a job with a military contractor, and for a time he seemed to get along just fine. He bought a red '74 VW Beetle that sported black dots and bug antennae. Eventually, the air travel for the contractor work made him anxious, so he quit. From then on, employment came in spurts. He drank more. "He'd go out and look for a job for a few hours in the morning and come back with beer," Jodi says. He worked in fast food. He mowed yards and took on odd jobs for a real estate agent. Eventually, a friend of Jodi's hired Eddie to make cabinets.
Throughout that first year home, the Rouths were growing increasingly concerned with his behavior. Some days he was the same old good-hearted Eddie who offered his time to anyone in need. He spent one weekend repairing an aunt and uncle's trailer. Knowing he was short on cash, they offered him money. He refused; that's what family is for, he told them.
At the same time, his family noticed, he often had a hair-trigger temper, and he was always hitting booze and pot. His imagination seemed overamped as well. In the summer of 2011, after he'd been home for about a year, Eddie and a cousin went to Houston to help build storage units. Eddie fell ill after a few days, so his sister Laura drove down to fetch him. On the four-hour trip back to Lancaster, Eddie began to chatter nervously about a tapeworm eating his insides. He made Laura pull over at a dingy roadside eatery, where he ordered plate after plate of food. "He was so convinced that this thing was eating him alive, he was buying protein drinks," Jodi says. "He was eating every hour, as much as he could eat."
Finally she took him to the VA hospital. And sometime later, when he started saying he was a werewolf and a vampire, Raymond took him back.
Eddie's medical record states that he was initially diagnosed with PTSD on July 23, 2011. Jodi continued to believe the VA would save Eddie, even after he started to dread each visit. "They're not doing shit for me," he once snapped, as she urged him to go. He had a point, in fact. Laura recalls sitting with her brother on one appointment during which the doctor stayed deskbound, eyes fixed on a checklist. "I felt like she asked the same list of questions to everyone," Laura says. "Then she said, 'Okay, well, we'll see you next time.' She couldn't have cared less what his answers were."
The Dallas VA would not speak about Eddie, citing patient privacy.The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs runs the nation's largest integrated health care system; Dr. Archuleta, the attorney, notes that the care of any one patient largely depends on where he or she makes contact. "You just don't know exactly who you're going to get," he says.
In Dallas, the hospital has stepped up the hiring of mental health professionals in a push to meet demand. It has added seven full-time psychiatrist positions in the past four years, for a current total of 59, to care for 13,500 patients with PTSD. A staffing expansion is on across the country, where the number of clinical providers has increased to roughly 20,000. The government sponsors PTSD awareness month and answers a 24-hour crisis line. Stigma once discouraged veterans from seeking treatment; now there are signs that this barrier is falling. Some 1.3 million vets sought mental health care in 2012.
But the numbers may have an unfortunate downside. Earlier this year, the journal National Affairs published a provocative 17-page essay describing a disability system that can lock sick veterans into dependency. The author was Lt. Col. Daniel Gade of the U.S. Military Academy (who stresses that he speaks for himself, not the U.S. Army). In 2005 in Ramadi, Iraq, a roadside bomb blew off Gade's right leg and nearly killed him. During his recovery and subsequent research for a Ph.D., he found a system that does little to help anybody return to productive life, especially those with PTSD.
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In 2010, the VA dropped the requirement that veterans must have a corroborated stressful event to obtain care. The decision was based on the recognition that proof of trauma is not always possible, and also that a distinct incident isn't even a necessary trigger for PTSD. Claims soared. In 2006, PTSD was the sixth most common service-connected disability, with 269,399 beneficiaries. By last year, claims for PTSD had more than doubled, to 572,612, and it ranked as the third most common reason for payments. This is partly because of an influx of Vietnam-era veterans with delayed-onset PTSD. Plus, a full 45 percent of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are now filing for disability. That's more than any other conflict by far, according to a 2012 Associated Press analysis.
As Gade sees it, the system is oriented toward giving disability benefits, not making veterans better. As a result, he says, vets are paid to stay sick rather than being encouraged to get better through such proven treatments as prolonged exposure therapy. (In randomized controlled studies, more than 80 percent of people with PTSD either report substantial improvement or a disappearance of symptoms altogether after receiving prolonged exposure therapy.) Richard McNally, Ph.D., of Harvard University, and Chris Frueh, Ph.D., a former director of the PTSD clinic at the VA in Charleston, South Carolina, who's now on the faculty at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, have also registered concerns. They fear that a substantial number of mildly or even questionably symptomatic veterans are diluting care for those most in need. In a review published this year in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, the two cite a litany of studies, including one examination of a sample of 74 v eterans that suggested that about half were either exaggerating their symptoms or malingering outright.
VA mental health officials say other data does not back up these claims. In short, many suspect that people are exaggerating their symptoms, but no one can say how common it is. And these suspicions do not diminish the fact that for hundreds of thousands of veterans, PTSD is starkly real. McNally believes that hospitals have to be able to dedicate time and therapists to these veterans in need. But when clinics are overburdened, he says, doctors might cycle through with what he calls a "pharmacological Band-Aid."
Eddie Routh was offered eight different prescriptions and repeatedly put into group therapy sessions. He rarely had individual counseling and didn't benefit from the groups, according to his mom. He lapsed into self-medicating, complaining that the drugs made him feel worse.
One night in January 2012, he sat up with his uncle Jamie (who asked that his last name be omitted) nursing a bottle of tequila and building anger. Often in those days, when Eddie was overcome by sorrow, he would work himself into a rage, as if trying to stifle his anxiety by force, Jamie says. "He was just feeling insignificant. It's hard to go from a decorated Marine to flipping burgers at Sonic."
Eddie stormed out of the house drunk, got behind the wheel, and came away with a DWI charge. Serving time for the infraction, he was made a trusty and given jail-house responsibilities, Jodi says. The structured life--even in jail--suited him.
A few months later, in April, Eddie met a girl online. (She has asked to be identified only as Jen.) He made her laugh; he was attentive and had a refreshing lack of pretense. He was romantic, but unconventionally so. Jen tells of the time Eddie spent a weekend helping at a friend's farm north of Dallas. He'd been working a field for a couple of hours on a sweltering afternoon when Jen walked out of the house to bring him water. Seeing her making her way toward him, he powered down the tractor, hopped off, and scampered around picking her a bouquet of wildflowers.
Also about this time, Eddie adopted a puppy, a black Lab mix he named Girley. He doted on her "like she was his own little girl," Jodi says. He basked in the kind of unconditional love only a dog can give, and he was reluctant to ever be without her. The night Eddie was arrested for homicide, Girley rode shotgun during the police chase.
For a time in 2012, he seemed to reach equilibrium. With the abiding presence of Jen and Girley, "he felt like he had something to give again," Jodi says. One day he sat down with a yellow legal pad and wrote "life goals for next 5 years." First up: education. He applied for VA college benefits and was accepted into Lincoln Tech, a trade school.
But as autumn approached, Eddie's mind again started to unspool. He had developed an obsession with waste, not wanting to throw away even the slightest bit of trash or morsel of food.
On September 2, 2012, the Rouths hosted a fish fry in their backyard. At some point, the conversation turned to Eddie's tuition. His education money was stuck in the VA bureaucracy. About the only thing of value the family possessed was a collection of firearms, many of them heirlooms that had long been in the family. His father offered to sell them to pay for Eddie's school. Eddie, who'd spent the afternoon drinking, would have none of it. Father and son began fighting. "I'll blow my brains out," Eddie shouted at one point. "You don't need me around here anyway," he said. Jodi hustled the guns out the front door in the arms of some friends. Barefoot and shirtless, a tearful Eddie stormed through the back door, called for Girley, and set out on foot.
By the time Christmas had come and gone, Eddie was becoming trapped in spells during which he would gaze blankly at nothing, unresponsive to the touch or voices of people around him. His eyes "wouldn't look like there's someone alive in there," says one friend. One day in January, his uncle Jamie called Jen, saying he'd just gotten off the phone with Eddie and was worried. Jen drove to Eddie's house and found him sitting on the sofa in an unblinking trance. "He didn't even acknowledge that I walked in," she says. "After about five hours, I finally got him to say a few words and eat some food."
Another day around this time, Eddie woke up in the morning and told his mother he felt too distressed to go to work. That evening, he wandered into Jodi's bedroom, looking more frightened boy than Marine, sat beside the bed, and asked his mother if she would hold his hand.
"A big strong Marine doesn't need his mama, you know what I mean?" Jodi says. "I was trying to get him to tell me, 'What's bothering you? What's wrong today?'" She put a hand on his cheek and turned his face toward hers. "Whatever he was seeing was really bad because he had such a scared look on his face. His eyes weren't looking at me. He just wasn't there. I just kept saying, 'Look at me. I'm your mom. Look at your mom.'"The final spiral into tragedy began the weekend of January 19, 2013, at Jen's apartment. That Friday night, he started accusing Jen of trying to steal his soul--much of his paranoia was founded in either religion or government--and saying he was going to die that night. Finally, around 2 a.m., she calmed him enough that he could sleep. For a time the next morning he seemed better, but then he started pacing in front of Jen's door brandishing a knife. "He decided that the government was going to hurt us if we left the apartment," she says. Eventually Jen's roommate summoned the police. Eddie was taken to a private hospital and later transferred to a VA facility. Again, after a brief time, he was released.
In the weeks leading up to his final hospitalization, Eddie had been trying to cut back on alcohol, honoring a promise to Jen. But now he was back to drinking hard. Jodi took Eddie back to the VA on January 30. His mind was so unfocused that Jodi had to answer the doctor's questions for him, she says. He was sent home.
By then, the stress of caring for Eddie had left Jodi spent. She needed to see her husband, who had begun a job out of town. She and Raymond agreed to meet in Abilene that weekend. She drove out straight from work on the afternoon of Friday, February 1. Sometime after she left, Chris Kyle made good on his promise to try to help Eddie, not by providing gym equipment, but by giving his fellow veteran a ride to a gun range with him and his friend Chad Littlefield. Target shooting was a method Kyle often used to seek common ground with veterans, to create a familiarity he hoped would open doors to honest dialogue. The three headed to Rough Creek Lodge, a high-end North Texas resort with a firing range Kyle himself had helped design.
Eddie called his sister, Laura, early Saturday evening from their uncle Jamie's house, where he'd stopped briefly after leaving the gun range, saying something about a shitty day and that he wanted to come over and talk. The drive took about 20 minutes. The day had been sunny and breezy, and Laura had her windows and doors open to welcome the springlike air. Eddie let himself in and sat at her dining room table. Laura was not happy to see him. Ever since the incident at Jen's apartment, Laura and her husband, Gaines, hadn't wanted Eddie around. They were afraid he might do something that would scare their daughter, who adored her uncle Eddie.
"I murdered him," Laura remembers him saying.
"Who? What are you talking about?"
"Chris."
"Chris? Chris who?"
"Chris Kyle and his friend."
Eddie seemed to drift in and out of reality, so Laura wasn't sure what to believe. "I thought he was just talking out of his ass," she says today. He started saying other peculiar things: "Are you and Gaines in hell with me?"
"I could smell the fucking pigs."
"I sold my soul for a truck."
Laura was just trying to get him out the door.
When she and Eddie walked outside, Laura saw Chris Kyle's truck, with its oversized custom tires. Her stomach clenched at the thought that her brother might be telling the truth. On the steps of her porch, he turned around and called her Beezer, her family nickname. He told her he loved her.
"It was like he was my tiny little brother that I needed to scoop up in my arms and make everything better for him. But I was so lost. I hugged him, and I said, 'I love you too, but I do not love your demons.'"
A look she had never seen washed over his face. You know how in horror movies when it gets to the scary part and the villain's eyes will just turn black? It almost felt like that in that moment."
As Laura frantically dialed 911, Eddie was heading north on U.S. route 67 toward home. He told his sister he was bound for Oklahoma, but Laura suspects he would not have gone anywhere without Girley. Police later stopped Eddie after a brief chase on Interstate 35. Shrieking and crying, Laura called her mother in Abilene, saying Eddie had shown up at her house, saying crazy things about having killed Chris Kyle and his friend. He was driving a black pickup.
Jodi froze. She knew that truck. In a panic, she told Laura she had to hang up. Kyle's number was in her phone, and she dialed it, praying as she heard the empty rings that he would answer.
On July 24, the grand jury in Erath County officially indicted Eddie, charging him with capital murder. According to police, Kyle--the most lethal sniper in military history--was brought down by an enemy he never saw coming. Littlefield's body lay nearby at the murder scene. According to an affidavit, Eddie told his brother-in-law he "couldn't trust them, so he killed them before they could kill him."
Because he'll face trial in Texas, Eddie Routh could be executed. He pleaded not guilty, appearing silently in pretrial court proceedings, his face pasty and fringed with a bushy, unclipped beard. During his time in jail he has been an unpredictable inmate, the sheriff says. Shortly after his incarceration, guards had to Taser him. He has no television because one day in June he smashed it to the floor, stopped up his commode, and flooded his cell. But mostly he is quiet, spending his time reading and sleeping. Some days he will accept visitors; some days he won't.
His family wonders how much he understands about why he is there. In a recent phone call with Jamie, he told his uncle he couldn't wait to get out. He sent his mom a letter, asking why she had not come to take him home. No one who loves Eddie appears to have abandoned him, even as horrified as they are by what they agree he has done, and believe he should atone for.
"I know it wasn't my Eddie that did this," Jen says. "If he ever realizes what happened and what he did, I don't know if he'll be able to recover."
Jodi has already vowed that if a jury decides her son should die, she will be there with him, a mother from beginning to end. Her prayer now, she says, is that he will be committed to a mental hospital "where he can actually get the care he needs." There is little chance her son will ever be free, except, she still hopes, from the prison of his own mind.
For an expanded version of this story containing additional reporting, download our e-book single The Enemy Within, available now wherever e-books are sold.
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