By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 26, 2003; Page F01

HEATHSVILLE, Va.

Chad Wegkamp woke up and decided to rob a bank.

He figured he had no choice. He'd already tried to solve his problem by operating on himself with a pair of scissors, but that proved so painful and bloody he had to stop. After that, he tried to make the $4,000 he needed to pay for the operation by printing it on his computer. But his homemade money looked fake so he stuffed most of it into a paper bag and threw it down the hill outside his parents' house in Mila, a little town on Virginia's Northern Neck.

Now, on the morning of Aug. 13, 2001, Wegkamp decided to hit a bank. He'd been thinking about it for a week, ever since he read about a bank robber who stole $10,000 in the next county.

Wegkamp, then 18, got up early, not long after his father left for his job as an accountant. His sister was already at basketball practice. His mother, a nurse who'd worked a 12-hour shift, was still sleeping. He took a black knit cap and cut eye holes in it. He replaced the license plates on his mother's silver Honda CRV with plates from the Toyota he'd totaled a month earlier. Then he took off.

He drove to Heathsville, about 20 miles away, and pulled into the parking lot of the Bank of Lancaster, which happens to sit across the street from the Northumberland County sheriff's office.

He put on black gloves and the cap, picked up a backpack and hustled into the bank. He had no gun, no knife, no weapon of any kind.

"Put your hands up," he yelled. "This is a holdup."

For a moment, the tellers thought Wegkamp was joking. But he seemed so agitated -- pacing, cursing, demanding money -- that they quickly realized he was serious.

He tossed his backpack to teller Donna Jewell.

"Put the money in there!" he ordered. "Put it all in there and don't hit any alarms."

Frightened, Jewell and another teller stuffed about $6,000 into the backpack and handed it back. Wegkamp walked over to Nancy Hamilton, who was sitting at a desk near the vault.

"Give me the keys to the vault," he demanded.

She told him she didn't have the keys.

"Get up against the wall, face first, or I'll kill you!" he yelled. Then he ran out and drove away.

He went home and put his mother's license plates back on her Honda. He stashed the knapsack of money in the laundry room, behind the dryer.

When his mother woke up, shortly after 10, he was sitting in the living room, watching TV. She was thrilled to see him there. It was the first time in weeks he'd left his bedroom before she demanded that he get up.

"Maybe his medication is working," she thought. "Maybe he's getting better."

Debra Wegkamp worried about her son. She had been the first person to suggest that he was schizophrenic -- even before psychiatrists made the diagnosis -- and she was terrified that he'd kill himself.

She had looked back over his life, searching for clues to his illness. His birth had been complicated and he hadn't breathed for his first few minutes outside the womb. Could that have something to do with it?

Chad was always a bit odd. As a baby, he used to bang his head against the side of the crib. When he got older, he'd rub his head on the grass until it bled. Then there were his little rituals -- he always knocked on a chair before he sat down in it. Before he could go to sleep, he'd repeat to himself, "I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die."

But Debra and Paul Wegkamp had dismissed those eccentricities because Chad was a smart kid who did well academically. In elementary school in Fairfax County, he was recommended for a program for gifted students. And after the family moved to the Northern Neck in 1995, he excelled at Northumberland High, earning a 3.55 GPA and graduating ninth among the 97 members of the Class of 2000.

He was a classic high school nerd. He didn't date. He didn't play sports like his sister, Ali, who is three years younger. But he was a computer prodigy. At 12, he was selling computers he built from parts he'd bought online, earning enough by his senior year to buy a used red Audi.

So when Chad went off to James Madison University in the fall of 2000 to study business and computer science, his parents were confident he'd succeed.

The first indication that something was wrong came in April 2001 when Chad called home to say he and some friends had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. A few days later, he confessed in an e-mail that he'd also been charged with possession of marijuana.

"It was a shock to us," Paul Wegkamp recalls. "We're Mormons. We don't drink. We don't smoke. And drugs are out of the question."

Paul and Debra feared that Chad had fallen in with the proverbial bad crowd. But the truth was far worse. He was, it later became apparent, psychotic.

It began when he was working out. Riding an exercise bike at the school gym, he felt something unusual in his crotch. Back in his dorm room, he examined himself and concluded that his scrotum was abnormally large. He went to a doctor, who told him there was nothing physically wrong. But Chad was convinced that his scrotum was too big and that it made his pelvis tip forward, which caused his back to become rigid, which caused his head to tip back.

And people could tell. He heard them talking about him, calling him "nerd" or "faggot" behind his back. Sometimes he'd confront them and they'd say, "I don't know what you're talking about." He asked his friends if people were talking about him. They told him he was crazy.

"I'm getting paranoid," he wrote in an e-mail to his father on April 19. "I always think everybody's talking about me and my eyes are always glassy white and I can see all sorts of blood vessels in my eyes."

He didn't mention his scrotum but he complained about his rigid back, the trouble he had keeping his head still.

"Maybe I have some whack condition or something," he wrote. "I'm sure it will pass but maybe mom can tell me exactly what is going on."

Paul showed the e-mail to Debra. She figured Chad was having some kind of anxiety attack. She called him and suggested he see the school nurse. She called again the next day, and Chad told her the nurse said there was nothing wrong.

By then, he'd stopped attending classes. He holed up in his dorm room, fiddling on the computer. His grades plummeted. He ended up with an F, three D's and a C.

On May 4, when the school year ended, his parents came to pick him up. Chad had a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He barely looked at them and answered all questions with a vague mumble.

Back home, he rarely left his room and seldom bathed. He spent all day sleeping and all night on the computer. He'd be alone in his room and Debra would hear him saying, "Shut up!" When she asked whom he was talking to, he'd say, "I'm only messing with you, Mom."

After 10 days, he told his mother about his scrotum, how it was affecting his whole body, how people were talking about it. He began cutting holes in his underwear so he could tape his scrotum up, then pulling on the tightest jockstrap he could find.

Debra took him to the family doctor, who said there was nothing wrong with Chad's scrotum. Chad didn't believe it so she took him to a urologist, who said the same thing. Chad still didn't believe it.

Debra suspected that Chad was schizophrenic. Working as a nurse in a nearby jail, she'd seen many schizophrenics and she knew that the symptoms included hearing voices, paranoia and delusions.

She made an appointment with Mario Gomez, a Richmond psychiatrist. On June 8, Paul drove Chad to see Gomez, who made a preliminary diagnosis: "symptoms of a delusional nature and depressive obsessions." He prescribed Prozac and a schizophrenia drug called Zyprexa. But Chad didn't always take his medication, and on June 29 Gomez noted that Chad showed "minimal improvement."

His parents agreed: Chad wasn't getting any better. He complained to Ali that wherever he went, he heard people mocking him. He took a job cleaning carpets but he complained that his co-workers were talking about him. After a couple of weeks he quit.

One day Debra heard him outside screaming toward a dock on the Great Wicomico River, a couple hundred yards away: "Shut up!" Horrified, she ran out and asked Chad what was going on. Trembling with anger, he told her the oystermen were yelling at him. But there were no oystermen there.

Still obsessed with his groin, he'd walk around constantly pulling up on his pants to keep his scrotum tightly bound. He told his mother he'd gone online and found a plastic surgeon who would operate on him for $4,000. After that, he kept asking for $4,000. He asked every day, sometimes six or seven times a day.

The scariest moment came in late July. Debra found surgical tape in Chad's room. He told her that he'd numbed his scrotum with ice and tried to operate on himself, stopping only because it hurt so much.

She was stunned. Immediately she worried about suicide, which she knew was common among schizophrenics, but she couldn't bring herself to utter the word.

"Chad," she said, "you're not going to hurt yourself, are you?"

He didn't answer.

"Please," she said. "I couldn't stand it. I really couldn't stand it."

That day, she started looking for a new psychiatrist. Somebody recommended one in Richmond and she called to beg for the earliest possible appointment. She got one for Aug. 14.

As it turned out, that was the day after Chad robbed the Bank of Lancaster.

Debra parked the Honda in front of her house and saw two policemen waiting there.

"I'm not the bank robber," she told them, smiling.

She'd been pulled over by cops twice the previous day -- the day of the bank robbery -- because her car matched the description of the getaway vehicle. Now she'd just returned from taking Chad to his new psychiatrist.

While Debra was telling the police that they could search the vehicle, Chad got out and walked toward the house. The cops stopped him. He had his baseball cap pulled low and he seemed nervous.

At that point, Paul came home from work. The police wanted to know about the license plates from their Toyota. Paul explained that the car had been totaled but he had the plates in the house. He retrieved them, and the cops' eyes lit up. They told him the plates matched those seen on the getaway car. They also said Chad matched the description of the bank robber.

Paul told Chad to get in the house. Inside, he asked his son, "What the hell have you done?"

Chad started crying. "Dad," he said, "I needed the money for my scrotum."

When the police asked if they could search the house, Paul said he wanted to call a lawyer first. When the lawyer advised him not to let the cops in without a search warrant, Paul handed the phone to a policeman so the lawyer could relay that message directly.

At that point, the Wegkamps say, the police warned that if they heard a toilet flushing or saw any signs of destruction of evidence, they'd storm the house.

Paul opened the living room curtains, and the whole family -- Paul, Debra, Chad and Ali -- sat in front of the window, so the cops could see that nobody was destroying evidence. Outside, the police pulled their cars up on the lawn and trained their high beams into the living room.

For nearly three hours, the Wegkamps sat, waiting. Finally, the sheriff arrived with a search warrant. A dozen cops swarmed in. They strip-searched the entire family, the Wegkamps say, then started searching the house.

For three more hours, the Wegkamps watched as the police foraged for clues. Chad, who had taken his antipsychotic medicine, fell asleep. The rest of the family sat rigid and nervous. The dog paced.

A loud yell came from the laundry room: The police had found the knapsack full of loot. At that point, the Wegkamps says, the cops celebrated with high-fives.

Soon the police announced that they'd found fake money Chad had made using his computer, as well as the green food coloring he'd used to dye it. Hearing that, Debra remembered the day Chad used his computer and scanner to copy some photos of flowers for her. She'd seen the "money" he'd created, but it didn't look real and she thought nothing of it. Now it was evidence of counterfeiting.

Sometime after midnight, a half-dozen police gathered around Chad, who was slumped on the couch. "Chad," one announced, "you are under arrest for -- "

He stopped. Chad was fast asleep.

His parents woke him up. The cops handcuffed him and led him off to jail.

That was the start of what Paul Wegkamp calls a "nightmare that has no end."

First came the newspapers. The Northern Neck News and the Northumberland Echo both printed front-page photos of Chad wearing prison stripes, handcuffs and shackles. In big red type, the Echo said: "Wegkamp could face life in prison if convicted."

That was true. Under Virginia law, robbing a bank -- even without a weapon -- carried a penalty of five years to life. Under federal law, counterfeiting could mean another 20 years.

Paul hired James Breeden, a prominent local attorney, and took a second mortgage on his house to make a $10,000 down payment for his services. A judge set Chad's bail at $100,000, but the Wegkamps no longer had enough equity in their house to use it as collateral. So Chad would have to remain in jail until his trial, scheduled for Dec. 18, 2001.

Breeden asked Northumberland County prosecutor R. Michael McKenney to consider the possibility that Wegkamp was not guilty by reason of insanity. McKenney said he'd study the psychiatric evaluations to see if Chad's mental illness prevented him from telling right from wrong, which is Virginia's legal standard for judging insanity in criminal cases.

On Sept. 10, Chad was taken to Richmond's Chippenham Medical Center for evaluation by Gomez, the psychiatrist. A CAT scan of Chad's brain revealed an enlarged ventricle, a condition frequently associated with schizophrenia.

"Mr. Wegkamp has schizophrenia, paranoid type," Gomez concluded in his official report. The illness caused such powerful delusions that "Chad could not distinguish between right and wrong with respect to his act."

Breeden hoped that Gomez's report would convince McKenney that Chad should be hospitalized, not imprisoned. But McKenney was unswayed. "Gomez's evaluation was poor," McKenney explained in a recent interview. "It rushed to a conclusion without any facts to support it."

Breeden offered to have another expert evaluate Chad, and McKenney agreed. Chad's trial was postponed until Feb. 26, 2002.

At Breeden's suggestion, Paul Wegkamp hired Richmond psychologist Edward A. Peck III to evaluate Chad. Peck studied Gomez's report, interviewed Chad twice and administered various psychological tests. He concluded that Chad suffered from a "Paranoid Schizophrenic Disorder" coupled with "overwhelming" delusions that rendered him "unable to distinguish between right and wrong." He recommended that Chad be sent to a mental hospital.

McKenney wasn't convinced. "I was suspicious that Dr. Peck was giving the results he was paid to give," McKenney says. "There was a hired-gun look to his report."

McKenney hired Roy W. Jarnecke, a Fredericksburg psychologist, to evaluate Chad. Jarnecke studied the earlier reports and interviewed Chad. He agreed that Chad was a paranoid schizophrenic. But he concluded that Chad "was aware of the wrongfulness of his actions" and "was able to control and direct his actions."

After that, McKenney told Breeden that he would proceed with the case and demand a jury trial.

That decision put Chad in a dilemma. If a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be sent to a mental hospital. But if the jurors voted to convict, they would then sentence him to a punishment somewhere between five years and life. On the other hand, if Chad pleaded guilty, a judge would sentence him under state guidelines that recommended a sentence between two and 4 1/2 years.

Breeden advised Chad to plead guilty. Chad took the advice. On Sept. 24, 2002, Judge Harry T. Taliaferro sentenced him to 35 years in prison, with all but three years and seven months suspended.

"I am disappointed but not surprised," Paul Wegkamp wrote in the diary he'd been keeping since his son's arrest.

Paul and Debra believed that Chad's psychosis had been worsened by his incarceration without psychiatric treatment. "We are going to be lucky now if Chad is ever able to function on his own in society," Paul wrote. "Another two years without treatment will leave him as a shell of his former self."

But the worst was still to come. In December 2002, a federal grand jury indicted Chad Wegkamp on three counts of manufacturing counterfeit money and three counts of possessing counterfeit money. At issue are 10 $10 bills and 36 $20 bills he printed on his home computer -- $820 in bills that McKenney says were too crude to fool him.

Chad faces a possible 40 years in prison and fines totaling $500,000. His trial is scheduled for March 19.

Why is the federal government prosecuting an already-imprisoned psychotic for making pathetically crude counterfeit money that he never tried to spend?

Paul J. McNulty, U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, declines to discuss the matter. "It would be inappropriate to comment," a spokesman says, "because it's an ongoing case."

"This is Virginia," says Mike McKenney. "We still take crime seriously."

McKenney, 44, is wearing a gray suit with an American flag lapel pin. The prosecutor is sitting behind his desk, flanked by an American flag, a Virginia flag and busts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

"This is a bank robbery in a rural area," McKenney says. "It's a crime that concerned people. Chad is mentally ill but he knows right from wrong. Even though he has mental problems, he has to be punished. I'm sorry his parents didn't identify his problem before that and take steps to address it. But I can't be held responsible for that."

McKenney figures Chad got off easy: The last bank robber prosecuted in Northumberland County got 27 years.

"I actually think that Chad should have gotten more time because he clearly knows right from wrong," McKenney says. "He did everything to conceal himself. He wore a mask. He wore gloves. He changed his license plate. He secreted the money."

He also sliced into his scrotum because he thought he heard people talking about it.

"That only proves he's mentally ill," McKenney says. "It doesn't prove that he doesn't know right from wrong." He shrugs. "I don't make the rules. I just follow them."

Isn't there some better way to handle cases like this?

"I'll bet there is," he says. "But I'm not sure what that is."

As Chad Wegkamp shuffles into the visiting room at the Northern Neck Regional Jail, his right hand is yanking the top of his prison pants to pull his scrotum up.

He's wearing a faded black-and-white striped prison uniform. His hair is a crude crew cut styled by inmate barbers. His sparse goatee fails to make him look mature, perhaps because he still suffers from adolescent acne. He's 20.

He sits in a chair and picks up a telephone so he can talk to the reporter on the other side of the glass divider. His voice is soft. His answers are terse.

How are they treating you here?

"It's all right," he says. "Not too bad."

He reads, plays cards, keeps mostly to himself, he says. He takes his medicine most of the time -- at least when he remembers to wake up early enough to get it.

Asked why he robbed the bank, he looks down, rubs his left hand over his eyes.

"It seemed like my world was falling apart," he says softly. "I thought if I got the money to do what I needed to do, I could go back to college and live a normal life."

What did you need to do?

"I don't want to say it out loud here," he whispers. "I basically had enough of feeling people were talking about me all the time and I decided to rob that bank."

Why did you try to operate on yourself?

"I just felt that because of the problem, I needed to fix it. I know it sounds crazy."

Are you mentally ill?

"I got to the point where I was so obsessed with my problem that I let it eat at me," he says. "I was mentally ill." He pauses. "I think I'm fine now."

Was his sentence just?

He shakes his head no. "I think I should have got some time because I did something wrong," he says, "but I think I got too much time. Two years was the minimum. I think I should get that. But I definitely should get some time."

Are you worried about the time you're facing for counterfeiting?

"Yes," he says. "Because with me having paranoid schizophrenia, every day is like 20 days, you know?"

Why is every day like 20 days?

"Because you think people are talking about you," he says.