ShareThisCharles Turner Harrison has been institutionalized since putting a 9mm pistol to the back of his mother's head in 1984, pulling the trigger and then telling police he thought he could freeze her and revive her at will.
In the bedroom of their home, police found an automatic rifle, seven live hand grenades and a safe with warnings that read "Explosives" "Armed" "Radiation Hazard" and "Do Not Tilt."
Now state mental health officials say it may be time to discharge Harrison, who is on a 14-day furlough at a supervised residential group home near Nashville.
Officials say they plan to release him if that goes well, though state prosecutors and perhaps the U.S. Secret Service may have a say in that since he once threatened to "waste the Holy Father" and wrote threatening letters to Nancy Reagan in the 1980s.
"The state respectfully submits that this defendant should not be released into the community unless it can be shown that he no longer represents a danger to himself or others," state prosecutor Thomas Henderson said in court papers. A hearing has been set later this month.
Harrison, now 63, was in the news even before Jan. 31, 1984, the day he shot his 65-year-old mother, Frances, as she prepared to take her mother to dinner. He had threatened her with a shotgun four years earlier at a mental-health center.
Family members told authorities that Harrison had delusions and suffered from a mental illness since 1972, but often refused to take his medication.
In 1981, soon after Pope John Paul II was wounded in Rome by a gunman, Harrison showed up at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Central, brandishing a 12-gauge shotgun and threatening "to waste the Holy Father" to prove that prayer was not effective. He was held under a temporary emergency commitment, but no charges were filed.
The FBI investigated him in 1983 when he placed a strangely coded newspaper ad referring to capital punishment legislation introduced by then-Rep. Don Sundquist.
Three years after his mother's death, Harrison was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to the Tennessee Department of Mental Health.
In 1993, he wrote an eight-page article on the threat of portable nuclear weapons that was published by Military Review, a bimonthly publication of the U.S. Army, which said he was a commercial pilot and member of the American Mensa Society.
The article soon attracted national publicity, not so much for its thorough research, charts and footnotes as for the fact that its author was a patient in a mental institution.
(Lawrence Buser is a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.)
