The Killing of Oliver Claude Devereaux

6 min readOct 22, 2020

My Face Off With OCD

In the fall of 1996, Dexter Braff confessed to the killing of Oscar Claude Devereaux. However Deveraux was subsequently found to be very much alive. The following are excerpts from interviews conducted by the lead investigator assigned to the case to determine what actually happened.

“My name is Oliver Claude Deveraux.

And I live to torture people.

You may know me by my initials — OCD — which was boorishly changed to stand for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As if turning my name into a clinical word jumble would somehow make me less real. Less formidable.

Pathetic.

Oh, I’m real.

And stealthy.

I worm my way into people’s minds and inflict the pain and panic of the damned. And then pile it on with hopelessness and shame, taking all the fight out of them.

I’m Lucifer, baby.

“I first met Oliver in my early twenties.

Well, ‘met’ isn’t quite the right word. Because he lived entirely inside my head; a squatter that took up residence just to fuck with me.

I’m quite particular in selecting whose life to ruin. You might even say I’m a bit obsessive about it. Ha!

Anyway, Dexter was the perfect victim.

Take the simple act of leaving his apartment. Just watching him linger outside the door, I could practically hear the conversation taking place in his mind.

“Did I turn off the lights?”

“I think so.”

“How about the stove??

“I know I didn’t use it this morning, but still…”

“I should probably check.”

Yeah, he’d do. He’d do just fine.

At that point, it was just garden variety anxiety. Quirky, but a minor inconvenience.

But I knew it wouldn’t take much to break him completely and paralyze him with terror.

And I knew right where to start.

Running.

Turning the thing that gave him peace into a war with phantoms.

It kind of just creeped up on me.

After a run, I had to position my running shoes so they were perfectly parallel, spaced about an inch apart, laces carefully crossed, one over the other, forming an equally perfect “X”. And I mean, perfect.

I agonized over every detail. Nudging a shoe a smidge to the left; a lace to the right. I felt compelled to return again and again to make double-triple-quadruple sure that every element was in place.

Because if I didn’t, panic would rise up to choke me.

And something catastrophic would happen.

Voices of reason shrieked with pained exasperation to be heard, to ignore such hysterics.

But the voices were no match against my runaway psyche.

The shoes were just the beginning.

For a time, I convinced him that every pin, every shard of glass, every stray staple, in fact any sharp object he would come across would magically leap up off the ground, burrow its way through his clothing, and turn him into a eunuch.

God. I was magnificent.

I didn’t need a doctor to put a label on it.

After all, I was a psych major in college (yeah, I know, irony).

Investigator note:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a common, chronic, and long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (obsessions) and/or behaviors (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over. These symptoms can interfere with all aspects of life, such as work, school, and personal relationships.

At the urging of my brother, I began to see a therapist. But all she really had for me were drugs.

And I didn’t want to be one of “those” people.

I was strong, damn it.

I would not surrender to drugs.

Idiot!

I’m all chemicals.

But pride kept Dexter from even considering his best weapon against me.

You don’t bring knives to a gun fight. And you don’t bring therapy alone to a chemical fight.

Now, you can bore me to death with endless rounds of therapy.

But I’m one patient prick.

Besides, those sessions can be a laugh riot.

Whatever.

I still had one more excruciating thought noose to wrap around his neck.

One of the reasons patients with OCD are slow to seek treatment is the sheer embarrassment of verbalizing the crazy.

Which brings me to my own private Voldemort — the obsession of which I could not speak.

So, let’s just say I became a bit too familiar with a Preparation brought to you by the letter H.

Yeah, snicker if you must. I might too.

But after a painful bout that lasted several weeks, a new obsession was born.

I lived in constant, irrational, and overwrought fear of them returning. I checked endlessly. Multiple times a day, every day, to try and convince myself that what wasn’t there, wasn’t there.

And that’s what made the obsession so impeccably cruel — impervious to checking (just because you can’t feel it, doesn’t mean it isn’t just out of reach), and oh so humiliating.

When I think about it, that was my crowning achievement.

And my ultimate undoing.

I was desperate, suffocating in solitary.

It affected my work. My family. My ability to be present with my two young girls. It was always there, pinging and pricking and probing my brain like the drip, drip, drip of water torture. In every human interaction, I heard the snickering of silent whispers mocking my impersonation of normalcy.

I had to do something.

Anything.

So, for the second time, I sought out a therapist.

It was almost cute.

He still had hope.

Right on cue, she recommended drugs.

And of course, I resisted.

So, she went to plan B — cognitive behavioral therapy. I wrote out and recited aloud, in painful detail, how I felt during an episode — every thought, feeling, and physical manifestation — the express purpose of which was to simulate a crisis so that I could learn coping strategies.

Fun, right?

It was unbearable.

CBT? Yeah, psych-speak for cognitive behavioral therapy. But to the patient? Probably a lot more like the urban definition (Feeling gutsy? Google it).

15 plus years into these episodes of misery, I was at DEFCON 1, an endless shitstorm staring me in the face.

Time to bring out the heavy artillery.

Drugs.

Never in a million years did I think he would actually go through with it.

But I was far from done. I know how difficult it is to find a medication that works.

Plus, I know that the sexual side effects of those SRIs are more than enough to break the resolve of even the most committed patient. I could always count on my associate, L. B. Doe, to back me up if I needed it.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Psychiatrists never really know how these drugs will interact with your blood chemistry. The most precise they’ll get is ‘Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you experience the side-effects. Sometimes you don’t’.

At best, they’re playing an educated guessing game.

And because it can take up to six weeks for the effects to kick in, it’s also a waiting game.

We tried Prozac.

Nothing.

Next up was Wellbutrin.

Didn’t even make it six weeks. Those side effects? Let’s say I wasn’t ready to become a born-again virgin.

Then we went a different way.

My shrink recalled an old school drug called Anafranil that was effective in treating OCD. But — and there’s always a but — for many, the side-effects were intolerable.

Super.

Another thing to obsess about.

I started in early October. Three or four weeks in, again nothing. But at least no side-effects.

I remember what happened next with extraordinary clarity.

Thanksgiving. Six or so weeks in. I’m reading the newspaper. And suddenly it hits me.

My mind is at rest. No dueling conversations. No panic. No angst.

No, well, nothing.

One minute, Oliver Claude Devereaux is my deviantly devoted tormentor. And the next, decimated.

Kaput.

Dead.

Like dead dead.

Armed with this nondescript yellow pill, I finally nailed the bastard.

That was nearly 25 years ago, and the SOB remains dead and buried.

Now, if I think about him at all, he no longer casts the long shadow of Oliver Claude Deveraux.

He’s just Ollie.

I’m gonna miss Dexter, but I’ll be just fine.

I may be dead to him, but not to others.

There are plenty more lives I can ruin out there.

You haven’t heard the last of Oliver Claude Deveraux.

In fact,

May I introduce myself?

The Killing of Oliver Claude Devereaux

Written by Dexter Braff