From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:
FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman’s Beverly Hills office at around five o’clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better.”
They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naïvely seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. “He had the old power idea of hypnotism,” Freeman said. “He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do.”
Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis—and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt “made a favorable impression” on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.
“He was a good pupil,” Freeman said. “This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn’t fight hypnosis. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence.” While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no “deep dark secrets,” he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a “deep antipathy to negroes.”
Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist “didn’t know nothing about hypnosis.” He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.
Far Outliers 