UNITED STATES
Irish Central
May 17, 2020
By Shane O’Brien
Robert Kolker’s ‘Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family’ is an account of the Galvin family, where six out of ten sons were diagnosed as schizophrenic.
A new biography tells the tragic tale of an American family thought to be one of the most disturbed families in American history.
‘Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family’ is an account of the Galvin family in Colorado Springs where six out of ten sons were diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Robert Kolker’s in-depth study examines how one son murdered his wife, one son raped his sister, and how one son tortured a cat to death for no reason.
The Galvin family started like many other American families in the 1940s.
An unplanned pregnancy forced Donald Galvin Sr. to marry Mimi Blayney in a shotgun wedding in Mexico in 1944.
Donald was about to shipped out to the South Pacific to fight in the US Navy during the Second World War and the couple’s story was not unlike many other wartime couples who had to rush marriages in order to avoid the stigma and dishonor that accompanied unmarried pregnancies.
Little did they know that their first-born son, Donald Jr., would be the first of 12 children.
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