We Are All Mad Here

Romancing the Treasury turned into a history-altering move for Katherine Magrini and her son Gordon Todd Skinner

Kathy Magrini commanded her home and business from a round dining table piled with mail and packages. Her days began with Pomeranians bouncing about her ankles like hedgehogs. In her mid-seventies, she employed a southern belle routine with callers and the hired help, but her friends and family knew better.

The moment you stepped inside her house, you sensed yourself in a columned space, a model of elegance. Ornately wrought floor lamps beamed near the stairwell; large landscape paintings adorned most walls. The furniture, plateware, cabinetry, and carpets all sparkled with American refinement. Precious metals shone throughout. The hallway display cabinets were heavy with silver and glass menageries: a tussy-mussie, tea infusers, salt spoons, and other rarities, all assigned special positions. In the far corner of the top shelf of a cabinet stood a gold chalice and ciborium from the 1600s.

Before she becameMrs. Magrini, Katherine Skinner was briefly married to William Imhoff (pictured above)

Several, including her son Todd Skinner, warned me about “Attila” or “the old battle-axe,” saying she was prone to blind fury, and that I, of all people, ought to be extra cautious. She held a particular disdain for journalists ever since that reporter from Rolling Stone showed up and wrote such an ugly article about her boy. It took me two years of seeking an audience with her before one was granted.

“She is the sweetest, little ol’ church lady you could imagine,” Magrini’s nephew once said to me on the phone, “And she wouldn’t have ever even known anything about LSD if her son hadn’t been involved with it.”

In the same call, he said he would “go Godfather” on me if my writing upset his auntie (a comment for which he later apologized).

Katherine and her father, Marshall “Gramps” Jackson.

Listen Here, Mister

Magrini sat waiting for me at her table, her face crimson and her hair styled in a dyed auburn bob. Wearing a butterfly-patterned mumu, she looked defiantly overweight and wore a frown like a thunderstorm. She told me she married a king-sized man named Gordon Henry Skinner in 1961 and bore him a son, Todd, in 1964. Her husband provoked her too much.

“A man may be the head of the household, but it’s the woman who turns his head,” she explained. In her husband’s case, she would eventually twist his head right off in a divorce.

Magrini demanded to know what sort of book I was writing, and what I thought about her son. I told her that Todd has an exceptional mind for mathematics, but that I hadn’t really decided what my project would entail. We both knew full well what it would entail.

“Yes, well he is very bright,” she said in a firm voice, “but you really have to be careful if you’re going to write about this. It’s a journey into madness, is what it is.”

She lowered her forehead at me and peered at me through ferocious blue eyes.

I admitted that I planned to write about the kidnapping, and the drugs, and the people involved. She ranted about Todd’s ex-wives so that it was unclear to me which displeased her more: Skinner’s first wife, Kelly, or third, Krystle. But in her opinion, it was the federal government that her son should have avoided.

“I told him Don’t you piss off the government,” she said in a loud, shrill voice, “Or it’s gonna be all over for you, mister.”

Kathy had a complicated relationship with federal agencies. They put away her son, after all, but she was the one who courted them in the first place.

Guts and Gumption

When Kathy decided to exorcise Gordon Henry from her life, it wasn’t an easy separation¹. She alleged physical and emotional abuse (as have his other exes) and yet she shared a son with him. The two first divorced in 1965, then remarried in 1970. Although he was a young child during this period, Todd Skinner didn’t like the constant arguments, and he even suggested to them they shouldn’t live together anymore. Kathy and Gordon Henry split up again in 1972, only to begin seeing each other episodically after that. Eventually, she’d had enough. In 1976, Kathy married the Rev. Dr. William Imhoff, a Christian minister who repossessed cars on the weekend. She doesn’t recall that marriage lasting more than a year before she figured it wouldn’t work out.

As she grew evermore independent of the men in her life, Kathy’s business acumen advanced across the board. She zigzagged across the country to negotiate deals. She attacked competitors. Then she decided she wanted to fully own the spring manufacturing company that she managed, so she finagled a leveraged buyout of the company, using $500.00 of her own money and a loan against the fancy furniture and art in her home and business (a friend of hers, Henry Kravis, would later perfect the art of leveraged buyouts). The checkmate paid off, and the doors of Tulsa’s high society swung open.

Paid subscribers, continue below where you’ll learn the details about Kathy’s marriage to Treasury special agent Gary Magrini, and the dramatic stand-off between FBI agents during the New Year’s Eve party. Subscribers will also see exclusive photos of the interior of the Magrini home, which includes shots detailing curious objects, along with locations where many scenes from The Psychonaut Files unfold.