Latest news with #Laybourne
NZ Herald
21-07-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Advice: Should I see a sex therapist? I don't know how to satisfy my wife
This is such an interesting question, and must be the bread and butter of psychosexual therapists. As you say, you're in a rut. It's not a drought (you can both have sex if you desire to, even if it's unsatisfying) but it's gone off the boil and you're blaming yourself for the fact that when you make love, she knows what's coming next – and it's not her. I'm sure many couples will relate to your letter on a deep level. Let's face it: in a relationship that lasts more than a few months, or even years, sex can stop being the glue that sticks you together. As the decades pass, it can stop being the solvent that sunders you apart, too. To your great credit (you don't say how long you've been together), you have acknowledged the problem and want to tackle it. Or you want your partner to, it's not clear. Whatever, you want to get your sex life done, as if it's Brexit, or smashing the gangs. It may be more complicated than that. Or, indeed, more simple. It could be that you're just not that into each other. As I've said before, there is nothing so capricious as Cupid. We can have fantastic sex with people we despise and terrible sex with people we adore. Chemistry, innit. This is where, I suppose, stimulants and sex toys can play a role to bridge the animal attraction gap. I've deployed the experts to answer, and useful websites are at the end. Sophie Laybourne, a relationship therapist, says: 'An unsatisfying sexual experience is the best predictor of future unsatisfying ones, unless you take stock – because fearing that things will go wrong generally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in this particular department.' She suggests that old favourite – self-focus exercises: cuddling, soapy showers, stroking. 'They might then move on to graded sensate focus exercises, where penetrative sex is initially taken off the table and the hectic pursuit of orgasm replaced by no-pressure touching and stroking of different parts of the body,' she says. Sexual desire in the female is not 'uni-directional', and can be turned off by small things. Dirty sheets, even a bad haircut, can send a woman toppling backwards down the old 'Ladder of Desire'. To make sure you're on the same rung, you need to communicate. It's not always a simple case of, 'Go and brush your teeth, darling'; it's to do with accelerators and brakes too, she says. Accelerators can be a quiet dinner together where you ask her questions, laugh at her jokes, and listen. A brake is expecting her to be up for it when your mother-in-law is staying, children apt to break in at any moment and the dog barking. You know. Laybourne explains: 'Most women, as [American sex educator Emily] Nagoski points out, experience what's known as 'responsive desire', which means that they are not like three-day eventers waiting for the off but more likely to experience desire in response to something like, say, a fun night out with a man who asks them lots of questions about themselves and displays a side-splitting sense of humour.' It was the turn of the married therapists David and Ruth Kern next. 'The role of a sex therapist is to understand and work through various areas of a couple's life, to pinpoint where the block is and then help the couple work through this – often with the use of exercises, although this is not effective without the deeper psychological work first,' they say. 'Before any real work can start, it's important to rule out any underlying medical/biological problems that may affect sexual connections. If there are no underlying issues, then there is a need to look at and understand the psychological aspect to this problem' – stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and, of course, loss of attraction. They dig deeper, too. This blockage could track back to your childhood, which is father to your adult attitudes to sex and relationships. 'A lot of psychological blockages to sexual connection can be due to loss of control: during orgasm, the body and mind have to completely let go to achieve climax. Losing control can be scary and feel vulnerable, thus 'not letting go'. It's understanding the deeper reasons for this that may include negative reinforcement of sex and relationships as a child; sexual abuse in any form; over-smothering from mother as a child; your personal space not being respected, which can lead to intimacy issues later on; or being raised in a family system where you felt unheard, unseen and not given choices.' Ah, the traditional, old-fashioned childhood, then, could be to blame for your shared experience of repression now, and the tendency of many to lie back and think of England for as long as it takes. The Kerns go on: 'With Jim and his partner, it will be good to work through the above points to see if some of their issues lie in those areas. This is about both of them and how they relate to each other sexually; unless there is a medical issue, both partners have a role in why their relationship is where it is. One thing that we do advise is to take sex off the table completely for a month or so. This takes the pressure off and gives some breathing room to talk and discuss what the underlying issues may be for them both.' Back to me. You say you love each other dearly. Have you ever talked about this issue, or is it too painful to acknowledge that you don't click in bed? My instinct is that it is something you can't change – love and sex not always being on the same page – but if you do love each other and want to stay together, that may be more important in the long run than the earth moving every time for you both. Oh yes, websites: to find a therapist working in your area, visit the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists' site: If face-to-face is not important, try for a psychosexual therapist to work with online. Thank you for your letter, Jim – you sound nice and, most importantly, kind.
Boston Globe
23-06-2025
- Boston Globe
She was a quiet bird expert. Then she was called to investigate a murder in Maine.
Advertisement 'What's these houses?' Laybourne asked the detective, her gravelly North Carolina drawl weighing down every syllable. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'They're brooder houses,' he answered. This amused Laybourne. Before the trip, a friend had told her that she was heading to the chicken capital of Maine, and the abundance of poultry infrastructure lent some credence to this quirky bit of trivia. It was a welcome, albeit brief, distraction in otherwise tense territory. At her hotel, Laybourne received a handwritten letter from Peter Culley, the young state prosecutor who'd soon be interrogating her on the witness stand. He apologized for not picking her up personally from the airport; the team was ironing out some last-minute details on the case, he explained. But, he noted, 'I fully expect we'll get to your testimony tomorrow.' Advertisement Culley, a lifelong Mainer who was just a few years out of law school, had plotted an exhaustive case against Henry Andrews, a 35-year-old laborer who stood accused in state court of the brutal murder of Hazel Doak, his elderly former landlord. Laybourne would appear in the penultimate act of the prosecutor's script, the last witness he'd call before closing arguments. Roxie Laybourne examines a specimen in an undated photo. from Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Birds, Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution Some of Laybourne's colleagues at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., considered her boyish. Some found her ornery. Everyone agreed that she was an authority — perhaps the authority — on feathers. Culley hoped that if any embers of doubt were still smoldering in the jury box by the time Laybourne took the stand, she'd extinguish them by offering up scientific analysis showing that feathers recovered from the scene of the crime matched bits of feather that were found on Andrews's clothing at the time he was apprehended. To the best of anyone's knowledge, this 1972 case would mark the first time that feather forensics would be used in a homicide trial. When morning arrived, Laybourne stepped outside and walked over to a small, wooded area near the hotel's parking lot. To her surprise, she spotted some chicken feathers on the ground. On the drive to court, she saw trucks hauling wooden crates, leaving trails of chicken feathers blowing in the wind. Just about anywhere else, it'd be strange to take a walk in the woods and emerge with poultry down stuck to your boots or pants. But in this wedge of eastern Maine, feathers seemed to be everywhere — and that made Laybourne uneasy. 'I didn't know what I had gotten myself in,' she later said. Advertisement F orget blueberries and lobsters; for a short stretch in the mid-20th century, chickens topped the culinary pecking order of Maine. Belfast played an outsized role in the industry, and millions of broilers met their maker in the city's dueling poultry plants. Build an economy on the back of butchered chickens and life will get messy. As Laybourne observed on her first morning in town, the industry's leftovers were everywhere. Some residents had to rake feathers off their lawns and others complained of a foul stench that would drift through their yards. Most unappetizing was the steady stream of putrefied byproduct that flowed out of the processing plants and into Penobscot Bay. The bloody, fatty industrial runoff caked the shoreline and congealed into a blanket that bobbed atop the water. At low tide, a rust-colored stain could be seen on the rocks and sand, earning Belfast the unfortunate nickname 'the City with a Bathtub Ring.' A writer for Newsweek wrote about how ritzy New Yorkers had taken to calling Belfast 'Schmaltzport,' a reference to the Yiddish term for chicken fat. Chickens marked a hard-won path to prosperity for a city that had endured its share of booms and busts. To showcase the local industry's might, Belfast started hosting Advertisement Satiating thousands of New Englanders sweltering in the July heat wasn't easy, but the broiler festival rarely left guests hungry. A Popular Mechanics reporter once marveled at the scale and efficiency of the operation: 'During the two-days of the festival, a 130-man crew works in three shifts to prepare 13 tons of Maine broilers over charcoal-fed barbecue pits totaling 300 feet in length,' he wrote. 'The birds, brown and hot, are then put on a 100-foot conveyor belt and carried directly from the pits to the serving tables.' It was American exceptionalism at the local level — and fun for the entire family. On the weekend of July 17, 1971, however, the celebration soured. That's when, according to prosecutors, Henry Andrews blew into town on Friday with two friends who were ready to party. Drinks flowed early and the first place Andrews took his buddies was a sturdy white farmhouse a mile outside of town. He had rented a room there a few years earlier while clearing trees on the surrounding property. During the impromptu visit, Andrews found Hazel Doak, a 71-year-old widow who had lived there for more than 20 years. She was Andrews's landlord during his time in town and the relationship was allegedly rocky. Doak didn't appreciate Andrews showing up unannounced that Friday: After a tense exchange, she asked the two men accompanying Andrews to remove him from her property and get lost. They complied, shook off the uncomfortable start to the weekend, and made their way into town for dinner and a night of drinking. Around 1:45 a.m., an inebriated Andrews reportedly ditched his pals and teetered over to the Main Street taxi stand, where, through droopy eyes and slurred words, he asked for a ride back to the Doak farm. The trip lasted fewer than 10 minutes and cost a buck. The driver peeled away into the night, leaving Andrews swaying under the influence at the edge of the driveway. Advertisement At 10:30 the next morning, Doak's longtime friend Edith Ladd pulled up to the house. The two women had spoken on the phone the previous night and made plans to head over to the broiler festival together. Ladd went to the back entrance that she typically used and found it still latched shut. She went around to the front of the house, where the door swung wide open. Inside, she found Doak's lifeless body heaped on a bed, clad in nothing but a nightgown. White and tan feathers dangled from her hair, specked her shoulders, and clogged her mouth, throat, and nostrils. Horrified, Ladd looked down and found feathers stuck to the floor, forming a trail that went from the bedroom down the hall and toward the dining room. Laybourne examining a feather at the Smithsonian. from Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Birds, Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution Ladd called the police and huddled in her car with her daughter, grandson, and other family members, who had been waiting patiently to get to the festival. When the officers arrived, they followed the trail of feathers downstairs and found the cellar door cracked open. The best they could surmise, someone had grabbed Doak's pillow and smothered her with such force that it burst the pillow open and sent feathers everywhere, including onto the murderer. Whoever it was then fled the property and dashed off into the woods. Leads came in quick and signs pointed to Andrews, who was nowhere to be found. Near the end of the weekend, a soaking-wet Andrews walked into the Belfast Police Station and, according to police testimony, allegedly declared, 'I came to give myself up.' Advertisement The officer on duty later testified that he didn't know what Andrews was giving himself up for and he didn't bother asking. Instead, the officer sold Andrews a pack of cigarettes, gave him a box of matches, and arranged a ride over to the sheriff's department, figuring the guy got stuck in the weekend rainstorms and could use a warm meal. The sheriffs on duty knew exactly who Andrews was and what he was wanted for. They placed him under arrest and collected his clothes — and the feathers that were stuck to them. Police sent several bags of evidence to the FBI for careful analysis at the bureau's crime lab in Washington, D.C. There was head hair and pubic hair, a pack of cigarettes, four latent fingerprints, pillowcases, bed sheets, one US dollar, and nearly every piece of clothing Andrews had with him when he was arrested: boots, belt, shirt, socks, trousers, and pajama pants. Knowing the murder weapon was a pillow, the agents in Washington understood that the feathers stuck to his clothes might be a key piece of trace evidence, but they had no clue how to analyze them in any meaningful way. Fortunately, they had heard all about L aybourne's investigatory superpower was an ability to take a tiny fragment of feather, look at it under her microscope, and identify the type of bird from which it came. She reached her conclusions primarily by analyzing the shape and patterns of structures called barbules that are invisible to the naked eye. It didn't matter if the piece of feather looked like pocket lint that had been whipped around a blender — Laybourne almost always determined its avian owner. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only person in the world who possessed this unusual, self-taught skill set, which would become the foundation of a new field called forensic ornithology. Laybourne began her career in the 1930s as a taxidermist at a small museum in her native North Carolina. During World War II, she landed at the Smithsonian, where she stuck with taxidermy for a few years and then started helping manage the museum's massive bird collection on behalf of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It was ornithological grunt work — satisfying but not always stimulating. But one fall day in 1960, her boss asked her to have a look at some mutilated bird remains that had been removed from the engines of an Eastern Air Lines plane that struck a flock of birds while taking off from Logan International Airport. Laybourne at work in the Smithsonian in an undated photo. from Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Birds, Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution Her life was never the same. She spent thousands of hours holed up in back rooms of the museum, analyzing chopped up bird bits on behalf of the FAA, the US Air Force, airlines, and engine makers. Knowing what kind of birds were getting hit most frequently —and how much they weighed — was key to informing new safety and engineering standards. In the absence of species and weight data, 'the technical community was left with solving a problem it could not define,' a colonel in the Air Force told Laybourne. But transferring her techniques to violent crimes and testifying in a murder trial was uncharted territory for everyone involved. It was anyone's guess as to whether this emerging branch of forensic science and its sole practitioner would be able to withstand the scrutiny of aggressive defense attorneys, dispassionate judges, and uninformed jurors. Before heading to Maine, Laybourne analyzed and reanalyzed the feathers collected from Andrews's clothing. Unfettered access to the Smithsonian's bird collection meant that she could compare the evidence against exotic reference specimens from some of the most distant corners of the world, be it a Blyth's hornbill from Papua New Guinea or a harpy eagle from the Amazon. Pillows aren't typically filled with the feathers of rare birds, though, and Laybourne didn't need to dig deep for this case: Of the 11 pieces of evidence provided to her for analysis, 10 of them contained traces of duck, goose, and/or chicken feathers, a common mixture in commercial products. In Laybourne's expert opinion, the feathers plucked from Andrews's socks, boots, and pants matched the mix of feathers in the pillow that was pinned over Doak's face as she struggled to fill her lungs one last time. For all of her scientific expertise, Laybourne was unpolished and unpracticed when it came to criminal proceedings. She didn't know what to expect when she entered the courthouse, and that morning's realization that chicken feathers sometimes seemed to rain from the sky in Belfast didn't help soothe her nerves. The morning bustle inside the small courthouse was a sharp departure from the employee-only corridors of the museum, where biologists talked in hushed tones and the birds never made a peep. After a few awkward minutes of hanging around, waiting for the trial to get underway, Laybourne struck up a conversation with a gentleman who said he was a birder and wanted to know more about her work. A member of Culley's team quickly interrupted to inform Laybourne that she was actually speaking with Andrews's attorney. 'I couldn't have gotten in a bigger mess,' Laybourne later said. Despite the bumpy start to the morning, Laybourne delivered the goods once she was on the stand. Sensitive to the limitations of her science, she didn't overstate her findings or attempt to stretch her analysis to favor the prosecution. She explained that she had performed 'thousands of feather match-ups' in the past. The feather fragments collected from Andrews's clothes, she said, had similar characteristics as the ones removed from the crime scene. 'As far as I could tell,' Laybourne told the judge and jury, trying her best to cut through the scientific jargon and get to the point, 'they look like they could have come from the same source.' The testimony went just as Culley had planned. Laybourne returned to Washington and the State of Maine rested its case, handing the floor over to Andrews's team. Andrews had pleaded not guilty/not guilty by insanity. Laybourne at the Smithsonian in 1992 with the bird collection. from Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Birds, Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution Facing what looked to be a mountain of evidence, Andrews's attorney told the court that he would prove the murder was 'brought about by insanity.' According to news reporting of the time, jurors heard about an occasion when Andrews chopped down his brother's bedroom door with an ax while sleepwalking and about another instance in which he allegedly choked a 19-year-old. Andrews's own mother took the stand, testifying that her son exhibited disturbing behavior from a young age. When he was 3, she said, 'He changed from a normal, pleasant child to a highly emotional child' who would set the grass on fire and experience extreme mood swings. His troubles worsened after he suffered a head injury in a motorcycle crash as a teenager. He was in and out of hospitals with a series of mental health episodes, his mother testified, even confessing to the jury that she wished her son had never been discharged from the first ward where he was sent after the accident. After establishing his client as a man plagued by many demons, the defense attorney attempted to poke holes in the case by taking aim at Laybourne. He told the jury that there was no evidence placing Andrews at the scene of the crime. The taxi driver never saw Andrews enter the house, and nobody witnessed him leaving. The state's whole case rested on some newfangled field of feather identification, which the attorney derided as a 'weak basis' on which to convict a man of murder. The jury entered deliberation on a Saturday. The options were not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity, or guilty. After only 2½ hours behind closed doors, the jurors emerged with a unanimous decision: not guilty. The ruling stunned many people, including Andrews's own attorney. Culley, the prosecutor, recalls the defense attorney walking over and asking, 'What just happened?' Fifty years later, Culley said he still considered it a baffling injustice. It had nothing to do with Laybourne, he said. Her testimony was sound and her feather identifications accurate. All Laybourne could do was focus her talents on the next case and continue following the science. B y the time the jury delivered its verdict in Maine, Laybourne was already back in her corner of the Smithsonian, working up a report on her next case and preparing to testify again. This time, detectives in Utah had found feathers in the house of a woman who had been bludgeoned to death, allegedly by a man wearing a down jacket that tore during the altercation. If Laybourne could match the feathers at the scene to those in the jacket, that would be key evidence for the prosecution. As curious as her career path had been, Laybourne never intended or expected to be working at the intersection of ornithology and homicide. 'I didn't like doing crimes of violence,' she later recalled. But she stuck with it and plodded deeper into criminal affairs out of a sense of duty, knowing full well that law enforcement didn't have any other feather experts in their corner. "The Feather Detective" by Chris Sweeney. Handout In the fall of 1972, she boarded a flight for Salt Lake City, ready to present evidence in a case against another accused murderer. At some point during the trip, she must have wondered what she was getting herself into. It was a question she found herself pondering frequently as her caseload evolved. How had it come this far? How did a Southern girl with a talent for taxidermy end up at one of the most renowned museums in the world, investigating assorted tragedies? In the months, years, and decades that followed that first bitter murder trial in Maine, Laybourne, who died in 2003, transformed her obscure niche into a truly consequential field of science. Her findings helped successfully prosecute murderers, poachers, and even a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, who tarred and feathered a civil rights activist. She investigated several more tragic airplane crashes caused by birds, working closely with the aviation industry and the Air Force to bird-proof their planes and develop new safety standards. And she trained a generation of proteges in forensic ornithology, forever changing our understanding of birds — and the feathers they leave behind. Chris Sweeney is a journalist based in Boston. This story was excerpted from by Chris Sweeney. Copyright © 2025 by Chris Sweeney. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Send comments to magazine@ Learn More: Chris Sweeney will appear in conversation with Globe editor Lisa Weidenfeld on July 23 at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith. To register and for more information, visit
