17 Jan In 1963, Her Disapproving Parents Sent Her To A Mental Institution, 44 Years Later She Got Her Revenge

You don’t need to have read One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to know that mental institutions in the ’60s weren’t happy places. Built to inhabit those who didn’t conform to the strict rules of society at the time, mental institutes were a mix of underperforming schoolchildren, truanting teens, and anarchic adults – most of whom were not mentally deficient in the slightest, but simply those who went against “the system”.

One of those patients was 19-year-old Julie Mannix. The daughter of extremely wealthy parents – her father, Daniel P. Mannix, wrote the book the Fox and the Hound which was later adapted by Disney for the screen – the young debutante from Philadelphia had her life mapped out for her.

Her parent’s expected their beautiful blonde daughter to marry a rich man, but instead, she fell “madly” in love with a young Jewish boy from the Bronx in New York City, called Frank von Zernceck. But the 23-year-old did not meet the approval of her parents.

To add further scandal, during a trip to the family gynecologist it was discovered that the teen was pregnant. Rather than discuss the situation with Julie, the doctor went directly to her parents who were horrified by the news that their unmarried daughter was pregnant with the child of a boy they thought unworthy.

Not only that, but it later transpired that Frank was married. “Just like that, the life I’d known suddenly came to a halt,” Julie recalls.

Concerned about how the story would affect the family’s reputation, Julie’s parents devised a drastic plan to deter any unfavorable rumors from surfacing. Diagnosing their daughter as “severely depressed” they committed her to a psychiatric facility where they planned for her to have a secret abortion.

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