Elizabeth Wiltsee, in a movie still from 1969 while a student at Stanford, lived her out her final days homeless on the streets of Watsonville. Wiltsee is the subject of a new documentary that premiers Saturday in San Jose.

Elizabeth Wiltsee was a familiar face around Watsonville from 1994 to 1999, though few people knew her name. Living on the streets, her mental illness was out in the open for everyone to see. She scared the nuns at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, where she slept at night.

But even fewer people knew, or could have guessed about Wiltsee, that she taught herself to read ancient Greek and Mandarin at age 10, once scored a perfect 1600 on her SATs, and graduated from Stanford University with honors.

Wiltsee’s life and mysterious disappearance is the subject of a new documentary, “The Dust of Words,” a sensitive portrait of brilliance and madness that premieres this weekend in San Jose at the Cinequest Film Festival.

Palo Alto filmmaker Bill Rose interviews church members and Watsonville figures like City Councilman Greg Caput. He also tracks down people from Wiltsee’s past over the hour-long film, including family members and her English professor, who vividly remembers Wiltsee.

“Her keenness of word and spirit, her skepticism, her luminous smile — you had to be grateful for such a student, even among a wonderful class at the climax of the 1960s,” Stanford professor John Felstiner recalls.

After graduation, the world could have been her oyster, but she shunned what she called the fancy life and chose to live on the fringes of society; she wanted to be completely unencumbered, as free as possible, said Rose.

Rose’s film includes letters and writings, read by an actress in a series of voiceovers. Even in her early 20s, writing on themes of loneliness and detachment, she was already showing signs of being stuck in her own head.

All during the 1980s, Liz had been writing political plays, offering them to theater companies around the country, keeping each rejection letter. Even the onset of mental illness could not deter her fiercely independent spirit, Rose said.

Gradually, she was beset by mental illness, experiencing voices and the feeling the world was spying on her. Voices would sometimes tell her to commit suicide.

Her family members believed she was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. They encouraged Wiltsee to get psychiatric treatment, but because of state laws, they could not force her.

She arrived in Watsonville in about 1994 and took a spare room in a small house. Her landlady kicked her out because of erratic behavior.

Parishoner Toni Breese noticed Wiltsee was sleeping in the portico of the elementary school next to the church.

“I started putting yogurt and fruit out in the morning,” Breese recalled.

Blonde and petite, Wiltsee spent her days reading in the library and wandering around town with her arms full of plastic bags. She ate at Loaves and Fishes, the soup kitchen, sitting apart and refusing other charity.

Wiltsee was so anti-social that some thought she was a mute. But occasional outbursts were anything but that.

“The first time she blasted me in plain English, I knew she wasn’t a mute,” Breese said.

A church administrator interviewed in the film recalls the pastor being afraid of Wiltsee, who would yell at him, red in the face, calling him the devil.

“She challenged everybody’s faith,” Breese said. “There were devout Christians who responded to her with fear. Those who did not respond the way they wished to respond came away feeling absolutely horrible.”

One St. Patrick’s priest, Patrick Dooling, describes onscreen his personal evolution in dealing with mental illness. Wiltsee’s illness, he concludes, is one of those imponderables, like trying to understand why a decent God allows people to suffer so tremendously.

“The point is, really, to be compassionate — not to understand the whole thing,” Dooling says.

And despite Wiltsee’s erratic behavior, many people in Watsonville indeed deemed her condition worthy, not of scorn, but of compassion, Rose said.

The church left bathroom doors open on cold nights. Parishioners bought her a new pair of tennis shoes.

Perhaps no one had gained Wiltsee’s trust more than Walter Washington of Loaves and Fishes. Washington also volunteered giving out coffee and doughnuts at Sunday mass and started inviting Wiltsee into the kitchen.

On one occasion, Washington started reciting an Emily Dickenson poem he’d always liked. Wiltsee interrupted and finished the remainder of the poem.

Columnist Steve Bankhead would sometimes see Wiltsee at a Little League field, sitting alone and “smiling serenely at the empty diamond.” Bankhead dubbed her “The Smiling Lady.”

Wiltsee started attending the 8 a.m. mass. When asked what she was doing on the streets, she would say that she loved living outdoors.

Just before her brother Chris Wiltsee came to visit in July 1999, she disappeared.

Her remains were discovered six months later in Pacheco State Park. She had apparently walked along Highway 152 for 60 miles after reportedly telling a fellow homeless woman: “I’m going home.”

Chris Wiltsee stops well short of calling her death a suicide, but says his sister was probably looking for peace in her final days.

“I think that she was happy knowing that she was not going to be around much longer,” he said. “(For her) it was just walking off into the wilderness, stop eating and pass on in that way.”

What led her to Watsonville of all places remains a mystery. But some said she never would have received the same amount of care had she lived in San Francisco or San Jose.

When the family discovered that Wiltsee left behind about $7,500 in an IRA account, they donated $2,500 to Loaves and Fishes and the rest to the Watsonville library. When the new library opens up in April, it will feature a small study room with a memorial plaque bearing Wiltsee’s name. The family has said they would fly out from the East Coast to attend the opening.

Library director Carol Heitzig said the study room is a fitting memorial.

“It probably would have appealed to someone like Elizabeth,” Heitzig said. “She was a quiet person and she would’ve enjoyed it. We were all fond of her.”

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*Photo of Wiltsee courtesy of Bill Siska, photo of church courtesy of Bill Rose*

(Published in 2/26/08 edition)

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