Date: Sunday, November 7, 1993
Section: METRO
Page: 29
By Judy Rakowsky, Globe Staff
When Dr. Linda R. Goudey decided to cancel a Caribbean
scuba diving cruise five weeks ago, she knew it would mean forfeiting
a week in the sun, but she thought it might save her life. It did
not.
The decision to cancel came after Goudey, a Stoneham
obstetrician and gynecologist, had a premonition that if she went
on the trip she would die, said her former husband, Clifford Goudey.
On Oct. 4, four days after Goudey told a few people
close to her about the haunting dream in which she died in her car,
she was found dead in her Saab, apparently strangled. The car was
in the parking lot of New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham,
where Goudey worked.
Goudey's death is being investigated as a homicide,
but no conclusive ruling has been made. The medical examiner's office
is still awaiting results of toxicology tests, and no new information
is being released, said Jill Reilly, spokeswoman for the Middlesex
district attorney's office.
However she died, Goudey, known as Lin to her friends,
left behind a kaleidoscope of images as a Joan of Arc of the ob-gyn
world, a devotee of transcendental meditation and an avid animal
rights advocate.
Goudey, who readily warred with insurance companies
on behalf of her patients, also stood by her animal-rights principles
in her own way.
"We were at Vail," recalled a skiing buddy
who asked not to be named, and "she would run up to people
in fur coats and say 'Fluffy, you killed Fluffy.' "
But this slender 43-year-old bubbling with chutzpah
also surprised her friends by what they described as submissive
devotion to her boyfriend, Dr. Timothy D. Stryker, a Stoneham endocrinologist.
Their relationship, said several friends who knew
them both, was controlling and rigid.
As one friend said, "He knew it when she went
to the bathroom."
Goudey died before the Caribbean vacation she had
planned to take with Stryker. But Stryker went ahead, reserving
his own spot for a week on the Aquanot Explorer, based on St. Vincent's
island, the tour company confirmed.
Stryker, though initially identified by law enforcement
sources as a suspect in Goudey's death, has not been charged with
any crime.
Goudey knew several friends had misgivings about
her relationship with Stryker, but she would not hear of ending
it. "She always said, 'It's better to be with someone than
no one,' " said a Goudey confidante who asked not to be named.
"She didn't like being alone."
Stryker has declined a request for an interview.
His lawyer, Martin Leppo, said his client did not see the relationship
as troubled. "They had a very understanding relationship, and
it was a very happy relationship," he said.
He acknowledged that "Dr. Stryker is very structured
in his own life, but she controlled her own time."
Goudey was committed to delivering healthy babies
against the greatest odds, and had a special interest in gestational
diabetes. Many of her patients drove extra miles to come to her
and entrusted her with pregnancies that other doctors had deemed
risky. Goudey did not take a fellowship in high-risk obstetrics,
but through sheer dedication and on-the-job training, she brought
many problem pregnancies to a healthy conclusion.
Although Goudey was devoted to bringing life into
the world often against great odds, Clifford Goudey said she was
adamant about never having children.
But even amid a chaotic schedule, Goudey always had
time for others.
"If you were having a bad day, she would send
you flowers," said a nurse who worked for Goudey regularly
at the hospital, where Goudey had an office next door.
"A nurse on a floor would complain of a headache
and she would run all the way back to her office to get some aspirin,"
said another friend.
Linda Rafuse Goudey was intense and responsible dating
back to her parents' divorce when she was 10 years old. She earned
two degrees before she decided to focus her laser curiosity on medicine.
At the University of Maine, she met Clifford Goudey
when she was an undergraduate zoology major. In 1972, they were
married and spent their honeymoon on a 26-foot sailboat.
At first they lived in Woods Hole, where he was still
in the Coast Guard and she was earning a master's degree in marine
biology. They spent the next 11 years taking turns supporting one
another in graduate studies. She worked as a technologist at Cambridge
Hospital and later at the Red Cross in Boston while he was in graduate
school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After he graduated and became a research engineer
in fisheries and underwater vehicles at MIT, she applied to medical
schools. Harvard, Boston and Tufts universities accepted her, but
the University of Massachusetts at Worcester was an irresistible
bargain.
Dr. Michael Muto, a gynecological oncologist, remembers
Goudey well from their days at medical school and afterward, when
they were residents at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
"She was always in the front row with her hand
in the air," recalled Muto of their medical school days. In
residency, Muto said, "she was a very devoted physician. She
spent hours and hours with her patients."
Dr. Frederic D. Frigoletto Jr., associate director
of the 1983 residency program that Goudey attended at Brigham and
Women's, described Goudey as a ''good resident, a bright, hard-working
and dedicated young lady."
But in the final year of her residency, he said,
"We came close to taking disciplinary action against her"
after some patients wrote letters criticizing her for being "insensitive"
to them. He added, "We had an equal or more number of letters
that said she was the best thing since Skippy peanut butter."
Muto defended Goudey, saying that with the acute sleep deprivation
and workload of the ob-gyn program any resident was bound to seem
insensitive at some point.
Clifford Goudey said he was his wife's biggest fan
throughout the years of medical training. But after 17 years of
marriage, he initiated the divorce that became final in 1990. The
wedge that drove them apart, he said, was her all-consuming devotion
to transcendental meditation.
''It became a very important part of her life,"
he said, "to the exclusion of anything else."
Meditation, he said, "became more important
than eating at a normal time or adapting to a schedule that allowed
her to be with someone she was supposed to care about and more important
than going to family events."
Proponents of TM say it is simply a means of relaxation
that has been shown through medical studies to reduce stress.
TM beginners are required to meditate for 20 minutes
twice a day. But those who take TM to a deeper level, in the opinion
of local therapist Steven Hassan, become "involved with a destructive
mind control cult." Hassan has included TM in a book he wrote
about mind control cults.
But if TM contributed to the breakup of the Goudeys'
marriage, it was a bond between Stryker and Linda Goudey.
"For Tim, TM became a way of living and a way
of being," according to one friend of Goudey.
Goudey tried to comply with Stryker's rigid requirements,
the friends said, from his insistence on absolute quiet when he
meditated to demanding to know her every move.
On one occasion Goudey later complained about to
friends, she had to sit outside his house while he meditated. When
he finished she went in and showered, emerging to find him walking
out the door without her because she was not ready on time.
She followed a strict schedule whenever she was not
delivering a baby in her off-hours, friends said. They meditated,
exercised and dined together, but rarely went out.
She always had to leave his home in time for him
to be in bed by 10 p.m., friends said, a rule that meant missing
the ends of movies and leaving social functions early.
Another friend of Goudey's said she practiced TM
just to please him.
"She was a terrible meditator," the friend
said. "She would fall asleep. She tried hard because she wanted
to please him."
Over the past four years, said her colleague Dr.
Glenn Dixon, chief of obstetrics at New England Memorial, "she
became fanatical about her body -- she became a strict vegetarian,
drank no alcohol."
While Clifford Goudey could not understand the appeal
of TM, he said he developed a healthy respect for a kind of sixth
sense his wife seemed to possess.
One winter several years ago, he said, he had arranged
to meet her at the home of friends in Maine. He headed up in a Volkswagen
van that was none too roadworthy, but he was on schedule until about
five minutes from the house. He then lost control of the vehicle
descending a snowy hill. The van flipped, and he was trapped inside.
At that very moment, Lin leapt to her feet in the
friends' living room. She said, according to her ex-husband: "Cliff's
been in an accident. We have to go help him."
She seemed to have special intuition or psychic ability,
said Clifford Goudey.
Her intuition carried over to her work.
Time and again she would sense a baby was in trouble
during delivery, despite no external signs.
A patient said, "Lin had a sixth sense; if she
didn't, my daughter wouldn't be here."
"She did seem to pick up on things other doctors
missed," said Jean Stryker, who used to work in Goudey's office
and is the sister of Timothy Stryker.
"She would sense something and act on it, and
she was right," Jean Stryker said.
But the doctor who used her sixth sense to rescue
babies in distress was unable to use the premonition of her own
death to save herself.
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