Читать книгу The Measure of Madness: - Katherine Ramsland - Страница 13

There was no physical evidence found at the scene of the crime; all the blood had been cleaned up. Police searched a Port Authority Bus Terminal locker and found a five-gallon bucket containing Ms. Beerle’s skull and some bones. Someone had spent a good deal of time and effort removing the flesh from the bones, bleaching them clean, and packing them up. The bucket contained chlorophyll-scented cat litter to mask the smell.

Daniel Rakowitz, 28 years old and mentally ill, was the primary suspect, and Ms. Beerle, the victim, had been his roommate. Many were convinced that he had cooked Ms. Beerle’s remains and fed them to the homeless. He became known as “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.” The nickname reflected the public’s fascination with the case, fueled by months of extensive media coverage.

Like most New Yorkers, I had been following this case closely in the news. The murder took place on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was once the destination of thousands of European immigrants. In 1989, gentrification had not yet taken over the neighborhood, and the run-down blocks were widely perceived as a wasteland of drugs and homelessness.

The killing occurred only a few blocks from where I had lived a couple of years earlier. Then an unemployed graduate student, I shared a tiny second-floor apartment on 2nd street off Avenue A with some friends. My former roommates and I talked about the Rakowitz case as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the city during those years.

Mr. Rakowitz’s defense attorney, Norman Reimer, retained Dr. Schwartz to evaluate his client. At the time of this case, Dr. Schwartz was about 60 years old and had been Director of Forensic Services at Kings County Hospital for almost thirty years. He was a nationally renowned psychiatrist who often got called in on high profile cases. The psychiatric unit at Kings County was also famous in forensic circles for having admitted a number of notorious criminals over the years.

Dr. Schwartz ran the department democratically and made a habit of inviting junior staff members to work on cases with him. One morning, he called me into his office, “I’m evaluating Rakowitz for an insanity defense,” he said cheerfully. “Would you like to work on this case?”

I was a newly licensed psychologist, having graduated only four years earlier from my doctoral program in clinical psychology. I had some experience taking the stand in more routine cases, but this was the first time I would be testifying at a trial with so much media attention.

“Yes!” I said. “I’d love to.” Privately, though, I thought: I hope I don’t say anything really stupid at the trial.

All my pressing hospital work was put aside as Dr. Schwartz took me through the complex story of Beerle’s murder and Rakowitz’s arrest. I sat transfixed in his office for what seemed like hours. Dr. Schwartz loved to tell stories, and he was in no rush.

His enthusiasm for bizarre crimes and difficult cases was evident, but his ebullience was a little at odds with the gory details of this particular case. As we talked, I looked around at his diplomas and crime memorabilia, the bust of Freud on his desk, and the framed newspaper articles featuring him as the expert witness in famous cases. Then I looked back over at him. Dr. Schwartz was a short man—a fact accentuated by the large wooden desk he sat behind—yet his height never seemed to affect his confidence.

“I was hired to examine Rakowitz for competency to stand trial,” he told me. It was a complicated hearing with three doctors testifying for the defense and two for the prosecution. Mr. Rakowitz was eager to be found competent and insisted on testifying at the hearing as well.

Dr. Schwartz leaned over his desk and handed me the judge’s ruling. “Rakowitz’s testimony was quite a spectacle. Three of us thought that Rakowitz was not competent but the judge ruled that he was able to stand trial.” There was no hint of annoyance or wounded pride in his voice. Dr. Schwartz had testified in hundreds of cases and I assumed he was accustomed to having judges and juries disagree with his opinion.

Dr. Schwartz, always busy with hospital business, answered a few phone calls while I finished reading the judge’s ruling. Then he went on. The murder allegedly occurred in August, but the police did not begin their investigation until September. During the weeks before his arrest, rumors spread through the community that Mr. Rakowitz had killed Ms. Beerle and cooked her remains to serve in soup.

Initially the police did not believe the defendant could commit such a violent crime. “Rakowitz was a colorful character,” Dr. Schwartz said, “and the police thought he was harmless.” Rakowitz must have appeared to them as one of the many drug addicted, mentally ill homeless people living around Tompkins Square Park.

“No blood evidence was found in the apartment,” Dr. Schwartz continued, “but Rakowitz led the police to the Port Authority locker and confessed. He doesn’t stand a chance to be found factually not guilty at trial.”

Dr. Schwartz gave me a file of newspaper clippings to review. In sensationalized cases like this one, the criminal always seems to steal the spotlight. I skimmed through the articles, trying to get a sense of who the victim was.

Monika Beerle was a 26 year old year old Swiss student. She was studying at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance and working as an exotic dancer. There was little objective information about the sequence of events that led to her murder, but it was believed that Mr. Rakowitz invited her to move in with him a few weeks before her disappearance. He had recently moved in to the inexpensive walk-up on East 9th Street, and the lease was held under the name of a few acquaintances. Soon after moving in, Ms. Beerle changed the lease to her name and demanded that Mr. Rakowitz move out.

The articles described Mr. Rakowitz as a strange character, even by New York standards. Originally from Texas, he had been living in New York City since 1985, eking out a meager living by selling marijuana. Frequently homeless, he was often seen carrying a chicken under his arm and proselytizing about the magical powers of marijuana. He referred to himself as the “God of Marijuana.”

A photo showed a bizarre-looking man with blond hair, a scraggly unkempt beard, and piercing blue eyes. He was rail thin and bore an uncanny resemblance to the popular image of Jesus.

I took the subway to downtown Manhattan to meet with Mr. Rakowitz’s lawyer. Mr. Reimer told me that his client had rejected a psychiatric defense. Mr. Rakowitz was deemed competent to stand trial so the law stipulated that he was also competent to refuse the insanity defense. Therefore, I was to limit my report to a description of his history and my opinion as to his psychiatric diagnosis.

Mr. Reimer handed me a packet of his client’s legal and psychiatric records. He also gave me Mr. Rakowitz’s videotaped confession. I couldn’t wait to get home to watch it.

I felt a sense of anticipation as I pushed the tape into the VCR. Finally, I would be seeing Mr. Rakowitz in action. I was again struck by his resemblance to Jesus. I wondered if he cultivated that image, or if his physical appearance naturally fed into his delusions of divinity.

Mr. Rakowitz appeared fairly normal to me at the beginning of the tape. He was dressed neatly enough in a shiny thin jacket. He was friendly with the detectives and assistant district attorney. He chuckled and seemed oddly relaxed, considering how much trouble he was in.

Mr. Rakowitz began talking about the events leading up to Ms. Beerle’s murder. He explained how he invited her to live with him. Their relationship quickly deteriorated when, within a few days of her moving in, his cat was killed by a pitbull when Ms. Beerle let the cat out of the apartment. There were also misunderstandings about his rent payments. He said she threatened to have him “beaten up” if he did not pay rent. She tried to kick him once.

Mr. Rakowitz then described their last confrontation. Soon after Ms. Beerle changed the lease to her name, she attacked him with a knife. He punched her once in the throat and she fell to the floor. He told the prosecutor that he never meant to seriously harm her. He had been angry, but he was acting in self-defense.

Incredibly, Mr. Rakowitz insisted that he thought she was “faking it” when she lay motionless on the floor, gurgling sounds coming from her throat. He stated that she did not seem to be breathing but he could hear her heart beating. He smoked a joint and left the apartment. When he returned, he found her body cold. Only then did he realize she was dead.

Mr. Rakowitz was afraid he would be arrested, so he decided to hide the evidence of her death. Over the next ten days, he dismembered her body in the bathtub and cooked the flesh. He claimed that other individuals came to the apartment in those weeks and saw the macabre scene.

I almost felt nauseated listening to Mr. Rakowitz’s confession. He described the killing and dismembering in a strangely calm manner, as if it were no more than an unpleasant job assignment. I watched the video over and over and never saw a hint of remorse in his face or voice. He seemed rather to be appealing to the assistant district attorney for sympathy. He explained how “difficult” he found the job. He even went so far as to complain that he had trouble eating during those days.

If the confession was not strange enough, Mr. Rakowitz’s beeper went off several times during the interrogation. I had never seen anything like it in a videotaped statement. He was being paged while confessing, presumably by individuals who wanted to buy marijuana from him.

Mr. Rakowitz smiled sheepishly when his beeper sounded, as if caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. He even asked for a piece of paper to write the numbers down. He seemed to assume that he would be released later that day to make deliveries. Up until that point, the prosecutor and detectives had remained polite and businesslike, but after the beeper sounded for a third time, the impatience in their voices was notable. They commanded him to turn it off.

Mr. Rakowitz’s psychosis leaked out approximately thirty minutes into the interview. He told the assistant district attorney that he tried to enlist in the FBI the year before to help prosecute satanic cult members. He had learned about the cults as an adolescent, he said, and knew that cult members used infants as human sacrifices.

Mr. Rakowitz implored the assistant district attorney to let him make amends for killing Ms. Beerle by working undercover to expose members of these satanic cults. He said that his arrest would give him the “street cred” necessary to gain control over the cult members and bring them to justice.

At this point in the interview I heard mumbling in the background. I figured that the prosecutor and the detectives were conferring about what to do next. I felt oddly amused by this. I could imagine their panic, now that the interview was spinning out of control and right into the hands of a defense attorney looking to plead insanity. Mr. Rakowitz was beginning to look less like a cold-blooded killer and more like a deranged lunatic.

The assistant district attorney abruptly interrupted Mr. Rakowitz’s ramblings about satanic cults, announcing that they had talked long enough. I could not help smiling. I knew she did not want any more of Mr. Rakowitz’s craziness to show up on the tape.

I bet the assistant district attorney wished she had stopped the interview earlier. I wondered how the case would have played out if she had ended the interview right after Mr. Rakowitz confessed to killing and dismembering Ms. Beerle. If the tape had stopped there, Mr. Rakowitz would have come across as a rational, but strange, individual. Yet she allowed him to keep talking.

It was an extraordinary confession. I was astonished to see that Mr. Rakowitz seemed to enjoy the interview, as if he did not realize that he was going to be charged with murder. I put the video away. It was time to see him in person.

When the corrections officer escorted Mr. Rakowitz to the drab interview room, I immediately noticed the drastic change in his appearance. He still had the long blond hair and beard, as well the cheerful grin, but now he had a definite paunch and full cheeks. He had gained a considerable amount of weight during his incarceration.

He reached out to shake my hand. He seemed eager to meet me and happy to be back in the spotlight. I could not decide if he did not understand the trouble he was in, or if he was just unrealistically confident about his chances at trial.

It was a challenging series of interviews. Mr. Rakowitz was clearly manic. I tried to write down his words verbatim, but he spoke too quickly for me to keep up. His thinking was so disorganized that he was impossible to follow at times and he often broke out into uncontrollable laughter.

Mr. Rakowitz frequently interrupted the testing with bizarre comments. He told me that very special things were going to happen to him in 1996. He might be elected sheriff, President of the United States, or the leader of a satanic cult whose members he would turn from bad to good. He told me his dreams could foretell the future.

I was struck by the sophisticated words he used. One of the best ways to estimate a person’s I.Q. is by his or her vocabulary. I gave Mr. Rakowitz an I.Q. test and he only scored within the average range, but many of his scores on the individual subtests comprising the test were above average or superior. On the math subtest, for example, he answered every question correctly.

I administered several other tests referred to as projective or unstructured personality tests. I gave him the House-Tree-Person drawings, the Rorschach (Inkblot Test) and the Thematic Apperception Test.¹ Many individuals who appear psychologically healthy on the highly-structured I.Q. test reveal their psychotic thinking through these more ambiguous and unstructured tests.

Mr. Rakowitz’s drawings were weird and disturbing. He drew a tree floating in space. It was as if he literally was not grounded. He drew a frenzy of leaves representing his disorganized, chaotic thoughts. Normal people draw a house with a door and windows. He drew a greenhouse with a marijuana plant in it. “You have to draw something people live in,” I told him. He added a little line at the bottom and said, “Those are the steps to the basement.” It was as if he created an invisible basement where no one could find him or even see him. He was totally alone with his marijuana.

After we finished with the tests, I asked Mr. Rakowitz about his case. To my surprise, he referred to the victim as “some woman” that his ex-roommates had killed. I confronted him with the medical expert’s autopsy report but he told me he was not convinced that the body found by the police was actually Monika Beerle’s.

I then asked Mr. Rakowitz why he confessed. He told me that he made the tape under duress, that the officers had threatened to kill him if he refused. He said he planted hidden, yet obvious, errors in the confession to alert viewers to its falseness. He described specific instances of this, but his explanations made no sense to me.

I returned home and carefully watched the tape over and over, looking for these “errors.” I could not find any.

During the next session, Mr. Rakowitz told me that various people in the community were plotting against him. He was convinced that these people resented his divinity and his drug business. He said that both he and Monika Beerle had been placed in that apartment as part of a year-long plot to incriminate him.

Mr. Rakowitz described many other grandiose delusions. When I asked him to show me proof of his divinity, he said he did not have real physical proof until a few years ago when he looked at a certain picture. He recalled that, through divine intervention, he saw his own image emerge from the picture. The picture then morphed again into the image of a dog.

The next week, Dr. Schwartz and I sat down to discuss the case. We were both struck by Mr. Rakowitz’s illogical insistence on his innocence. All the physical evidence, including the self-incriminating video confession, pointed to his guilt. Yet, he maintained to both of us that the murder was committed by unidentified others.

“I think he did it,” Dr. Schwartz said, “but Rakowitz insisted he was innocent. He told me that Ms. Beerle’s murder was part of an orchestrated scheme to prevent him from forming the ‘Freedom Party’ and becoming President.”

Dr. Schwartz continued, “Rakowitz believes he was visited by angels. He told me that he is the Lord and was sent to help the homeless. And he uses strange numerological equations. He told me that 1996 is the year he’s meant to become President because the numbers in his date of birth somehow add up to that year.”

Mr. Rakowitz’s birthday was 12/24/60. I took out a piece of paper to add up the numbers, but could find no way that they added up to 1996.

“I’ve heard a lot of grandiose delusions,” Dr. Schwartz said. “But his might be the strangest.”

I concluded that Mr. Rakowitz was a paranoid schizophrenic who was psychotic, not only when I met with him, but also at the time Ms. Beerle was killed. I completed my report and sent it to the defense attorney. It was time for the prosecutor to hire his own experts. Months passed, and I became busy with other cases.

The trial finally took place in the State Supreme Court building in Manhattan in February of 1991. Mr. Rakowitz’s defense was that someone else had killed Ms. Beerle. Initially, he refused to permit his attorney to enter an insanity defense. He changed his mind the day before I was scheduled to testify. Then he allowed his attorney to put forth two diametrically opposed defense strategies: one, that he was factually innocent and had not killed Ms. Beerle and two, that if he had killed her, he was insane at the time.

Mr. Reimer called me that night to let me know of the abrupt change in defense strategy. I hung up the phone in shock. I had only a few hours to prepare for what turned out to be some of the toughest questions I would ever be asked on the stand.

The next morning, I got off the elevator and headed to the courtroom. The press was already there setting up their equipment. I sat on the wooden bench outside, nervously reviewing my notes and waiting to be called. Finally, a court officer came for me. I walked through the crowded courtroom to the witness stand and glanced over at the defendant. He was dressed neatly with his long blond hair neatly combed, but he still looked other-worldly. He grinned broadly at me, seemingly amused by the proceedings.

After I was sworn in, Mr. Reimer began the direct examination. Direct examination is when a witness is questioned by the attorney calling him or her as a witness. His questions about Mr. Rakowitz’s psychiatric treatment laid the groundwork for an insanity defense.

I explained to the jury that Mr. Rakowitz had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia years before his arrest. He had confided to the hospital staff that he could kill people with prayer. During his two previous psychiatric hospitalizations in Texas, he told staff that he had heard the voice of God.

I testified that the psychiatrist who treated him at Riker’s Island jail after his arrest also diagnosed Mr. Rakowitz with paranoid schizophrenia and had prescribed Thorazine, an anti-psychotic medication.

When Mr. Reimer asked me about Ms. Beerle’s psychiatric history, the atmosphere in the courtroom became charged.

“These are psychiatric records for Monica Beerle at Saint Vincent’s Hospital,” Mr. Reimer said, holding up the documents. “In attempting to come to your conclusion concerning the events in question in this case, did you in any way rely upon information that was contained in those documents?”

“Objection!” Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Mathis exclaimed.

“She can tell us what she relied upon and then you’ll have an opportunity to cross-examine her if I permit it,” the judge ruled.

“Can you tell us, specifically, what information [in her records] was germane to your evaluation here?” Mr. Reimer then asked.

Before I could answer, the prosecutor interrupted again. “Objection,” he said.²

The judge ruled that I could answer. I had mixed feelings about describing Ms. Beerle’s psychiatric records. I did not want to give the impression that I was blaming the victim for her own death, but her psychiatric records were valid sources of information for the jury to consider.

“She was suffering from a serious psychiatric illness,” I said. “She was hospitalized at least twice here in New York. And during these episodes she also became psychotic and behaved irrationally. She was prescribed Lithium—”

The prosecutor again interrupted. “Objection, your honor.”

“No, I’ll permit it,” the judge ruled.³

“She was found walking, I believe,” I continued, “on the Verrazano Bridge, and even in the hospital she had to be kept in seclusion…”⁴

Ms. Beerle’s psychiatric records put things in a new light. I glanced over at the jury and could see them considering the idea of two mentally ill people living together in the small apartment. It did not take a clinical psychologist to tell that it was a recipe for disaster.

Mr. Reimer then focused his questions on his client’s psychotic illness. I testified that Mr. Rakowitz referred to himself as the “New Christ.”

“What he sees as reality is not what we see as reality. It’s part of [his] psychosis,” I said. “The belief that people can influence your mind, [that] they put thoughts into your mind or make you have visions is a very definite symptom of schizophrenia. And [Rakowitz] appears to have had it for many years.”⁵

As I spoke, I watched the defendant to gauge his response to my testimony. I felt somewhat awkward talking about his mental illness in front of him. But he continued to smile, serenely, even as I called him delusional and psychotic. It was surreal. I wondered what the jury made of this man who seemed to enjoy standing trial for murder.

After that, Mr. Reimer began asking questions about the murder itself. I testified that Mr. Rakowitz had told me he was innocent. I mentioned the hidden messages in the videotaped statement, adding that I was unable to find them.

Finally, Mr. Reimer asked me the most important question, whether the defendant fulfilled criteria for an insanity defense which in New York State is called a “not responsible” defense. I replied that, in my opinion, if Rakowitz had killed Ms. Beerle, he was not responsible at the time. If he had killed Ms. Beerle, he was unable to know or appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions.

The first part of my testimony, the direct examination, was now complete. The court broke for lunch. Since my testimony was interrupted by the recess, I was still technically on the witness stand and was, therefore, not permitted to discuss the case with the attorneys. I ate alone to avoid any image of impropriety.

We would not reconvene until 2:15, leaving me with over an hour to eat. I would return to the witness stand after lunch for the cross-examination, the questioning by the other side, in this case, the prosecution.

I headed uptown toward Chinatown for lunch. The walk gave me the chance to stretch my legs and relax for the first time in hours. At one of my favorite restaurants, I took a seat and pulled out a crossword puzzle. I needed to clear my mind of the repetitive, nagging thoughts about what I should or could have said differently.

At 2:30 I again took the stand. It was time for the prosecutor to question me. He began by talking about Mr. Rakowitz’s intelligence.

“Isn’t it a fact the defendant has the intelligence to mislead an examiner if he chooses?” ADA Mathis asked.

“Sure,” I said.⁶ I knew that any defendant can lie and that Mr. Rakowitz was much smarter than many other defendants I had evaluated. The prosecutor then returned to the question of Ms. Beerle’s psychiatric illness.

“So you don’t have an opinion with a reasonable degree of medical certainty how Monica Beerle acted on August 19th?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Your Honor, I move to strike all of the opinions about how Monica Beerle may have acted on August 29th given the doctor’s testimony.”

“Overruled,” said the judge.⁷

I had barely caught my breath from this surprise motion when the prosecutor asked the judge to throw out all of my testimony.

“I note she has given an awful lot of opinions that aren’t in her report,” the prosecutor said, “and I understand the law; a report that doesn’t give the opinions that the expert is going to testify to, the psychiatric expert fails to give notice, and on that basis, Your Honor, I am going to move her testimony be stricken.”⁸

Judge Haft denied the motion to strike my testimony. He told the jurors that the defendant’s authorization to interpose the insanity defense was not given to his attorney until the previous day. The judge explained that he had already given permission for me to testify about conclusions that I had not included in my report.

I was relieved. I knew I had not done anything wrong in the preparation of my report, but when the prosecutor asked that my testimony be stricken, I felt like I was being accused of incompetence.

I was excused from the witness stand a few minutes later. With a deep sigh, I stepped down from the witness stand. It had been a long day.

The trial continued. Dr. Schwartz also testified that the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity. Perhaps the highlight of the trial came when Mr. Rakowitz testified in his own defense and told the jury that he did not kill Ms. Beerle. I was not present in the courtroom for his testimony but I was told that it was quite an outlandish presentation.

After nine days of deliberations, the Manhattan jury concluded that Mr. Rakowitz was not guilty by reason of insanity. I wondered how much weight the jury placed on my testimony. I suspected that the most powerful piece of evidence was the defendant himself. The jurors watched him testify. They looked across the courtroom and saw him smiling bizarrely, day after day, week after week. I am sure they recognized how profoundly disturbed he was, even though no clear psychotic motive was ever presented at the trial.

When the verdict was read, Mr. Rakowitz gave the jury a bizarre farewell address.

“I hope someday we can smoke a joint together…I won’t fault you for your verdict…the prosecution had an overwhelming case against me. But I’ll be getting out soon and I’ll sell a lot of marijuana so I can bring to justice the people who actually committed this crime.”⁹

Mr. Rakowitz’s prediction that he would be quickly released did not come to pass. He remains in a forensic hospital to this day. He has the right to periodic reviews to determine whether he remains mentally ill and dangerous. If a judge determines that he is not dangerous, he could be transferred to a state psychiatric hospital. In time, he might even be released. So far, he has twice requested hearings, first in 1995 and then in 2004. He was turned down both times.