The Measure of Madness:. Katherine Ramsland
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