The Mad Bomber of New York (38 page)

Teten recognized that Dr. Brussel's method of profiling relied heavily upon Freudian principles and ethnic preferences to analyze specific crime scene elements and to combine these with his findings to form a psychological impression of an offender. “In what might be termed a three tier approach,” wrote Dr. Teten,

Dr. Brussel first focused on those parts of the crime scene which may contain psychologically relevant data. Upon identifying those parts, he then examined each one individually for their possible meaning and impact. Once this was accomplished, he combined the information derived from each part to form a detailed profile of the offender's mental state at the time of the crime.

Dr. Brussel had an exhaustive, almost encyclopedic knowledge of the manner in which the characteristics of mentally abnormal people affected their behavior. Using this knowledge, he identified the various mental abnormalities observed in terms of known mental disorders. This approach enabled Dr. Brussel to not only identify any major mental disorder affecting the perpetrator, but also to visualize any secondary disorder contributing to or modifying his or her behavior. He then developed detailed profiles of the perpetrators and their lifestyles using the common characteristics and behaviors associated with the mental disorders identified.

Though Brussel employed what Dr. Teten admitted was a “comprehensive and probing level of analysis,” there were fundamental differences in the way the two men approached the issue. Unlike Dr. Brussel, Teten did not believe, for the most part, that Freudian theory could readily produce consistently reliable data as to an offender's psychological tendencies. Further, he felt that Brussel's methods were overly dependent upon an uncontaminated crime scene—an assumption that could not be universally made with confidence. Finally, Teten believed that ethnicity could not be relied upon as an accurate indicator of weapons choice or criminal behavior. Though the two men generally agreed that Brussel's approach was the more comprehensive and discriminating of the two, they recognized that it also had the greater likelihood of leading to biased or erroneous results. Conversely, Teten's approach, while less capable of producing specific and usable data, was less subject to bias and misinterpretation. “I would much rather offer only general information that is accurate, than a detailed but possibly misleading profile,” wrote Dr. Teten.

Though they would agree to disagree on methodology, Teten studied the basic principles of Dr. Brussel's work, contrasted them with his own, and used them in his lecture course at the BSU in Quantico as a historic example of a successful profile. In the years that followed, he would team with and inspire other law enforcement professionals such as Roger Depue, Robert Ressler, Dick Ault, and John Douglas, each of whom would contribute to the expansion of the FBI training program and the development of criminal profiling as a practiced law enforcement technique.

The pioneering work of Howard Teten as revealed in the classrooms and laboratories of the BSU has been immortalized in recent years in books and motion pictures such as
The Alienist
,
The Silence of the Lambs
, and
Kiss the Girls
. Strange and eerie accounts of unsolved crimes and ingenious methods of profiling continue to fascinate the public and provide entertainment through the annals of real-life mystery. It was, however, the inventive achievement of Dr. James Brussel that provided the critical turning point—the magical coming of age moment—that would lend awareness and credibility to this fledgling and untried technical process. What began in the winter of 1956 as the impulsive postulates of a Manhattan psychiatrist born of the frustration of an overtaxed and fatigued police department, would become, through the efforts and research of an innovative progeny, a scientifically recognized and generally respected law enforcement tool.

“He was an innovator,” wrote Howard Teten regarding Dr. Brussel. “[A]n individualist who was not content with the status quo, choosing instead to seek new approaches and methods in his dedication to the betterment of man—and he found a way to fulfill that dream. Who could ask for an opportunity to do or accomplish more?”

XXIII
RIGHT FROM WRONG

D
URING
J
UDGE
L
EIBOWITZ'S OPEN-COURT RULING THAT
M
ETESKY WAS
psychologically unfit to stand trial, he had accurately explained that, according to New York law, Kings County would retain jurisdiction over the case even during Metesky's period of commitment at Matteawan State Hospital. Accordingly, if, in the opinion of the Matteawan psychiatrists, Metesky ever regained his sanity, he could be brought back to court and tried for his crimes. Leibowitz had contrasted the situation with a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity after an actual trial on the merits, in which case a defendant would be similarly committed but could be released if found sane rather than sent back to the courts for trial.

Noting the similar retention of jurisdiction in New York County, Judge Leibowitz used the occasion of his ruling to blast the legislature in allowing the anomalous situation of two courts in neighboring counties to arrive at separate and inconsistent judgments as to competency to stand trial. His conflict with Judge Mullen had proven frustrating and fruitless and, despite his order of commitment, remained largely unresolved. “To the layman and the lawyer alike this seems indefensible on the basis of just plain common sense,” lectured Judge Liebowitz.

Though Metesky had not stood trial and therefore had never formally asserted the insanity defense, the proceedings to test his competency delved into many of the same general issues and principles and elements of proof that such a defense would normally have examined. The high-profile case against Metesky would, accordingly, focus the spotlight of controversy upon the insanity defense in New York and become a springboard for change in the system.

At the time, insanity laws in the United States were undergoing a period of flux and instability. By the mid 1950s, the McNaughton rule, the long-standing law in New York and in most other jurisdictions that excused a defendant from criminal responsibility if he did not know the nature and quality of the act or that the act itself was wrong, was under attack by judges and many state legislatures. In some states the rule had been abandoned in favor of the Irresistible Impulse rule, which stated that even if the defendant cognitively understood the difference between right and wrong, he would nonetheless be excused if mental disease had caused him to lose the power to choose between right and wrong. And in 1954 the United States Court of Appeals expanded both rules in the famous
Durham
case, which held that “an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”

Using the bully pulpit of his high-profile ruling in the Metesky case, Judge Leibowitz admonished the New York legislature to adopt changes in current insanity laws to bring the state into accord with modern advances of scientific knowledge. “I trust that the State of New York will not remain in the tail end of the procession and cling to the McNaughton rule that was born back in the middle of the last century, when little or nothing was known about psychiatry.” To bolster his sermon on the issue, Leibowitz called upon Dr. LaVerne to expound upon the need for legislative changes in the realm of insanity as a legal defense. In a prearranged complement to Leibowitz's ruling, the judge garrulously congratulated LaVerne as “a fine example of what a psychiatrist should be,” and invited him to step forward before the bar to offer whatever recommendations he may have on the issue.

“Metesky may have had a delusional mission which compelled him to explode bombs in order to arouse public interest,” began LaVerne, “but unwittingly he has performed a useful mission to society in focusing the spot-light upon a dire need of reform in legislation.” The doctor provided a brief history of the laws of insanity and cautioned that the current standards originated at a time when psychiatry was in its infancy and little was known of the workings of the human mind. With clinical advances in the field, and recognition of psychiatry as a credible adjunct of medicine, LaVerne stated that it was time for the law to catch up to the science. “The Metesky case poses a challenge in that it will expose the entire field of law . . . to a thorough re-evaluation. The present laws of our state that determine the question of sanity are cumbersome, obsolete, time-consuming, costly and may even harm an already mentally ill defendant.”

Criticism of New York's statutory version of the McNaughton rule had actually begun shortly after its initial enactment in 1879 and reached a crescendo shortly after the Metesky case. Essentially, it was the dichotomy between medical insanity and legal insanity that drove the effort toward legislative reform. Modern psychiatry had shown that an individual could possess the requisite mental faculties to be aware of the nature and quality of his acts and to know that they are wrong, while at the same time suffer from a psychiatric disorder that removed the normal powers of self-restraint. Stated another way, one could technically know what he was doing yet still be utterly unable to stop it. The law, it was argued, did not account for this anomaly.

In October 1957, no doubt inspired in part by the controversy of the Metesky case, the first practical step in the reconsideration of New York's insanity laws took place in the form of a conference sponsored by the State Department of Mental Hygiene with the cooperation of the Governor's Council. In support of the reform effort, Governor Harriman stated at the conference:

Application of [the McNaughton Rule] results in the law treating an individual as sane even though he may suffer from mental defects which affect his otherwise rational activities . . . At present, criminal trials in which a defense of insanity is raised are marked by a conflict in testimony between psychiatrists who rely on the one hand on the McNaughton rule and on the other upon the standards set by medical and psychiatric science.

In the coming years specific proposals for legislative change were sponsored, and several advanced through committee and even to a vote of the New York Assembly, but each time the political sensitivity of the issue resulted in either withdrawal of the bill or outright rejection. Finally, in 1965, after consultation with the District Attorney's Association, New York prosecutors, and prominent psychiatrists, a revision to the arcane McNaughton rule was proposed that seemed palatable to the critics. Though most supporters of reform had advocated adoption of a more liberal approach to the problem—a defense based upon the inability to conform one's conduct to the requirements of the law—a compromise position was agreed upon and a newly revised standard for insanity in New York criminal cases was adopted by the state legislature.

With the enactment of section 30.05 of the New York Penal Law, the originally codified McNaughton rule was amended to prevent criminal responsibility for one's conduct “if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks
substantial capacity
to know or appreciate either: (a) the nature and consequences of such conduct; or (b) that such conduct was wrong.” The intent and effect of the new statutory provision was to relax the stringent requirements of the old rule and to allow the defense of insanity even when the defendant possessed some rudimentary understanding of the nature and quality of his act or that such act was indeed wrong. Though the statute was amended in 1984 to shift the burden of proof to the accused, the legal standard by which insanity was determined in New York remains to this day. The impassioned pleas of Judge Leibowitz and Dr. LaVerne had added to the chorus of change that would affect perhaps the most controversial issue in American criminal law.

As George Metesky lay helplessly in the tuberculosis ward of Matteawan State Hospital fighting for his life, however, he knew little of the dramatic changes in law, politics, and psychiatry his case would one day help to inspire.

He cared only for each struggling breath that he drew.

XXIV
MATTEAWAN

I
F
B
ELLEVUE WAS THE MENTAL HEALTH EQUIVALENT OF PURGATORY,
Matteawan State Hospital stood as the hopeless embodiment of the blazing abyss itself. Behind the confused sprawl of interconnected redbrick chambers, the dazed and tormented souls that populated the human “storage bin” that was Matteawan endlessly roamed sterile corridors lacking purpose, lacking hope. The physical structure stood as a gloomy metaphor for insanity. Jutting dormers and stilted bastions formed the uneven roofline of each segmented wing of the complex and hauntingly coalesced into a taller main structure, the central focus of which was an extended crowned vertex lined with steel-barred windows. The foreboding arched entryway at the base of the main building might just as well have borne Dante's ominous inscription to the gates of hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Prior to the age of reform that would give birth to institutionalized care for the mentally ill, horrific as many of those institutions may have been, the diagnosed insane were treated as criminals and were subject to torturous “treatments” typically aimed at exorcising evil spirits deemed to be at the root of the deviant behavior. Indeed, prior to the mid-nineteenth century little distinction had been drawn in New York between the criminally insane and the less dangerous non-criminal element suffering from mental illness. Both were universally and jointly treated in the New York State Lunatic Asylum in Utica—the first state hospital in New York.

As enlightened thought crept into the world of psychopathology, however, it became readily apparent to mental health professionals that integration of the two distinct populations presented dramatic and unjust dangers to the civilly, as opposed to criminally, committed patients. In 1855 the New York Legislature, in recognition of these dangers, moved to segregate criminally insane inmates to institutions falling under the jurisdiction of the Department of Correction, and in 1859 the first State Lunatic Asylum for Insane Convicts was opened on the grounds of Auburn Prison. Those “twice cursed” with the stigma of mental illness and criminality would now be housed in hybrid institutions that would come to be known as “mental prisons.”