Savage Grace - Natalie Robins
Page 43
An ambulance arrived right after we did, and then additional policemen arrived, and while she was being ministered to she was lucid enough to comment that her grandson had been talking on the phone and playing music twenty-four hours a day all week and that he had been up all night mumbling over a table that had his mother’s ashes in the center.
From a Psychiatric Interview with Antony Baekeland, New York City, 1980
My grandmother helped me and brought me back to New York. I spent one week with her but I had a difficult time. I was up all night and I couldn’t eat. I felt I was being denied physical and eye contact with my grandmother. There is something in my eye that stops me from meeting other people face to face. I suppose if it meant having sex with my grandmother, I might have wanted to have sex with her. At the end of that week I knew that I would be unhappy with her. I was calling the airlines to fly to Mallorca or England but my grandmother, who is a very mysterious woman, tried to prevent me from making these phone calls. I kept hearing voices, including my grandmother talking in my head, but I couldn’t hear her voice clearly because there was noise around and my voices kept bothering me. The voices are those of people I know and people I don’t know. They sound like a machine. They talk back to me and it really bothers me a lot. The voices tell me that I’m a savior, that I’m Satan, that I’m an angel, that I’m royalty. Sometimes they say that I’m a dirty little man or a bad woman or a dog. They also give me helpful messages. I hear them all the time. I also hear music and the music lifts my soul.
We were in my grandmother’s bedroom but she wouldn’t shut up. She kept talking and talking and talking and she wouldn’t let me make the phone call. Then I threw the telephone across the room at her and she fell down. When she fell down, I felt very bad for her. I didn’t want her to go to the hospital with broken bones and suffer more, so in order to help her I rushed to the kitchen, took a little knife from the drawer, went back, and stabbed her in the breast. I wanted to kill her so I could liberate her—not because I was angry, just to liberate her from the mistake I had made and from the suffering that she was experiencing at the time and from the time I was thirteen years of age.
All this happened because I was denied physical contact with my grandmother and homosexual relations with anybody else.
After I stabbed her, the nurse came to the door and she must have called the ambulance.
Lena Richards
I can’t understand how he didn’t kill her. All those blows! Her only comments in the hospital were that she wished nobody to know. She wanted to know if everybody knew. That’s how she reacted—she didn’t want anybody to know anything. She wanted to keep it quiet.
Gloria Jones
Somebody called right away. You know—people, everybody.
Cleve Gray
I heard it on the radio, that he’d stabbed his grandmother. That’s how I found out about it, on WINS.
Cecelia Brebner
He was not on any medication at all, and I think probably that was the problem. But you know, what happened really is that Broadmoor made a mistake—they make so many mistakes. They took him for purely a schizophrenic. In fact, he was a paranoid homicidal maniac. You know, when I took him to Nini’s that first day, she said to me, “Look at this lovely photograph of Tony with his cat.” I have never seen anything so terrified in my life as that cat!
Brooks Baekeland
The photo was taken out at Verderonne, where Mary McCarthy lived later with her last husband. The photographer wanted Tony, then aged about eleven, to hold the cat, but cats don’t always accept to be restrained, and that strange man with one huge eye, crouching and telling Tony, “Hold it!,” had alarmed the cat. The fact is, Tony was an absolute charmer with animals.
Police Officer John McCabe (Retired)
He didn’t look capable of violence. The grandmother evidently repeated things and this annoyed him, he told me.
Nina Daly
It was in the morning. We had had breakfast together, I think. I was very close to him. He was with me every minute. I never thought he would go that way. I don’t know how it happened. I can’t imagine. Just something snapped. Yes, that’s it. That’s what happened. You never know.
He was so loving. All I did was break my heart over him. Why could this happen to me, you know? And then I remembered it happened to Barbara, too—and I knew how much she loved him. We both loved him the same.
It was too much for me. Too much. It could have been dangerous. It nearly killed me. I wasn’t in a lot of pain. It didn’t hurt because I loved him so much.
Sergeant Joseph Chinea
Mrs. Daly told us that he had taken over her apartment. And then the nurse let us in on a lot of things. She pointed out the ashes to us and told us about the bizarre way he’d been behaving—the loud music, that he was making a mess out of the apartment, that he was telling everyone to shut up and not talk to him. He had become very agitated as the week progressed, and he was staying up all night, worshiping.
He spoke about what he called his grandmother’s nagging. “Nini was exactly like my mother,” he said, “nagging and bothering me, constantly talking to me.” Then he told us that he had killed his mother—I remember the shock on that. He volunteered that information to us. “I just came here from England,” he said. “They had kept me there for killing my mother.” Everybody just looked at themselves. “My mother never left me alone, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. But she was easy—one shot and she was finished. I just stabbed her once and that was the end of it. But I kept stabbing Nini and she wouldn’t die.” Apparently what happened was most every blow struck bone and the knife was deflected.
Invoice, Investigatory Evidence, Police Department, City of New York
ARTICLE
1 brown handle knife app. 5" blade w/all blood stains.
The above is a complete list of property removed.
Brooks Baekeland
There was only one person in the world both silly enough and generous enough to want that released tiger in her house. And she was almost killed for her goodness—a few days after I’d said no to Tony’s request to come out to see me in Rhode Island, he kicked and beat and stabbed his little granny almost to death when she objected to his voodoo rites with his mother’s ashes.
I had kept every letter and drawing that I had ever received from him from the time he was three years old—not just from sentiment but from presentiment. But when I learned of the stabbing, I destroyed every single thing I ever had of him.
Cecelia Brebner
At Broadmoor he made the most terrible terrible toys for his little half-brother—apparently they were so grotesque and so macabre that his father threw them away immediately. And his paintings…apart from a rather delicate one he did for me, all without exception were macabre in the extreme—huge white hearts on a green background, pierced with a sword and dripping blood. He said he hid these from the warders. Later I saw the same motif on a box he’d made for Nina Daly.
Sergeant Joseph Chinea
We had realized right away that we were dealing with what we call an EDP—an emotionally disturbed person. It was just a matter of controlling him—handcuffing a person like that can make them violent, and then it’s necessary for us to use violence against them, so we contained him in the living room but we let him roam around the room. It was cluttered because he had his things in there—suitcases, his music. He was sleeping on the couch—there was bedding on it and it wasn’t made up. I remember it being a very tiny little apartment and I remember thinking, “Someone with all this money,” you know. He also had photographs in his belongings—things he had laid out. Apparently when he was over in England he had become involved with the occult. It seemed that way to me. Anyway, you could see that the room had totally become his.
He showed us his paintings and drawings that he said he had done while he was incarcerated. And you could see in the drawings that…To this day I can’t understand how the British government could repatriate h
im.
Telegram from Kingman Brewster, Jr., United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, to Cyrus R. Vance, Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., July 30, 1980
AS MR. BAEKELAND HAS RETURNED TO THE U.S., LONDON CONSIDERS HIS CASE CLOSED BREWSTER
Dr. Thomas Maguire
The moment he stepped on the airplane, he was outside English authority. But I was very disappointed when the U.S. Consulate could not accept authority for him—I had asked and they had said they couldn’t. No one would accept legal authority for him. Once he got on that plane he was basically a free person.
Rosemary Rodd Baldwin
Michael Alexander says he’s never going to try and get anybody released ever ever in his life again. Ever.
Michael Alexander
I don’t feel any sort of responsibility. On the other hand, I suppose you might say that I was as deceived by Tony as everybody else.
Sergeant Joseph Chinea
In the patrol car riding over to the 19th Precinct for debriefing, he talked all the time about his grandmother. When we arrived we asked him if he knew where he was and he said, “Yes, I’m in the police station.” “Do you know what you did?” we asked him. “Yeah, sure.” Detective McLinskey, one of the detectives who was questioning him—there were three of us in the debriefing room with him—hit a nerve. Essentially what he was doing was nagging Tony with questions. And Tony became agitated immediately. “My grandmother nagged me,” he said. “My mother nagged me. Why did they have to nag me? I don’t like people to nag me.” Right away we laid off. We sensed this guy’s going to go crazy on us.
Terence McLinskey
I could imagine his emotions at the time: “Am I going to go to jail? Are they going to kill me?” He was in bad shape, and somewhat disheveled. I was just doing my ordinary everyday job. You live by your wits as a detective, you live by your communications skills. You can do great work—not punitive, but directing people to the proper agency. I wanted to help Tony Baekeland make peace—I was trying to help him find his personal salvation. I was trying to build up that he was worth saving, no matter what. I mean, he happened to be a homosexual who had killed his mother and then tried to kill his grandmother.
I wonder if the poor guy found any answers to the whys and the wherefores.
From a Psychiatric Interview with Antony Baekeland, New York City, 1980
I intend to read many religious books. They lighten my awareness and I get full with love and power and heavenly minds, all in the form of music.
From the Logbook, Sergeant Joseph Chinea, July 27, 1980
To Manhattan Central Booking, arrived 11:03 a.m. Defendant made complete admission to events leading to assault and actual assault.
Statements: Before Rights—“I stabbed her. She kept nagging. I asked her to stop. I threw the phone at her but she continued to nag so I got the knife and stabbed her. Get some help.”
Statements: After Rights—“I stabbed her five times. I wanted her to die fast but she wouldn’t die. It was horrible. I hate when this happens.”
Mrs. Cecelia Brebner, friend of the family, interviewed at 19th Pct.
She said she wanted to volunteer as a witness to the fact that Baekeland was mentally disturbed.
Out of Central Booking with Defendant 12:23 p.m. To Department of Correction to begin processing, 12:32 p.m.
To Manhattan Criminal Court, Room 131, 3:15 p.m. Await paper & arraignment.
From Police Files
Nature of grandmother’s injuries: multiple (eight) stab wounds to chest, arms, and hand; fractured collarbone; multiple fractured ribs (four-five), causing breathing problem; bruises and abrasions. Confined to Lenox Hill Hospital.
Other members of family fear for their lives. Ask for remand.
Victim may not want to press charges. Told one police officer she still loved him.
From a Psychiatric Interview with Antony Baekeland, New York City, 1980
Oh, my grandmother survived. She has ways and means I know nothing about, but let’s forget about her and talk about homosexual relations.
I’m not going to call the hospital and find out how she’s doing—why should I call her? She talks to me all the time through the special power that she has.
From the Logbook, Sergeant Joseph Chinea, July 27, 1980
9:00 p.m. Defendant held over for a.m. 7/28 arraignment.
From the Arraignment, The People of the State of New York Against Antony Baekeland, Defendant, Criminal Court of the City of New York, County of New York, July 28, 1980
The Court: Psychiatric examination ordered, administrative psychiatric segregation; suicide watch.
Headline, the New York Times, July 29, 1980
EX-PATIENT IS HELD IN 2D STABBING
Headline, New York Daily News, July 29, 1980
HE’S CHARGED WITH STABBING GRANDMA AFTER SERVING TIME IN MURDER OF MOM
Headline, Daily Express, London, July 29, 1980
FREED BROADMOOR PATIENT ACCUSED OF U.S. MURDER BID
Dr. Frederick Baekeland
It was very much against my opinion and my advice that Tony was let out of Broadmoor without any adequate follow-up program set up. I’m not surprised that there was a problem eventually.
From Broadmoor, David Cohen, Psychology News Press, London, 1981
If an ex-patient commits a crime, the symphony of outrage from Fleet Street is loud and vicious. In 1980, Now magazine ran a dossier on Broadmoor “disasters” and identified twenty cases in which ex-patients had committed acts of violence after being released.
Michael Alexander
The papers in London attacked Dr. Maguire quite strongly over what happened with Tony. And Tony was described in the media here as “the mad axman of Broadmoor.” It was “the mad axman strikes again” sort of touch, you know. I got on to the papers about that. I said, “Look, that’s not the way to present this case. Dr. Maguire behaved extremely correctly under the circumstances.” I didn’t get very far. They stuck to their story.
Letter from Dr. Patrick G. McGrath to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, Undated
Broadmoor
Dear Mrs. Svinka-Zielinski,
I have received your letter and clip from the New York Times. I have also heard from Antony’s father. Let me say straightaway how distressed we here all were to hear of Mrs. Daly’s injuries at the hands of Antony, but we are somewhat relieved to see from the report that she will recover.
I do hope that the whole family, including Antony, will recover from this incident which you rightly describe as a catastrophe.
Yours sincerely,
Patrick G. McGrath
Physician Superintendent
Letter from Dr. Thomas Maguire to Cecelia Brebner, Undated
Broadmoor
Dear Mrs. Brebner,
I am very grateful for your letter to me which gave me details of the tragic events. Strange to relate, I have had no further communication from anyone although I was expecting a request for a medical report and history from his present medical attendants. I wonder whether you have knowledge of subsequent events which you might pass on to me as of course I am intensely interested to learn from my faux pas.
Yours sincerely, Thomas Maguire
Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist
Dr. Thomas Maguire
He’s the only patient who ever backfired on me like that.
Heather Cohane
During the week he was in New York, Jack and I were on our boat in Italy, miles from any telephone or any communication. We didn’t know for a long time what had happened. And when I heard, I was upset for days, and the reason I was upset was because I had trusted my judgment. I just couldn’t believe it—the grandmother, the one person left that he loved!
Letter from Antony Baekeland to an unidentified friend, “Eryl,” written in police custody, 1980
Dear Eryl,
I am in trouble, I am sorry to say. The spirit which has been directing me has for a span been “misdirecting” me—not, I hope
, to cause this grief, now passing, but in order to serve Mammon and the powers of disorder and wickedness, which through lack of eternal and infinite vision have tied knots in the fabric of life, or some, thank God, of it.
I have been held captive here for a very long span, thinking that I served the Power of Love when I had been lured into bondage and captivity by certain pleasures which may under correct direction prove creative and progressive, but which caused me great pain and grief, since I believed in those who held me in this state of being. I do not think for 2 minutes that the spirit that has been behind me wilfully caused my troubles, but that He was misled by those whom
He served, and so on. Indeed, my Whole Family here is of the House of Hades. So please will you keep your eye on me so I can come out.
Tony
Thilo von Watzdorf
Three weeks after I’d tried to call Tony at his grandmother’s and it just rang and rang with no answer, I tried the number again and this time somebody picked up. I said, “Is Tony Baekeland there?” And the voice said, “I’m his grandmother’s nurse. Something terrible happened. Tony is on Rikers Island. Would you like to speak with his grandmother?” I said no, I wouldn’t—I mean, I had never even met her. But she wanted to speak with me. She got right on the phone and she told me what had happened. She said, “Isn’t it terrible? I love Tony so much.”
PART IV
RIKERS ISLAND
1
JULY 27–OCTOBER 31, 1980
THE MAJORITY OF NEW YORK CITY inmates are housed on an island in the East River between the Bronx and Queens, known as Rikers Island. It originally belonged to a Dutch immigrant by the name of Jacob Ryker, who sold all of the original ninety acres to the city in 1885.