Post by bingbong on Feb 15, 2008 22:49:55 GMT 12
Friend Is Questioned for Eight Hours in Killing of Therapist
I have included the link for photos plus the surveillance video
www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/nyregion/15slay.html?pagewanted=allvideo
Friend Is Questioned for Eight Hours in Killing of Therapist
Mike Mergen for The New York Times
William Kunsman, a musician who knew Dr. Kathryn Faughey, spoke with reporters on Thursday at his home in Coplay, Pa. He said he met Dr. Faughey at guitar camp six years ago.
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By AL BAKER
Published: February 15, 2008
Detectives investigating the killing of an Upper East Side therapist dug through her e-mail messages, telephone records and paper files, officials said Thursday, as they followed several potential paths to finding her killer. A Pennsylvania man who knew the victim — and exchanged recent e-mail messages and telephone calls with her — was interviewed by detectives for up to eight hours, officials said.
Skip to next paragraph
Dr. Kathryn Faughey, 56, was fatally stabbed Tuesday night.
Investigators increasingly believe that the victim, Dr. Kathryn Faughey, was the intended victim, even though the killer asked a doorman for her office suite mate, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, before attacking the woman in her East 79th Street office Tuesday.
They are focusing on the theory that the attacker was not a patient of the victim, but someone she knew outside her professional life, or even a relative, spouse, lover or acquaintance of a patient, officials said.
Detectives have found two suitcases the assailant left behind in the office. One held women’s fluffy slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults; the other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape.
The crime scene provided a trove of forensic evidence: blood at the scene was being collected and analyzed, traces of the attacker’s DNA were being sought and detectives were trying to gather fingerprints and fibers.
One of the suitcases was expandable, suggesting to at least some investigators that the attacker intended to kidnap the victim and leave with her in the suitcase.
The case has alarmed Manhattan’s mental health community and made armchair detectives of many because it seems, on the surface, such a mystery.
It was the e-mail messages that led to the most fast-moving developments Thursday. One e-mail exchange — the most recent ones from a day before the killing — and telephone calls linked a Pennsylvania man, William Kunsman, to Dr. Faughey, law enforcement officials said.
Mr. Kunsman, a musician who had met Dr. Faughey and her husband, Walter Adam, at guitar camp six years ago, was picked up at 4:30 a.m. at his home in Coplay, Pa., on Thursday, the officials said.
He went voluntarily to the State Police barracks for Troop M in Bethlehem, Pa., where detectives from New York City met them, the officials said. One investigator said Mr. Kunsman was cooperative at first and even voluntarily provided police with a sample of his DNA. At about 1 p.m., Mr. Kunsman asked for a lawyer and the questioning ceased, the officials said.
Photographs of him were shown to Dr. Shinbach and a woman who had been in his office on the night of the slaying, said a law enforcement official who had been briefed.
The woman did not identify Mr. Kunsman as the attacker, but Dr. Shinbach did, law enforcement officials said. The e-mail messages Dr. Faughey exchanged with Mr. Kunsman dealt not with any romantic issues, officials said, but with practical problems Mr. Kunsman was having, possibly over losing his job and his health insurance, officials said.
When asked if Mr. Kunsman was a suspect, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, declined to answer, saying only that he had been questioned in connection with the murder.
At about 5 p.m. on Thursday — after he left the barracks — Mr. Kunsman held an impromptu news conference from the front porch of his tan, wood-sided bungalow home on Quarry Street in Coplay to express his innocence and speak of his mourning for Dr. Faughey, whom he called his friend.
“Y’all shouldn’t be here today,” he said to the reporters outside his home. “I had nothing to do with what happened to Kathryn.”
Mr. Kunsman said he did not have a lawyer. He declined to discuss what the detectives asked him, saying he did not want to jeopardize their investigation. “They were doing their job,” he said. “They were very thorough about doing their job. I couldn’t possibly have been in New York City at the time.”
He added: “It’s a lot to digest in one day. I found out my good friend is gone. I’m grieving. It’s just been a hell of an ordeal.”
Some investigators said a series of details brought Mr. Kunsman to the attention of detectives: He had met Dr. Faughey and Mr. Adam at the guitar camp; his name came up in Dr. Faughey’s e-mail record; the adult disposable diapers found at the scene — sold in relatively few places — had been delivered to one store in Coplay.
One investigator said that Mr. Kunsman had recently been seen around Dr. Faughey’s office, at 435 East 79th Street, off York Avenue, though another investigator questioned the veracity of that account, calling it a rumor.
But Mr. Kunsman did not fit the description of the attacker the police had been given by witnesses, nor the characteristics of the man seen in videotaped images entering the suite of offices shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and leaving some 59 minutes later.
He appeared to have a fuller head of hair than the man the witnesses described, and the one on the videotape has a bald spot.
The female patient who had been in Dr. Shinbach’s office, whom police did not identify by name, confronted the assailant after he had attacked both doctors, the police said. When the assailant came out, bloodied, he tried to force her into a bathroom, but she kneed him in the groin and then locked the door to the suite of offices as he fled to the basement, officials said.
After the assailant attacked Dr. Shinbach, he took his wallet and read the address from his driver’s license back to him, to make it clear that he could find him, officials said.
Dr. Faughey’s husband said he did not believe Mr. Kunsman, whom he called “a very close family friend,” was a suspect in his wife’s death. He said he and his wife had “met about 400 to 500 people at get-togethers where we play guitar.” But he said no one stood out in his mind from those meetings.
“I looked at the video,” Mr. Adam said of the videotape images. “That was not my recollection of what he looked like, but the video was poor." Mr. Adam said none of his wife’s patients were referred to her from the courts or criminal justice system, but through conventional professional channels.
Early Thursday afternoon, investigators took evidence from the doctors’ office wrapped in paper. One piece was a chair, and another had a biohazard sticker affixed to it.
Other items were brought out in large and small evidence bags, and three big white boxes were also carried out.
Investigators were wading through lists of Dr. Faughey’s patients’ names. But the investigators have had to grapple with medical privacy laws in trying to gain access to her patient records. It remained unclear whether the police would seek a court order to overcome that legal hurdle.
As a musician, Mr. Kunsman had recorded a compact disc, “Acousticology 101,” in 2004 that blended music from widely different traditions.
A Web page that promotes the album, cdbaby.com/cd /williamkunsman, also says he joined the Marine Corps in 1983 as a trumpeter and took up guitar playing and songwriting the following year while at the Navy School of Music in Norfolk, Va.
Instrumentalists and vocalists from the Marines, the Army and the Navy go there after basic training to polish their technique in hopes of landing a place in a military band.
Mr. Kunsman served in military field bands in New Orleans and Japan, and also played in a jazz and rock ensemble.
The Web page said that when he left the Marines, he tried “without success” to form a hard rock band. Then, in 1993, he made what the Web page called an “unlikely transition” to acoustic music, taking up fiddle playing in West Virginia and playing with a bluegrass group, Willow Creek.
The Web page said he was a founding member of another band, Mountain Heritage.
Later, “he retreated from the bluegrass scene” to work as a solo artist and songwriter, the Web page said.
Reporting was contributed by James Barron, John Eligon, Richard G. Jones, Daryl Khan, Dmitry Kiper, William K. Rashbaum, Nate Schweber and Carolyn Wilder.
Therapist Remembered as One Who Refreshed the Broken
*
By RAY RIVERA
Published: February 17, 2008
Much of the later part of Kathryn Faughey’s life was contained on this block of East 79th Street between First and York Avenues. It was where she shared a top-floor apartment with her husband, bought flowers on the corner on special occasions and listened to her patients as they shared their troubles. And it was where her funeral Mass was held on Saturday — at a church steps away from where she was killed on Tuesday.
Dr. Faughey, a 56-year-old psychologist who practiced in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom.
About 350 people attended the hourlong service, including many of her patients, which was held at St. Monica’s Catholic Church. From the steps of the church a small memorial of flowers and cards was visible outside the building a half-block away at 435 East 79th Street where Dr. Faughey was slashed to death in her office.
“It’s just such a tragedy,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral. “We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst.”
Dr. Faughey’s body was carried into the church in a poplar casket and followed closely by a procession of family members and friends, including her husband, Walter Adam.
The Mass was presided over by the Rev. Seamus Finn, who knew Dr. Faughey and had last seen her at a fund-raiser for Northern Ireland at the Waldorf -Astoria in November.
“In one way,” Father Finn said in his sermon, “her profession was so solemnly centered on the act of listening and trying to bring freshness to lives, trying to bring freshness to lives that are often broken apart by anger, by bitterness, by pain and by suffering.”
The circumstances of Dr. Faughey’s death has drawn an inordinate amount of news media attention. Mourners had to push through crowds of reporters, photographers and television cameras to enter and leave the church on Saturday. Some spoke to reporters but most shied away to grieve in private.
Father Finn recalled Dr. Faughey as a woman who found beauty in many places. “She found it in the city that she loved so dearly, for as many times as Walter tried to convince her to move out of it,” he said in his sermon. “We know she found it in places like Paris. We know she found it in just the simplest conversations with anyone of us.”
The eulogy was given by her friend, Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., who knew her from their days together at St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, where Dr. Faughey had once been a professor.
Sister Daly described her as a woman of “incredible wisdom” and deep spiritual faith.
She then turned to her friend’s coffin and, clapping her hands together, said, “Kathy, well done.” The congregation rose to its feet and joined in a standing ovation.
Queens Man Is Arrested in Killing of Therapist
By AL BAKER
Published: February 17, 2008
A 39-year-old man who blamed a Manhattan psychiatrist for having him institutionalized 17 years ago was charged on Saturday with killing a female therapist in a furious knife attack and then slashing the psychiatrist when he tried to come to the woman’s aid, law enforcement officials said.
David M. Tarloff, who was charged in the killing of a Manhattan therapist, was escorted from the 19th Precinct station house Saturday.
The man, David M. Tarloff, was picked up at his home in Queens at 7:20 a.m. and later made statements implicating himself in the killing of the therapist, Kathryn Faughey, 56, and the assault on the psychiatrist, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, who is in his 70s, on Tuesday night inside the East 79th Street offices they shared, the police said.
Mr. Tarloff told investigators he went to the doctors’ offices with plans to rob Dr. Shinbach. He then planned to take his ailing mother, Beatrice, either out of the country or to Hawaii. It was unclear why Dr. Faughey was attacked: she may have inadvertently crossed his path.
Mr. Tarloff told investigators that he did not know that she would be in the offices and had not intended to attack her. Dr. Shinbach was slashed when he ran to try to help Dr. Faughey after hearing her screams, the police said.
The suspect spoke to detectives for 25 minutes — from 8:15 to 8:40 a.m. — and had “cuts on his hands,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who announced the arrest at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Saturday. Then Mr. Tarloff said he wanted a lawyer “and the questioning ended,” Mr. Kelly said.
Law enforcement officials have said that detectives found Dr. Faughey’s office awash in blood and discovered two suitcases the assailant had left behind in the building’s basement. One held women’s fluffy slippers, a blouse and adult diapers. The other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape. The police said that the suspect had been in the basement in the hours before the killing, possibly to scout out an escape route, and fled through a side door to the street after the attack.
A palm print found on the handle of one of the suitcases matched a print from Mr. Tarloff’s left hand that was taken after he was arrested on Feb. 1 at a Queens hospital. He had tried to visit his mother and got into a confrontation with a security guard, according to court records and law enforcement officials.
Two more palm prints from Mr. Tarloff’s right hand were found on the packaging for the diapers that were inside the same suitcase, officials said.
In addition, Mr. Tarloff was picked out in police lineups by three people who saw him on the night of the attack: Dr. Shinbach, a female patient of his who saw the assailant in the office’s waiting room and another patient who was leaving when the assailant showed up, at about 8 p.m., the police said.
“Forensic evidence and Tarloff’s own words placed him at the scene of the crime,” Mr. Kelly said. “These officers knocked on doors, they followed leads and they examined evidence around the clock to make this arrest possible.”
Charges filed against him on Saturday included second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder and assault.
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Tarloff was captured on surveillance videos from the lobby and the basement of the building where Dr. Faughey and Dr. Shinbach were attacked.
On one video, the suspect entered the lobby shortly after 8 p.m. wearing a black cap, a dark coat and sneakers, and toting the two suitcases.
He told the doorman that he was there to see Dr. Shinbach, and walked swiftly up a set of stairs to the professional offices on the first floor.
But Dr. Shinbach had another patient, a woman, waiting for him, so the man who entered the suite sat on the couch next to her until she went in to see Dr. Shinbach at 8:30 p.m.
At 8:50 p.m., Dr. Shinbach heard Dr. Faughey’s screams and rushed into her office and saw her lying still on the blood-soaked carpet by her desk.
The attacker then turned on him, slashing him in the face, head and hands. “She’s dead,” the killer said, as he continued his attack on him, police said. When he finished, he pinned Dr. Shinbach against the wall with a chair, took $90 from his wallet and fled out the building’s basement exit, 59 minutes after he had arrived.
During the interrogation of Mr. Tarloff, “there were no statements concerning his interaction with Dr. Faughey,” Mr. Kelly said.
As Mr. Tarloff waited at the 19th Precinct station house, where he was questioned, a portrait emerged of a quiet, eccentric person who had shared a second-floor apartment in Corona, Queens, with his mother until she recently moved to a nursing home. A balding, 5-foot-10 man, he was sometimes seen walking on his block dressed in slippers and a corduroy blazer. He was prone to bursts of anger, those who knew him said, and he had agitated some of his neighbors by knocking on their doors to ask for money.
The developments in the case came as Dr. Faughey’s family and friends gathered for her funeral Mass on Saturday morning at a church steps away from where she was murdered five days earlier.
Dr. Faughey, a psychologist who practiced cognitive behavior psychotherapy in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom. She grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and lived with her husband of 25 years, Walter Adam.
About 350 people, including many of her patients, attended the hourlong service at St. Monica’s Catholic Church.
“We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral.
Mr. Tarloff, in statements to investigators, expressed anger at Dr. Shinbach, whom he blamed for having him committed to a mental health institution in 1991. But officials said it was unclear if Mr. Tarloff had ever been Dr. Shinbach’s patient or if he had ever been institutionalized.
Mr. Tarloff had indicated that he might have been “institutionalized or incarcerated up to 20 times,” Mr. Kelly said, though a records check to confirm that was still being done.
The Feb. 1 arrest in Queens occurred at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, in the third-floor critical-care unit, said Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.
Mr. Tarloff was trying to visit his mother, a law enforcement official said. A security officer at the hospital, Joel Leroy, saw Mr. Tarloff “touching a critical-care patient, in violation of prearranged visitation conditions,” Mr. Ryan said. “Then he yelled and cursed loudly inside the unit, and approached the nursing station in a threatening manner.”
When Mr. Leroy tried to restrain Mr. Tarloff, he attacked the guard and wrestled him to the floor, Mr. Ryan said.
Mr. Tarloff was charged with third-degree assault, disorderly conduct and harassment and was released on his own recognizance the next day, 10 days before Dr. Faughey’s murder. Mr. Tarloff was due in court on Feb. 25.
Growing up, Mr. Tarloff seemed popular with his friends and took care with his appearance, said one neighbor, Phyllis Zicherman, who said she had known the Tarloffs for decades. She said he had attended college but left under unknown circumstances — around the time she and other neighbors said they noticed he began to change.
And his mother’s absence profoundly affected him, several neighbors said. “He was depressed because of his mom,” Ms. Zicherman said.
A worker at the nursing home where his mother is living said that Mr. Tarloff sometimes phoned her three or four times a day.
“He calls here harassing his mother,” said Robin Moore, a security officer there. “He gets her upset. She’s very sick. When he doesn’t get to speak to her, he makes threats.”
Another security officer, Veronica Darby, said Mr. Tarloff was not allowed” to see his mother, who has been at the home for less than six months. The police had two encounters with Mr. Tarloff last year that led to evaluations of his mental health, officials said, although the details were sketchy.
In one instance in August 2007, officers responded to his father’s Staten Island address and treated him as an emotionally disturbed person, officials said, meaning that he was taken to a hospital to have his mental health evaluated. At that time, his father, Leonard, told officers he was “off his medication,” the police said.
A person who answered the phone at the home of Mr. Tarloff’s father declined to answer questions and hung up.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Kareem Fahim, Ann Farmer, Christine Hauser, Daryl Khan, Dmitry Kiper, kreacher Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Jack Styczynski, Mathew R. Warren and Karen Zraick.
I have included the link for photos plus the surveillance video
www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/nyregion/15slay.html?pagewanted=allvideo
Friend Is Questioned for Eight Hours in Killing of Therapist
Mike Mergen for The New York Times
William Kunsman, a musician who knew Dr. Kathryn Faughey, spoke with reporters on Thursday at his home in Coplay, Pa. He said he met Dr. Faughey at guitar camp six years ago.
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By AL BAKER
Published: February 15, 2008
Detectives investigating the killing of an Upper East Side therapist dug through her e-mail messages, telephone records and paper files, officials said Thursday, as they followed several potential paths to finding her killer. A Pennsylvania man who knew the victim — and exchanged recent e-mail messages and telephone calls with her — was interviewed by detectives for up to eight hours, officials said.
Skip to next paragraph
Dr. Kathryn Faughey, 56, was fatally stabbed Tuesday night.
Investigators increasingly believe that the victim, Dr. Kathryn Faughey, was the intended victim, even though the killer asked a doorman for her office suite mate, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, before attacking the woman in her East 79th Street office Tuesday.
They are focusing on the theory that the attacker was not a patient of the victim, but someone she knew outside her professional life, or even a relative, spouse, lover or acquaintance of a patient, officials said.
Detectives have found two suitcases the assailant left behind in the office. One held women’s fluffy slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults; the other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape.
The crime scene provided a trove of forensic evidence: blood at the scene was being collected and analyzed, traces of the attacker’s DNA were being sought and detectives were trying to gather fingerprints and fibers.
One of the suitcases was expandable, suggesting to at least some investigators that the attacker intended to kidnap the victim and leave with her in the suitcase.
The case has alarmed Manhattan’s mental health community and made armchair detectives of many because it seems, on the surface, such a mystery.
It was the e-mail messages that led to the most fast-moving developments Thursday. One e-mail exchange — the most recent ones from a day before the killing — and telephone calls linked a Pennsylvania man, William Kunsman, to Dr. Faughey, law enforcement officials said.
Mr. Kunsman, a musician who had met Dr. Faughey and her husband, Walter Adam, at guitar camp six years ago, was picked up at 4:30 a.m. at his home in Coplay, Pa., on Thursday, the officials said.
He went voluntarily to the State Police barracks for Troop M in Bethlehem, Pa., where detectives from New York City met them, the officials said. One investigator said Mr. Kunsman was cooperative at first and even voluntarily provided police with a sample of his DNA. At about 1 p.m., Mr. Kunsman asked for a lawyer and the questioning ceased, the officials said.
Photographs of him were shown to Dr. Shinbach and a woman who had been in his office on the night of the slaying, said a law enforcement official who had been briefed.
The woman did not identify Mr. Kunsman as the attacker, but Dr. Shinbach did, law enforcement officials said. The e-mail messages Dr. Faughey exchanged with Mr. Kunsman dealt not with any romantic issues, officials said, but with practical problems Mr. Kunsman was having, possibly over losing his job and his health insurance, officials said.
When asked if Mr. Kunsman was a suspect, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, declined to answer, saying only that he had been questioned in connection with the murder.
At about 5 p.m. on Thursday — after he left the barracks — Mr. Kunsman held an impromptu news conference from the front porch of his tan, wood-sided bungalow home on Quarry Street in Coplay to express his innocence and speak of his mourning for Dr. Faughey, whom he called his friend.
“Y’all shouldn’t be here today,” he said to the reporters outside his home. “I had nothing to do with what happened to Kathryn.”
Mr. Kunsman said he did not have a lawyer. He declined to discuss what the detectives asked him, saying he did not want to jeopardize their investigation. “They were doing their job,” he said. “They were very thorough about doing their job. I couldn’t possibly have been in New York City at the time.”
He added: “It’s a lot to digest in one day. I found out my good friend is gone. I’m grieving. It’s just been a hell of an ordeal.”
Some investigators said a series of details brought Mr. Kunsman to the attention of detectives: He had met Dr. Faughey and Mr. Adam at the guitar camp; his name came up in Dr. Faughey’s e-mail record; the adult disposable diapers found at the scene — sold in relatively few places — had been delivered to one store in Coplay.
One investigator said that Mr. Kunsman had recently been seen around Dr. Faughey’s office, at 435 East 79th Street, off York Avenue, though another investigator questioned the veracity of that account, calling it a rumor.
But Mr. Kunsman did not fit the description of the attacker the police had been given by witnesses, nor the characteristics of the man seen in videotaped images entering the suite of offices shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and leaving some 59 minutes later.
He appeared to have a fuller head of hair than the man the witnesses described, and the one on the videotape has a bald spot.
The female patient who had been in Dr. Shinbach’s office, whom police did not identify by name, confronted the assailant after he had attacked both doctors, the police said. When the assailant came out, bloodied, he tried to force her into a bathroom, but she kneed him in the groin and then locked the door to the suite of offices as he fled to the basement, officials said.
After the assailant attacked Dr. Shinbach, he took his wallet and read the address from his driver’s license back to him, to make it clear that he could find him, officials said.
Dr. Faughey’s husband said he did not believe Mr. Kunsman, whom he called “a very close family friend,” was a suspect in his wife’s death. He said he and his wife had “met about 400 to 500 people at get-togethers where we play guitar.” But he said no one stood out in his mind from those meetings.
“I looked at the video,” Mr. Adam said of the videotape images. “That was not my recollection of what he looked like, but the video was poor." Mr. Adam said none of his wife’s patients were referred to her from the courts or criminal justice system, but through conventional professional channels.
Early Thursday afternoon, investigators took evidence from the doctors’ office wrapped in paper. One piece was a chair, and another had a biohazard sticker affixed to it.
Other items were brought out in large and small evidence bags, and three big white boxes were also carried out.
Investigators were wading through lists of Dr. Faughey’s patients’ names. But the investigators have had to grapple with medical privacy laws in trying to gain access to her patient records. It remained unclear whether the police would seek a court order to overcome that legal hurdle.
As a musician, Mr. Kunsman had recorded a compact disc, “Acousticology 101,” in 2004 that blended music from widely different traditions.
A Web page that promotes the album, cdbaby.com/cd /williamkunsman, also says he joined the Marine Corps in 1983 as a trumpeter and took up guitar playing and songwriting the following year while at the Navy School of Music in Norfolk, Va.
Instrumentalists and vocalists from the Marines, the Army and the Navy go there after basic training to polish their technique in hopes of landing a place in a military band.
Mr. Kunsman served in military field bands in New Orleans and Japan, and also played in a jazz and rock ensemble.
The Web page said that when he left the Marines, he tried “without success” to form a hard rock band. Then, in 1993, he made what the Web page called an “unlikely transition” to acoustic music, taking up fiddle playing in West Virginia and playing with a bluegrass group, Willow Creek.
The Web page said he was a founding member of another band, Mountain Heritage.
Later, “he retreated from the bluegrass scene” to work as a solo artist and songwriter, the Web page said.
Reporting was contributed by James Barron, John Eligon, Richard G. Jones, Daryl Khan, Dmitry Kiper, William K. Rashbaum, Nate Schweber and Carolyn Wilder.
Therapist Remembered as One Who Refreshed the Broken
*
By RAY RIVERA
Published: February 17, 2008
Much of the later part of Kathryn Faughey’s life was contained on this block of East 79th Street between First and York Avenues. It was where she shared a top-floor apartment with her husband, bought flowers on the corner on special occasions and listened to her patients as they shared their troubles. And it was where her funeral Mass was held on Saturday — at a church steps away from where she was killed on Tuesday.
Dr. Faughey, a 56-year-old psychologist who practiced in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom.
About 350 people attended the hourlong service, including many of her patients, which was held at St. Monica’s Catholic Church. From the steps of the church a small memorial of flowers and cards was visible outside the building a half-block away at 435 East 79th Street where Dr. Faughey was slashed to death in her office.
“It’s just such a tragedy,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral. “We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst.”
Dr. Faughey’s body was carried into the church in a poplar casket and followed closely by a procession of family members and friends, including her husband, Walter Adam.
The Mass was presided over by the Rev. Seamus Finn, who knew Dr. Faughey and had last seen her at a fund-raiser for Northern Ireland at the Waldorf -Astoria in November.
“In one way,” Father Finn said in his sermon, “her profession was so solemnly centered on the act of listening and trying to bring freshness to lives, trying to bring freshness to lives that are often broken apart by anger, by bitterness, by pain and by suffering.”
The circumstances of Dr. Faughey’s death has drawn an inordinate amount of news media attention. Mourners had to push through crowds of reporters, photographers and television cameras to enter and leave the church on Saturday. Some spoke to reporters but most shied away to grieve in private.
Father Finn recalled Dr. Faughey as a woman who found beauty in many places. “She found it in the city that she loved so dearly, for as many times as Walter tried to convince her to move out of it,” he said in his sermon. “We know she found it in places like Paris. We know she found it in just the simplest conversations with anyone of us.”
The eulogy was given by her friend, Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., who knew her from their days together at St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, where Dr. Faughey had once been a professor.
Sister Daly described her as a woman of “incredible wisdom” and deep spiritual faith.
She then turned to her friend’s coffin and, clapping her hands together, said, “Kathy, well done.” The congregation rose to its feet and joined in a standing ovation.
Queens Man Is Arrested in Killing of Therapist
By AL BAKER
Published: February 17, 2008
A 39-year-old man who blamed a Manhattan psychiatrist for having him institutionalized 17 years ago was charged on Saturday with killing a female therapist in a furious knife attack and then slashing the psychiatrist when he tried to come to the woman’s aid, law enforcement officials said.
David M. Tarloff, who was charged in the killing of a Manhattan therapist, was escorted from the 19th Precinct station house Saturday.
The man, David M. Tarloff, was picked up at his home in Queens at 7:20 a.m. and later made statements implicating himself in the killing of the therapist, Kathryn Faughey, 56, and the assault on the psychiatrist, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, who is in his 70s, on Tuesday night inside the East 79th Street offices they shared, the police said.
Mr. Tarloff told investigators he went to the doctors’ offices with plans to rob Dr. Shinbach. He then planned to take his ailing mother, Beatrice, either out of the country or to Hawaii. It was unclear why Dr. Faughey was attacked: she may have inadvertently crossed his path.
Mr. Tarloff told investigators that he did not know that she would be in the offices and had not intended to attack her. Dr. Shinbach was slashed when he ran to try to help Dr. Faughey after hearing her screams, the police said.
The suspect spoke to detectives for 25 minutes — from 8:15 to 8:40 a.m. — and had “cuts on his hands,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who announced the arrest at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Saturday. Then Mr. Tarloff said he wanted a lawyer “and the questioning ended,” Mr. Kelly said.
Law enforcement officials have said that detectives found Dr. Faughey’s office awash in blood and discovered two suitcases the assailant had left behind in the building’s basement. One held women’s fluffy slippers, a blouse and adult diapers. The other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape. The police said that the suspect had been in the basement in the hours before the killing, possibly to scout out an escape route, and fled through a side door to the street after the attack.
A palm print found on the handle of one of the suitcases matched a print from Mr. Tarloff’s left hand that was taken after he was arrested on Feb. 1 at a Queens hospital. He had tried to visit his mother and got into a confrontation with a security guard, according to court records and law enforcement officials.
Two more palm prints from Mr. Tarloff’s right hand were found on the packaging for the diapers that were inside the same suitcase, officials said.
In addition, Mr. Tarloff was picked out in police lineups by three people who saw him on the night of the attack: Dr. Shinbach, a female patient of his who saw the assailant in the office’s waiting room and another patient who was leaving when the assailant showed up, at about 8 p.m., the police said.
“Forensic evidence and Tarloff’s own words placed him at the scene of the crime,” Mr. Kelly said. “These officers knocked on doors, they followed leads and they examined evidence around the clock to make this arrest possible.”
Charges filed against him on Saturday included second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder and assault.
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Tarloff was captured on surveillance videos from the lobby and the basement of the building where Dr. Faughey and Dr. Shinbach were attacked.
On one video, the suspect entered the lobby shortly after 8 p.m. wearing a black cap, a dark coat and sneakers, and toting the two suitcases.
He told the doorman that he was there to see Dr. Shinbach, and walked swiftly up a set of stairs to the professional offices on the first floor.
But Dr. Shinbach had another patient, a woman, waiting for him, so the man who entered the suite sat on the couch next to her until she went in to see Dr. Shinbach at 8:30 p.m.
At 8:50 p.m., Dr. Shinbach heard Dr. Faughey’s screams and rushed into her office and saw her lying still on the blood-soaked carpet by her desk.
The attacker then turned on him, slashing him in the face, head and hands. “She’s dead,” the killer said, as he continued his attack on him, police said. When he finished, he pinned Dr. Shinbach against the wall with a chair, took $90 from his wallet and fled out the building’s basement exit, 59 minutes after he had arrived.
During the interrogation of Mr. Tarloff, “there were no statements concerning his interaction with Dr. Faughey,” Mr. Kelly said.
As Mr. Tarloff waited at the 19th Precinct station house, where he was questioned, a portrait emerged of a quiet, eccentric person who had shared a second-floor apartment in Corona, Queens, with his mother until she recently moved to a nursing home. A balding, 5-foot-10 man, he was sometimes seen walking on his block dressed in slippers and a corduroy blazer. He was prone to bursts of anger, those who knew him said, and he had agitated some of his neighbors by knocking on their doors to ask for money.
The developments in the case came as Dr. Faughey’s family and friends gathered for her funeral Mass on Saturday morning at a church steps away from where she was murdered five days earlier.
Dr. Faughey, a psychologist who practiced cognitive behavior psychotherapy in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom. She grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and lived with her husband of 25 years, Walter Adam.
About 350 people, including many of her patients, attended the hourlong service at St. Monica’s Catholic Church.
“We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral.
Mr. Tarloff, in statements to investigators, expressed anger at Dr. Shinbach, whom he blamed for having him committed to a mental health institution in 1991. But officials said it was unclear if Mr. Tarloff had ever been Dr. Shinbach’s patient or if he had ever been institutionalized.
Mr. Tarloff had indicated that he might have been “institutionalized or incarcerated up to 20 times,” Mr. Kelly said, though a records check to confirm that was still being done.
The Feb. 1 arrest in Queens occurred at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, in the third-floor critical-care unit, said Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.
Mr. Tarloff was trying to visit his mother, a law enforcement official said. A security officer at the hospital, Joel Leroy, saw Mr. Tarloff “touching a critical-care patient, in violation of prearranged visitation conditions,” Mr. Ryan said. “Then he yelled and cursed loudly inside the unit, and approached the nursing station in a threatening manner.”
When Mr. Leroy tried to restrain Mr. Tarloff, he attacked the guard and wrestled him to the floor, Mr. Ryan said.
Mr. Tarloff was charged with third-degree assault, disorderly conduct and harassment and was released on his own recognizance the next day, 10 days before Dr. Faughey’s murder. Mr. Tarloff was due in court on Feb. 25.
Growing up, Mr. Tarloff seemed popular with his friends and took care with his appearance, said one neighbor, Phyllis Zicherman, who said she had known the Tarloffs for decades. She said he had attended college but left under unknown circumstances — around the time she and other neighbors said they noticed he began to change.
And his mother’s absence profoundly affected him, several neighbors said. “He was depressed because of his mom,” Ms. Zicherman said.
A worker at the nursing home where his mother is living said that Mr. Tarloff sometimes phoned her three or four times a day.
“He calls here harassing his mother,” said Robin Moore, a security officer there. “He gets her upset. She’s very sick. When he doesn’t get to speak to her, he makes threats.”
Another security officer, Veronica Darby, said Mr. Tarloff was not allowed” to see his mother, who has been at the home for less than six months. The police had two encounters with Mr. Tarloff last year that led to evaluations of his mental health, officials said, although the details were sketchy.
In one instance in August 2007, officers responded to his father’s Staten Island address and treated him as an emotionally disturbed person, officials said, meaning that he was taken to a hospital to have his mental health evaluated. At that time, his father, Leonard, told officers he was “off his medication,” the police said.
A person who answered the phone at the home of Mr. Tarloff’s father declined to answer questions and hung up.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Kareem Fahim, Ann Farmer, Christine Hauser, Daryl Khan, Dmitry Kiper, kreacher Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Jack Styczynski, Mathew R. Warren and Karen Zraick.