Who is Daniel Rakowitz?
Saturday—Jeff
Tomorrow,
we leave for Greece for several months to work on Kaldis adventure #15. By now you’d think I’d have the transition
routine down pat…bills set to be paid automatically by my bank, mail reviewed
and forwarded to me as needed by my office, the farm protected by watchful
eyes, and my departing MIE blog all set and ready to go.
But
then came the unexpected. My longtime high-level-of-service bank fell victim to
the financial upheaval of 2023 resulting in it being acquired by America’s
largest bank. Merging those two approaches to banking presented a challenging
test of cultures, and May kicked off long planned efforts to switch all of the
acquired bank’s accounts to their new home.
That’s
all well and good, but a daunting task when the transfer includes each client’s
lifetime of bill paying records and payee information. By the way, did I
mention there was but a narrow one-week window for the old bank’s clients to
transfer the information to their new bank or risk losing that information
forever?
Let’s
just say my past week has been consumed with trying to sort things out before I
leave, with fingers firmly crossed in the hope that on my return there will not
be sheriff’s deputies lined up seeking to collect on unpaid bills. For my
mail and farm preservation, I’ve crossed my toes.
As
for my MIE post for this Saturday, it came to me by accident. I was looking up
information on Manhattan psychiatric hospitals—just in case this banking mess
should drive me nuts–when I came across the following Wikipedia post. It summoned up
thoughts of themes found in some of the most influential thrillers of our
generation. Do you see what I see
in this Wikipedia entry?
It
kicks off with a killer opening line:
Daniel Paul Rakowitz is an American murderer and
possible cannibal.
He was born in 1960 in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri where
his father was a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army… He moved to New
York City around 1985. An eccentric well known to his East
Village neighbors as a marijuana dealer and owner of a pet rooster,
Rakowitz founded his own religion - the Church of 966.
In 1989, he walked around Tompkins Square Park in
the East Village bragging to some of the people he believed were his disciples
that he had killed the woman he believed to be his live-in girlfriend. Monika
Beerle, actually a roommate of Rakowitz's, was a Swiss student at
the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, and a dancer
at Billy's Topless.
Several of Rakowitz's friends disputed the notion that
Monika was his girlfriend. Nevertheless, by his own confession, he dismembered
her body in the bathtub, boiled the parts, and served some of her remains in
the form of a soup to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. He said that he had
boiled her head and made soup from her brain. He had tasted it, liked
it, and thereafter referred to himself as a cannibal.
At least one of the people to whom he had told his tale
went to police. Rakowitz was arrested shortly thereafter and led the
police to the Port Authority Bus Terminal storage area, where he had
stored her skull and teeth.
On February 22, 1991, a New York jury found Rakowitz,
then 31 years old, not guilty by reason of insanity for the killing of Monika
Beerle on August 19, 1989. In 2004, a jury found Rakowitz no longer
dangerous but decided that he is still mentally ill and should remain at
the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on New York City's Wards
Island.
Just imagine what other
blockbuster thriller tales must lie within those Psychiatric Center’s
walls. And while you’re doing that, I’ll
be escaping to my Greek islands home…in search of other sorts of
cannibalistic stories…perhaps about banks.
--Jeff
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