Jeanine Pirro, then the Westchester district attorney, who charged Michael with second-degree murder, would call him “the most famous schizophrenic in America,” a perverse designation, though strangely in tune with the aura of specialness that had characterized so much of his life, and that had shaped the expectations we’d grown up with. When police officers from Hastings-on-Hudson showed up the next morning to bring Michael back there, they were surprised to find reporters, photographers, and TV cameras waiting outside the Ithaca jail. The woman was dead, the scene ghastly.Īnd so it was that my best friend from childhood, who had grown up on the same street as me gone to the same sleepaway camp, the same schools, the same college competed for the same prizes and dreamed the same dream of becoming a writer, was arrested for murdering the person he loved most in the world.

“He did just what he said he did.” They had people at the apartment. Mospan prefaced his request to the Hastings-on-Hudson dispatcher by saying, “This may sound off the wall …” Because who kills someone in Westchester County, drives to Binghamton, and takes a bus to Ithaca, as Michael said he had done, only to surrender to campus police? The dispatcher asked him to wait a moment, and then a detective came on the line. His concern seemed urgent and genuine, though puzzlingly he said this had happened in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, 220 miles away. He thought so, but asked, “Can we check on her?” In that case, “where did the blood all over your person come from?” Michael told him it was Caroline’s blood. When Sergeant Philip Mospan, the officer in charge that night, asked Michael if he was hurt, he received a simple no. Once inside, Michael didn’t need much prodding to answer questions, but whenever he mentioned possibly harming his girlfriend, whom he sometimes referred to as his fiancée, he added, “or a windup doll.” They escorted the man, whose name was Michael Laudor, to Barton Hall, the looming stone fortress that the campus police shared with the athletics department. The police station was all of 100 yards away, on Campus Road, and officers were already coming toward them, some on foot, others in cars.

She thought again that the disoriented man, whose clothes were bloody, had been attacked or maybe had fallen into one of the steep gorges that famously intersect the campus, but when she tried to steer him out of the road, he leaped back, a large hand clenched into a fist. Brewer radioed in the strange encounter, requested backup, and got out of her car. He seemed to be saying that he might have killed someone, his girlfriend or perhaps a windup doll. He was muttering incoherently his rust-colored beard and hair were wildly matted. He lowered his face, shiny with sweat, close to hers. Suddenly, as if in a single stride, the man was at her window. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald