Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (51 page)

He was evidently playing the most macabre music and he had those photographs of Barbara and the black candles and he was performing a kind of black mass.

Lena Richards

I was nervous around him because I just didn’t know what to expect—I couldn’t tell. He didn’t have much to say, really. And he didn’t seem to have much patience for anything, I noticed. Apparently all week he’d been using the telephone a lot and drinking all the wine—Nini said, “He’s to have it,” so he ordered more. On Saturday when I got there, he asked me to go to the store for him to get him some writing paper. I was wondering why he couldn’t go out himself. I told him it was early, I didn’t feel like going out yet. So he did go, after all, and I asked him to get me a newspaper, but he forgot. And when he came back he curled up in a chair and slept for a long time.

Cecelia Brebner

Late Saturday afternoon I went over to have tea with Tony and Nini and no sooner had I gotten there than the nurse beckoned me into the bedroom, she said Nini wanted to talk to me. Nini told me, “I’m so frightened of him, Celia.” I said, “Well, Nini, I don’t know how to advise you at this point. I don’t know whether we can call the police because he hasn’t committed a felony.” When I came back into the living room, Tony said to me, “I’m not well, Celia,” and I said, “Now, Tony, tell me—define this. Are you sick mentally or are you sick physically?” He said, “I wake up at three in the morning,” and I said, “Well, so do I. It’s the jet lag, the time difference. But each day it will get a little better. And you know where I am if you need me.” And he threw his arms around me and said, “Oh, I love you, Celia, I love you.” I said, “Well, Tony, prove your love. All I want you to do is be kind to Nini and show them that you can fit into normal society again.” He said, “Yes, yes, I can, I can.” So I said fine.

Lena Richards

I didn’t prepare supper for Nini that Saturday because he said
he
wanted to do it. He even told her what he was going to make her. But then I think somebody called and asked them out to dinner. Anyway, I left.

But later that night I called to see if she was okay. She said she was. I knew she wasn’t going to say she wasn’t, but I thought she wasn’t her own self.

Dr. Frederick Baekeland

I had dinner with them that night, the Saturday after his arrival, and he seemed rather tense but not extraordinarily so—and of course I’ve seen him very tense at times. One of the big problems in psychiatry is the limits of predicting behavior. Another big problem is that a person may look tense and it could have to do with any number of things, and if the person’s not going to tell you anything about it, that presents still another problem.

Thilo von Watzdorf

Tony called me in New York and I told my secretary, “No no—tell him I’m not available.” I had only arrived in town a few days before and was just starting a new job at Sotheby’s and a new life. The telephone call came during my very first meeting with the staff of my department. The last time I’d seen Tony was at the party Barbara gave on Cadogan Square the night before he killed her, and I hadn’t communicated with him at all during the whole time he was in Broadmoor.

When he couldn’t reach me by phone in New York he wrote me a letter saying how fondly he remembered me from Ansedonia and how all he wanted now was to take care of his little grandmother and how he didn’t have any friends in New York his own age and would so much like to see me and couldn’t we meet.

I got the letter on a Sunday night—I’d been in the country for the weekend—and I was touched by it. I rang and rang and kept getting no answer. I couldn’t imagine why no one was picking up since I knew his grandmother was in her late eighties and there had to be somebody there to look after her.

Lena Richards

On Sunday I came maybe a couple minutes after nine a.m., and Tony didn’t open the door for me right away. I didn’t have my own key, I’d given it to
him.
When he finally came to the door—he was wearing his cutoff pants—he said, “Lena, quick! Get the police!” Or the ambulance, or something to that effect. “I just stabbed my grandmother.” He didn’t move. I got scared, so I didn’t go in. I ran back down the stairs—I had on high heels—and I ran to the corner and called the police. Then I waited outside Nini’s building for them to come, and when they did I took them up.

Sergeant Joseph Chinea

We responded to a 911 call, and when my partner John McCabe and I entered the apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street, he came running out of the bedroom at us, saying, “She won’t die!” We could hear his grandmother screaming. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him past me, and McCabe, who’s a beefy man, grabbed him and he didn’t struggle. He kept repeating, “She won’t die, the knife won’t go in! And she keeps screaming! I can’t understand it.”

I ran into the bedroom and saw this elderly, frail lady lying against the wall. The nightstand was turned over and she was in the corner. It looked as if she was trying to get away from him. She was wearing a satiny nightgown and the blood was just running through it, it wasn’t soaking up. She was still screaming, but once she saw me she started to calm down. The nurse had arrived during the assault, and she probably saved the woman’s life.

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

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

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 him.

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

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

From the Logbook, Sergeant Joseph Chinea, July 27
,
1980