Where a Man Can Lose His Mind

By Kevin Guilfoile

On an August afternoon in 2007, John Mullarkey sent a text message (by some accounts to his mother) with his blood-splattered cell phone: I stabbed my self at demi.s i love you.

That same instant, Gayle Slomer of suburban Pittsburgh heard a desperate, frantic shriek outside her daughter's window. She ran out the door to find her daughter's 16-year-old neighbor Demi Cuccia bleeding in the front yard from more than a dozen stab wounds. Moments later Mullarkey, Cuccia's on-again-off-again boyfriend, emerged from Cuccia's house, a 10-inch, self-inflicted gash across his own neck. "Get away from me! I hate you!" Demi screamed at Mullarkey.

It was one of the last things she ever said.

Mullarkey confessed to the brutal murder at the scene. Later in the hospital, still unable to speak, Mullarkey wrote on an eraser board and handed it to an Allegheny County homicide detective: If somebody did something bad and they were taking medication, Mullarkey wrote, would that be a defense?

Approximately four months before the murders, Mullarkey began taking the powerful prescription acne medicine Accutane. According to the defense, Mullarkey stopped taking the meds just days before the murder because he was concerned about side effects, which included radical mood swings. Friends of Cuccia's however, paint a picture of Mullarkey as always having been controlling and jealous, and in the days before the murder, Mullarkey sent Cuccia a series of increasingly desperate emails and texts concerning the state of their relationship.

It's a shocking story, but many of the details will sound horrifyingly familiar to Chicagoans, as well as to readers of this site.

On October 24, 2006, respected dermatologist Dr. David Cornbleet, was viciously stabbed to death by Hans Peterson, a former patient for whom Cornbleet had allegedly prescribed Accutane several years earlier. Like Mullarkey, Peterson claimed to have stopped taking the drug after he became concerned about side effects. In fact, Peterson claimed to have taken only a couple of doses. Nevertheless for more than four years afterward Peterson would describe a series of persistent and unbearable side effects that he blamed on the small amount of Accutane he had taken in 2002.

Accutane has had a long history of both success and controversy. Many, including Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, whose son committed suicide while on the drug, have tried to link it with depression. Roche, the pharmaceutical company that distributes Accutane includes a hefty warning label as required by law, but claims no causal link to depression, suicide or violence has been found.

The Mullarkey case, which has gone to trial this week, appears to be the first time a defendant has claimed his judgment had been impaired by Accutane. The results will be watched very carefully in Chicago, and in Peterson's native Eugene, Oregon, and also in Basel, Switzerland where Roche is headquartered.

If the Accutane defense succeeds, we will no doubt see it again.

Even if it doesn't succeed, I suspect we will see it again.

The story of Dr. Cornbleet and Hans Peterson is just as tragic but far more bizarre than the Mullarkey case. The tale includes a lengthy manhunt across several states, the nuances of international law and extradition, the television show Dexter, online poker, Barack Obama, a strange claim about Asperger's syndrome, and the heroic intervention of an Iraq war veteran. More than anything, though, it's about fathers and sons. I won't repeat all the details here, but if you follow this link and start at the bottom you can get, if not the whole story, a good sense of it.

As John Mullarkey sits before a jury, Hans Peterson sits in a jail cell on the island of Guadaloupe. He has been there for almost two years. The French government refuses to send him back to the US to face judgment, but they also seem reluctant to deal with his crime themselves. No charges have been filed and none seem to be coming in the immediate future. Under French law, Peterson can be held for another two years without trial. Although they serve a different system in a different jurisdiction, Peterson's court-appointed lawyers no doubt will also be watching the outcome of the Mullarkey case with keen interest.

Finally, a meaningless but eerie coincidence: I first wrote about the murder of Dr. Cornbleet 11 months after the crime, on August 15, 2007. The post went up around 9:30 Central Time.

John Mullarkey murdered Dana Cuccia just seven hours later.

UPDATE: A pharmacist testified in the trial yesterday that Accutane likely caused Mullarkey's depression and a mental disorder. On cross examination the pharmacist admitted that his experience with the drug was limited to what he'd read. "I don't think the FDA would (require those warnings) unless there was a problem with the drug," he said.

TOTALLY UNEXPECTED UPDATE: Roche pulls Accutane out of the US Market after an unrelated jury verdict in a class action lawsuit awarding more than $30 million dollars to users who experienced inflammatory bowel disease. More later.

UPDATE: A jury in Pittsburgh took just two hours to convict Mullarkey of first-degree murder.

Naivete and Speed Make a Great Combination

By Kevin Guilfoile

"It didn't work. I want to die. You don't understand. I want to be dead."

Those were words allegedly spoken to paramedics by Jeanette Sliwinski, the 23-year-old Chicago model who two years ago drove her red Mustang convertible at almost 90 miles an hour into the back of a Honda Civic, killing three Chicago musicians on their way to lunch. Sliwinski's trial began this week and it's not an underreported story, at least not around here. The papers are giving it prime space. The blogs are all over it. The local television stations have reporters at the Skokie courthouse. Even the national networks have nosed into the proceedings because of the bizarre nature of the charges and also, undoubtedly, because the defendant is as easy on the eyes as she is hard to stomach. There really shouldn't be much for me to add.

Except that Jeanette Sliwinski murdered my friend.

We have a tendency to sentimentalize the character of the unfairly and prematurely dead, but I could produce a hundred witnesses to tell you that Doug Meis wasn't a guy you even had to know well before you grew to love him. You only had to watch him play the drums. He always had this incredible look, this incredible, transparent look of undiluted joy on his face. His elbows moved around his hands in these wild and joyous, concentric and eccentric orbits. Whenever I brought someone to see the band Exo play for the first time, they always said the same thing to me during the rare silence--God, I can't take my eyes off that drummer! It was impossible to watch Doug play and not know how much fun he was having. And it was impossible to be around him and not have that much fun.

On the morning of July 14, 2005, Jeanette Sliwinski got into a fight with her mother and climbed into her sports car with a bottle of gin and the intention to kill herself. But she wasn't only going to kill herself. She was going to do it in a way that would punish her mother and everyone else that had made her life so unbearably unhappy. Her suicide was going to be a spectacular one. She would kill herself violently. She would kill other people in the process. It would be on the television. In the newspapers. And the long list of people who had wronged Jeanette Sliwinski would have to live with all that blood and destruction forever on their consciences.

Her first thought was to drive into a train, but when she got to the tracks there was no train there. Angry and determined, she pushed the accelerator to the floor. She ran through one red light. A second. A third. Her life would end when something, and hopefully someone, stopped her car.

Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, and Doug Meis had just left the offices of Shure Microphones to get a bite for lunch. They were stopped at a red light on Dempster, waiting to make a left hand turn toward Wendy's.

Sliwinski spotted the rear of their car, retargeted her eight-cylinder missile, and gunned it.

According to Sliwinski's interpretation of the vague, unwritten laws in her head, maybe she thought this couldn't be a homicide. At the moment Sliwinski decided she would never again press the brake of her car, she had never seen Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, or Doug Meis. In the tiny universe with Jeanette Sliwinski at its center, these individuals didn't exist any more than a city in China she'd never heard of. How could she kill someone who wasn't alive? This was the brilliance of her plan. At the very moment these men would enter the plane of her existence, Jeanette Sliwinski would leave it. Her mother and all her other enemies would feel the anguish of the dead she would leave behind, but Jeanette never would.

She would be out of there.

Sliwinski's lawyers are going to try to spin her pathological narcissism as insanity. They've asked for a bench trial, probably deciding that between the testimony of appalled witnesses and the grief of the victims' families and the inevitable slide show of the defendant's glamour shots, she would never get a moment's sympathy from a midwestern jury. Instead they will put five psychologists on a full court press, trying to hang their hopes on a judge's interpretation of insanity law.

But Jeanette was not temporarily delusional, as her lawyers will claim. In fact her plan unfolded almost exactly as she imagined it would. There was violence. Blood. Death. Destruction. Headlines. Her mother was shocked, shamed, humbled, and humiliated. The only part of her scheme that didn't come together perfectly is that she wasn't crushed to death. In accordance with one of God's favorite jokes, she only fractured her ankle. The impact had injected the endless, incurable pain and sorrow of other people's suffering into her own soul, not somebody else's. And now she has forever to think about how good her life used to be.

After hearing the deafening crash, the manager of a nearby mattress store ran out into the street, a demonstration pillow still in his hands. He saw Sliwinski's overturned car, with the model's slightly injured foot sticking out the window. The lifeless body of one of her victims was splayed on the nearby concrete.

"Get me out of here!" he heard Sliwinski demand.

No, Jeanette. You're stuck here with the grieving rest of us.

UPDATE: Jeanette Sliwinski was found guilty, but mentally ill, of three counts of reckless homicide and one count of aggravated battery, lesser charges than the three counts of first-degree murder sought by the prosecution. Sentencing will be November 26. Channel 7 says she faces a maximum of ten years. The Associated Press says a maximum of five.

Autopsy photos

by Michael Dymmoch

After the initial shock, the autopsy photos become meaningless. The victim was stabbed and strangled and crushed by blunt force trauma, and People’s exhibits 53 to 80 exhaustively document her injuries. One of the jurors looks up at the clock. I do, too. I’ve seen photos like these before. And I didn’t know the woman. All of this seems overkill to me, as over killed as was the victim, stabbed and smashed and strangled.

The medical examiner has testified already as to all this carnage. His explanation of the photos is reinforcement—in case anyone missed something on the first pass. We in the gallery will not see the images, but the jury will. When the M.E. is finished, the pictures will be “published”—passed from juror to juror—here in court, then passed around later—if they can stomach it—in the jury room.

Couldn’t we just stipulate that she was brutally murdered? That’s not in question, is it? Won’t all of this distract us from the real point of the trial—did the defendant do it?

This is the part they leave out of legal thrillers. This is real life, real death—nauseating as the smell of putrefaction, ugly as road kill.