Jon Cornbleet on the Peterson Verdict

By Kevin Guilfoile

Justice has been a long time coming for members of Chicago's Cornbleet family. It's been five years since Hans Peterson drove here from New York and brutally tortured and murdered their dermatologist father in his Michigan Avenue office.

After a year-long manhunt and an even longer extradition battle, Hans Peterson was convicted this week by a French court in Guadalupe and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 22 years. It's the maximum penalty allowed under French law.

Yesterday, Dr. Cornbleet's son, Jon, spoke to reporters about the verdict



Incredibly, even though this was a huge story in Chicago in 2006 and 2007, and received national attention on shows like Dateline NBC and Inside Edition, not a single English language print media outlet has reported this week's trial and verdict (I'm not aware of TV coverage either, but it's possible I could have missed it). An exception was Whet Moser's thoughtful and personal piece on the trial for Chicago magazine's web site.

The Chicago Tribune does have a story today about an Australian who was sentenced to two months detention in Indonesia for marijuana possession, but nothing about the conviction on the same day of an American who stabbed a Chicago doctor more than two dozen times just a few blocks from Tribune Tower.

(For more background on this story look at this and here, or you can really go in-depth with this excellent Chicago Mag article from 2007.)

UPDATE: Here's a television report (in French) that includes scenes of the courtroom and a comment from Peterson's mother:



UPDATE 2 Jon Cornbleet will be addressing the Chicago media Tuesday (11/29) morning. I assume we'll finally see local coverage of this story Tuesday night and Wednesday.

The Trial of Hans Peterson: Tuesday's Testimony

By Kevin Guilfoile

(For more background on this story look at this and here, or you can really go in-depth with this excellent Chicago Mag article from 2007.)

Another update from the Guadalupe trial of Hans Peterson, killer of Chicago dermatologist Dr David Cornbleet.

This report contains a pretty thorough summary of yesterday's testimony, including that of Peterson's French mother and the Chicago coroner who examined Dr. Cornbleet's body.

Peterson's mother, who was born in France (a fact that enabled her son to apply for French citizenship and avoid extradition) describes dramatic changes she perceived in her son after just a small dose of Accutane. The medical examiner said that the extent of the injuries suffered by Dr. Cornbleet resembled those of a "hate crime."

One interesting detail--it appears the family of Dr. Cornbleet is also represented by an attorney, who has the right to cross-examine witnesses. He pointed to Peterson's history of problems managing his anger and observed that Peterson's mother is not a medical expert who could identify a link between Accutane and Hans's ailments.

(Also, read this thoughtful, personal piece from Chicago magazine's Whet Moser on the start of the Peterson trial.)

DAY FIVE UPDATE: Shortly after the arrest of Hans Peterson, some speculated that the most he could serve under French law was 20 years. Today, the prosecution asked for a sentence of life plus 22 years.

The Prisoner Who Now Stands Before You

By Kevin Guilfoile

On October 24, 2006, Hans Peterson drove a rented car from New York to Chicago and walked into the Michigan Avenue office of dermatologist David Cornbleet. His intention was to torture the 64-year-old physician with a knife and blowtorch.

Torturing and murdering someone, even someone more than twice your age, turns out to be more difficult than it seems. Dr. Cornbleet fought back. Peterson eventually overpowered him, however, stabbing him more than twenty times until he was dead.

We followed the Cornbleet case extensively here at The Outfit, even publishing the first photo of Peterson after his arrest, and uncovering Peterson's ominous postings on an Accutane web site. But there hasn't been much news on that front in quite a while. Peterson fled to the island of St. Martin where he was eventually arrested by French authorities. He has been sitting in a jail in Guadalupe for four years.

Today he finally goes on trial for "murder and acts of torture and barbarism." (Even though this was once a high-profile case with primetime network coverage and an appeal for extradition from then Senator Barack Obama, I can find no coverage of this at all in the English-language media. Many thanks to the pen pal who alerted me to the news.)

It appears the case will be a war of experts, with the defense attempting to mitigate Peterson's guilt by claiming that the Accutane prescription Dr. Cornbleet had written for Peterson's acne several years before the murder caused significant and irreversible damage to Peterson's brain.

French justice is slow to arrive, but swiftly delivered, apparently. A verdict is expected by the weekend.

We'll post it when we hear it.

UPDATE: Here is a very brief summary of the first day of testimony.

UPDATE 2: Summary of Tuesday's testimony.

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.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Baby

By Kevin Guilfoile

I'm sure you don't know this but The Outfit has a Caribbean doppleganger, a French-language blogger who has been covering the Hans Peterson case from paradise climes with nearly as much diligence as us, albeit with a little less discretion and a lot more flair.

More on him in a moment.

The case is back in the news as a team of French prosecutors, judges, and police officers will arrive in Chicago on Monday to begin their investigation into the murder of Chicago dermatologist Dr. David Cornbleet. They will be interviewing witnesses, detectives, and the family of the victim, and they might visit the Michigan Avenue office in which Dr. Cornbleet was murdered.

(If you're unfamiliar with this bizarre case, in which a former patient of Dr. Cornbleet confessed to his brutal murder but not before fleeing to the Caribbean where he now waits, in a web of complicated extradition laws, for trial in a French court, start at the bottom and read up. I promise you won't be bored.)

Thanks to a legal system that must be the envy of our current administration, Hans Peterson has not been charged with a crime and yet has been sitting in a Guadeloupe prison since his confession last August. Presumably this legal junket to the states will finally lead to murder charges which will then be prosecuted under the French inquisitorial system in an island court.

Unlike our adversarial system, in which the prosecution and defense would duel over his fate before judge and jury, the investigation, trial, and sentencing of Hans Peterson will all be directed by a judge. At trial, representatives for the prosecution, defense, and even the victim will be allowed to make suggestions, but it will ultimately be the judge who interviews witnesses, the judge who weighs the evidence, the judge who renders a verdict, and the judge who issues the sentence.

Prosecutors in Guadeloupe have assured the Cornbleet family that justice will be served in a French court, and I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of their public service. I assume they will seek a thorough investigation and a fair trial. Jon Cornbleet, the son of the victim, recently told the Sun-Times what message he hopes to communicate to the judge:

"I want to explain to them that everybody is upset about this,'' Cornbleet said. "I want to explain to them that this is a huge national case that everybody has their eyes on. I don't think they understand what it has done to my family.''

This might be a message that will be well-received. France is fairly sensitive to victims' rights, even requiring in some cases that the state compensate victims financially when the the offender is unable to.

Of course the Cornbleets have never asked for compensation, as far as I know. I think what Jon Cornbleet would like the French government to know is that the world is watching this case. Or, if not the world, CNN, Inside Edition, Dateline NBC, the United States Senate, the US State Department. And of course, The Outfit. And also Jabiru.

Jabiru is Gilbert Blum, the aforementioned blogger and a St. Martin journalist operating under the auspices of Le Monde who has taken an interest in this case. Apparently he has received much of his information from the local detectives who took Peterson's confession, as well as the attorney who will represent him at trial.

Months ago we reported that Peterson had carried a blowtorch with him on the night of the murder with the intention of cutting off Dr. Cornbleet's hands and feet and then cauterizing the wounds, keeping the physician alive while he suffered. Jabiru goes into far more detail (even if the awkward translation sometimes makes the depiction more lurid):

To carry out his demented mutilation operation, he buys a small blowtorch with gas cartridges, special pliers to “slash the dermatologist with”, a hacksaw, some rope, plus his knife… before the fateful appointment of 24 October 2006. Faced with Dr. Cornbleet, he uses as an excuse a blemish on his buttock and the consultation takes place normally.

Then, as he was about to leave empty-handed, he pretends to the dermatologist that he also has a blemish on his leg to show him. And then the cold-blooded attack begins, releasing a drive to kill pent up since April 2002.

His diabolical delirium (a Dibbuk, as Dr. David Cornbleet’s Ashkenazi ancestors used to say) materialized in the persecution feeling which has been haunting him, eating at him inside his body and soul for the past four years. But in a broken up family context, he does not talk about it. Therefore there is no outside critical mind that could go against the negative deviance of his intimate thoughts. No meeting, no advice, no feed-back from his father, his mother or his sister Stephanie.

He feels perfectly normal and totally logical to punish his persecutor by slashing at his hands and feet so that he may no longer carry out his profession. A fiendish plan, including cauterizing the wounds with the blowtorch!

Under the threat of torture, the physician defended himself, hitting the aggressor with the knife. Then he becomes relentless, with no visible emotion, until he finally finishes him off with the thrust of the knife in the heart of his executioner having become an expiatory victim until his last breath. Leaving the office with warm blood stains, he told someone there to call for an ambulance quickly. On exiting the building, he conceals his face in front of the video cameras.

We might be seeing the first glimpses of Peterson's defense here. I'm not sure if this comes from Peterson's statement or from his attorney but this is the first suggestion I've seen, however improbable, that he did not intend to kill Dr. Cornbleet that day:

His main goal – four years after the first consultation – was not (he said) the death of his executioner, only mutilation… Of course, for all his patients David Cornbleet is everything but an executioner. But Hans is locked within the delirium of his paranoid delusion, controlled by the injustice he feels as a victim.

Much has been made about the effect that the drug Accutane might have had on Hans Peterson, even after only two doses. Peterson's father, also a physician, has gone so far as to say that it was the cause of his son's psychosis. Perhaps the most interesting implication in Jabiru's posts (and in his comments here at The Outfit as well) is the possibility that the defense will include the suggestion that Hans has Asperger's Syndrome.

For the court attorney in Guadeloupe, the burden of defending Hans Peterson is heavy and somewhat tricky. The first trips to the visiting room in the Basse-Terre jail look more like short progressive taming sessions.

The murderer is not talkative. He is autistic, and his distinctive features are:

Lack of communication with people. Reasoning intelligence and good writing qualities, including self-analysis.

A champion of online poker on the Internet, the year the crime was committed, he has 130,000 dollars in his account. Therefore he did not kill for money. “A rational gambler typically knows the expected payoff and loss, as well as the probabilities of winning and losing”, he says.

From now on, his brain, locked into a prison cell, is going to remain shut away inside the prison, like a snail inside its shell. A young French-American borderline individual, coming to take refuge on a French island to avoid the risk of a lethal injection, his trial will probably take place within 2 years. Who is he and why did he kill?

Hans Peterson’s four aces, his “game of bluff” could be Asperger’s syndrome.

Readers of this site know that three months after he murdered Dr. Cornbleet, Peterson began posting to Wrong Planet, an "online resource and community for those with Asperger's Syndrome". Although Hans had registered at the site three years earlier, it was only after Dr. Cornbleet's murder that he began inquiring whether he might have the disorder. Hans was clearly trying to figure out why he was different from everyone he knew.

As far as I can tell Hans has never been diagnosed with Asperger's, a high functioning form of autism that has nothing to do with murderous rage. But it's possible that his attorney is trying to use Asperger's as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Several months after we had first discussed Hans's personal inquiry into Asperger's, Jabiru commented here at The Outfit:

I discuss about that with a french psychiatric expert. Autism and Asperger Syndrom have also to be in your mind to understand a little more about this criminal.

I can only assume that Jabiru is getting that idea from Hans's defense attorney. And although it's difficult to imagine what Asperger's has to do with murder, if Hans's defense is really lining up psychiatrists to attest to that fact it's something that might give observers of this case pause, especially in light of this paragraph from the US Department of Justice analysis of the French judicial system:

Expert witnesses, such as psychiatrists, have a great influence. The court will generally abide by the conclusions of expert witnesses.

Cornbleet Murder Case Media Alert

For Outfit readers who have been following the case, this week Channel 5 in Chicago ran parts of an interview with Hans Peterson's father, Dr. Thomas Peterson, which was taped for an upcoming edition of Dateline NBC:

"There are multiple victims and multiple villains. I feel that one of the victims is Dr. Cornbleet and one of the villains is Dr. Cornbleet. One of the victims is Hans Peterson and one of the villains is Hans Peterson."

Here is part two of the NBC interview which explores the Accutane angle in slightly more depth and includes a response from the victim's son, Jon Cornbleet.

Chicago's ABC affiliate (WLS, Channel 7) also ran an interview with Dr. Peterson. That piece includes a statement from Dr. Douglas Bremner, the Director of the Emory University Clinical Neuroscience Research Institute, who performed a brain imaging study a few years back that claims to show that Accutane has an effect on the orbitofrontal cortex.

If you're confused by the conflicting scientific claims made about the risks of Accutane (also known as Isotretinoin), here is a good explanation of why you're confused, referencing Bremner's study, a more recent study which shows no link between the drug and depression, and another that calls for more studies. If I understand it correctly, Bremner's study showed how Accutane might be linked to depression, but it did not actually show a cause-and-effect relationship:

Dr. Bremner explains that to invoke depression, isotretinoin must influence the brain. During the investigation, brain function of the subjects was measured using positron emission tomography (PET) before and after four months of treatment with isotretinoin. Isotretinoin treatment was associated with decreased brain metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex- the area of the brain known to mediate symptoms of depression. Yet, there were no differences in severity of depressive symptoms between the isotretinoin and antibiotic treatment groups before or after treatment.

The local CBS station (WBBM, Channel 2), includes some quotes from an interview with Dr. Peterson on its web site, but has no video.

UPDATE: The local papers all have updates on the anniversary of Dr. Cornbleet's murder.

I Was a Lonely Boy, I'm Not the Only Boy

By Kevin Guilfoile

While reading coverage of the Cornbleet murder in The Daily Herald, a newspaper from the island of St. Martin, I came across this startling sentence:

(Hans Peterson) reportedly inflicted major lacerations on the dermatologist’s hands and feet and then cauterized the wounds with a blow torch before stabbing him to death with a knife.

I had seen it alleged in other foreign reports that Peterson used a blowtorch in his murder of Dr. Cornbleet last October, but I have never read that claim in the American press.

That's probably because it's not true. Not exactly.

I'm told that Peterson confessed to investigators that he brought a blowtorch with him to Dr. Cornbleet's office with the intention of torturing the physician by cutting his hands and feet and then cauterizing the wounds so he wouldn't lose too much blood. This would have kept Dr. Cornbleet alive for as long as possible so that Peterson could cruelly prolong his suffering. But Peterson couldn't follow through with that part of his plan and he described to authorities the reason why.

More on that in a minute, because it touches on a subject we've discussed recently here at The Outfit.

[If you're unfamiliar with the Cornbleet murder case, in which a Chicago dermatologist was brutally stabbed to death by a former patient because the patient believed he was suffering permanent side effects from a prescribed anti-acne medication, start at the bottom and read up.]

Immediately, it struck me that this idea--cutting into the hands and feet and then cauterizing them--didn't occur to Hans a priori. He had to have heard of someone doing that before. I can only speculate, but I know of at least one popular movie--Tony Scott's version of Man on Fire--in which Denzel Washington does something similar to a man's hands with a cigarette lighter during an interrogation. There is also a more obscure film from the late 90s called Thursday. I haven't seen it but here is a monologue from one scene according to IMDb (bold emphasis mine):

BILLY HILL: Well, I ain't gonna s*** ya, pal. When I leave here today, you're gonna be dead as Cinderella over there. Regardless of what you tell me, I'm gonna f*** you up. [opens his bag and takes out a battery-powered circular saw; turns on the saw and holds it in front of Casey's face] YOU READY TO GET STARTED? [turns off the saw] I know you threw out the smack. And you probly don't know where the money is, neither. That's cool. Tho the truth is... I ain't got nothin' better to do, while I wait here for my old friend Nick. [reaching in his bag] Just so you know, I ain't gonna let you bleed to death. [takes out a blow-torch] No, sir. Cuz when I cut you... [turns on the blow-torch] I'm gonna cauterize it. I consider myself an artist. Matter of fact, I picked up this little girl at this club one time... and I cut on her for 16 hours. That's a personal best, but... I keep hoping... [turns on the saw] Alright, now, let's see. I think I'm gonna start at the feet, AND WORK MY WAY UP!

I have no idea if Hans has seen either film, of course.

I have been told, however, that Hans was a big fan of the Showtime series Dexter (based on a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay). I would never suggest that Dexter, or any other television program, caused Hans to become a killer. But Dexter premiered just three weeks before the murder and it's obvious why the character of Dexter Morgan--a serial killer who only kills villainous people--must have appealed to Hans, who rationalized his savagery by claiming that he was somehow a victim of Dr. Cornbleet's greed.

(There will probably be a lengthier post on this in the future, but I should note here that Peterson's assertion that Dr. Cornbleet prescribed him Accutane because he was desperate for patients and wanted Hans to make the mandatory follow-up visits is not only absurd on its face, but refuted by evidence that Dr. Cornbleet had a thriving practice and regularly saw more than 100 patients a week.)

But back to Peterson's confession. Hans allegedly told St. Martin police that he did not use the blowtorch on Dr. Cornbleet because killing a human being turned out to be a lot harder than he thought it would be. Dr. Cornbleet was in fine shape for a man of his age. He fought back. Hans ended up punched and bloodied himself. It took all of Peterson's attention and energy just to subdue Dr. Cornbleet. He had nothing left for extracurricular activity.

In the surveillance video from the night of the murder we see Peterson leaving the office building, covering his face with a sweatshirt and, according to one witness, apparently bleeding from the nose.

Last week Libby wrote an eloquent post about the proliferation of violent images in the media and the difficulty we all have determining which depictions are edifying and which are gratuitous. I don't believe that such images caused Hans Peterson to kill and I won't play psychiatrist and pretend I understand the forces, internal and external, that drove him to that madness. But when it came time to actually murder someone at close range, with his own hands, Peterson discovered that violent scenes on television and in movies and video games (and novels, too) had deceived him. He was completely unprepared for the intensity and the struggle and the blood and the chaos. The motion. The smell. The sound. Real murder was nothing like the movies.

In the first episode of Hans's favorite television series, Dexter Morgan, who is not only a serial killer but also a forensics technician, admires a crime scene (not his) that is mysteriously free of blood splatter. He thinks to himself in a voiceover, "No blood. No sticky, hot, messy, awful blood. No blood at all. What a beautiful idea!"

And not possible except on cable TV.

UPDATE: The Cornbleet family has provided a link that will direct you to the US State Department's web site. There you can send a message directly to the Secretary of State (as Senators Obama and Durbin have done) requesting that she continue to put pressure on her counterparts in the French government for the extradition of Hans Peterson to the United States.

UPDATE 2: "There are multiple victims and multiple villains. I feel that one of the victims is Dr. Cornbleet and one of the villains is Dr. Cornbleet. One of the victims is Hans Peterson and one of the villains is Hans Peterson." Channel 5 in Chicago has posted part of an interview with Hans Peterson's father recorded for an upcoming feature for Dateline NBC. They will be running more of the interview on the news tonight, as well as a reaction from Dr. Cornbleet's son, Jon.