By Tien-Shun Lee
During his testimony last week at his sanity trial, former East Villager Daniel Rakowitz — who has admitted to boiling and cleaning the bones of his former roommate — professed his love for marijuana and for pet animals.
Rakowitz, who has been locked up in a psychiatric facility since the notorious incident, also stuck up for weasels — animals he once likened to psychiatrists.
“You called [psychiatrists] liars and weasels, didn’t you,” Assistant District Attorney Gary Galperin asked Rakowitz during cross-examination on Monday.
“I wouldn’t insult weasels,” Rakowitz replied.
“So you have more respect for weasels than psychiatrists,” Galperin retorted.
During an emotionally charged account of what happened on Sat., Aug. 19, 1989 — the day that Swiss dancer Monika Beerle was killed — Rakowitz said Beerle was smoking pot and seemed to be doing fine until three of his friends began talking inside the apartment that Rakowitz and Beerle were sharing.
“She started getting a little bit agitated and threatening those three people that they had to leave,” said Rakowitz.
Beerle had ended up becoming Rakowitz’s roommate by paying the back rent on his apartment after she failed to find an apartment through a real estate agency, Rakowitz testified. The real estate agency wouldn’t accept Beerle’s money without proof of a job.
Rakowitz said he had known Beerle for five days before she moved in with him. He said the first day Beerle moved in, he found his cat missing, and later learned that the cat was dead in between two buildings. When he told Beerle about the pet’s death, Beerle said she had put the cat out in the hallway to see how it would react with a pit bull.
On Aug. 19, Beerle told Rakowitz’s friends that they had to leave, Rakowitz testified.
In response to Beerle’s threats, one of Rakowitz’s friends, Randy Easterday, told Beerle, “I’m not Daniel. You don’t know who you’re f**cking with,” according to Rakowitz.
Rakowitz said that when Beerle later returned with the building superintendent, known by local tenants as “Crazy Dave,” she asked the super if he was going to get Rakowitz’s friends out of the apartment.
After Dave asked Rakowitz for a joint, Beerle became angry at the superintendent, and told him, “I just got through f**king you so you would get them out of there,” Rakowitz testified. Rakowitz said everyone in the room then began laughing at Beerle.
According to Rakowitz, Beerle then tore her blouse and told the people in the room that she was going to go to tell the police that “you had raped me.”
According to Rakowitz’s testimony, Dave then said, “Should I go ahead and kill
this b*tch?”, to which Rakowitz responded, “I don’t give a damn. Go ahead and kill the b*tch.”
Dave then put Beerle in a chokehold, and later Easterday got up and put a metal rod against Beerle’s windpipe, Rakowitz said.
Afterwards, two people in the room left and Rakowitz and Easterday continued smoking pot.
“Me and Randy, we continued smoking pot, thinking nothing of it,” said Rakowitz. “I was just thinking, ‘She’s going to be really angry when she wakes back up.’ ”
Beerle never woke up. Rakowitz said she died while he was out delivering marijuana to a customer.
As a child, Rakowitz, now 43, was arrested twice after his father, a deputy sheriff in south Texas, called the police. According to Rakowitz, he had to pay a $1.15 fine after being arrested for refusing to wash the dishes when he was about 17 years old. Two months later he was arrested again and fined $18 for the damage of the family’s front door.
In 1989, Rakowitz ended up being arrested after he went to the Ninth Police Precinct in the East Village to tell them about the killing of Beerle. The videotaped session of Rakowitz in the precinct was made on Sept. 16 — about one month after the murder.
Rakowitz said he felt relieved after going to the police to tell them about the murder.
“They told me, ‘We don’t want to arrest anybody unless they actually committed the crime,’” Rakowitz recalled while testifying last week. “I felt good. I felt really relieved. I wasn’t going to be arrested for this, and my friends were not either.”
On the witness stand, Rakowitz’s face turned a shade redder as he recounted in gory detail the dismemberment of Beerle into pieces and told about how he scrubbed down the worm-covered bones of the Swiss dancer, sprayed them with disinfectant in a bucket, and covered the bones with kitty litter.
“I put the lid on top of the bucket, and I put it inside some more Hefty bags,” said Rakowitz. “I kept adding more Hefty bags. It really started to smell in the apartment.”
Eventually, Rakowitz took a duffel bag containing the bucket of bones to a Manhattan Mini-Storage in Hell’s Kitchen, then moved out of his apartment to an apartment close to Washington Sq. Park. Rakowitz said on the day he went to the police, he checked Beerle’s bones into the Port Authority luggage area.
Rakowitz was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity in 1991. He is currently housed in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, a maximum-security hospital on Ward’s Island. In 1995, Rakowitz went through a first sanity trial to determine if he was sane enough to be transferred to a non-forensic psychiatric hospital, known as a “civil,” where patients are typically housed before being transferred to halfway houses. The jury found him not sane enough and Rakowitz remained at Kirby.
While several of Rakowitz’s psychiatrists have said that Rakowitz has not expressed remorse, and that he has bragged about his past, during the current trial Rakowitz repeatedly has expressed remorse for the death of Beerle, and for what he called the “stupid comments” he made while high on marijuana.
During cross-examination, Rakowitz said he used to watch his pets, which included a dog, a cat, a rooster and a fan-tailed dove, gather around him when he lit up a joint.
“Did they inhale?” asked Assistant District Attorney Galperin.
Rakowitz responded, “I loved my animals, but I did not share my marijuana with them. I wanted it all to myself.”
Rakowitz admitted that he was not only a user, but also a seller of marijuana, and that he had received beeper calls for marijuana sales during the time that Beerle lay dying, and while he was being interviewed on tape at the Ninth Precinct.
According to psychiatrists at Kirby, Rakowitz has never taken psychiatric medications and is not motivated to stay in a psychiatric institution because he does not think he is mentally ill.
Rakowitz admits to having had delusions of grandeur and a psychiatrist who testified said Rakowitz thought he had hundreds of followers.
When asked by Galperin if he believes that he is mentally ill, Rakowitz responded “Not now. Back then, most definitely.”
Rakowitz may have been the last witness in the trial. If so, closing arguments will follow and the jury will begin deliberations.
