“I’m sorry for that woman,” the killer mumbled. “She attacked me,” he said of the unarmed psychologist he’d just slaughtered with a cleaver and boning knife.
A Manhattan murder jury today watched the chilling confession tape of David Tarloff, the paranoid schizophrenic on trial for the 2008 slaying of Dr. Kathryn Faughey in her Upper East Side office.
Full of evasions, excuses and apologies, the ten minutes of police video may well be the best evidence against Tarloff’s insanity defense, Faughey’s family members agreed after watching along from the audience of Manhattan Supreme Court.
“I think it’s very good,” said Owen Faughey, 62, the victim’s brother. “I feel it shows he had enough lucidity about what he did to be found guilty. He showed remorse. He showed regret,” he said.
“He knew what he did,” added Faughey’s brother Mike, 55. “And he knew what he did was wrong.”
It took cops four days to trace Tarloff by his crime scene fingerprints to his filthy Corona, Queens apartment, and take him to an Upper East Side precinct.
Once in an interrogation room, Tarloff spoke nearly non-stop, at times rambling, mumbling and skipping from topic to topic — his mental illness clearly visible.
“Pastrami, or salami,” Tarloff answered, when asked if he’d like a sandwich. “Actually, I’ll have pastrami, please,” he jabbered on. “Or corned beef. Salami’s good. Whatever you guys can do for me.”
Told he’ll be taken to court that night, Tarloff hung his head and fell silent for several moments.
“David?” called a homicide detective in the room1, Robert Mooney — now a supervisor of investigators for the DA’s office. “David?” the detective asked again before Tarloff acknowledged him.
But much of Tarloff’s unprompted mumblings centered on how he, not anyone else, was a victim.
“I didn’t want to kill them. All I wanted was money,” he said. “This has never happened to me. I was going to tie him up and scare him,” he said of Faughey’s colleague, Dr. Kent Shinbach, who nearly lost his life to Tarloff’s cleaver.
Shinbach had ordered Tarloff involuntarily committed 17 years prior, and Tarloff had not forgotten, according to the video.
“F— him,” Tarloff said of Shinbach. “He should go to hell anyway.”
“I would never hurt anyone,” Tarloff insisted to Mooney. The only thing he’d ever killed before, he said, were the roaches in his apartment. “I tried to keep the place clean,” he claimed.
His goal in robbing Shinbach was to get enough cash to rescue his mother from her Queens nursing home, where she had been “sitting in feces” for the past five years, he said.
“I didn’t know she was going to be there,” he said. “I thought it was his own office,” he said. “I wasn’t going to hurt anybody — I swear to god on my mother’s life.”
He added, “I’m sorry. I only wanted money to go away. I’m sorry.”