Metro

‘Cleaver’ as a fox

Dr. Kathryn Faughey

Dr. Kathryn Faughey

TERRIFYING: David Tarloff is too crazy to convict for the meat-cleaver death of Dr. Kathryn Faughey, his lawyer says. (
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There’s crazy, and then there’s thinks-he’s-Jesus crazy, a defense lawyer told prospective jurors yesterday in the sensational trial of the man who killed an Upper East Side psychologist with a meat cleaver.

Five years after he brutally slashed Kathryn Faughey to death in her East 79th Street office, David Tarloff — a Messianic schizophrenic with 21 hospitalizations in his records — is hoping to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Deep insanity.

“Did those cases involve seeing the face of God on the floor?” defense lawyer Bryan Konoski asked prospective jurors, after noting that nearly all of them had known someone who’d needed at least brief, minor mental-health treatment.

“Or someone who sees flakes or dust particles and believes it is some kind of message from God?” the lawyer asked.

“Or a person who believes they are the son of God and can talk to God?”

There is little doubt, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin told panelists, that Tarloff suffers from mental illness. “The issue,” the judge told them, “is whether of all the people with mental illness, does he fit in the category where he is not responsible for what he’s done.”

Dr. Faughey was just 56 when she died heroically, trying to protect her colleague — another psychiatrist who had treated Tarloff nearly 20 years earlier — from the madman’s cleaver.

Prosecutors have argued that Tarloff, 44, had arrived at Faughey’s office with multiple knives and a plan: to commit a robbery that would give him enough money to remove his mother from a nursing home and take her to Hawaii.

To find Tarloff not responsible for the murder, jurors must agree that he did not understand that what he was doing was wrong.

By the end of the day yesterday, nine jurors had been sworn in and were told to return Monday morning for opening statements.