Religious delusions compelled the Upper East Side cleaver killer to slash his way through an Upper East Side psychiatric suite five years ago, defense witnesses testified today.
Years before he bludgeoned and stabbed a beloved psychologist to death in her East 79th Street office, David Tarloff believed he was the Messiah and heard the voice of God directing him how to live his life in minute, obsessive detail, according to a defense psychiatrist and Tarloff’s own father.
“He’d tell me, ‘I’m going to go to hell because I didn’t listen to [God],’ ” Tarloff’s father, Leonard, 76, told jurors, testifying for a second day on the witness stand at his son’s murder trial.
In the days before the February, 2008 slaying, desperate to “rescue” his mother from a Queens hospital, Tarloff announced, “God is telling me I’m running out of time to save my mother,” the father told jurors.
Tarloff, 44, believed he needed to go to the office of his very first psychiatrist, Dr. Kent Shinbach, so that he could rob him for cash to rescue his mother, testified defense psychiatrist Dr. Eric Goldsmith.
Shinbach was severely slashed and nearly lost his life coming to Faughey’s aid, surviving to tell jurors last week that Tarloff was “entirely focused on the task at hand, which was assaulting me.”
Not so, the defense shrink told jurors today.
“David Tarloff did not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct,” Goldsmith said, using the precise wording of the state statute for an insanity defense.
Prosecutors, in turn, are trying to show that Tarloff had a history of using violence, threats and tantrums to get his way. Tarloff faces up to life in prison if convicted of murder, and an indeterminate term in a locked psychiatric facility if found not guilty by reason of mental illness.