He’s Norman Bates — with a meat cleaver.
Jurors in a Manhattan murder trial peered deep inside the creepy, mother-obsessed mind of admitted killer David Tarloff today.
Months before the paranoid schizophrenic slaughtered a beloved psychologist in her East 79th Street office, Tarloff was notorious at the Forest View Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, where he enjoyed climbing into bed and laying side by side with his wheelchair-bound mother, Beatrice.
“Did he kiss her on the mouth?” prosecutor Evan Krutoy asked witness Susan Pauliny, nursing director at the Forest Hills facility.
“He did kiss her on the mouth,” Pauliny told jurors. “I said, ‘David, that’s really not appropriate behavior in the lobby. You can kiss her on the hand. You can kiss her on the cheek.”
Tarloff, 45, repeatedly demanded to bring his mother back home to the apartment they’d shared in Corona, insisting he was happy to bathe her and change her diapers, nursing staffers told jurors. “I’m sorry — I love my mother,” he’d say when he was reprimanded.
The nursing staff testimony may help the defense, who are trying to prove Tarloff was not guilty by reason of insanity for the slaying of Dr. Kathryn Faughey, 56, in her East 79th Street office in February, 2008.
Tarloff has told cops and shrinks that God had directed him to rob Faughey’s colleague, Dr. Kent Shinbach, so he could use the cash to rescue his mother and take her to Hawaii.
But there was much to damage his insanity claim as well. Tarloff used the nursing home as a personal restaurant and piggy bank, staff testified — routinely stealing food from patients’ trays and withdrawing $100 or more at a time from his mother’s accounts.
Confronted, the filthy, disheveled Tarloff sometimes turned violent and loud — cursing, flailing his arms, and once tipping over an urn of hot coffee, staff told jurors. He’d been arrested for assaulting one staffer, and was barred from seeing his mother at all at the time of the killing.
Also today, jurors and Faughey’s family members watched grim-faced as a coroner described the more than a dozen mallet blows to Faughey’s head, and the to-the-hilt thrusting of a knife into her upper chest.
Faughey’s head injuries and stab wound were so separately serious, it could not be determined if her death resulted from the brain damage, the loss of blood, or a combination of the two, a coroner testified.
Prosecutors are expected to present the final witnesses of their direct case tomorrow, followed by the defense insanity case and the DA’s rebuttal case. Tarloff faces life in prison if convicted, and an indeterminate institutionalization in a secure psychiatric jail if found not guilty by reason of insanity.