A former West Village guitar shop owner had a loving relationship with the longtime girlfriend he’s accused of slashing to death just days after being released from a Manhattan psych ward, his lawyer said Monday.
Dennis Guglielmo, 69, allegedly attacked his doting beau, Alice Birnbaum, with an ax and knife inside his Downing Street pad on May 1, just two days after he was discharged from Bellevue Hospital ’s psychiatric ward.
“I have spoken with 12 people who had contact with him and his girlfriend,” said defense attorney Adam Freedman at Guglielmo’s Manhattan Supreme Court Arraignment Monday, where he entered a not guilty plea.
“They all described a loving relationship. She was with him until the end … He’s very sad, unhappy and depressed. It was not something he wanted to have happened.”
Freedman said it was likely he’d argue his client wasn’t sane at the time of the brutal stabbing.
Court doctors found Guglielmo, who has been held at the psychiatric ward on Riker’s Island since his arrest, mentally fit for trial, Freedman said.
The deranged musician had voluntarily checked himself into Bellevue two weeks before the murder, complaining of paranoia and an acute lack of sleep, law enforcement sources said.
And Birnbaum was the one responsible for encouraging staffers to discharge him, sources said.
It’s unclear what triggered his rage.
The music lover grew up in the West Village and was a neighborhood fixture who claimed to have hung out with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, according to a pal.
He’s due back in court Sept. 2.