The man accused of killing an Upper East Side psychologist with knives and a meat cleaver in February 2008 told detectives after his arrest, "I was trying to scare her." The 20 minute video of David Tarloff, recorded four days after he allegedly killed therapist Kathryn Faughey in her office, was played yesterday during a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In the video, Tarloff "appeared alternately coherent, confused and disturbed," the Times reports. And as detectives were about to leave the room, he told them:
I’m sorry. I’m sorry for that woman. I didn’t know she was going to be there. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. Please. Please. Remember this. I swear to God on my mother’s life... I thought she was going to kill me. I just — I didn’t know what to do, I — everything happened fast.
Tarloff says he went to the office to rob psychologist Kent Shinbach, who shared an office with Faughey and had treated Tarloff for schizophrenia in the past. When Shinbach resisted, he heard a voice and when he went to see who it was, he found Faughey. "I just wanted to go in and look and she attacked me," he said. (Shinbach was wounded but survived.)
Tarloff also told detectives he's been institutionalized over 20 times and was molested as a child. He claims he wanted the money to take his mother from her nursing home and bring her to Hawaii. "I swear to God, I was just going to tie him up, tape him up, shut the door and go," Tarloff said. The defense wants the tape tossed out as evidence, and Tarloff's lawyer tells the Times, "One of the issues I’m trying to explore is whether David Tarloff’s state of mind was such that he could not voluntarily make any statements as a matter of law."
Faughey's four siblings were in the courtroom yesterday when the video was played. "It's so hard to be sitting through this, and seeing him," Faughey's eldest brother Kevin told the Post. "But it's just something we're going to have to do."
