One Demeaning From Murder

One demeaning It’s December 30 of 1988 in Larchmont New York. 21-year-old Paul Cox is home from a stressful semester at college for the Christmas break. He plans to blow off steam and party hard with friends, and he asks his mom if he can borrow her car. Of course, not mentioning that he’s going to be anything but safe and has every intention on getting blasted drunk. He’s not your typical “blow off some steam” type of college student, however. Though Paul’s only 21, he’s already a full-blown alcoholic and has been since he started drinking at the age of 13. To all appearances, he comes from the perfect home life. He’s the handsome boy-next-door all-American looking guy with blonde hair and blue eyes. He grew up in an upper middle class, (in my terms, rich) Irish American family. He’s the 5th of 7 kids and his dad is a vice president of a Chase bank, so they don’t grow up wanting for much. Where they grow up in Larchmont is what seems like the perfect place to raise kids. It’s an affluent suburb north of New York City with great schools and well-to-do families. They live just a few blocks from the Long Island Sound Yacht Club. Even with all the privileges of wealth, Paul didn’t have the easiest of childhoods. He’s seen from the beginning as the family’s “problem child.” He’s mischievous and getting into trouble often. Even so, he’s a shy and sensitive child who is heartbroken anytime his parents criticize him, which was a constant because of his problem with wetting the bed. He’s humiliated that his parents keep a star chart in the hall where all the kids can see if he wet the bed when he doesn’t get a star. When he had started school, he had trouble from the get-go. As time went on, his grades slipped further and further, and his parents seemed to use negative reinforcement to attempt to shame him into doing better. By the time Paul reaches junior high and high school, he’s consistently failing classes. His parents dub him as “lazy” and that he just doesn’t want to try. He feels repeatedly put down and belittled by his parents and he just wants to escape the demeaning. He finds that escape at 13 in alcohol. It deadens his feelings of worthlessness and anger, and he turns to it whenever he gets the chance. Paul failed out of one high school and squeaks by in another one to get his diploma. Even though he didn’t do well in high school, he manages to get into college. I get the feeling that he was kind of forced or heavily expected to go to college by his parents because he doesn’t take college seriously at all either. His main focus is partying, being popular and he drinks and drugs up far more than he attends classes. Paul does love that he’s the life of the party wherever he goes. In fact, he’s so popular in college, he gets voted in as a class president because of his platform of get drunk and flunk for all. Even with this achievement, however, he flunked out of college as well. His last college GPA for the semester before Christmas break was a whopping .25. So now that we have some back story of his upbringing, we’re heading back to that night in 1988 where Paul is asking for the car to go out with friends. He hasn’t yet broken the news of his college flunk-out and he knows all hell will break loose when he does tell them. So, he decides he needs this one night of stress relief before they find out. His parents agree to let him use the car with the understanding he’d better not drink and drive. Of course, Paul assures them that he won’t, never intending to follow that silly little rule. I’m joking here – be SURE to follow that rule! On this night, Paul goes on a massive bender. He starts with friends at a bar where they have 5 pitchers of kamikazes which – (let’s share a little recipe here for those interested) – are essentially a margarita made with vodka instead of tequila and were invented on an American naval base in Japan after WWII. So, they smallish group has 5 pitchers of these kamikazes as well as 2 pitchers of beer. Maybe to freshen the palette? By 2 am, Paul and friends are full-on shit-faced. For Paul, years of heavy drinking has made his tolerance quite high, his alcoholism is so pronounced that he has the shakes when he’s not drinking… but on this night, he’s truly outdone himself. So, when it’s time to go home, he rejects any suggestion of not driving and he and his friend hop into his mom’s car and take off. They don’t have that far to go, but even so, Paul misses a turn and smashes into a guard rail. The car isn’t just damaged, it’s pretty badly damaged and Paul is now freaking out as much as a totally drunk persons can freak out. This isn’t the first time he’s wrecked one of his parent’s cars, and the last time he had gone through being severely scorned for it. I’m imagining for years like, “well, if you hadn’t wrecked the Mercedes years ago… yada yada yada.” Which is fair in a way – it’s hard to trust someone who has a history of poor behavior. Not wanting to face the cops and get arrested, he walks off into the night, leaving his friend behind who is also fine and walks away towards his own place. While drunk walking, he’s thinking about the upcoming degrading he’s going to get and just keeps thinking about what a failure he is. He has a 3 mile walk to get home, dreading the confession he’ll have to provide to his always displeased parents. Meanwhile, at his parent’s house, the phone rings at 3am, waking them out of a dead sleep. It’s the police calling to say they’ve found their wrecked car alongside the road with no one in it. Paul’s mom, Mary, tells them that her son had the car for the evening and goes to see if he’s home, but he’s not. The next morning, at 8am, Mary charges into Paul’s room. This time, Paul is in bed. Mary yells at him to get his ass out of bed, they need to figure out the situation with her wrecked car. Paul is super hungover and he can’t actually even remember what happened the night before. The last thing he remembers was his friend, Gene, who had been in the car with him yelling at him, but he doesn’t remember why. He gets out of bed and realizes that he’s completely naked and that his clothes from the night before are nowhere to be found. He's able to convince his parents that the car had a flat tire, so he had left it at the side of a road. I’m assuming he implied that someone must have stolen it then and crashed it. However, self-loathing bubbles up and he knows he’s let himself get out of control again. That same feeling had caused him to attempt suicide when he was 16. He had taken loads of Tylenol with alcohol, and it wasn’t just a cry for help. It had been severe, and it all indicated he had to die, but had been found in time and had his stomach pumped. He admitted after his suicide attempt, that he needed help, and a psychiatrist examined him. This doctor found that Paul suffered from pretty serious learning disabilities which was why he had struggled so badly in school. However, since it was so far into his academic life, there was no way for him to catch up in his mind. This realization made him furious with his parents that they didn’t get him help when he first began having troubles with school as a young boy. He had felt they had caused his humiliation and made him feel like a freak all of his life when he could have been helped early on and had a normal upbringing. By the time Paul was 18, his anger at them became so subversive that the psychiatrist determined he had patricidal and matricidal tendencies. This meant the doctor believed he had the subconscious urge to kill his parents, but not necessarily that he would act on that. However, since Paul was 18 at this point, this information was privileged, and his parents have no right to that tidbit unless Paul decided to tell them himself. BREAK Now we’re fast forwarding a couple of years to the winter of 1991. It’s been a little more than 2 years since the car crash and Paul is now 23. Paul’s girlfriend has convinced him he needs help and he’s decided it’s time to seek it for his alcohol addiction. He started with Alcoholics Anonymous, and he’s been sober now for 2 months. He’s committed to seeing himself through to a better future. As we’ve heard often, there’s 12 steps addicts go through in AA. Paul has made it through the first 3, but he’s stalling on the 4th step. Step 4 is to make a fearless moral inventory of yourself. Basically, going through all your actions and taking inventory of everything you’ve done that you regret. Since that car crash a couple of years earlier, Paul has had horrifying dreams with violent images. Since getting sober, the dreams have gotten more frequent and more vivid. In these nightmares, he’s standing over 2 people in a bed soaked with blood while holding a large knife in his hand. He knows he’s killed these people in the dream and he thinks they’re his parents. The thought of sleeping brings fear that these dreams will keep coming and that they’ll get more and more disturbing. His parents are fine in real life, so he certainly hasn’t hurt them physically. Despite that fact, and the more time that he’s sober, the nightmares keep coming, and with each one, more details emerge. Soon, the nightmare shows him that he breaks into a house and stabs the couple in their bed while they’re sleeping. Slowly, the faces in the dream changes from his parents to another couple. People he remembers seeing on the news a couple of years prior. The car crash had happened on New Year’s Eve and on New Year’s day, the wealthy residents of Larchmont woke up to the disturbing news of a double homicide in their area. Lakshman and Shanta Chervu had been slain in their own home and in their own bed. The couple was originally from India and were now living the American dream. They had moved to Canada in the 70’s with nothing but the clothes on their backs and eventually emigrated to the United States. They were both practicing doctors now who had worked extremely hard to get where they are. In 1975, they bought a lovely 2 story home in Larchmont, which was a dream come true for them. They were excited to raise their family in the small community which had only about 6000 people and boasted excellent schools. It had been 14 years since they had moved to Larchmont on that New Year’s Day. The Chervu’s daughter, Arati had been trying to get a hold of them to wish them a Happy New Year. When her repeated attempts to call went unanswered, Arati became concerned and asked her uncle who lived nearby her parents to go check on them. The uncle pulls up to the house, and everything looks normal and in order out front, and the front door is still locked. So, he heads around to the backside of the home. There he sees a broken window and screen along with drops of blood splattered leading away from the house. He immediately calls police, who discover the dead couple laying in a large pool of blood on their master bed. They were 51 and 58 at the time of the murders, still dressed in their pajamas. They’d been stabbed multiple times and their throats had been slit. The rage of the attacker was clear with how brutal the slaying was. Police are frustrated, they’re not sure of who would have the motive to kill the couple and the motivation wasn’t burglary. Everything of value was in it’s place. It did look like whomever had done this had washed up downstairs in a bathroom and there was a knife missing from the knife block that was on the kitchen counter. They did discover one major clue, a perfect bloody palm print that didn’t match anyone in the family. However, without the weapon or any clues besides the palm print, the police have nothing. There hadn’t been a homicide in Larchmont in 12 years, and police were shocked that it would happen in this area. The news broke and was featured incessantly on TV as police tried to piece together what happened. Paul and his parents saw the news story and were horrified when they saw the killings were at their old home they had lived in until the time Paul was 7 years old. When Paul saw the news, he remembered a time he’d seen the woman before. When he was still a kid, after his family had moved from that house, Paul had stopped by his former home and knocked. When the Indian-American woman answered, Paul introduced himself and explained how he had grown up there and asked if he could tour it for sentimental reasons. She told him no and he went on his way. Now, at the age of 23, wracked with these vivid and horrifying nightmares, Paul wonders if he could have had something to do with their deaths. He decides to share these thoughts with his AA group to see how to work through it. He explained how he was blackout drunk and doesn’t consciously remember hurting anyone, but could the dreams actually be memories that are swimming up out of his subconscious? The police have still been hoping for leads on this now cold case. They even consult a psychic at one point who spoke of water and implied that the knife was in water somewhere. Paul is still struggling with the idea that he may be a murderer and seeks more and more guidance within AA. He believed AA’s focus on anonymity meant that anything he said was also legally confidential. However, this is not the case. AA is not considered to be under the religious confessions or lawyer confidentiality safety umbrella. In May of 1993, one of Paul’s AA friends speaks to their psychiatrist about Paul’s story. I tried to find out if psychiatrists are obligated to report this info and it’s kind of a grey area. They ARE required to reach out to law enforcement to warn of a patient’s intent to commit a crime. As for crimes that have already happened, they don’t have to tell police unless they believe the perpetrator is likely to offend again. In this case, the psychiatrist decides to report it. Police jump on the information and snatch Paul Cox off the street and get his palm prints. When compared to the one at the Chervu murder scene, it’s a match. In June a year later, 1994, Paul goes to trial for the murders. His defense team argues that he was legally insane at the time of the incident since it happened during an alcoholic blackout. They argue that he wasn’t responsible for his actions during it because he and his brain was out of control. Paul’s parents, who were likely the intended targets, attend court every day to support him. After all the information is presented and both sides rest, the trial falls apart when the jury can’t reach a unanimous verdict. Another trial begins about 5 months later for the same case. This time, Paul takes the stand to explain how severe his alcoholic blackouts were. He says he believes he did commit the murders but that he has no true memory of his actions. Psychiatrists testified that it was likely that when Paul crashed the car, the trauma of the event, along with the mass of alcohol in his system triggered his blackout. They say during such a blackout, the information feeding into the brain doesn’t transfer into long-term memory and this is why he doesn’t remember doing what he had done. They explained that the inability to store memories in a blackout isn’t 100% complete. So, people will often remember little snapshots of what happened, especially when reminded or seeing something that triggers the memory. So seeing the news reports probably started the flashbacks in Paul’s dreams. They said that the shock of the crash, the alcohol, and his own self-loathing trauma triggered a deep psychosis. They believe he couldn’t determine in that state, what was reality and what was fantasy. Their theory was that he had set out to go home, but he would have passed by his childhood home on the way to his later in life home. Seeing this while in this psychotic state, his rage exploded, and he commits the murders, thinking he’s killing his parents. After that, he walks home and goes to sleep. Paul does admit that he also saw in his dreams getting rid of the knife in Long Island Sound, but I didn’t see anything about what he had done with his clothing. This time, the jury does come back with a verdict. They find Paul guilty of manslaughter and he’s sentenced to two 25 year terms to be served concurrently which means he serves all the time in one shot as opposed to consecutively which would have been back to back. In August of 2001, a judge overturned Paul’s conviction, believing that the sanctity of AA confidentiality was much like a religious privilege because of the religious components of AA. However, the state appealed the judge’s ruling and another court help up the original sentence. In 2015, Paul was released from prison after serving 20 years. Sources: Theguardian.com, NYtimes.com – article by Joseph Berger, unraveled, episode 3: dead drunk, lohud.com, http://truecrimediscussions.blogspot.com, caselaw.findlaw.com