The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

Police officers inform Eddie that Michael has killed Carrie and fled. The rabbi and his wife are taken into protective custody. Eddie feels guilty as he was the last person Michael met with before the incident. Norma Rosen contacts Jonathan with the news, warning him not to go home.

On the day Carrie was killed, Michael repeatedly called his mother threatening suicide and murder. When Ruth asked to speak to Carrie, Michael stated he had killed her. Ruth called the police, who found Carrie dead with multiple stab wounds and her throat cut. A coroner’s report reveals that Carrie was pregnant.

After killing Carrie, Michael leaves Hastings-on-Hudson by car. He then abandons the vehicle, taking the bus to Ithaca. Getting off at Collegetown, he intends to go to Telluride House. He walks to Stone Arch Bridge and looks down at the gorge.

Officer Ellen Brewer is patrolling Cornell campus when Michael signals for her to stop. As he is distressed, disheveled, and rambling incoherently, she believes he may be a victim of a crime. When Michael claims he has killed either his girlfriend or “a windup doll” (438), Officer Brewer escorts him to the nearby police station. Here, he repeats his claims, adding that Carrie was going to have him committed.

Although Michael is covered in blood, he seems frightened and vulnerable, and the police officers are still not convinced he is a murderer. Michael provides Carrie’s name and address and asks if they can “check on her” (441). Hastings police department confirm that Michael killed his girlfriend.

Shocked, Officer Brewer realizes that her assumptions about Michael led her to drop her guard. In police training she was warned about “the fatal funnel”—a situation where a seemingly safe scenario quickly turns into one of jeopardy. Michael is arrested and handcuffed to a ring bolted to a wall. Helped by two male colleagues, Officer Brewer collects forensic evidence from Michael and his clothing. Michael’s mood shifts from cooperative to withdrawn, and when they are finished, he remains naked, refusing to get dressed. When Michael is uncuffed, he springs at Officer Brewer, punching her in the face. She hits her head on the filing cabinets and is knocked unconscious.

When Officer Brewer comes to, her jaw is dislocated, and several teeth are displaced. She sees Michael flinging the station’s three biggest officers across the room. Michael is finally subdued when one of the officers uses a nightstick. Long after the event, Officer Brewer is haunted by nightmares about Michael. When she eventually returns to service, she lectures trainees on the principle of the fatal funnel, using Michael as an example.

Michael is taken back to Hastings and kept in custody. He is placed on suicide watch and charged with second-degree murder. The media is quick to take an interest in the case as they realize Michael is also the subject of a current movie production. Michael is photographed getting out the police car and his picture appears in all major newspapers. Jonathan notes that Michael looks uncharacteristically “mad and menacing” (453) in the photographs. The New York Times prints the story on the same page once used to praise Michael’s success. In other newspapers, headlines describe Michael as a “[p]sycho” and a “[t]wisted genius” (453).

Michael’s arrest is devastating for those who perceived Michael as a positive example of living with mental illness. Elyn Saks decides to postpone writing her memoir about schizophrenia, afraid that people would identify her with Michael.

Reporters pester Jonathan and Michael’s other friends and family. Jonathan has nightmares. In some of them he has stabbed an unknown victim and is covered with blood. In others, Michael has killed Mychal and is chasing him with a knife. Jonathan feels he has failed his friend. The last time they spoke, Michael admitted to having “bad thoughts.”

Carrie’s parents identify Carrie’s body and meet with the district attorney, Jeanine Pirro. The Costellos tell her that the most painful part of Carrie’s death is that their daughter has been forgotten in all the publicity about Michael. Pirro is strongly opposed to the insanity defense and hopes Michael will be convicted of second-degree murder.

The New York Post publishes excerpts from Michael’s memoir proposal as an insight into a killer’s mind. Ruth Laudor meets with Bo Burt and Owen Fliss to discuss Michael’s legal options. Ruth wants to stop her son going to prison, convinced that he would not survive the experience. However, Bo suggests Michael should plead guilty as he is likely to serve less time in prison than in a psychiatric hospital. As Michael is clearly in a psychotic state, Bo is confident that he would be transferred to a prison psychiatric facility. Michael is still refusing to take medication and punches a prison guard in jail. Jeanine Pirro is unhappy with the conclusion of two psychiatrists who find Michael unfit to stand trial. She appoints a third who comes to the same conclusion.

A month after Carrie’s death, another case of paranoid schizophrenia is in the news. In July 1998, Russell Weston storms the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, shooting two police officers dead and injuring two others. It emerges that Weston believed he needed to retrieve a “Ruby Satellite” from the Senate safe to prevent a cannibal apocalypse and a world-ending plague. Several newspaper articles argue that the cases of Michael and Weston highlight the crisis in mental healthcare since deinstitutionalization. Both men were not taking their medication and their loved ones had no way of making them.

Michael is sent to a hospital to be medicated and reevaluated after a year. Columnist Frank Rich argues that the movie of Michael’s life should still be made, pointing out that too many films either demonize or sanitize mental illness. By contrast, telling Michael’s story in its entirety would paint a nuanced and honest picture of schizophrenia. Gerolmo agrees and writes a new ending for the screenplay incorporating Carrie’s death. However, movie executives reject the idea, deciding to secure the rights to A Beautiful Mind instead. The book, by Sylvia Nasar, tells the story of mathematician John Nash who had paranoid schizophrenia and won a Nobel Prize.

Michael is indicted on four counts of murder and by August 1999 is declared fit for trial. Expecting an insanity plea, Jeanine Pirro hires the forensic psychiatrist, Park Dietz. Dietz is known for his “high threshold” for insanity, having previously concluded that Jeffrey Dahmer, John Hinkley Jr., and the Unabomber were sane. Nevertheless, Dietz concludes that Michael believed Carrie was non-human when he killed her, supporting the defense’s claim. Consequently, there is no trial, but Michael appears in court in May 2000 to issue his insanity plea. He listens to the victim statements of Carrie’s family who hold Michael responsible for his actions. They describe being haunted by Carrie’s ordeal and the knowledge that the man she loved was the perpetrator.

By 2003, Jonathan has two children. When his father dies from dementia, Ruth attends the funeral and asks Jonathan to call Michael. Jonathan takes the hospital’s number but does not call. A few years later, Jonathan bumps into his old history teacher, Greg Morrison. Greg reveals he has visited Michael and suggests they go together. Michael is in Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, a maximum-security psychiatric hospital for those unfit to stand trial or found not guilty due to insanity.

When Jonathan begins visiting Michael, they talk about their childhood. Michael recalls the time Jonathan was hit by a dirt bike. He also apologizes for failing to help Jonathan when he was beaten up. Michael does not refer to killing Carrie and it is unclear if he knows she is dead. On one occasion, Michael says he wants to go home but becomes confused when Jonathan asks him where that is. Although Michael claims a jacket he wears is from Guido, none of his old professors visit him.

Jonathan reads The Center Cannot Hold and travels to see the author, Elyn Saks. Elyn, who is a law professor and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, reveals that she stopped taking medication many times. Only when she accepted that she needed medication did her life change. Elyn fortunately never succumbed to violent ideation. Jonathan also speaks to Bo Burt and Owen Fliss who express guilt over Michael, wondering if their support of him at Yale played a part in his mental health crisis. When Jonathan visits Eddie Schechter at his synagogue, the rabbi shows him a plaque memorializing Carrie. Jonathan looks for a second plaque before remembering that Michael is still alive.