A killer's 'logic': Taylor 'led a tormented life'

With the fate of Ronald Taylor's insanity defense before the state Superior Court, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has obtained the psychiatric report that would form the core of his attorneys' case. The insanity defense is everything to Taylor; even his lawyers acknowledge that he shot five people, killing three, in Wilkinsburg on March 1, 2000. This story is based on that report and on interviews with Taylor's acquaintances.

A man in East Liberty's Walsh's Lounge & Bar says, 'Those who know don't tell. Those who tell don't know.'

That, he says, is why no one here wants to talk to a reporter about Ronald Taylor.

The long, narrow bar - at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon - is as packed as a singles club on a Saturday night. A man and woman make out in the center of the room, largely ignored as they grope each other.

Two women Taylor's age, both of whom are drinking, say they know Taylor. He lived in East Liberty for nine years.

You can't ever tell what will make a man snap like that, they say.

The first refuses to give her name. The second, fingering the neckline of her gold lame top, says her name is Lisa.

The first woman says, 'Who's he think he is anyway, playing God?' To which Lisa snaps back, 'Why you saying that• What kind of friend are you?'

'Well, he shouldn't,' the woman says.

'You could say the same thing about me,' Lisa says.

Prosecutors say extreme prejudice against whites drove a clear-headed Taylor to shoot five men in a rampage last year. Three of them died. The Allegheny County district attorney's office is seeking a death sentence for Taylor, a 40-year-old black man with no previous criminal record.

Taylor's attorneys argue that their client was legally insane at the time of the killings and should not be held responsible for them. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, Taylor would be sent to a mental hospital and freed when - or if - deemed safe to himself and society.

And even if Taylor were found guilty, insanity could be used to argue against a death sentence.

Jury selection, originally scheduled for last week, was postponed because prosecutors asked the state Superior Court to bar Taylor's attorneys from using the insanity defense.

THE REPORT

A psychiatrist's report paid for by the defense reveals the blueprint that Taylor's defense team hopes to follow at trial.

Taylor, the report says, was so upset by his struggle with paranoid schizophrenia and his life in the slums that he believed even God hated him.

But just because a person is mentally ill doesn't mean he's legally insane.

To convince jurors that Taylor was legally insane, his attorneys must prove that his mental illness was so severe during the rampage that he either did not know the nature of his acts or did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

Meeting the definition of legal insanity and then convincing jurors that a defendant is legally insane is extremely difficult. Only a tiny fraction of insanity defenses are successful.

Hoping to clear that high bar, defense attorney John Elash plans to use a psychiatric evaluation of Taylor prepared by Horacio Fabrega Jr., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Fabrega declined to comment for this report.

The report says that long-standing psychotic delusions tricked Taylor - who never married or even held a job long enough to support himself - into thinking that white people, the government and God were conspiring to hurt black people in general and him in particular.

Ultimately, the psychiatrist concludes that Taylor meets the legal-insanity criteria.

But prosecutors disagree, saying Taylor was sane during the shooting spree, killing calmly and deliberately.

It is that issue - the use of the insanity defense - that is before the Superior Court.

Deputy District Attorney Edward Borkowski hopes the Superior Court will agree that Taylor's reluctance to cooperate with a psychiatrist hired by the prosecution should preclude defense attorneys from using Fabrega's report.

Borkowski and Elash declined to discuss the case for this story.

The 26-page report is based on Fabrega's sometimes-tense interviews with Taylor. According to the report, Taylor doubted he could trust Fabrega, apparently fearing that the psychiatrist was gathering evidence for the prosecution.

Fabrega also reviewed evaluations prepared by other mental-health experts who have treated Taylor since at least 1990. The report says Taylor began to suffer from extreme depression as a teen-ager. In his early 20s, he started to hallucinate.

Taylor developed full-blown paranoid schizophrenia by his early 30s, when he lived in public housing in East Liberty, Fabrega writes. The disorder haunts sufferers with delusions and bizarre hallucinations - in Taylor's case, insects and bats. Often, victims must take medication to interact normally with others.

Taylor's battle with schizophrenia twice landed him in psychiatric hospitals - first in 1990 and again in 1998, the report says.

He received anti-psychotic drugs and psychotherapy as an outpatient at the Hill District unit of Pitt's department of psychiatry and at St. Francis Medical Center's division of psychiatry. He also attended People's Oakland, which offers outpatient support for the mentally ill.

In 1992, the government considered Taylor's mental illness so debilitating that he was put on full disability and received monthly checks from the Social Security Administration.

As Taylor entered adulthood, he believed God had joined forces with Satan to hurt black people, the report says. He once built a cross, designed a cardboard image of Jesus Christ, attached the image to the cross and burned it.

He did so 'intending and believing this would hurt or get even with God for his rejection and abandonment,' the report says.

Taylor thought white medical professionals were allowing him to suffer. He was plagued by skin problems, itching, allergies, frequent urination in the night, eye infections, joint pain and acid reflux, the report says.

Three years before the shootings, Taylor likely sent threatening letters to the mental-health workers trying to help him, the report says.

Finally, the report emphasizes its claim that Taylor's landlord said he would have to leave his Wilkinsburg apartment when his lease expired last June.

The fear of eviction played a crucial role in Taylor's killing spree, and it underscores perhaps the most striking feature of Taylor's psychosis detailed in the report: Taylor loathed Pittsburgh's housing projects but couldn't seem to escape them.

EAST LIBERTY

Taylor lived in a sprawling red-brick public housing complex at 59 West Penn Circle from 1990 to 1999. Some say he stopped by Walsh's Bar on occasion.

They say he walked the trash-cluttered streets inside Penn Circle and bought sodas and snacks at the Highland News Shop and the East Liberty News and Variety Store.

But few claim to know him well. They say he was hard to know. He kept to himself.

It would be easy to be anonymous in East Liberty. People come and go, hang out and move on, pace about in the shadows of the public housing high-rises that tower over Penn Circle. With so many people here on disability, no one asks and no one tells.

'I'm on disability,' a man says. 'It's mental. I don't want folks knowing.'

Fabrega's report says Taylor hated East Liberty and fought for years to move to public housing elsewhere.

'He was deeply affected by the immediate social environment of his apartment,' Fabrega writes. 'Neighbors were said to be loud, to argue and fight into the night. ... The use and selling of drugs in the environs of his apartment was constant. He was fearful of the drug dealers.'

The smell of burning cocaine exacerbated Taylor's asthma, the report says. The noise of fights and reveling kept him awake and miserable.

'He reported feeling angry, hateful, and having violent thoughts of harming 'the crack dealers' by shooting them. ... (Taylor) led a tormented life marked by feelings of hopelessness, depression, anger and rage,' Fabrega writes, adding that Taylor often fantasized about suicide and murder.

Taylor's desire to leave resulted in a long-standing feud with the city Housing Authority, as well as with maintenance workers who he felt never served his needs, the report says.

He locked himself in his apartment for days at a time, afraid people were trying to sneak up and shoot him in the back.

THE HILL DISTRICT

Rows of industrial-size trash bins sit on the sidewalks outside Addison Terrace, a public housing complex on Bentley Drive in the Hill District. Residents throw up their hands at the spectacle - a fitting symbol, they say, of the quality of life here.

The sidewalks are where their children play. The trash bins stink. Sometimes, garbage drips over the sides and clutters the path.

Other than in the projects, they ask, where else would you expect to find trash bins permanently out front, in plain view• Nowhere, they answer. Nowhere but here.

Taylor's family moved from Homewood to Addison Terrace when he was 12, records show. He would live in Building 30 there until he was 23, when the family moved back to Homewood.

Speaking for his mother, sister and brothers, Taylor's older brother Khalil said his family declined to comment for this story. Taylor's father died in 1998.

During Ronald Taylor's years in the Hill, his struggle with mental illness became obvious. His anger, some say, was remarkable even for a black teen-ager growing up in the projects.

'I knew him as an outgoing person. Somewhere along the way, he became a depressed person,' says Gary Johnson, 42, who lived a few streets over during the 1970s. 'After he slipped, he had this kind of mean demeanor. He had this grit to him. He walked around with his eyebrows all squinched up, mad at the world.'

Johnson is tall, with a barrel chest and biceps thick as loaves of bread. On his right arm, just below his shirt sleeve, is a black tattoo of a rabbit and the word 'Love.' On his left is a large red scorpion.

Around his neck he wears a silver crucifix, because - unlike Taylor, Johnson says - he has learned to roll with the punches.

The construction worker, who lives in Addison Terrace today, says he used to shoot hoops with Taylor or just share a bottle of Thunderbird or Wild Irish Rose.

But by the time he moved, Taylor was walking around in fatigues with a bottle in his pocket and Vaseline on his face, like a boxer or a warrior, Johnson says.

'His face would just be shining.'

Johnson says he and the other guys he knew in the Hill were mad at the world in those days, too. As a young man, he couldn't get work at the same pay as whites and found himself increasingly lured into the drug trade.

Fabrega's report says that during his late teens, Taylor became moody and often withdrew to his room. He painted it black and decorated it with a drawing of a skull and crossbones looking down from the ceiling.

Whites weren't Taylor's only problem, the report says. His father, though a good provider and hard worker, was strict, and the two frequently clashed. The elder Taylor carried a pistol at home and sometimes aimed it at his son during arguments, the report says.

'Violence, guns, and the possibility of shooting and killing others in contexts of threats and hostilities, either for purposes of defense or for purposes of imposing one's power and authority in a context of power struggles, were symbolic themes that were prevalent in the family environment,' Fabrega writes.

Trying to balance the anger, Taylor's mother read and preached the Bible, the report says. Shirley Taylor taught her children to deal with personal and social problems by appealing to the God whom Ronald Taylor grew to hate.

'He became more moody and prone to angry outbursts,' Fabrega writes. 'He participated less and less in household activities ... (and) would not attend celebrations, funerals, weddings and other social occasions.'

FORCED INTEGRATION

In 1976, shortly before Taylor turned 16, buses rolled in to the projects and took him and his classmates out of the Hill District's overwhelmingly black Fifth Avenue High School. The buses took them across the Monongahela River, through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and into the suburbs.

Taylor was among the first students meant to benefit from the integration of urban blacks and suburban whites at the new Brashear High School in Beechview.

In opening pages of Brashear's first yearbook, politically correct enthusiasm praises the experiment: 'We were once DIVIDED, but now we are UNITED.'

But some graduates describe Brashear during its first months as a powder keg.

Taylor's anger made him a spark. Those who knew him say he got into several fights. Records show he was transferred to the Letsche Education Center, then an alternative school primarily for students with serious behavioral problems, by April 1978.

Though Letsche was in Taylor's familiar Hill District, he refused to attend and dropped out.

Eleven years later, Taylor earned a high school equivalency diploma at the Connelly Technical Institute, but his asthma and mental problems frustrated his attempts to find employment, Fabrega's report says.

WILKINSBURG

Shirley Taylor moved into Woods Towers in October of 1998, after her husband died. At 64, she must have thought she had finally arrived. The modern apartment complex for the elderly in a quiet neighborhood stands in stark contrast to the Hill District public housing and the Homewood slums where she spent all her adult life.

The Wood Street area in Wilkinsburg, a dry borough along Pittsburgh's eastern border, is happy to be what it is: a slow but steady strip of doctor and dentist offices, barber and beauty shops, grocery and tobacco stores and a mix of black-culture businesses, among them a Caribbean restaurant and African-imports retail store.

A chance to live in Wilkinsburg symbolized freedom from all that bothered Ronald Taylor, Fabrega's report says.

'A sustaining influence during this period of his life was his attachment to family and especially (his) mother,' Fabrega writes.

'It was in the logic of this crucible of despair and mounting and engulfing psychosis that (Taylor) experienced a sense of relief when he was finally able to obtain alternative housing.'

But in 1999, after Taylor left East Liberty for an apartment just up the street from his mother's, his condition worsened, Fabrega says. Because Taylor already believed that the government and God had conspired to hurt blacks, his move to Wilkinsburg could never be far enough away.

'At this juncture (Taylor) ... was having auditory hallucinations,' the report says. 'He was deluded and the content of his deluded world view involved police, God, the devil, maintenance workers and whites in general as involved in (a) system of control, oppression and persecution against himself and blacks.'

Although Taylor had hoped to be happy in Wilkinsburg, he had broken off outpatient treatment at St. Francis because he could not convince the staff that he needed a nonwhite counselor, the report says. Without that treatment, which ended in July 1999, Taylor's psychosis intensified.

On Feb. 21, 2000, the week before the rampage, Taylor sent a critical report to People's Oakland, the outpatient center.

The report frightened the staff, because Taylor's handwriting seemed to match that of anonymous notes they received in 1998, Fabrega writes.

'Those notes ... record a clear loss of boundaries and a failure to contain and control his hostile feelings involving race relations,' Fabrega writes.

The psychiatrist says the language was especially threatening to a black staff member whom the writer singled out as having betrayed her race by cooperating with whites.

Taylor had come to view whites as 'the enemy,' Fabrega writes. And the enemy was no longer simply exploiting him. It was persecuting him.

THE ATTACK

Taylor woke about 8 a.m., his usual time, the day of the rampage. The report says he had not been using alcohol or drugs the evening before. Substance abuse has never been documented among his many problems.

Taylor had wanted his apartment door repaired for almost four months.

John DeWitt, a white maintenance worker, says Taylor broke the door in the fall of 1999 after locking himself out of the apartment. After he broke the door, Taylor could lock it only with a deadbolt.

So DeWitt and another white maintenance worker, John Kroll, came that morning to repair the door. Because of Taylor's past racist comments, a black worker, Andy Williams, was to help placate Taylor, but Williams arrived too late.

Curiously, the door had been replaced twice already, DeWitt says - once when all the doors in the complex were replaced, then again when Taylor discovered the deadbolt on his new door didn't work.

Though Taylor would later fly into a rage over the repair work that morning, he said nothing at first, DeWitt says.

It was only after the men removed the old door and returned with a new one, DeWitt says, that Taylor accosted them. He called DeWitt 'dirty white trash' and 'a racist white pig.'

'It took less than 40 minutes to hang the door, which is why I didn't understand why he was so upset about it,' DeWitt says.

At one point, DeWitt picked up a hammer.

'There was nothing threatening about it to me,' DeWitt says. 'I just picked up the hammer and Taylor said, 'You think you're pretty tough.''

'I didn't respond,' DeWitt says. 'Then he walked away. Then he came back and pointed a finger at me and said, 'You're dead.''

Fabrega's report says that, while the repairs seemed routine to DeWitt, in Taylor's mind they were tantamount to all he feared. With the door missing for 40 minutes, Taylor's anxieties had time to grow out of control.

'Symbolically, this 'opening of himself' to possible attack, of being unprotected and vulnerable, given his already deeply disturbed mental state, acted as a stressor,' the report says.

Taylor called his mother, Fabrega says. He also called the building manager, Joy Vankirt, to complain.

And then came either the threatening news, or a reminder of it, that Vankirt had decided not to renew Taylor's lease. Fabrega says he could not confirm which was the case, because Vankirt refused to talk with him.

The building manager told the Tribune-Review she could not comment about whether Taylor's lease was to be extended or canceled. She denied talking about the lease with Taylor that morning.

Either way, 'The threat of eviction or at least forced release from his apartment had a devastating effect on (Taylor's) mental state,' the report says.

And then DeWitt returned and lifted the hammer. Taylor, the report says, saw an enemy brandishing a weapon.

'(Taylor) was living in (a) police, totalitarian, hostile state peopled by potential assailants and one of them had crossed the line and was out to get him,' Fabrega says.

So Taylor went back into his apartment, found the .22-caliber revolver he had taken from his mother, and loaded it.

The rampage began.

By the time it was over, Kroll, 55, of Cabot, Butler County, would be dead. So would former priest Joseph Healy, 71, of Wilkinsburg, and Pitt student Emil Sanielevici, 20, of Pittsburgh's Greenfield neighborhood. Wounded were Richard Clinger, 56, of North Huntingdon Township and Steven Bostard, 25, of Swissvale.

Now, Fabrega says, a 'dense amnesia' prevents Taylor from remembering most of the rampage. But then, at least one thing seemed clear to Taylor: The time had finally come for him to act.

''HE SEEMED METHODICAL''

During the rampage, witnesses say, Taylor appeared to go about his business stoically.

He did not seem out of control, they say. He seemed methodical.

He told blacks he encountered not to fear him, because he was after whites.

But this calmness, Fabrega writes, came after Taylor suffered a complete break with reality. The events of the morning had 'ushered in an altered state of consciousness.'

The attack mirrored the fantasies he had acted out in his apartment, when he burned the crucified image of Christ and performed other satanic rituals, the report says.

The logic at work in this altered state would have Taylor thinking, 'I must get even; my problems and my condition can only be solved if I eliminate the agents of evil who are attacking me and destroying me and members of my race,' Fabrega writes.

This 'logic,' Fabrega says, made Taylor legally insane during the rampage.

Though Taylor knew he was breaking the law, Fabrega writes, he was convinced he was right.

HOMEWOOD

In a street near the former Taylor home, a teen-ager in a red jacket shouts that a pit bull is loose. People scatter as the dog approaches.

In a row house apartment at Hale Street and Formosa Way, Vivian Johnson, 59, remembers when Shirley Taylor was her neighbor.

Shirley Taylor worked as a nurse's aide in a nearby hospital. Her husband was sick a long time before he died, Johnson says. When he died, Shirley decided she couldn't keep up such a big place and moved to Wilkinsburg.

Often, her son came to visit.

'He was quiet,' Johnson says. 'I had no idea he was mentally ill.'

She stares off down the street, where police say guns are sold illegally. Even they are afraid to come here.

Johnson nods. 'It's getting closer,' she says.

Chuck Plunkett Jr. can be reached at cplunkett@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7996. Marisol Bello and Mike Seate contributed to this report.

The modern insanity defense originated in 1843 after an assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Robert Peel.

Although woodworker Daniel McNaghten killed Peel's secretary, he was found 'not guilty by reason of insanity' because of a mental illness so severe he believed he had to murder to protect himself.

In Pennsylvania, a defendant can be acquitted if proved legally insane when committing the crime.

'Legally insane' doesn't merely mean that a defendant had mental problems. A defendant must be so ill that he didn't understand the nature of the act he committed or that his actions were wrong.

American law emphasizes a defendant's intent - whether he meant to commit a crime. For example, a person who accidentally runs over someone is treated much differently from a person who deliberately runs over someone.

If a defendant's mental condition was so clouded that he didn't understand what he was doing, the law does not hold him responsible.

The law explains: 'A madman who believes that he is squeezing lemons when he chokes his wife or thinks that homicide is the command of God is plainly beyond reach of the restraining influence of the law; he needs restraint but condemnation is entirely meaningless and ineffective.'