Word: adan
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...murder's infamy usually derives from the renown of the victim or the ghastliness of the crime. But when Richard Adan, 22, a budding playwright and a waiter, was stabbed last summer by a restaurant patron, the fascination focused on the killer: Jack Henry Abbott, Marxist, existentialist, prison murderer, author (In the Belly of the Beast) and, beginning a few weeks before Adan's killing, literary celebrity (see ESSAY). On his 38th birthday last week in Manhattan, Abbott was found guilty of manslaughter. Because he admitted that he had killed Adan, the verdict was considered a victory...
...verdict of first-degree manslaughter is applicable when the killer is found to have been in the throes of "an extreme emotional disturbance." On the night he was killed last July, Adan had explained to Abbott that his tiny, bohemian café lacked a bathroom for customers. He then led the ex-con outside to show him where he could discreetly relieve himself. Yet Abbott's 24 years in violence-steeped prisons and reform schools, Fisher argued, had caused him to mistake Adan's ordinary gestures for provocation. It was a "tragic misunderstanding," Abbott claimed in court, that...
Henry Howard, Adan's father-in-law, was angered but found room for mercy amid his grief. "I never wanted him to get the chair," he said. "Put him on an island. Give him a typewriter. But don't let this guy walk the streets again." Abbott will be sentenced this month...
Fisher at first told the jury that Adan had been stabbed-in an "accident"-with a knife that Adan had brought outside. But on the stand Abbott conceded that the lethal knife was his; indeed, he showed the jury how he had concealed it in the waistband of his jeans. He still insisted that he thought he saw Adan pull a knife and lunged self-protectively-but added that as Adan staggered backward after the stabbing, "that's when I saw there was nothing in his hand...
Wayne Larsen, who was walking past the Bini-Bon that morning, told the jury a different, and chilling, story of a quarrel between a "shorter figure" (Adan) and a "taller figure" (Abbott). Adan, he said, made what looked like "a conciliatory gesture," turned his back and walked away. Abbott flew after him, reached over his shoulder and stabbed with such "terrific velocity" that "the hair swung back on the taller figure's head." The sound of the knife thrust, said Larsen, "rings in my ears today." As Adan lay dying, Larsen said, the "taller figure" stood over...