Michael Laudor

     After reading the following story, consider whether Ron Howard has any basis for rescinding (i.e. undoing) the contract to purchase movie rights to the story of Michael Laudor. 

People, July 6, 1998
Copyright 1998 The Time Inc. Magazine Company

    At 4:17 on the afternoon of June 17, Ruth Laudor frantically called the police in the tranquil New York

City suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson. Worried that her son Michael, 35, who had a history of mental

illness, might do something violent, she directed them to a building next to the police station, where he

shared an apartment with his fiancee of nine months, Caroline Costello. "She didn't want to give us a lot

of information," says Lt. Vince Schiavone. "She wanted us to get there."

    It was already too late. Police found Costello, 37, dead on the kitchen floor with at least a dozen stab

wounds to her neck and back from a kitchen knife and blood splattered across the walls and

refrigerator. Within eight hours, Laudor turned himself in to police, and the next day he was charged

with the village's first murder in two decades.

    For years, Laudor--by turns delusional, paranoid and brilliant--had been a symbol of hope, a model of

how the mentally ill can lead lives of value. So inspiring was his 11-year struggle with schizophrenia that

Hollywood had offered him $ 1.5 million for what seemed to be a triumphant story. (Until recently, Brad

Pitt had been considering the role.) But by the time of his arrest, the tale had taken a horrific twist. "He

had been going down and down and down," says freelance journalist Randy Banner, a longtime Laudor

family friend, "and finally reached the bottom."

    Ruth Laudor had spoken repeatedly by phone with her son and Costello the day of the murder. "They

were trying to get some people in--some counselors, some psychiatrists--to try to deal with him," says

Schiavone, who drove to Ruth Laudor's home in nearby New Rochelle immediately after the body was

found. "When we walked in, she said, 'Is she?' " he recalls. "We said, 'Yes.' She just broke down."

Magnifying the tragedy, an autopsy revealed that Costello was one-month pregnant--a particularly sad

coda to this tale of madness and murder. "I want to get married and have babies," Laudor once told

Banner. "But I don't know if I'll ever be able to have a family--I'm ill."

    As he grew up in an affluent section of New Rochelle, Laudor's horizons seemed limitless. The third of

three sons of Charles, an economics professor at Adelphi University, and Ruth, a retired social-services

administrator, Laudor was funny, good-looking and clearly brilliant. He graduated in the top of his high

school class and later from Yale with highest honors in just three years. Then in the mid-1980s, while

working in Boston for a large management-consulting firm, Bain & Co., he experienced the first signs of

his illness: he became convinced that coworkers were tapping his phone.

His paranoid delusions became so troubling that he abruptly left work and returned to New Rochelle to

write fiction. Soon, however, his mind blurred the line between imagination and reality, and Laudor

began to believe that the Nazis who populated his fiction were pursuing him on the leafy suburb's

streets.

    In 1987 or '88 a family friend persuaded Laudor to see a psychiatrist. Within months he voluntarily

checked into Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with a form

of schizophrenia, a mental illness affecting more than 2 million Americans that is usually marked by

hallucinations and delusions. There the torturous hallucinations intensified, but he also started taking

medication that brought the condition under control. His father helped him through the worst of it. "If

Michael saw flames around him," recalls Randy Banner, "[Charles] would say, 'put your hands in the

flame. I promise you won't be burned.'"

    At his father's urging, Laudor entered Yale Law School in 1989. Again he excelled academically. He also

thrived socially after meeting Caroline Costello, a fellow Yale graduate who was then working for IBM in

nearby Hamden, Conn. The two seemed a study in contrasts: Costello, the second of three daughters

of a biostatistician father and a nurse mother, was timid and raised a Roman Catholic. Laudor was

gregarious and deeply devoted to Judaism. Nonetheless, says Banner, "they were madly in love with

each other, emotionally and physically."

    Though Laudor graduated at the top of his law school class in 1992, his mental illness made it nearly

impossible for him to get work teaching law. So he cofounded a suburban New York City counseling

program to help people cope with mental and physical disabilities. "Michael was always willing to share

his recovery with people," says his partner in the project Joe Bravo, a paraplegic. "He had accomplished

a great deal, and that was worth sharing."

    He had come so far that The New York Times hailed his remarkable recovery in a 1995 profile.

Self-deprecatingly calling himself a "flaming schizophrenic," he told the reporter, "I'm using 60 or 70

percent of my effort just to maintain the proper reality contact with the world."

    The article led to a $ 600,000 book contract with Scribner for The Laws of Madness, which was to be

Laudor's story of his battle with schizophrenia. In addition, director Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment

bought the movie rights in 1996 for a reported $ 1.5 million (emphasis added). Laudor moved out of his

tiny studio apartment in the Bronx to a more spacious, two-bedroom flat in Hastings with a sweeping view of the

Hudson River. Costello--a technology specialist for the Edison Project, a private firm that manages

public schools--moved in, and the two became engaged last fall. The relationship thrived, with Costello

so committed that she was considering converting to Judaism.

    Though the excitement of the book contract initially buoyed him, the stress of working on it wore

heavily on Laudor. "It was the isolation of writing, combined with the pain of recalling the worst part of

his life," says friend Vera Hassner Sharav, director of a national advocacy group for people with mental

illness. "Someone with schizophrenia shouldn't be so isolated."

Eventually he became more and more depressed, finding it difficult in recent months to drag himself out

of bed in the morning. For support he could no longer turn to his father, who died of prostate cancer in

1995. After attending synagogue regularly for about a year, Laudor and Costello stopped showing up. In

addition, his medication had ceased to be effective, he told friends, and his doctors were tinkering with

a cocktail of drugs, seeking to help him find stability again.

    Then Laudor and Costello appeared unannounced June 12 at Friday-night services at the synagogue.

"Michael was visibly moved during the service," says Rabbi Edward Schecter, adding that Costello

mentioned the couple were in a difficult period. The next Tuesday, Laudor met with the rabbi. "I did not

think him dangerous," recalls Schecter, "to himself or to anyone else."

    The next day, Costello was dead. And now Laudor--who is on suicide watch at Westchester County

Jail--stands charged with second-degree murder, facing a maximum penalty of 25 years to life. His

lawyer Robert Ollman is considering an insanity defense, which Westchester County District Attorney

Jeanine Pirro would vigorously challenge. "It would be an insult to every mentally ill person in this

country," she says, "to say that because someone is mentally ill that they are more prone to violence."

Ironically, Laudor himself had put great energy into trying to dispel that very notion--and surely would

have used his lucrative memoir to reinforce the point. "He had success, fame and fortune," says

Hastings police lieutenant Schiavone. "Now the end of his story will have to be rewritten."