A Very Unstable Genius

details of the account remain covered until revealed She was the only child of James Hagan, an optician, and his wife Adella, and her father had wanted a boy. The couple were stern and academically ambitious, and they raised her to achieve while making clear that she was not the son they had hoped for. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a young woman, in an era when the condition was called manic depression and treated with little more than lithium or nothing.

She graduated from Chatham High School in 1963, where she was remembered as attractive, well groomed and fun loving, and she had attended the Barbizon modelling school. She went on to Douglas College, the women's college at Rutgers, and in 1969 she met and married Peter A. Cook, an English graduate student from Bedfordshire. She graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1973 and trained as an intern and surgery resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1975 she became the first woman appointed a urology resident there. By 1979, the year her marriage to Cook ended, she was a fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In 1982 she was appointed chief of the urology division at Rutgers Medical School and chief urologist at Middlesex General Hospital in New Brunswick, now the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. At that point she was one of only six board certified women urologists in the United States.

In 1983 she met William Tyrell, an industrial engineer who worked at Motion Systems in Eatontown, at a dance club at the Jersey Shore, and they married in 1984. She wanted children but he did not, having sons from a previous marriage. She worked seven days a week and often fourteen hour days, and in the mid-1980s the pressure, the paperwork and her growing disillusion with insurance companies and HMOs drove her to take to her bed for two months. She was hospitalised for several weeks, diagnosed again with bipolar disorder and put on medication. She recovered and returned to work, but in 1987 she gave up medicine altogether. She and William took a long-term lease on the Villa Olga, a small hotel and restaurant in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands that had once been the Russian consulate, for about $600,000. They renamed it the West Indies Inn and spent several hundred thousand dollars expanding it from eight rooms to nineteen.

The late 1980s were good, but Hurricane Hugo damaged the inn badly in 1989, and the Gulf War and the recession of the early 1990s wrecked the tourist trade. In 1992 they gave up the business. William returned to Motion Systems and she stayed on St Thomas for about a year trying to sell the lease, without success. The couple lost about $250,000. In 1995 William was hit by a car while riding his motorcycle a few blocks from their New Jersey home. He had limited vision in his left eye from a childhood bicycle accident, and the crash broke several ribs and mangled his left leg. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it William checked into a motel after leaving hospital and said the marriage was over.

In September 1996, while separated but still hoping to reconcile, she went to a go-go bar near his office in Eatontown, told the staff she was going to dance for her husband's birthday, got drunk, climbed on the bar and performed a strip tease. William was not there and his birthday is in May. this part of the story is covered for now In 1998 she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Eatontown police. The divorce was finalised in 1997, with William paying her $65,000 a year for three years and keeping the New Jersey house while she took the St Thomas house. She came out of the marriage with more than a million dollars in cash and assets, including two condominiums in Killington, Vermont, and retirement accounts worth more than $550,000.

She moved back to New Jersey and did unpaid research on bladder cancer using rats at Robert Wood Johnson, but she was aimless. She clipped coupons obsessively and hoarded flower pots. She helped her ageing parents, especially after Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, when neighbours saw her pumping water out of their driveway. Her parents kept to themselves. Adella was in her nineties and often ill with respiratory problems; James was in his late eighties, cheerful and fond of talking about his days as an optician. details of the account remain covered until revealed Her mother told her that if she baked a birthday cake she would throw it on the floor.

By August 2000 she had stopped bathing, eating and sleeping. She was writing prescriptions to herself for Remeron, an antidepressant, and Restoril, a strong sleeping medication. She later said it took her four hours to put her shoes on. On the morning of 26 August 2000, at 6.48, she called 911 and said her parents had been dead in their beds for days, that she had gone out of her mind and done a really bad thing. Police found James, 86, and Adella, 92, in separate twin beds in the master bedroom, dead for at least eight days. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

She told psychiatrists that a commanding male voice had ordered her to kill them, and that she believed smothering them would send them to a better sphere where they would all be happy and where her father would stop calling her a harlot. She placed a plastic bag and then a pillow over her father's face while he rested in bed, and did the same to her mother. She then walked backwards for about a day, believing it would reverse what she had done. She spent several days in the house with the bodies. A psychiatrist reported that she could not recall the day of the killings but knew they had been alive on 12 August, her mother's birthday.

She was held on $250,000 bond at first and bail was later set at $2.5 million. this part of the story is covered for now Her friend Charlotte Corash, who had known her for forty years, took an early buyout from her job, hired defence lawyers and mental health experts, became her guardian and cleared out the parents' house.

details of the account remain covered until revealed Three psychiatrists and a psychologist agreed that she had been in the grip of a major psychosis, hearing voices and reading messages into playing cards, television adverts and traffic lights. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He said she had not asked for help because she was incapable of asking. She was committed to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, a maximum security institution, until she was judged no longer a danger.

this part of the story is covered for now She had bought an $850,000 house before leaving, and her release came with oversight from social workers and psychiatrists, half-day sessions at an agency called Park Place in Monmouth County, and periodic reviews by a judge for the rest of her life. Her new neighbours, Joseph and Catholine Gatty, objected, arguing among other things that buying a house in a declining market showed poor judgment. In July 2010 a judge reduced her clinician visits from once a week to twice a month after reports that she was stable and in good remission. Neighbours shunned her. She died at her home on 18 April 2015, aged 69, and was cremated.