The story
Morton, Illinois sits close to the middle of the state, roughly halfway between Peoria and Springfield and between St Louis and Chicago. The episode describes a prosperous, leafy town of 16,232 people with a median household income of $77,000, more than $20,000 above the national average, and a median home cost of $204,100, about $100,000 below it. Its crime rate is put at about half the average for both violent and property crime.
He married Mary in 1959; she converted to Judaism before the wedding. They had four children and twenty happy years.
In 1981 Mary's mother died and, according to everybody, she changed. From October 1981 she had an affair with the rabbi, which lasted until about June 1982. She took a job with Exclusive Home Products, a multi-level marketing outfit selling household goods, and used supposed sales trips as cover, falsifying purchase orders for fictitious customers; the couple had to pay the company $2,000.
Counselling continued with someone else until March 1983, when Mary refused to go on.
It started amicably, then Mary filed motions, including one for a temporary restraining order barring him from the family home. In May they agreed that he would stay in the house and she would move out with the two youngest children; the two older children chose to stay with their father. He repeatedly told the court she was interfering with his visitation, and he learned she was taking the children to a fundamentalist Christian church instead of raising them in the Jewish faith as agreed.
At the same time the medical school was reorganising and his job was at risk. He became depressed and from mid-1984 the head of psychiatry at the medical school treated him and prescribed daily medication.
On 4 December 1984 Mary told a co-worker that movers were coming in two days to take the rest of her things and that her nightmare would finally be over. On 6 December the movers, Keith Mordue and William Vogel Jr, arrived, and so did John Brady, a six foot seven lawyer appointed guardian ad litem for the children. At about 10.30 a.m. Mary left to fetch boxes and returned 20 to 45 minutes later.
At about 11.40 Brady was on the kitchen phone when he heard a crash from the bedroom, like a shelf coming down, then Mary calling for help. He could not pull him off. Neither could Mordue, who grabbed him by the belt. A case of 45s smashed over his head did nothing, and a baseball bat swung down on his right shoulder did not move him. He said nothing and seemed unaware of anyone. The men ran out; officers Mark Tatum and David Frank arrived and found him curled up on top of her, his head against her arm. Mary had 27 stab wounds from a large kitchen knife, one her own company sold, and the knife was still embedded in her chest. She died of internal and external haemorrhaging.
Fierer was catatonic, did not answer his name and did not react to an IV. In the ambulance he repeated in a high squeaky voice: Mary, don't do it, put the knife down, my hand is cut, don't stab me, Mary, you stabbed me. In Mary's purse were a Catholic rosary, a religious poem, a Baptist prayer card and a pamphlet from a Bible church entitled How to Become a Christian.
His defence was self-defence combined with insanity: Mary attacked him with the knife, he blocked it with his left hand and grabbed the blade with his right, and he remembered nothing until the emergency room. Two defence doctors called the 34 wounds on his hands defensive; a prosecution doctor called them slippage cuts from stabbing. Police found bottles of potassium cyanide and secobarbital in his car and, in his bedroom, a newspaper clipping about a recent divorce-related homicide.
At the 1992 retrial the cyanide was excluded but the clipping was not, and he was reconvicted. He died on 18 November 2007 in North Palm Beach, Florida.