Town note
Hockessin is about 20 minutes from Wilmington, Delaware, and about an hour from Cheswold.
about 0:06:22The story
Hockessin is a small town of about 13,600 people in New Castle County, north-west Delaware, twenty minutes from Wilmington. On the figures James reads out, its property and violent crime rates are exactly average.
Dr Martin Cohen was a clinical psychologist from New York, fifty-nine in 1988. After fifteen years running public mental health hospitals in Illinois he was appointed director of the Delaware State Hospital, a 460-bed facility south of Wilmington and the largest in the state. Staff called him kind and caring, and he told a reporter that everyone has a breaking point.
His wife Ethel, four or five years older and from Chicago, had danced in a Broadway show and worked as an occupational therapist. Everyone called her bubbly. By the late 1980s she had high blood pressure, arthritis and knee trouble and walked with a cane.
He was bright, good-looking and a fine tennis player, but strange: a mohawk, a Superman costume at school in March 1979, a red velvet dress and fishnet stockings, a faked seizure in a crowded McDonald's. He began using cocaine in his junior year and was thrown out of the Marines after two weeks for failing to disclose his drug addictions. In 1984 a short relationship ended; he became depressed, shaved all the hair off his body, began binge-eating and had violent sexual fantasies.
He did not want to move to Delaware, writing to a friend that his parents would need his help and that he was sacrificing his own happiness. The family rented a townhouse at Beech Tree Lane, in the Gateway Townhouses off Old Lancaster Pike. He enrolled as an art student at the University of Delaware and worked at a local gas station for a week or two. His art teachers were disturbed by his drawings, including a coat rack holding the heads of a man and a woman, and a sketchbook with doodles of people being shot in the head and the words 'fuck you', 'I hate you' and 'death of happiness'. He told a psychologist he had to commit murder to get the anger out of his system.
On the evening of 12 November 1988 his father was watching television downstairs and his mother was in the kitchen. He called downstairs that his father had fallen. Ethel climbed the stairs with her cane and the cordless telephone. As she turned, he hit her in the face with the dumbbell and stabbed her; the wounds to her throat almost severed her head.
He showered, smoked a cigarette and watched for police. When none came he ransacked the house, taking his mother's handbag, his father's wallet, jewellery, cassette tapes, a Sony stereo cassette player, clothes, a guitar and an amp, and between five and seven hundred dollars in cash. He returned to Delaware, freebased, went back to Chester for more, then parked behind the post office and asked the second dealer to sell the family Nissan.
Martin was normally at work by 6.30 every morning. When he did not appear, his staff raised the alarm, and his sister in New York called because she had not reached him on the Sunday evening. Two hospital staff members went to the townhouse with the letting agent and her key and found the bodies upstairs.
The autopsies found repeated blunt-force blows to both heads, consistent with a barbell, and deep knife wounds to both throats. Neither had alcohol in their blood.
He did not attend his parents' funeral in Queens. A couple of days later the Nissan was found near Chester. By Thanksgiving he was on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and in December he talked his way into an impound lot and drove off in the towed LTD, nearly running over the attendant. America's Most Wanted put him on the air three times for a $2,500 reward.
By February 1989 he was staying at the Salvation Army men's shelter in Sacramento and working at a produce warehouse as Michael Richards. He saw a promo for a profile of a punk rock drummer who had killed his parents, assumed it was him, and left for San Francisco.
There he met Conrad Lutz, a fifty-one-year-old vice president at a Wells Fargo branch.
On 24 February 1990 he waited across the street from Lutz's bank, met him when he left at five, and they took a bus to Castro Street for dinner and then to Lutz's second-floor apartment, arriving about 7.30. They ate ice cream and watched a film until about ten, when they went into the bedroom.
He showered, changed his trousers and filled duffel bags with CDs, records, Lutz's cufflinks, a gold ring and an expensive watch. He took a taxi downtown, drank coffee at an all-night burger restaurant, then went to Berkeley and sold most of Lutz's records before checking into a hotel under an assumed name. Two days later America's Most Wanted broadcast his profile and he caught part of it in a deli. He could not use Lutz's cheques or cards, so he went back on the road, crossing the country several times and stealing from people unlikely to report it. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, he suppressed an urge to kill again.
In the second week of February 1990, shortly before Mardi Gras, he arrived in Louisiana and moved into an efficiency apartment with no electricity, shared with Greg Fitch, a twenty-one-year-old homeless rights worker.
On 2 April 1990, at about 10.30 in the morning, he hailed a cab at the edge of the French Quarter. The driver was Abed El Hakum Kalil, an Egyptian and a former special forces soldier. When the cab slowed, he jumped out and ran without paying the $32 fare.
Kalil chased him. Kalil caught him in a headlock, put him in the cab and flagged down a police car.
Afterwards he ate a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal for half an hour while detectives watched through the glass, then gave a taped statement describing both crimes and saying the murders were premeditated and that he had been sober.
He was flown to Delaware in stages, with an orthopaedic brace on his knees because airlines would not carry a restrained passenger. In July 1992 his request to move to the Delaware State Hospital was refused, and in December 1992 he waived any claim to his parents' $330,000 estate.
The board refused in less than three minutes. Reporters contacted him in 2019 and 2020; he replied once: 'I don't want to be interviewed.'