Judge: Start planning for Greist’s release

WEST CHESTER >> The Common Pleas Court judge overseeing mental health proceedings involving notorious killer Richard Greist has ordered officials at Norristown State Hospital and other parties involved in the case to begin formulating a plan that could eventually result in his release from confinement there.

Judge Edward Griffith’s twopage order, signed Tuesday, does not explicitly state that Greist shall be released from the hospital where he has been involuntarily committed for more than four decades.

Nevertheless, it does direct authorities to work towards a procedure that finds Greist “may be discharged from inpatient treatment” at some undetermined future point, once a detailed proposal is developed for his future treatment “to include his transfer to an appropriate step-down facility.”

It is the first time that a judge hearing Greist’s case has given him the hope that he could win his freedom from Norristown, a goal he has been fighting for over a period of more than two dozen years.

Greist, through his attorneys, has consistently argued that he is not a danger to the community and could live outside the walls of the psychiatric hospital in Montgomery County.

“Mr. Greist is grateful to his doctors and the court,” said courtappointed attorney Marita Malloy Hutchinson of Westtown, of Griffith’s order. She is one of two attorneys who represented Greist at his semi-annual commitment proceeding before Griffith earlier this month.

When contacted about the judge’s decision on Thursday she declared that, “After 43 years of confinement, (Greist) is hopeful that he will be able to live the remaining years of his life in a less restrictive environment.”

Contacted by phone, attorney William Hobson of Philadelphia, Greist’s personal attorney, declined to comment on Griffith’s decision. “The order speaks for itself,” he said in a court conversation. “That all I can say at this point, in the interest of my client and the community.”

Chester County District Attorney Deb Ryan, whose office has steadfastly opposed any thought of letting Greist leave the state hospital, maintaining that he remains a mentally ill and dangerous man, declined to comment on the order through a spokeswoman.

The office, however, stressed that Greist’s commitment order for 2021 remains in place.

Although his name and the circumstances of his case have largely dimmed in the public imagination over the years, at one point in time Greist was one of the region’s most infamous killers.

Photographs of his capture outside the rural home he shared with his wife, their family, and his grandmother, bare-chested and bloody, were published around the world and won a Pulitzer Prize for the photographer, Tom Kelly III of The Pottstown Mercury, who shot them.

In May 1978, Greist, now 70, flew into a drug-fueled psychotic rage and stabbed his wife, Janice, to death with a screwdriver in their East Coventry home. He then cut her body open and killed and mutilated their unborn son, then stabbed one of his two daughters in the eye and attacked his grandmother with a butcher knife.

At a non-jury trial the following year, Greist was found not guilty by reason of insanity by the late Common Pleas Court Judge Thomas Pitt after a defense expert testified that he was suffering from psychosis at the time of the attacks and could not legally distinguish between right and wrong. Because of that verdict, controversial at the time and a precursor to a similar finding for the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan, he will never have to serve time in prison.

He was, however, ordered confined by an involuntary commitment to the hospital at Norristown for psychiatric patients. Under state mental health law, every year a judge is asked to determine whether Greist is still suffering from a severe mental disability that would make him a “clear and present danger to himself and others,” and whether he should remain so confined for the next 365 days.

Over recent years, judges have gradually been increasing the level of outside-of-grounds privileges that Greist is permitted to take advantage of, supervised and unsupervised. In 2019, for example, Griffith allowed Greist to have one 48-hour pass every three months from the hospital.

Previously, Greist had been granted unsupervised trips off the grounds for a 12-hour period every month, plus three 24hour passes every quarter. The new privilege meant that Greist would be able to spend a total of 32 days outside the Norristown facility on his own.

At some point in the process in 2018, the hospital had indicated that it might be willing to begin a review of how Greist could be formally released from his commitment but withdrew that suggestion after consultation with the attorneys for the county and the D.A’s Office.

But never before had any judge publicly broached the matter of if, or when, the hospital should work towards ultimately releasing him. Until now.

At the hearing before Griffith, which Greist attended via computer video link, the treating psychiatrist at Norristown, Dr. Edgar Martinez, testified that the hospital still took the official position that Greist should remain committed for another year. But he told the judge that in his personal opinion, it was time to begin making plans for the aging man to leave the hospital.

In his order, Griffith said Greist would again be involuntarily committed until 2022, and that his previous order detailing Greist’s privileges and responsibilities would remain in place. He allowed Greist to participate in grounds privileges and visitations approved by his treatment team once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

But the judge said that all the attorneys involved — Hutchinson, Hobson, Bruce Laverty from the Chester County Department of Mental Health, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and Assistant District Attorney Myles Matteson — should soon present him with the outline and timetable of a plan to transfer Greist to an off-ground halfway house. They should also be prepared to develop “appropriate modifications” to the 2019 commitment order, he stated. A meeting with Griffith to discuss the procedure has been set for next month.

Greist for years has maintained that the psychosis that led him to fatally stab his 26-year-old wife Janice Greist and their unborn eight-month-old son is in remission and that he should be released from the hospital. His personal psychiatrist, Dr. Ira Brenner, has urged the court to begin a process of getting him ready for release, while a prosecution-hired psychiatrist, Dr. Barbara Ziv, had argued against it.

Richard Greist