A KILLER AWAKENS
Shoots pa, spends years in a mental hosp, but then ...
When Chester B. Duryea stepped out of the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in 1941, he was a docile 69-year-old with a receding hairline and rimless spectacles.
It was a fitting image for an old man who had become known as the “mental Rip Van Winkle.”
More than a quarter of a century earlier, Chester, then a handsome 43-year-old, pumped four bullets into his dad, Hiram, 80, a millionaire and Civil War hero. Then he went to sleep for 18 years.
A call came into the Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, police station on May 5, 1914, asking for help at Duryea’s imposing three-story cottage on 85th St., overlooking Shore Road.
“I have just shot my father,” Chester calmly announced as he answered the door in his pajamas. “Come with me.”
He led them to the second floor, where they found Hiram dead with an automatic revolver and a rifle next to him. Seven bullets had been fired. Four hit the mark. “Why did you do this?” a detective asked. “I received a message from Washington telling me to do it,” Chester calmly responded.
He tried to explain why he shot his father, but the story kept changing. First, Chester said that they quarreled and that he feared his father would kill him. Moments later, he declared that burglars busted into the house, and he was shooting at them.
Some of his explanations were flights of fancy. “We were whirling around in the air when it happened,” he babbled at one point. “Angels told me to do it.”
At his arraignment, Chester was polite and soft-spoken. But later he flew into a rage and had to be dragged to Bellevue Hospital in a straitjacket.
Born into a world of wealth, power, and achievement, Chester was poised to coast on his family’s reputation into society’s most exclusive circles.
His father was a revered Civil War general. After the war, Hiram and his five brothers made a fortune running a starch company that was founded by their father in the 1850s.
Troubles started for Chester soon after his marriage in 1898 to Nina Larre Smith, who came from a prominent Boston family. Four years and one child later, the separation of this high-society couple was big gossip, appearing in newspapers across the country, sometimes on front pages.
As early as the honeymoon, she said he hit her, flirted with other women, and screamed curses at her. He became more violent when he was drunk, which was often.
After the split, Chester brooded over paying alimony and child support, growing increasingly morose, distracted, and violent. He settled into an apartment on 80th St. in Manhattan, but his mind deteriorated so much that he could not care for himself. His widowed father invited him to stay at the big house in Bay Ridge.
In the days preceding the murder, Chester was binge drinking and was agitated because of a dispute over a starch-processing patent. He was also stressed about a book he was writing. A housekeeper said that he had been working in the library almost up to the moment he shot his father.
Alienists, as psychiatrists were then called, examined Chester and determined that he was not mentally fit to stand trial. Off he went to Matteawan, where doctors believed there was not much to do for him, wrote John Holland Cassity, M.D., in his 1958 book, “The Quality of Murder.” Cassity said that Chester exhibited all the signs of Korsakoff’s syndrome, brain damage often brought on by alcohol abuse. A panel of experts declared him a “hopeless paranoiac.”
At Matteawan, Chester fell into a “state of inertia and confusion” and often required tube feeding, Cassity wrote. It was like a trance or a fitful sleep, which earned him the Rip Van Winkle nickname. This mental twilight, experts believed, was likely to last for the rest of his life.
But Chester surprised everyone. In the early 1930s, he started to wake up. Soon he was writing letters to attorneys. One of the letters reached a famed criminal lawyer, James D. C. Murray, who specialized in hopeless cases. Murray believed that Chester was no longer a threat to himself or others.
In 1939, Murray took a bold gamble. In a four-hour hearing, he had Chester take the stand to make a strong case that he had regained his memory and sanity and should have his freedom. It was a dangerous strategy.
“Dares Chair at 68 to Prove He’s Sane,” was the Daily News headline on the Duryea story on Jan. 11, 1940.
Proving his sanity might mean he’d have to face trial for the cold-blooded killing of his father and the death penalty.
It was a risk Chester was willing to take. On March 13, 1940, he quietly left Matteawan and was escorted to a Brooklyn jail to await trial. But prosecutors could not round up any evidence; witnesses had died, and the guns had gone missing. The case was dismissed.
He walked free, regained control of the $100,000 trust fund his father left for him, and lived quietly in Queens hotels. Then, in August 1948, police found the old man crumpled on the steps of the Long Island Rail Road station in Bay Shore, with a black eye and a cut on his head. He died later in the hospital but, in the final mystery of his life, doctors could not determine whether the cause of death was alcohol, accident, disease, or murder.
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