On March 18, 1972, a man climbed through a first-floor window of an apartment in Jamaica, Queens, and stabbed Camille Perniola, seventeen, to death as she slept. She was a developmentally disabled girl who lived with her parents, and he was gone before they saw him. Two months earlier Joseph Baldi had walked out of the Creedmoor State Hospital because no one had told the hospital he was under indictment for trying to shoot a policeman.
Baldi was born on January 16, 1941, in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, and from a young age he burglarized homes. He showed signs of mental illness and was treated at Creedmoor from April 1962 to January 1967, learning carpentry in its workshop. On the night of September 19, 1970, looking for an apartment to break into, he climbed through a back window at 144-96 88th Avenue in Jamaica into the bedroom of Areti Koularmanis, twenty-three, a Greek Canadian visiting her husband's parents with her children. To keep her from screaming he stabbed her in the throat. She staggered out and woke her husband, then collapsed, and died at Mary Immaculate Hospital. The police found no clue to who had done it.
He went on breaking into ground-floor apartments in Richmond Hill and Woodhaven. Early on September 5, 1971, a Woodhaven resident reported a man climbing through a neighbor's window, and officers John Hamberger and Frank Mobileo caught up with him. As they moved to question him, Baldi pulled a .22 revolver from his hip and tried to shoot Hamberger; the gun misfired, and the officers took him. He had a stolen driver's license on him. Charged with attempted murder, burglary, theft and possessing a weapon, he was sent to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Hospital in Beacon and on November 30 moved back to Creedmoor. A Queens grand jury indicted him in December, but the district attorney's office had not been told of the transfer, and Creedmoor had not been told of the indictment. On January 21, 1972, it released him.
After Perniola came Clara Toriello, twenty-one, a secretary recently engaged to a policeman, stabbed four times in the back and neck in her bed on April 13 in a ground-floor apartment she shared with three family members; he tore off her underwear and slashed it to shreds. On June 17, near his rooming house in Jamaica, he stabbed Deborah Januszko, fifteen, in the chest. She staggered into her parents' bedroom, said she had been stabbed and died before help came. Her age is given as fifteen in most accounts and sixteen in some.
Days later some of her classmates told police they had been stalked by a tall, thin, dark-haired man, a description other women had given too. On June 21, 1972, two Queens homicide detectives, Donald Parker and Michael Walsh, stopped a man matching it on the street. He agreed to go to the station and soon said he might have hurt Januszko. The detectives then learned he was wanted for trying to kill a police officer. In a forty-five-minute taped statement he confessed to all four murders, and he acted them out for the police in a trance-like state, opening imaginary doors and wiping blood from imaginary knives.
He was tried first for the attempt on Officer Hamberger, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyer, Sidney Sparrow, argued he was a schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder; Dr. Daniel J. Schwartz of Kings County Hospital testified he had known what he was doing. After an eight-day trial he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years. For the murder trial the two sides agreed the re-enactments would not be used, and a state supreme court justice, Thomas Agresta, dismissed the charges in the Koularmanis, Perniola and Toriello killings on the ground that Sparrow represented him only in the Januszko case; the district attorney's attempt to reinstate them has no known outcome. Baldi testified that he remembered nothing of the taped confession, and Sparrow and Dr. Harry LaBurt, a former head of Creedmoor, laid out his psychiatric record. Justice George J. Balbach ruled him fully aware of his actions and found him guilty of murdering Deborah Januszko. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
His release as a model patient caused an outcry in New York, where he was set beside Charles Yukl and Ricardo Caputo, two other men who killed after being judged safe. His appeal, People v. Baldi, argued that his lawyer had failed him in handling the insanity defense, and it became the leading New York authority on ineffective assistance of counsel. He never won release. He died at Sing Sing on October 17, 2009, at sixty-eight.