The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  According to today’s most highly respected psychiatric diagnostic tool, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual III, drawn up by Columbia-Presbyterian’s own Psychiatric Institute, mania has as its essential feature “a distinct period when the predominant mood is either elevated, expansive, or irritable, and when there are the associated symptoms of … hyperactivity, pressure of speech, flight of ideas, inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, and excessive involvement in activities with a high potential for painful consequences.” The manual advises psychiatrists who interview patients who have possessed for at least one week “at least three” of the above symptoms to make the diagnosis of mania and begin treatment—the favored drug today is lithium—immediately.

  Margaret Kilcoyne possessed all seven of the diagnostic symptoms, and her final days were like a living illustration of the manual’s definition.

  The shift in Margaret Kilcoyne’s emotional balance from hypomania, an excited, exuberant state that many of us experience, to mania, an illness, probably started some three weeks before her disappearance. It came as the result of success.

  Dr. Kilcoyne had started her career in medicine as a nurse. Then, in the 1950s, she’d decided to go to medical school. Becoming a doctor, she’d taken a position at Columbia-Presbyterian doing clinical research with hypertensive adolescents. But after a few years she found herself yearning to study the brain chemistry involved in hypertension. She was particularly interested in angiotensin II, a peptide that regulates blood pressure. Ian Phillip, a researcher in Iowa, had localized angiotensin II in cells in the hypothalamus, but although others had attempted to replicate his work, no one had succeeded. Dr. Kilcoyne wanted to work on the problem. With all her experience treating the ravages of hypertension in youngsters, she longed to see the disease eradicated. She was convinced that if the peptide regulating blood pressure could be localized, the disease might be conquered.

  In 1979, she made up her mind to try to get a grant to do experimental brain research. She’d never done laboratory research before, so in order to get funding she teamed up with an internationally known Columbia neurologist, Dr. Earl Zimmerman. With his guidance, about a year before her disappearance, she submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health, outlining her interest in determining which brain cells, if any, contained angiotensin II. To her delight, the NIH agreed to fund the project.

  She and Zimmerman began working on angiotensin II in the summer of 1979. It was a happy time for her. She who had been a nurse and managed the unusual step of becoming a doctor had now expanded her horizons even further, entering the heady field of pure research. She began working like a demon, but although she and Zimmerman conducted experiment after experiment, no matter how much they applied themselves, they couldn’t find the evasive peptide. Then at last, three weeks before she disappeared, the two researchers triumphed. Angiotensin II was present in the brain, they verified, and they could pinpoint the exact spot!

  It was a significant scientific discovery, but not as earth-shaking as Dr. Kilcoyne assumed it to be. For her, it was the crown of her career. She was excited, elated, even ecstatic. Zimmerman, used to the ups and downs of academic research, cautioned her against overdramatizing their achievement. “After all,” he pointed out, “we weren’t the first. Phillips was here before us.” But she couldn’t control her excitement. They’d accomplished something terrifically important, she insisted every time they talked about the discovery. And three days before her disappearance she said to Zimmerman, “Maybe we’ll win the Nobel, Earl!”

  “Hey, that seems a little strong,” he responded. “Maybe now we’re going to be able to make some sense of angiotensin II, take it apart, make further experiments, and see where they take us, but right now all we’ve done is gotten a handle on it.”

  But Dr. Kilcoyne was not in a mood for caution, and shortly afterward she telephoned her closest relative, her brother Leo in Canada, and told him, “I’m now in a position to win the Nobel Prize” and “I’m in a position of nationwide power.” She made a tape recording of the call—a tape recording police found after her disappearance and which sparked the theories that she’d been kidnapped or murdered.

  She told her brother during that conversation that her work had “the potential for great good to mankind” but that she was constantly having to buck interference and red tape. She saw the whole situation as a “spiritual test,” she said. But no matter. Whatever the stresses, she’d arrived. Her findings were so significant that the other day she’d noticed, just from the way a colleague tilted her head, that she had earned a supreme stature among her peers. She dwelled on this sign of her new status for a while, but then she mentioned an unsettling matter: she was being spied on. Her example: she’d gone into the lab on Sunday, and while she was there the phone had rung; she’d answered it, but there had been no one at the other end of the wire. She’d better go to Nantucket, she told her brother. She’d better get away.

  By the end of that conversation, Leo Kilcoyne knew that something was wrong with his sister. Aside from her offering dubious evidence for both grandeur and persecution, her words had been pouring out of her, as if under pressure, and he’d been virtually unable to get a word in edgewise. It was only after considerable effort that at last he was able to say to his sister that since she sounded so overwrought, leaving the city wasn’t a bad idea. Indeed, he promised, if she’d go up to Nantucket and take a rest, he’d meet her there on the weekend.

  She thanked him, reminding him that he’d previously helped her through a crisis by joining her on the island.

  On Wednesday morning Margaret set out for Nantucket, telling her friends at work that she was exhausted. It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d retreated to the island to recover from overwork or overexcitement. She had “heart palpitations,” she used to explain, and whenever her heart raced, she would go to the island to calm herself down.

  She said goodbye that morning to Dr. Ritter and then to her friend Dr. Kane. She told neither colleague that for several nights running she—like most manics—had had no more than an hour or two of sleep. Nor did she mention that she believed herself to be on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize. She saved both those telling pieces of information for a stranger, the young Avon executive she encountered in Rye. Indeed, the Avon lady learned quite a lot about Margaret Kilcoyne that night, for once they got to the Marriott, the doctor decided that perhaps it was dinner, not sleep, that she needed, and the two women proceeded to eat, drink and chat for hours.

  The woman from Avon found Margaret Kilcoyne fascinating. “I’d never met anyone quite so knowledgeable before,” she told me, “or so compelling.” She and Dr. Kilcoyne discussed many things—not just science but politics, music, food, and wine, although, in classic manic style, Dr. Kilcoyne did most of the talking. Her quick mind ranged swiftly from subject to subject, idea to idea. And, true to type, she ordered munificently. Few things characterize manics more than their tendency toward economic expansiveness, and sitting in the Marriott, where the cuisine hardly warranted the gesture, Margaret Kilcoyne asked for, and managed to obtain, a bottle of Lafite-Rothschild 1970.

  Much later in the evening, she made friends with the waitress who served the wine and ended by offering the young woman, who acknowledged that she’d studied psychology in college, a job. She would shortly be setting up a lab on Nantucket, Dr. Kilcoyne explained, and the waitress could be one of the first of the many employees she was planning to have.

  By the time the meal was finished, it was one in the morning and all the rooms at the Marriott were filled. The Avon lady generously offered to put up her new friend at her house for the night, and the two women went to her home and to bed. But at five-thirty in the morning, the cosmetics executive suddenly awakened and, getting out of bed, looked into Dr. Kilcoyne’s room. Her guest, she noticed with surprise, was up and gone already, despite her earlier insistence on needing sleep. She was worried, but an hour later she received a reas
suring call from the doctor, who explained that since she hadn’t been able to sleep more than an hour or two, she’d decided to get an early start.

  Up to this point, Margaret Kilcoyne had hidden her mania from her colleagues, revealing it only in front of strangers, people who couldn’t recognize it because they had no basis of comparison. But when she arrived on Nantucket on Friday, January 25, her mania began to be apparent to people who knew her. Shopping, she spent $650 in just a few minutes, buying groceries in multiples of three and explaining to the A&P clerks that she needed vast quantities of food because she’d soon be holding a press conference and crowds of reporters would be there. To the cab driver who drove her and the supplies home, she said that after her press conference, she’d be establishing a major scientific lab on Nantucket.

  That night she had dinner with friends, Grace and Richard Coffin, and with her brother, who, true to his word, had arrived on the island. The Coffins and Leo knew Margaret was out of control. She barely stopped talking throughout the evening, and the Coffins, who wanted to tell Leo about their recent trip to Mexico, had to beg her to be quiet. When they did, she at last decided that she’d best go to bed. In the morning, when Leo went to awaken her at six forty-five, she had vanished.

  What could have happened to Margaret Kilcoyne? I finally concluded, and her family concurred with me, that in her manic, delusional state she could have acted on almost any mad, grandiose notion. She could have believed, for example, that she could take a little dip in the January ocean without getting chilled or even that she could walk on water. Most likely these thoughts didn’t occur to her when she first left her house. She must have left hurriedly, for she didn’t take a coat, but she must have been worried, for she did take her passport and wallet. Perhaps she was once again imagining that someone was trying to steal her research and thus had made up her mind to flee. But where? How? Perhaps it was then that the idea of fleeing over water occurred to her. She piled up her possessions. And then she must have taken wing, must, with the notorious bad judgment of manics, have accidentally drowned herself. It was suicide, although not the usual kind of suicide, which is death by despair. It was death by delusion.

  DENTED PRIDE

  New York, New York

  1983

  ON A STREET CORNER in Manhattan’s SoHo district one warm September evening, an aged, clunky 1964 Chevy station wagon dented the rear of a new red Ferrari. The Ferrari was driven by Frank Magliato, the thirty-two-year-old owner of a fashionable SoHo boutique. A twenty-four-year-old New Jersey man named Anthony Giani, who had come to the city to buy drugs, was riding in the Chevy. Before the night was out, the businessman would go home, get a gun, and shoot the visitor from New Jersey right above the eye.

  Men have often taken up arms to avenge an injury to their country, their home, their family, but this seemed to be something new—an act of rage for injuries inflicted on an automobile. Giani died in a hospital three days later. Magliato was put on trial and convicted of homicide.

  He had led an apparently exemplary life until the day of the incident, whereas his victim had been a violent, depraved man. Their encounter, and Magliato’s fate, raised age-old questions of morality and justice.

  In August 1983, a month before the two men met, Anthony Giani’s life had started to whirl to pieces. It had been coming apart slowly for several years, ever since 1975. He’d been sixteen then, a slim, average-size young fellow without any particular ambition. He dropped out of high school that year and started working, taking a variety of jobs. For a while he was an elevator operator, then a cab driver, then a cab dispatcher, then a factory worker. Nothing lasted. When he was eighteen, he began using heroin.

  His mother, Rosemarie Giani, blamed in part the hardness of her life when Anthony was little. She and his father, Anthony Giani, Sr., of Jersey City, New Jersey, had three children in quick succession: Anthony first, then two girls, Donna and Michelle. But shortly after Michelle was born—Anthony was six—the Gianis split up and Mrs. Giani went to work to support her three youngsters. Commuting to her job as a secretary in a financial company, she left the children in good hands, those of their grandmother. But the older woman was getting on in years, and dealing with three little ones wasn’t easy, particularly since Michelle was brain-damaged and needed constant attention. The other two children may have gotten short shrift. But what was worst for the family, Mrs. Giani felt, was that they were always on the move. Her salary was small. She couldn’t afford to buy a home, so she rented. But it seemed, she told me, “as if whenever we’d get settled and live in a house for a year, the owners would decide to sell, and we’d be out looking again.”

  Still, the Gianis got by. Holding on to the same job for sixteen years, Rosemarie ultimately managed to afford a special private school for Michelle and to send Donna to college. But Anthony became more and more of a problem.

  He kept getting arrested—in 1979, for receiving stolen property; in 1980, for burglary and theft; in 1981, for lying drunk on a street. Later in 1981 he was arrested several more times—for having a concealed knife, for stealing a CB radio, for ripping up a traffic ticket. In some cases, the charges were dismissed; in others, he was convicted and had to pay fines.

  He also kept getting into fights. When a cab driver complained that he’d failed to pay for a ride, he battered the cab. When a man accidentally shoved aside his girlfriend as she stood at a bar, he attacked the man. Worst of all, according to a probation report, he beat his brain-damaged sister.

  His temper was terrifying. One former girlfriend told an investigator that even when he wasn’t high on drugs, “he would have tantrums and fits of anger. He’d cry or plead or bang his head against the wall, lie on the floor and kick his feet, or pull out his hair.” She recalled going with him once to Union Square in Manhattan, where he tried to buy drugs. When some dealers attempted to rip him off, he “became crazed, began screaming and pushing them around. Guns went off in the air, and he kept right on fighting and arguing.” When he was high on drugs, his tantrums were even stranger. “One night, I was at Anthony’s house,” the girlfriend said, “and all of a sudden he got real angry and started spitting at the TV, which was turned off.… I became very frightened and wanted to leave, but he wouldn’t let me. I got more scared and had to lock myself in the bathroom to protect myself. He was banging on the door, and if he got to me, I’m sure he would have hurt me.”

  That was in 1981. By 1983 Giani was, if anything, even more out of control. He was arrested for stealing in February, March, and early August. After the last arrest, he was sent to a medical center for a psychiatric evaluation. But a few days later, on August 9, he slipped away from the hospital for the night. The next day, he returned with two bags of marijuana hidden in his shoes. The drugs were discovered and he was arrested again. It was his twenty-fourth birthday.

  Perhaps it was because he had started his twenty-fifth year with an arrest, or perhaps it was because he had twice lost consciousness while on drugs, but on Friday, September 2, Giani made an effort to change his life. He presented himself to a methadone clinic in Jersey City and was admitted to its twenty-one-day drug detoxification program. Trying to be cooperative with his interviewer, he told as much about himself as he could find to say, explaining that he had been thrown out of his home, that he was living from day to day with friends, that he had no social life, no recreational activities, “no outlet besides going to movies.”

  He also admitted that he had a $40- to $80-a-day heroin habit and that he was using cocaine about five times a week. A test of his body fluids drawn that day revealed traces of morphine and quinine in his system.

  That there are men like Anthony Giani on the streets of big cities is a fact that affects the lives of all city-dwellers, causing them daily to have to moderate their movements, regulate their responses. Men like Frank Magliato are another story, the Horatio Algers of our times, the climbers, the winners, the symbols of the vitality of our metropolises, where fortunes can still be ma
de in one generation by those shrewd and industrious enough to apply themselves. Consider the contrast. At the very time Anthony Giani was being given his urine test for drugs in New Jersey, Frank Magliato was starting his Labor Day weekend at his summer rental in fashionable Southampton. His girlfriend, a jewelry designer, was visiting her parents in Florida that weekend, so for company he had brought along his dog, a costly Shar-Pei.

  He needed the holiday. He’d been working hard, both at Diddingtons, the SoHo boutique of which he was the principal owner, and at a relatively new career: stockbroking. The year before, he’d obtained a license and begun brokering part time. Very soon afterward, he had become president and part owner of E. C. Farnsworth & Company, a small brokerage firm. His had been a phenomenal rise.

  He’d grown up in Farmingdale, Long Island, the oldest son of a photoengraver. His father’s brothers, too, were blue-collar workers—one a trucker, the other a horse trainer at a racetrack. But Frank and his brothers—there were three boys altogether—quickly entered the ranks of the middle class. One of his brothers became prominent in the insurance business; the other, president of Frank’s business, Diddingtons.

  As a youth, Frank hadn’t anticipated having a business of his own. He’d attended a technical college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and worked during his summer vacations at whatever came to hand—first in a sunglass factory, later at a Korvette’s in Albany, where he started as a janitor and rose to salesman. But he was bright and ambitious, and after graduating in 1973, he took a job in the field he had studied, environmental engineering, and within a couple of years was developing plans for fossil-fuel power plants for the New York State Power Authority. He was doing well in his chosen profession, but around that time he realized he wanted something more out of life, wanted to run something, to be his own boss. In 1978, still only in his twenties, he opened a small clothing boutique in Greenwich Village called Diddingtons, a venture he went into with a girlfriend. Magliato proved himself a talented entrepreneur: Diddingtons was a brilliant success. A year later, the shop moved to a far larger, far more promising location in SoHo.