Daniel Rakowitz
Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center
600 East 125th Street
Wards Island, NY 10035

Daniel Rakowitz is an American murderer and cannibal. He was born in 1960 in Rockport, Texas, where his father was a policeman. He moved to New York around 1985.
In Manhattan’s East Village in 1989, Rakowitz walked around Tompkins Square Park bragging that he had killed his roommate, Monica Beerle, a Swiss student at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, and a dancer at Billy’s Topless. He said that he had boiled her head and made soup from her brain. He had tasted it and liked it, and thereafter he referred to himself as a cannibal.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity on February 22, 1991, and was moved to a state hospital for the criminally insane.
In 2004, a Manhattan jury determined that Rakowitz was no longer dangerous, but was still mentally ill enough to require inpatient care.
Daniel Rakowitz was a well-known character in the neighborhood around Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s. Part of a rootless young crowd that squatted in the Park, he earned a reputation as an oddball among even this seriously iconoclastic group. He was often seen wandering about with a chicken on his shoulder, mumbling about the devil and police control. To those would listen he announced that he was Jesus and would soon take over the country and legalized marijuana.
Bemusement turned to horror, however, when it was discovered that, on August 19, 1989, Rakowitz had murdered his roommate, Monica Beerle, a Swiss dancer and student, and, over the next several weeks, dissected and boiled her remains in the kitchen of their apartment at 700 East 9th Street. A friend of his actually walked in while Beerle’s head was in a pot on the stove but did not notify the police. ” I didn’t want to hurt him anymore,” she explained. Rakowitz put Beerle’s skull and bones in a plastic pail that he deposited in a locker at the Port Authority bus station.
Rakowitz then bragged about the killing to the crowd of regulars in the Park, but he was known to be so demented that nobody took him seriously. Some, however grew a little queasy when they recalled the soup that he had not long before brought into the Park and ladled out to the homeless. (It is unknown if Rakowitz actually turned his victim into stew). But the police eventually got word of rumors of the homicide, picked him up, and received a tangled, bizarre confession filled with talk of Satanism, animal sacrifice, and the new religion that Rakowitz had started. In a later interview he said, “I’m the new Lord, and I will take leadership of the satanic cultists to make sure they do everything that has to be done to destroy all those people who do disagree with my church. And I’m going to be the youngest person elected to the U.S. presidency.
Born in 1960 in the little town of Rockport, Texas, Rakowitz evidently showed signs of mental illness quite early, and was given psychiatric care and medication even as a pre-teen. He came to New York sometime around 1985 and quickly established his reputation.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity on February 22, 1991 and shipped off to a state hospital for the criminally insane.
Monica Beerle, who was studying at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, had moved in with Rakowitz only out of a desperate need for an apartment. She had lived with him for only 16 days.