Posted on 06/11/2006 4:16:14 AM PDT by raccoonradio
When 5-year-old Robert Kosilek started dressing as a girl in a Chicago orphanage, the seemingly innocent act set in motion a tragic cycle of punishment and abuse that paved the way for the killer con’s violent downward spiral.
The nuns who ran the orphanage beat him with paddles and rulers, locked him in a closet and forced him to kneel on a hard, wooden floor on top of rice grains. He was repeatedly molested by his grandfather starting at age 10.
Now serving life without parole for the 1990 murder of his wife, Kosilek has embroiled the state in a drawn-out legal battle to force taxpayers to foot the bill for his sex change operation. The bizarre case has gone on for nearly two weeks in U.S. District Court, where Kosilek shows up daily in makeup and women’s clothing.
This week, Kosilek, who calls himself “Michelle,” testified that he’d rather die than live as a man.
Bristol Assistant District Attorney John Moses, who prosecuted the murder case, called Kosilek an “intelligent guy” who is trying to manipulate the system.
“One of the ironic things in this thing is if he killed (his wife) because he wanted to assume his own transsexual lifestyle, then in essence, he’s trying to have the Commonwealth of Massachusetts fulfill his motive in the killing,” Moses said.
Indeed, a Herald review of Kosilek’s psychiatric reports and other records shows a man profoundly confused about his gender from his early youth. It was confusion that unleashed a torrent of abuse and violence that twisted his psyche and culminated with the cold-blooded slaying of his wife.
At age 11, when Kosilek told his mother he wanted to be a girl, his drunken stepfather stabbed him with a beer bottle. By 12, he was in a reform school and hustling johns on the streets of Chicago as a male prostitute, records show.
He’s also been gang-raped behind bars twice and beaten with a brick outside a gay bar.
On May 20, 1990, though, Kosilek turned from victim to vicious killer, strangling his 35-year-old wife, Cheryl, with a piano wire in their Mansfield home while high on pills.
Kosilek’s journey from being a gifted student to killer in protective custody in a Bay State jail is laid out in excruciating detail in a 1992 psychiatric evaluation obtained by the Herald.
He was born Robert Kosilek in Chicago in 1949 to a pair of alcoholic parents. His father went to prison for mail fraud when Kosilek was four. The same year, his mother sent him to live in an orphanage.
“The nuns beating me were real vocal about my being Satan’s child,” Kosilek told Dr. Larry Strasburger. “I insisted I was a girl despite being anatomically a boy.”
He started using drugs at age 10, becoming hooked on heroin, LSD and methamphetamine by age 16. He started taking female hormones and began growing breasts in the late 1960s but stopped after a 1972 jailhouse rape.
He recalled his mother as a “vicious drunk” who beat him with lamp cords. She died of alcoholism and tuberculosis at age 50. His father died of alcohol-related illness at age 61.
Despite his stepfather’s relentless abuse and taunts of “pervert,” “faggot,” and “sissy,” Kosilek found comfort in cross-dressing.
“There were things that girls got to do that I didn’t, like sharing things about makeup and clothes and boys,” Kosilek told Dr. Strasburger. “They could go to the prom. They could have attention paid to them. I was afraid to act on my feelings (of being a girl) after my stepfather stabbed me, except in secret.”
While Kosilek’s bizarre tale likely will fill up psychiatric texts for decades, assistant district attorney Moses can’t lose sight of a murder he describes as “gruesome and vicious.”
“His move to transsexualism and his insistence on a sex change . . . he may just be using this as a defense mechanism to escape in his own mind the blame for killing a very beautiful woman,” he said.
"Man! I feel like a woman..."
How Massachusetts is it.
>>Court, where Kosilek shows up daily in makeup and women’s clothing.
So? So did Michael Jackson... :)
>>testified that he’d rather die than live as a man.
If Mass. had the death penalty, he could have gotten his wish
with regards to the former.
(There have been attempts to bring the DP back to Mass. but they've been shot down by legislature or courts, IIRC. Just let us vote on it!)
Then there was Richard Sharpe (here in Beverly)...dermatologist cross-dresser who murdered his wife. Convicted (applause broke out in courtroom when sentenced). Life without parole.
>>"I loved Karen," he cried as his lawyer, Joseph Balliro Sr., and several bailiffs tried to shush him. Straining toward the camera lenses, he yelled, "I'm sorry for what happened. I loved Karen." For the victim's family and prosecutors, the outburst was just more evidence the controlling, manipulative personality that fatally shot the 44-year-old mother of three as she stood in her foyer July 14, 2000... Kathleen Lembo, Karen Sharpe's sister, gave a victim impact statement to the judge.
"How could you say you love somebody that you murdered," an incredulous Kathleen Lembo, Karen Sharpe's sister, asked outside the courthouse. "I'm sure he has all kinds of agendas, but it's not something we're going to concern ourselves with."
Let him kill himself.
While working in the medical biz,I interacted with many,many Harvard grads and only a few of them struck me as being potential murderers.
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